28 April 2023

23S Week 8. Our Home:Taking Care of Earth


—with Paula Chandoha and Mary Rose Muti

Paula Chandoha gave a focus talk about how her family cares for their farm.


Mary Rose Muti introduced two videos of Robin Wall Kimmerer.
The first video was a Science Friday interview (29 minutes) 


27 April 2023

23S Week 7 Nature Walk through Mt Auburn Cemetery

—led by Mary Margaret Halsey.

We met inside the gate at 11 am on Thursday 20th April and were fortunate in having perfect day for our walk.

Our first objective was to locate the gravestone of our past president, Elaine Fisher.  This proved somewhat more difficult than expected, but Catherine finally spotted it.
 

In 2014 Elaine had given a focus talk on "What Matters to Me and Why". She showed many of her photographs, including the pair "Crossing the Street / Returning".  She chose the first of these images to engrave on her gravestone.  Elaine has now crossed the street never to return.  She added a haiku by Kobayashi Issa (Issa="a cup of tea") one of "the Great Four" haiku masters in Japan.


            A lovely thing to see:
            through the paper window's hole,
            the Galaxy


Entering the cemetery was like stepping into another world.  As we proceeded MaryMargaret taught us to listen attentively, to be really present.  I heard the sounds of birds I had never heard before.

One of the first things to take my breath away was this magnificent sugar maple with its tasseled flowers blowing in the breeze.
Many of the trees were still bare while others were covered in blossom and yet others had large leaves.


We were immersed in beauty.

MaryMargaret gathered us together to hear the prologue of Peter Wohl's book, Wild Mind, Wild Heart, a piece called "Sacred Scrolls" by Robert NashuWa, a Passamaqouddy Native American spiritual practitioner.





A final jewel in my time at Mt Auburn was to watch a very rare leucistic, pure white, song sparrow hopping from a garden bed to a bare bush and back again. (Unlike albinism, leucism only affects the color of the feathers not other parts of the body.)

Mt Auburn Cemetery is an inspiring place, an escape from all our worries and cares.  As Lindsa described it, it is a bubble, isolated from the rest of the world.



14 April 2023

23S Week 6.

Click here to hear Lindsa Vallee's focus talk.


The main lecture was given by Peter Wohl, author of Wild Mind, Wild Heart: Discover Your True Self in Nature, Zen Buddhist teacher, registered Maine Guide.  Click here to hear him.

Listen to the dragonfly....          by Ival Stratford Kovner


06 April 2023

Poem: I Dare You

by Dorianne Laux

It’s autumn, and we’re getting rid 

of books, getting ready to retire, 
to move some place smaller, more 
manageable. We’re living in reverse, 
age-proofing the new house, nothing 
on the floors to trip over, no hindrances 
to the slowed mechanisms of our bodies, 
a small table for two. Our world is 
shrinking, our closets mostly empty, 
gone the tight skirts and dancing shoes, 
the bells and whistles. Now, when 
someone comes to visit and admires 
our complete works of Shakespeare, 
the hawk feather in the open dictionary, 
the iron angel on a shelf, we say 
take them. This is the most important 
time of all, the age of divestment, 
knowing what we leave behind is 
like the fragrance of blossoming trees 
that grows stronger after 
you’ve passed them, breathing 
them in for a moment before 
breathing them out. An ordinary 
Tuesday when one of you says 
I dare you, and the other one 
just laughs.

 Copyright © 2023 by Dorianne Laux. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 4, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

“‘I Dare You’ was written while in the midst of downsizing from a large house in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I taught at North Carolina State for thirteen years, to a small home in California where we retired. I had a party for my grad students and told them they could survey the house and take anything that caught their eye or fancy. They filed out the door with a white lace parasol, a red sequined cocktail dress, a tin angel, throw pillows, canned vegetables, rolled up rugs, pictures, potted plants, towels, posters and coasters of Dolly Parton, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Cher, the dining room table, and a roll of toilet paper. It was exhilarating! All that ‘stuff’ gone from my life. I’m a poet, so I wrote a poem about it. But it’s also a poem about aging and accepting that you too will be carried out like a broken lamp and buried in the dump we call a graveyard, or scattered into a plot of land, or poured out over the ocean. This exodus was somehow a preparation for the acceptance of this fact. I did not expect the final line, but when it came, I knew that other world I had belonged to was coming to a close. Youth. Remember when you’d do anything on a dare? On a whim? And that feeling of Why not? Poof. What remains between us is mirth.”
—Dorianne Laux

 




23S Week 5. Inspiring Women Leaders

The focus talk was made up of contributions from WomenExplore participants describing women who had inspired them.  Click here to hear what they had to say.

Main lecture:  Muna Killingback
Muna Killingback joined the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy with many years of experience advocating for and writing about women's and human rights, peace, and social and economic justice issues.  At CWPPP, she works with the 
Gender, Leadership, and Public Policy graduate programs, oversees communications, and assists with fund development. Formerly at the Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters at UMass Boston, she had previously served as Executive Director of the Cambridge-based nonprofit organization, WomenExplore (formerly Theological Opportunities Program). 

She is a former director of communications for the World YWCA, headquarters of the global women's movement in Geneva, where she had been one of its first-ever Young Women Interns. As a freelance writer and editor, she specialized in the work and communications needs of nonprofit and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including grant writing. She continues to be active in the World YWCA network and is a member of the Executive Committee of the YWCA World Service Council. She has also served on YW Boston's Advocacy Committee and is an appointed member of UMass Boston's Restorative Justice Commission, as well as serving on the McCormack Racial Equity Task Force and the Professional Staff Union's Committee on Racial Equity (CORE). Muna earned a Master's degree in International Relations and a graduate certificate in Human Rights at UMass Boston.  She is currently a fourth-year doctoral student in the Global Governance and Human Security PhD program, also based at UMass Boston's McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies where her research is focused on the feminist peacebuilding work of women's NGOs and faith-based organizations. Muna is also an affiliated faculty member in the UMass Boston human rights minor.

 Muna is a proud Arab-American, the daughter of an immigrant and refugee from the Middle East on her father's side and also has deep roots in rural Pennsylvania on her mother's side. 

Muna also asked a few people to come and each speak very briefly about what inspires them. They are: Julie Kabukanyi, Chanel Fields, Cassandra Porter, and Fernanda Costa.  They are all alumni of the Gender, Leadership, and Public Policy graduate certificate program or the Gender, Leadership, and Public Policy track of the Master of Public Administration program at UMass Boston. 


Thank you everyone for inviting me. It is always a great privilege and honor to be among you again! Sending lots of love to all & so happy you are still going strong. I wish you another strong 50 years of being a safe and thoughtful and inspiring space for women to be their authentic selves.


References:


YWCA (it’s a totally secular organization in the US btw): https://www.ywca.org
If you are interested in peace issues, there is the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF) that has chapters in the US. My very favorite US women’s peace organization is Code Pink btw.

Fernanda Costa to Everyone:
So sorry I have to leave soon for a meeting. But loved learning with you all and hope we can stay in touch. https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernanda-oliveira-costa/

There was a really good film about the women peacemakers in Ireland.