~The Grandmothers~Manifesto~

We are the Grandmothers, the Keepers of the Creator's Highest Law, which is the Law of Good Relationship. We are the elder women of all cultures. Some of us have borne children, some have served the world in other ways. Having already brought forth and nurtured the younger ones and the dreams of our youth, we now hold our blood and, in so doing, carry the Wisdom of the Ages within our wombs..

We know that it is only in good relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the Mother Earth, and to the Divine which resides within all of creation that life has any value, meaning or true purpose..

For too many long eras of human history the voices of the women have been silenced. The wisdom of the Grandmothers is expressed in our Love for the innocents, our respect for the healing gifts of Nature, and our patience with the unfolding natural rhythms of life. Sadly, this wisdom, honed by years of experience and our womanly perspective, has long been ignored, discounted or forgotten. But we are the graduated citizens, representing the ultimate leadership and benefit to society, for our holistic intelligence has the welfare of the human community at heart..

We do not believe that humanity is destined to forever play out the old patterns and themes of discord and strife. We see our human family poised on the threshold of a new consciousness. Old paradigms based on struggle, greed, power and fear must end. Educational, social, political and religious institutions will make the leaps that reflect humanity's awakening, or they will dissolve to make way for new systems..

Seeds of humanity's new beginnings lie hidden in the old ways of many of the older traditions. Holding these gems of the ancient Grandmothers within us, we stand for loving alternatives to present hierarchical power structures and oppressive economic systems.

Bringing the full force of our wisdom into this present time, we, the Grandmothers of the Earth, herein exercise our calling as Wisdom Keepers and declare the following:

1) LIFE IS SACRED. As all the great teachers who have come before us understood, there is an intelligence that arises from the heart that surpasses the intellect alone. It is the reverence for the Divine within all aspects of creation that renders our thoughts and actions to be harmless and life serving. Let the sanctity of life be the central theme and motivation of every teacher and leader of both secular and religious domains, that humanity's days may finally be filled with the peace, good will and freedom that we created to enjoy..

2) THE PURPOSE OF LIFE IS GROWTH. Growth implies the evolution of greater understanding and wisdom. We, the Grandmothers, know that wisdom requires the capacity and the will for honesty and self-reflection. Humility arises when the fearful conditioned personality surrenders to the Higher Power within. Then the tendency to blame others, or to project upon them the "evils" we cannot face in ourselves, melts away. Let our leaders be humble and dedicate themselves to personal growth as the authentic road to lasting world peace..

3) WE ARE ALL RELATED. All human beings of every race, creed, gender, or level of development, are our brothers and sisters. All the world's children are our own, to be treated with wisdom, kindness, love and respect..

Each adult is responsible for the welfare of the children. We, the Grandmothers, understand that once people are capable of viewing each other as family, human dynamics will expand into entirely new dimensions. Let all governments and social institutions serve this expansion..

4) WE ARE THE CARETAKERS OF EARTH. Care taking implies stewardship, not domination. We willingly co-exist with the other species of our planet. They, too, are sacred expressions of the Creator and members of the interdependent Web of Life. We know that technologies have been and will be created that can enhance the lives of all without destroying or depleting the Earth. As holders of this sacred trust we Grandmothers receive all the gifts of Nature with gratitude, and we endorse only the technologies that are Earth-sustaining and life enhancing for all beings. Let all methods of fuel, food and material production, all expansions and developments, honor Nature's preservation and enhancement..

5) SELF-LOVE IS THE ROOT OF HEALTH & HAPPINESS. The capacity to truly love oneself is an essential ingredient of personal fulfillment and must become an educational goal. As Grandmothers, we insist upon only the ethics and policies of all social institutions which can inspire the children to love themselves as treasured creations of the Divine - in all their strengths and unique gifts, as well as their areas of weakness and need for growth. We understand that only full cups can overflow to lead rewarding lives and to be of good service to society. Let all local and global programs be dedicated to wisely educating and supporting the teachers and parents of these precious beings..

