The Roar of Women Waking Up!

It occurred to me yesterday that some time had passed since last writing in this blog. It’s not that I have not had thoughts, or that I have not ‘done’ things, it’s that I was not called to share them. To me, those moments felt ‘over’ and ‘gone’, and as much as I was fully engaged in them in the moment, they also felt ‘done’. Once complete, I felt gratified for having feasted well on that moment, and about as interested in revisiting it as I might be in pondering the digestion of yesterday’s lunch!

That got me thinking….what has my life been about and what is it about NOW? To be sure, much of my life in the past has been about sharing my experiences and accompanying insights with others in a way that would allow them to learn and grow and expand and become more. That meant capturing what ‘was’ and finding ways to present it so that it could be related to, absorbed and digested by others in ways that would also feed them from my experience. Today, it’s different.

It does not call to me to do that anymore. Yesterday, when Koreen and Noreen and I presented the Sekhmet Rising Book Project to a local women’s group, I discovered something much more powerful for myself.

Koreen and Noreen did most of the talking. I set up the conversation to come, and brought closure to it when the time came. I sat back and watched these two amazing women decloak and unveil themselves in ways that brought wave after wave through my body. Both of them – strong, vibrant, irreverent, compelling, playful, courageous, outrageous… each in her own way, and all of those things present nonetheless. As I listened to them, I watched the faces of the women in the audience; and as I listened to them, I remembered who they had been when I first met them. In the moment of our first meeting, I had seen them this way. They were the ones who could not yet see.

That led to another thought: could they have made this journey to their own magnificence differently? Could it have happened faster? Could they have found themselves sooner? Or was it essential/necessary/required that they follow the winding road through Igniting the Self, Resourcefulness in Action, Influencing with Intention and Catalyst for Change. In this moment, I am unsure. In this moment, following what I witnessed yesterday, I am drawn to ponder new conclusions.

But I digress…. When the three of us finished our brief (30 minutes) presentation (and think of that – 3 big talkers, done in 30 minutes!), the room exploded into conversation! Meaningful conversation. Not idle pleasantries, but things of meaning. Only a couple of women left, and the most of them were still there long after the official closing of the meeting. It was wonderful! The presence of life was palpable!

In the face of very woman in that room, I saw all those things: I saw courage and compassion; I saw vision and the power to manifest it. As I watched them listen to Koreen and Noreen, I saw the pull of their desire to speak out loud from the truth that lies deep within each of them. I saw their restlessness and in it, saw their genius.

It is clear to me that my future lies in stepping much more visibly, forcefully and powerfully into bigger and bigger conversations, with larger and larger collectives of women. It calls to me – somewhere deep in my belly… somewhere in my own restlessness – to move faster, and with much stronger and broader stokes of the brush to bring more of the strength of who we are into the picture of our world, as we might come to know it.

I feel an urgency. I feel an intensity. I have made an effort in the last 18 months to be reasonable about it and with it. I can no longer do that.

The call to women to lead is not rhetoric. Nor is it a sound that any of us can hear with our ears. It is a vibration that we feel with our bodies. Like my experience of the earthquake in Kona, it begins with a ‘knowing’ in my body in September of 2004…and then it becomes turbulence in places where none had existed before. It increases in intensity and becomes a vibration that moves across the flesh of this physical body. And then, the earth moves. Did it have to take a little over two years? Yes, for me it did – because I did not yet know how to hear. It’s different now.

In the coming months, there will be more conversations. Larger collectives of women. More women awakening and awakening other women. More women bursting into explosions of meaningful conversation. It does not have to take long. It does not have to be hard. And it does not have to wait for anything else to happen, other than itself.

Breathing is good…..