kelpiewilson

Women’s Café

Here in Takilma, Oregon, we have an amazing event every year on International Women’s Day called Women’s Café. Women from all over the valley get together to applaud each other's efforts at everything from poetry and music to bellydance. Barbie dolls, bible stories and excerpts from The Vagina Monologues have all shared the stage. This year, my friend Deb Murphy, who is the indefatigable organizer of this event and its terribly amusing emcee, asked me to get up and talk. Some years I yak and some years I bellydance. This was a year to talk. Here are some excerpts from my riff on “Women and the Earth,” the theme of this year's International Women's Day:

It would be nice if I could just talk about women and the earth tonight, but I can’t. I have to include a third party that keeps butting in here and that’s the economy.  I’ll start by telling you about my favorite woman economist and end with some inspirational words from the deep ecologist Joanna Macy.

Women’s concerns are very much like environmental concerns. They are continually relegated to the status of a “special interest” and placed outside the central concern of the economy which is making money. …

I quoted from an article I wrote in 2006 about Hazel Henderson, the “housewife economist” who is famous for her quip: “economics is a form of brain damage.”

Then I told the story of the women in Iceland who are not concerned with "stimulating" their economy to “rise again,” but are focused on restructuring it to work better for society.  I love their idea of doing “emotional due diligence” on the companies they invest in. Toxic corporate culture and greed have been our downfall. Let’s leave it to women to get us out the mess. I sure wish Obama would put a bunch of sharp women like that in charge of the US Treasury.

I closed with some words of encouragement from the deep ecologist Joanna Macy from our interview in Yoga Plus Joyful Living:

KW: Your book World as Lover, World as Self is subtitled Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. Is courage what we need in these times?

JM: Yeah. I’m a sucker for courage. We are naturally courageous because we naturally love life, just as we thirst for water to drink, air to breathe. We have a battery of senses with which to engage our world. We have minds that can choose, and we want to be alive. Life wants to go on, and so we can feel the currents of life carrying us into fresh, original, unexpected paths of healing, if we’re not closed down. To overcome fear you have to look at what you’re afraid to see.

In central myths of our world’s traditions, the journey of the hero is to go down into the dark and face the monster, face what he doesn’t want to see and then, breaking through that, realize that he is strong enough to face what has appeared so terrifying to him. Then, he comes into his full magnitude and power of being.

Courage Of The Shambhala Warrior

KW: When you recover this courage—is that when you become what you call the Shambhala Warrior?

JM: I use that metaphor from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. We need to find and we can find those qualities of the warrior within us, the courage. I’m not afraid to use warrior language because it summons up keen attention and strong will and spunk and passion for life. We’re much tougher than we think.

A Freudian Take on "Pro-Life" Power Trips

A fellow named Chuck Gregory contacted me with a link to his site where he says he exposes "the aborticentric nature of the 'pro-life' movement."

Chuck had some interesting insight into one of the comments posted to the Alternet article, Why Are Even Smart, Liberal Men Freaked Out by Abortion?, by Anonymous. Someone who calls himself Caleb Darkstar wrote:

What freaks me out is the power given to a woman to so easily change the end result of a bad decision. She has made a mistake that holds the potential to change her entire life, and yet she can abort much more than a fetus. She can abort an entire future that lays in store for her. That powerful, it’s like nothing else I can compare.

I on the other hand, (being a male), would like to have a little of this power. If I get a woman pregnant why can't I claim "Sperm donor status"? Why can't I have a magic place to go to that would free ME from all the obligations, trials and tribulations that go along with parenting and supporting a child for life if she decides to keep it.

WHERE IS MINE?

Chuck Gregory's insight is this:

That "powerlessness" you speak of has an awful lot to do with aborticentrism, and of course it is not impotence about keeping a woman from having an abortion; the real powerlessness is in the face of an eventual and certain death.  Anti-abortionism is the allegorical struggle in which he overpowers death by "rescuing" an idealized version of himself.

It's very Freudian, and 'pro-lifers' are going to try dismiss it as psychobabble, but they can't dismiss their disregard for real and really needy human life.

I think Chuck is on to something.

Another Great Response to Monbiot's Population Blind Spot

I found a really excellent response to an earlier Monbiot column dismissing population growth at a blog called Zone 5 - the edge between nature and culture. Here's a quote, but read the whole thing. It's really good:

Playing around with statistics to show that consumption is the real problem, not population, as Monbiot does, again fails to see that the two issues are inextricably linked. For example, it is often said, if we all become vegetarian, the world could support a bigger population. But what happens then if we achieve this and the population continues to grow?

Presumably, the response to those who try to raise the issue of population control will once again be:

“Ah, yes, but if we all just live on one bowl of rice a day and huddle round a single light bulb the world could support twice the current population! Let’s have 10 billion! Let’s have 20 billion!”