Category: Women’s Voices

Earth Day Reflection by Sara Wright

I awakened this morning to frozen raindrops hanging from trees – jeweled beads, snow capped hills, and a cacophony of spring songs – I was serenaded by robins, chickadees, phoebes, goldfinches, and nuthatch tweets as I walked out the door into the early morning sun. I listened for the cardinals, who for the moment were absent. It was cold! 28 degrees at the end of April speaks to anomalies, or more realistically, Climate Change.

Yesterday we had rain, and working in the still damp air is literally a healing experience. The fragrance is a combination of chemicals released by soil-dwelling bacteria, oils released from plants during dry spells and ozone created when lightning splits oxygen and nitrogen molecules that then turn into nitric oxide.

I dug in baby trees that I had rescued from the side of the road the day before. Salt kills tender cedar seedlings if the road crew misses slaughtering them. Around Maine trees are worthless except as an economically viable product, a heartbreaking reality for someone like me. Continue reading “Earth Day Reflection by Sara Wright”

The Phenomenology of Embodiment—a poem by Marie Cartier

Picture of author, Marie Cartier (left) and her partner, Kimberly.
Photo of the author and her wife by: Margaret Smith

In these United States and across the world we are in quarantine. Lockdown.

Shelter in place. We’re alone together.

And I miss it all: restaurants, coffee shops, movies, hanging out with friends in real time,

But mostly I miss hugs—and I live with my wife and we hug a lot

…but I miss hugs from friends and even sometimes strangers.

I’m a hugger.

I miss handshakes and whispers and rubbing shoulders and close smiles.

Are we embodied beings? Does the body need other bodies?

What is a “crowd of something called” is always my favorite thing to look up:

a pandemonium of parrots, a swarm of eels, a fever of sting rays,

a cauldron of bats, a gaggle of women,

a herd of sea horses, a clutch of vampires, a clowder of cats,

an army of frogs, a crash of rhinos, a business of ferrets,

a passel of possums….

It’s all mythical now, for humans anyway, groups and crowds.

We might as well be mermaids.

And if mermaids were fish, a group of us would be called a school.

If we were human mermaids, we would be a tribe.

And if we were sea mammals, like dolphins, we would be a pod.

I’m missing my pod,

my school, my tribe.

Like whales or manatees, or dolphins—we need a pod.

We are social creatures. We zoom our pod on social media.

And I worry for the elderly in my pod that they do not use this technology that keeps us whizzing

into each other’s homes.

Zooming in– in Brady Bunch boxes.

Here we are! Open your mic!

Toasting the edges of my Brady Bunch box with my glass of wine—Cheers!

Did God mean for us to need each other in bodies? As bodies.

In the same space?

What does it mean that we are here spinning on the planet in embodied forms?

Our experience and our consciousness of being in bodies—

the phenomenology of what it means to be in a body with other bodies.

We are bodies first I think; we are bodies.

Human bodies. A crowd of them, a group… a family, a band, a community,

a nation, a city, a town…a party.

So– I miss hugs, and handshakes and close spaces and smiles and whispers.

I miss sitting tight next to strangers at a sold-out play, a concert, a movie….

I miss crowded events, parades…a club where I am jostling my drink

across the floor to meet my friends.

I miss waiting for a table and making small talk with the other patrons

and chatting up the maître de.

I miss laughing with clerks at the convenience store and talking

to everyone. In person.

And I miss hugging. I’m a hugger.

And I miss, oh I miss

my pod.

 

–Marie Cartier
April 2020

Photos by the author: from the “sheltering at home” collection

Marie Cartier has a Ph.D. in Religion with an emphasis on Women and Religion from Claremont Graduate University.  She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall (Routledge 2013). She is a senior lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies and Queer Studies at California State University Northridge, and in Film Studies at Univ. of CA Irvine.

Beauty, Blessings and Bistros: The Hawaiian Huna approach to dealing with the virus as well as everyday stresses by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

One of my favorite trainings I have received on my spiritual pathway is with Aloha International. I was ordained as an alaka’i (Hawaiian spiritual guide) in 2016. I began studying Huna intensely in 1997. In 2015, I personally met and studied with our Kumu Kupua (founder and shamanic guide) Serge Kahili King. I love the Hawaiian way as it is gentle, loving and teaches us to examine our beliefs, life practices and thought-patterns in a way which heals our wounds and nurtures our lives in many beautiful ways. Huna means secret but not as something we can’t share, rather something that is hard to discover or grasp like the mists of the sea. Dr. King, however, makes it easy and I am happy to share some of his teachings here.

