Making it Mine: An Un-Orthodox Passover by Joyce Zonana

Passover is a holiday of remembrance, of ritual re-enactment: this, we say, is what our ancestors experienced. This is what they felt and knew, what they tasted in their blood. The movement from slavery to liberation, from the soul’s winter to spring. We must never forget, we say, we must always remember, be thankful for our freedom, never take it for granted. “In each generation,” the Haggadah enjoins, “we should feel as if we personally had come out of Egypt.”

jz-headshotThis year, I celebrated the Jewish feast of Passover on March 31st–almost three weeks before the holiday’s official start on the evening of April 19th, the 15th of Nissan. It turned out to be my best Passover yet.

Because I’d been accepted for a residency at an artists’ colony beginning on April 17th, I had known since last Fall that I would not be home for the holiday. Given Passover’s importance for me–a Jew who left Egypt in her own lifetime, part of what some have called the “Second Exodus”–I had thought I might postpone the residency and even considered turning it down. But the colony could not change the dates, and, after much deliberation, I decided that my work as a fledgling translator was worth missing my usual gathering of family and friends. I told myself I could mark the arrival of Passover internally.

Continue reading “Making it Mine: An Un-Orthodox Passover by Joyce Zonana”

The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 2 by Carol P. Christ

Last week, In the Room of Undressing where women strip themselves to the bone, my great-great-grandmothers on my father’s side spoke in me. I had been afraid they would judge me for not being a wife and mother like they were, but they did not.

The story continues with my great-great-grandmothers on my mother’s side.

Ingrid Mattsdottor, born 1829, Överhogdal, Jämtlands Län, Sweden, died 1918, Kansas City, Missouri, proprietor of a boarding house, mother of five daughters:

I was the oldest of eight children. Our father died when I was eleven. At sixteen I was sent to work as a servant in a village far from home. I stayed for six years. After that, I worked for two years on a farm in our village. I was twenty-nine, and wondering if I would be an old maid, when Olof and I married. Our five daughters came quickly. I knew a lot more about work and children he did, so I took charge. When the crops failed all over Sweden for two years running, I said enough was enough. As soon as our last daughter was born, I sold the farm, and we left for America.

Iowa was worse than Sweden. Our little Carin died the first year. Olof gave Ingrid to a wealthy Swedish couple without so much as a word to me. He kept talking about going back to Sweden. One day he took the money I set aside and bought his ticket.

By the time he came back for us, Anna, Sarah, Belle, and I had moved to Kansas City. I was running a boarding house. I told Olof that we had no intention of going back to Sweden with him. When Anna married, instead of moving out, she brought her husband and his children to live with us. Belle became quite the business woman and took over my role as provider. Sarah and her family were always close by.

I worked as hard as any man and Belle did too. “Far better off on our own,” we would often say. We are proud to have another strong woman in our family. I am sorry you didn’t get to meet Belle. You would have liked her.

Continue reading “The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 2 by Carol P. Christ”

No Hope, No Problem: Reflections on Pesach, Time and Paradox. by Ivy Helman

29662350_10155723099993089_8391051315166448776_oIn “Time Telling in Feminist Theory,” Rita Felski suggests that there are four main ways feminists discuss and use time: redemption, regression, repetition and rupture.  They are aptly named as they behave similar to their labels.  Redemption is the linear march of time, hopefully progressing step by step towards a redeemed, or at least better, future even if sometimes things get momentarily worse.  Regression is the want to go back in time or at least return to idyllic and/or imagined pasts: to matriarchy or to a time before patriarchy’s violent arrival.  Repetition is a focus on the cyclical nature of time in bodies, in daily chores, in seasons and so on. Rupture posits a break in time in a way what was before no longer makes sense or doesn’t exist.   Think utopia or dystopia.

While she speaks of them individually, she also acknowledges that no one is bound to one manner of speaking of time and that, in many ways, they overlap and intertwine.  Most feminist theorists use more than one although she asserts that feminism as a whole, “Unlike Marxism or liberalism… does not fold a temporal vision into its very core” (22).  What she means exactly by this is unclear.  Yet, if she means that feminism doesn’t share one unified vision of time or of the future, then I would agree with her.  If she is suggesting that feminism isn’t really all that concerned with time, then I disagree.  Feminism is all about creating a better world for us and for future generations. Continue reading “No Hope, No Problem: Reflections on Pesach, Time and Paradox. by Ivy Helman”

Raven’s Cry by Sara Wright


Fake coyote calls split
a moon cracked sky in two.
False ‘Indian’ hoots and drums
stunned sleeping birds –
Why do ‘whites’
insist upon using Indigenous ways,
to make a point?
Coyotes know.

Did they think that she was blind
or that her dreaming body,
a roiling belly
wouldn’t warn her?
Deception is a ruse
to twist and hide from truth
even when La Llarona’s river
becomes a mirror
shivering under
 winter solstice flight. Continue reading “Raven’s Cry by Sara Wright”

The Art of Reclaiming Lost Time by Mary Sharratt

Last year I made a list of my recurring negative thoughts. Topping my list was: “There’s never enough time.” 

