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.