Spirit In Action – Third Annual Conference For Women
Women In God, Women In Good
Notes: Carol Desjarlais
Harpist Jara Goodrich played the harp for the entry.
Upon entering the Banquet Room at the Hilton Garden Inn, in Freeport Maine, I was struck by the simply beauty of tables decorated tall white candles with and tall crystal chimneys. As a place setting for each participant was a Soul Gifts CD as the main color, small boxes of Enlightenment mints, a pad and paper.
Opening: Megan Devine, conference Weaver & Jane Honeck
During this time of war, fear and confusion it is even more important for us as women t o come together on days like this to nurture each other and to join in spiritual unity sending our strength, hope and love out to the world.
Together we can make a difference. Women have been spiritual foundation in families, communities and the world since time eternal. When we lead with our hearts, we know where we are headed. When we live in love, doors open and new opportunities for positive change make themselves know, Now is not the time to step back in fear, rather it is the time to move forward in love and know we are not alone.
Today will be a day of love, hope and inspiration; that it will be a time to nurture your soul, make new friends and understand with all of your heart and soul that you are part of a greater community of women who together will make a difference.
Welcome and you belong.
Opening Ceremony: Pirun and Rebecca Sen. A Cambodian Best Wishes Dance where she, representing three Gods, carried a bowl of flower petals from heaven which are part of her dance. With absolute grace and fine purposeful movements, she danced and tossed the petals towards the audience as an expression of good will, good luck, happiness and prosperity to all present. Her father, Pirun played a Buddhist Temple musical instrument called a Roneat.
Patricia Reis: Taking Care in Troubled Times: Body Mind and Spirit
Portland psychotherapist, Author. “Through the Goddess: A Woman’s Way of Healing; The Dreamer’s Way: Dreamwork and Art For Remembering; Recovery; Daughters of Saturn; From Father’s Daughter to Creative Woman.
1. Nurturing:
We are born nurturers and have been harassed by that word. A word that goes with that is “Selfish” and that word cans top us in our tracks. We must claim our right to take back the positive right to Self-care.
Anyone who has been on an airplane knows the first instructions before the oxygen comes on in case of emergency. They tell you to take care of yourself first, and then help those with you. Self-care when others would prefer you Caretake.
I have a feeling the plane may not be going down but our oxygen is in trouble. We need to take care ourselves first with a full tank of gas in order to be Present. People need us.
Mary Oliver, “The Journey”
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
You knew what you had to do = a new voice. You need to save the only life you can save. You.
Self-Care Caretaking
Respect-based Control
Let go Foster dependence
Motivate and empower believe invaluable
Discernment tied up and tied down
Loving requires forsaking boundaries and does not cerate love
Body Mind and Spirit are not separate.
• Body
We need to root out negative messages.
We need to attend to physicality with mercy and kindness.
We need to exercise but not the way everyone else is, we must do it so it fits us, personally.
We need to watch our diets, but not like everyone else. Your body will tell you what you, yourself, need.
Listen and observe your own voice; that small voice that accompanies us
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
…Our soft animal body, the seasons and cycles of womanhood, our gifts and our requirements. What is Wild in you? We must think particularly, our sexuality. We are in bondage to no one. We have erotic fire. That is our source of healing, our creativity and our transformation. To not honor that Wildness is to become confused, angry, fearful, depressed. We must confront our own fear of our sexuality and use that erotic energy to change the world.
Audre Lorde, Black lesbian feminist, activist, and poet:
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling…
We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.
It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.
The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.
• Mind
Women are plagued by depression and anxiety.
Depression in Winter Jane Kenyon
There comes a little space between the south
side of a boulder
and the snow that fills the woods around it.
Sun heats the stone, reveals
a crescent of bare ground: brown ferns,
and tufts of needles like red hair,
acorns, a patch of moss, bright green….
I sank with every step up to my knees,
throwing myself forward with a violence
of effort, greedy for unhappiness–
until by accident I found the stone,
with its secret porch of heat and light,
where something small could luxuriate, then
turned back down my path, chastened and calm.
