A circle of wisewomen is an archetype in itself. The image that comes to mind is a group of respected elders, grandmothers, or clan mothers meeting together in a circle. Each is equal in importance, none is elevated above the rest, and all are concerned about the well-being of their community. This circle has both a sacred dimension and embodies the collective wisdom of its members. It is the archetype that has the potential to channel women’s wisdom into the culture. This archetype is not a goddess. She is a Circle.
When older women meet together in a wisewomen circle, they are reenacting what was lost when indigenous and goddess-worshiping cultures were conquered, and yet each circle is a new creation with unique possibilities. Each circle helps us remember a time when women elders were looked to for wisdom and authority. Whatever once existed and then was not allowed, still exists in the collective unconscious or morphic field, waiting to be brought back into consciousness. It is not about needing to “reinvent the wheel” but about remembering it. The respect for the sacred feminine and its expression through women elders, priestesses, or oracles may be excised from patriarchal history, forbidden, and then forgotten, but once the process of remembering begins, it is like uncovering a blocked spring that once was a holy well.
Each circle of women is its own invention, and yet a common pattern emerges. Wisewomen circles meet as if in a temple space around Hestia’s warm hearth. These circles have an energy pattern in the shape of a wheel. Each woman is connected to the others through her connection to the center of the circle and a spiritual center in herself; each has a place on the rim of this wheel of energy. The invisible pattern is felt and strengthened over time, each time the circle meets it’s as if another invisible layer is added to the pattern. In such circles, rituals and meditative silences evolve to “center” the circle at the beginning, hold the center during, and dissolve the circle at the end.
Members of wisewomen circles have qualities we associate with the crone goddesses—wisdom, compassion, humor, outrage, decisive action, maturity—but they are also imperfect mortal women in the third phase of their lives, aware that they are aging and vulnerable to all of the feared aspects of growing old and dying. They know that the vitality, creativity, and influence they now have will pass, and they know that their time is limited and precious. Each woman has her lifetime of experiences and lessons to draw from. Individually and collectively, they have more psychological insight and compassion than they did when they were younger. Many will have past group experiences to draw from. They may have known each other most of their lives or met for the first time when the circle was formed.
A wisewomen circle may be comprised of women with something in common; they may be activists, grandmothers, corporate women, psychotherapists, craftswomen, writers or musicians, alumnae of the same institution, cancer survivors, or residents of the same retirement community or neighborhood; they may be of a similar class, background, or race. Or, on the surface, they may appear to have nothing in common. In either case, what shows doesn’t matter—for what is valued is the essence of each woman herself, her soul qualities and psychological maturity. Their honesty, trust, healing laughter and compassion makes the circle a sanctuary for authenticity, and a spiritual home base. I think of women who comprise these circles as crones who have been toughened and tenderized in the right places.
PRECURSORS TO CIRCLES OF WISEWOMEN
Consciousness-raising groups proliferated from the mid-1960s through the 1970s. These groups brought the pervasiveness of sexism into our awareness. The members were usually women in their twenties or thirties who met primarily on college campuses and in urban centers. For many, these groups were transformative, and resulted in their members’ developing a sense of sisterhood, a shared identification with all women. Many women left their groups when they moved geographically, or moved psychologically into another stage of their lives. Others left hurt and disillusioned, but most had a taste of what it was like to speak freely in a group where they could be strong and vulnerable, angry and tearful. In CR groups, they could talk about their ambitions, relationships, sexuality, and dreams of whom they might become and how they could change the world.
