Current state of the argument (Guess which)

The reason racism is discrimination is because of white domination and colonialism. Sexism is discrimination because of male domination and patriarchy. Transgender people are discriminated against when they face exclusion and violence based on their being transgender or gender nonconforming. 

But transgender discrimination, or transphobia, doesn’t have the same structural relationship to sexism that it does to racism, when we apply the principle of intersectionality. Transgender status defines a relationship between a person’s natal biological sex and their current identification or self-presentation to the world. There is a political disagreement between the position that transgender status changes a person’s sex-classification (or stated another way, that sex classification for legal and social purposes is a matter of arbitrarily assigned gender and has no inherent implications that concern human rights), and the position that sex-classification is a necessary legal and social underpinning for women as the female sex, or those born female, to claim the space and the authority to define ourselves and intervene in the world around us on an equal basis with the male sex which has collectively both defined itself as primary and suppressed and exploited us, our labor and our physical bodies, with the result of denying us even the space of our own selves. Sex classification under this position, which I endorse, is the political underpinning for women’s liberation movements and feminism. 

If you believe that transgender status changes sex-classification, that what we are really classifying is gender, which can be changed by a person’s self-identification or outward presentation, then denying male transgender persons (who identify as women) access to lesbian space and identity, to female-only sports teams and locker rooms and prisons, to female-only events and support groups, to female-only domestic violence shelters, to female-only consciousness-raising and social spaces, to complete affirmation of their male-born realities as part of women’s human rights and feminism, is a no-brainer. Of course they have a right to such access and those women who seek to deny them are mere bigots, like racists. Intersectionality is collapsed because women as the collective noun for persons of the female sex, have been made politically invisible, have been politically disappeared and suppressed.

If on the other hand, like me, you are female, lesbian, and deeply value the different intimacy you experience with other lesbians, other women, that is disrupted when a male person insists on his presence among us, welcome to a new reality of having no recourse and no political allies that can be trusted except for ourselves. Going to progressive events, demonstrations against war (such as Israeli genocide of Gaza), going to support groups, hell, all the other things that don’t affect me personally but that can affect any of us like going to prison or needing a domestic violence shelter (or hospital bed) – single lesbians, especially young ones newly coming out and seeking to date and find others like ourselves – all of this becomes a minefield. Do I hide what I feel and believe? Do I say it openly and wait to be thrown out? Do I walk on the margins? Do I quietly leave when it becomes clear that other women welcome a man as one of us? 

Many lesbians, like me, are also marginalized for other reasons and get used to being marginalized. Personally I seem to seek out places where I don’t expect people to be like me. It was an anomaly that I went to law school at CUNY which has the motto ‘Law in the service of human needs’ and I found others who cared passionately about human rights and also most of whom were working class. But the exclusion comes into every facet of life. It has affected my relationships in the human rights and disability/anti-psychiatric oppression work, not only on a personal level but certain people’s willingness to work with me or promote my work at all. (That seems to shift and change over time; I am never left entirely without space to work in, and this is also because my networks and scope of action is bigger than what the anti’s can do to me, at least for now. I don’t think they can erase me entirely even if they could manage to convince the whole community to go against me, because what I’ve done is integral to their own work. It matters less whether my name gets attached, though I will keep working as long as I can.)

So I’m here making a political and personal argument. 1) There is no good reason to elevate the transgender activist (or trans/queer, or trans feminism) position over the women’s liberationist one. They are arguments about how to approach the same reality. 

2) The suppression of our ability to talk about this argues in favor of the feminist position. If women had no political claim to being an oppressed sex class, surely we would be controlling media, universities, governments, and surely we would be able to defend ourselves against the violence that trans activists inflict on us when we do exercise our right to speak. Violence that becomes increasingly escalated. 

3) Does no one care about women’s pain? Women’s hurt feelings? The micro- and macro-aggressions against us? Are lesbians supposed to go back to being closeted, accepting whatever we can get on the margins, while male pornographers abuse our image and the rest of society gets off on it?

I think I know the answer to that last question. 

Birth is two, Death is one

I had this thought the other day – birth is always two people, two consciousnesses, two subjectivities, two essential participants. It is not a parallel to death. In death there is only one.

Why does this matter? Somehow the concept that birth is an activity or momentous event only for the person who is born, is just not correct and leaves out too much. We are not born alone, we are born to a mother, from her body and on her body. She relates to us immediately and we relate to her, as two separate beings now recently inseparable through a common blood supply. We remain interconnected from shared cells and blood and knowledge intimate of one another throughout our lives.

