Paper. White. Yes, please! An Invitation to take note.

Every year, on Groundhog’s Day - around the time of Imbolc and Candlemas -  I restart my phenology notebook.  Much like a candle, this practice of dedicating a few minutes a day to giving nature my full attention has usually burnt down to a self-extinguished nub by the end of the calendar year.  I used to blame the winter holidays for their time thievery.  Then, I started to curse the darkness and cold for that same trick.  Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the wisdom of deep hibernation and what it feels like to truly let every leaf fall to the ground and abandon every practice  - even the healthy ones - for just a brief season.  I’ve learned firsthand that it creates longing.  The kind that inspires poetry.  And love notes.  So much so that now, just as the paperwhites are pushing up, I feel the excitement, “Paper.  White.  Yes please!”  It’s with fresh enthusiasm that I grab my phenology journal and open to a new page… a new year.

“Oh! I’ve missed you!”

I am exclaiming that to both my journal that sits in front of me and the women that I am writing this to - the ones that I ever wish would be sitting in a circle right here and now with me.  It is a new year indeed and I’m eager to “go for it” with some embers I’ve been poking around in last year’s ash.  Here’s my first idea.  If it glows for you, let’s go for it.  If it doesn’t, I get it, and I will be sure to keep sending up flares.

Oh, and also consider this your early Valentine because this is an invitation to strike out together in this coming year in the name of love - biophilia to be precise.

What?!?!?!?…. What is Biophilia?

So, there was a book published the year I was born, 1973, called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (fast forward 48 years and look around you to get the gist, sheesh.) In it Erich Fromm described biophilia as "the passionate love of life and of all that is alive."  I first learned about the term when passionate love for my children had me fast-tracking a parent-PhD in "how to raise an ecoliterate child".  (More on that adventure can be found here.). David Sobel seemed to hold the secrets.  He prioritized above all protecting and nurturing children's biophilia.  He prescribed lots of free play and mentor-inspired exploration in nature before the age of thirteen.  I doubled down on a shared hope: If humans only save that which we love, then we must above all else support our children's innate love of all life on earth.  

How: Phenology and Poetry

I found phenology when I was looking for ways to do just that - feed my children’s innate biophilia.  I got us each a notebook, wrote “PeeWee Phenology” across the front and we were off - at least once weekly - to not just notice with our full attention what was happening in the natural world but to actually take NOTE of it.  Why?  Aldo Leopold's life work is the answer to that question.  By noting our observations we are compiling data to be used as reference points in a future that is certain to be full of climate change and consequences.  It's an opportunity to exhibit and deepen one's "love of place" by stepping into citizen scientist boots weekly, or daily, and making a record of which species did what and when each year.  

Unbeknownst to us, by declaring ourselves phenologists we were also signing up to become devotees to awe - a glorious side-effect of making a dedicated practice of noticing nature.  When it comes to paying attention it seems that practice doesn't make perfect but rather makes something a new way of being.  A healed and returned instinct.  These days at our house whatever is happening inside just stops when the first ducks return to the pond or an early summer breeze releases the pine pollen.  This is where the poetry came in for me -  it was no longer enough to notice what was occurring around me.  I needed to document how it felt to be in synch with a bigger landscape than my tiny self-serving internal one.  This capacity for awe was a natural phenomenon that was arriving in all seasons now and at soul-saving rate of proliferation.  Maybe it was my age, and/or my exhaustion from weathering so much shame and despair in those years - but I knew, this too needed to be documented.  Writing a daily "haiku" (non-traditional) became a tiny habit* of expressing my passionate love of all that is alive - myself included.  And just as love begets love, that creative expression grew into occasional amateur sketches and watercolored snapshots. 

 

Poetry and Phenology?  At first glance these two seem like unlikely pair but housed under the same cover they are nothing short of spellbinding.  As The Tree That Time Built so eloquently illuminates the scientist and the poet both, "observe and explore connections within the natural world."  

It is my hope that by inviting others to join me in this practice, together we will be able to explore and create connections that will inspire us to act as agents of positive change for the future of our home planet.

The Practical Part of HOW:

1) Interested in giving it a try?  Great.  Join us on Zoom Wednesday Feb 2 at 6 pm to start a phenology notebook.  Pick your path:

No fuss prep: bring a 3 ring binder with blank pages, pen and colored pencils if you like.   

