There is a village of women who know they are fire & they burn fierce

with Love & even though each of them lives in different places, far apart,

in golden fields & loud cities & by oceans & rivers & underneath the

baobabs in Africa, still they come together often in dreams & for all you may think they are just ordinary women you pass on the street every day, they are the ones who hold the Heart of the World for all of us who will come after.

                            - Flying Edna

I've just returned home from a retreat with my village of women.  They say it takes a village so the seven of us meet every spring, deep in the quiet outdoors, five hundred acres of sprawling greenery off the Carolina coast.  It is a spiritual oasis, an ocean of love, nestled away in the towering trees that shield us from a busy beach resort just outside its rustic grounds.

We come not knowing what love has in store for us.  However, one thing we know for certain is that we care deeply about each other, and about the brokenness of our country and the world in which we live.We are warriors of love.  And we come together to be in sacred relationship, to commune from the depths of our inner being, where each ones devotion to truth nourishes our soul, lifts our spirit, and fills our reservoir.  

Suspended in time and embraced by a community of like-minded warriors - men, women, and children, we share our stories.  We laugh and cry and sing.  We hold each other tenderly in the fire because that's what love requires.  Sometimes the men join in our circle of seven - Jeff, Will, or Bill, adding tidbits of sagely wisdom and inspiration.  We share our visions for a better world.  A world filled with love rather than fear.

And we come together with intention.  Because intention is everything.  Our intention is to support and empower one another so that our wise woman love spills over into every part of our life, an unbroken stream informing every word, thought and action so that we may sow seeds of love, not hatred, that mend our towns, cities and country sides.  Because we all know - it is time!

Time to heal and to share what we have received because we can only share what we have gleaned from our own true and examined experience.  The unexamined life carries no weight on this path of fierce love. For love can only be sown by those who carry the seeds of love in their heart.

So our work together is to listen carefully, to see where loves light may be hidden - perhaps behind an old wound, or a judgement, or sense of shame that inadvertently cut us off from loves pure flow.  Like a plant cut off at its root that has withered and died, there are parts of ourself cut off from our heart.

Jeff keeps reminding us to be patient because "love moves slowly."  Even when I want it to move fast and wildly and without holding back.  Yet, do not dismay I am told.  Because love has its own perfect way.

Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world.

All things break.  And all things can be mended.  Not with

time, as they say, but with intention.

So go.  Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally.

The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.

-  L. R. Knost