Gather the Women Begins at Home

Here is why I love Chestertown. I have a big function going on at my farm in support of youth trying to recover from alcohol and addiction. This is a state-wide gig—or anyway we’ve done our best to outreach this to young people throughout all the counties in Maryland. And here is the specifically Chestertown, specifically Kent County Eastern Shore thing about this: our food, the main bbq delights, was donated by a fellow outside town who happens to have a cattle farm—fresh beef sausages and hamburg; my boyfriend’s mom just dropped off two pints of fresh salsa, the ingredients of which come straight from her garden all summer long; the fresh veggies and salad to eat will come straight outta mine; another guy from town donated all the ice cuz he owns a Marina just off the Bay and they have ice machines; the bonfire bins are bins I made last week under the tutelage of a good girlfriend’s mom and her expert torching and teaching skills; and just about all the other food is coming by means of good ol fashion potluck. And it got me to thinking…

There is a movement I got involved with, unwittingly, in the fall of 2005. After a year and a half long adventure living on the road with Brandon, my fella, in his pick-up truck, and briefly for a time on the coast of Oregon where we house-sat a trailer with walls so thin that the wind at times blew the curtains around inside, we were traveling homeward and had taken pause in Boulder, Colorado. Mika was our hostess, she was an old college buddy of his and someone who I’d known from school, though never, until then, known well. A young woman who enchanted me with her dark beauty and easy quality of seductive vulnerability, of the type that made you want to reach out and both hold her and love her and especially let her hold you, too. She is this delicate creature, like a butterfly, but always you have a sense about her of a long holding inner-strength like that of a bendable, flexible reed. That ten days in Boulder cemented for me a new way of being: Mika’s friends, high on permaculture and philosophies of new-world communities, bent on traveling, fearlessly, and giving themselves open and over to opportunity and the free reign of potential; Mika’s job on the organic farm picking apples, her best girlfriend’s job on another where I got to ride for a visit to harvest lunch on the back of said girlfriend’s hand-fixed tough-ass Harley; Mika’s roommate’s internship on another organic farm where we volunteered for a day too and sweat and picked eggplants and peppers and tomatoes and dirtied our fingernails and t-shirts and our jeans rolled-up and later I got to make it all into a delicious feast, homemade sauce and all, that fed people and more people and the more that just kept showing up. And we all talked and exchanged numbers and ideas and big broad thoughts and experiences and later that week, on my way home from the Hot Springs where we spent a day cleansing and a cold night in the woods, I read about a conference in a mind/body/spirit mag happening the world over in a month from then: Gather the Woman(GTW). One of these conferences would be in DC, right around when I arrived home. And the conference would prove defining for me in terms of this new lifestyle I had easily fallen in step with by the time my traveled heels wound up in Colorado.

Gather the Woman is an important momentum of change in our ever-escalating society of fear and punishment, evasion and intolerance. “With the power of motherhood within her, a woman can influence the entire world,” began Amma, one of India’s primary spiritual leaders, at 2002’s Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders in Geneva. Amma went on to say, “The love of awakened motherhood is a love and compassion felt not only toward one’s own children but toward all people, animals and plants, rocks and rivers—a love extended to all beings. It is not restricted to women who have given birth; it is a principle (italics mine) inherent in both women and men. It is an attitude of the mind. It is love—and that love is the very breath of life.”[1] From this conference began the evolution of a movement of principles, outlined in Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen’s book of the same name—Urgent Message From Mother: Gather the Woman, Save the World, and it was about this book and the resulting conferences around it’s ideas that I read in the mag that day in Boulder. And yes, there were men at the conference. And when the conference began with the Message from the Hopi Elders, which I stumbled upon months earlier with joy and recognition in a hostel in Mexico, I cried tears of acknowledgment. This movement was home to me—get it, this movement of principle started right here, in my own heart.

As some may recall it was not long after that fall, after the conference and Boulder, that Brandon and I began organizing around a newsletter we’d created called The Oregon Dialogue. It was these values, these principles of literal Universal Love we meant to call out about, to organize and empower. As GTW seeks to symbolize, he and I set about creating our own Circle of community and connection right here in Chestertown. Indeed, through the gifts of today’s technology, we were able to grow these values with friends across the continent—in Hawaii, Oregon, North Carolina and more.

I mention all this because it, GTW, or Attitude of Love, or Being the Change, it takes all forms and it shows up, at any time, at any place, the moment you wish it to be. Circles are natural as day—a whole image of infinite compliment like night into day or hot into cold. The principle of love, of unity of connection and coming together from the center of things, literally from the human heart of things, can happen the moment you say it will. Like me, opening my mouth and heart two months ago and saying—for young people recovering—ahh, let’s use our farm. Put the word out, tell um to bring music and we’ll get a fire going. Who knew that by today, all sorts of loving acts would come together to feed and entertain and host all these people coming to support giving young people a second chance. Community. Circles of hope, small as an Eastern Shore town is, large as the hearts of lots of good people from Boulder to here to beyond. Love knew.

Check out http://www.gatherthewomen.org/
Read the book.

And May it begin with You.

[1] Jean Shinoda Bolen, Urgent Message From Mother: gather the Woman, Save the World, p.15

*note: There is much discourse about the origin of the "Message from Hopi Elders." The link provided is indeed a valuable and inspirational sentiment, though it seems that it is not neccesarily the views of the Hopi Nation. For more in-depth information I suggest Frank Waters Book of the Hopi.