6) COMPASSION IS A BASIC SKILL. In a world where technologies of mass destruction permeate our societies, the ability to "feel with" another is crucial now to our planetary survival. Compassion frees us from the bondage of fear that keeps us locked within conflict, struggle and warfare. Once the intelligence of the heart is awakened, harming another is unthinkable, for the sense of self surpasses the ego and includes others in its circumference. Let there be education that addresses the development of compassion, for we know that only through acquiring this basic skill can our children enjoy their existence in peace, dignity and grace..

7) PROBLEMS ARE CREATIVE CHALLENGES. We, the Grandmothers, now stand against war and outmoded and destructive reactions to the issues that arise between peoples. We insist upon leaders trained in the skills of diplomacy, multicultural competence, conflict resolution and creative thinking. Those who resort to manipulation, force and unethical means to achieve ego-centric ends must grow or be replaced by those who embody the capacities for true leadership. There is enough brilliance in the minds of the entire human populace to find solutions to all dilemmas. Let it be tapped now..

AND WITH THIS DECLARATION we, the Grandmothers now circle the planet with our Love and our Wisdom. We, the elder women, hold a large percentage of the world's wealth and represent tremendous voting power as well as savvy grass-roots leadership skills. We now pledge to support only those leaders, institutions and projects that respect and reflect our Manifesto. For the sake of the children and the generations of them to come, we oppose all tyranny, greed, hatred, division and violence..

It is said in Hopi prophecy that when the Grandmothers speak, Peace will return to the Earth. We speak now. Let our voice be heard as the final word, as it is meant to be..

(Article adapted from the Tucson Council newsletter, December 2007)

"When the Grandmothers speak, the world will heal." This beautiful Hopi prophecy stirred my heart when I first heard it, sitting among the Tucson Council of Grandmothers that has been meeting yearly for fourteen years. These women pray and do ceremonies for the sake of the Earth, offer personal and spiritual growth workshops for one another, and share with younger women the garnered wisdom of their collective years. This gathering was originally called together by the late Mary Diamond. It has survived her and grown exponentially, spawning new Grandmothers Councils in the Midwest and the Gulf states. My journey into the Grandmother archetype began with these women at Rex Ranch in 2005, on the night of our Full Moon ceremony. There, in our semicircle of beautiful elder women, we sang to the moon. We sang to the waters of the Earth as we collected the water samples we had each brought from our respective locales into one large bowl, praying for water's restoration everywhere. Since it was the year of Hurricane Katrina and not long after the great Tsunami, our ceremony touched me deeply. Being a new grandmother and having written the Grandmothers' Manifesto not long after the events of 9-11, I knew that something was in the air, something deeply profound was blooming within me and perhaps others..

Later that night, in my own quarters, I was not able to sleep, stimulated as I was by the events of the evening. Around midnight I was compelled by some inner dictate to step out in my nightgown and go to the grassy grounds where the ceremony had been held. The full moon was now directly overhead and I stood on the ceremonial site, basking in its light for several long moments. I found myself saying, "Grandmother Spirits, I dedicate this life of mine to the service of your purpose." I had little idea who the grandmother spirits were, yet I knew I belonged to them. Since that event, my life has taken several serendipitous turns to discover grandmothers everywhere who are hearing the same clarion call of the ancient prophecies and stepping up to fulfill them. It is time..

The wave that we ride is the emergence of the "grandmother archetype" that is remembered in the ancient stories... a powerful metaphor, a truly sacred symbol that arises now from the depths of the psyche of the individual and of society. It is being activated and embodied by circles of elder women on many fronts, in many locales, and it holds the seeds of an entirely new consciousness that stands in stark contrast to the prevailing paradigms of our current situation as a human family. I like to call this the Age of the Grandmothers. And many, like me, are beginning to "come-of-age.."

After the Tucson gathering, series of serendipitous events occurred. Firstly, I was given an intuitive reading by my friend, Jeni, who makes her living using her exceptional insight. She announced that I had a bevy of grandmother spirits just hovering around me, awaiting deeper connection. Jeni knew nothing of my previous midnight rendezvous with the grandmother spirits in Tucson..