Depression results from women knowing something sacred and not being believed. We need to move the depression through to expression.
Read the Goddess Roots of Confronting anger.
If we do not become who we were meant to be, we are only half made, we are victims, we are liars, we are pressured, we have no voice, we have no power and we can not grow.
Fear today is constant and to heal we need to take action.
Audre Lorde: The Cancer Journals, written in 1980. This work is about herself, her struggle with breast cancer and her mastecomy. In The Cancer Journals Lorde explores the feeling of hopelessness and despair as she faces death itself. She felt that this book gave her strength and power to explore her experience with cancer and to share it with other women.
Define your personal path of action and examine how fear stops you and hwere you need to take a stand.
• Spirit
Night Wind Woman – Joy Harjo
a woman can’t survive
by her own breath
alone
she must know
the voices of mountains
she must recognize
the foreverness of blue sky
she must flow
with the elusive
bodies
of night wind women
who will take her into
her own self
look at me
I am not a separate woman
I am a continuance
of blue sky
i am the throat
of the sandia mountains
a night wind woman
who burns
with every breath
she takes
Practice sacred dimensions through the following:
1. silence – find a way to have silence in your life. You must have silence to hear your own small voice. Create your own day, or time of day, of rest. It is not the amount of time, but the intention.
2. fasting – refrain from your usual intact of “something” – internet, email, television, constant bombardment of negativity. It is not just food we need to fast from.
3. Dreams – Dreams are our inner literature. They are a long-honored source of knowledge. You need to analyze and ponder night images and messages.
4. Prayer – acknowledge the sacred in life. Prayer can come in many forms.
Diane Ackerman – Forms of Prayer: “Poetry,” Ackerman said, “is my form of celebration and prayer. My way of inquiring about the world. I use words as an instrument to unearth shards of truth.”
That truth, according to Ackerman, seems to be about our yearning to be relocated, the human desire to experience vicariously the soul-searching of poets, who pay exhausting attention to their senses so they can clarify the human condition.
“People like poetry,” mused Ackerman, “because it shows people human truths that they may have already known but had forgotten because it wasn’t yet in memorable language.”
Bring to bear the body, mind and spirit through compassion ( my god, you are doing the best you can), mercy (you are struggling with a female body, that soft animal body), cherish by taking breaks, gratitude that we are here at all. Make yourself one small promise about Self Care and do not let yourself down. We have a long lineage of women counting on us.
A Summer’s Day: Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Jane Honeck – Family Roots: The Give and Take of Family Sustenance
What you know today can be suspect tomorrow. Take care of today and quit worrying about tomorrow. Lessons I have learned:
1. There is a fool born everyday. I was single parent with three boys and thought it was pretty much over for a relationship. Then I met my husband to be.
2. Family can become new and extended. It can be children, step-children, an Ex, ex-sister-in-laws, ex ex brothers- in- laws…etc. I have new extended family.
3. Keep the faith – I thought my three boys were going to be crippled by divorce. I had to share my concerns and I learned that we were not all going to hell in a hand basket. By sharing, I could compare and feel so concerned about what I thought was the unique sorry state of my kids. With family, all things are possible. Remember, every crisis will soon be a distant memory.
4. Count on Change and you won’t be disappointed.
5. Our family is everyone who cares for us. An experience with son having heart surgery and she heard from people all around the world who sent their prayers and best wishes. Email, phone calls, drop-ins until she finally started to hide from all the care. After the surgery she and her husband were talking and she said, “But why haven’t I heard from my family?” It was then she realized, she had…her extended different family.
6. It is more difficult to receive than to give. Sometimes fear can be your new best friend.
7. When all else fails, pray.
8. Find new ways to dream of the empty nest. There will be emotional changes. The nest will never really be empty, just temporarily, or just different. See lesson 4.
9. Dreaming is a pleasant pastime.
10. See lesson 4.
11. Go with the flow because you will break not bend. Life and family can change on a dime.
“Family life is full of major and minor crises – the ups and downs of health, successes and failure in career, marriage, and divorce –and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It is difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.” - Thomas Moore
Stories of Grace: Nurturing Community through Compassionate Outreach – Karen Packhem. Community advocate and co-founder of Scarborough’s Project GRACE. Recipient of 2002 Bishop Amadee Prouix Award for volunteerism.