I have several medical people in my family. They study science and closely follow journals to find treatments and cures. I bless those efforts because their findings are wonderful tools when we, ourselves, are in need of medical treatment. The shamans, however, have a different approach to disease. Instead of looking to see what medications work, we like to explore why other methods work. Placebos, for example, are so powerful that scientists must go to extreme measures to avoid activating them with practices such as double-blind studies. What if instead of working to eliminate the placebo effect, we work to strengthen it? What if our goal is to harness the power of our minds to explore how our expectations, beliefs and thoughts affect our health and well-being? Continue reading “Beauty, Blessings and Bistros: The Hawaiian Huna approach to dealing with the virus as well as everyday stresses by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”

Self-calming with Syllable Counting and Rhyme Finding by Elizabeth Cunningham

In times of stress, I like to count syllables. It soothes me the way the click of knitting needles might soothe others. Finding rhymes is also calming. Below are poems in forms that require syllable count and/or rhyme, the last three written recently. I hope you are all sheltering well.

Villanelle: 10 syllables to a line. A, B rhyme scheme, with repetition of the 1st and 3rd lines.

 

noon

I have come to love the silence of noon
the cars have all gone wherever they go
I can hear the bees hum their tuneless tune

the noon of the day is the sun’s full moon
listen, the air is still, the wind lies low
I have come to love the silence of noon

the chainsaws silent, no wood to be hewn
no scratching the dirt, it’s too hot to hoe
I can hear the bees hum their tuneless tune

each shadow cast, now drawn close, is a rune
thickets conceal spotted fawns and a doe
I have come to love the silence of noon

this refuge from noise, a sweet daily boon
a full body blessing, crown to tiptoe
I can hear the bees hum their tuneless tune

each noon is a moment, passing so soon
the wild meadow flowers before we mow
I have come to love the silence of noon
I can hear the bees hum their tuneless tune Continue reading “Self-calming with Syllable Counting and Rhyme Finding by Elizabeth Cunningham”

When the Tomb Feels Safer than the Garden by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee

I have always loved Lent and Holy Week. When I was young, I enjoyed the challenge of fasting. Holy Week was the powerful culmination of it all, so I would try to make the fast even harder then, like a sprint at the end of a marathon. Chocolate quickly got boring, so once I gave up all desserts. Another year, I gave up lying. (I’m a PK – Preacher’s Kid; enough said.) And then there’s the famous year sometime in my 20s when I decided I’d better give up swearing. (PK, remember?) Both my sister Trelawney and my husband just love to remind me of how I literally swore while walking out of the Ash Wednesday service. And didn’t even notice. And when they finally explained why they were laughing at me, I, of course, immediately cursed again. Sigh. Well, I respond each time, that’s why I decided to give it up in the first place!

My kids and I have also had a lot of fun observing Lent and Holy Week. Each year, it teaches us something new about abundance – especially amid the wealth of intensity and ritual during the last week. We are not legalistic about it; we just want to learn and grow together. One year, we limited plastic as much as possible. And I’ll never forget the year we gave up paper products. That was the first year we didn’t get sore noses, because we used handkerchiefs instead of tissues. As Trelawney likes to say, we finally stopped blowing our noses on a tree. Continue reading “When the Tomb Feels Safer than the Garden by Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee”

The Practice of Bearing Witness by Stephanie Arel

She looked away and stared out the window, trying to hold back the tears in her eyes. “The tents,” she said and shook her head looking down at the ground. The tears were coming, but softly. I asked her what the tents represent. She shrugged her shoulders and said into the camera phone: “The bodies I guess. They don’t have enough room for the bodies.”

In this time of the coronavirus, as in Italy and Spain, New York City has room neither in the hospitals nor the morgue for the bodies that are dying. Up from 25 a week, to 24 a day, bodies are being buried on Hart Island, or City Cemetery, where the unclaimed and unidentified have been interred for decades. Others are waiting in refrigerated trucks for friends and family members to collect them. This New Yorker along with thousands of others have seen the stark reality, one that left even Trump sick at heart.

We are witnessing a global pandemic. Evidence of the ravages of the coronavirus lies all around us. The response to the virus has made physiological, economic, and psychological impacts on our lives. We have changed our working styles, dealt with lowered income, or lost our jobs. Staying secluded at home, we have taken on new roles for which we were not prepared; many of us have become sick, and some have died. We are together witnessing a major world disaster.

What does it mean to be a witness? What will it mean to carry that witnessing forward to future generations to mark this historic event so that when something like it happens again, future generations will have the tools they need to respond more quickly, adapt more easily, recover more rapidly? For this generation, just as those who researched and learned from the Spanish Flu, we bear witness. Continue reading “The Practice of Bearing Witness by Stephanie Arel”

Persistent Beauty by Molly Remer

I knelt beside a sprinkling
of deer fur
dotted with delicate snowflakes.
Don’t take a picture of that,
my husband said,
people will think it is gross.
I don’t find it gross.
I find it curious.
I find it surprising.
I find a story.
Sometimes I feel like
I have to battle a horde
of demonic trolls
before I can take care of myself,
I tell him,
and yet somehow,
I say,
always,
always,
I find my life is still a poem,
in the quietude,
in the battling,
on my knees in brown gravel
to better see this spray of fur
and how the frost
glows like white stars.

