As part of the harvest team at ALIA, it was my role to try to synthesize today’s experience in a blog post for the ALIA website. Here is that post…
On the OSU campus where ALIA 2011 is being hosted, there are more fireflies than I have ever seen before. They make themselves seen at night when we wander from the fullness of our experience in the organized sessions to the other fullness of experience in our informal gatherings in the dorm (fondly called “ALIA underground”). While we walk, processing the day, they sparkle all around us like a thousand diamonds in the depth of the shadows.
Tonight, after a time of deep listening while our friends from Japan shared their stories of ongoing trauma resulting from the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear leakage, I wandered into the greenspace outside of the student union building, leaned up against grandmother tree (an ancient sycamore that would take 5 people to complete a circle around her), and breathed in the depth of today’s experience. Opening my journal, I tried to synthesize my thoughts of the day. All that would come, though, were tiny spots of light flashing in and out of my mind, like the fireflies flickering in the grass around me.
When I got back to the dorm room, I asked others to share in the synthesis, and what I heard from them were more tiny (but rich) spots of firefly light.
Here are those fireflies:
Today has been a deepening.
Sometimes tiny moments change us – almost imperceptible turnings.
Connecting us with our bodies, and then sensing the other people in our spaces.
The strength and wonder of touch.
There was lightness in the moment of the Brazilian dance flash mob.
We started the day with spontaneous.
This is embodied consciousness.
We offered the stories into the centre of the circle.
Lightness helped us deal with heaviness.
Some of our community left and walked the land and then re-joined the circle.
We serve as witnesses of each other’s body space and witnesses of each other’s stories.
Today we took conversations to a deeper place.
We find each other in the groups.
Seeing ourselves in others and in the social space.
Holding space for our Japanese friends to share stories of trauma & transformation.
We are carrying the stories for each other.
She found a little green man who taught her about having conversations with the earth.
There is a sense of lineage.
When she understood it was not her own, she could reclaim her life.
Trusting each other to hold the group’s best at heart.
Dichotomies. Yin Yang.
We find the conversations we need, and the conversations find us.
A community made a choice to live with a mindset of abundance.
Flashes of collective insight arise from the space.
A flower continues to bloom in a place of disaster.
What I need will be provided.
We are the victims, the supporters, and the perpetrators.
Systems change when real conversations happen.
Moving from hero to host and holding both in our hearts like yin and yang.
After disaster, there arises a clarity of what is meaningful in my life.
She was able to let her body relax after arriving in Columbus.
What I don’t need isn’t worth carrying.
Concern as a young woman exposed to radiation that she may not be able to give birth.
Tears of sorry and of joy listening to the stories, feeling the connection.
Your bravery inspires my own.
The room went past the walls and entered a space all its own.
We are in a massive flow of connectivity.
Trauma can be a gift if you hold it tenderly.
Going to a dark place with our friends and coming back up.
There is space for play even in trauma.
The energy of youth revitalizes the elders, the wisdom of the elders informs the youth.
We are finding new pockets of activism.
Trauma can make us harder or softer.
Music changes us.
Here we are finding a place of trust.
And then, after the thought fireflies had been gathered and the light shared, there emerged a spontaneous musical jam session in our dorm room, each person bringing a gift into the room and offering it to the collective good. Food, wine, music, touch, movement, play, warmth, vulnerability, spontaneity, creativity… community emerged out of our common experience.
I wish I could tell you what it feels like
to come to a place where you are understood
and deeply seen.
I wish I could tell you what it does to one’s heart
to know that your passions are shared, celebrated, and encouraged.
I wish I could tell you what it means
to share a space with 400 other women and men
and know that the feminine is truly honoured and welcomed in.
I wish I could tell you how energizing it is
to have conversations that ask for your
deepest questions and vulnerabilities.
I wish I could tell you how moving it is
to be reminded, by the way it is modeled,
that questions are the way to lead change.
I wish I could tell you how it makes your body come alive
when you move around the space with your tribe members
trusting that bodies hold wisdom our minds know nothing about.
I wish I could tell you how it transforms a space
when someone sits down on the floor with coloured markers
and begins to draw your questions and dreams.
I wish I could tell you about the feeling of power
when passionate people move into a circle
and there is no stronger position than the one you occupy.
I wish I could tell you about the tears that fill one’s eyes
when a truly passionate artist/performer
steps into his full beauty with driftwood and glass balls.
I wish I could tell you about the magic
of a brief after-dinner conversation
about stillborn babies and butterflies and our deep women’s stories.
I wish I could tell you all of these things.
But I can’t. Because words are only dim reflections of the truth.
(p.s. I am at ALIA Summer Institute, my watering hole, summer camp, tribal council, retreat, and learning journey all rolled into one.)