Women told the truth of their own lives to each other in these small groups and what they discovered was communicated widely to others through anthologies, articles, and conferences—generating anger and activism that led to the women’s movement and changed assumptions about women. In The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, Ruth Rosen documents how the women’s movement was revolutionary in its impact, forever altering the lives of women and changing American culture. Women learned that when they acted together, they could be a powerful force for change. Sisterhood was powerful. In consciousness-raising groups, the essential idea was: Tell your personal truth, listen to other women’s stories, see what themes are shared, and discover that the personal is political—you are not alone.2
The recovery movement was the next major movement in which people met in groups. Addictions to emotion-numbing substances (alcohol, narcotics, food) and the process addictions (workaholism, gambling, shopping, sex, codependency) were the focus of recovery groups in the 1980s and early 1990s. The Alcoholics Anonymous model of meetings, in which people told their own stories, combined with a twelve-step program was widely adapted to all addictive behaviors. Meetings were open to all; confidentiality, the admission of powerlessness over the addiction, and the need for help from a higher power were essential principles. These groups helped many women who are now of crone age change their lives by overcoming addictions and codependency. Insights into codependency and dysfunctional relationships came from examining the characteristics of alcoholic marriages with new consciousness gained from the women’s movement. Once more, there was an outpouring of literature, and the result was a proliferation of grass-roots codependency groups. Codependent and abused women learned about denial and saw how they had been enabling their partners to continue addictive behavior. Alcoholic women realized how they had used alcohol to numb feelings they could now express in a recovery group. Ann Wilson Schaef’s Women’s Reality, Co-dependence, and When Society Becomes an Addict brought insights from both movements together. Women saw how they were repeating painful family patterns and how church and society expected them to do so.
A grass-roots, little-noted women’s spirituality movement also had its beginnings in the 1980s. Its origins were predominately on the west coast and were psychological and apolitical. Symbols, myths, music, meditation, art, and ritual were common elements, along with a reverence for nature, the sanctity of women’s bodies and the earth, and a return of goddess spirituality in many forms. Women met in small groups that often had been inspired by attendance at women’s spirituality conferences or by participation in women’s workshops and retreats. They told their stories, adding a spiritual narrative to the content; made beautiful altar spaces in the center of their circles; and honored the sacred feminine. The first “crone rituals” to mark women’s passage into the post-menopausal phase were done in these large and small gatherings.
Cancer support groups were another testimony to the supportive power of being in a circle of women. They became an adjunct to the treatment of cancer, especially breast cancer, in the 1990s. They grew out of the unexpected results of research done at Stanford in the mid-seventies that were not evaluated until 1989. The study involved eighty-six women who had metastatic cancer, half of whom were in support groups, and a control group of matched subjects who received the same standard medical treatment but were not in groups. The study was designed as a short-term project meant to demonstrate that women in support groups might have less anxiety and use less pain medication than the control subjects, which was found to be so. In these groups, women told their stories and shared whatever they found helpful, including visualization. Over a decade later, prompted by his skepticism that such alternative adjuncts could really help, and thinking that this early study could prove this, David Spiegel, M.D., 3 traced the records of women in the study and was astonished by what he found. Women in the support groups lived almost twice as long (36.6 months vs. 18.9 months) as women who were not in them, and well over a decade later, three women who had been in the support groups were unexpectedly still alive. Cancer support groups are now commonly attended by women coping with a diagnosis of cancer and undergoing treatment. Support groups of all kinds proliferated in the last decade of the twentieth century: people with a myriad of serious physical illnesses including AIDS, incest and rape survivors, parents of children who have died or been murdered are examples. These groups form in the aftermath of a natural disaster, or a terrible accident, or act of violence in which many are affected. The healing and helping potential of circles of people who are surviving whatever they suffered in common is now known.
Consciousness-raising groups, recovery groups, support groups, and women’s spirituality groups will have been the precursors of wise-women circles for many individual women in the crone phase because they participated in them. We didn’t need to be in one to be affected; these were movements and experiences that changed collective consciousness. If we were in them, however, we had the experience of learning the healing power of being in a circle where women say what they know from their own lives.
