Message 1

Today We Begin our Retreat with a
Day of Prayer and Meditation

Carol Hansen Grey
Emailed March 3, 2003

Dear Gather the Women Participants:

Today marks the beginning of our sacred global women's retreat. My hope is that you can set aside some time today to take a break from your normal activities and connect with the resonant field created by millions of women like yourself who are dedicated to creating a balanced world of harmony, partnership, justice and peace. Tomorrow, March 4, we continue our week of preparation as we honor ourselves with a day of introspection, reflection and contemplation.

On this second day we invite you to take an inward journey, examining how you've arrived at this place in your journey, reflecting on your contributions and the contributions of untold millions of women who have helped pave the way to the creation of this moment in time, and contemplating the power of millions of women joining their spirits and their energies to create together a world where all life is appreciated and held sacred.

Take walks in, or envision, nature.
Contemplate until you feel the real
and wondrous connection
between you and every living thing.
Sense in the soil, in the trees, in the murmur of air
the presence of our ancestors.

Reflect on the women of your own family,
stretching back into antiquity
and forward culminating in you.
Hold in your mind's eye the eons of women,
their strength and vulnerability, all they held dear
and all that they mourned.

Honor their pain with your attentiveness.
Feel their legacy as a seed that you carry.
Let the tears come.
Pledge with all your heart to end
the suffering of our sisters.

​

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

​

WISDOM FROM SOME OF OUR ANCESTORS

The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied, and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one thousand generations back of them ... Millions of women, dead and gone are speaking through us today.
- Matilda Joslyn Gage
from National Citizen and Ballot Box-1889
a newspaper she founded and edited.

 

I am daughter, sister, mother in thousands of generations of women, women whose skills created peaceful and bountiful civilizations, women who preserved remnants of our knowledge when the civilizations passed. I am a woman. In me lives the knowledge and experience of all beings. I can use that knowledge and experience to create a loving, spontaneous world.
- Ann Valliant
The Womancraft Guide Manual Collection

 

The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future.
- Abigail Scott Duniway (1885)
Suffrage organizer in the Pacific Northwest

I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.
- Alice Paul (1917) Pioneer Suffragist

 

There is not a path that has not already been walked by the women who have gone before. You do not walk this path alone.
- The Tao of Women

 

Blessings to you as we continue our journey together.

Only Love Prevails,
Carol Hansen Grey
Executive Director
Women of Vision and Action