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WWW.SOBONFU.COM

Newsletter February 2010

You are invited to visit our website: http://gatherthewomen.org



“We serve life not because it is broken, but because it is holy.” ~ Mother Teresa

In This Issue

I. Message ~ Gather the Women Facebook Activity
Authored by rotating members of the GTW

II. GTW Vibe ~ Gather the Women Vision Statement
Stay on top of what’s happening in this amazing organization

III. Passions ~ Meet: Lynda Terry
Focus on one GTW woman. Get to know the another women in the circle, what she’s passionate about and why she’s here.

IV. Earth Circle ~ Birth Announcement: Women Waking the World
Events, organizations and people outside of GTW

V. Circle Offerings ~ Exerpt: Ways Women Lead Newsletter > Invitation to Participate – Petition for 5WCW Call to Action Video: Jean Shinoda Bolen
The when and where of what’s coming up.

VI. Echoes ~ Saying Goodbye to My Friend Howard Zinn by Alice Walker
A news item related to women.



Message

GTW on Facebook
Gather the Women’s Facebook group now has 1,430 fans! Log on and join in the discussion! Here’s a small sample of what the fans have to say:

So many amazing women in this world! We should be thinking about the women in Haiti who need our thoughts and actions.
January 18 at 2:14am

A circle of human consciousness moving deeper into love and peace can effect positive change. May all women of the world join this movement. Pass the word about GTW!
January 5 at 9:54am

Happy New Year from Sweden! December 31, 2009 at 4:04am

One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history. –Peace Pilgrim November 19, 2009 at 12:19pm

I’ve been a fan and also active in GATHER THE WOMEN for years. This organization’s women show that we have to connect global peace with the treatment of women. November 13, 2009 at 2:59pm

“The state of the world today demands that women become less modest and dream/plan/act/risk on a larger scale.”–Charlotte Bunch, activist and author November 13, 2009 at 2:03pm

Today marks a day for all women, now and for future generations as we ushered in with open arms the energies of the Divine Feminine! Looking forward to what is still to come. I’m pleased to have found this great organization. With love and light, Tami November 11, 2009 at 2:01pm

“Let’s never doubt the difference we make with our response to “gather the women” and create opportunities for women to come together, to inspire, to be inspired, to connect, to network and support one another.” —Joy Harriett Adams, GTW Convener November 9, 2009 at 2:27pm

Bright Blessings from Australia xx November 8, 2009 at 2:21pm

Women, powerful, life giving, keepers of the world! November 8, 2009 at 10:56am

Grateful for my sisters near and far . . . November 8, 2009 at 7:44am

Blessings from Vancouver, Canada November 7, 2009 at 11:32pm

Peace and many blessings to all my sisters on earth. November 7, 2009 at 10:14pm



GTW Vibe

GTW Vision Statement

Linked globally by our interactive website, we invite women to demonstrate their courage to risk leaving old conformities by joining with millions of others throughout the world to celebrate women’s true worth, to express shared concern for our human family, and to create and support actions that will enable humanity to live together in a balanced, harmonious and peaceful world.

Gather the Women is evoking at a profound level an experience of our own woman’s worth to the world.

As women we bring life forward. We are in touch with the cycles of life and we function in a context that is deeply relational. We have the capacity to generate creative solutions that benefit all life on the planet.

Gather the Women is creating a rich exchange of cultural values to dissolve the ties that bind us to the illusion that one segment of our human family can win while another loses.

Together we women are contributing to a new collective wisdom and we are lending our strength to that which we wish to embrace. From this emerging balance is being born a new dimension of our humanity.



Passions

Meet ~ Lynda Terry

While Lynda spoke to me about her life, in the hope of deepening familiarity and sisterhood among the women gathered in this virtual circle I was reminded of a quote I love by Anias Nin, “And the Day came when the effort it took to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Like the gaping mouth of baby bird in spring, the soul opens wide longing to receive. The inner hunger to awaken can be painful, incessant, unrelenting as the higher self pangs for relief that lies in the mist, beyond the boundaries of the nest. Laboring to birth us into the mystery of our greatest service because birds must learn to fly, a nest is just too small.