More artful prep : get a sketch journal for just this project, pencil, a fine line sharpie, ruler, compass, protractor, watercolors or colored pencils...

Bonus! Learn how to make the practice of keeping your journal - a tiny habit* of Self-care. 

2). Make a commitment to saving what you love.

Keeping an artful poetry and phenology journal has grounded me while navigating our intense reality that the climate is already changing and we are not moving quickly enough yet to meet critical timelines to avoid catastrophe.  (Pause for a breath.)  In just a few years' time my personal phenology journal has shown me some alarming shifts in seasonal patterns.  My journal has made it quite clear to me that while I notice, chart, wonder, and admire, I also must act.  Now. That is where I am hoping to find sisterly solidarity.

I'm making a go of adding another tiny habit to my life.  I am going to find a time 1X weekly to connect with other women who want to share a haiku, or a nature photo, or a phenology observation, along with any updates on their own efforts in being a climate activist! If you're interested in joining me, this Feb. 2nd let's light a candle in the name of love (biophilia) and plan a weekly date to witness, encourage, and cheer each other on in small, regular acts of being the change!

If you're interested contact and I will send you the zoom link!

Our Tending Tent: It's May 28.

In 2013, in honor of the average 28 day menstrual cycle,  May 28th was declared Menstrual Hygiene Day.  It created an annual focal point for an ongoing global vision: 

To create a world in which every woman and girl is empowered to manage her menstruation safely, hygienically, with confidence and without shame, where no woman or girl is limited by something as natural and normal as her period.

For us, it is a global platform uniting our tiny red tent with a determined and ever growing movement of other individuals committed to reclaiming "the curse".  It is one day of the year that we feel the uplift of something much loftier and more expansive being hoisted high above us.  It is an opportunity to be inspired.  

Here is how we are spending our day.  

Our tent is still intentionally small while we are navigating the sometimes unpredictable (and always magical!) waters of project based homeschooling.  We've wisely adopted a "go with the flow" attitude regarding our Raising The Red Tent project and have been rewarded with much less stress and much more enjoyment!  Whenever possible we keep it simple.  As Marge Piercy points out in "The Low Road", with just two and then three people you've already got something

...a delegation, a committee, a wedge. 

We've already got three and that is all we need for our first ever stitch-n-pitch:

Our communal project:  Reusable Handmade Menstrual Pads.  Luna Wolf website offers a wonderful pattern and tutorial.  Treehugger also has an article not only with links regarding HOW to make your own pads but also WHY you might want to.


Our personal project: An action bracelet inspired by the MHD website to help remind us of the commitment we are taking on:

We commit to reach 25 girls with affordable menstrual hygiene products in 2019. (With the hope that we FAR exceed that number).

Fresh from the 2019 Bay Area Maker's Faire we are overflowing with motivation to make a difference!  And, since maker magic is contagious we're hoping others will catch it.  If you do, please share your own story of craftivism in the comments section of the blog.  

   

  

  

The Mother Lode: Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered? Not our girls!

Halloween isn't a day in our household, it is it's own sub-season.  Sometime in early October one of us will see an unruly flock of ravens, or get caught in an unexpected tornado of fallen leaves, only to rush home, breathless, and declare: "The Ancestors are here!"  

In the weeks that follow we build an altar to those that we've loved and lost. We add photos, a special bone found in the woods, marigold garlands, love notes, purple fairy lights, poems, and most importantly quiet moments of reflection.  We also spend those weeks, of course, up to our eyeballs in costume creation.  Our moods of merriment and mourning take turns leading and eventually they dance us up to the threshold of the ultimate mystery.  On All Hallow's Eve we find ourselves dressed in disguise, slightly spooked by our anticipation, daring each other to be the first to step out into the dark.

Last year as we sat down to the drawing table, my daughter, age six, made a most remarkable choice in costuming.  I remember immediately running to call one of the original heroines of The Red Tent on Rose Avenue.  Shaking with excitement I quite fittingly blurted out, "You are going to DIE when you hear what Baanko wants to be for Halloween!"

A big green booger.

My heart swelled with pride.
I took it as a sign that so far we are succeeding in doing her girlhood differently. 
Last I checked I didn't see "sexy booger" as a costume idea being marketed to women this Halloween.  Baanko had proven me wrong.  Clearly they cannot make a "sexy" version of every halloween costume.  (Even though to my horror one company did attempt to pawn off "Sexy Offred"  this season!) While sexy cop, sexy Christmas elf, sexy nurse, sexy (insert any profession that has nothing to do with being sexy) may continue to haunt us for eternity I took pleasure in the small win that my daughter came up with a costume that could never be hemmed to mid thigh with corset and underwires installed to show off "the real treats" of the holiday.



In the early hours of her trick or treating  I caught a snap shot of her in her globby green glory.  I smiled when I saw that it was framed with Victoria's Secret in the background.  Right, in my opinion, where we should leave it and all the other ghouls that scare girls into thinking that their form is what will determine their destiny.  I thought about the question that guides our red tent project, "How would your life have been different...if there had been a place for you?"  and realized what Baanko, the booger,  really was: The place.  The other option.  The choice that so many of us have forgotten that we have.  She was the resistance, authentically.  Suddenly her hayride through our commercial trick or treating district looked like a victory parade to me.  I hoped maybe, just maybe, one other girl or woman might notice her unintended statement and remember their lives can still be different. Baanko for one magical night was a little green smear on our common cultural landscape.  True to function and form she was and is a booger; determined, actually engineered, to stick, to hold its ground - almost to an impossible degree of perseverance.

Baanko-the-booger reminded me of one of the most toxic cultural messages so many women have been haunted by their entire lives: At all costs, prioritize desirability over desire.  Or, in other words, your form is more important than your function to us.  Yes, you can be anything you desire to be in life, as long as you are still desirable to others while doing it.  The irony, of course, being that people are most desirable when they put function over form and allow themselves to be absorbed into that at which they naturally excel.  The painter, painting.  The runner, racing.  The mathematician, proving.  It is a state in which a woman is focused on the useful kind of critical thinking while navigating what she loves.  I've never heard a woman ask, while standing drenched in her purpose, "Does my butt look big?" 

When I think of the question "How would your life have been different...?"  I think of a massive power plant containing all the energy that I, and so many women that I've met, mistakenly squandered while under the spell of this particular message.  Appropriate for the season, it is a horrifying thought.  So, I employ the best trick in my bag and rather than bemoaning the ghosts of my own past I think of how I can make it different for our daughters.  I remember my own function and feel the familiar slide into flow.  The writer, writing.  I begin crafting a piece that I hope will help my daughter understand that the ability to enchant (and most other super-natural like powers) are the natural side affects of a woman who is following her bliss.  And, for the record, never once do I wonder if the butt I'm sitting on while I write is too big.

The Tending Tent: "Twas the night before the New Blood Moon..."

...literally and metaphorically that is and a night that registers at about a 4 am level of darkness and quietude.

I reached out to a friend this weekend during the protests over the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and asked, "Why am I not out yelling in the street right now?"

"Outrage fatigue" was her reply with no punctuation at all, let alone an exclamation point.  I knew what she meant.  We are getting drained.  We are nearing what I remember a mentor warning me about when I was a facilitator in in-patient recovery:  We know how serious things are.  We know women are dying.  We see them starving themselves to death.  And because of that knowledge we have to be ever lightening up, or we, and those we are helping, will not have sufficient energy to see this momentous journey of recovery through to its promised outcome.  Recovering takes tons of energy.

That workshop with Dr. Anita Johnston was a turning point for me. Up until that moment in my work I had been carefully hemming in what was a very natural instinct for me, humor in the face of horror.  I thought levity would come off as insensitivity and that I wasn't taking our situation seriously.  Once I trusted Dr. Johnson's  guidance however, and started regularly allowing my outrage to blaze in a way that felt light and energizing rather than suffocating - everything in my work and my own life changed.

Another lesson from my days on those front lines is to never underestimate the benefit of being useful.  Whether we are very personally or sympathetically experiencing this moment in history, if we care we will continue to feel the urge to act, "what can I do?"  From my personal experience with victimization the need for an outlet to be of purpose, to fight rather than freeze, is everything.  Healing this cultural wound will be a fight, like personal recovery, that requires massive amounts of endurance.  When I look at the two coping techniques, continuing to rise up and lighten up while being of purpose, I think of women doing what I dare say they do best - circling up and tending.  Tending to themselves, tending to each other, and in our case tending to a culture long in need of an intervention.

Although it is our natural instinct, fueled by that amazing hormone Oxytocin, it has been my experience that since the red tent has long vanished from the common cultural landscape women tending together is something that must be taught and modeled.  The most common reflection I remember hearing under the red tent that I hoisted in the name of recovery was, "I didn't know it could be like this..."  The blank was filled in seemingly endless ways; that I could feel so safe, that other women aren't my competition, that I'm not the only one.

Although the red tent I'm raising this time around is not in the name of recovery but rather prevention it is tethered to the same principal - tending.  It will be a place where we can model ever lightening up and rising while being of purpose  along with many other things.  In fact, my notebook has quite literally exploded at the seams with ideas of how I can help make our daughters' lives different.  This and a recent internal broken binding has convinced me that now is the moment to fight.  Counter-culturally, but not counterintuitively, by the act of tending.

In the name of purpose and lightening up I'm inviting you to grab a guy line with us and pull with all your might.  Starting this Monday, on the new moon, I'll be pulling hard every week to unravel the guy line "I'm pitching a tent" from base locker room talk to a new inspired way of living that will benefit not just our  daughters but all that they touch.  You can join this weekly "Tending Tent" we're raising in person or by starting your own and sharing your ideas and stories with us.  We will be posting all of our ideas and experiences under "The Tending Tent" blog entries.

Wild Child Wednesday: Nature as healer.

This fall both of our children are "back to school" outside of the home.  It would be a breathtaking vacuum around here except that their departures coincided perfectly with our move from forest into town.  I'm spending these first few childless weeks unpacking from our life on Orcas Island and the rich nine months we were nestled in the Deschutes National Forest.  Each afternoon Baanko is assessing my work and staking her claim on pieces of that learning-rich time together that she is not willing to retire.  We are setting up a "project room" where The Warthog School and our Raising The Red Tent endeavors can continue to grow. 

Today we both took a pause from our new work.  We both had stomach aches. Baanko was weathering exposure to the ever changing microbiota of her shared classroom.  I was not weathering well my exposure to Dr. Blasley Ford's prepared testimony at the Senate Judiciary hearing.  The sun rose with a promise of what could be the last truly hot day before winter's inevitable coming and cast long early rays on our recently recovered radio flyer.  Baanko hatched a plan, packed carefully, and declared, "I think we can do Wild Child Wednesday even on a Thursday."  It was decided.  We both needed the benefit.

All afternoon we played on the river's bank.  She taught her dolly to fish and I sketched a scene that was all out of perspective.  Only my daughter's image at the center seemed to reflect reality.  Her image was complete, I realized, because she is still whole.  Her life is still on track to be different.   The little yellow boot, the fallen branch that she'd imagined into fishing gear, and her wind tossed hair all flowed from my hand with ease.  She is effortlessly all right.  Beyond her, however,  I am struggling to capture what is happening in this moment.

I decided, at least for the afternoon, to accept that.  When I did,  I realized that I am more than struggling to process what is happening around us.  "Struggling" isn't a powerful enough word to describe mothering with complex PTSD.  Especially when the complex of the trauma includes sexual abuse.  I am not struggling I am efforting.  Immensely.  Daily.  In all of the activities that are not deemed by our culture as important work.  I am grieving while protecting.  I am recovering while educating and preventing.  I am tending two young girl children; one who came through my body and is growing up in front of my eyes, and one that forever lives inside of my body ringing adrenaline alarms and ever waiting to be saved.  I am working for us within a culture of me.  It isn't a struggle.  It is a battle of a lifetime.

One from which I need to go AWOL from time to time if not for just an afternoon.  To follow the very advice that I used to give to women in recovery:  Find a way, whenever possible, to see beyond the common culture which is ever yelling and flashing its content loud and fast in front of your face.  I confidently promised each woman that past its dizzying and confusing display they would find a source of steady support for their most authentic sense of self - Nature.  To them it probably sounded like a fantasy world.  A place where cycles, like those in their own bodies that they had been trained to try overcome or at least ignore, are an authority worthy of trust.  Where tending and befriending, connection and cooperation, and all the instincts that are chemically coded into us from birth, are trusted and proven strategies for long term survival and success.  Yet the more they retreated to and reflected upon the natural world the more it became their reality of choice.  The number one observation I heard as feedback from them was that things were finally "making sense".  From my vantage point, I was observing women coming to their senses.  They returned from nature alive and enlivened in spite of all they had suffered up unto the present moment.

