Something about the book reading it years later. I think I'm better to understand things now, than before:
When she is speaking to Delia and Esperanza, the healer:
"She further explained that in order to accomplish a dream of that nature [dreaming awake, or dreaming to be a hawk, for example], women have to have an iron discipline. She leaned toward me and in a confidential whisper, as though she didn't want the others to overhear her, said, 'By an iron discipline I don't mean any kind of strenuous routine but rather that women have to break the routine of what is expected of them.
And they have to do it in their youth,' she stressed. 'And most important, with their strength intact. Often, when women are old enough to be done with the business of being women, they decide it's time to concern themselves with nonworldly or other-worldly thoughts and activities. Little do they know or want to believe that hardly ever do such women succeed.' She gently slapped my stomach, as if she were playing a drum. 'The secret of a woman's strength is in the womb.'
Esperanza nodded empathically, as if she had heard the silly question that had popped in my mind: 'The womb?'
'Women,' she continued, "must begin by burning their matrix. They cannot be the fertile ground that has to be seeded by men, following the command of God himself.'"
A bit further in:
"'In order to be a dreamer, I had to vanquish the self.' Esperanza explained. 'Nothing, but nothing, is as hard as that. We women are the most wretched prisoners of the self. The self is our cage. Our cage is made out of commands and expectations poured on us from the moment we are born...
'The sorcerers, on the contrary, understood freedom as the capacity to do the impossible, the unexpected-to dream a dream that has no basis, no reality in everyday life....The knowledge of sorcerers is what is exciting and new. Imagination is what a woman needs to change the self and become a dreamer.'"