Season’s of Deep Spiritual Turmoil

For Lynda Terry the first perceptible steps towards the woman she is today began with longing for a community of women and longing for inner peace. During her 20’s in a season of deep personal turmoil the world around her began offering hints that would direct her toward her higher path.

A Brief Moment of Stillness

The first hint came in the form of a painting that profoundly moved her with the caption: “acquire inward peace and a multitude around you will find this salvation.” A brief moment of stillness in her first meditation six years later began moving Lynda’s life in a direction to awaken. Devoted to her meditation practice Lynda could no longer sustain her power driven, masculine core that valued corporate success as the apex of existence. Instead, she began a deep seeking period. Never missing a single day in her meditation practice Lynda’s emotional health improved, her values and temperament shifted. A two and a half year sabbatical from dating became the happiest years of her life, learning to be with herself and awaken spiritually again.

A Place to Stand Spiritually

Real footing in her emerging perspective came for Lynda in 1999 when she met Sherry Ruth Anderson, author of The Feminine Face of God. For the first time she had a place to stand spiritually, and perspective to appreciate her own progress. Role models continued to emerge. A cornucopia of spiritual nourishment came to Lynda from the one major religion has not suppressed the feminine. The Hindu yoga tradition retains a rich philosophy around aspects of the feminine. Grounded in feminine spiritual heritage Lynda learned how to embody the feminine, to be a woman, and the importance of participating in service to the world. She taught meditation, mind/body medicine and lead courses and retreats.

What would I do if I Weren’t Afraid?

New dimensions of the divine were revealed in a deep call to silence that changed the nature of her private spiritual journey. Three questions would clarify her path forward. What would I do if I weren’t afraid? Who is my community? What is my service? The answer: You are to be in service to women. She began having dreams of women gathering as equals. External affirmation came when a Shaman at a New York City ashram said to her, “Bring women together in your home. You’ll be guided what to do. Start simple, but the outcome will be phenomenal.”

3 Rivers of Energy

In October of 2002 Lynda suddenly had an inner knowing to say “yes” to this thing that was perusing her. She emailed women she knew and explained the guidance and visions she was having, then offered an invitation for the women to help her midwife what was emerging. The women who received her email responded to the energy, with crying and expressed that they’d been waiting for this call. A process began to appear as three rivers of energy began to merge, the sacred feminine, women and peace. The collective intention gave birth to Vessels of Peace in October 2002 just as the U.S. was invading Iraq.

What now?

This is an exciting time in women’s spiritual leadership. We can help create a greater shift in human consciousness, with collaborative leadership, rather than the old way of following one charismatic leader. What needs to change? We can take ownership collectively. What would it be like if everyone lived in a place of unity and in diversity? Power shared by women and men in the community. The Iroquois Confederacy was that dream. Our forefathers drew liberally from that confederacy to create the dream of our country, but that dream was broken. The dream wasn’t honored in the treatment of other nations, races of people, or with women. The cracked Liberty Bell seems to be a symbol of this broken dream.

A Dream for the Planet

Vessels of Peace has been honored to share space with the First Nations women in Canada who shared a prophecy that says, North America holds a dream for the planet. That dream has been broken. The women of North America can help repair the spiritual dream. This work is needed at this time. It is work seeded in very ancient intentions.

A Net of Light

Women can come to a level of readiness to hold space on a global level over the next couple of years. A deep field of peace. A net of light. Together we can hold the peace frequency. We can heal the earth by feminine presence and community, partnering with the divine feminine to take a big step on the arc of unfolding.

Brittle in a Difficult Time

Fully experiencing the divine means her will and the will of the divine are aligned. For Lynda the only passion she has left is to serve. Aware of service Lynda is focusing on a very important healing inspired by the 13 Grandmothes. “We ask that the older ones of you hold your arms open for the younger ones, and we ask this,” they explained, “because the younger ones have been made very brittle by the pressures of the world they are living in. Many of them are cut off from this awakening sisterhood. So hold your arms open to them. Welcome these younger sisters, these daughters, even granddaughters. They need you,” the Grandmothers said, nodding. “They need your love and support. (From Grandmothers Speak January 2010 message) The young women have no models to show them how to be women in this world, no way to even seek out older women. These young women are coming behind us to serve. Their awakening feels so compelling, so critical. We need each other. Remember that a whole new world will be oriented in a different way. Aligned to sisterhood. A new alchemy between men and women. Sacred partnership.

