Woman as Spirituality

This weekend my daughter and I attended and presented at the 30th annual Women & Spirituality Conference at Minnesota State University in Mankato. It was a beautiful weekend for the drive, and a wonderful way for my oldest daughter Kathleen, and I to spend time together. I continually am awed by what it means to be a mother. The keynote speaker this year was Winona LaDuke, Native American activist and writer, mother, grandmother, amazing woman. I’m still hoping to get her book, Naming the Sacred, soon. I should have stood in line to buy it after her speech, but I was there not just with my daughter, but also with Max, her nine year old, and he’d been sitting very patiently for the entire speech (and opening ceremony); we were all hungry and ready to find lunch.

I continue to think about the things that LaDuke presented, about who gets to decide what belongs to whom? Who does get to name what is sacred? Why do we believe our justice system is even about being just? Why do we have so many incarcerated people in our country? This morning I spent too many minutes (any minutes at all are too many for me) on Facebook. I keep vowing to shut down my page, but then I’m drawn to telling someone “Happy Birthday” or something, and there goes my meditation time, to Facebook browsing, not a good trade-off. But I was there, and found some ‘friend’ dissing the Occupy Wall Street folks, and it made me so frustrated, but I didn’’t answer, didn’t reply, didn’t want to start a Facebook fight. So, one more note to self, stay away from Facebook, except for pics of grand-babies.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the fight is over. It’s not. Ignorance and fear are hard things to fight. I know, I fight them in myself more often than I’d like to admit. A person like LaDuke, however, gives me courage to continue to ask myself the hard questions, to hold out hope, to be appalled that a company can own the rights to seed and food. Really? How did that happen?