Who Knows the Way? Women Do.

Lillie Allen, Nancy, Margherita Vacchiano
Lillie Allen, Nancy, Margherita Vacchiano

The message flows from all corners of the world: This is the moment in history when women need to lead the way.

This clarion call isn’t for women-only leadership. Or the well-worn way of ruling from the top.

“Social justice activists and diverse communities are re-imagining and redefining what leadership means and which faces are at the forefront. Late in the 20th century, scholarship emerged describing new leadership as a collective, shared process that evolves with participants and prioritizes relationship-building.”*a

Relationships are at the heart of leadership. Many women have long understood the importance of living within a complex web of family and friends, colleagues and strangers, ancestors and generations yet unborn.

Be Present Inc.’s Black & Female Leadership Initiative,* highlights the “leadership of Black women in partnering with diverse people to create sustainable change that serves everyone in our communities,” where all voices are welcomed.

Twenty years before I first stepped into Be Present trainings, Lillie Allen offered the groundbreaking Black & Female: What is the Reality?® Workshop at the First National Conference on Black Women’s Health Issues. Starting with black women and girls, Be Present’s work now includes everyone.

Be Present says, “Collective leadership occurs when people come together and mobilize resources in ways that improve their communities. It is an intrinsically inclusive approach to leadership because it requires individuals to cross boundaries of all types –such as race, gender, class, age, religion and culture – as they commit to cooperative learning, joint action, shared responsibility and mutual accountability. Competencies include the capacity to develop oneself and to cross many boundaries: those between individuals and groups, those among organizations and those fostered by issues that divide. It also involves challenging assumptions; expanding perspectives from an emphasis on the “I” to accentuating both “I” and “We”; and bringing people together to address conflicts.” *b

Today’s leadership needs to bridge the big topics that have separated the world into “us” and “them.” Instead, it needs to be collective, grounded in the intersection of “I” and “We.”

Now is the moment for humans to honor all of our wisdom—feminine and masculine—and for leaders to serve in a way that benefits us all.

In my latest YouTube exploration (located on my website’s Gender page), I explore how writing Big Topics at Midnight helped me access parts of myself I understand as feminine wisdom—intuition, body knowing and playful creativity. The more I listened inwardly, the more profoundly I woke up to myself and to the world around me. Only then was I ready to step into the fullness of my own leadership within the collective, Nancy Ann Mathys Thurston style.
*Be Present, Inc., Black & Female Leadership Initiative, Overview and Design, January 2013-December 2017.
All quotes are from this Leadership Initiative. The other citations’ reference information are noted in this Initiative:

*a. A Framework for 21st Century Leadership, http://www.joe.org/joe/1995december/a1.php
A Review of Leadership Theory and Competency Frameworks, http://www2.fcsh.unl.pt/docentes/luisrodrigues/textos/Lideran%C3%A7a.pdf
The Holistic Leader: A Developmental Systemic Approach to Leadership, http://www.julieorlovconsulting.com/docs/holistic_leader_article.pdf

*b. The Collective Leadership Framework: A Workbook for Cultivating and Sustaining Community Change, a publication of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (2007), www.iel.org/pubs/collective_leadership_framework_workbook.pdf

Listen Up, Honey-Bunchkins

HectateI was stuck. Defeated. Hiding under Mom’s blue afghan.

Luckily I’d “met” a character that could give me just the shove I needed—Hectate, my own combination of the goddess Hecate and my wise inner guide with an attitude the size of Texas. Hectate, never one to mince words, demanded that I get up and do what was mine to do.

She had me put Helen Reddy’s All Time Greatest Hits in the CD player, crank up the volume and sing at the top of my lungs. Hectate wanted to “write” me a letter, so I sat at my computer, fingers poised over my computer keyboard, took a deep breath and waited. My fear and trembling disappeared as Hectate began to “dictate” this:

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Church night in the South

Listen up, Honey-bunchkins,

Your singing sounds great. How polite of you to close the windows first. Still afraid someone will hear you and Helen singing together? Being loud still too wild for you? …

You belted out “I Am Woman” while you danced with the vacuum cleaner as a young woman back in Boise land. Funny how your wildness came out a bit when you cleaned house.

Welcome home to the fullness of your life as a woman. It took you long enough. Fifty-two years old is no spring chicken. The power of the lie is so strong it is hard for women to break through much younger. Especially strong, intelligent women like you.

Like many women of your time, you’ve lived out a strange combination of falling asleep and feeling invincible. You thought you could do it alone, right? At times you almost sank from the weight of your strength. You tried to play by enough of the rules that you could sustain the illusion of your independence from things as messy as sexism and patriarchy. You got a little constipated trying to hold it all in while not noticing. …

$#@* invincibility and strength. They damn near drug you under a few times. …

This society does its little jig, pretending everything is just peachy for everyone. You are living in an insane world. That is not the whole picture, of course. Life’s beautiful, too. But it is the insane part that put you to sleep and is causing such havoc these days. Are you ready to wake up? Are you ready to open your eyes and see things as they really are? …

Time, it is a wasting. Midnight’s near, and it’s hard to see the way. But I need you human women to WAKE UP NOW. You must claim your wisdom and live it in the world. If women continue to remain silent, there is little hope for this little planet. …

You were created with just what you need to thrive, to live fully. You were not created lacking. Quit acting like it. Believe in your greatness, your magnificence and your power. Yes, most of the current world institutions embody a distorted power, dangerous “greatness.” $#@* that shit! You are talking about another kind of power. Don’t be so afraid. Live. NOW. …

If you try to hold back, I’ll drag this out of you. That will really hurt. So get on with it. Generations of women have your back and add their spirits to your breath.

Find that voice of yours, that WOMAN’S voice, and speak it. Living with only part of your wisdom is a luxury the world can no longer afford. None of us. Not men. Not women. Not trees or plants. Not rocks or stars. Not water or flame. Not air or animals or the cosmos. …

Amen, so be it, just do it, have fun along the way and all that. You are never alone. Don’t forget, you have a heavenly posse leading the way.

Blessings, honey-bunchkins, Hectate*

While I still hide under Mom’s afghan now and then, humming along with Helen now and then helped me to remember Hectate’s straight-to-the-point guidance and put a little kick in my step.

Hectate has made it clear that she wants to share some of her wisdom with a larger audience.  She will “take over” Nancy’s facebook author page for her own posts.

*Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012) page 264-266, slightly adapted

Drawing by Khara Scott-Bey, Illustration from Big Topics at Midnight.