Necessary wisdom from the Hopis:
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Archive for Matridynamics
From June Jordan’s “The Revolution Now”
The following is an excerpt from “The Revolution Now: Update On Beloved Community”, an essay by June Jordan written in 1997 and delivered at a celebration of Martin Luther King’s life. Necessary strength and faith during these overwhelming times, and still so relevant:
June Jordan
And you cannot achieve a stabilized mutually respectful, conscientious, neither dominant nor submissive, love, without a revolution of the spirit that invented and imposed and enforced iniquities of inequality in the first place.
Is there reason for hope?…
,,,I know there is.
It may be small. It may be dim. But there is a fire transfiguring the muted, the daunted spirit of people everywhere. Like the “still small voice” that came to the prophet Elijah, this is not a spectacular, televised conflagration. But the burning away of passivity and misplaced anger and self-loathing among the poor and the invisible and the inaudible and the insecure and the economically dispensable and the socially ostracized–that burning away persists like the undeniable light from the farthest stars.
I know that it is happening.
–from Affirmative Acts, pg. 207
Breaking Silence
It’s been awhile since I posted to this blog, for all the usual reasons–family obligations, other work, too much to say, no words to adequately say it, sheer exhaustion. In the meantime, I’ve been posting assorted links to the Reclaiming Medusa Facebook page, which has given me a chance to get a sense of which of the many stories of our day resonate most deeply within my psyche. Going forward, I hope to be able to post those here first, but at least for the next few weeks, due to other commitments, it will remain sporadic.
A few nights ago, I read a wonderful passage by Jeannette Armstrong in the 2010 We Moon calendar (p. 91) describing the Okangan Indian of having someone speak for each of the components that make up our world–water, air, elders, children, etc. as part of the community decision making process which also includes examining how any given decision will impact each of these components. She writes,
There’s a built-in principle in terms of how we interact…Someone has to ask those questions…
…When we include the perspective of land and include the perspective of human relationship, one of the things that happens is that community changes. People in the community change. The realization that people and community are there to sustain you creates the most secure feeling in the world.
Many years ago, I was visiting with a friend whose young child was on a streak of wild behavior. She looked at him in exasperation and said, “You are making a lot of decisions, most of them wrong.” I’m not sure that was the most pc way a super perfect parent would have phrased it, but it was a rather accurate observation from someone with the wisdom of seeing beyond the immediate time and space horizon of a toddler.
We live in a world where we seem to have about as much collective perspective as that adorable child had that morning way back when. As children do, he survived toddlerhood without too much damage and grew to be a wonderful young man. The grownup inhabitants of planet earth on the other hand seem to be throwing one perpetual tantrum and are in serious need of time out. One wonders what would happen if we were to mature out of this and adopt the wisdom of the Okangans.
Reclaiming Our Ground–The Empowerment Of Standing Up For Our Lives
Like many of you, I have discouragement fatigue. No matter what we do, it seems that the corporate and and government leaders are determined to take the fast road to hell in a handbasket. We keep waging war, we continue to destroy the environment, people are hungry and sick, too many have lost jobs and homes, our schools and roads are in disrepair. Getting out of bed in the morning sounds like a really bad idea. What difference will it make if we sign one more petition, call our elected officials one more time, let alone head out into frigid temperatures to a protest gathering?
One very good reason is that it is not so much about the impact our actions have on others but rather how our actions empower ourselves. I have written multiple times about the power of protest and standing up for what you believe in (here, here and here) but what is so difficult to capture in words is the spiritual empowerment of standing your ground. I’m not sure how many protests I attended before I came to understand this–quite a few–until one day, standing with a few friends protesting outside of a lecture given by Condoleezza Rice, I found myself feeling literally rooted to the cold sidewalk where we stood. That is something you have to feel to understand, not something that can be adequately said in words. But since that time, whenever I am out on the street, I stop to pay attention to the strength and connectedness that comes from standing your ground.
