and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

Warsan Shire

Imagine A Woman

Imagine a woman who believes it is right and good she is a woman.
A woman who honors her experience and tells her stories.
Who refuses to carry the sins of others within her body and life.

Imagine a woman who trusts and respects herself.
A woman who listens to her needs and desires.
Who meets them with tenderness and grace.

Imagine a woman who acknowledges the past's influence on the present.
A woman who has walked through her past.
Who has healed into the present.

Imagine a woman who authors her own life.
A woman who exerts, initiates, and moves on her own behalf.
Who refuses to surrender except to her truest self and wisest voice.

Imagine a woman who names her own gods.
A woman who imagines the divine in her image and likeness.
Who designs a personal spirituality to inform her daily life.

Imagine a woman in love with her own body.
A woman who believes her body is enough, just as it is.
Who celebrates its rhythms and cycles as an exquisite resource.

Imagine a woman who honors the body of the Goddess in her changing body.
A woman who celebrates the accumulation of her years and her wisdom.
Who refuses to use her life-energy disguising the changes in her body and life.

Imagine a woman who values the women in her life.
A woman who sits in circles of women.
Who is reminded of the truth about herself when she forgets.

Imagine yourself as this woman.
- Patricia Lynn Reilly

Today

Today

Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

-Mary Oliver, from A Thousand Mornings

Leadership

"I learned that leadership was not about the warrior journey only, but about showing vulnerability as well.  Only when I stepped forward and showed my vulnerability, I cannot tell you how many women came and told me their own story and broke their silence.  It's ok to show vulnerability because we are not perfect and actually our imperfection is the beautiful thing about us; our struggle; it's not necessarily an easy dance.  It's a wobbly dance sometimes

It's like a black stone (she points to her chest) that dissolved from me and became a crystal.  That's the physical feeling that I literally feel.  I can tell you all of this and not cry.  It is out of my system.  My demon is out of me, but it took me years.  It was quite a painful journey and it took quite another kind of courage.  The courage to speak our inner truth, the courage to break our inner silence, the courage to show our vulnerability, the courage to say something as simple as 'I'm not happy' .  Courage is not planned.  Sometimes you have to jump off the cliff and just do it."  Zalnab Salbi

STOP!

"Just for this moment, stop. Stop everything. Stop and look around. Stop and breathe. Stop and take in what you already have. Name the beauty around you. Each and every thing, sight, color. Just for a moment--or five moments. Notice all the things that feed you that aren't food. And then notice what happens."  Geneen Roth

Women in the World Statistics

"90% of modern world casualties are civilian, 75% of which are women and children.  80% of the 43 million refuges  in the world are women and children and that's just in war.  As we speak now 2/3 of the most impoverished in the world are women.  70% of the world farmers are women.  They produce 60% of the food and 90% of the most staple food like rice and beans and maze.  They earn 10% of the income and they only own only 2% of the land.  As we speak now only 3% of the decision-makers in the media are women, in this country.   Only 2.2% of Peace Agreements are signed  by women."  Zalnab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International

"Like the women of Liberia, we broke the barriers of religion, race, ethnicity, status and we stepped out and redeemed out time.  We broke all the barriers that patriarchy has set in front of us and we said "War is nonsense.  Peace is what we want.  We will take it if you don't give it to us."  We can never, ever redeem our time if we continue to wait for the men to give it to us.  Is it in your home?  Is it in your community?  It is time for us to break the barriers that separate us.  It's time for us to bind together.  Hold on to that thing that binds us, even though patriarchy wants us to ignore it. If you don't know what I'm talking about when you go to take a bath, find another woman to stand  by you.  The thing that unites us is our Womanhood.  It moves beyond child, it moves beyond tribe, it moves beyond culture, it moves beyond everything.  As women, we need to hold together.  As women, we need to redeem our time.  As women we need to take it back.  As in the 60's and 70's.  As women, we need to be more radical.  There is nothing wrong with stepping out there and saying we are claiming our space.  Why are there still issues of discrimination?  You need to take it!  The men will not give it because it is shifting the status quo.  You need to take it. "  Lehmay  Gbowee

Women's Search for Self

"For many women, the shift from being the bountiful mother to being a person in search of her essence is a difficult period of change.   Naturally, people admire the selflessness of the caring mother, but what's to admire in the search from a self?   This effort will look narcissistic and far from virtuous.  When you make the important move to find yourself, you will probably have to go it alone.   You may have to accept that you will be misread and underappreciated.   Certainly your family will have to adjust."  Thomas Moore

Silver, The Moon and the Feminine

"Silver is he metal of the moon and because women's biology is connected to the moon, silver is associated with the feminine.   The luminous glow of moonlight lacks the sharp clarity of sunlight, but it's gentleness unfolds, synthesizes, brings together as one.   Feelings and intuition that remain hidden from the sun surface in the moonlight."  Marion Woodman

Women's Bodies

"Women's body has carried the man's shadow of lust, greed and sloth.  Consciousness is also absent that neither recognizes the rape of the body soul.  Neither considers it a moral issue.  Neither hears the voice crying out from dis-eased genitals.   Each goes to the doctor for pills and salve."  Marion Woodman

Women and Healing

"A period of healing from childhood wounds frequently occurs for women in their mid-thirties and early forties as the profound changes leading to menopause begin.   I call this seven year period in the feminine life cycle "turning straw into gold".   Therapists often notice that old memories of emotional and physical abuse surface during this period preceding midlife.   It is a miracle of feminine biology that we undergo mental housecleaning in preparation."   Joan Borysenko

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?"

Divine Feminine

"If you want to find the Shekhina, the Divine Feminine, then go to the place where women tell stories."   Rabbi Nachman

Women's Friendships

"Women who love God as Father, those who love God as Mother and others who couldn't give a hoot about God's theoretical gender or existence, find themselves sisters on the journey.   Beyond religion or lack thereof, beyond warm fuzzies or cold scars that ideas about God have planted in our minds, the unmistakable perfume of divine belonging envelopes us as we come together as friends."   Joan Borysenko

Image

"The compulsion to be desired and desirable undermines self-direction, self-confidence, and self-determination in women of all ages, in all our roles, whether or not the affliction is conscious.  Wanting to be wanted is about finding our power in an image rather than in our own actions.   We try to appear attractive, nice, good, valid, legitimate, or worthy to someone else, instead of discovering what we actually feel and want for ourselves.   Other people are expected to provide our own feelings of power, worth or vitality, at the expense of our own authentic development.   In place of knowing the truth of who we are and what we want for our lives we become trapped in images."    Polly Young-Eisendrath