We come also into a world, with many more people, but two is the first number. It means that all other relations are also two. One comes later as we face ourselves, but that can also be two, a doubling of consciousness within oneself.

Because it is a mother through whom we come into the world, our heritage is always female and depends on women. Women’s centrality in and to the world stems from this fundamental fact. Coming into a world that is not newly born with us is inextricable from women’s existence and significance for human life. Patriarchy flattens that into women being part of a lesser form of being, which negates women’s own Being and natality as unique Existences in the world. It also aligns itself with death, as Hannah Arendt distinguished natality in birth, from mortality as the pursuit of war.

One can be a kind of resistance or insistence or defiance, one against the many or one distinguishing itself from the many. We need that both in facing our own inevitable death, and in navigating a weird world where two is a dangerous number, especially when it involves two women. Whether mother and daughter, or lovers, or sisters, or friends, patriarchy teaches us to be suspicious of one another, to fear the intimacy and the deep knowledge we might have as people who are connected ultimately through humanity’s womb within the natural and cosmic world, but who still need to come to know one another in our specificity. With all the risks involved.

I think it matters to accepting plurality and difference in the world. Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality is a treasured reference for me, and her view of it includes plurality. I had always read it as emphasizing a kind of bare newness, as if the newborn comes out into nothing, or emerges terrifyingly alone. Thinking about birth as plural from the beginning while death is singular does not mean giving up the sense of newness as new being. The miracle of natality that Arendt emphasizes (and that the poet H.D. also celebrated after the same war in her long poem Tribute to the Angels) is newness of being, in a sense witnessed from the perspective of observers, or of the mother. It is what I can experience with new breath, as well.

When I am acting as being, I need to engage immediately with the plurality and contingency as complement. With my matrix of relationality, all of what I am born into and create myself, or have created. The relationships in which I move through the world.

It is also within myself. It is heritage that lives within me and through me. The contingency is also Being, there is no separation except in how I experience it at any time. That I can experience myself as making choices in relation to my relationships, or in the context of my relationships. I can turn my consciousness in new directions and can see my relationships differently.

Seeing, hearing, witnessing, thinking about another person, wondering about their reality and trying to understand what they live as they live it, feels delicate and tentative. I know that is happening when I find myself surprised, knowing something I hadn’t realized about this person before.

The multiplicity of contingency, coupled with our essential nature as Being, allows us to forgive ourselves and others our mistakes and to accept imperfection. HD delves into this beautifully in Tribute to the Angels, with the flowering of a half-burnt apple tree and the unexpectedness of the sacred appearing of its own accord within everyday life. Confronting the burnt wood, all of what we find in our landscape that we might not have chosen in our idealized version of ourselves, all that is given and done as we are right now, is the other side of seeking the sacred.

The work to heal and rebuild is active and co-creative and requires conscious decision as well as letting go of control. When HD’s Lady appears and ‘the Child was not with her’… rather,

her attention is undivided,
we are her bridegroom and lamb;

her book is our book; written
or unwritten, its pages will reveal

a tale of a Fisherman,
a tale of a jar or jars,

the same—different—the same attributes,
different yet the same as before.

H.D., Tribute to the Angels (39)

and…

This is an active relationship with Spirit or Goddess, that feels similar to me, to what I think of as a typically Jewish approach to co-creation in questioning the divinity. If it’s a divinity you trust, you might not need to resist it, I don’t go for a divinity that wants absolute obedience or bowing down to its power… there can be too much passivity and allowance for caprice in that, too little acceptance of our own receptivity and conscience and our own Being-ness. The Jewish concept of ‘g-d’ contains both (questioning and absolute obedience/nothingness), but/and the relationship is a patriarchal one that doesn’t work for me. I don’t see the Christian one as better; HD though her poem is thoroughly Christian, is working through her own witnessing of spirit within that imaginary. What feels right though, is a kind of active relationship to deity that puts all our contingencies into Being, into dialogue with active Being. I can relate to Deity without being perfect, with all my flaws and seeking. And my flaws open to new realities that haven’t been here before. When I was seeking at an earlier time, I prayed for work to do that would use all of me. The CRPD work used my flaws as well as my strengths. As I later came to experience it. 