I don’t know what compelled me to leave the beaten path on the way to my meeting, but almost before I knew it, I was wandering along a rough, ungroomed trail by the river close to downtown. People tend to avoid this trail for fear of encountering the homeless people who normally frequent it.
As soon as I stepped off the pavement, the tight feeling in my chest reminded me why I haven’t taken that trail in over twenty years.
It was almost certainly the trail that my rapist used to get to the window of my basement apartment.
That apartment building was along the river, just up the path from where I entered, and a person could easily sneak in from behind without arousing any suspicion from the street or sidewalk in front of the building. Nobody noticed him slip into my window and take my innocence away.
That path is not a place where good things happen. It’s not a place where respectable people wander. It’s a place where homeless people find shelter from bad weather under concrete overhangs and fallen trees. It’s a place where substance abusers hide from the prying eyes of the police.
Why then was I on the path and why didn’t I turn back? I’m not sure. Something compelled me. Perhaps it was a search for redemption, or a curiosity about what my response would be now, more than twenty years later.
As I got deeper into the path and further from the safety of the street, my throat began to close around my breath. What if I encountered someone who looked like my rapist, in this place where few people would here me scream? What if I stumbled across a crime in process?
At one point I passed a concrete overhang where flattened cardboard boxes and tattered blankets told the story of its inhabitants. “Did my rapist live here?” I wondered.
In some places the path was so muddy from recent flooding that it was nearly impassable. A flip-flop wearing young woman in front of me (the only other person on the trail) slipped and got her foot stuck in the mud. In my sturdier runners and from my place of somewhat more solid ground, I reached out my hand and pulled her out of the mud.
Almost to my destination, I emerged from the path back onto the street. There in front of me was a health centre that was once the hospital where my first daughter was born fifteen years ago. It was only a block from the apartment where I’d been raped nine years before that.
As I walked to my board meeting, I was suddenly overcome by the layers of personal stories that this one city block held for me. First a rape in my early womanhood, then the happy birth that made me a mother, and now, in that same block, a meeting of the board I sit on for thefeminist organization that is working to empower marginalized women.
All of these stories coming together in one place. Stories of hurt, happiness, and redemption. Stories of violence, transformation, and fulfilment. Women’s stories, all of them. My stories. The layers of me – from hurt young woman, to excited young mom, to maturing adult ready to use those stories to help other women.
In the end, it was the moment that I stopped to pull the young woman out of the mud that stood out most for me. That was the lesson that I was meant to learn from my wander along the riverbank.
Though I was once the victim of crime, now I was the one who pulled other women out of the mud. The strength of my more sturdy position and appropriate footwear meant that I could reach over and offer others a lifeline.
And that’s what leadership is about – reaching a place on the path where our somewhat more sturdy footing gives us opportunity to offer support and balance to those on less solid ground and less prepared for the situation at hand. We’re still on the path with them, avoiding the muddy patches ourselves, wondering where the path will lead us, worried about the dangers along the way, and yet our life experience and wisdom gives us something to offer other sojourners along the way.
It is both as simple and challenging as that.
Here’s a video I took along the trail.
Note: It seems appropriate that this experience occurred yesterday, just before I leave for my week at ALIA, a place where I will be challenged and encouraged in my leadership journey. This image, of pulling the woman out of the mud, will sit with me as I contemplate where the journey is about to take me.
Beth & Diane after building a leaf labyrinth together
Back in October, I had the pleasure of spending 4 days in a circle of powerful, warm, funny, wise women. We listened to each others’ stories, built a labyrinth of leaves, cried together, laughed together, ate together, dreamed together, and plotted ways of changing the world. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I felt like I was wrapped in the warmest hug of feminine support.
Even though I’d never met any of the women before, we were able to create an incredibly loving and energizing environment. This circle of women continues to meet periodically to offer each other support over the phone lines. I feel very, very blessed to have them in my life.
This is not the kind of feminine relationships you hear most about in the corporate world. No, we’re more likely to hear of cat fights, gossip, and “bitches” who do anything to protect their own interest. Some of that is true, and some of it isn’t. I’ve experienced both sides of the coin. I believe that the part that is true is largely due to the fact that there is incongruence between corporate culture and the most instinctual way for women to relate to each other. We haven’t found a way to bring our feminine wisdom fully into the boardrooms and cubicles (and frankly, our feminine wisdom might very well abolish both boardrooms and cubicles).
One of the greatest beauties of the circle/story retreat I was at in October was the range of ages and life wisdom of the women in the room. The youngest was a medical doctor who hadn’t yet reached 30, and the oldest was into her 70s. We had all archetypes – maidens, mothers, and crones – represented in the room, and it was a beautiful thing that reminded me of the best kind of community.
