The Fierce Love of Eve Ensler
FAMED FOR HER FEARLESS WORK as an activist, author, and theatre artist, Eve Ensler has found peace in a quiet country home where a statue of Tara sits in the stillness of the pond in her yard. “Tara has been for me a beacon of the way, being the mother of all the buddhas,” she tells me. “As the first feminist buddha, she is a powerful force of guidance and inspiration. She has to do with compassion, wisdom, and connection, and that is essential to my life here in the country.”
A quiet life in the country would have been unfathomable to the younger Eve Ensler, who used to view the earth as her enemy. “I have been afraid of trees,” she writes in her memoir In the Body of the World. “I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the paces of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the earth.”
More than that, she viewed her own body as an enemy. “My body was a burden,” she writes. “I saw it as something that unfortunately had to be maintained. I had little patience for its needs.”
Yet it was trying to understand this enemy of a body that set Ensler on her path to changing the way the world regards women’s bodies—through her plays, books, activism, and the candor with which she describes the experience of being in a body