There’s a need to relate to one’s own actual imaginary with its culture and heritage as well as questioning it or allowing it to stretch – so though I can’t use the formula for Jewish prayers ‘Baruch atoh adonoy, asher kideshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu…’ or even change it to a female version (I don’t experience this as commandment that I’m obeying), I found myself this first night of Chanukah having the rhythm and cadence of the Hebrew in my mind to get to ‘l’hadlik ner shel Chanukah’. The next night or the one after, I made it active: ‘anachnu madlikim (should it be madlikot?) nerot shel Chanukah’…. and invoked ‘elat ha’esh’, Goddess/Lady of fire. So maybe part of my struggle, part of my flaws, is being a smart-ass, questioning, taking some things seriously and some things arrogantly flipping off, wherever it goes I am this kind of complicated Being with other equally complicated Beings.

Healing poems

despacio
despacio
when the world is unkind
and you find yourself all alone
here,
i am holding you
here, i am breathing with you
here, i am listening to you
here, i am washing you
here
we will walk together in this life
through woods and fields
there are flowers and bees and sun
there is a cat beside us
we will hold all between us
we will dream together with a love that blazes to the stars
and back again
we will sign this
for the future

the beauty
stonecrop with its little pink spore balls, millions of them in the shade
then reaching the place to go into the dark woods, down to the cove
where red maple on and on holds a space for
slanting sunlight on bleached reeds and spots of still, slowly rippling water
on which a few startled geese have stirred themselves
when i began to sing:
	i’m still standing
	they didn’t torture me to death
	though it may seem like something small
	though it may seem like nothing at all
	i’m still standing

to give myself choices knowing
i’m not that or that
my path has been a fitful one grasping after
what will put my soul at ease,
then to not grasp after ease itself
to live in the pathway unerring and sure without
a real map or guide, improvising
maps and guides from scraps left by others and in the end what’s most sure
is what comes up from beneath
the real growth after a lightning strike
where the scaffolding that is dead wood is shown
to be dead, not lost or found or wounded
and for a few minutes you can swim free,
in the light and dark

Esther story

thinking about my jewish upbringing in yeshivas. so much of that impacted me in ways that the feminist consciousness raising I transplanted myself into didn’t touch, nor did the left movements I joined or coming out as a lesbian.

paradigm of path for women was to be chosen as a wife then you’d have some power as a mother and keeper of the home. even though I was encouraged to get an education and do something more, that was imprinted beneath. maybe school impacted me in ways it didn’t my sisters, because more than they did I needed the stability in school, its reliability, as a refuge from my mother’s instability and her dependence on me at times as moral compass or at least sounding board.

girls were pressed into duty to serve women. that was true in my home and family. adult women had privileges that girls weren’t let into, seemingly not until you were married yourself. go fetch me this, then stay away. no transmission of knowledge except a candy-coated variety meant to inculcate me into accepting woman’s fate as a lovely fairy tale.

queen esther as the ideal, golden-painted crown, the star of purim. risking her life, putting her sexuality and life choices at the service of her people, too young to really know what it meant. a hero and a warrior.

some feminists rewriting stories called esther a scab and valorized vashti who refused to be prostituted to the king’s buddies. they should have embraced her as a warrior into the community of women, ululate the walls down.

saving her people did mean something. scabs can have their own haunted stories.

that means something to me because i identified with esther as a child, my hebrew name is esther (one of them) and i’ve played some of this out in my own life – not sexuality but service that has at times been sacrificial.

there is a temptation to shun the company of women, of ordinariness, when it’s offered and keep to the heights of imagined glory for service. or simply to continue on the path of service believing it’s needed. maybe that’s true or isn’t. but there’s a time to say, enough.

take off that mantle and be wrapped in the blanket of friendship, community, commonality. it’s not to say the service stops, only that it’s no longer demanded. no longer a wheel to be chained to exhausted. friendship, community, ordinary tasks, building the foundations.

Belonging

A root chakra thing. my belonging is to the earth and of the earth, a closeness that cannot be withdrawn because it is the condition of my being as flesh and blood. if and when she ends I end because that is the condition of my being, and I will give back to her because that is the condition my being.

unlike human connections, this one is not a judgment or criticism, it is infinite and compassionate in that my own acceptance is all that is needed to allow me to rest in it.

the heart can release what it no longer needs, any fantasy attachments or claims for legitimizing what cannot be delegitimized… to no longer argue or defend being as a ‘right’

the sense of persecution, all the negations and judgments just an illusion if I can stand strong enough in that root that enlivens me, nourishes me, comforts me and leads me home

The Word is Power

In one of our most intense transformative experiences during the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete in 2022, we were gathered in a cave where we planned to recite our mother-lines. This cave had been used for Goddess-oriented rituals in Minoan (Ariadnean) times and before then, and Carol Christ, the originator of our pilgrimage, revived a Goddess-centered spirituality in this and similar places where groups of women could encounter this ancient heritage.

