I haven’t been blogging as much as usual the past three weeks. The week before last my daughter was here visiting, and that one-ups almost everything else in my life. These days we live almost 1,000 miles apart, so we don’t get to see each other as often as I would like.

And last week I was preparing for a Festival Choir concert that we performed Saturday and Sunday. It was a joy and a lot of work to get ready for our concert, but I guess I knew that was the case when I joined. You see the Festival Choir is one of the best choruses in Wisconsin.

And this week I collapsed, pooped, didn’t want to do a thing. But I don’t feel bad about my choices at all. My daughter always lifts my spirits, and the music the Festival choir made was heavenly. I think our conductor, Bruce Gladstone, said it best as we waited to perform for the second time. He reminded us all of our ecological footprint and how we are trying to reduce it so that we can step lightly on the earth. But he said for him, it was just as important to leave an imprint of beauty. Our choir had spent a huge amount of our time — in rehearsal and outside to learn Mozart’s “Regina Coeli,” Bejamin Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb,”  two luscious pieces by Brahms, plus much more– and we had used that time to make our small part of the earth a more beautiful place. When I get down on the human race and realize just how we are degrading the planet, I have to remind myself that we are also the ones who create — great music, great art, great drama, great literature.

Without the arts, our lives would be drab. And I believe without the arts, we will be much less likely to repair and heal our world.  Tikkun needs the arts.  I guess I would probably be less tired if it weren’t for my choir, but I would also feel less alive.

Earth Day 1970 found me protesting for greater environmental protections. But for many years afterwards, I figured that the issue was a no-brainer. You just don’t destroy the biosphere, the food and shelter your species depends on for survival. I put my efforts into the women’s movement instead, because there seemed to be a lot of inertia about women’s rights and society was crying out for greater gender equality.

In retrospect, I was right about my second assumption — there was a lot of inertia concerning women’s rights — but I was wrong about my first — environmental action wasn’t a no-brainer after all. We’ve made a lot of advances in women’s rights. And we’ve made some progress on the environment, but not anywhere near enough. As a result, we’re headed for a lot of trouble. Why? In part because we environmentalists lost the P.R. battle. Somehow we didn’t make it clear that our issue wasn’t just an issue. It was survival we were talking about.

Sunday we’re celebrating “Coming Out Day” at First Unitarian in Madison, and I’ve been asked to tell my coming out story. Compared to many, mine is pretty painless. It’s a story of ignorance, invisibility, and ultimately of the ability to pass. You see, I’m a bisexual woman in a committed heterosexual relationship.

I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. It was definitely in the “provinces.” So perhaps it’s not so surprising that although I’d heard of homosexuality, I had no idea until I reached college that female homosexuals existed. I’m not sure I encountered the word “lesbian” until I was in my twenties.

In 1965 as a freshman at Smith, I started to hear rumors that the woman who lived across the dorm hall from me was “different.” Nobody stated directly how she was unlike the rest of us. But according to the whispers, she was recruiting other girls as well. By the time I returned from my junior year abroad, she seemed to have succeeded in enlisting at least one other girl, and it became apparent to me that they were lovers. None of this seemed to affect me very much. In those days, I was pretty sure that I was heterosexual.

It’s unclear to me if I ever would have discovered my sexual attraction for women if it hadn’t been for the women’s movement. Lots of the women I hung out with in the late 1960s and 1970s were out lesbians. They were strong, wonderful women. Eventually I had to acknowledge that I was attracted to more than one of them on more than a platonic level.

Teaching the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum (and blogging about it) lit a fire under me. The title of the course refers to a story told in the book of Jeremiah. This week I finally recorded the song I wrote about this tale on YouTube. Now others can learn the tune and sing it in their “Cakes” classes.

If you don’t know the story, here’s a synopsis: Jeremiah rants and rails against the Queen of Heaven, telling the people that worshipping Her is a betrayal of YHWH. (This actually proves to be historically incorrect, since YHWH had a consort for most of the years until the Babylonian exile — even in the temple in Jerusalem. But Jeremiah doesn’t know his archaeology, since he’s living during these turbulent times.) He threatens the people that if they revere any God or Goddess other than YHWH, God will punish them. Here’s how Jeremiah expresses God’s anger at the people:

As I told you a few weeks back, the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum empowers women in remarkable ways. During last night’s class I discovered that it sometimes empowers in different ways at the same time.

