Medicine

I've been in an on-going conversation with women for the last several years that starts with a question, "what do you do in your daily life that feeds your female soul?" Depending on who I ask this question to it can be like a stick of dynamite thrown into a well. In many circles it's not ok to assume there is a difference between women and men, female and male. Well, since everything I have experienced since I was about four has taught me that not only is there a difference it's of the utmost importance that we re-learn how to celebrate these differences, I simply start from this place of certainty and go from there...and this project is an obvious tribute to what seems so very obvious to me; that the unique qualities that women are born with have necessary medicine for the planet, for humanity. This medicine has been silenced for many centuries, millenia in fact. So, if you're with me so far, the question "what do you do that feeds your female soul?" becomes a matter of life or death. or at least it could, if you allowed yourself to carry the beautiful weight of importance with you. If you allowed that your full thriving is integral to the full thriving of all life on the planet. And I will tell you that when I sit with my female clients I tell them that I am deeply invested in their ability to nourish and nurture themselves because it so profoundly effects their ability to contribute their full female selves to the world.

So here is where I get my own medicine, where I find nourishment for my female soul and I would Love to hear from you about where you get yours. This could blossom into a profound global conversation, a cross-cultural smörgåsbord of options for us each to choose from in our search to nourish that beautiful wild wisdom and voice deep inside each of us who is, perhaps, longing to have her day in the sun, her night in the moon...

Today a dear friend, Ixeeya, came over to offer henna to my body. She is a ceremonialist and ritual dancer, a world traveler. To her these things are life itself. So when she shows up at my house (for any purpose whether it's simply so we can roll around in the grass or run into the hills together) she brings the energy of queen and priestess. She brings ancient energy. She does henna as a ritual art. And she came over to offer me something to take on the two-month trip I'm taking with my boys to visit family and to begin to create a film which asks people the question, "What is beautiful in your life?" We rattled and saged and called in all the guides who might be coming with us on this journey. And as we did this I received a clear message: I needed an arm band on my left arm and a wide band around my right thigh, high up...these two things were the amulets that needed to come with me. So she began.

Getting henna'ed is a beautiful process. Ixeeya is an artist so she does not rush. She is also studying to become a shaman and she lets the spirit world move through her as she creates whatever piece she is painting onto my body. It took her two hours to do half the thigh band. This process was wildly intimate: for half the time she was crouching between my legs to get the portion of the band that runs between my thighs. And it reminded me that this is how sisters must be with each other if we are to be in right relationship with ourselves, our bodies, each other and our male lovers. We must touch each other intimately, lovingly, frequently. Tenderly touching another woman is, in many ways, like making Love to ourselves. You can't fully tell from the picture above, but this band has a snake, a wild pony, a bird of prey, the sun and the plant spirits all intertwined in a collage of beauty. On Sunday she will do the back half of the thigh band, putting the moon directly opposite the sun. She will also do the arm band.

After that I took myself into the hills, on a trail that, at the moment, has wet mossy rocks like ancient daughters of Ma herself looking down on the path, unapologetically gushing water with sandy beds, vividly colored wild flowers and tall grass. I ran and ran, following the path, until I was called to leave the trail. I went straight up the side of the hill until I found myself standing outside what seemed like a sacred place, a place of rock spirits and tree spirits with the setting sun streaming through the wet pine needles and branches. Everywhere I looked I saw life and it beckoned me. I stepped into this circle of high piled rocks, pine trees and wild flowers. There I did yoga. I did sun salutations to the setting sun with wide hip stretches to say "yes" and "thank you". I did tree pose in front of a beautiful young pine whose branches were reaching and stretching in fluid motion up to the sky. As I stood strong on my right leg I felt the power of the thigh band offered by Ixeeya wrapping itself around the sturdiest most muscled part of my leg. I did head stands in front of this tree, feeling the roots of me plunging into the earth to mingle with hers and the spirit of me lengthening my spine, up my legs and shooting out the souls of my feet and my toes toward the sun; a primal surge of electric current that nearly all living beings on this planet experience. After I was done I thanked everything and everyone that was responsible for my full self, I thanked my ability to feel all things (both pain and joy), thanked my ability to Love all things and I walked down the path seeing everything I had passed only an hour before in a new light.