ADDING INDIGENOUS WISDOM
The perception of indigenous peoples worldwide is of being in relationship to all living things and the earth, not as owners or dominators, but within a sacred interdependence. The photograph of Earth from outer space taken by Apollo astronauts brought an awareness that we are all indigenous people to humanity and fostered an indigenous sensibility in many of us. Indigenous means native, as in living or growing naturally—at home, here. Indigenous perception and consideration for “all our relations” has influenced environmental and ecological activists in their efforts to save endangered species and preserve wilderness areas and rain forests. Indigenous Native American wisdom includes council meetings that consider the effect a decision would have on seven generations to come. Indigenous practices, such as meeting in a circle where listening as much as talking is enhanced by the use of a talking stick, and decision-making by consensus were adopted by meetings of women’s spirituality, New Age, ecological, and environmental groups. These teachings came from numerous Native Americans whose mission was to bring indigenous consciousness to the white culture, often in accordance with a prophecy.
The framers of our Constitution and Bill of Rights were inspired by and liberally took ideas from the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, particularly the system of checks and balances. What they chose not to borrow included the concept of rights and privileges for women, the responsibility for and rights of children, and the unacceptability of slavery.
The governance process in the Great Law of Peace served the Iroquois Confederacy (the six Seneca nations) well, long before the arrival of Western Europeans, and is still operating. The well-being of the tribal community depends upon the perception and discriminating judgment of its elder women, who form the Council of Clan Mothers. The Clan Mothers, chosen by the people, are women old enough to have grown children, yet young enough to still be active. The Council of Clan Mothers, in turn, chooses the members of the Council of Community, which is the men’s council. The women’s council gathers the concerns of the people and, by consensus, identifies which of these most need attention. They then ask the men’s council to take up the problem, and suggest action. What the women elders see as a need, is not to be ignored. When the men’s council reaches a consensus about what to do, they report back to the women’s council. If the women approve, there is agreement to proceed. If not, the process begins again.4 This same procedure was followed by the Iroquois Confederacy before the six Seneca nations of the confederacy could go to war. War was a decision that required the consensus of the Clan Mothers whose primary concern was the well-being of the community. When the decision was made, the men’s council became a council of war and chose the war chief from among themselves.
WOMEN’S CIRCLES AND THIRD-WAVE FEMINISM
First Wave: the Suffragettes
In 1848, five women friends met around a circular mahogany table to write together a revolutionary document modeled after the Declaration of Independence. It was the Declaration of Sentiments that was presented several days later at the First Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, on July 19–20, 1848. The convention produced the Declaration of Rights of Women. At the time, women could not own or inherit property and, in fact, were the property of their husbands, as were their children. They did not have a right to their own wages. They were considered incompetent to testify in court. Husbands had the right to physically discipline them and could rule them as they saw fit. The legal position of women was virtually the same as it had been in ancient Greece, except that fathers could not sell their deflowered daughters into slavery. Of course, women could not vote. The legal strides toward democracy that began with the Greeks and led to the formation of the United States of America, and rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, applied only to men in 1848. The Declaration of the Rights of Women enumerated eighteen legal grievances suffered by women and also called attention to women’s limited educational opportunities. Seneca Falls was the starting place for equality for women. This was, geographically, in the midst of the Iroquois Confederacy and these white women were aware of the rights held by indigenous women of the area that they didn’t have themselves. The circle of five women friends (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann McClintock) who organized that first convention and wrote the first statement together exemplified Margaret Mead’s inspiring and pragmatic words: Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
The Seneca Falls circle raised issues of equality and justice for women, which initiated the women’s suffrage movement. The right for women to vote was resisted and ridiculed. Suffragettes struggled against arguments that for women to vote went against the divine order and their nature. Suffragettes were harassed on the street and denounced from the pulpit. An amendment to the constitution that would allow women the vote was introduced forty-five times in Congress, before it finally passed and was sent to the states for ratification. There was resistance to overcome in every state. Women went to meetings, discussed the issue among themselves, met together in homes to organize. They formed delegations to speak to legislators. They demonstrated, marched, and were arrested. Finally, after seventy years of effort, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. On November 2, 1920, American women finally were able to cast a ballot. Among them was Eleanor Roosevelt, who, at thirty-five, voted for the first time.