Our reading for the evening was a compelling story — the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham (Genesis 22). As told in the Bible, this tale contains no mention of Isaac’s mother Sarah. Instead YHVH tells Abraham to demonstrate his loyalty by making a ritual offering of his one-and-only child. So Abraham dutifully takes fire-making tools, a load of wood, a knife, and his son Isaac to a nearby mountaintop to be slain. Of course, at the last minute an angel stays Abraham’s hand and provides a ram instead. What our class focussed on was the conspicuous lack of information about Sarah in this story.

Sarah is not easily overlooked. More girls have been named for Sarah than for any other woman in the Bible. There are good reasons for this. Sarah was a Chaldean princess and, because royalty and ritual leadership were inextricably tied together in those days, a priestess as well. She’s the only woman whose age is given in the Bible. She was the matriarch of the Jewish people. And Abraham owed his flocks, herds, and status to her.

Before we started to create modern-day midrashim — reinterpreting and commenting on this Biblical tale — we looked at several theories that questioned how this story was told in the Bible. Dancer and liturgist Fanchon Shur deduces from her absence that Sarah was the “hand of God” that stopped the sacrifice. Carol Ochs in Behind the Sex of God concludes that

the sacrifice of Isaac marked the death of the matriarchal tradition personified by Sarah. The meaning of Abraham’s test becomes clear when viewed in the light of the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy. The first allegiance in matrirarchy is to one’s offspring…In patriarchy, the first obligation is to an abstract moral principle…obedience to God.

Subject: Body Of The Goddess

Dear Friends,

Today is Vijaya Dashami, the Day of Victory that completes the 9-day Hindu Navaratri celebration of the Goddess in all her aspects and manifestations. In mythology, Vijaya Dashami marks the final triumph of the Goddess, after nine days of battle, over the demon Mahishasur. It also marks the start of the harvest season, and invokes the Divine Mother as all the powers of fertility and the life-giving gifts of the earth.

I stand firmly, fiercely, and unequivocally against the global rise of Hindu fundamentalism, and its appropriation of Hindu traditions for its fascist agenda. And at the same time, I reclaim my Hindu spiritual and cultural heritage as a feminist scholar, radical activist, and artist.

Here’s a poem that Shailja sent to illustrate her opposition to Hindu fundamentalism:

It’s been interesting to hear my readers’ theories about why women have experienced a decline in happiness in the last 40 years. (Go look at the responses to my first post on this topic). As I said, everyone seems to have their own hypothesis why this might be so. But even though I talked about my own conjectures two days ago, I felt that something was a little off. So I went back to the General Social Survey (GSS) study that everybody’s citing. Lo and behold, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, the authors of the study, make NO claims to know why women’s happiness in the last 40 years seems to be on the decline. And in fact, they suggest that we might want to doubt whether the numbers actually reflect a downswing in women’s personal satisfaction at all.

Stevenson and Wolfers refer to a long-recognized understanding in the social sciences that individuals tend to reply in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others (the so-called “social desirability bias”). Some researchers argue that as a result of the social desirability bias, people in good circumstances may require more to declare themselves content, even though they may actually be happier than people in worse circumstances. Stevenson and Wolfers speculate that women may now feel more comfortable being honest about their true happiness and, as a result, might reduce their previously inflated responses. Or that the increased opportunities available to women may have increased what women require to declare themselves happy. Either way, one indication that we should question the numbers, they say, is the decrease in women’s suicide rates over the last 40 years, while men’s suicide rates have stayed the same! That indicates that at least at the very bottom rung of happiness, women have become happier.

So that’s the first thing I learned: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” as Benjamin Disraeli supposedly said long ago. Beware numbers trying to bolster weak arguments, or maybe any arguments whatsoever.

Marcus Buckingham has caused a stir in the blogosphere by reporting on the United States General Social Survey about American women’s happiness. The long and short of it is that women are unhappier than they were 40 years ago (and men are happier). Nobody can figure this out. People have their own pet theories (See several of them at Huffington Post and elsewhere). But really it’s all sheer speculation. Why would women be unhappier now when they have more opportunities, greater education, more access to the political process, and better work options?

Part of the problem is Buckingham’s description of the study involved. I read another report of this major study, and it showed that some of the reasons for the discrepancy between women’s and men’s happiness had to do with how much time each of them engaged in activities they disliked. Since the 1960s, men have gradually stopped participating in pursuits they find unpleasant, while women are working just as hard, then as now, on things they don’t like. There’s been a shift in which activities those include — more paid work and less housework — but the bottom line is that women spend 90 minutes a day more than men doing what they would rather not do. In 1969 it was only 40 minutes.