Wile at a vigil in 2005, two days after being arrested and jailed when trying to enlist at the Times Square Recruiting Center (left to right: Miriam Poser, Joan Wile, Cindy Sheehan, Carole Abrahams, Joan Kaye and Maggie Vall)
Joan Wile, founder of Grandmothers Against the War and one of my sheroes has a wonderful piece on her blog, where she talks about why the sense of empowerment that comes from standing up for what you believe in is so important in these discouraging times (and while both she and I are talking about standing in the literal sense, as I try to do in my writing every day, you can do a whole lot of standing up from a sitting down position :-). Describing the weekly gathering of Grandmothers Against War on the day after George Bush was re-elected she writes,
The other people standing on Fifth Avenue with me were equally depressed and ready to give up the struggle. You’ve never seen so many long faces.
Then, an amazing thing happened. As we stood there with our peace signs and banners, the black clouds in our minds began to waft away. Slowly, we began to smile and chatter in our usual good spirits. By the end of the vigil, we were practically jubilant. Nothing had changed — the grim reality was still the fact that the worst President in history was going to head the government for another four years and reap hideous injustices and catastrophes. But, WE had changed. We had decided to press on and continue battling for our issues.
It was clear that in the act of fighting back, we were able to banish our hopeless feelings.
Eve Tetaz at an anti-war protest in March 2007. By Lori Perdue.
Or put another way, in the words of Eve Tetaz, an almost 79 year old who has racked up her 21rst arrest for protesting puts it,
“In everything I do,” she said, flashing her large smile, “I want to be a reflection of my faith.”
Indeed. Imagine the power of what might happen if every person who feels that corporations should not be more powerful than people and every person who is unemployed and every person who cannot afford healthcare and every person who believes in the right to breathable air and drinkable water and every person who has lost a home or lost a child or spouse to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were to gather with their neighbors in the town squares of this country. Not in anger although goodness knows we have every right to be, but simply to empower ourselves with the act of standing up for our lives. That would be a force to be reckoned with.
Gift Warped
No that isn’t a typo in the title to this piece. I love giving gifts, but what I am seriously not fond of is giving gifts because it is expected, a pastime that we pursue with relentless obsession during the month of December.
As Genevieve Vaughan writes in For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange,
We have made giftgiving, which is the source of life and joy, a slave to the artificial masculated ego and its expressions at the economic, political, and ideological levels. This drains the gifts of humanity into the coffers of the few, whose priapic excesses are kept from the needs and transformed into phallic armaments, deadly ‘marks,’ by which one group can demonstrate its ‘superiority’ over another, which is forced to give way. (p. 118)
The connection between standing in line in the pre-dawn hours outside of Walmart on the day after Thanksgiving and the birth of Jesus is quite clearly non-existent, although the connection with the GNP is 
quite strong. The degree to which the reason for the season has been lost in the traffic jam at the mall was illustrated quite nicely in the local newspaper where I was visiting over the Thanksgiving weekend which ran two stories side by side at the top of the first section, the first explaining how “Black Friday” is an important barometer of the economy and right next to it a story about cuts in state social services.
There are many good reasons to give, perhaps the best being to satisfy a need. My father used to tell a story of giving his very nice winter coat to a perfect stranger in need during the Depression. His Mother was not too thrilled by that, but what he did was gifting in its finest form.
On Facebook, JP Morgan Chase has set up the Chase Community Giving Program that allows Facebook users to vote on how they will give away $5 million to various charities. Which sounds like a good thing, but let’s face it, $5 million is a pittance for the huge banking company that is heavily involved in financing for such detrimental things as mountaintop removal and has engaged in lending practices with credit cards and mortgages that have left a lot to be desired for its customers and the communities in which it lends and has involved a great deal more than $5 million. So while they exchange their big bad corporation mantle for the generous corporate citizen mantle with programs such as these, it is hardly the same as the altruistic gift my father made as a youngster.
Cause branding is a popular concept for many companies. Breast cancer has become highly profitable for any company that can figure out how to take whatever it is that they manufacture and make a pepto pink version of it from which they will donate some exceedingly small percentage to finding a cure while they still profit handsomely from the sale of whatever doodad they are hawking. But hey, they look good, you got a beautiful new pink thingy and can feel virtuous about buying it because it is for a good cause. Of course, if you’d written a check for the same amount to the charity that benefits from your purchase, it would be much more useful, but you wouldn’t have anything to show for your virtuousness and these days, that is a hard sell. We want something in exchange for what we give. Companies want recognition, not to mention profit, for their community support. Bottom line is we are much more likely to give if we get something in return. Even charities feel the need to give you something for your generosity–think raffles, public television premiums, etc.
