Poet, farmer, weaver, or gypsy-nomad

Dear friends,

I, Mara, write to you in the middle of a sandwich of grief and reflection as we honor the death of two remarkable women this week. 

A few days ago, on Sunday, May 16, one of our intellectual God(m)others, the legendary Dr. Jean Houston, died. Jean was a leader in the human potential movement and co-founded the Foundation for Mind Research.

This Friday, on May 22, (m)otherboard has a planned event to celebrate the living legacy of one of Jean’s friends and collaborators: futurist, ecological economist and journalist Hazel Henderson who spent decades diagnosing the failures of conventional economics and imagining greener economies and ethical markets. Hazel, in her words, “went virtual” on May 22, 2022, four years ago. 

Jean said of Hazel: “She was a world historical being. In a sense, she comes from the future as an act of divine grace from the universe.” We feel called to say the same about Jean. 

This is a heartfelt invitation to join us on Friday for POETRY CLUB: Going Virtual with Hazel Henderson. This event is open to (m)otherboard members and new friends alike. 

POETRY CLUB: Going Virtual with Hazel Henderson
Friday, May 22
12:00 PM–1:30 PM EDT

It is an astonishing mystery that both of these trailblazing women died the same week, four years apart. In the inbetween, (m)otherboard was born. So, here we all are, alive together swimming through the vast ocean of the wisdom they left behind. Their work could not be more urgently needed and appropriate for these times.

Friday’s program will be a memorable and tender time to celebrate these women—if you knew their work intimately or if you are discovering it for the first time. Hazel was an instrumental influence in the creation of the Zebras Unite movement. 

A few years ago, my friend Sydney gifted me The Power of Yin: Celebrating Female Consciousness featuring Hazel, Jean, and the legendary Barbara Marx Hubbard. Over two weekends in 1977 and 1978, these women gathered with tea, snacks, and a tape recorder running in the background—transcribed down to when the biscuits were served. The manuscript was rediscovered and published thirty years later. If ever there was a book to sum up what (m)otherboard is about, this is it. We're only now catching up to what they saw. (You can read the full story of my encounter with the book here.) To quote the introduction by Barbara Delaney:

“But what exactly is a feminine orientation of consciousness? As so beautifully illuminated in these dialogues, it is an essentially humanistic consciousness emerging from the feminine tendency to cherish, to nourish, to preserve. Not Man as Conqueror, but Woman as Nurturer. No longer inexorably bonded to reproductive functions, the emerging new woman is increasingly turning her female energies to the much larger tasks of nurturing the species and preserving our threatened life-support system. This implies a different kind of creativity—a holistic creativity sensitive, above all, to the requirements of life-oriented growth and process.

Female thinking and social wisdom reflects a whole complex of new forms and conceptualizations. It is a thinking that is qualitative rather than quantitative: growth, for example, is seen not in terms of gross national product, but in terms of the unlimited growth potential of human resources. It is characterized by an aversion to hierarchies—an artifact of patriarchal structuring—and an instinctive tendency toward more flexible networking forms. Women have a deep sense of the cooperative, sharing ways that will be essential to our survival as an interdependent planetary species.”

I want to offer a bit of context for how we arrived here, and give you a taste of why Jean and Hazel are so crucial to, as we call it at (m)otherboard, "the new canon" of foundational work—much of it from the past—that informs our values and beliefs. There would be no (m)otherboard without these women, and the countless matriarchs, named and unnamed, that we’ll be uplifting and celebrating more intentionally moving forward.

The metaphor “we stand on the shoulders of giants” is inaccurate. It’s closer to “We are comforted by the threads they they wove, and we drink from the wells they dug.”

For the past year, I’ve been working behind the scenes with Hazel’s trustees and the Hazel Henderson Center to bring Hazel’s legacy to life. This includes imagining ways to introduce and revivify her prolific, prophetic wisdom, alongside the countless wisdom keepers in her circle such as Jean, to you all—a new generation of wise, thoughtful, and prescient peers. 

Alongside an extensive and extraordinary network of Hazel’s devoted, beloved sisters, advisors and friends, I am but one link in the chain called to perpetuate her living legacy, conjuring the spirit of a woman I never met in person. I am learning to become a human bridge, a translator between the solutions she saw as a futurist, and the present predicament she prophetically predicted. 

I reach across the ancestral realm to women whose legacy whispers in my ears like fairy godmothers, and hurtle forward, crossing the divide to this ever-composting world we live in now. We are all doing the same work, of composting the nutrients that might serve future generations and all life.

I believe with all of my heart in principles like human potential, the Golden Rule, and the promise of the Love Economy. But we are contending with a hostile environment and an endless feed of clippable content. It takes some collective imagination, creativity and commitment to break on through to the other side, so to speak. To find their signal through the noise. For their longer sentences and dependent clauses to land. For the strings of heartstoppingly foresightful, sparkling prose and wisdom to really, fully be heard.

We started (m)otherboard’s book club about a year ago. It has grown into a film and poetry club as we’ve spent deep time with the texts that ground us in creative visioning. And we’re halfway through a booklet club with a small group reading an advanced reader’s copy of American Indigenous Democracy: A Call for Interdependence. 

Through deep practice with all of you in these experiments, we’ve seen that reading together  are simple, tried and true relational technologies to get us all, literally, on the same page: hearing directly from authors, reading aloud, writing and reflecting. If you’re joining us for the first time, this is what you can expect on Friday. 

For now, I want to leave you with the snackable content we’re all used to: five of my favorite quotes from The Power of Yin: Celebrating Female Consciousness:

To Jean and Hazel: message received, dear god(m)others. Your work continues in a virtual realm. Here’s to more dialogue, more exploration, and more (m)othering by (m)others. 

– Mara, founding god(m)other + and the God(m)others