Shortly after our ritual began, we were interrupted by a small group of people who came into the cave with cameras to take photos. They would not agree to go away and come back later as requested by our leader’s male partner who was at the cave entrance for this purpose. Our leader, Laura Shannon, asked us, ‘is it ok to let them come in?’ As she reminded me recently, I replied, ‘no, not really’. Laura continued drumming a heartbeat, and we sat there holding our space. The group took photos with flash that shined in our eyes. I remember crying bitterly and connecting intensely with what all our foremothers have been through, their Goddess rituals invaded and broken up, knowing that the destruction of these heritages involved rape and murder and tortures.

At the time I had not realized how powerful out holding of space was. It felt to me still like a desecration that we could not prevent, though we did continue after they left and connected with each other and our mother-lines in powerful ways.

But later on I found myself drawn to what it means to simply hold on to the thread of life, the heartbeat. To take our presence and maintain our ground without dominator energy. This has worked in myself, in my life and environment, since that time. I realized that my existence as a lesbian, which feels so marginalized, is itself a form of resistance that feels like it has gathered over lifetimes.

Yesterday some of us from the Pilgrimage were able to connect together over zoom. Afterwards, I had a dream where we were together after our gathering in a kitchen, getting ready to eat as we would if we had been together in person. On a high wall to my left, there was a huge embroidered tapestry with a message, some words I can’t remember as advice to women and then ‘Love, Mother Mary’, on top of a huge rose petal, burgundy red. Below her were women interacting with each other, in a live tapestry, and they were lifting their skirts to each other. One had a woman’s head coming out, birthing (like the art work by Frida Kahlo of birthing herself), and another was covering a woman’s head in cloth that was arising from the ground. This was a representation of the life force, birth and death, I understood.

And a message came to me, ‘The Word is Power.’

It feels challenging to claim that. Power has had such a feel of dominator energy, both as male domination and as white settler colonialism, that it’s hard to feel comfortable with it. (Though I have argued for it in the past. It feels hard to claim it fully as belonging to women in particular.) That in itself tells me the meaning, of what so many of us are grieving. I am acutely aware of frustration at not being able to say all that I mean freely, without risking stepping over lines that are designed to punish uprising women. I grieve for that since we are still not where we want to be. We’re not yet free and knowing our unfreedom makes it hard to be a woman, to affirm being a woman. It’s not safe to do that when to many people on both the left and right, being a woman is confused with being a doormat, or that remains one among the acceptable definitions (e.g. a well-known published trans writer has graphically talked about identity as a woman meaning being sexually dominated, treated as a hole). It’s not safe to talk about this even in spaces that are women-only, lesbian, feminist, we are having to create safe spaces to talk with each other but then it becomes an echo chamber if we don’t do more. (And women are doing more. It’s my own action I’m struggling with.)

Thinking about what it means to hold space – to defend it with our presence, our will, our taking up of space. Being there and not being dislodged. Connecting with the life force and grounding into that, so we can be unshakeable no matter what happens. We can adapt and hold the heartbeat. There’s an energy of growth that needs to happen, like a tree growing upward and downward and outward, its trunk adding rings. Trees can topple and it’s not only one tree either, the roots connecting underground, the seeds, the life continuing however it can.

Power is to be used effectively, and for that reason it can also make sense to hold it in abeyance until one finds the outlet, the time to light the spark. That is how I see my sense of things now for lesbians and for women generally. I move cautiously in my power, and move decisively whenever it is time.

Relational, transactional and instrumental

In the movie Tår, the lead character’s wife says to her in a critical moment, ‘all your relationships have always been transactional, except for one, and it’s sleeping in the next room’ – referring to their young daughter. It seems clear that this causes pain and alienation and yet as a woman seeking and achieving success in what remains a man’s world of public achievement and renown, part of that comes with the territory.

I am wondering about the relationship between relational, transactional and instrumental ways of doing things. I’ve been connecting with some deeper ways of accessing peace in myself and relating to others from that space, projecting peace and peacefulness into the world. That allows me to get by potential hostility, to recognize and assert the boundaries that are there, to act directly and forthrightly when I have something to defend, without adding any hostility or aggression of my own.

