Dancing at Grassroots

Yesterday, the annual Grassroots Festival started, a four-day extravaganza of music and dance, 10 000 people dancing, hanging out, and generally having a great time.

As I said to a friend, this is my religious event of the year. I passionately believe in the importance of people getting together to have a good time—the kind of good time that isn’t about consuming lots of alcohol but about getting high on great music and great community.

One thing I love about Grassroots is that it doesn’t just attract one type of person. There are all kinds of people, young and old, and they’re all mixing and mingling.

I especially love watching people when they’re dancing to some really happy music, maybe Cajun or Zydeco or whatever, and they become like children, crazy and wild and silly.

In my opinion, we need this. It’s medicine. It lets us shake off the bad stuff, at least for a while, and come together to celebrate life which, despite the oil spill and the economy and all our other worries is still as gorgeous and heart-stoppingly amazing as ever. We need to let the rhythm wash us clean. We need to let go of everything and be with the grass under our feet and the warm summer air.

Last night, the almost full moon was rising hazily and lazily as we danced in the Infield to Donna the Buffalo, the local group that got Grassroots started 20 years ago, and is still going strong.

This morning, it poured, but now it’s stopped. Anyhow, mud is part of the picture, it’s never slowed us down at Grassroots, and it never will. For that, and for the life force that pulses through all of us, I am deeply grateful.
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Helping Afghan Women

For the past year, I have worked with Jalaja and the other amazing individuals at the Institute for Circlework. It is truly phenomenal to see the amount of support people have given to the ICW and the amount of impact we have on women around the world. I'd like to give you some updates about some current developments.

We met last night to discuss things related to our new Afghan Women's Project, which aims to raise $15,000 to bring three Afghan women here for Jalaja's Circlework training this September. While editing their bios for the web site, I was amazed and awed at the amount of life experience these women have gained and how well-situated each is to help other women in Afghanistan. All of them deserve to come, and our meeting focused on ways to make this possible.

Jalaja has come up with a list of ways you can volunteer to build infrastructure for this project. The most important and crucial part is for all of us to raise enough through donations to fund their training.

If you have other ideas or wish to do something amazing — such as holding a workshop in an area of your expertise and donating a portion of the proceeds — please contact us at info [at] instituteforcirclework [dot] org. We'd love to hear your ideas about getting this project underway.

If you're in Ithaca

• Become part of an ongoing pod of volunteers who meet monthly to support the ICW's current projects
• Write a press release
• Help compile a list of places we can send press releases
• Poster your town and neighborhood
• Forward our fundraising E-mails to contacts who may be interested
• Share our Facebook posts about fundraising and retweet us on Twitter (@iCirclework)
• Help with event organization
• Contact specific people you know to tell them about our work. These could be possible participants, donors, volunteers, magazine editors, celebrities, you name it!
• Take photographs of ICW events
• Do video shoots and/or editing
• Donate a portion of your goods or services to the ICW

If you're elsewhere

• Create a local pod of volunteers to coordinate events supporting the ICW in your area
• Write a press release
• Help compile a list of places we can send press releases
• Poster your town and neighborhood
• Forward our fundraising E-mails to contacts who may be interested
• Share our Facebook posts about fundraising and retweet us on Twitter (@iCirclework)
• Coordinate small events in your area to raise funds, such as workshops or potluck dinners
• Contact specific people you know to tell them about our work. These could be possible participants, donors, volunteers, magazine editors, celebrities, you name it!
• Photograph volunteer events
• Donate a portion of your goods or services to the ICW

Thanks to everyone who has supported us or plans to support us. Our organization has a real opportunity to make a difference in the lives of women across the globe, and it's all thanks to you.

– Kayleigh

For Passover...

My friend Rupa Cousins sent me this wonderful article by Rabbi Ted Falcon, Ph.D., which he wrote for YES! Magazine:

In the ancient story, related in the Book of Exodus, our enslavement was so deep that we were not even fully aware of it. We had lost our identity and forgotten the fuller nature of our being; we had forgotten that we could live in any other way. Then, like now, the pain sometimes gets severe enough for us to cry out, and it was that outcry that began the process of our redemption. At first, when we awakened to the pain, that was all we knew. In the story, we were not even able to hear the possibility of freedom that Moses revealed to us. Our anguish was too great, inhibiting our ability to see beyond it. The vision that Moses presented finally pierced the shells of our forgetting.

Awakening to the possibility of a freedom that transcends our current self-definition. It requires remembering ... that we are more than the limitations we have accepted. Moses provided for us the paradigm of such awakening when he met the Presence at the burning bush in the wilderness. I am convinced that his meditation in the wilderness included the intrusion of a Light that shattered the field of reality he perceived. What got referred to as the “burning bush” was more like a radiance threatening to consume the whole of reality. The Light burst forth with unlimited energy to awaken him to the fuller dimensions of his own being.

From that Light he heard a call to greater purpose and meaning in his life: he was to lead a people from enslavement to freedom. When he asked the Voice for its Name, he heard: Eheyeh asher Eheyeh, I AM as I AM. He awoke to the absolutely unlimited “I” that is the ground for each of our individual identities. He met the “I” through which the deepest meaning always flows.

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Back from the United Nations

Back from the United Nations. Amazing women, powerful, committed, passionate, dedicated, articulate. And yet, every event followed the worn out old model where an expert stands at the front of the room and talks while everyone else sits in rows and listens. Other than short question and answer periods, there was no interaction or dialogue. The mind feasted while the heart went hungry.

How I yearned to hear the story of the striking black woman on my left, or the serious young Japanese woman on my right! And while I was grateful for all these organizations that are working so hard on women’s behalf, I ended up with a headache from trying to digest an overdose of information.

Activism—what a strange word it is! Of course it is essential that we take action on behalf of the world, but our actions must be rooted in stillness, silence, and deep listening. When we fail to maintain a balance between doing and being, activity and receptivity, we become agents of the very insanity we are trying to overcome. At the United Nations, I felt somewhat as if I had walked into a convention of activity addicts.

What a relief to finally form a circle, to slow down, take a deep breath, and listen to the authentic voices and stories of other women! Many of them had never been in a circle before, yet they seemed to take to it like ducks to water. “My work focuses on weapons of mass destruction,” an African woman told us in a matter of fact way, as if that were a perfectly normal line of business to be in.

Another woman spoke about her work with victims of rape and sexual violence. “Every day,” she said, “I hear so many terrible things, and sometimes I just feel crushed by it all. This circle has shown me the possibility of letting go the burden I carry and taking care of myself, even as I take care of others.”

We cannot save the world is not by driving ourselves to exhaustion. If we want real change, real transformation, let us find the courage to stop running, turn from the mind to the heart, and drink deeply from that well of healing wisdom.
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Healing for Women in the West Bank

Back in the USA, but the journey continues!

Want to share with you some amazing news. The women at our West Bank retreat very much wanted the circles to continue, and clearly, Nimala is the person to lead them. Now, some general souls have donated the funds she needs to continue leading the circle for the next year.

It makes me so happy to see that when people touch the energy field that our circles create, they totally get their power and importance, and want to support them and help them thrive and grow. Each circle is like a bright light that radiates love, peace, and healing into our struggling world.