Last Spring I sat in a group of Stephen Jenkinson's students at his Orphan Wisdom School in the thawing reaches of Ontario near the Quebec border. We listened to Merv, a local Algonquin elder, talk about life among his Pikwàkanagàn First Nation people. After Merv left, when our largely white group sat in silence sodden with shame, Stephen said this: "The difference between his people and you is that they wake up every day in the presence of what happened to them. You wake up every day in the absence of what happened to you." 

I am and once was called Amazon
Now I am called lesbian.
I know that the Matriarchy ruled back then.
Sisters, the Matriarchy’s gonna rule again.

Only a few centuries ago, as recent as the colonization of North America, as many as 9 million women accused of being witches were interrogated, tortured, and executed - burned at the stake, hanged on the gallows, or beheaded. Every summer I join thousands of women in the woods of Northern Michigan to remember. To push back against the cultural amnesia that would have us forget our lineage and the legacy of matriarchal power that is our birthright.

Our Amazon witches have returned to the flame.
And we will dance in our moon circles once again.
Sisters, we’ve known and loved each other in our past.
Amazon Nation is rising at last!

This year at the 39th annual Michigan Womyn's Music Festival I stood with over 100 women at the back of a meadow to raise a wooden carving, burnished by generations of female hands: the goddess, Diana. Around me: women of every age, every size and complexion, reverent, irreverent. Wearing Birkenstocks, flip flops, clogs, heels, platform boots, cowboy boots, steel toed work boots, nothing but dirt on their bare feet. Bearded, one-breasted, barechested, tattooed, fully clothed, in newsboy caps, fedoras, wigs, head scarves, hair teased high, hair shorn into flat-tops. A crone resting in a garden cart chariot. Racing among us, a pack of young girls, fierce and feral in the safe embrace of the freedom they feel on the Land. 

The women you might expect at a Goddess Raising. And the women you wouldn't. One by one we turned to the woman to our left and said these words of re-membering: "Sister, I give you my hand. Together we form a strong circle."

We danced in a snaky spiral, chanting "Remember me, loving you," our line looping in on itself so we could gaze fully into each others' faces. Giddy, solemn, tearful, tender, playful, laughing, sweaty, mugging, flirting, faltering - losing ourselves and finding ourselves in sisterhood with the women you would expect, and the women you wouldn't.

Five nights later we were joined by thousands more for the Festival's Opening Ceremony, the energy raised in that spiral, raised with Diana, now exponentially multiplied as the Amazon Band united every molecule of every woman there with our past, present, and future. 

We come regenerate, we come remember
We come for knowledge - Power! Power!

Come, come again back to our feeding ground
Fill up and resonate the sound, the sound, the sound.
Come gather round, womyn, this is how we do
Big up the female! Big up the female!

We who gather under those August Michigan skies know better than most that "Whenever females honor ourselves, wherever we take up space, and sit collectively in the source of our collective power, we are burned and stoned, both literally and metaphorically". We would begin the process, five days later, of responding to those who would put us in the modern-day stocks of political correctness. We would go back to Area 51 - the world we live in for the other 51 weeks of the year, the world that dishonors women and brutalizes so many, still, just for the crime of being female.

But on that night, and for those days on the Land that represents Home to tens of thousands of women, we connected to the truth of our beauty, the truth of our power, the truth of our sisterhood. Truths we do not know we've forgotten until we experience what it's like to re-member.

Amazon womyn gonna rise again, Amazon womyn gonna rise again, Amazon womyn gonna rise again. Rise again, rise again!

With the Festival over, we on crew began the work of dismantling our city in the woods. Picking up and moving out every hay bale and piece of recycling. Pulling down the big tents and deconstructing the three stages women's muscle had hauled and sledged and screw-gunned into place. Eventually nothing would be left on site but a burn pile for the workers' closing bonfire. 

This year, though, there was some wood that could not be put to the flame. The branches. The branches that had been culled from the forest, painted white and in rainbow hues; that were held aloft, Amazon Proud, in the Opening Ceremony; that were woven into a magical nest at the entry to the Night Stage bowl. Branches emblematic of the tree of life, of our connections to each other and the Land, to the roots of all that has come before, and to the tender young buds of the future pulsing with female power.

The branches got strapped to the roofs of cars (the photo in the slideshow below was snapped by a surprised passer-by on the highway in Nebraska). And they were clipped into tiny woo bundles, dispersed across Area 51 to keep us re-membering what happened to us, what matters, and what we know to be true.

Thanks to my sisters on crew for the Area 51 photos below. Click left in the upper left hand corner to play.

Within 24 hours in June I received two inquiries that felt too connected to be coincidental. Lynda Martin-McCormick was seeking support to create a home funeral for her husband, David. 

Lee Emmert, a filmmaker, was seeking subjects for a short student production. "I’ve long held the view that the way we handle death and burial in our culture is…bizarre," Lee said. "I think it’s important to open up the issue by considering other, more ‘natural’ options; including alternative processes, home funerals and home burials." 

I deliberated with my colleague Nancy Ward. The two of us, both engaged to support Lynda's family, had referred Lee to a number of potential interview subjects who could recount their past experiences with reclaiming death care and bereavement rituals. But here was a family going through it in real time. Would it burden them to consider this request, to allow the student film crew from the University of Oregon working under Lee's supervision into their home during this tender time? Or would it present another facet of David's legacy, an expression of their deeply held values and beliefs, to offer their experience to the broader world?

We concluded that it wasn't our decision to make. We presented the opportunity to Lynda. She said yes. The result of this family's open-heartedness, the film crew's sensitivity, and Nancy's eloquence is nothing less than exquisite. 

Please take a look (it's under 5 minutes) and share with those who might be interested in this intimate view of a family fully empowered in their encounter with death.