Request for Collaboration

Lynda is interested in collaborating with women who feel called to help create a space to reach out to younger women.
Look for information about the results of this collaboration in future editions of the Gather the Women Newsletter.
Contact Lynda at: lyndaht@sbcglobal.net
Visit Vessels of Peace at their website: http://www.vesselsofpeace.com/



Earth Circle

Birth Announcement: WOMEN WAKING THE WORLD
by Marilyn Nyborg

I am very excited to announce the public launching of Women Waking the World (WWW) a global initiative and movement to restore women’s wisdom, values and influence in service of all life. (We refer to ourselves as the other WWW!)

Our story began in November of ’08. I had received a “download” earlier that year depicting the original feminine face of God, the shift to the masculine face of God, the birth of patriarchy and the loss of the divine mother’s influence. Mirroring the ongoing devaluing of the feminine within this backdrop, was the accompanying depiction of escalating exploitation and degradation of Mother Earth, confirming in visual eloquence the late Thomas Berry’s insight that, “Women and the Earth are inseparable. The fate of one is the fate of the other.”

I shared this vision with a number of women and found complete resonance with three other women Julie Raymond in Idaho, Pat Fero in Michigan, and Victoria Hanchin in Pennsylvania. All of these women have been active participants and regional coordinators for Gather the Women. Together we cover 4 generations from 40-70. Our skills are those of writers, artists, authors, therapists, activists and visionaries, which created a deep bond between us. For 9 months the four of us exchanged thoughts, writings, edits, concepts, articles and other research material.

Research and documentation continues to tell the story of what is happening to women, but what we can do now to facilitate turning this tide? Identifying the answers to that question is the work of Women Waking the World. In time we recognized the need to create a conversation using the model of “truth and reconciliation” around the Divine Feminine. It seemed time to tell the truth—in a context of restorative listening– of her repression, abuse, and demonization, to fully address what is needed to finally reverse the damaging impact of degrading the feminine in women, men and society, which has been seeded by centuries of patriarchal consciousness and its patterns of domination.

Kathleen McIntire ( www.soaringinlight.com ) offered a generous financial donation to seed the project from intention to tangability. The four remaining core group members were joined by Kathleen on a trip to meet Anodea Judith (www.sacredcenters.com), the author of Waking the Global Heart. Later the core group also collaborated with Dale Allen (www.daleallenproductions.com), creator and solo star of In our Right Minds and the video accompanying this article. Support has also been offered by, Elinor Gadon, Barbara Marxx Hubbard (www.barbaramarxxhubbard.com), Jean Houston ( www.jeanhouston.org ), and Jean Shinoda Bolen (www.jeanbolen.com). Affirmation and support continue to flow from grace in ever developing connections and partnerships.

Albert Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Issues can only be resolved from a more evolved perspective. Solutions can then be constructed to address the underlying imbalanced consciousness that generates problems in the first place.

While dealing with what appear to be “women’s issues” we recognize there is a larger pattern that affects the wholeness of all humanity. Degradation, of the feminine in every aspect of a woman’s being, rejection of the feminine in men and society, has robbed the human family of life-affirming essentials: interconnection, relatedness, cooperation, intuition, and nurturing life. We affirm the fundamental source of imbalance—the imbalance of the masculine and feminine —is the key to solving the planetary crises of our time.

Balance in the grand scheme of evolution is a force to be reckoned with, and the time for balance is long overdue. So it is, that WWW intends to initiate the conversation of our time, using the model of Truth and Reconciliation successfully used in many deeply conflicted areas around the globe but made famous by the work of Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa.

Impulsed by a powerful urge that now is the time to fully address the truth of feminine repression, abuse, and demonization, Women Waking the World seeks to expose the patterns of domination damaging the feminine in women, men and society. Women waking the World seeks to remedy the wounds that stilt humanities growth toward wholeness, by working towards restoring balance between the feminine and masculine.

