Page 96 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

challengers make what I experience as a swarm attack on my designated leadership and authority. I

now see the challenge as a deep and natural human need to match strength and competence in order

to claim our own personal authority. I have learned to welcome these strong challenges as younger

strength testing itself. At several moments in my work life, this natural challenge has been laden with

the toxic sting of unconscious misogyny, both mine and theirs. Having come to understand this

universal venom, I do not take these moments as mean-­‐spirited stings from a reactive hive but rather

as the sign of a residual toxic disorder in our species. To take these poisoned moments personally is

not a useful response.

I’m a woman leader who is aging. Instead of clinging to my long-­‐held position of acknowledged

leadership, I have to discern when it is time to let go and move aside. This is different from

disappearing myself. My wish is to make time and space to support the emerging competence of new

leaders. Their time has come and mine is going. If I take the lesson of the hive, I accept this dynamic

just as I learned to accept my own earlier need to separate from my mother, my sisters and my

teachers in order to learn to mother and sister myself. This way, I can continue to have my own

internal authority while supporting others’ growth-­‐in -­‐community, a benevolent long-­‐term function of

human hive life and an antidote to collective global misogyny, one of the most lethal of our human

colony’s collapse disorders.

A physiological benefit of the episodic tinnitus symptom of buzzing in my ear is that I have been fully

relieved of the progressive and crippling arthritic pain in my hands, a legacy inherited from my father.

As a result, through my own hands, I feel a spirit level connection with my dear father who suffered

long and hard with the degenerative arthritis pain in his big bony hands. My big, bony hands have heat

and a buzz but no pain.

Another benefit of the buzzing is that it has become an invitation to turn inward to listen to my own

knowing. When I do that, the buzzing disappears and I hear myself way more accurately. Once again I

know what I know and must do about the problem at hand.

Learning to live in collaboration with the benevolent bees as neighbors and allies in our blended

community helps me experience the interdependence of all forms of life. My tiny practice of