Our Wild Child Wednesday outings are a weekly "coming to my senses" and somehow Baanko knew I needed it this past Thursday.  The Deschutes River runs 55 degrees F late September and she insisted that I at least submerge my feet.  My attention became naturally absorbed; the heat of the last summer-like day, foliage warming our landscape with deep reds and golden yellows, the sound of geese migrating above us, the scraping of Baanko's two twigs enacting her imaginary need-fire to cook her imaginary fish, the smell of cool grass up close to the dirt.  By afternoon's end I was a sense-able woman again.  I had been put  back together by following the lead of someone who has never come apart.

Baanko narrated our walk home with expressions of awe about different trees turning new colors and animals she spotted on both river bank and neighborhood streets.  To the back drop of her wonder I marched a strong steady path back to the home that I am ever tending.

I am sufficiently recharged and ready to pick up what I believe to be important work.  I am ready again.  To be sensible. To be of use.


"To Be Of Use" by Marge Piercy.

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Mystery School on Mondays

It took me about a month to process the unexpected shift in students at The Warthog School.  It was a whirlwind that lifted our son, on excited yet anxious wings, to his new school this past January.  Never have I seen someone so rise to the question we pose every blue moon, "What would you do just once in a blue moon?"  A boy who vowed never to step foot into a classroom again suddenly dreamed up a dream that left us breathless.  Like everything about him the transition was intense.  Yet he declared and delivered on his dream.  He is now a proud and happy member of our local village school.  Winter's quickening has passed and in its place I quite literally see spring in his step.  He is alight with inspiration, readiness, passion, and joyousness.

After he flew our nest I spent about two weeks working on "what comes next" for me.  My first action item was to begin this Raising The Red Tent blog.  It is a project that I have patiently waited for the opportunity to embrace.  Our son opened a door out into the world so I dashed out behind him.  It was a glorious and indulgent two weeks of engagement.  I wrote, I created intentions, I sent invitations, I met with other moms to talk about the vision... I felt aligned with authentic self and purpose in this new (yet familiar) direction.  It was a late January flurry of excitement so enchanting that I forgot to close the door behind me.  And, as winter's wind will do, she gusted an unexpected guest seeking shelter back through the threshold of The Warthog School.  Before I could blink, and taking me by complete surprise, my next student had arrived.  Our daughter was standing in front of me with her heels dug in.

"It's my turn." She said with eyes that expected compliance.

Although I felt the tug of everything else I was just beginning there was no way to deny or ignore it.  Yes. Absolutely.  It's her turn.

It's her turn in our family.  It's Her turn in our culture.

Growing up alongside a sibling with behavioral special needs I've tracked the signs of what I know she's at high risk for: second fiddle.  I've been on the look out for the tell tale signs of self-diagnosed less-importance.  Accommodation.  Stuffing of needs.  Over-compliance.  The "It's OK, it doesn't matter" approach to conflict resolution.  She's got a blush of them all already which made her defiant stand a breath of fresh air.  I'm relieved that she is ready to be first chair. 

And with that, The Warthog School was called back into session for spring quarter.  We are already off and running and you can follow all of our adventures in holistic, nature-based learning here.  If you do, you will hit a weekly intersection of our two blogs.  We're calling it Mystery School Mondays and it's where The Warthog School overlaps Raising The Red Tent.

Homeschool is giving us an unexpected chance to once weekly go deep for the day (rather than just an hour) into a subject that we all need to understand now more than ever - the mystery and wonders of the feminine.

There is a nesting nature* to this pairing that will long keep me inspired.  The Warthog School was originally born under The Red Tent. When my children were small and I was still working full-time at The Red Tent I began The Warthog School as a curriculum that would supplement my children's lives with the ecoliteracy and biophilia.  I couldn't find what they needed so I started creating it.  Like my children, The Warthog School was quite literally born under The Red Tent.

When E.P.'s learning needs demanded that The Warthog School become a full-time homeschool this nesting flipped.  My passion for all things red tent had to be downsized and put in storage in my heart while we allowed The Warthog School to unfurl into a full-fledged homeschool adventure.  I had to retire from what I knew, recovery, and jump into something new - prevention.  While homeschooling our son I jotted notes about my old passion, "How will I raise a red tent for my daughter?" And, as the years ticked on, "When?" 