We believe reclaiming and revaluing the feminine within all humans, is the key to shift to a global consciousness that allows planetary problems to be solved from a level of wholeness, rather than from fragmentation and separation. Coming together finally, in wholeness and partnership, will bring about a new dimension of humanity and likewise, a new Earth.
Visit Women Waking the World’s website at: http://womenwakingtheworld.com Contact Women Waking the World at: womenwakingtheworld@yahoo.com



Circle Offerings

Excerpt from the Ways Women Lead - February Newsletter
http://lightpages.net/lp/news.cfm



Ways Women Lead is pleased to share the latest developments about our unique leadership program for women and girls that models and evokes conscious leadership. Our program will launch in Bulgaria in late May 2010 with a training of trainers and planning meeting, and continue through local gatherings and an international event in late October. It is bringing together women and their organizations from within and outside of Bulgaria to collaborate and exchange their wisdom and expertise in conscious leadership.

From our perspective, conscious leadership that is awake to its own value and needs, and to that of its community of partners, is essential as we step forward to meet the challenges we face today. This is leadership that has the capacity to create rapid change because it springs from the heart of every person, grows and connects with authentic communication practices, and catalyzes others to bring the fullness of their unique potentials into the service of the whole.

As part of its collaborative outreach, WWL has an international delegation attending the upcoming 54th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, with activities open to the public. (For more information about the UNCSW go to http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/ ).

• Women’s Circle, Friday, February 26th, Episcopal Church Center, 815 2nd Avenue: A time to get to know one another, the women’s organizations and CSW activities. Sponsored by Ways Women Lead, Millionth Circle, Anglican Women’s Empowerment and International Public Policy Institute. All who want to attend must send their name to Ann Smith, ann@circleconnections.com. Only those whose names are on the list will be given entrance to the building.

• International Panel on Sex Trafficking, Wednesday, March 3rd, UN Church Center, 11th floor, 777 United Nations Plaza, corner of 44th and 1st Avenue, 4:00-5:30 pm. Sponsored by Ways Women Lead, Soroptimist International and Anglican Women’s Empowerment at the UN Church Center. No reservation is needed.

• Interactive Workshop on Conscious Leadership, place and time to be announced. Sponsored by Ways Women Lead and the International Public Policy Institute with Millionth Circle, Gather the Women Global Matrix, Women Waking the World, Women’s Learning Exchange, and Imagine the Good. Featuring the trailer to the movie being produced by Imagine the Good called “The Heart to Lead, Women as Allies for the Greater Good”.

You are warmly invited to co-create with WWL’s exciting new program in whatever way you are called, as sponsor, contributor or participant, in-person or online. For more information see www.wayswomenlead.net, participate at www.lightpages.net/wayswomenlead.cfm, or contact Ann@wayswomenlead.net or Jeanie@wayswomenlead.net .



Invitation to Participate

The Tide is Turning
Let’s go viral with a 5WCW petition!
Sign the 5WCW petition. http://www.5wcw.org

The United Nations needs to be the sponsor of the 5th women’s world conference, so that women from all 192 UN countries know that it is about and for them. Many will be able to come only because it is a UN conference that is recognized by their governments. It needs to be designated as the 5th, to acknowledge that it follows the other four, specifically Beijing and that it is intended to bring to fruition the goals and aspirations that were put into the Beijing Platform for Action (with no further debate on them). It would be as significant to women working for women as the Olympics are to athletes. Events leading up to it, the conference itself, and the ripples radiating out from it, including meeting in circles, would raise consciousness and oxytocin levels, moving us toward reaching a critical mass and a new era.



Echoes

Saying Goodbye to My Friend Howard Zinn
by Alice Walker
http://www.alicewalkersblog.com/
©2010 by Alice Walker
AW
Photo: @1991 by Jean Weisinger

Saying Goodbye to My Friend Howard Zinn

We have lost a gift, which having received it, all of us might become.

On hearing the news of his death.

Me: Howie, Where did you go?

