From the four corners of the earth and the four seasons of women's lives we are weaving a tapestry across the globe ~ gathering women's stories, celebrating women's wisdom, cultivating a legacy in which all life is sacred.

The GCW is dedicated to the resurrection and celebration of women's wisdom...period. In doing this we honor the integral power and place of women on the Earth, kindling a revolution with the power to transform humanity one woman, one family, one village at a time.

This is both the fiercest political activism and the deepest spiritual devotion.

GCW NEWS!

Come visit our BLOG to keep up with daily offerings of Women's Wisdom and Truth! If you would like to contribute to this Blog, please Email us!

The GCW has been honored with Boulder Colorado's Emerging Leaders Award! We are honored and grateful for this important recognition.

Also, equally exciting, the GCW has become a fiscal sponsor for the beautiful Boulder Colorado organization, SoulSong. Founder Sharon Fletter, midwife to many visions and missions, is working tirelessly with indigenous women around the globe to bring sustainable economic opportunities to their communities! We are proud to be sponsoring SoulSong and will be promoting their Boulder Benefit on Sunday May18th. More details to follow!

STORY EXCERPTS:

"Losing my husband on 9/11 has been an amazing journey. Everyone asks, 'Aren’t you angry?' And I just look at them and say, 'No...I’m not...' I knew forgiveness needed to happen in order for me to go on. Everyone wanted me to be enraged. So, I had to figure it out on my own. It was something very simple. It came as a question, 'who am I to judge what they believe?' They believed that what they were doing would get them to heaven, would give them honor in heaven. And they deeply believed that or they would not have done what they did. Killing more people got them a better place. And once I completely understood that - really thought about that - then I could forgive them. And I don’t know why. But I’ve never had the depth of anger that a lot of people still have. It’s what keeps us in the war. That’s not a good part of our lives. I have difficulty with that.” 44, USA

"I had grown up dancing, always dancing. But I stopped." 40, USA

"My father was trying to influence people not to change to Islam. They had to get rid of my father so that, maybe if he died, more people would change. They had been searching for my father for a long time. Then one day, we were in our house having dinner and we heard a knock on the door. Three men walked in. Three soldiers. They pulled my father. We didn’t know what was happening. My mother wanted to cry then they said if she cried then they would shoot her. We were just scared. We pretend, all of us children, we pretend to sleep, to lie down. Then my father was beaten and then he was pulled outside and he was killed.” 23, Sudan

"I feel it’s a very subtle knowing we carry as women, like it’s our nature to be sisters to each other, like it’s part of remembering our essence. Knowing that my sisters are there makes me feel so confident to walk this path. I think, for me, when the Woman inside us really wakes up, all her sisters wake up with her. And then they find their way to her and she finds her way to them...somehow. When a woman wakes up she can’t be alone. It’s not her nature somehow." 33, Israel

"It is almost grotesque that I would speak of certain things. I am also wanting to speak of these things. But you also will never understand. You won’t. It’s different here than in your country. It’s just different. I don’t feel sorry for what I did, and I’ve heard this is how American women think we should feel. I mean, I guess it isn’t honest to say I don’t feel sorry. I am very sorry for the way things are. But I also think that, here, women have a duty to know what is right and what is wrong; to know what is perceived as right and what is perceived as wrong. My mother knew this all her life. I know this. My sister and her daughters know this. I think that if a woman knows this then she will not get raped. I was humiliated when my daughter was raped. And the balance of this family is wrong after that. It is wrong and needs to be made right. When my husband and his father came to me and told me what would happen I didn’t feel like I had a choice but I also wouldn’t have, I never would have done differently. It’s a matter of right and wrong and it’s important to know this as women or we don’t, we won’t make it.” (mother speaking of her participation in her daughter’s honor killing) age withheld, Pakistan

      "When I got my driver's license I would drive down to the beach, especially at night, and then walk along the beach.  And there'd be this...just this empty space.  People were a long ways away; houses were a long ways away.  And I would sing...at the top of my lungs...I would sing out to the water.  And the waves would be coming in and I would sing.  And I remember a few times what happened was that the water would come alive. It would come alive and resonate with my voice. And my voice would be resonating all over. And I could feel it go across the world.  It was so incredible.  It's such a beautiful feeling.  But, you know, I only did that by myself.  I never did that with anybody else." 56, USA

"I remember seeing my cousin again after a few weeks of not visiting with that part of our family. I realized after I saw her that in fact my family hadn’t even been talking about any of them and in particular her, at all lately, which is different because in my culture we talk about everyone in the family all the time. The family is the network, the fabric. It’s who you are. Well, I saw her again and she had been so horribly scarred. Her face was pitted, like it had been burned. I asked my mother what was wrong with her and my mother told me that she had been late coming home from classes and it had gone around the village that she had actually been with a man. Her father, my uncle, threw acid on her. He did it to mark her, to tell everyone that he didn’t approve of her behavior. Later she told her mother and my mother the truth of where she had been. She had been late because she had been raped by two men. But she knew that her fate would have been so much worse had she admitted this than if she had let the rumor happen that she had been with a man." age and country withheld

"I think I was somewhere between seven and nine...we had woods behind our house and in the woods was this teeny brook called ‘Little Brook.’ It was spring and I remember going back there because I was not liking the vibe in my house. I found my way back there - the bank was very mossy and there were little violets everywhere. I remember lying down...I can still feel the moss under my back...and I just let my fingers trail in the rocky stream. I lay there for some time and had the visceral experience of presence and divine grace. I don’t know that I could describe it then, but it was this all-permeating, all-loving, all-safe, completely held Knowing. It went into the cells of my body like an answer. Like, “oh, this is what I’ve been yearning for. This is what life is.”  I was safe within this all-encompassing consciousness. I was part of it." 59, USA

"The sex I’m having with Sam is an expression. There’s just this uninhibited expression that...maybe it has to do with being forty-two now. I feel like I’m on fire. And you know? I had forgotten. It had been gone from my life for so long by the time I met Sam. And part of that fire comes from Sam ~ he sees me. At forty-two I now know what it’s like to be seen." 42, USA

"I wrote this creation myth where Mother god came from the ocean and Father god from the sky, and he was fire. They came together in the fall on a cloudy, misty day and in their love making they created me." 47, USA

"I remember standing there on the porch with my baby on my hip watching my husband go down the field on his brand new red Ferguson tractor that had these huge metal gratings on the bottom because we couldn’t be sure that there weren’t still landmines in the earth from all the wars. And the land we were working had once been the Dead Sea and it was filled with salt. We didn’t know how to farm it. It was many years before we could get the farm producing at a high level. The idea in the beginning was that we’d be family farmers, husband and wife and that volunteers would come from all over and work with us. But really, this meant that my babies and I were down at the field all day long. Or I would take care of someone else’s babies all day and she would go down to the field. Sometimes the babies would be in swings out in the field, or in a playpen and I’d be out there picking watermelon, tomatoes or grapes. Actually I loved that part of it; working the land together. But there was something about farming that, as strong as I was, it always demanded more than I could give. It would take and take and take and I couldn’t give anymore and of course there was always plenty more to do. It always had me crawling, just brought me to my knees.”  52, Israel

"I feel, since I didn’t give birth myself, that each time I create a painting I give birth. Painting is the kind of work I saved myself for when I decided not to create yet another human being. I’ve noticed that people say they’re sorry when I tell people I never had children. I don’t want people to be sorry. I’m not sorry. It hasn’t been easy all the time but I don’t regret it at all. I want to be a mother to all children, to the world." 55, USA

"I remember, when I was two, we were not living right in town, we were living out in the country. The memory I have was sitting on the little foot bridge and dangling my feet in the water - looking at my feet with my shoes on...in the water! It was a wonderful feeling, watching the water, pushing my feet back and forth. Of course, it was completely against the rules!" 94, USA

"Having my daughter was a really beautiful experience of the power of women. It was my husband and seven women in the room! With her birth I wanted to be touched and I had so many hands on me. No self consciousness about my body. I was pacing around during labor. I had a visceral sense of all the women who had done this before...the presence of the women who were in the room, their witnessing of me and this birth. And then there was this cosmic ancient sense of, ‘wow, we really open this door’ and I could feel that my sounds were their sounds. Looking at myself in the mirror I looked different, not like me. When my daughter was born there was an incredibly fierce winter storm going on outside. Outside the wind was howling and the windows were rattling and inside there were all these women, it was warm, candles everywhere. I felt like the wind was bringing her in, ushering her through. We chose her middle name, ‘Takku’, which came to us in a dream - we had no idea what it meant! Months later at her blessingway, a friend, who is Cherokee, told us that in Tlingit language, in Juno Alaska, it means ‘wind’ or ‘Chinook’! She has a lot of that power in her." 38, USA

"I didn’t have an orgasm, I didn’t even know what one was, until I was in my early thirties. I knew something was up. But through my entire marriage I never experienced orgasm. I didn’t know anything about self-pleasuring. I remember as a young kid and even a young teenager, playing with my sisters and brothers, and being awakened sexually, you know, as we’d be tumbling over one another. As a young person I had a lot of sexual fantasies that I was riddled with guilty about. We’d go to confession...oh God I sometimes wonder, to be a fly on the wall...the priest who was getting an earful, thelittle-fry on the other side of the window spilling her guts!! So, I knew I needed help. Here I was in my early thirties in NYC, talking to my girlfriend and she said, “Well, I know this orgasm coach.” And I said, “That’s what I need!” So, I started working with this woman. It was the first time I had ever looked at my own vagina! She’s down there holding a mirror saying “Look how beautiful you are! Look how you’re built!” But you know, here I am, I’m 46 and I still have not had an orgasm with a man. You know, if there’s not sacredness around the erotic, if there’s not Love around the erotic, it doesn’t do it for me." 47, USA

“I started going to the woods with the intention to really listen. I could get myself to this deep altered state where every plant I walked by was a being. It’s like a continuum from object to being. A forest is not what our culture thinks – it’s not a “forest products center’. It’s a collection of living beings. When I go into the woods I have intimate encounters with these beings. They respond to me. I actually have dialogues with these beings and it’s pretty amazing, this dialogue with these beings. So I do that often.” 54, USA

"You couldn’t take the spark out me. One of my sisters used to say, “Couldn’t you just be wallpaper like the rest of us? You have to stand up and say your truth? You have to stand up to her?” Truth is I was the best little girl I knew how to be. I had a nickname, I had the same name as my dog and it was ‘Blackie’. I was darker than my sisters, different from my sisters. I was often told as a little girl that if I wasn’t a good girl they’d send me back to the Indians. I remember spending a great deal of time in the backyard dreaming that that would happen.” 52, Israel