Page 7 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2
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often leads her somewhere unexpected. But there is call and response within the issue itself, most
obviously in the anguished longing for ceremony for roadkill in Gillian Goslinga’s “To Witness” which is
answered so concretely and beautifully in Carolyn Flynn’s “Grandmother Squirrel.” The Mourning
Feasts Cynthia Travis hosted for grieving communities in post-‐civil-‐war Liberia are echoed in Ruth
Wallen’s “Cascading Memorials,” installations that enable public, communal mourning for the
landscapes we are losing.
Though the writing in this issue seemed to constellate around the categories of “Grieving” and
“Guided,” that’s not to say there is not plenty of grief in the ‘Guided” pieces, and vice versa. And, as
more than one of the writers here points out, grief itself can be a guide. Travis writes: “Proper grieving
is one of the key indigenous technologies that open the doors between worlds.” I’m sure I’m not the
only one to have noticed that when I fall on my knees and ask for help—not always, but often—it
miraculously comes, though not necessarily in the form I expected. It’s worth noting that the women in
Deena Metzger’s dream in “Dreaming Another Language: She Will not Kill” come to her because she’s
been been praying for rain—because she’s been asking, on her knees, “what is to be done, what is to
be done, what is to be done?”
Kristin Flyntz, whose expert copy-‐editing skills have been applied to most of the pieces collected here,
wrote to me once she’d gone through the bulk of them to say that it felt to her as if “the intelligences,
the teachers and the knowing that we desperately need have deliberately gathered in this issue, both
in their human form (the writers) and in those who are working through them. Perhaps we are being
shown, collectively, where we need to go in order to live in alliance with all life...” Reading these words
I felt, it is so! Just as all of the writing here is informed by the understanding that our continuation on
this earth hangs in the balance, all of it can be read as a response to the questions: “Are there other
ways to live?” and “What is to be done?”
Barbara Mor, a friend and collaborator of many years and author of the epigraph above, drawn from
her landmark ecofeminist book The Great Cosmic Mother, died unexpectedly in January of this year at
the age of seventy-‐nine. In the fall, I had an exchange with Barbara about this journal-‐to-‐be. Initially I’d
written to ask her permission to use the title, since I discovered, only after I had decided on it, that she
had a blog called Dark Matter/Walls. Barbara gave me her blessing for “Dark Matter,” but in October,
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