birthing feminine leadership

I'm in the midst of getting trained as a doula. I've spent the past two days learning about child birth and the role of the doula -- the one who mothers the mother, who offers labor support -- and tomorrow I'll go back for a final day. It's been beautiful and is happening amidst, or perhaps also provoking, a couple of important realizations.

The first realization is about the similarities between my work as a doula and my work as an advocate for and with women environmental justice leaders. The doula is spoken and written about universally as an advocate for the mother in an often-rushed and confusing birth environment; the teacher of the workshop, Felicia, also emphasizes the element of collaboration. It is not the doula making choices or speaking for the mother; the doula ensures that the choices and the voice of the mother are elevated above the din, to guide the birth process.

Same with environmental justice lawyering. Luke Cole wrote frequently about the role of the environmental justice lawyer as an advocate who is not out in front, but instead occupies a "tech support" position, making sure that grassroots leaders occupy a place at the table that is equal to all the other players, and making sure the community's agenda drives the process.

Felicia spoke about the doula's crucial service of ensuring that the mother always has the opportunity to provide her informed consent to the doctor's decisions about what should come next. One of the major items on the advocacy agenda of indigenous environmental justice leaders is the principle of free, prior informed consent -- no industrial project or mining operation will take place on indigenous lands without the rightful occupants of the land understanding and freely consenting to that endeavor.

The laboring mother, the Mother Earth -- whether subject to rushed, clinical interventions during the most intimate moments of birth, or plundered for minerals or fossil fuels, the feminine body in our culture is disregarded and desecrated. Her power, her choice, her wholeness, her agency -- all are undermined by invasive procedures performed on the hospital bed or at the strip mine site.

Again and again, as I access these stark and painful understandings I am nonetheless confirmed in my purpose in the world. First in Israel in 1999, then in the Inyo Mountains in 2007, I heard it clearly: healing the feminine principle, at every level. My body, the bodies and lives of women, the earth's body. Big task, for one kind of lazy, sort of naive only-child, isn't it? Yeah. But what else do I have to do?

The second realization is about my work in the world. Everything I am called to do, from coordinating advocacy for women environmental justice leaders, to holding space for laboring women, to dreaming up an activist women's health collective, is about supporting women to heal and to rise. And when I see it laid out so clearly, I finally start to make some sense to myself. In truth I can't separate the healing of my ancestry from my forward-moving participation in the earth's healing. All this work, I will be the first to admit, is deeply rooted in my lineage: my mother's mother was such a broken woman, whose brokenness damaged my own mother. But that brokenness stops with me. I am here to restore wholeness. That's my commitment to myself, to this world, to my future children.

Eve Ensler says: "when we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us . . . happiness exists in action, in telling the truth and saying what your truth is, and in giving away what you want the most." With all my various and seemingly incongruous work, I suppose I am giving what I want the most -- healing for the Mother. Wholeness, balance, respect, love. For my mother who did not have these, but who managed to survive and even thrive, nonetheless. When I see women who need support I go towards them with my light and strength, so as to buttress their own power and magnify their own radiance, so that beauty can live.

Last weekend at the Bioneers conference, women's leadership in the environmental movement was the concept on everyone's lips (along with the imminent urgency of fixing the climate). A diverse chorus of voices spoke to the redemptive power of women's collective, collaborative, inclusive orientation in decision-making and problem-solving. Nina Simons, who graced our WEA event earlier in the week, opened the conference on Friday morning with her wisdom on the essential qualities of women's leadership. I'll try to paraphrase them here, as best I can.

After telling us that the Dalai Lama in September said that "the world will be saved by Western women" (it's true, you can Google it), Nina shared with us the following principles:

• Women are learning that we already are and know enough.
• Strength comes from within, informed by the power of our love and service.
• Cultivating self-awareness is essential to grow beyond wounds.
• Power comes from purpose and inner authority, not credentials or permission.
• There is a dance between leading and following, speaking and listening.
• Every system has limits, and an ebb and flow.
• Reciprocity and synchronicity are essential.
• Flexibility counts: leadership can come from any position.
• Power is something sacred from within us all -- not power over, but power with and through.
• Vulnerability can inform our strength.
• We cannot do this alone -- our flourishing requires relationships of rigorous love and challenging support.
• We are learning to listen to land/ people/ intuition/ sacred spiritual traditions.
• We are learning to share authority and cultivate rotating leadership.
• Diversity is our strength.
• We are connecting and collaborating across boundaries despite our fear.

Reflecting on these, I feel relieved, buoyed and powerful. I am -- we are -- valid and valuable. Perhaps most significantly, I remember that there is something larger than me, larger than all of us individually, at work here, something to which I can and must give my life over.

Just recently a new bloom opened on my orchid plant, shining its long-awaited loveliness into the room. It was in bud for weeks and weeks. I wasn't sure if it was even going to open -- a similar bud had just shriveled and fallen off without ever blooming. But this one persisted, growing and changing from within until it was ready to reveal itself. And now it's here, and the world is a more beautiful place for it.

That's the other thing I'm learning: everything in time. All I can do is create the conditions that support life, and then allow life to do what it knows, by nature, how to do.