Second-Wave Personal and Political Feminism
The suffragettes were the first wave of the American women’s movement, and once they achieved the vote, feminism receded. The second wave had its origins in World War II, when women manned the home front, as men went to war. It was a temporary necessity, and women were expected to be independent and competent only “for the duration.” In the postwar United States of the late 1940s and 1950s gender roles became stereotypical. Men went to work and women stayed at home. This was when women went to college to get their “MRS. degree,” and their “PHT” (putting hubby through). Women had babies—collectively producing the baby boom (from 1946 to 1964)—and the ideal was togetherness in suburbia. Women went from wartime in the forties, when, in the absence of men, they filled every position that they could, to the fifties, when the only acceptable occupation for a woman was “housewife.” Almost everyone strove for the appearance of conformity and normalcy; no one wanted to be different.
Women who had had a taste of independence and were not fulfilled—as they were supposed to be—as housewives, were silent. Women who did work, were divorced, childless, or never married, were also silent (and shamed) through the fifties, but a feminist wave was building. The women’s movement began with consciousness-raising groups in the mid-sixties and reached a crest in the 1970s, the Decade of the Women’s Movement.
The Suffragette Movement had begun with one small group of women friends who met together to draft a statement and plan a conference. This “new” women’s movement’s momentum came from uncounted numbers of consciousness-raising meetings, where women discussed feminism and told their own stories, which tapped into and unleashed anger and pain that had been buried under the silence of the postwar generation of conforming women. The movement began with protests and publications. It drew from the ranks of intellectual and politically active liberal women in New York and Chicago, and their ability to articulate ideas, organize protests, and publish. Between 1968 and 1973, five hundred publications appeared, reaching women across the country and giving them an awareness of sexism and patriarchy. Revolutionary changes resulted. In The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, Ruth Rosen describes the events that led to momentous changes in the United States and spread to become a global women’s movement. Resistance and backlash followed. There was an initial momentum for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and then, as the deadline for ratification approached and met organized resistance, it failed to be ratified by the requisite number of states in 1982.
Third Wave: Spiritual Feminism
The first and second waves of feminism began with women meeting together and talking about their lives, dreams, and issues—as friends do—and then taking action. The third wave of feminism is gathering now in women’s psyches. Its first visible sign is the growing number of grass-roots women’s circles that have a sacred dimension. The third wave contains within it the essence of the first and second waves. It will be seen once there is sufficient momentum and size. I believe that the third wave has to do with bringing women’s wisdom and spirituality into the world.
Might a circle with a spiritual center be a vessel for women to transform themselves and the world? This was the visionary premise of my book The Millionth Circle. I had been thinking about the archetype of the circle and women’s aptitude to form circles, when “the hundredth monkey” came to mind and inspired the title. The Hundredth Monkey was the allegorical tale that sustained the efforts of antinuclear activists who worked to end the nuclear arms race when conventional wisdom said that it was impossible for ordinary citizens to change the inevitable destructive course of the superpowers. The Hundredth Monkey told the story of how scientists studied monkey colonies on separated islands by dumping sweet potatoes on a beach, drawing the monkeys out of the trees where they could be studied. They observed a young female monkey washing her sweet potato before she ate it, which was new behavior. Time passed, and first her friends, then their mothers, and finally the male monkeys on this one island adopted this new habit. But what was most remarkable was that this new behavior was now observed on the other islands as well, with no direct communication between them. This became a new norm: this was now what monkeys did. “The hundredth monkey” was the one who—by adopting this new idea—not just tipped the scales on the initial island but brought the new behavior into the consciousness of the entire species. Rupert Sheldrake, a theoretical biologist, postulated the Morphic Resonance Hypothesis, which accounted for such an effect in birds and animals. Applied to people, it means that when a critical number of people change how they think or behave, the culture will also. For there to be a hundredth-monkey effect, there have to be ninety-nine others who make it possible. Nuclear nonproliferation treaties and the intention of the superpowers to disassemble their nuclear arsenals is now a reality. As I put these thoughts together, I made an intuitive leap: what if “the millionth circle” will be the one new women’s circle that brings humanity into a postpatriarchal era?