As a freelance writer, I lead a life of frantic multi-tasking, each month peppered with deadlines and to-do lists, newsletters to send out and a website to maintain. Like everyone else, I balance work commitments with family responsibilities, household tasks, critter care, exercise and fitness, and spirituality. How can I get all this stuff done if I dare take the time to meet my friends for lunch or go somewhere fun with my husband?

Add the crunch of a struggling fiction market. These days, it’s not enough for writers to simply write – we also have to market and publicize ourselves, otherwise we might not sell enough copies to get another contract. New and aspiring authors also feel the pressure to create a massive social media following just to sell their first book and get their foot in the door. All this, of course, creates a vicious circle as writers and other creatives feel the obligation to spend an increasing amount of time on social media hyping ourselves. The end result is that we have precious little time left over to actually write. Writing of any depth demands hours of uninterrupted time. Continue reading “The Art of Reclaiming Lost Time by Mary Sharratt”

Acting Out by Esther Nelson

I’ve had two distinct vocations during my lifetime—so far.  Three, really, if you count parenting a vocation.  Parenting took up a lot of my time for many years.  There were aspects to it that were fulfilling, enlightening, and satisfying, but parenting doesn’t last a lifetime.  Children grow up before long and then what?

I grew up in Temperley, a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina, with fundamentalist, evangelical missionary parents, the second of five children.  My parents met at Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois, an ultra-conservative, Bible-believing school that encouraged and prepared students to go into the world and preach the Gospel.  My parents were zealous to reach Jews for Jesus and sailed to Argentina in 1941, a country where many Jews from Europe emigrated to in the 19th century to escape various upheavals. Continue reading “Acting Out by Esther Nelson”

Storytelling as a Spiritual Practice by Nurete Brenner

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Audre Lorde

Question: What tools do we have that are powerful enough to dismantle the Master’s house?

Answer: Storytelling.

Storytelling does not belong to the “master.” Storytelling is subversive because it belongs to the collective and not to the individual; it gives agency to the powerless; it is not dependent on time or money, and it makes visible those who are overlooked and ignored in our globalized industrialized system. Continue reading “Storytelling as a Spiritual Practice by Nurete Brenner”

The Sanctuary of One Another by Molly Remer

53850207_2292227257656150_5800641319395131392_o“Please prepare me
to be a sanctuary.
Pure and holy
tried and true.
With thanksgiving
I’ll be a living
sanctuary
for you.”*

—Beautiful Chorus (Hymns of Spirit)

In March, my husband drove our daughter into town to work at her Girl Scout cookie booth and released me to prepare for an all-day Red Tent retreat for my local women’s circle. After I packed my supplies for ritual, I set off on a walk in the deepening, rain-dark twilight. As I walked, I sang a song of sanctuary over and over, until I felt transported into a different type of consciousness, my feet steady on muddy gravel, the leafless branches stark against grey sky, moss and stones gleaming with sharp color against the roadside. A fallen tree absolutely carpeted with enchanting mushrooms caught my eye and invited me off the road and into its arms. As I stood there, feeling as if I had stepped out of ordinary reality and into a “backyard journey,” the spring peepers in the ephemeral pool in our field began their evening chorus. It has been so cold out with below freezing temperatures, snow, and ice for days since first hearing them in early March that I actually wondered if they would survive to continue their song.

Mercifully, though, it is not a silent spring. Continue reading “The Sanctuary of One Another by Molly Remer”

The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 1 by Carol P. Christ

Over the past year or so I have been reciting my mother line, seven generations back, as a mantra of gratitude that helps me sleep at night. Sometimes I also name my sixteen great-great-grandparents, though I often fall asleep before finishing.

I have gained courage from the strength of their lives, but I never wondered what my eight great-great grandmothers would think of me. My life feels so different from theirs. Perhaps I feared they would judge me and my life.

This weekend, while re-reading Woman and Nature, I followed the narrator through a Passage to the Room of Dressing:

Where the women are not close. Where the women keep themselves at a distance.  . . . where the women tell each other that they are happy.  . . . The room where the daughter denies she is anything like her mother. (156)

Continue reading “The Room Where We Support Each Other, Part 1 by Carol P. Christ”

Happy Birthday, Dear Brother by Barbara Ardinger

Today would be my brother Dale’s 75th birthday. To honor him, I’m rewriting an article I wrote for a business magazine in Orange Co., CA, in 1992. Although I was a regular columnist for that business magazine, I seldom wrote about business. I guess I was their comic relief. I wrote this piece during the 1992 presidential election campaign (Clinton, Bush, Perot) when the Republicans were going on and on and on about “family values.” I chose to write about Real Family Values.

In the late ’60s, Dale dropped out of his senior year at the University of Missouri, where he was majoring in art and earning A’s. He went home to Ferguson and came out of the closet. It freaked our family, big-time. First, they blamed it on our mother, who had died in 1965. Then they blamed it on higher education. Then they blamed the Sixties. Then it was the fault of Art “because everybody knows all artists were degenerates.” Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Dear Brother by Barbara Ardinger”