Some days I really don’t want to read my newspaper. Today was one of them. It wasn’t the hydrogen peroxide bomb or Obama’s waffling on the Patriot Act. It wasn’t the Palestinians and the Israelis, who still aren’t negotiating. And it wasn’t the ongoing court battle over a new Wisconsin law granting some rights to domestic partners. All of those things bothered me. But what really got to me was the news about climate change or “global weirding”, as my brother-in-law calls it.

Today my paper regaled me with the fact that NASA scientists have found that Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are melting at a rate that’s much more rapid than previously thought (and the last time I read about polar ice, meterologists were already saying it was much faster than predicted, so they’re telling us now that it’s even worse). The glaciers in the Antarctic thinned by nearly 30 feet a year from 2003 to 2007, 50% faster than the preceding eight years. And in Greenland, glaciers are shrinking by nearly 3 feet a year, a lot faster than measurements until now had calculated. It’s bad. In fact, one Berkeley climate expert called this discovery “ominous and distressing.” In other words, climate changes will be worse and faster than we feared.

Glaciers Melting in Greeenland and Antarctica

When I read this I had visions of myself walking up and down State Street with a sign that read “The End is Near.” I guess I needed a little humor to offset my absolute terror. And as I write this post, I’m having difficulty holding onto my thoughts, because I almost instantly repress them, deny them, or distance them from myself with humor or distractions. Looking for very long at the facts of our global situation is much too scary for me.

As I told you in my first post in this “Sister Talk” series, my sister Amy Vedder — with her husband Bill Weber — first realized the importance of the human connection in conservation efforts while working in Rwanda in the 1970s. Since then they’ve always tried to create win-win situations for the animals and the people affected by their projects. After many years this strategy resulted in a conservation program called “Living Landscapes.” The projects under the umbrella of this program have all involved large-scale conservation efforts that extend beyond the borders of parks and reserves. Their breadth has been necessary in order to meet the needs of both the wildlife species as well as the people in nearby areas.

I’ve always thought Amy and Bill’s win-win thinking made sense. Conservation efforts won’t work in the long-run if people don’t gain something as well. When I talked to Amy about the “Living Landscape” program, she told me how her thinking had evolved. You can see her talk about this at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp82BMWxgE4&feature=channel_page.

We usually think of environmental justice when we refer to how the disadvantaged suffer from pollution and other toxic chemicals more than those of us belonging to the middle or upper classes: siting of waste facilities, home location near highways or poison-spewing factories are just some of those issues. But when I spoke with my sister Amy, she brought up another form of environmental inequality — lack of access to wilderness and nature. You could call this a form of nature-deficit disorder imposed by poverty and class, not by the decisions of middle-class parents or their kids. (You can see the third part of my talk with Amy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj8LIWpVw_0&feature=channel_page).

This issue has interested me for a long time. In fact, at least a dozen years ago I read about Alastair McIntosh, head of Graduate Studies at the Centre for Human Ecology at the University of Edinburgh and a program he began there. Several of McIntosh’s students introduced groups of poor inner-city youths and adults to the Scottish Highlands, a place they had never visited before. According to McIntosh, at first these people felt frightened or ridiculous, because wilderness was an environment foreign to them. But after two or three days of supportive experiences in the wild, these city dwellers began to change. Some of them became angry, others quite sad, as they realized what they had been missing all their lives. Direct contact with nature, with wilderness, with trees and animals and birds, is a profound experience of beauty, “almost a spiritual experience,” according to McIntosh, an experience of which the urban poor had been deprived. (Of course, as a Wiccan, I would delete the “almost” from his statement.)

I’ve been reading a lot lately about “nature-deficit disorder.” I guess this is a result of Richard Louv’s recent book Last Child in the Woods, where he coined this term to describe the human costs of alienation from nature. According to Louv, the proliferation of structured activities (homework and sports), fear of “stranger danger,” and video games keep children from playing outside in nature. Lots of these same young people can tell you all about the destruction of the Amazon rainforests and which species are endangered, but they don’t know much of anything about the bugs and birds in their own backyard.

I agree with Louv when he says that children need time to bond with nature on their own terms, time to play without any necessary goal beyond following their curiosity. But I would go even further and say that all of us — adults as well as kids — need time in wild settings, time to rejuvenate, time to experience amazement and discovery. We all need unstructured time to unwind, to play, to find calm in our frantic world. And nature may be the best place for these activities.

