Some Thoughts on Hope, Peace and Love and Not Forgetting Why We Go To War. Read here.
This piece was a closing talk given in late June 2010 at Hope Springs Institute.

Mapping the Territory of the All Female Group

The Dilemma
Women's groups gather every day all over the planet. Women in groups do much vital, extraordinary work that keeps the world moving round and round. While a good woman's group is good medicine for our global pain, a bad one is dangerous. A bad group exudes a lethal poison, sickens the chambers of the heart and weakens the contextual fibre of the women's community through its avoidance of the inevitable painful dynamics such as: refusal to resolve conflicts, the choice to create scapegoats rather than reconciliations, and the insistence on avoiding the politics of projection in the circle. We all want to break through these painful congestions. We need help. We have to understand why we get in trouble with each other and how to stay out of the very predictable troubled waters of our own deeply guarded secretive misogyny. Refusing to learn what we have forgotten is not a solution. Refusing to know is one more collusion with the oppressive force of misogyny which lives both within us and outside us in our world. For the purposes of this essay, the definition of misogyny is that force which turns against a woman because she is born woman; that force in a woman through which she turns against herself and other women. Read More.

The Recycling Moon

Background for the Study of Lunation and Leadership
Obsessed with the connections between my own night mind, the night sky and its astronomical population, I would lie awake in my bed, looking out the high round window into the great mystery…. Just before I climbed into bed, I’d look down on the beach below the garden to see what the tide was telling me. I still live here today, between the moon and the tides. My small house grips onto the narrow, rocky ridge between the woods and the river beach and my small life is entirely governed by these tides, this moon and its cycling rhythm and the laws of the seasons on the coast of Maine.

For a long time, I had been gathering dreams, moods and paintings from the beach of my night mind as others gather sea-glass on the day beach. For me, these collections were moon scat, signs of a mystery I couldn’t yet understand. I just liked the feeling of trapping wild images in words or pigment. In time, there was a harvest of thousands of images and I could lay them in piles like pieces of an unstitched quilt. That was a lonely craft so, because I have expertise in working with women’s groups, I put out a call to see if there were enough women to go night hunting and trapping with me. Under the moon. That group is still meeting.

And since then I have started watching the group process in reference to the moon phase too. These groups were meeting always in the daytime at my house but we all lived under the moon. Finally I saw how the moon affected the sun clock, the daytime rhythms and the behaviors of women in groups. Now I see how the moon, the individual woman’s cycle and the women’s group process are woven together in an elegant, delicate and interdependent weave of emotional, intellectual and spiritual patterns. This weave of patterns contains the seeds of the practice of female authority. The way in which the solar calendar usually eclipses the lunar one is cultural, of course. But in the law of nature, the moon is the equal of the sun.

The Lunation Cycle lives in everywoman, in her uterus. The mother body lives in harmony with the moon’s monthly cycle. Through the menstrual ebb and flow. The moon’s predictable pulse governs the menstrual cycle as well as the ebb and flow of her moods, The moon might even be a source of female-identified power and authority. Long eclipsed behind the dominance of the solar culture, the lunation cycle might be as important as source of renewable energy for women as the sun is for heat and wind is for electricity.

This is the source of my inspiration, my focus and my sense of mission: getting back in full alignment with the pattern of cosmic harmony.