Full Moon: The Imagery of Wholeness and Celebration

Until the last seven or eight months, I would have argued that my most important learning about peacemaking and change has come through relationships with children, either from my own or those in my care. But today I must count the sacred events of the past two months among my most profound teachers: witnessing the heart-breaking-open experience of midwifing a comrade through the process of conscious dying; watching the birth of a child; attending a daughter's ritual transition; and participating in a son's commitment ceremony. These events testify to the essence of politics and feminism in action and to individuals reclaiming authority and power in the context of community.

On the last day of March, my partner Joan, my beloved friend, crossed over into the next world. Exactly one month earlier, on the last day of February, a new life--Isaac Daniel--crossed over into this one. Spending a month with him and his family, singing to him, sitting silently, with him looking deeply into my eyes while I looked deeply into his, feeling peaceful in that moment of recognition was consciousness changing, an insight into the meaning of living peace unfolded. The road to peace, like living and dying, is always under construction. Last weekend, Matthew, Joan's son, stood with Amy under the chupa at a temple in Farmington Hills, Michigan, promising to love and cherish one another in the company of family and friends. They pledged not only to love in the spirit of compassion, but if that promise lost its power to hold them, to separate in the same humility. Tomorrow we will attend daughter Ruth's Bat Mitzvah, a ceremony marking her journey from childhood into womanhood and beyond.

The river of birth, growth, death, and rebirth flowing through the human experience, passages that move in and out of each other, connecting us to one another, tells a story of the persistence and impermanence of life. They highlight the condition of the human impulse to create joyful, productive, creative living environments and relationships. Joan's and my last dance together spun her into a spiral of light and back into the arms of the universe. It pushed me into a contemplative and reflective time, feeling the enormous loss while sensing her amazing liberation. She accepted death as a transformation and a rebirthing process. Our six months of seclusion and uninterrupted care was an unusual articulation of political and feminist activism. Taking charge of my time, deciding that her and my relationship was paramount, resisting pressures from the marketplace doctors and undertakers, assuming authority for determining the details and particulars of her journey from diagnosis to cremation, embracing the wholeness of death, those were profoundly political and feminist actions. Becoming her own expert, she wove a patch of bliss and wholeness into our lives. The world around us, the community to which we belong held us, provided for us, supported Joan's dying and my caretaking.

Individuals claiming power within the context of community is a model for social change and a possible formula for subverting systems of power-over. Living from a community base made our choices possible: to rethink the meaning of time and to reclaim space to be intimate with the sacred changes happening around us, above, below, and within. Magic happened. Being attentive, being with the dying and healing experience transformed us and heightened the sense of our place in the world. We were not alone in our decision to create sacred spaces and to honor the things that we believe the most precious and important about living and non-living. The cycles of earth and all life that lives on within and above are connected and interdependent. One cannot flourish without the other. And each day Joan and I expressed our gratitude, and we made joyful sounds like: "the earth, the air, the fire, the water, / return, return, return, return." And sang "when we return, / They will remain / Wind...