It was a particular delight to me to have such beautiful older women present – women who fully embodied and embraced the “crone” archetype. Beth and Diane in the photo above are two of those women. Wow! These women are amazing! Their energy, wisdom and pure delight in the world continue to inspire me these many months later. They didn’t try to hide their ages behind layers of make-up or plastic surgery as the fashion industry has convinced many women to do. They celebrate who they were, dance in the leaves like phoenixes rising from the flames, and share their wisdom and strength in the most generous way I have ever seen.
How I wish they could live next door to me and I could sit at their kitchen table whenever I need a boost of courage!
Yesterday I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Diane (whose face you see above). Even over Skype, Diane sparkles with energy and love. I adore her. She teaches Reiki, leads women’s circles, has a labyrinth in her back yard, builds sweat lodges, and does all kinds of amazing things in support of other women. She has become one of my most treasured mentors. I can’t tell you what it means to have a cheerleader like Diane who absolutely believes that I am on the right path and will do anything she can to help me along that path. If she believes that I will succeed, how can I not?
Qualla with her birthday cupcake
On the other side of the coin, I too have had the pleasure of becoming a mentor to a younger woman who sparkles with energy and love. Last year, when I was at ALIA, I met Qualla Parlman. We spent her nineteenth birthday kayaking off the coast of Nova Scotia, followed by a delicious barbecue on the dock. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with her at ALIA (as we weren’t in the same sessions), but since then we’ve gotten to know each other better online and I absolutely adore Qualla and I would do anything to help her succeed. She is an emerging young leader who’s learning to trust her feminine wisdom and I just know she will do big things in the world. I am honoured to be a companion on her journey.
It’s the way of women, isn’t it? The true, natural, instinctual way of women – not the way we have been socialized to become (or to believe we are). We are meant to support each other through the generations and across the generations. We are meant to find wise women who will teach us the ways of the world, and then we are meant to BE those wise women and offer our wisdom generously and without apology to others who need it.
Who are your wise women, and to whom are you offering your wisdom?
“The purse strings of the planet are held by men. The greatest expenditure: global military spending at $900 billion. In 2003, according to the Women’s Environmental and Development Organization, the estimated funds needed to look after basic human needs were as follows: to provide shelter, $21 billion; to eliminate starvation and malnutrition, $19 billion; to provide clean safe water, $10 billion; to eliminate nuclear weapons, $7 billion; to eliminate landmines, $4 billion; to eliminate illiteracy, $5 billion; to provide refugee relief, $5 billion; to stabilize population, $10.5 billion; to prevent soil erosion, $24 billion. The estimated annual total budget for human needs, $105.5 billion vs. the actual global military spending, $900 billion. Imagine how differently women with maternal concern might manage the “family budget” now spent by the nations of the world.” – Jean Shinoda Bolen, Urgent Message from Mother
It’s time, women (and men who embrace their feminine wisdom).
Time to stop letting our leaders spend so much money on weapons when what we really believe in is caring for Mother Earth and her children.
Time to stop letting it be okay for little boys to grow up socialized to fight and win and never show their emotions.
Time to say “it is NOT okay to run through the streets of our cities and destroy things because your favourite team lost a game that has become much too violent and leads you to believe that violence as a response is okay.”
Time to tell our politicians to start building communities instead of polarized enemy camps.
Time to honour sustainable growth over excessive production and consumption that rapes our earth.
Time to let kindness become as important in the corporate world as competition.
Time to rise up and be leaders and stop letting old leadership paradigms hold us captive.
Time to quit apologizing for our wisdom and ideas.
Time to let our fierce love change the planet.
Time for courage.
Time to place some of the power of the purse-strings into women’s hands.
In micro-credit programs in developing countries, it’s a well known fact that if the money is placed into the hands of the women, there is a much greater probability that the children will get fed, the community will be looked after, and the money will be paid back when the loan is due. What if we extrapolated that wisdom and did the same with the $900 billion currently invested in military spending?
We’ve waited long enough. We’ve watched too many things break our hearts. We’ve seen too many of our sons and brothers die in needless battles. We’ve let too much oil spill into our oceans. We’ve been patient with too many testosterone-driven government decisions. We’ve cried over too many little girls sold into sex slavery.
I’m fed up. You’re fed up too, I know it. It’s time to act. Time to make bold moves.
Time for Sophia leadership.
Note: I feel a fire burning in my veins, and I know I need to act. This is my calling – to serve as a catalyst for emerging leaders learning to trust their feminine wisdom – and I need to start doing more about it. This is urgent. We can’t sit around waiting for someone else to right these wrongs and shift the balance. We ALL need to act. With this in mind, I’m planning to offer something I’ve been meaning to launch for quite some time now – a Sophia circle. It will be a gathering place for women who feel their fierce feminine rising up and calling them to claim the name “leader”. If this feels like the right fit for you, leave a comment or send me an email with any ideas or thoughts you might have on it. I’ll be unrolling the details in a few weeks, when I come home from ALIA.