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Nine years ago when I suffered a serious illness that put me out of commission for several months, I learned that while giving might be easy, receiving was a much, much harder thing to do. I was a single mom with 2 young children and I was flat on my back in a hospital bed, a position from which you can definitely not drive carpool. All of a sudden things that I somehow managed to juggle on my own required the help of others and much as I’ve never been good at asking for that help, it was clear I had no choice. But what I found out over and over again was that all I needed to do was to say what was needed and there would be someone who would help. They didn’t expect anything in return, that was never the point, much as a mother tends to a baby’s needs simply because there is a need, not in exchange for something given in return. They gave their time and help according to what Vaughan calls the gift paradigm which she explains this way:
The gift paradigm emphasizes the importance of giving to satisfy needs. It is need-oriented rather than profit-oriented. Free giftgiving to needs–what in mothering we would call nurturing or caring work–is often not counted and may remain invisible in our society or seem uninformative because it is qualitatively rather than quantitatively based. However, giving to needs creates bonds between givers and receivers. Recognizing someone’s need, and acting to satisfy it, convinces the giver of the existence of the other, while receiving something from someone else that satisfies a need proves the existence of the other to the receiver. (p.30)
Quite a far cry from the dominant form of gifting in our society today, which Vaughan calls exchange. While I’ve used the commercialized giving that epitomizes December as a jumping off point, the notion of exchange and gifting go well beyond that to describe economic systems as a whole:
Opposed to giftgiving is exchange, which is giving in order to receive. Here calculation and measurement are necessary, and an equation must be established between the products.
In exchange there is a logical movement which is ego-oriented rather than other-oriented. The giver uses the satisfaction of the other’s need as a means to the satisfaction of her own need. Ironically, what we call ‘economics’ is based on exchange, while giftgiving is relegated to the home–though the word ‘economics’ itself originally meant ‘care of the household.’ In capitalism, the exchange paradigm reigns unquestioned and is the mainstay of patriarchal reality. (pp.30-31)
As the newspaper stories I mentioned above sadly illustrate, our current mode of gifting is indeed a measure of the economy, and it is precisely the amount we spend and charge that indicates the non-viability of the system when at the same time services for those in need are being cut. Vaughan’s work in demonstrating that there are viable and far healthier alternatives to our current economic system has, to say the least, been marginalized and is familiar for the most part only in limited circles of feminist critique. However, as we face multiple crises–the economy, healthcare, climate change, war, it would be extremely useful to go outside the usual box in all its fancy wrapping to utilize her wisdom in understanding and healing our world systems.
The First Church Of The Sidewalk
We’re having the wrong conversation, or perhaps more accurately, we’re having a lot of wrong conversations.
This past weekend, I joined a small group of people from across our community who felt moved to stand up against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. We chose to stand in a place where we have visited before in the cold December air–on the sidewalk next to the main road leading to the biggest shopping malls in town because we knew people would have plenty of time to read our signs as they were stuck in traffic. The traffic was lighter than it has been in past and several stores in the strip mall behind us have been shuttered in the last year. No doubt people heading into the malls will be spending less this year, considering each purchase a bit more carefully.
A few people yelled angry things at us, most just stared, a few honked and waved in support. But they all kept driving. Into the mall, with less money but refusing to see the connection between the money we spend in Afghanistan, for what noble cause (as Cindy Sheehan eloquently puts it) I have no idea. In explaining the reasons for the escalation, Obama opened with references to 911, claimed that terrorists trained overseas had been found in America (although on the Colbert Report a few nights later, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napalitano was hard-pressed to offer any evidence of that, and the mainstream media sure isn’t pressing the point). Obama’s speech offered no change, in fact it could have just as easily been delivered during the Bush presidency. Telling us we must risk more lives to fight the elusive enemy called terror. And meanwhile, Americans rack up credit card debt at the mall just in time for Wall Street to hand out its obscene bonuses.
Change? Not hardly, just a propping up of the system so that it can keep feeding on itself. Congress meanwhile bound and determined to pass a healthcare bill regardless of merits cheerfully sold out women’s reproductive rights in the eleventh hour for 3 votes and whatever the final form of what is likely to be a very sorry piece of legislation looks like, the compromises made in the name of health industry ‘support’ will no doubt come at the cost of lives, probably many more lives than have been lost to ‘terrorism’. Still, people keep driving to the mall.
But perhaps nowhere is the discussion more nonsensical than when it comes to the environment. The whole notion of Cap and Trade is insane (and for a wonderful, easy explanation that even a grade-schooler (although apprarently not members of Congress) would understand of why, go here). Here in the southeastern U.S. our mountains have been sacrificed for coal, the tops summarily cut off and the debris dumped in our streams as if we have the right to do such a thing without regard for the true cost to people and the environment.
As Bill McKibben points out, this wrong conversation about the environment, unlike the wrong conversations about the economy and health care, has the potential to be an end game, to wit physics does not know to respond to politics, “It’s like nothing we’ve ever faced before — and we’re facing it as if it’s just like everything else. That’s the problem.”
And still, people keep driving to the mall. Back in 2002, as the war in Afghanistan was ramping up, we had a sign in our yard that said, simply, “Peace”. Some of my neighbors felt moved to respond by literally circling our front door with “We Stand With President Bush” signs. It was a terrifying sight. When the Christmas season rolled around again later that year, one of my sons wondered what would happen if we put a sign up that said “Peace on earth, Goodwill to all.” In the years since, I have stood my peace several times alongside the malls as we did last weekend. And in the last few weeks, I have stood up for health care, and for the environment. And I’ll keep standing up. I think of it as attending the First Church of the Sidewalk, surely a far holier experience than a day at the mall.
The one thing I know for sure–we need to quit the annual mall trek, get out of our cars, put down the plastic shopping bags and say enough of the damaging and downright deadly conversations. Health care is a human right, war does not create peace and most assuredly begets terrorism. The wealth of corporations cannot come at the expense of the welfare of people and we can not trade our way to capping carbon or fuel our world by destroying mountains.
Stand up. Speak out. It is time to insist upon speaking truth to power.
Scenes From A Zipless Recovery
Dear Main Street Residents, 
The recession is ending, no more worries, sorry for the inconvenience.
Love,
Your BFFs on Wall Street
As the national economy starts its slow recovery, 11 states and the District of Columbia are showing signs of emerging from the recession, according to a new report. (from Moodys Economy.com via Stateline)
Moody’s also estimated that the national recession ended in August, although the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private research firm that calculates the official dates of recessions, has yet to declare the end of the current downturn.
But let’s just bear in mind where that rose colored pronouncement came from– according to a report from McClatchy,
The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a blistering report on how profit motives had undermined the integrity of ratings at Moody’s and its main competitors, Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s, in July 2008, but the full extent of Moody’s internal strife never has been publicly revealed.
Translation: I’ve got some swamp land in Florida for sale. Well actually I don’t but can you blame me from trying to sell it to you anyhow. If you want a more honest take on the view from the top of the economic pecking order, this refreshingly honest commentary from a Goldman Sachs executive is probably more to the point:
“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” Goldman’s Griffiths said Oct. 20, his voice echoing around the gold-mosaic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose 365-feet-high dome towers over the City, London’s financial district. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” (Bloomberg)
Meanwhile, down the block on Main Street, recovery NOT is still a happening event:
The official jobless rate — 10.2 percent in October
one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. (New York Times)
For black teens nationwide, the rate was 40.8 percent in September. (Chicago Tribune)
40.8%…just roll that number around in your brain for awhile. Then consider this:
U.S. companies increased their output in the third quarter even as they slashed working hours, driving productivity up at a 9.5% annual rate in the quarter, the Labor Department estimated Thursday. …
Productivity is output divided by hours worked. Output rose 4% annualized, while hours worked plunged 5%. Real hourly compensation increased at a 0.2% annual rate. (Market Watch via Daily Kos)
If you look in your Berlitz for Wall Street-ese, that translates to, ‘we worked harder for less hours to make more stuff which we can afford less because we
earned less or worse yet, lost our job. And here’s a little conjugation of the screw you verb translation above, 
Credit card companies are rushing to increase interest rates to historic highs of more than 30 percent, cut credit limits, and add new fees, even for customers who pay their bills on time. (Boston.com)
And then there is the pesky matter of health care and the ‘reform’ that is supposed to cure it:
According to research by the John Hopkins Children’s Center, an analysis of 23 million hospital records from 37 states shows that a lack of health insurance likely played a role in the deaths of nearly 17,000 U.S. children over a 17-year period. (Denver Post)
One wonders if “children not covered” is a line item in annual reports by insurance companies which just had a VERY profitable quarter:
Managed care company Cigna Corp.’s third-quarter profit soared 92 percent, as improving equity markets spurred a big turnaround in a discontinued business that hurt the insurer last year.