The structure of a circle is inherently egalitarian rather than hierarchal, which is why it can serve as a wonderful model for how honest and caring communication among equals is practiced. This knowledge can have a radically positive effect on relationships outside the circle, when what is learned in the circle is taken as the model into other relationships and groups. In hierarchal relationships, power is the ordering principle. In hierarchies, you must know your place and act accordingly in order to get along or get ahead; and you can be punished overtly or subtly if you do not observe this arrangement. A hierarchy can be as small as two people, when one person is habitually deferred to by the other (this also defines a codependent). When the hierarchal unit is a man and a woman, to transform the relationship into a circle of two requires conscious effort because it goes counter to the unconscious configuration of four thousand years of male superiority that has only recently been examined and questioned in western civilization.
The conventional tasks of the first two phases of a woman’s life are personal and the issues that arise are about her rights and relationships. These were also the focus of the first two waves of feminism. The agenda was achieving the vote or having a political voice, equality of opportunity and egalitarian relationships. Each wave of feminism requires consciousness-raising—which is about what women know in contrast to what we have been told; it’s about women defining for themselves what they want and are capable of.
In a circle with a spiritual center, silent prayer or meditation centers the women and the circle, and allows the sacred feminine to enter. The circle becomes a temenos, which means “sanctuary” in Greek. Spiritual consciousness-raising is a thread that has run through both the first and second waves of feminism, but the focus was on changing relationships and circumstances for women in the world. These outer concerns are also the focus of the first and second phases of individual women’s lives. When women’s groups become circles with a spiritual center, they become vessels for women’s spirituality to grow into consciousness.
The sacred feminine and the archetype of the triple goddess disappeared into the collective unconscious under patriarchy, and women’s wisdom has been absent from politics and governance. In contrast, the checks and balances provided by the Iroquois model of governance with a women’s council and men’s council acknowledged the need for both the feminine principle of relatedness, which fosters the care of all members of the community, and the masculine principle of problem-solving and achievement of goals.
A whole person develops both of these aspects of the psyche, when it is possible. When stereotypes are enforced, development of the whole person is thwarted. The first two waves of the women’s movement have had a profound effect on an individual woman’s potential to develop both sides of herself, and on changing the relationships between men and women from male dominance to equality. The culture remained patriarchal and unbalanced, however, with women now also contributing to this when they are focused solely on success. Whether the goal to be won is the bottom line of profitability or the battle that wins a war, when the masculine principle is not balanced by the feminine principle of relatedness, there are noncombatant casualties because individuals and the environment are treated as expendable. Suffering is inevitable when this is so, and the effect will be passed on for generations.
True relatedness has a sacred dimension. Between individuals it is an I-Thou, soul-to-soul acknowledgment, and there is no hierarchy. Deep ecology extends this to all life. Might a third wave of spiritual feminism bring this principle of relatedness into planetary consciousness? Might “grandmother and clan mother” concern for all the world’s children be the spiritual foundation of third-wave feminism? On Mother’s Day, 2000, I watched the Million Moms March on television and wondered if I were seeing the first demonstration.
Like other feminists of my generation, I have been annoyed at how younger women feel entitled to opportunities that did not exist or were not open to women when we were their age, especially when they also said, “I’m not a feminist.” My mental (and sometimes verbal) comeback used to be, “Who do you think opened the doors for you?” Then I observed myself being just as entitled and unappreciative of the suffragettes, about my right to vote. This is what a shift in the morphic field is like: what was once unimaginable and then a struggle to obtain, is taken for granted.
WISEWOMEN CIRCLES
When the members of a circle with a spiritual center are crone-aged women, they form a circle of wisewomen in a culture that no longer recognizes the wisdom of older women, but as we have seen, support can come from archetypal patterns. We have the example of Clan Mothers from the Iroquois Confederacy or Grandmother Lodges from other Native American traditions, and the image of circles of wise-women in our imagination that tells us about the archetype.