Then the beautiful book, A Call to Power: The Grandmothers Speak, came into my hands. It was written by Sharon McErlane, a woman who had also been "visited" by the Great Council of Grandmothers, the spirit Grandmothers. The message of the Grandmothers within the book is breathtaking in its simplicity and beauty, and gives great reason to hope for a better future for our children and grandchildren. They told Sharon that the source of our planetary trauma and spoliation is the depletion of the power of Yin and it is up to women, first, to bring the Earth back into balance. To serve this purpose, according to the Grandmothers' guidance, Sharon offers Empowerment Ceremonies for women who then, in turn, offer them to others. These circles have burgeoned to become international in scope. I was so touched by this profoundly simple ceremony that I committed to offering it in my own garden for others on a monthly basis, and I have traveled to Sharon's home in Laguna Beach to be with gentle warm women from around the country and other parts of the world who are doing the same..

In the meantime, I enrolled in a ministerial training program through the Center for Sacred Studies that was predominantly offered on-line, which was something I could afford both time and money for. I loved the program's global spiritual perspective with emphasis on indigenous teachings.

But, to my surprise, after enrolling, I discovered that the monthly tutors for this program were the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers from several continents who have been meeting twice a year for the last four years! Jyoti, a lovely, wise, and dedicated spiritual teacher of Cherokee descent, was not only the coordinator for my ministerial program, but she has been the main organizer for the Indigenous Grandmothers' events!

This group of thirteen indigenous grandmothers is now traveling the world and speaking on globally televised programs with their messages of love and healing. Interestingly, several of them speak of the prophecies of their own cultures that are similar to the Hopi prophecy. It is stated in numerous versions, such as: "When the Grandmothers from the four directions speak, a new time is coming." One of the members of this council, Grandmother Rita Pitka Blumenstein is from the Yupik people of the Arctic Circle. When she was nine years old, her great-grandmother gave her thirteen stones and thirteen eagle feathers to pass out one day at the Grandmothers' Council she had seen in her visions. These, of course, were distributed, tearfully, to the council of thirteen at their first meeting in upstate New York..

The beautiful thing is that as the Grandmothers are now speaking, the world is ready to listen.

Says Jyoti of these thirteen amazing personages:

"The wisdom of these women and the power they walk with in such humble ways brings a presence, brings such hope into the heart of each and every one of us... So much of the feedback I've been given is that they help us recognize that there is a deep need for the grandmother in each one of us personally. There is this deep place of nourishment that the Grandmothers open in us and something very personal and very intimate is invoked.."

In October of this year I drove to Ashland, Oregon to interview Sharon Mehdi (another Sharon), a soft-spoken, humorous and delightful woman, about her book, The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering. We spent a lovely afternoon together talking about her book's miraculous success. The story is about two grandmothers who stood silently in the park for peace and attracted such attention that eventually all the women in town joined them. Sharon intended this book for her first grandchild but it spread like wildfire through her friends who loved it, through her hometown, and then through the country, as it was picked up by Penguin publishing company to become a national best-seller. Sharon told me that a medicine man on Mt. Shasta had told her ten years ago that it will be the women who will change the world. She took the message to heart. "As soon as enough people want peace, we will have peace," Sharon said to me. "And it's going to be the women.."

I believe it is the women now coming into their own spiritual power, and the men who honor them and who are balancing Yang with the Yin within themselves, who will set the world aright. I marvel at the perfect dovetailing of all these events and conditions of my life into a new gestalt of devotion and direction. The Age of the Grandmothers is upon us. We are a part of it. I realize I must have been "born to be a Grandmother" and as I ponder the future for the three precious children who have initiated me into this sacred stage of life, the truth of that statement grows more obvious each day..

What does the coming of this Age of the Grandmothers mean for our world? The archetype of Grandmothers is such a different paradigm for the western world, it turns everything on its head. The abuse and suppression of women has been hand-in-hand with the over-use and pollution of Mother Nature. This should not be surprising, for I believe the root cause of these effects is the same. Power and excessive knowledge has not been balanced by wisdom. The right-brain, which I believe is the corridor to the soul, has all but atrophied in the western mind and left mainstream culture bereft of the feminine perception of the sacredness in all things. As Brooke Medicine Eagle said once, "We've been "yanging it up" for at least seven-thousand years!" Many people don't know of a different history, and thus, have no idea that things really could be different, could be more loving, beautiful and balanced than the violence and dysfunction we have witnessed for so long.. But I have always believed that a different future is possible for humanity..