There seem to be two sides to the nature-deficit coin.

I recently talked with Amy Vedder, one of our nation’s foremost experts on wildlife and wilderness conservation. She’s the vice president of the Wilderness Society, and made her name in environmental circles by starting — with her husband Bill Weber — perhaps the first ecotourism project in the world: the Mountain Gorilla Project. She and Bill recently published In the Kingdom of Gorillas, describing their groundbreaking work in Rwanda with this Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land, as the subtitle spells it out.

Despite her prominence, I was able to get her alone for an hour, talking about things that are important to me. You see, she’s my sister. And we were attending a family reunion. My brother-in-law videotaped our discussion, so you can listen to the whole thing if you’re interested. (I’ll be blogging about it for the next four days, and my brother-in-law Luciano‘s four YouTube videos will correspond to my posts). See it here–Sister Talk: A Discussion with Nancy Vedder-Shults and Amy Vedder–or at the end of this post.

Today we celebrated our annual water service at First Unitarian Society. Pouring water together that we had brought back to Madison from vacations in other spots, we celebrated our community gathering again after a summer spent apart.

Like rivers running to the sea,/We’re coming home… (UU hymn)

The worship service also commemorated water as the holy necessity it is in our lives: the sacred water that runs through our veins, the water we drink to maintain our lives, the water that brings the earth alive, the life-giving liquid flow that cycles through the clouds, the rain, the springs, the lakes, the streams, the rivers, finally streaming to the oceans, where it evaporates to become rain again. Without water, there is no life.

The ocean is the beginning of the earth./All life comes from the sea. (Wiccan chant by Starhawk)

This fall I’ll be teaching “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” again. Shirley Ranck wrote this groundbreaking curriculum about women in Western religion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was first published in 1986. The fact that it took the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) at least five years to put it out says a lot about this pioneering course.

The UUA is notoriously liberal, even progressive. But this class pushed the buttons of Unitarian Universalist’s still largely male hierarchy, and they delayed publication. Why? Maybe because it offered consciousness raising within a religious context. Maybe because it included some controversial research. Maybe because those patriarchs could see its long-term consequences: More women embracing the Goddesses in their lives.

It certainly had all of those effects. In fact, the consciousness of UU women — already empowered by political feminism — became raised even further by contact with spiritual feminism. And although the curriculum contained references to the controversial archeologist Marija Gimbutas, that didn’t stop UU women from pouring into Wicca, welcoming both its deities and its ritual. In fact, UU women made Wicca one of the fastest, if not the fastest-growing religion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

With the help of the UU Women and Religion Committee, Ranck updated and re-issued “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” last year. It’s still a wonderful course. And it still empowers women in ways that political feminism can’t. Where else would a teacher request that women sketch themselves nude and then talk about how this experience helped them to understand their concerns with body image? Where else would women talk about how patriarchal mothering antagonizes mothers and daughters in a divide-and-conquer strategy that has supported male domination? And where else would women learn about the history of masculine Gods displacing Goddesses?

I don’t normally read Thomas Friedman’s op. ed. pieces. But this one — “Connecting Nature’s Dots” — drew my attention, probably because of the word “Nature” in the headline. Practicing Wicca attunes me to nature, since to me it’s sacred. I ground my spirit in its rhythms (as the title of Starhawk‘s recent book The Earth Path proclaims). We are creatures of Mother Earth. She sustains us. And being in touch with Her cycles gives me significant insights into my life.

Thomas Friedman’s recent eco-safari in Africa seems to have brought this home to him. Of course, as a journalist, he sees it all from the perspective of a newspaper. In fact, you could sum up his piece as “Extra, extra, read all about it in the animal and insect tracks on the earth.” But I found his insight significant, nonetheless. Friedman’s guide, Map Ives — the 54-year-old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, which supports ecotourism in Botswana — could read the tracks of passing animals as well as detecting the weather from their marks. More importantly, Ives pointed out all the interconnections and “free services” that nature provides.

Plants clean the air; the papyrus and reeds filter the water. Palm trees are growing on a mound originally built by termites. “If you spend enough time in nature and allow yourself to slow down sufficiently to let your senses work,” Ives said, “then through exposure and practice, you will start to sense the meanings in the sand, the grasses, the bushes, the trees, the movement of the breezes, the thickness of the air, the sounds of the creatures and the habits of the animals with which you are sharing that space.”