Service should be spirit led.
1. Fund-raise so that you include the community and allow them to give and receive
-Presents For Parents – white elephant gifts from teachers and community, donations of wrapping materials, children shop the first of December. Older teens help wrap and help children shop. It is a way of regifting.
Raise enough just to meet the needs.
2. Have fun or you will not have volunteers come back.
Social Nights. Dance offered to community and volunteers.
Have an auction at dance.
3. Adopt-a-family as a family. Have the family, to be gifted, make a wish list.
Teach our own children to be volunteers. Our children will realize that others have less, as well.
4. Child Projects of Service, never too young
A Day Care had a lemonade stand and raised money for the GRACE project.
After-school projects for teens
5. Memorial Gifts – in lieu of flowers give to Project
Performance: Dawn Boyer and Brett Hartenbach of Rock My Soul. A group formed in 2004 has a unique brand of rousing, raise-the-rafters gospel music. They volunteer to sing where needed; churches, hospitals, senior citizen’s homes, schools, etc.
Blessing and Lunch.
Different Drummers Performance. A drumming group from Yarmouth that is a community-based, freestyle drum circle. Founded 2003, they are a diverse group, ranging in age from 8 – 85, who find commonality in creating music together. All their music is improvised and radiates positive energy. Totally full of energy and unique sounds blended together to become roof-shattering beautiful heart rhythms. A real spiritual feast as a dessert for lunch. They were a group of twelve but have up to 240 drummers in the small community of Yarmouth. They include a tribal singer who sings to and with a crystal bowl in a primal language and Martin Steingesser, a performance poet comes to us from Portland, ME, where he works with the Maine Arts commission’s touring Artist and Artist in residence Programs. Baron Wormser, Poet Laureate of Maine, describes Martin’s poems in the recently released collection, Brothers of Morning, as articulating “… the many seasons of the heart - joy, outrage, longing, whimsy, sadness … in a … burning, tender voice that rejoices in the ungainly splendors of human feeling.” Poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar describes Steingesser as a”musician”, acrobat and teacher.” In performance, his voice whispers, rants, clangs and sings, blending movement, some sign language and music in programs for all ages. ~ “”He is a musician, acrobat and teacher of poetry, this book ablaze with imagination,”" says poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar. ~ A master teacher, he was given the Maine Alliance for Arts Education’s Bill Bonyun Award for Exemplified Talent and Professionalism as an Artist and Contributions to Arts Education, in 2006. Steingesser performed “Dark Side of the Heart”.
Raffle: A Raffle of 14 items was done with the grand prize raffle of six copies of “Soul Gifts; The World’s Self-Help Book and Soul Rubbing Exercises” and an etching.
Journey Toward Peace: Tales From Afghanistan – Shquipe Malushi. Albanian/American poet/writer living in New York; Executive Director, Albanian American Women’s Organization; Shqipe Malushi, an Albanian/American writer and peace activist who is part of Women’s Campaign International’s work in Afghanistan.
She will spoke a little on her work in Kabul and the journey toward peace. Malushi says, “the women of Afghanistan are highly stressed and traumatized yet are learning it is their responsibility to bring positive change to their lives.”
Originally from Kosova, came to the United States 25 years ago with $50 and 50 words of English. In her journey of transformation, she became a poet, writer, leader, teacher, producer, lifecoach, consultant, and humanitarian helping women and children between war and peace.
She began her stories by saying her name should have been “Mischievous”. She spoke of losing her father, a pharmacist, who was poisoned and her mother who died shortly after and being raided by grandparents in the old way where there was no showing of care for girls. At fourteen, she stole her dead mother’s passport and money from her grandmother’s upstairs trunk and ran away. She dressed herself as a pregnant covered woman, using a pillow, and managing to get through three countries and land in Instanbul. There she lived in a commune of hippies until she was found out and sent back home. She expected to be killed or beaten badly, she was neither. She was shunned for six months and then an uncle began putting bars up on her bedroom window. She was kept licked up in the bedroom for one year. There, she began her education. There she says she learned grace. She told her uncles she wanted to go to school. After a year they said she could go to school if she became a pharmacist and took over her father’s business. She agreed and was sent away to school in a different country. Immediately she became a problem at school, on purpose, and was kicked out and never returned home.
