A blog of her own is like having a room of her own in cyberspace. Why is this important? Because if our species is to survive, women's voices need to be heard. Right now women are attempting once again to add the equal rights amendment to the constitution, here in 2011! According to Supreme Court "justice" Scalia, "person" in the the 14th amendment does not mean women, and therefore women are not equally protected by the constitution. My head spins at the complete insanity of this arrogant sexism. I wonder where Scalia thinks he came from.

I'm not! (Sorry for misspelling your name, Virginia, in my last post.) Many of us have grown up with this phrase "who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Elizabether Taylor and Richard Burton made it a household presence, though the movie completely missed the point. This is an example of the erasure of one woman's generous genius as well as an example of the general erasure of women in patriarchy overall, as evidenced by our floundering fathers' constitution of, by and for men, which as noted previously, WOMEN ARE STILL POINTING OUT IS COMPLETELY WRONG, while men continue to think we are engaged in a debate!!

FemUnity is women's community. FemUnity is Sisterhood--you know, the hood where sisters hang out. Where is that hood? Well, it has been oppressed, depressed, suppressed, repressed, compressed and just generally pressed down into the smallest corners of our souls--but it is there! Most of us have no idea how "pressed" we are, and hard-pressed at that! Sisters are resilient. We are like that tender green shoot that finds its way up through concretized patriarchy--we are an unstoppable force because we are the very embodiment of the cosmos HerSelf. We are that. We hear spiritual teachings say "you are that".

Have you seen this? If not, please see the trailer and find the movie! It is more than a movie. It is a moment in time documented by women showing how women peacefully brought to its knees the forces, guns, and violence of patriarchy in Liberia that never caught the eye of mainstream media. It is a tribute to the power of FemUnity in action. If you don't know the story of these a-mazing* women, I encourage you to let yourself be inspired by their courage, wisdom, heart, resolution, and fearlessness.

This is the story of the passing of Monica Sjoo, pioneer feminist artist, author, and one of the founding mothers of the awakening of Goddess spirituality. Monica's last project before her passing was the contribution of her artwork to Leslene's book.

I have been back from my study trip to Sardinia and Italy for over a month now. As I re-settle into my familiar life, I feel different. Traveling to lands and sacred sites where evidence of the Goddess is irrefutable gives me a new spark and added hope. Since these times in which we live are indeed perilous, as the global wanton dis-ease of the hatred of women spreads, going unnamed and unnoticed, while simultaneously claiming victory as the number-one most inhumane, degrading, violent, deadly, destructive, disastrous and unspeakably painful force on our planet, I felt nurtured by the living presence of the Great Mother, Dea Madre, in Sardinia.

Giving birth naturally, according to Vicki Noble, is a "peak shamanic experience" for a woman (Shakti Woman). When women give birth in wide-awake consciousness, we are given the opportunity to know how we are in relationship with the mysterious creative life force.

As a student, teacher and independent scholar of pre-patriarchal women's culture and spirituality, I feel that to really understand our environment and what is happening in/with it, it is vitally important to understand and respect the connection women have with the environment.

When I think of the sacred Earth Mother and the sacred Dark Mother of the great yoni-verse, or song of the sacred gateway of all life, death and regeneration, I feel a deep, expansive stillness, wrapping around me like a warm velvety blanket woven with the wisdom threads of the ancient wise grandmothers who have gone before me. The really ancient ones-the ones reaching out across the timeless expanse of this stillness, piercing my heart, beckoning me to wake up to my whole/holiness, as a woman, made in the image of the Mother Goddess herself.

For the last 5000 years the global rule of men, or patriarchy, has wreaked havoc and destructive chaos on earth and all her children. This grievous fact is hardly noticed by anyone in our species other than those who are victimized by it-women and children. And even then, those who suffer at the hands of male rule are often blamed for that which is inflicted upon them. We very often hear about injustices of racism, oppression, and classism. While these are certainly cultural and social priority issues, we almost never hear of the injustices of sexism, from which all other "isms" spring, and the misogynist foundations of patriarchal structure and hierarchy that create the unspeakably abusive state of dominance, or power-over.

Yesterday I went to see my doctor, and when I put the book down I was reading, she noticed the title and asked me if it was good. The book is "Narcissism, Denial of the True Self" by Alexander Lowen. She said she thought denial of the true self is counterintuitive. I wholeheartedly agreed and said to her that it was a good book about narcissism, and she told me her mother was definitely a narcissist. I then told her that I felt that narcissism is an epidemic, to which she agreed with nervous laughter. I also told her I was doing research on narcissism because I am writing a book about it from a feminist perspective.

I had intended this column to be about Janet Jackson's bravery in baring her brown-skin African-American breast before Amerika during half time at the super-bowl, causing tremendous uproar and chaos. Good for her. Brava. A metaphor for our times-the return of the breast of the Dark Mother. And I was going to take a look at the schizophrenic reality of that and the paid-for-view half-time programming involving numerous women running around in their underwear playing tackle football, no doubt baring breasts, and the clamoring, gawking, oogling and beer-drooling of the viewers, all accepted as normal male behavior.

As the world turns, I continue to be more and more intrigued by the plague of narcissism introduced to humanity by the white male elite and the advent of patriarchy, some 5000-6000 years ago. Like a cloud of locusts, this narcissism has descended on the psyche of humankind, and unlike locusts, it has not died out. Here in the West, this condition has become so normalized that we don't notice the sheer insanity of this state. This condition is very complex. In my last column, I discussed some differences between the genders and this narcissistic reality. In this column, I will explore a different face of narcissism.

Having been someone who was part of this revolution, I still am not really sure I could call it a revolution when I think about pre-patriarchal times, about 5000 years ago when communities were based around the mother-child bond and the apprehension and experience of deity was of a great mother, the Goddess, or whatever you choose to call Her. Since humanity has lived longer in peace and woman-centered culture than we have lived in war, lies and male domination, I find it difficult to define what has been called a sexual revolution as a true revolution because I would need it to shatter the global confines of the patriarchal imprisonment women suffer daily, which it has not.

Every Friday afternoon from noon to one o' clock women in my community gather on the downtown street corners to stand in solidarity with Women in Black. Women in Black is a global movement of women who dress in black and stand in silent vigil to share the collective grief born of war, which is, of course, unspeakable.

For too long we have lived with a language that is inherently male biased which has shaped our collective human experience. Naming from an androcentric perspective has been disastrous for women in particular because in this language there is no word that women can claim as our own to describe ourselves. All words for women are in the shadow of the male, i.e., fe-male, wo-man, wo-men. We have been told that the name of our essential life force is "Eros"-the name of a phallic deity. We have lived with understanding the shadow as that which is split off from our conscious mind, named as such by a man, who no doubt has given the world valuable insights, but whose own sexism and racism have been nearly overlooked by the very field that embraces psychological healing.

Gender Equality in Matrilineal, Matrifocal and Matriarchal Societies

For many of us, death is something we would rather not think about. Why is this? Why do we not want to understand the deepest mystery of life? Why are we so afraid to die? These are some of the questions that beckoned me on a journey to learn about the true nature of death, resulting in a recently published book, Midwifing Death: Returning to the Arms of the Ancient Mother, weaving together knowledge about how our pre-patriarchal ancestors viewed life and death with modem stories telling how the sacred passage of death and dying can be midwifed in grace, love and beauty, which are all aspects of the sacred feminine in women's spirituality--the oldest spirituality on the planet.