Howie: What do you mean, Where did I go? As soon as I died, I went back to Boston.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961 my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over. My African roommate and I got a good look at him everyday when he came for his mail in the post-office just beneath our dormitory window. He was always in motion, but would stop frequently to talk to the many students and administrators and total strangers that seemed attracted to his energy of non-hesitation to engage. We met formally when some members of my class were being honored and I was among them. I don’t remember what we were being honored for, but Howard and I ended up sitting next to each other. He remembered this later; I did not. He was the first white person I’d sat next to; we talked. He claimed I was “ironic.” I was surprised he did not feel white.

I knew nothing of immigrants (which his parents were) or of Jews. Nothing of his father’s and his own working class background. Nothing of his awareness of poverty and slums. Nothing of why a white person could exist in America and not feel white: i.e. heavy, oppressive, threatening and almost inevitably insensitive to the feelings of a person of color. The whole of Georgia was segregated at that time; and in coming to Spelman I had had a run-in with the Greyhound bus driver (white as described above) who had forced me to sit in the back of the bus. This moment had changed my life, though how that would play out was of course uncertain to a seventeen year old.

One way it did play out was that the very next summer I was on my way to the Soviet Union to see how white those folks were and to tell as many of them as I could, even if they were white, that I did not agree to my country’s notions of bombing them. I didn’t see a lot of generals, but children and women and men and old people of both sexes were everywhere. They were usually smiling and offering flowers or vodka. There was no “iron curtain” between us, as I’d been told to expect by Georgia media. I love to tell the story of how I was so ignorant at the time I didn’t have a clue who folks were queuing up to see in Lenin’s tomb; nor did I even know what “The Kremlin” was. I also didn’t speak a word of Russian.

Coming back to Spelman, I discovered Howard Zinn was teaching a course on Russian History and Literature and a little of the language. I signed up for it, though I was only a sophomore and the course was for juniors (as I recall). I had loved Russian Literature since I discovered Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky back in the school library in Putnam County, Georgia. As for the Russian Language, as with any language, I most wanted to learn to say: hello, goodbye, please and thank you.

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it also. We did. My mother, who earned seventeen dollars a week working twelve-hour days as a maid, had somehow managed to buy a typewriter for me and I had learned typing in school. I said hardly a word in class (as Howie would later recall), but inspired by his warm and brilliant ability to communicate ideas and conundrums and passions of the characters and complexities of Russian life in the 19th century, I flew back to my room after class and wrote my response to what I was learning about these writers and their stories that I adored. He was proud of my paper, and, in his enthusiastic fashion, waved it about. I learned later there were those among other professors at the school who thought that I could not possibly have written it. His rejoinder: “Why, there’s nobody else in Atlanta who could have written it!”

It would be hard not to love anyone who stood in one’s corner like this.

Under the direction of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) many students at Spelman joined the effort to desegregate Atlanta. Naturally, I joined this movement. Howie, taller than most of us, was constantly in our midst, and usually somewhere in front. Because I was at Spelman on scholarship, a scholarship that would be revoked if I were jailed, my participation caused me a good bit of anxiety. Still, knowing Howard and others of our professors, the amazingly courageous and generous Staughton Lynd, for instance, my other history teacher, supported the students in our struggle, made it possible to carry on. But then, while he and his family were away from campus for the summer, Howard Zinn was fired. He was fired for “insubordination.”

Yes, he would later say, with a classic Howie shrug, I was guilty.

For me, and for many poorer students in my position, students on scholarship who also worked in the Movement to free us of centuries of white supremacy and second-class citizenship, it was a disaster. I wrote a letter to the administration that was published in the school paper pointing out the error of their decision. I wrote it through tears of anger and frustration. It was these tears, which appeared unannounced whenever I thought of this injustice to Howard and his family – who I had met and also loved – that were observed by Staughton Lynd, who realized instantly that a. there was every chance I was headed toward a break-down; and b. the administration would quickly find a reason to expel me from school. Added to the stress, which nobody knew about, was the fact that I was working for a well-respected older man who, knowing I had to work in order to pay for everything I needed as a young woman in school, was regularly molesting me. Lucky for me he was very old, and his imagination was stronger than his grasp. As a farm girl and no stranger to manual labor, I could type his papers with one hand while holding him off with the other. What rankled so much, then as now, is how much others respected, even venerated him. Perhaps this was one of many births of my feminism. A feminism/womanism that never seemed odd to Howard Zinn, who encouraged his Spelman students, all of them women, to name and challenge oppression of any sort. This encouragement would come in handy, when, years later, writing my second novel, Meridian, I could explore the misuse of gender- based power from the perspective of having experienced it.