This, for me, is medicine. And it keeps me tapped into the true power of what and who I am. What do you do on a daily basis that feeds your true self? What do you do that speaks to your female soul?

In Memorium

Just a few days ago a true matriarch passed away, (or "went home" as her granddaughter says) after 95 years of service in this world. Iva, who told her story in several installments (because if you live to be 95 it takes a long time to tell you story), was born in Kansas the oldest of five sisters. Iva met and married her husband when she was in her late teens. They had two children; a son and a daughter both of whom died before Iva. Her husband died when he was in his early forties leaving Iva to raise her children and her children's children. Now she has three grandchildren, six great grand children and more than ten great,great grandchildren with more on the way. Iva worked four jobs after her husband died, to make sure she could support everyone who needed (or might ever need) her help. Up until the day she died she was still concerning herself with her social security pension, even attempting to stick around long enough to get the June payment. When her granddaughter said, "it's OK grandma. You can go now. There's more than enough for everyone thanks to you. You can lay it down and go now" Iva seemed to listen, peacefully passing away in the early morning hours as the sun was just beginning to crack through the dusk.

Iva was a lover of women. I'm not referring to her sexual orientation but rather her life orientation. She was devoted to the women in her family. Her home, when I knew her, was a safe haven for women to go, lie down, make a cup of tea, tell their stories, ask for advice, sit at Iva's feet and simply cry...whatever needed to happen Iva's home was the place where you could let it down, speak it. I fell into this matriarchal culture of Iva's home so easily, like a seal slips into water. And there was a tacit expectation that when I walked through that door I was agreeing to engage in Truth Talk...and nothing else.

After Iva's death I was told of a family secret that had, as so many of them do, effected nearly everyone in the family, on some level or another. The family secret was a dark one and it cast its shadow on everyone and everything. After hearing about it I could see why so many things were the way they are...really, once you know the Truth everything tends to make perfect sense. Even if it hurts or makes us enraged, all events from that point on make perfect sense. This is why I Loved to do family therapy...once even just one person has the courage to speak the Truth you experience the 'ah-ha's' falling into place like dominoes. After I was honored with the Truth of this family secret, everything fell into place and I found myself sitting at my altar that night, tears streaming down my face speaking to Iva and all women still alive: Tell the Truth...speak the Truth. Perhaps I will go to my grave asking Muriel's question: "what if one woman told the truth about her life?"

This post is dedicated to the courage of women everywhere to step into the magnitude of our power by speaking our Truth. Surely if there is one religion, if there is one practice worth devoting ourselves to on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis, it is the fearsome and irrevocably powerful act of speaking our Truth. Do it out of Love for the rightfulness of all things. Do it because you know that Love can only flourish in the presence of Truth. Do it because it is the necessary first step in our transition to a world in which all life is sacred.

There is in all things an invisible fecundity,

a dimmed light, a meek namelessness,

a hidden wholeness.

This mysterious Unity, and Integrity,

is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans.

Thomas Merton

Silence...

Well, first off I feel I need to apologize for the poor blogging habits I've picked up as I've found myself juggling many things that seem to hold equal priority in my life: women & sisterhood, my two amazing children, a steady income, a personal life, a love life, and perhaps of most importance, my growing need to daily offer myself up to the wild places on this earth in order for me to stay powerful enough to nurture and stay present to all the above mentioned things. All of that seems a fairly poor excuse when you think that all blogging requires is ten minutes to process one of the many miracles and magic that occur in any given day. So, really there is never an excuse to not blog. And I'm determined to (try to) stay on top of it.

Having said that, if you're interested in reading something each day you may be required to tune in to two blogs because as of the 10th of June my two boys (Henry, 13 and Simon, 10) and I will be on the road for two months traveling around the US and Canada on an odyssey of reverence and celebration. We will be asking people, any people, all people, what they feel is beautiful in their lives, inviting them to share the objects/subjects of their awe with us in spoken word on camera, and in the process being reminded of all that is, and has been, so eternally right about this world. It is quite similar to the GCW in many respects. The vision of the GCW was borne out of an observation that women seemed to remember how to celebrate, seemed to remember what was worth celebrating, even in the most dire, unsafe and/or impoverished conditions. This is not to say that men don't have this ability, but I will say that from my own experience this profoundly important task seems to be somewhat a function of the female gender. At least it appears to have become so over the last few millenia.

