Friends and Colleagues,
… I’ve been severely ill for more than four weeks now. Especially difficult have been frequent episodes of convulsive/spasmodic coughing shaking the inside of my body quite painfully.
My main problem has been my lungs, which constantly fill with phlegm and when added to severe emphysema and asthma cause quite a problem.
I’ve had two mainstream doctors up here to my mountain retreat but they’ve been unable to improve my condition.
So Tuesday I asked for a visit from a local shaman whom I’ve known for a few years now and for whom I have great respect. What he said is quite interesting. Here’s one of his most memorable lines: “Too much compassion for plants and animals causes a lung problem.” …
So what I think we should take from this is that a much higher percentage of our current illnesses than we think are psychosomatic (or neurosomatic) rather than simply somatic. For example, we may think we’re sick from toxic chemtrail residues when actually we’re sick from these plus the neural stress resulting from having to absorb the info that those controlling us are so evil that they perpetrate chemtrails.
Certainly the news of these past four weeks has been more horrendous than that of any similar period I can remember. One of my most aware readers commented a few days ago that “Hell has come to earth.”
I’ve had information sickness several times before but always mildly: two or three days of deep fatigue, then back to okay again. In any case, yesterday morning my housemate came up to my second-floor room just as I was waking and said: “I’m scared. I think you are dying.” That same thought had occurred to me just the day before as I wondered how I was going to make it through this at 83….
On the positive side, it’s certainly a respectable cause of death: Natural World Hyperconcern (NWH).
And I’ve already arranged for my death to instigate at least one more really good party. Forty-nine days following it, there’ll be a Bardo Party for me at the Bolinas Community Center with excellent live music and potluck food. Yeah, at least my death will have some value….
Power to the Flora,
Keith Lampe, Ro-Non-So-Te, Ponderosa Pine ~ Volunteer
P.S. NYC graffiti a few decades ago: Death Is Nature’s Way of Telling You to Slow Down.
VI. THE ROARING INSIDE HER: FEMINISM
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
—FEMINIST AXIOM COINED BY IRINA DUNN, 1970
Women’s Strike for Equality, New York City, August 26, 1970. Photo credit: ©Diana Davies. Courtesy of Diana Davies Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
ASIDE FROM ALL THE solid sociological, historical, and psychological theories explaining why a movement arises at a particular moment and not another, perhaps the only believable one consists of one word: magic. Indeed, beginning in the 1970s, women all over the world were, in serendipity, gathering together in consciousness-raising groups. The goal was to share experiences of our psyches/bodies as emblems of sexist society, to uncover the striking universalities—and in the process, to take control of our lives. The first marches across the Berkeley campus made little impression on me. Nor did the CR (consciousness-raising) meeting we attempted in the commune on Vine Street. It was Anne Kent Rush and Hallie “Mountain Wing” Iglehart Austin who opened my pores to the necessary tasks at hand.
Even before I read such mindblowers as Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness or delved into the history of the demolition of early woman-originated healing/ritual traditions, their one-liners clinched the absurdity of dominating women and revealed visions of what should be or what, before the patriarchy, was. Why is the deity touted in today’s religions a man when it is females who enact the definitive creative act of childbirth? Why is there just one overarching deity and not many as in indigenous cultures and ancient mythology? And consider this: the institution of marriage was invented as a way to own and have power over women. Does the constant threat of rape unconsciously function to keep women “in their place”? They took away the stars and tried to divert our distress by giving us diamonds. Is the subjugation of women a mirror of the oppression of animals and land? Is it because at heart we are more expressive of nature?
As our minds were pried open from thousands of years of enforced closure, we began to take action. We demanded equal pay and equal rights. We marched to legalize abortion and “Take Back the Night” from rapists, imagined voting for a woman for President, launched women-owned businesses. We sought out female gynecologists, female Jungian therapists, female architects, female carpenters, female anthropologists, female house painters—all of whom were few and far between. We bought specula to do our own cervical exams. We became adept at telling men when they had crossed the line into sexist behavior. Many women abandoned the male world altogether. We studied prehistory, wrote books, painted canvases, produced what came to be called “women’s music,” and made our own films. We admired each other, fought with each other, made love to each other.
We became.
Kent, Hallie, and I—along with such stalwarts as Sally Gearhart, Merlin Stone, Barbara Hammer, and Charlene Spretnak—gravitated toward the facet of the movement called “women’s spirituality,” critiquing world religions that positioned females as foot-washers to Great Men and God, instead reaching into prehistory to create/recreate the rites of female-based sacredness, ancient goddess cults, witchcraft, and pagan herbal medicines. As French visionary Monique Wittig counseled us: “If you cannot remember, invent.”
And—ladies, get a grip—who could not have experienced instant enlightenment by that first glimpse of a woman in an—oh my Goddess!—all-women rock band, twanging the Man’s Machine: an electric guitar?
Suzanne Shanbaum, 1970s, then of the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective—with electric guitar. Photo credit and courtesy of Irene Young.
SUSAN GRIFFIN: THE ARDENT INTELLECTUAL
(1943–)
We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature.
—S.G., WOMAN AND NATURE: THE ROARING INSIDE HER, 1978
Susan Griffin is a poet, philosopher, playwright, scriptwriter, and champion of The Sensual. Due to a marvelous ability to drape events in irony and comedic insight, she is also a veritable hoot to be around. Early on her writing was associated with a feminist-invented theme: literature springing from everyday female experience such as being a single mother, subjects that were not considered by male critics to be worthy of the paper they were scrawled upon. But when her play Voices:
