What difference can I make?

Yesterday, I watched a PBS show on China From the Inside – Women of the Country. Staggering numbers: 622 million women in China; highest suicide rate of women in the world; 150,000 women take their lives every year, with another 1.8 million doing their best but not succeeding in ending their lives.

As I watched, I thought about my life as a woman. I pondered who I am, how I live and what is meaningful to me in having created my world of life/work/play. I wondered: how does what I have created… how does my work and a WEL-Systems perspective and all that it has spawned… connect to any of this? How can the work that I do ever possibly…even remotely!.. make a difference for any of these women on the other side of the world and my world? And the answer came.

If I can, then maybe mine is simply to do and be when others cannot.

I have a voice. In my world, my life is not at risk if I speak my mind, ask for what I want and say ‘NO!’ to what I don’t. I do not live in fear of being harmed for having done so.

I have a platform. I can write, speak and facilitate. I can invite people to come together and share with them a model of the world that has been deeply meaningful to me and create the opportunity for them to consider it in their own lives.

I have the freedom to engage both. Other than the extent of my own self-imposed limitations, nothing prevents me from gathering people together to consider a radical new way of moving through the world, and nothing prevents me from making this way as public as I choose (writing, speaking, facilitating, etc.).

Perhaps the most potent notion for me from this show was a recognition that in far too many places in the world (including, potentially, the woman next door or living two blocks to the left), women are not able to speak or gather. Far too many women in the world must put their lives on the line in order for them to even question ‘what is’ or explore ‘what might become’. Far too many women in the world must be shrouded in too many ways (shroud the body, shroud the mind, shroud the spirit, shroud the voice), ensuring that they stay unseen and unheard… that they stay anonymous and homogenized… except by a select few who determine what meaning their voice may have.

In the world, there are women who can speak. I am one of them.

In my work, I connect with so many other women who have such vital and important things to say…to share…with other women and with the world. So many women who bring hope and encouragement and potential as a message to each other – and it is a highly contagious message, indeed! When I am willing to speak, I become the invitation for others to find that in themselves.

Why does this matter? Because I believe in the notion of a shift in critical mass of consciousness. I believe in the notion of the 100th monkey… in the idea of information/awareness/consciousness moving through a field and becoming accessible to all in the field. And because I do believe all these things, I believe that every voice matters and I wonder: how many voices will it take to reach critical mass?

So there it is - having a voice and using it, just because I can. Do I hold that as my obligation? ? Not really…I hold it as my gift to myself that I may always remember who I am. Does it make me responsible for the women (and/or men) of the world and their keeper? Not really…I hold it as an outpouring of the discoveries about myself on the holodeck of my experience. Why else would I have created such things in my life?

I wonder what would happen in the world if every woman who could speak from the truth of her experience chose to do so. It really isn't complicated.

Breathing is good….