On a recent trip this proved to have amazing potential in connecting with strangers in brief moments in ways that were relational, despite the formally transactional character – being a passenger on a plane, a client in a restaurant or hotel, and other such passing interactions. It reminded me of the chapters on Juchitán in Heide Göttner-Abendroth’s book Matriarchal Societies and her edited volume Societies of Peace. In that culture, women go to market and they engage in complex relational transactions, where cost of an item in any interaction depends on relational factors rather than setting an externalized value of the item as commodity.

I think that a relational approach to transactions can also help those of us who aren’t farmers, don’t have many or any practical skills to share or aren’t confident enough in the ones we do have to offer them in a general way to the community (as exchange or as generally available gift to those who need), to move towards a subsistence-based economy and culture. Relating to a server as the overworked, highly skilled person she is, this is not about engaging in chitchat but the tone of the transaction (a person is overworked, and another person who is tired from a long day, probably don’t want to have chitchat). Respect and seeing the human being, looking for what you need and being open to what they can offer, and vice versa. Rather than ideas of expectation and entitlement and holding people to account (call the manager!) if you don’t get what you are expecting. (There might be times when it’s relationally appropriate to call the manager, but it’s an attitude that I’m talking about, to come in peace. Though it doesn’t directly relate, the stories of the Peacemaker and origins of the condolence ceremony in the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace have been in the background of my thinking these past years.)

There are gendered dimensions to all this for sure. In my law school contracts class, the misogynist professor (who could not and would not refrain from using heterosexual coupling as the metaphor for contract, which I argued unsuccessfully created a hostile environment for myself as a lesbian) had some interesting ideas about relationality in contract law. The case law example in the textbook he taught from, was about large corporations that had complex business dealings with each other, and the judge valued the preservation of their business relationship above the formal application of the terms for violating the contract. Guess who was the poster child for strict application of the formal ‘expectation interest’ in an earlier chapter? Shirley MacLaine, when she sued I think for a movie that the producers finally didn’t make. That was the only, *only* case of a female protagonist anywhere in the textbook except for cases on ‘reliance interest’ where a woman sued a man who reneged on his promises either of marriage or of financial support as a relative, when she had changed her position extensively in reliance on his promise (giving up her home, moving to his town etc.).

Was Shirley MacLaine wrong, greedy, for asking for the contract to be upheld? Sure she was wealthy and didn’t need it. But who is asking whether anybody else who is not female in contract law cases needs the money they’re suing for? Were the corporations greedy, were they exploiting their workers and making shoddy products? No one asks, we are only urged to admire the ultimate preservation of relationship – and even to valorize it as a lifting up of the feminine, even as we trash actual women.

So I want to urge us to take a really, deeply nuanced approach if we talk about subsistence values – to not make this any kind of moralistic or essentializing judgment about ourselves, about individual women. We all come from the class, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, disability or non-disability that we come from. We don’t need to punish ourselves or take a mathematical approach to fairness – adding up the pluses and minuses of advantage and disadvantage. We need to relate from our actual sense of relationship, seeing the human beings we are and asking ourselves, what do we really need here? What do we see, coming in peace?

I think that the work some of us are doing to theorize justice and think about community-based alternatives to the justice system and whether/how the state’s justice systems themselves can be transformed, needs to take all this into account. I don’t have answers to whether the state can be made more relational and less transactional in value. I don’t know what this would mean. I don’t think that making laws requiring a prioritizing of relationality would do anything, the law itself and its meaning and purpose and function have to change, how law operates and who owns it have to change.

Instrumentality is similar to transactional but/and I think it has some value in thinking about purposeful action. In sitting down to write, I was thinking about another blog post I want to write to address what I think are persistent misunderstandings in the disability human rights field about psychosocial disability. I thought, ok, it makes me weary but I’ll overcome it to write because it has a purpose. Yet I came to this website rather than my other blog space and wrote the more relational piece I’d been also thinking of. I’m not sure if I will write the instrumental one. It may be that I’ll continue to set that aside and leave it to a context where it comes up more organically (relationally).

The instrumentality of my to-do list won’t go away. As my teacher said in Shamanic Reiki, quoting a book by someone else, ‘after ecstasy, the laundry’. That’s another nuance, and deciding what’s on the to-do list, what has to be there and what comes first, all that, what matters is that we put it there and we are going to do what needs doing, but can choose how.

