Tune into Greenstone Media

At last women have control of a media network! As goes Gloria Steinem’s Keynote Address to the Conclave Learning Conference, Minneapolis, July 14, 2006, it is "Broadcasting: As If Women Mattered." http://greenstoneradio.com/GSM/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1 We now can listen to the voices of women talk about their experiences every day. Those voices may change our lives.

I remember a Spring day in 1978 when a woman's voice changed my life. I was studying to be a nurse practitioner. It was time to get my annual physical from the sweet nurse practitioner in the Student Health Services. True to her nurturing role, she inquired about my adjustment to being far from my home to attend to my studies in another city. I was a little homesick for my roommate back home.

Had I left a man or a woman back home? Her voice echoed into some vague hollow chamber of my brain. I had never spoken nor heard words for the experience of loving a woman.

She asked me if I had found the local Women's Community. I must have looked vacant, for she continued inquiring about whether I knew about women's culture or women's music. I understood every word, but could not comprehend what she was talking about.

She made me promise to go to a women's bookstore and buy Cris Williamson's "The Changer and the Changed."

I did. I rushed to my apartment, put that vinyl on and listened, to what years later Bonnie Raitt would call "a voice like honey on a cello," "I've been dreaming in the sun, won't you wake me up someone. . . . " When I looked out the window all that had appeared green and blue before this moment now popped in vivid azure, turquoise, emerald, and gold.

She prepared me with, "When you open up your heart to the living, all things come spilling in on you." So, I was ready to hear, "Sweet woman rising inside my glow, I think I'm missing you . . letting me know, taking me in, you let it all go . . . " and by the time she sang "Love of my life, I am crying, I am not dying, I am dancing. . ." I wept and danced around to strains of "What do you do for a living, are you forgiving, giving shelter."

It all happened in a few minutes. I had suspected all along that women's lives, apart from how they were tangled up with men's lives, were significant, worth singing about. Women's lives began to take voice for me that day. And I began to love them, love them all; love myself.

Some people actually think that loving women is all about having sex with them. I suppose this is why they find the notion of feminism disgusting, as though it were some sick man's pornographic daydream.

Loving women starts with believing in their words, and celebrating their lives. To learn how to do that we first have to listen to them. So we shall tune into Greenstone Media. Someone may give voice to something that sounds vaguely familiar and palpably real.

Gracie in Norway

This is my current favorite picture of Gracie, my 14-year-old daughter. One of her backpacking girrrrls must have snapped it in July, Gracie unaware, while they were trekking in Norway.

Gracie has not shown me this picture. I found it on her blog.

Some of Gracie's classmates' parents tell me they do not allow their daughters to blog. They are worried about cyberviolence. These same parents think I am nuts to have let my daughter travel out of the country to go backpacking at the age of 14; they also worry about terrorism.

Not I. I am more concerned that my daughter will not find her voice.

I read Laurie Halse Anderson's SPEAK when Gracie was in sixth grade. Her sixth grade teacher freaked out and called me when she realized that Gracie had chosen it as her "realistic novel." She advised me to read it before my daughter did. So I did. I won't ruin it by explaining why, but the protagonist spends most of her freshman year of high school in silence.

Now my daughter is a High School Freshman. She has not yet found her voice in writing. This is for a variety of complex reasons, and I will not go into them right now. So I work at helping her travel to wherever she can get on this earth. I hope for her to experience the world, and write about it wherever she will, and however she must. For real terrorism happens to girls when they are gagged and bound by the rules of what they may not say, or by what scripts they are forced to memorize and repeat .