Carrying our sacred stones

Women coming together to make lasting change

On this beautiful grassy bank, I sat together with my friend the poet and translator Haleh Liza Gafori. We were planning a powerful women-based gathering next year, which you will, of course, learn more about right here.

Meanwhile, here is a metaphor that came to me as we were talking about it.:

We are carrying stones, each of us who will participate. We are bringing them together because we need to meet, to connect, in order to understand together what we are doing. That is a nature of womencircles,

I have just been writing a proposal for a new book that includes a one paragraph summary of my career — an illuminating thing to have to write! It showed me that each time I hit a wall, I had to course correct—and those corrections often turned out to be the most fertile moments in developing my most authentic ideas.

I told Haleh that I suspect her career has been similar: each of us has developed something unique, in isolation. And now, we are no longer alone; people are coming to us to thank us for what we developed in those long years alone!

I told her that I feel the same thing will happen when we come together with other women. In the same way that we had to develop our individual stones alone, but now they are appreciated by those who need them, the group of women we are assembling, each carrying her own stone, will need to create something larger together with the same kind of faith.

I imagine that we are building a well to honor and contain the spring of sacred feminine power— water that will nourish a matriarchy to come.

Each of brings our stone for the well. We connect with others to understand where our stone belongs, what contribution it will make, how it fits in with the others in the well we are building together—this joyful sacred project.

And just as happened with our individual stones, maybe as we build this, no one else will know what we are doing. Maybe no one but us will appreciate it. But when it is finished, it will be there—-and people will thank us for it, because we built what we needed. And now they will need it too.