On Community

1. grief

the stars look down on me as i suffer with grief heavy-bodied and 
grave or gravid i can’t tell which
it would be a blessing for the clouds to break and send down
a birth of something new, blessed rain to the seeds that break
my water with child

2. fact and censorship

exile in place as silencing
i can’t say that or else they will stop listening
they will all pile on with condemnations, shaming
finger pointing they will call gentle,
‘exposing their vulnerability’ to challenge what they perceive as my greater power
and it makes me want to lift my skirt,
to have them behold the sacred vulva that is the fact they are so afraid to witness

3. on fire

our house is on fire
and outsiders fan the flames pour gasoline light more matches delight
in our inability to get out,
we’re done
and what they will have left is something sterile, maddening and generations-long to unpick and defuse

4. eye of needle

choices
leave one side or leave the other and be unwhole
straddle and be silenced in one place, silence myself to not feel directly the scorn and wrath that keeps witches under the structures
breaking loose from under the floorboards we dance and then they shut us up again
in the other place talk about the other way i’ve been shut up
which is the same really 
and meet the glances of popcorn eating shame as curiosity deference sidelong glances
it doesn’t work
and my exile is a narrow place mitzrayim
that is an eye of a needle i have to thread yet not do it alone

Jewish Mother Goddess

she’s the one you want, and the one who remembers
she’s heimishe, she’s got this
light and she’s cuddly
she wants to hold you
she’s got curly black hair and brown-tinged skin, her lips are soft almost purple
she’s sweet
she might sing
she likes to laugh and tell jokes
nice jokes, kind ones
gentle
she remembers
everything
she shifts, her lap is gold and rubies and
she remembers
she heaves up
and she remembers
she heaves,
grieving what she lost which was
her own little girl self,
she holds something for you
and remembers to say
don’t be afraid,
this is my trauma not yours
she sets it down gently
lets her jaw unclench
she tells a story
that makes herself almost laugh, she’s
distracted and goes dancing off the pier
thin and ghostly girl now,
she will come back though
the ancient other is holding her deep
calling her
within the depths
remembering her
again

Reimagining Crisis Support: Matrix, Roadmap and Policy (a book)… for readers of this blog

For readers of this blog, I’d like to share a link to a book I’ve written that takes abolition of forced psychiatry as a starting point and reimagines crisis support within a social model, outside of mental health jargon that has taken away our power to define ourselves.

(Having written that last, I’m reminded of my thoughts on identities – what I mean here, is not that our self-definition should have power to dominate others, but that we evolve our own lives from our own center of consciousness and conscience.)

If you have been a victim of the mental health system yourself, if you have gone mad, if you struggle with isolation in lesbian/feminist community not just about madness but about the deep trauma of forced psychiatry; if you want to think about how we connect in lesbian community and repair the harms among us rather than using psychiatry against women who are struggling – read the book, and let me know what you think.

The book was, among other things, a way to concretize some of the intersectional work I’ve been doing on this blog, moving it into human rights theory and practice. I could not talk about crisis support without bringing in my life experience of community and healing and self-healing, or my views related to wider themes beyond the strict outlines of human rights norms that impact the creation of community and our capability to move with each other in difficult times. If the society around us is structurally violent – economically, sexually, environmentally, bureaucratically – if it is organized to be violent against us, we can’t ignore that context and appeal to the same violent institutions to implement crisis support.

Ultimately, this refers not only to the mental health system as a social institution but also to problematizing the state, capitalist economy, male domination and colonialism as considerations in looking at the kind of communities we want to build and strengthen. So, where do we personally and collectively choose to build and strengthen community?

I’ve been on a journey (am still winding my way towards home) visiting some lesbian lands and exploring my personal ‘inner pilgrimage’ along with this outer one – following a trip with the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete this past October. A goddess consciousness – an awareness experientially of this female source of life, return and connection and renewal, with and among other women and in my relationship with the sun, sea, sky, earth, rivers, mountains, moon and stars – feels like the grounding point and center for me to be able to give out and share what I know and believe. It doesn’t mean you, readers, or any of my colleagues in the human rights world, have to agree with me – but it is my own source and has to be acknowledged in my life and given space.

That might not be news to you readers…. I suppose what I’m saying now is that I’m affirming this consciousness in the world directly and not pushing it to the margins.