Her story takes her through her life on a journey to America, to Hollywood, to meet the singer, Tom Jones. (She hopes to meet him before he passes.) She had a serendipitous life and through laughter and tears she takes us on her journey and through the blessings she received for the family of Man.
In American, she worked as a waitress and lost the job in five days because someone would order rye bread and she would bring bread, but not rye and when told they asked for RYE bread, she told them,” In Albania we have one kind of bread and we are glad. Eat. Eat.” She was given so many opportunities and she grabbed them.
She was told of a motherless Jewish family that needed a Nanny. She applied for the job but had no nice clothing. She had a pair of black pants that were so old they were gray. She wet them down to make them look black again. She was ushered into the interview and the interview took place in the most beautiful room with white rugs and white sofa. She knew she was in trouble. She was asked if she could cook because part of her job would be to cook for the children. She had never cooked in her life but when they asked, “Can you cook Italian?”, she would say , “Oh, yes.” She proceeded to say yes to anything they asked. She was hired and years later it was said that the father hired her because she had been so scared she had peed on the couch.
She became Maman to the three children. On the first night she was too cook. She had to phone her Grandmother in Albania to ask what to do. Her grandmother said to bake potato, bake chicken, and make soup. She made the soup with everything in the refrigerator, including yogurt, peanut butter, cheese, and mostly ketchup. Later, when the oldest son was grown he said they had lied about it being good; it had given them diarrhea for days.
Her adventurous spirit and courage and miracles led her to many impossible dreams coming true. She took her oldest child (as his Nanny) to a welcoming party when he entered college. The father became suddenly ill and was unable to go. Everyone was drinking and she got very drunk. It was said she had an enlightening discussion with a professor. That professor gave her a scholarship to Sarah Evans. She had nothing but the home she lived in, the family she was nanny too. She went for the interview, by help of Jewish neighbors ( Jews should have seen this Muslim woman as enemy.) She accepted the scholarship but was told she had to pay $1500 of her own for the scholarship. She had no money and cried in the taxi ride home. The taxi driver asked her why she was crying. She tearfully told him of receiving the scholarship and having no money to get it. The taxi driver and his wife came to the house the following day and brought her a check for $1500. Complete strangers were her miracle workers.
She says the way to get through life is to bitch, bellyache and get on with it.
She had no money for the travel to the college. Someone gave her the train and bus ticket. Three days into the scholarship, she was traveling three hours by train and bus after sending the children off to school, for three hours of class and the three hours back to fix dinner for the family. She was hit by a car and in a coma. She awakened to being paralyzed from the waist down and a serious head injury. Eighteen months later she was told she had to finish her scholarship semester in three months or lose it. She crutched her way to school and earned her first degree.
She eventually earned four degrees.
She would volunteer and help others and people would mistakenly think she was on payroll and she would get paid. That would pay for something else she desperately needed. Something always came up to help her.
She has had to be hidden under blankets going through riots in Kabul when she arrived due to bad timing during the riots. She has founded women’s organizations. She adopted a daughter from one of the orphanages she helped.
She is leaving tomorrow to go back to Afghanistan knowing that this is one of the most dangerous things she has done.
An amazing women of Spirit, sacrifice and service. I would not have missed her for the world.
Commitments: A time to meditate and write your intentions to nurture ourselves, our families, our community, our world.
Closing Prayers: Each standing in their compass area, with candle for light.
East: Carol Desjarlais, Native American song and prayer.
South: Member Rabbi
Shqipe Malushi sang Arabic prayer
Dr. Louise Bias gave a black Christian prayer.
Performance: Rock My Soul with the whole ensemble.
Fellowship.
Tags: Poems by Shewolf
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