So, this odyssey will include men's and women's voices. We will ask everyone we have the courage to approach. No doubt we will alter our focus and the wording of our invitation as we embark on and test out our questions on unsuspecting innocents. When Blythe and I were in the borderlands back in February and March it took me a good one and a half weeks to feel as if I knew what I was doing on the trip or knew why I, specifically, had been chosen for this journey. And it took a solid week before I had found the confidence to simply assume that every woman I came across was waiting for an invitation to share her wisdom with the world.

So here we go for round two...a slightly different focus on the surface, but really, not different at all. I still firmly believe that any fundamental and sustainable change arises from a place of perceiving beauty ~ a place of deep wonder and celebration with the world ~ rather than one of fear, hatred or dissatisfaction.

If you'd like to be involved please let us know by emailing us with your thoughts on what is beautiful in your life and why. Send us pictures of the thing in your life that is most beautiful to you (whether animal, vegetable, mineral or...). We will post these offerings to our blog site...which is still underway so you don't get to know the address just yet...but soon, so soon....

Sisterhood

So, we live in a time of great fear. No revelations here. We are terrified we won't have enough money. Once we get enough money we're terrified someone will take our money. Fearful our mate will leave us or scared blind that won't find the love of our lives. We're in lock-down with our children, no child left behind in the spectrum of all possible catastrophes; 'don't get hurt playing football!' 'Why doesn't my child want to play organized sports?!' We're conversely in turmoil that people are thinking too many things about us and that not enough people are thinking about us at all.

And today, talking to a powerful and intelligent man, a man who is in the 'know', we drifted to the conversation of women being sisters to each other vs. women who back-bite and claw. In his line of work, a trial lawyer, he admitted that he frequently sees the mean version of female. In my line of work I see just the opposite. Feeling myself get defensive (for not much of a good reason in this case, for this is a man who thinks my gender is beautiful inside and out) I told him my reality is the norm. Really...more often than not women behave like sisters toward each other. Statistically and anecdotally, women support our own kind more often than we back bite and steal, lie and cheat each other. Media doesn't want this truth to be know, for it doesn't sell as many issues as the other personification of women. In this day and age the only power available to us is the vicious kind, the kind we wield over each other like a sharp-edged saber. But that is the patriarchal concept of power: power-over. Women, in vast numbers all over the world, wield the female version of power: power-with.

Of course, we are human and if we perceive our lives to be threatened and we don't readily see the power of deep sisterhood in our lives, we will respond the way People magazine would have us believe is the norm. If we believe that our very survival is effected depending on whether that man loves us or this company hires us, and we have no other input to negate that fight or flight fear, we will respond accordingly. We will play dirty. But even with global living conditions for women heading ever-increasingly into the toilet, even though public health statistics for women and our babies show us to be in deeper mortal threat than even fifty years ago, most of us, most of the time, choose sisterhood. I've seen it in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, in South Africa amidst the AIDS pandemic, in that part of Mexico now referred to as Texas...in fact, all over this world. Sisterhood.

And, just to let you know the power of this truth? Sisterhood is the next revolution. The only one. Sure solar power is great. Removing George Bush is still important. But if, as an intentional global practice, the women of the world stood together, cried together, told the truth together, raised our babies together, perhaps even lived together (yes, with out men), well...I do wonder where the world would be right about now? It's a beautiful thing to contemplate.

We Are All Masters....

Because of the way this whole journey seems to work, I don't often have the opportunity to gather women's stories anymore. I'm busy doing administrative, fund raising and strategic things. But yesterday I took the time to sit with a woman and hear her story. Every time I do this I am brought home to the simplicity and power of the vision of the GCW. Every time I sit with a woman and witness her Wisdom I am moved to tears (literally, always) by the beauty of the feminine principle. I am reminded of how damn lucky I am to have been born in this body, a female body, in all its mercurial perfection.