In Buffalo Woman Comes Singing, 5 Brooke Medicine Eagle noted that “Grandmother” is a title which honors an elder woman, whether or not she has grandchildren. Taking an initiatory tradition into the wider world and adapting it, Brooke created an initiation ritual for contemporary wisewomen. She suggests that each woman decide for herself whether she is ready for this initiation. Besides being postmenopausal (which could be a result of an hysterectomy or chemotherapy), does she have the energy and concern for more than her own goals, her primary relationship, or immediate family? In this initiation, each woman must pledge to a circle of witnesses to use her energy in service of nurturing and renewing of life for All Our Relations. What this means and what form this will take is entirely up to the individual woman. The intention is to use the abilities she has honed, or the knowledge she has gained, or her financial resources, or personal influence to do something that will make a difference.
A circle of wisewomen can be a Grandmother Lodge for its members, each committed to use herself and her resources for her community—from local to global—in different ways. Support and ideas can flow about a project or an obstacle to overcome. The circle can be a place for an activist to retreat and resoul with women who know what she is trying to accomplish and what it will mean if she does. This can be a home base, whose members hold each other in consciousness or prayer.
A wisewoman circle might also be the spiritual and emotional foundation for a project. I saw how this works for the Sacred Grove Women’s Forest Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to save a stand of old-growth redwoods by buying the acreage and keeping it from being logged in perpetuity. For five years, using principles from Wisdom Circles for guidance, they have met in a circle once a month on a Sunday afternoon. They meet first as a circle—checking in, staying current with each other’s lives, observing special times, being silent together, making beauty and ritual—doing what women’s circles do that is soul-nourishing, and then they turn their attention to what needs to be done for the trees, which may be about raising money for the next payment, doing a mailing, holding a fund-raiser or a thank-you event for donors, or plan a visit to the forest, or an occasion that will bring others there. A similar circle is also at the heart of Women of Wisdom, another nonprofit organization that sponsors an annual women’s spirituality conference in Seattle. In Arizona, women friends began meeting together as the Grandmother Circle. They decided to organize a larger meeting for interested women, which grew into an annual conference-retreat. Their circle was the seed idea that has grown into numerous circles of crone-aged women—helped by their willingness to provide information and facilitate the formation of other grandmother circles.
THE WISEWOMEN’S MOVEMENT: SPIRITUALITY AND ACTIVISM
Women who have grown older and wiser have “maternal common sense,” and can see how much of the origins of the ills of a community as well as nations can be traced to whether its children are wanted, loved, healthy, and safe from abuse; learn impulse control and compassion; and are given opportunities commensurate with their abilities. For us, it is obvious that the well-being of children is related to the well-being of their mothers, which in turn depends on how women are treated. In the latter part of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first, this correlation is finally being voiced but not yet heeded.
American women who are now grandmothers began the women’s movement. Their daughters were beneficiaries, and now they are passing over the menopausal threshold to be among an estimated forty-five million still-active American women in the crone phase of their lives. With this numerical base to draw from, might wisewomen circles birth the wisewomen’s movement? If a generation of clan mothers take on the responsibility to look out for the well-being of the human tribe, might a “wisewomen’s movement” come into being in the first decade of the twenty-first century?
Third-phase-of-life women react viscerally on hearing of a twenty-nation survey report that one out of every three women worldwide has been beaten, raped, or somehow mistreated, and concludes that violence against women should be treated as a global health problem.6 Besides the immediate physical injuries, abuse and abusive relationships are linked to problem pregnancies, substance abuse, gastrointestinal disorders, chronic pain syndromes, miscarriages, infant deaths, and child mortality before the age of five.
Meanwhile, the United States in the year 2000 is the only industrialized country that has refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Twenty years ago, President Jimmy Carter signed the treaty and every year since, the Senate has failed to ratify the convention (along with North Korea, Afganistan, and Iran). Signed by 165 nations, the treaty expands the definition of discrimination to protect women and girls’ human rights or fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social and cultural, civil and legal fields. The agreement also insists that each country provide social services that allow women to combine family responsibilities with their participation in public life, and affirms a woman’s right to reproductive choice. The failure to ratify this is consistent with the shameful failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
Older women have learned that women’s issues and needs are not important priorities for men in power, and they have experienced how the women’s movement brought about major changes. We learned that women together are a force for change and that a movement can originate in circles of women.