How fitting it is that the ones to lead the world back into balance and into a more wholesome future should be grandmothers, for they represent all that has been lost to western reality. Older women have been the most marginalized people of the modern world. That they are old, that they are women, and that, in the case of the Thirteen Grandmothers, they are indigenous, presents a striking contrast to the value-system of the status quo...and a perfect antidote to it..

Being older, grandmothers represent the wisdom garnered from many years of living, the holding of the blood within thneir wombs, and the perspectives which come from being beyond the busy tasks of raising children and running households. Being women, grandmothers have access to intuitive knowledge, the right-brain knowing, innate understanding of relationship, and capacity for deep compassion. These qualities come relatively easy for women when they allow themselves to value and cultivate their gifts. Furthermore, older women have the ability to hold the best interest of all at heart..

When they are indigenous, grandmothers have not lost their intimacy with Nature, to traditional ways of wholeness and healing, to the spiritual world and to the truth of the Oneness of all things.

As Paula Gunn Allen says of Native American societies in The Sacred Hoop:

"And as the cultures that are woman-centered and Mother-ritual based are also cultures that value peacefulness, harmony, cooperation, health, and general prosperity, they are systems of thought and practice that would bear deeper study in our troubled, conflict-ridden time.."

Most of all, the Age of the Grandmothers represents unconditional Love, the absence of which, I perceive, is at the heart of all social dysfunction, on all levels of human experience -- from the personal to the family, the community, the environment, the planet. Feeling itself to be severed from the Great Mystery, from Nature, from others and from one's true Self, the western world has felt lost and lonely for a long, long time. It has tried for centuries to fill the gaping black hole in the heart with the "things of this world" -- success, attractiveness, material wealth, status, prowess and power. But these things are ultimately unsatisfying and empty. The greed, usurpation, abuse, anger and violence so prominent, still, are all expressions of this great, aching sense of loneliness within the human breast, although those so afflicted hardly know or admit this..

It is now, hopefully, the time to come out of the ages of such darkness into a new and brighter one predicted by the ancients of many cultures. If it is not yet a probability, at least it is a possibility, and who could be more appropriate in leading us into a brighter future than grandmothers... not just one, but many, sitting in sacred circles (not lined up in vertical hierarchies) bringing wisdom and healing to the Earth and all the Earth's children? In Sharon McErlane's book, A Call to Power, the spirit Grandmothers describe their influence:

"We give away, we help, offer and hold. We create a safe container for the family of life. The family is safe and secure because we are here, because we hold and support all. This particular quality of the one called grandmother is something everyone understands... Grandmothers seek the continuance of the family, they promote what is good in life; they seek to support. This is our mission. As the Grandmothers, we hold all fathers, mothers, and children of the family of life. These are our sons, our daughters and our grandchildren. We desire the highest good for all. This quality of selfless giving is what is now needed on Earth. This is why the Great Council of Grandmothers has come... We will be an easy form of the Divine for people to access. We are comforting and welcoming; we are a nurturing presence.."

It is this nurturing presence that is exactly what the world needs now.

As the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers are quoted in Carol Schaffer's book:

"it is time for the women of the world to own their innate wisdom. With the profoundly loving and sustaining power of the sacred feminine in the very marrow of our bones, women can return the world to the Garden of Eden it was meant to be.."

What a beautiful time to be alive and to be participating in this great age for humankind... the Age of the Grandmothers! I am so deeply honored to be informed and inspired by the Great Council of Grandmothers in the spiritual realms. And I am blessed beyond measure to be a woman, to be a grandmother, and to be member of these grandmothers' circles... a part of this sacred, feminine bridge from a dying, dysfunctional consciousness to the living consciousness of a restored and evolving world..

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