I often listen for the one moment in the story that feels like it is the reason I am gathering her story and not another woman. There is always (at least) one statement or paragraph that is that 'ah-hah' for me, the reminder that is exactly what I need in this very moment. So, Sharon, who is a wise and powerful soul, who has lived several lives as a midwife and mother, who could mother the entire planet without breaking a sweat, was speaking about the things we take on in this world that aren't really ours. In this breathtaking gentle-like-water voice she said, "Truly, all we have to remember is that we are all masters. Anything that takes us away from that is not ours, truly...it's not ours and we can simply let it go!"

I am on a path. You are on a path. There are times in our lives when we are faced with things that remind us of our human-ness; of the fact that we have hearts that get broken; times when our trust and faith get challenged, perhaps even shattered temporarily. Is this not a gift? Isn't this a moment that allows us to test the resolve of our knowing that we are all masters. That we can be completely heartbroken and know that we are still fully alive, still on our path. With Sharon's gentle permission, I stepped back on my path. With all the pain I had been feeling lately as I work to redefine an old relationship, I stepped back on my path and took a deep breath.

Thank you, thank you Sharon. We women have so much work to do, far more work than we're already doing. We'll only get there if we remember we are all masters...we are all beauty incarnate. We are all essential gorgeous beings. We can be broken hearted, we can grieve deeper than the earth's core. We can feel rage powerful enough to incinerate a redwood. We can do all this and realize that this is simply proof that we're on our path; alive and feeling, responding to a world that is hurting, grieving, raging, pulsating and thriving while she spins. In sisterhood we will remember this. In sisterhood we will set to work cultivating a planet in which all life is sacred. Aho.

A Theme...

Today I walked with a dear friend and sister...she took me to a place that has flowing water (rare for these parts). A place called Bear Creek with babbling, dancing, clear, breathtaking, affirming, flowing water. There is still snow on the ground right now, though not for long. The sun was shining brilliantly, the song birds singing joyously for Spring is most assuredly here.

As we walked we talked about our yearning, our longing, the sense of urgency that comes from living in a global culture that has silenced something that, to us, feels as crucial as water, as air, as oxygen. We talked about the starvation we feel for the wild and free creative spirit and energy that is the feminine herself. 'How do we survive?' 'How can we continue to struggle with concepts like money and rent and profession, when all we care about is finding, celebrating and dwelling within Her?'

We acknowledged that so much of our daily thought and energy is taken up with our projection, onto other women in our community, of perfection. We imagine that other women have figured out the money thing, that other women have figured out the partnership thing, that other women are having regular mind-blowing, spiritually fulfilling, deeply honoring sexual encounters. And yet, I have not met a woman who truly has. For the last five years (really, for my whole life) I have been a woman to whom other women speak their Truth. It has just happened that way. And certainly that is why I am doing what I'm doing now: resurrecting and celebrating female Truth as if human survival depended upon this one task. I can say that despite appearances I have yet to meet a woman who is not struggling under the weight of urgency, of longing, of loneliness, of deep primal (primary) desire. This has become our common female odyssey, even if we refuse to acknowledge it.

And so, I am left, once again, wondering what might happen if all women committed to speaking our Truth. Really...if you knew you were alone in the forest, with only the songbirds and the trees to hear you, what would you utter? What burden would you lay down? What Truth rests heavy on your shoulders, or in your heart? What if you knew that the fate of the world rested upon your utterance of this familiar Truth? What if it were really that simple...what would you dare speak to the hills, to the birds, to the sky?

As my dear sister and I came to the end of our walk, we arrived at a spot on the trail that the sun had thawed. It was as inviting a spot as I've ever experienced. There we removed our shoes and socks and let our bare feet sink deep into the wet ground. The mud was thick and rich and warm. We walked and pranced and prayed in silence as the wet earth seeped up between our toes saying "Yes...this is yours. Now, what will you do with it?"

This moment, every moment, is yours and yours alone. You are here right now. Take off your shoes, sink your feet into the rich earth and let the mud seep deep. Speak loudly and assuredly...tell someone your Truth and do it as if all life depended upon the success of your endeavor...because dear sisters, it most assuredly does...