WISEWOMEN AT THE CORE OF THE CULTURAL CREATIVES
With simple deductive reasoning, it is likely that the readers of Goddesses in Older Women—all the women and the exceptional man who would read a book with this title—are “Cultural Creatives,” the designation that began with population studies at Stanford Research Institute, described in The Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People are Changing the World, by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson.
The values and concerns of this large segment of the population, comprising 26 percent of the adults in the United States, would likely be those of any wisewoman circle. Ray and Anderson wrote, “What politicians often refer to as “women’s issues” are a key to understanding the Cultural Creatives. They see women’s ways of knowing as valid: feeling empathy and sympathy for others, taking the viewpoint of the one who speaks, seeing personal experiences and first-person stories as important ways of learning, and embracing an ethic of caring. They are distressed about violence and the abuse of women and children, and they want more good childcare facilities and far more attention on children’s needs and education. They have strong concerns about the well-being of families and want to improve caring relationships in all areas of life, private and public.”7
The Cultural Creatives are more idealistic and altruistic and less cynical than other Americans. They are concerned with personal authenticity, global ecology, and the well-being of all people on the planet. Of the fifty million, 60 percent are women. In addition, Ray and Anderson differentiated a “Core” group of Cultural Creatives based on the intensity of their values and beliefs, and the extent to which they put their values into action. Some twenty-four million people—twice as many women as men—were in the more committed group of Cultural Creatives. The Core group is characterized by their concern for both social justice and their inner life: they found that “strikingly, the stronger their values and beliefs about altruism, self-actualization, and spirituality, the more likely they are to be interested in social action and social transformation.”8
Circles of women and consciousness-raising are the means through which women bring about change in themselves and change patriarchy. Circles proliferate organically. Circles are like plants: some disseminate seeds of information and inspiration, and new circles grow from them; others send out runners that take root close by—one woman talks about her group to another woman who decides to form a circle herself. However they begin, the essential form is the same. The power of circles to bring about change in the culture is in their numbers and in the archetypes that are active in the women in them.
She Is a Circle
Creating a Wisewoman Circle
To transform a group that you already have
into a wisewoman circle
or create a new one—
the first consideration are the members.
Who will be in this circle?
Are they juicy crones?
Does each woman have wisdom and compassion,
a sense of humor, a great laugh,
spirit, and soul?
Is she outraged at injustice and indifference?
Does she want to make a difference?
Does she have a sense of community,
faith that there is meaning in life and that it matters what we do?
Does she care about the well-being of others beyond her own,
for values that are being lost,
for the survival of a neigborhood or the planet?
Has she grown through her difficult times?
Can you count on her?
Does she have time and energy
to be in this circle
as an activist or contemplative or clan mother?
And will the circle be a sanctuary
for her?
Experiences in past groups
and wisdom gained through life
will help sustain and maintain a circle.
There are also resources, books on the subject of circles
that I recommend.
My own Millionth Circle is a poetic and intuitive slender volume.
A Zen and the art of circle maintenance.
A right-brain approach to sacred circles.
Wisdom Circles by Charles Garfield,
Cynthia Spring, and Sedonia Cahill
builds upon Ten Constants,
which are
solid foundation principles for wisdom circles
and guidelines for being in one.
Christina Baldwin’s Calling the Circle
contains the most specific “how-to” of the three.
There are agreements and procedures,
enumerated principles,
a bibliography and references.
Information and examples that aid this endeavor.
Books help when forming and sustaining a circle.
Are food for thought and ideas to contemplate.
Talk about this with others.
Be visionary together.
Reflect on what you might do,
pray for guidance.
Silent prayer centers a circle of wisewomen,
each praying in her own way
for wisdom, courage, insight, compassion.
May the highest good come into the circle
and go out from it.