Mystery School Mondays are answering those questions for me.  I am raising a red tent for my daughter, now, by putting it right on her campus.  Once weekly the Warthog School will be something that I believe our culture has sorely missed  - a women's mystery school.  A time to marvel together about "girl power" and all the positive ways we can direct our future as women.

*"Nesting Nature" became the first mystery to explore on our new Monday studies...

WHEN: Once in a blue moon of course. (Which is NOW.)

On New Year's Eve of 2010 I sat under a full blue moon circled up with a handful of the founding heroine's of The Red Tent on Rose Avenue.  We were at El Capitan Beach in Santa Barbara County, California celebrating our inaugural wild woman retreat.  After using our senses, our bodies, and our voices to enjoy the last day of the year we sat around the campfire to use our imaginations to envision what was next.  We took turns looking beyond just the coming year and dared one another to dream big by asking, "What would you do only once in a blue moon?"

I was at a more dramatic point of transition in my own personal life than I knew at the time.  It turns out that was to be the last retreat for The Red Tent on Rose Avenue.  With a nine month old child in tow and a deep desire for another even the radiant full moon couldn't illuminate just how much would change for me.  I scryed into the fire in silence that night and walked into the new year holding a once in a blue moon vision for change.  I wanted to transition my red tent work from recovery to prevention, from therapy to education, from just women to girls, and most importantly from aligning with a patriarchal tradition to pursuing partnership with institutions driven by scientific research and a well established code of ethics.  It was going to be a giant course correction taking me places physically and psychologically that I could never have imagined.

Eight years later the vision is sparked. 

Circled under another full blue moon* with my seven year old daughter we're kicking off that campfire-scryed vision.  We've got a blog raisingtheredtent and the beginning panels of a patchwork red tent.  We're following Marge Piercy's prompting from her poem "The Low Road" and trusting that from us two our community will grow:

Two people can keep each other sane, can give support, conviction, love... Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge. With four you can play bridge and start an organization. With six you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds, and hold a fund raising party. A dozen make a demonstration. A hundred fill a hall. A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter; ten thousand, power and your own paper; a hundred thousand, your own media; ten million, your own country. It goes on one at a time, it starts when you care to act, it starts when you do it again after they said no, it starts when you say We and know who you mean, and each day you mean one more.

 *a super blue full blood moon eclipse at that!


 

HOW: Good Old Fashioned Stitch and Pitch

A few years ago when I was talking to author, editor, parent-coach, Dads-and-Daughters founder, New Moon Magazine co-creator, all around amazing Joe Kelly about "Raising The Red Tent" he caught an essential snag in my pitch.  One that I spot all around us now.  Like so many well meaning adults I was framing up a project that would "empower our daughters" not realizing that I was implying from the start, through my language, that power was something we needed to give them.  His caution humbled me.

I stayed quiet for a while after that conversation.  That seemingly subtle glitch in my diction highlighted so much for me about what is most toxic in girlhood.  While overt advertising messages pollute girlhood with sexualizing and unattainable feminine "ideals" they are a toxin that can be identified and fought against.   I believe the more subtle subversions of reality, like the one Joe caught in my own well meaning pitch, are a much more dangerous poison.  Since they come from a well-meaning, trusted source they slip into one's system without setting off any alarm bells.  Unfiltered, the message is immediately metabolized and integrated without even a bitter taste left on one's tongue.

It happened to me.  As a girl I imbibed many messages about power being something outside of myself that another person or experience could give to me.  I understood myself as lacking from the start which filled me with anxiety and a determination to get "empowered".  Empowerment was a quest, that for me, was fraught with peril and much struggle including spiritual and sexual abuses.  To this day, subtle glitches in diction raise the hair on my neck faster than any infamous Carl's Jr.. ad ever could.  A woman's entire life story can begin, "Once upon a subtle and subversive misrepresentation of my innate power..."
Mine did.

But enough about me.  This tent isn't about me and my past.

This tent is for our daughters and their futures.

So, "HOW do we raise a red tent for them?"

First, I think we need to winnow the wisdom from our personal pasts without getting chaffed and stuck in our old stories. "Enough is enough."  "Time's Up".  Women everywhere are uttering these phrases in unison now.  Our focus must be on prevention and our collective future.  Whatever state we've recovered ourselves to is and must be good enough to start.  There is simply no time left.  Never before has a new story about women, power, and our connection to the earth been so imperative.  It is up to us to craft it NOW.