Come home. Write about it.

My old friend, with whom I was once in love -- he and I are back in touch.

I fell in love with him one night in my freshman year of college. There were many events leading up to that night, I suppose, but I remember distinctly the circumstances of the falling. We were at his dirty fraternity house. And I don't mean "dirty" like food on the floor and unsavory bathroom conditions. I mean "dirty" like loud music, cocaine, boys fucking girls and then hurting their feelings. (That's not what happened with my friend and I, exactly, but that's the kind of company he kept. Just trying to paint the picture.)

I should rewind, too, and tell you about the day earlier in the semester when our school flooded. It was the El Nino year, year of rains so torrential that an entire college campus infrastructure was overcome by water. The libraries flooded; important materials were lost. The day after the biggest storm, to all of our great glee, classes were cancelled. So my friend and I went on an adventure. He came and found me in my dorm and then we went to visit our french teacher. The sky was gray and the air was refreshing, moist, washed. We walked around our stunned campus that day. Spending time with him made me feel tentative and delighted.

He had this effect on me. He may have had the same effect on all the girls he hung out with, in fact I'm sure he did, because he paid such close attention. I always felt a little bit on edge around him, because he was, in fact, edgy. "Edgy" like you were never sure what he was going to say next. "Edgy" like he could leap across all boundaries of appropriateness with a single utterance. But he was also immeasurably sweet. People loved him. His frat brothers loved him. He clearly came from love, if not love and struggle.

And like I said, he paid attention. When I was around him I felt myself at a kind of tenuous balance point, teetering between a painful exposure, his piercing commentary peeling back layers before I was ready, and the surprising tenderness of being seen so clearly, with such generosity.

So, he kept after me in his odd way. Eventually, of course, we ended up making out with each other. And that night that I started telling you about: I don't recall if that was the first night that we spent together, but it was most definitely the night that the doors to my heart swung open. I remember him playing with me, locking me out of the room, and I remember how much I wanted to get back in to be with him. Then, back in the room: he rolling cigarettes, sitting at his desk, smiling at me.

I forget how exactly it happened but then there it was. The long, slow tumble towards another person, the heart's bright gasp of recognition. But it wasn't meant to be -- he fell away from me almost immediately in the ensuing days, in his maddeningly edgy and inaccessible way. I wrote him a letter demanding that he show up, be with me, let me love him . . . which, as you can imagine, was the death knell. We fell out of contact almost entirely for a long time after that.

But he found me again the following year, I think, and started reaching out to me again. And since then we've re-kindled something of a friendship. I've felt him kind of tracking me all these years, staying in touch one way or another, with a kind e-mail or a random text or chat. Our contact has been frustrating, compelling, loving. In the intervening time he got married to a beautiful woman and is achieving success as a producer. He could have gone in so many directions but he has triumphed, has chosen life. I see that and I am truly proud of him. We finally got together a few weeks ago for the first time in years, over lunch with another friend of his. It felt like no time had passed at all.

Tonight we chatted a bit online, and in our chat he wrote me something of a poem, that ended up cutting straight to my heart. It surprised me, but it also didn't, how swiftly I was transported back to our brief moment together, 12 years ago. The shock of being witnessed was as electric then as it is now, as veiled and elusive as the witness may have been. I was surprised, but I also wasn't, by the tears rolling down my cheeks.

Some living quality of our contact is frozen in time and space, caught, left behind. What has survived all the time up until now is just a piece of it, held at arm's length. But words like these cast light on the ice and melt it down. They're nonsense words, elusive, cryptic; nonetheless, they reach me. In being reached I can recall what's possible: gentleness at close range, ceasing to scramble away from contact and instead breathing quietly in its sight. And that gift yields a flood of further treasures. Later in the evening, after we chatted, I went to the dance and found myself opening up right to the edges of my body. Whirling through space I remembered trust. I remembered safety, my own; and perfection, the mystery's. I smiled wide and gave my life to Life, once more.

All because of a few silly words from an old friend.

Thanks, DOC.

~

i'll say this.

...

put your shoes on

the same way you did

when you were still under 20

and still excited to see something brilliant

or repulsive that defined you.

Come home.

write about it. You deserve the opportunity and command.

don't be so green.

You words may emit bad carbons.

or brilliant diamonds.

and that

exactly

is why it is so trying

and hard and sad

to be brilliant.

you are like you are.

there is a violin playing in my living room.

and a man speaking.

saying, "stand up"

but he is very young

and knows nothing of the world

like you

or I

which makes him so small

and you

and I

so big

and important.

feed your stream

of consciousness

and dance.

tonight,

you will not regret anything

except for not listening to yourself more

adding lamps to your bedroom

photographs to your wall

and removing the television from your home.

and of course calling me more often,

which makes me sad

because I always believed so much

in your capacity

to change the world.

and that, my dear friend.

...

is terribly sad.

the converse...

of your smile.

it is sad to wait there

and pass the last ten minutes of your evening

in something I wish i had a long time ago.

so sister,

please

live it out.

that is what the world needs.

the black and the white

the yin

the circle

the square.

and some dumb bastard to stop typing

when he's not getting paid to do it.