Page 8 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

when I sent her the link to our website, she wrote to me with misgivings: “Post GCM (The Great Cosmic

Mother),” she wrote, I had enough of those NewAge women who were immersing in their version of

dreams & visions to escape (in my opinion) the disciplines of history & the chaos of politics. I think our

dreams & visions need to be grounded in the horrors of ancient & current realities; & that it is time to

retrieve the polemical Fist, if not my version then someone's somewhere.” Barbara’s uncompromising

fury on behalf of women and the earth has been a touchstone for me all these years; she has always

embodied the kind of fierce protectiveness Laura Bellmay, in “A Call from the Edge,” says we urgently

need. So I took these words of Barbara’s to heart, and do even more so now that she’s an ancestor.

There is no question that all the dreams and visions in this journal have been and are grounded in “the

horrors of ancient and current realities,” and I hope that rage, and outrage, will always be seething not

far from the surface on this site. (Interestingly, the cause of rage was taken up at the “Geography of

Hope” conference most adroitly by longtime Buddhist practitioner Wendy Johnson, who spoke of

anger as the “refiner’s fire” and cautioned us: “Don’t be too nice, it’s overrated. And there isn’t time.”)

As for retrieving the polemical fist...well, our version may not be quite as antagonistic as Barbara would

have liked, but the fist is there. Perhaps it’s tempered by the recognition of our fragility. And also by an

understanding that the fist, like the heart, does also need to open, even when we’re confronted with

atrocities. A Liberian peacebuilder who worked with child soldiers and warlords in Liberia’s civil war

advises Travis: “...We must deliberately move into the field and lavish love on those incapable of

loving.” And to the violent young man in her dream in “Dreaming the Future,” Valerie Wolf says, “A

part of me wants to lean in and help you change.”

At the end of Wolf’s piece, a dancing girl in her dream creates a magical pathway to the spirits. It’s one

of many instances of dancing in this issue. Judy Grahn’s dragonflies dance. So does Deena Metzger’s

rain. Even trauma, at the end of “The Music of Grief,” gets up and dances. Despite the horrors of

ancient and current realities. And because of them. This dancing Barbara Mor would have understood,

and applauded. “...the universe...is the first dancer,” she writes in The Great Cosmic Mother, where she