Tag: Lise Weil

La Llorona and the Dark Green Religion of Hope by Sara Wright

Picture of Sara Wright standing outside in natureI recently returned to Maine after what can only be called a harrowing journey from the Southwest. Grateful to feel beloved earth under my feet, I walk along the pine strewn woodland paths to keep myself sane. My animals have been ill, my neighbor was hospitalized briefly, other neighbors deliberately destroyed my garden wall crushing a baby balsam, and used this property as their personal ski slope, the threat of the C/virus looms – there are no words to describe this kind of exhaustion. As a PTSD survivor all my senses are on permanent scream. The simplest task has become monumental. And I am only one of so many…

Each day I attempt to feel gratitude for what is good in my life.

Momentary peace is found in the Dark Green Religion of Hope that I experience walking under every balsam, lichen, wet leaf, deciduous tree, listening to chickadees, phoebes, juncos, and finches, meandering along the swollen brook – Just to see clear mountain waters rushing to the sea reminds me that Nature’s rhythms are my own, and that most of the time I am not breathing with her – unless I take these walks. Somewhere along the way over these last weeks I have lost access to my body (PTSD). Continue reading “La Llorona and the Dark Green Religion of Hope by Sara Wright”

Lise Weil – Requiem by Sara Wright

For the Visionaries of the Women’s Movement and Beyond.

“I glimpse lines crazing my face in the windowglass,
crone’s bones emerging. My eyes are growing larger;
soon they will perch on stalks and swivel, crustacean.
The better to see how others do it:
this last chance at living…

The message is we’re too fatigued to change the myths
of ourselves at this stage, preferring to die, unmake
the world, in the familiar. Understandable. Yet I persist
in lusting to be seamless with the universe while still aware
of it—so I suspect a future darkly bright, kaleidoscopic
as symmetries glittering beneath eyelids rubbed dry of tears.”

Italics are my own.

Robin Morgan “Reading the Bones,” from her latest book of poems, Dark Matter: New Poems, published by Spinifex Press.

Yesterday I attended a reading for the memoir In Search of Pure Lust written by my friend and former professor Lise Weil, a woman who has dedicated her life to visionary thinking and teaching by inviting anyone to enter who has ears to listen and an open heart.

When I first encountered Lise’s radical feminist ideas my hair caught fire; and the flames between us continued to rise higher and higher. Our friendship remains as tempestuous as the fire that binds us still – fire and air are the two mediums of communication that flow between us – one a lover of women, a lesbian, internationally known translator, editor, writer, lifetime visionary activist and teacher, the other, a dedicated Earth centered heterosexual woman, a naturalist and mystic whose lifetime of writing had been confined to her journals up until that point, a woman who returned to school only after her children were grown. Continue reading “Lise Weil – Requiem by Sara Wright”

Review: In Search of Pure Lust, author Lise Weil by Sara Wright

In this remarkable memoir one woman’s life is set in the collective context of the women’s movement as a whole, and through Lise Weil’s eyes we get to see the “both and” quality of her struggle to understand the wound caused by what went wrong not only in her personal relationships with women, but between the powerful women who inspired the women’s movement in the first place. We can only heal this wound personally and collectively if we are willing to self-reflect, ask difficult and painful questions, and take responsibility for our actions, something that the author is willing to do. By addressing our own mother-daughter and woman to woman betrayals, choosing to respect one another’s differences regardless of sexual orientation, color, race, religion etc. we can finally unite with one purpose – to save ourselves and the planet.

What Lise proposes – namely, that Lesbian Visionary Thinking opened the door to women re–imagining women as powerful agents in their own lives even as they became women who acted upon these visions – is, I believe, truth. Lesbian visionaries envisaged a woman centered culture and created one. Many of us realize today that without a feminist standpoint, the ravages of patriarchy are going to destroy us all.  We have much to learn from reading this story. Continue reading “Review: In Search of Pure Lust, author Lise Weil by Sara Wright”