Women, power, earth, craft.  This string of words should have acted as a trail of breadcrumbs delivering me to the obvious "how" we must begin our story.
But, some stories are too important I guess.  So I missed my cues and stayed stumped on this starter question, "How do we make a tent that is accessible, relatable, and inviting to a seven year old girl?"

It was while I was busy over-intellectualizing that my daughter quite literally began raising the red tent for herself.

It started a few weeks ago.  She began by making it real through language, "Mom when are we going to make our red tent?!"  It was real.  She was eager.  It was a "place" to her.  It belonged in her cultural landscape along with the library or the park.  Where was it already?  She was getting impatient. 

Next, she fleshed it out with wonder.  "What will we do there?"  "I'm so excited."  "Can I bring my baby doll?"  "No papas, no brothers allowed?  Really?"  It was unfurling through her imagination and excitement.

Finally, with impatience peaking, she took matters into her own hands regarding making our dream tangible.  Enticed by a mutual love of spending crafternoons together, she convinced me to turn away from my keyboard and toward the sewing machine.  She had a beautiful plan.  She was the director.

And, by days end we had the beginning pieces, quite literally, of our red tent.

It was four pm by the time she said, "Now we have to stitch our two patches together!"  She didn't look disappointed when I told her that we would need to first get fabric for a binding which imposed a stopping point for the day. Instead, she sat quietly for a few moments.  She was both satisfied by the hours of our co-creativity as well as absorbed by her own dream of completion. "Oh, I cannot WAIT until we sew it all together and get in it!!!"  She actually squealed from her excitement.

And with that she answered my question of "HOW?"  I laughed at the simplicity of the solution to the giant problem I had created for myself.  I didn't have to worry about inviting seven year olds into a tent!  Tents, forts, hide-outs are the natural habitat of the still wild and whole girl child.   And, what is a red tent if not a mystery school.  A magical, clandestine, wonderland.  Thanks to our impromptu mother-daughter stitch and pitch my question is no longer "How do we make the red tent inviting to our girls?"  My question now is, "Why don't we invite our girls to make this red tent."  And, not just the flesh and blood girl children we call our daughters and nieces in daily life.  But, also the girl children who, against decades of patriarchal pitfalls, managed to become the amazing women that we now call our friends, sisters, peers.

Our daugthers and nieces are ready.  As Joe Kelly so aptly pointed out to me, they don't need to be empowered.  Our girls were born, whole, complete, perfect, and with their power in tact.  They just need the safe space in which to enact, create, question, express, lead...  I gave my daughter the supplies she called out for and by days end she had raised her red tent.  It was simple for her and powerful for me.

Light on years and baggage my daughter pulled her patchwork panel unfettered from her heart.  As if there were only one blueprint inside, with no hesitation, she polished off a picture of the two of us holding hands and smiling under a red tent.  She was onto embroidery while my canvas was still blank.

I was editing my ideas, "How do I envision HER future red tent without making it all about me and my personal past?"

By putting all of my energy into making it different for her than it was for us.

I asked myself the question that  I've asked women in recovery so many times:  "How would your life have been different?"  This tent, if crafted well, will be a sturdy patchwork of living answers to Judith Duerk's long standing inquiry:

How might your life have been different if 

there had been a place for you...a place of women,

where you were received and affirmed?  A place where

other women, perhaps somewhat older, had been affirmed

before you, each in her time, affirmed, as she 

struggled to become more truly herself.

How might your life be different?

Excerpt from Circle of Stones by Judith Duerk

  

As soon as I asked myself this question my patchwork panel was decided and created with the same confidence as my daughter's.  It was a vision focused not on "what should have been" but rather on "what there is still time to create".  My patch reclaimed words, ideas, and energy that have historically linked me to the pain of domination and stitched them into a vision of sustainable personal power.

I believe that this simple prompt, encouraging us to envision how our lives would be different, can show us HOW to enact the change that our girls need and deserve.   So, I’ve got our start.  I’m canvassing my contact list from the Red Tent on Rose - quite literally.  I’ve sent out blank canvas panels to those heroines so that there past contributions can support our future.  I’ve also hemmed blank canvas panels for our girls to dream unfettered.  Stitched together they will tell the new story about women and power that we all so desperately want to hear.

Here we go...