April 6, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Remember Our Power!
by Gloria Steinem
This essay was written and read by Gloria Steinem at Praises for the World, a community ritual based on "Praises for the World," the CD by Jennifer Berezan, performed on March 22nd, 2003, in Oakland, California. As a spiritual response to fundamentalism and religious justification of violence, it may travel in this and other countries. See our story on the concert.
Once upon a time, indeed, for nearly all the time that human beings have walked the earth, you and I would have been living very differently -- in small bands, raising our children together as if each child were the future of all of us, and migrating with the sun and the seasons.
There were no nations, no lines drawn in the sand. Instead, there were paths and watering places, with trade and cultures blossoming whereever these paths came together in a pattern that spread like lace over the continents.
This was far from a primitive way of life. Indeed, inner space was explored and understood by the many, just as outer space is now explored and understood by the few.
If you and I had lived on what is now called Australia, disputes over paths and watering places would have been settled by who could use the land the best; who knew the cliff that looked like a lizard, or the hill that crouched like an animal, and who knew the length of the song it took to get there.
If you and I had lived here on this continent that the ancients called Turtle Island, we would have had talking circles, so each person could speak and listen until consensus was reached.
Yes, there were male chiefs, but they were chosen and advised by female elders. Yes, there were hard decisions, but they were made with seven future generations in mind.
In all of this, the goal was balance -- between females and males, between each person and the community, between nature and humans, if, indeed, those things were thought of separately at all. As the Cherokee wise woman Rayna Green says, "On this continent, feminism, which also means womanism, mujerista-ism is memory."
In ancient Africa from which all of us one had the deeds to land, no one had the deeds to children and certainly not to women. Each of us belonged to ourselves -- and also to the community.
Women had two or three children two or three years apart, no more than their health and mobility would allow, because women knew the power of herbs and timing, as women still do among the Kwei or San, the so-called Bushpeople who live in the original way in the Kalahari.
The goal of ancient games was cooperation, not competition. The most respected art was healing, not wounding. Violence was present, but only in self-defense.
I say all this because these are the things that have been programmed into our cells -- for millennia. These are the true things for which our cellular memory still longs -- a memory awakened by meditation, by Jennifer's chants and Alice's images, by the drummers and the dances, by coming together, as we are tonight, in the name of human possibilities.
We cannot go backward -- but we can go forward with our whole selves, and our whole memory.
What we have been raised to think of as inevitable division and hierarchy, monotheism and nation states, actually account for less than ten percent of human history.
Ancient places say, the Nubian temples of the Nile depict God as all living things. As the great Egyptologist Henry Breasted said, "Monotheism is but imperialism in religion." We see this now, as each side acts in the name of a god that looks like their rulers, a god that pretends that life after death is more honorable than life itself.
So perhaps this gathering tonight is the first gathering of the post-patriarchal, post-racist, post-monotheist, post-nationalist age!
We must keep resisting and creating our way out of the recent hierarchical past in any way we can, but we will be stronger if each of us here begins with our own bodies. They were not born to hurt or be hurt, and we can pledge never to use our bodies -- or allow them to be used -- in that way. We can create laws that say: The power of the state stops at our skins.
As we face a Chief who was not chosen by wise women or by the majority of anyone here on Turtle Island we will be stronger if we remember our power.
As we are told that the end justifies the means when we know that the means are the ends, we will all be stronger if we remember: There was another way. There is another way.
So let us say an ancient goddess prayer as it comes to us through the spirit and poetry of Robin Morgan. These words include all of us, women and men of all ages, for men create and thus have wombs, too.
It goes like this:
Blessed be my brainthat I may conceive of my own power.
Blessed be my breast
that I may give sustenance to those I love
Blessed be my womb
that I may create what I choose to create.
Blessed be my knees
that I may bend so as not to break.
Blessed be my feet
that I may walk in the path of my highest will.
Gloria Steinem, a writer and feminist activist, is a founder and consulting editor of Ms. magazine. Her books include "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions" and "Revolution from Within." Singer and composer Jennifer Berezan has a website, www.edgeofwonder.com, at which "Praises for the World," "Returning," and her other CDs may be ordered. If you would like to support the travel of this spiritual event that is a response to violence and the misuse of religion, they both invite you to make a tax-deductible contribution to The Dance Brigade, P.O. Box 6181, Albany, California 94706.