With Staughton Lynd’s help, and after he had consulted with Howie (I did not know this), I was accepted to finish my college education at Sarah Lawrence College, a place of which I had never heard. I went off in the middle of winter, without a warm coat or shoes and ice and snow greeted me. But also Staughton’s mother, Helen Lynd, who immediately provided money for the coat and shoes I needed, as well as a blanket that had been her son’s. In my solitary room, and knowing no one on campus, I hunkered down to write. Letters to the Zinns, first of all. To inform them I had been liberated from Spelman, as they had been, and had landed.

I was Howard’s student for only a semester, but in fact, I have learned from him all my life. His way with resistance: steady, persistent, impersonal, often with humor, is a teaching I cherish. Whenever I’ve been arrested, I’ve thought of him. I see policemen as victims of the very system they’re hired to defend, as I know he did. I see soldiers in the same way. In some ways, Howie was an extension of my father, whom he never met. My father was also an activist as a young man and was one of the first black men unconnected to white ancestry or power to vote in our backwoods county; he had to pass by three white men holding shotguns in order to do this. By the time I went off to college, the last of eight children, he was exhausted and broken. But these men were connected in ways clearer to me now as I’ve become older than my father was when he died. They each saw injustice as something to be acknowledged, confronted, and changed if at all possible. And they looked for signs of humanity in their opponents and spoke to that. They both possessed a sense of humor and love of a good story that made them charismatic teachers. I recently discovered, and it amuses me, that their birth dates are remarkably close, though my father was thirteen years older.

Howie and I planned to rendezvous in Berkeley in March, when he came out to spend a few weeks with his grandchildren. In April we planned to be on a panel with Gloria Steinem and Bernice Reagon at an event in New Orleans for Amnesty International. I had decided not to go, but Howie said if I didn’t come he would “sorely miss” me. I wrote back that in that case I would certainly be there as “soreness of any sort” was not to be tolerated.

Over the years I’ve been in the habit of sending freshly written poems to Roz and Howie. After her death, I continued to send the occasional poem to Howie. Last week, after the Supreme Court’s decision to let corporations offer unlimited funding to political candidates, I wrote a poem about what I would do if I were president, called: “If I Was President: ‘Were’ For Those Who Prefer It.’” My first act as president, given that corporations may well buy all elections in America from now on, would be to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, both men accused of murders I’ve felt they did not commit; both men in prison for sadistically long periods of time.

Howie’s response, and the last word he communicated to me, was “Wonderful.” I imagined him hurriedly typing it, then flying, even at eighty-seven, out the door.

The question remains: Where do our friends and loved ones go when they die?

They can’t all go back to Boston, or wherever they’ve lived their most intense life.

I fell asleep, after leaking tears for Howie most of the day: my sweetheart’s shirt was luckily absorbent and available to me, and after tossing and turning almost all night, I had the following dream: We (Someone and I) were looking for the place we go to when we die. After quite a long walk, we encountered it. What we saw was this astonishingly gigantic collection of people and creatures: birds and foxes, butterflies and dogs, cats and beings I’ve never seen awake, and they were moving toward us in total joy at our coming. We were happy too. But there was nothing to support any of us: no land, no water, nothing. We ourselves were all of it: our own earth. And I woke up knowing that this is where we go when we die. We go back to where we came from: inside all of us.

Goodbye, Howie. Beloved. Hello.

This piece ran Sunday, January 31st in the Boston Globe.

About:

Julie Raymond, GTW Newsletter Editor
gtwnorthwest@yahoo.com
Idaho Falls, Idaho
208.252.1390