Women's Friendships

"How might your life have been different, if as a young woman, there had been a place for you, a place where you could go to be with women? A place where you could be received as you strove to order your moments and your days.

A place where you could learn a quiet centeredness...to help ground yourself in daily patterns that would nurture you through their gentle rhythms...and after the fires were lighted and the drumming and the silence, you heard for the very first time...each woman slowly speaking into the stillness, sharing her feelings of how she saw her life and what she wished to say of it...weaving the threads of her life into a fabric to be given and named.

And as the shadows of the day lengthened into dusk and you leaned your head against your mother's shoulder, you pondered in your heart a different sense of a woman's life.

If someone had been able to see that you were taking the first tiny baby steps toward feeling your own feelings, of knowing that you saw life differently than those around you. If you had been helped to experience your own uniqueness, to feel the excitement of sensing, for the very first time, your own awareness of life. What if someone had helped you to own all of this...to own your own life.

And the women helped you to go inside yourself and consider all the experiences of your life and to reflect on them...if the women had helped you draw your thoughts and feelings together and to weigh them...so that you could come to a clearer knowing of what your life was about. And if the women had listened as you told them of your whole life and the meaning that it held for you.

And at the end of that process...the oldest women in the lodge had come and sat in a circle and you saw that they had left an empty place....a place for you. And you softly and timidly made your way to the empty space and quietly claimed your wisdom. The wisdom of your soul.........How might your life have been different?"