I’ve been wondering when Tikkun Daily would start talking about global warming, environmental degradation, resource shortages, etc. I’ve been worrying that maybe I’M supposed to bring up the topic, since I’m the ecofeminist blogger. I’ve even been thinking that all our talk here about other issues is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic. And now I know why I haven’t written about the emergency we face.

Today I read “Humanity at the Crossroads” by Graeme Taylor in Tikkun and freaked out. I knew all the facts he collected in his essay, but reading it altogether in one place really got to me. I meditated. And my meditation was interrupted over and over again by fears, fears, and more fears. It IS an emergency we face. We have to change things fast. And that’s pretty darn scary.

But what I realized when I finally took my walk — noticing how summer is sliding into fall, how some leaves are turning brown around the edges — was that “Where there’s fear, there is power/Passion is the healer/Desire cracks open the gate/When you’re ready it will take you through.” Starhawk, probably the best-known practioner of Wicca, wrote this chant many years ago, and it has guided my life through many turbulent times. Usually I need the help of this song when I’m having personal difficulties, but it seems to apply to this much more political situation as well.

Today after returning from a delightful vacation in the Adirondacks, I’ve been immersing myself in the Sunday NY Times Magazine. This week to my utter astonishment, the entire magazine section of the Sunday Times has been devoted to the international issues surrounding women’s rights. It’s entitled “Saving the World’s Women.”

The cover story, “The Women’s Crusade” by husband-and-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, begins by enumerating several of the causes for women’s oppression in China, South Asia, and Africa — sexual slavery, lack of employment opportunities, lack of education, even lack of food and medicine for girls (but not for boys) — and how some of the women affected by these issues have turned their lives around through microfinance. These are wonderful stories, inspiring and perceptive about women’s situation in the developing world.

But soon Kristof and WuDunn move on to what they consider the more important issues: that educating and empowering women undermines extremism and terrorism; that aid to women in the Third World is the key to ending global poverty; that gender inequality hurts economic growth; and quoting Larry Summers (chief economist of the World Bank in the 1990s) that “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world.” Even the aid organization Care, the World Bank, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kristof and WuDunn tell us, are beginning to focus on women’s empowerment as an antidote to poverty and extremism.

It saddened me to see women once again viewed from an instrumental perspective and reduced to tools for the improvement of the world. Instead of looking at women’s stories and what they tell us about women’s rights, this NY Times duo seems interested in how helping women ultimately fights poverty or how empowering women fights terrorism, i.e. how women can be used for the betterment of society. I don’t understand why people don’t realize that the issue of women’s rights is important in and of itself. We don’t have to justify it by showing its geopolitical or economic significance. Women’s rights are human rights.

I perform weddings as a lay minister at First Unitarian Society in Madison. Frank Lloyd Wright built our original church, so many non-members want to get married there — too many for our professional ministers to handle. As a result, I often have the opportunity to perform interfaith weddings where I put my Unitarian Universalist (UU) principles to work.

UU’s believe in the “inherent worth and dignity of all people,” “acceptance of one another,” and “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Instead of a creed or dogma, what holds us together is a set of seven principles, three of which I just listed for you. What this means in practice is that although I’m a pagan, I accept others’ belief systems as appropriate for them, respecting their inherent dignity and their search for truth and meaning. When I perform a wedding, I respectfully work with the couple who comes to me to create a ceremony that’s right for them.

Some of you might have been surprised to learn that I wrote about tree divinations in the latest Matrifocus. Actually I’ve been writing an entire book — The World is Your Oracle — in which I compile and create oracular techniques, a volume I trust will prove useful to practitioners of many faiths. Why? Because I believe that divination allows us to get in touch with our own inner wisdom. And because we have reached a point in our history where change is occurring so rapidly that we need to rely on our own know-how and skills, not just those of the “experts.”

In North America most of us associate divination with the occult. We know one or two oracular methods, at most three or four, including popular forms such as tarot cards, the I Ching and the Nordic runes. Stereotypically, the concept of divination conjures up an image of an old gypsy woman using her deck of playing cards to tell someone’s fortune. For most of us, the gypsy’s cards portend events that have yet to occur, a death in the family or the arrival of a new lover.

We don’t have to search far to discover the reason for our dominant notions about divination. The first definition in most English dictionaries states that it’s the practice of attempting to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge using occult or supernatural means. From my perspective, this is an archaic understanding of divination, one created during a time when we drew sharper distinctions between the everyday and the mysterious, the natural and the supernatural, between rationality and non-rational ways of knowing, and even between the present and the future.