Gather the Women, Save the World

International Women's Day was yesterday.

The first time I heard of the day was 2006, I was living in Chestertown--Kingstown, actually--just across the river past the bridge.  With Brandon in our asbestos green house once called the Pod with the pine tree forest firepit and singing angel garden yard, a place he and I tagged Truslow Road.

Just before that, Brandon and I spent 18 months living on the road, it was a journey my spirit felt compelled to and we lived from his truck in the forests of this country, and followed serendipity signals around the nation that led us in connection with the earth and her rhythms, and we lived the idea that this connection alone held the secret to our futures, to all of humanity, to life sustaining itself happily in the years to come on our planet.

Our last stop on that trip was in Boulder, at our friend Mika's for 10 days, we went with her friends and worked and played on different organic farms.  We soaked in mineral springs in the mountains and laughed and laughed and laughed some more, and on the way out of town I picked up a Mind-Body-Spirit mag with a small little press release about Gather the Women.  This was October, we were heading east again, and Gather the Women was having an international meeting--small little circles of women gathered, circle by circle, around the world. In a month it would happen, with one to take place in DC.

I went.  With a Renaissance woman named Natalie from Chestertown whose homemade blueberry muffins we used to sell in the coffee shop there, and to this day they are the best I've ever had.  Gather the Women was, and still is, about gathering as people to connect on and share the values that women intrinsically bring to this world.  As women with these inner qualities of instinct, compassion, patience and understanding, strength, care-giving and unconditional motherly love, it's about how to use our inborn gifts to literally unite the world.  We do it a moment at a time by being who we are within, by teaching all people, starting with one another, how to value our innermost selves.  And it's so, so important to teach it to, to love and help heal, our men.

It's an action, for sure, political as it comes and like all actions with the most lasting change, it's one that is always, always going on just underneath it all, living room to living room, fire circle to circle, kitchen table over tea. Urgent Message From Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World is a book that came out after the movement began and it gave words to the heart-breaking and re-finding experience I personally had with Brandon those years on the road.  On the road, on an indistinct path for a deeper, more significant meaning in my life, a meaning that didn't include but was defined by my inner-connection with all of Life, with all the people and places and experiences it brings.  I recommend this book for all, women and men.

My path has been one with many, many big and little pieces of change, and it has always been about this.  Connecting to others, to the earth, the tides, to the hearts of friends and strangers alike, it continues to be my single most focus.  It is reverent to me, what it means to be really alive.  It's how to stay awake a day at a time, and how to wake others up to the same.  Our inner selves, the part that authentically counts. Gather the Women gave to me, to my path, a name.

There have been countless ladies, and men, living these innermost values.  I can not list all the ones who've so impacted me since then, but what I can say is that I am in a time in my life when living those innermost values, more than anything else in the world, has opened me up to my own true happiness and bliss.  It has impassioned and inspired me, given me endless strength where again and again I thought there was none.  During a time on our planet when what you have on the outside is what appears to count the most, the people whose hearts, and how they are willing to live openly with them, those people out there who've happened in to my life because of their own process of waking unto them selves, they have made all the difference.  They are the guideposts along the way.  As I've gone along, I have certainly gathered a host of phenomenal women and men.  We are a tribe world-strong.

I've come a long ass way since I started with Bran back then.  We all have~staying put in your own little neighborhood, or out there somewhere uncharted on the road~

Just how far can we still go?