I sit on a stone in the pines and let the winds come, sweeping my hair back and lifting my lamentations from my forehead, where they have settled like a black cloud.

I let the air soften my shoulders and my sorrows, sunshine bright on thick brown pine needles, slickly strewn across the steep hill. Continue reading “Persistent Beauty by Molly Remer”

Feeling Squeezed by Esther Nelson

Tyler Foggatt, associate editor of The New Yorker magazine’s, “The Talk of the Town series,” recently contributed (March 23) an essay titled “Cooped Up.”  She notes that China, the first country to shut down due to COVID-19, is now in the process of opening up.  More than ten million people in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, were under lockdown.  She writes, “When restrictions were eased, earlier this month, the city’s [Xi’an] divorce rate spiked.”  Marital conflicts, often existing underneath the radar, bubble to the surface and sometimes explode during periods of quarantine (forced togetherness).

According to Foggatt, American psychologist Lawrence Birnbach predicts that the divorce rate in the U.S. will rise as the current pandemic unfolds.  Two of his patients, married to each other and self-quarantined together, reported they have argued more than ever, mostly having to do with how thoroughly (or not) one person washes their hands and wipes down surfaces.

I think many of us can relate to this.  Long before the current health crisis developed, my spouse and I went about our lives quite differently.  At times we clashed.  Keeping our distance from each other—even before social distancing became the “right” thing to do—was effective inasmuch as that strategy kept things from boiling over, at least most of the time. Continue reading “Feeling Squeezed by Esther Nelson”

A Theological Conversation by Natalie Weaver and Valentine

My son asked me to discuss with him the theological problem of the dual natures, i.e., the divine and human natures, coexisting in the person of Jesus.  He asked me to begin by assuming the premises that 1) Jesus was a real, historical person and 2) that Jesus was both human and divine.  The question then became, “Did Jesus know he was God?”

Of course, as a theologian, I was delighted to have this conversation with my son.  It was fascinating to see how his mind worked, to hear him evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of high and low Christologies, to hear how he resolved the question himself, and to have an opportunity to share my own thoughts with a genuinely engaged, truly curious, and attentively listening dialogue partner in the person of my teenage son.  Not too shabby a victory for any parent!

As we talked, he continued to provide context for the question, which began as a classroom debate in his high school theology seminar.  Apparently, the students were tasked with taking some element from their in-class discussion, evaluating it, and then applying it practically by a twofold retrospective reflection in which the students were 1) to identify a specific situation in their life that could have gone better and 2) to share how their insight drawn from class would have made all the difference.  Now, my son expressed a bit of frustration with this assignment because he would have preferred to discuss how today’s insights might help him in the future, rather than to dwell in the past.  As his wheels turned, I left him alone to puzzle out his assignment, with the promise that I eagerly would return in an hour to see what he produced, accompanied by my own essay on the same task.

Continue reading “A Theological Conversation by Natalie Weaver and Valentine”

Beth March and the Courage of the Gentle Giver by Cathleen F

As someone who spent my prepubescent years watching director Gillian Armstrong’s “Little Women”, I was eager to see Greta Gerwig’s newly released version. Previously unexplored contours of each character, and of my changed perceptions, were made visible through this iteration. The most difficult and touching part of the film that lingers with me is the story of Beth, pianist and caretaker. Beth’s untimely death brings grief into the center of the March family narrative, and Gerwig’s portrayal brought up grief in me about my experiences with invisibility as a paced introvert in a culture that celebrates speed and extroversion.

I grew up wanting to be like Jo March, the outspoken, reactive protagonist. Jo was the rebel, the obvious feminist, and, mostly importantly to me, the brave one. Beth seemed to me to be boring, relegated to a life at home, bound by illness and a preoccupation with the needs of neighbors. Her steadiness looked to me like obedience; she could not fight away the disease that eventually killed her, and I wished to be everything besides her, the introvert who observed and cared and loved music and then died. As I grew into my own introverted, observant, caregiving tendencies, I began to wonder if I had been tricked by my culture, by my upbringing, to think I was Beth when I was really Jo! While social pressures certainly influenced my personality, as they do for us all, I didn’t want to believe that perhaps I was growing into my natural temperament, endowed by the Universe, expressed in my mind and body. As a woman in the 21st century, as a feminist, I was supposed to be like Jo, not the way I was (am). To have a deliberate or tender nature was, in my subconscious perception, to betray the spontaneous, assertive natures of those more worthwhile feminists who got things done. Continue reading “Beth March and the Courage of the Gentle Giver by Cathleen F”