Don’t know about you, but I sure the hell can’t sleep at night with that. And lastly, give a big cheer for the ever so Gross Domestic Product that rose a “better than expected” 3.5% in the third quarter. And here is one reason:
Billed as a way for the government to put more fuel-efficient vehicles on highways, the popular $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program mostly involved swaps of old Ford or Chevrolet pickups for new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data.
The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F150s. They were 17 times more likely to buy a new F150 than, say, a Toyota Prius. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.
The overall mileage increases over the clunker fleet represent a decline of 1.87 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, based on families driving an average of 12,000 miles, a yearly savings equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide spewed in the U.S. in just 2.5 hours. (AP)
(Note–To get a further idea of just how absurd this program was, during the Cash for Clunkers program, I traded in my 10 year old van that was beginning to have significant problems for a car that gets much better milage. However since my van officially got 19 mph, I didn’t qualify for the program, even though my new car is far more efficient than some of the trucks and SUV’s that qualified for the rebate. And while it gave a huge short-term boost to auto sales, it is doubtful that will have a long-term impact and the more important question is why boosting the auto industry without a significant change in transportation policy is appropriate in the first place. Yes jobs are at stake, but this kind of short-term thinking is not going to save those jobs in the long run.)
Dave Lindorff has a more detailed explanation,
Most of that rise was the result of government subsidies to car-buyers and first-time house buyers. It was a one-shot stimulus that pushed forward spending, but it was no indication of a recovering economy, just a spasm of spending using taxpayer money. Furthermore, an excellent article in Businessweek by Michael Mandel noted that fully one-percent of that GDP gain was the result of a failure by government economists to account for a collapse in corporate spending on research and development and on training and retaining intellectual assets (a complicated way of saying that engineers, scientists and technology workers were being laid off at a higher rate than other workers, and much R&D work was being shipped overseas for good), So really the “growth” of GDP in the third Quarter should have been at a 2.5% rate, and even that was largely government pump priming, not recovered economic activity.
So what to take away here? First of all, let’s quit using the DOW as a measure of how things are. As Lindorff points out apropos of the oft repeated ‘wisdom’ that employment is a lagging indicator,
High and pro-longed unemployment leads to reduced demand for goods and services, and to a psychology of fear and consumer withdrawal. Once people feel that they aren’t going to find a new job soon, and once those who still have jobs feel that their employment is not secure, they no longer buy things except what they absolutely need. And in an economy where fully 72% of economic activity is consumer spending, that is no longer a “lagging indicator.” High, prolonged unemployment becomes a causal factor in the economic downturn.
In other words, sooner or later (and I’m betting on sooner), there is going to be major blowback on Wall Street.
In our current economic system, the official barometer of whether we are economically healthy or not is based primarily on the health of corporate citizens, not human ones. Don’t have insurance, a job or a house? No worries, the market is up. Which really should give us pause to think that maybe, possibly, we are measuring the wrong stuff.
As all of the above should certainly serve to illustrate, the current discourse on the economy is delusional. If we are truly to ‘recover’ in a meaningful way, we will need to re-define what we consider as economic well-being. Imagine how our policies might be different if, as Riane Eisler suggests, we measured the value of caring. Or if we gave to meet needs instead of assuming the necessity of an exchange of goods as Genevieve Vaughan suggests.
And while I am not going to address it in depth here, any sustainable economic policy must also take into account and be responsive to the issues of climate change and global warming. We cannot continue to degrade the planet at will and we need to take immediate steps to address the changes that are already happening.
Until we make those paradigm shifts in the way we think about the economy, the rumors of its recovery should be considered as the poppycock that they are.
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Postscript–Lest there is any doubt–the title of this post traces it’s origins to Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying,
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving.” No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.
–Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973)
Janie Rezner: Right Relationship And Being In Gratitude… And Compassion
With her kind permission, what follows is a thought provoking essay by Janie Rezner about what I suppose might be called the faux meaningful mantra. As I told Janie in our correspondence about this piece, my personal not-so-favorite is the notion of living in the moment. As if we can separate this moment from the history that brought us here or pretend that it has no impact on the moments that will follow. The only true power is power with and from within, and the notion that meaning can be gained from constructs of power over will always be a falsehood.
Right Relationship and being in Gratitude.
I believe these concepts are rather popular these days… in the spiritual ‘realms’ at least. And sometimes worn like a mantle by the folks touting them, who may perhaps inwardly pat themselves on the back about being “on the path.”
However, in these conversations seldom is there a mention of the suffering peoples in the world…
Spiritual and religious services and gatherings, rituals and sacred musical events –environmental groups, any gathering of serious minded persons, who do not even make a mention of the suffering peoples, women and children, and grandmothers and grandfathers of the world, not a mention or a prayer for the innocent and oh so vulnerable animals and other creatures of this earth who suffer beyond measure, living horror filled lives and deaths… and the continuation of WAR, and the degradation of our earth itself…
Seem to me to be kinda short on Compassion…
And that there is NO MENTION of the horrific sexual abuse against millions and millions of women and children all over the world, at this very moment, who are being violated and tortured, by insane patriarchal men, all over the world, at this very moment…
Where is the ‘right relationship’ in that?
And, further, regarding we humans, men’s that is, “sacred vow with the animals that it’s ok with them to be sacrificed, “ that they are willing to hand their life over to you –so we may eat…. you know, how those Indians did it… in a sacred way… you remember…
Do you really think that antelope was put on earth to feed YOU? What about it’s OWN life… I wonder which animal “they” polled to come up with such an idea??
Let’s turn it around… “oh by the way” – says the monster, “I’d like to kill your daughter tomorrow so we can eat her. Thanks so much.”
Where’s the right relationship in that?
I suggest HUMILITY and GRATITUDE FOR THE GIFT OF LIFE EVERYWHERE…
~~~
My commitment is the bring forth a new paradigm grounded in the supremacy of the Great Mother, our creator. That is what real supremacy looks like!! She is our mother, for heaven’s sake. How else do you think you got here??? Did you fly into earth on your own?? Whose body held you and nourished you and protected you all those months you came into being… and in the months and years beyond… as we came into our adulthood…and who is still a powerful and essential part of our lives?
In order to move into a higher state of consciousness, we need to bring into our awareness the “shift” that is happening–the reemergence of the Great Mother, the Sacred Feminine. This is the time to call her forth–to proclaim her space in our consciousness.
Janie “Oquawka” Rezner
Spiritual Feminist Warrior
Matridynamics
She changes everything she touches
And everything she touches changes.
© Starhawk
When I was a child, I had a book about a little girl whose grandmother gave her a word, I don’t recall the name of the book, but just the point that the gifting of words was enormously powerful.
Last week I asked for suggestions for “a word to describe the rising up of a matri- (meaning honoring both women and Mother Earth) energy force for peace.” I received numerous suggestions, all quite inspiring. The two that resonate with me are matridynamic which was offered by Loretta Kemsley and gaia-archy which was shared by Susan Hawthorne. They are both very potent words. Gaia-archy feels like a good descriptor of a framework, but matridynamic at least to me sounds more like an organic, growing, changing process that reflects what is needed.
There is little doubt that we have reached the time where there must be not only a turning away as Phil Ochs once put it, but also a very major change in paradigm. In this country it is now painfully obvious that every aspect of our well-being has been sold to the highest bidder and that those we have chosen to run our nation are, with few exceptions, corrupted to the core. Globally, the climate change that our plunder of the earth has wrought is making itself painfully apparent time and time again, with floods, droughts, water and food shortages, melting glaciers and disappearing species. There is no turning back now, only a question of how we go forward.
For this we need a changed way of being with ourselves and with the earth, a new way of going forward, a visionary shift that is well described by the word matridynamic.
Many thanks to all that participated in this dialog and especially to Loretta for such a magnificent word.
Looking For…A Word
I am trying to find a word to describe the rising up of a matri- (meaning honoring both women and Mother Earth) energy force for peace. It is a powerful word, but it is escaping me. Suggestions?
