A Small Taste...

For the last six years I have been in the process of writing a book prompted by my experiences gathering stories for the Global Culture of Women (a non-profit I founded eight years ago). I am in the final stages of this extraordinary project, which has grown and morphed over and over. Now it is a Women's Wisdom Card Deck and Guidebook, with the guidebook being a body of work that could easily stand on its own. There are 43 cards all with original photographs, most of which have been donated by female photographers who have traveled the world capturing extraordinary images of every-day women. The purpose of this offering (like the mission of the GCW itself) is to inspire women everywhere to share their soul stories and speak their wisdom. As if all life depended on it, because it does. As momentum gathers, and as I find myself struggling to stay truly dedicated in this final phase, I decided to take excerpts from the book and send them out into the world, cracking the door for this beauty - very soon - to be released. Here is a short paragraph from the chapter and card entitled "Nature / The Wild". And the image you see here is the one that is used on the card.

"The wilderness is often gendered ‘she’. We live on ‘Mother Earth’. We are told we cannot fool ‘Mother Nature’. Storms are more frequently gendered female than male. In poetry, music, art, fiction and non-fiction alike, the wild world has always been considered the domain of the unbridled, mercurial and potentially deadly feminine. Over the years, as women's stories have been gathered, I have witnessed an interesting fact: with great frequency women will describe their first intimate relationship as being with Nature / the Wild. A woman might talk about the stream behind her house, the rock formation in the neighborhood, a horse with whom she shared her deepest secrets. It is here, a woman might say, that she discovered where she comes from and what she’s made of.  It is here, she recounts, she felt most seen, where she felt just-right (not too big or too small, too powerful or too quiet), where her own deep well of emotions and the largeness of her experience was mirrored elegantly by The Wild."