Her Destiny is Change

by Beth Cohen

  The irony of Anna’s brilliance, as useful as it was for these men, they thought it her weakness and Womeness to even have such thoughts. As soon as she spoke up for the women, they dismissed her and left with a guffaw. Anna was more than insulted and frustrated when it came to the Women of the Wideness, she was powerless, helpless. This sense of powerlessness ate at her being and entered her soul.

  *** Ike loved his wife dearly, and it was clear to him that his wife would always be the leader, the one whom others would look to for advice, not him. He loved his wife, but he could not see the frustration and pain these meetings with the men had caused her. Ike, after all, was also a man raised in the Wideness. Before the Spilt, Ike believed that the women had every reason to be satisfied with their roles in life. Before the Split, Ike’s beliefs were not very different than the beliefs of the rest of the men.

  Anna adored her husband and her daughters. She had no idea that Ike was at all envious of her position and her spiritual assets. Her husband Ike was a talented and respected wood carver. His work decorated the buildings and offices of the wealthiest buildings and governors. When she was invited to give counsel, it always gave her great comfort and surety when she walked into a building or room and saw Ike’s work displayed.

  Although some would call their existence mundane, Ike and Anna did not feel this. They both felt extremely lucky to have each other and the family they created. Of course, there were the regular trials of raising a family — of raising three beautiful daughters. Each daughter with her own spirit and drive so different from another. Yet, they all shared their adoration for their parents. An adoration and respect that was indeed rare in a family comprised mainly of teenagers. All in all, their life was good.

  *** One day, while Anna sat in her Green Shrine, she had a vision. This vision was different than any she had before. Anna often sat in her shrine meditating on some task that she was charged with, some family situation, even a particular political or business question. For Anna, it was not unusual at all for these meditations to bring about clarity — a unique view of the world.

  Anna had in the past visions of a different world. She didn’t have a name for this world, but it was indeed some sort of version of the Wideness… ‘The Wideness Not’…That was Anna’s private name for that particular vision and that vision caused her a great fear. What Anna saw was the Wideness after the Great Split. At first, she didn't understand the visions or the voices she heard. On this particular day, not too long before the Great Split, Anna remained in her Green Shrine the whole day and several days more.

  This wasn’t all that unusual. It had happened several times before. Three of those times Anna emerged and announced that she was to give birth to a girl child during that year. This time Ike found himself hoping that this wasn’t the case. Later he felt guilty — and secretly thought that his wishes might have had some influence bringing about upcoming events. It was widely held as fact among the women of the Wideness that thoughts, hopes, wishes, and even raising an image, could and did bring about events and circumstances. Living in a house with four women, Ike had come to accept this as a truth as well. (And it must be said, it should be said — and so I will say it here and now— it was this acceptance of things, of all things considered to be of, for and from women, that brought Anna to Ike. For Anna, his acceptance and openness had indeed been the greatest deciding factor of their union.) In Anna’s soul, there was nothing more important than acceptance. For Anna, love was not enough. For Anna, a union could only come to be if both partners accepted and respected each other. For Anna, a union could only come to be if her partner was able to look at her every day and say, “Ahhh…I get it. That is interesting…I’ll live with this for a while and see how it fits with me as well.”

  You see, even back then, when Anna was still too young to have or recognize her wisdom gift, she knew that she knew things. She knew that she could sense things. She knew…and she knew that these things would come to pass.

  So, on that first day when Anna did not come out of her Green Shrine all day, Ike was not yet concerned. But when the day turned to night and the night to yet another day and the days and nights turned into a full week, Ike knew that trouble was more than likely to be on its way. Anna had once told him that good and happy visions are light and airy. They don’t take up too much space in the heart or in the mind. They allow you to flow with them, in and out, and leave them when you will. But then there are other visions… Visions of difficult times, of wars, of conflicts, disease, heartache and pain. These visions are heavy and dense. These painful visions take up a great deal of space…and this space takes up time. And so it was, a great deal of time.

  *** So, when after a full seven days, Anna emerged from her Green Shrine looking drained and purely exhausted, her husband did the only thing he could. He carried her to their bed and laid her to rest. He brought her tea and played her soft, soothing music. After she slept, he asked her to speak, to share her burden and ease her discomfort. But she just looked at him with eyes that had seen the

  encroaching darkness and fell back into a deep slumber.

  Anna slept for several hours more and woke in the middle of the night. The bedroom window was open and a warm breeze blew and the curtains fluttered. Ike had fallen asleep next to his wife after assuring his girls that she would be fine after a good sleep. Although he had spoken to them with much assurance, he himself had never seen Anna in this state. His belief was not as strong as his wife’s and he was hoping that her faith would indeed see her through whatever she had experienced in the Green Shrine…

  When Anna awoke, she was relieved to find herself in her own bed beside her husband. The breeze was comforting and gave her strength. Her cat jumped up on her bed and sat on her belly. The movement woke Ike as well. Ike’s calm face turned to concern when he saw the expression on her face. She was sitting in bed now, looking distant and dazed.

  She started to speak. She asked about their girls. She understood that some days had passed and that she had been “away” for some time. She knew that something had happened to change things, something had happened that she could not yet put into words. As a tenet of the Green Shrine, Anna never let her experiences in the Shrine fill her with any emotion that would cloud her judgment or get in the way of necessary actions — but this time it was different. Anna was having a difficult time ‘returning’ to herself. While she was not entirely afraid, she was indeed uneasy, to say the least.

  *** Anna went to the beach. She walked with her husband and her dogs. Mostly, she walked with herself. She walked and she walked and she walked…What Anna had sensed while meditating was not something that came with words. She could not find a way to express what she had bared witness to in the Green Shrine. She felt that words, any words that she would chose, would not allow her to share that future with her husband or anyone else. How could she tell them that it was all going to change, that the pain of so many women and children would be beyond their worst fears and imagination, that the pain that had been hidden away by so many, had become apparent to her now. And this pain would spread like a disease through the majority. The only thing she could do was what she felt that she needed to do for her family. It was there on the beach that she had the conversation with Ike that would determine his future and the future of so many others, especially in the years after the Great Split and especially for the Women’s Forward Movement. It is in this conversation that Anna made Ike promise to never leave his girls — to stay with them no matter what — to stay with them wherever they were and to keep deep contact with them throughout.

  It is this conversation and the promises that were made between husband and wife, between Ike and Anna, that shaped the priestness and that shaped the destination of Ike and his relationship with the Power of All Around and the future of the Green Shrine of Deep Thought. It is this conversation and these promises that kept Ike with his daughters, directed him to the Path of Deep Thought and began his journey that would see him to the
Women’s Forward Movement and help him locate his own spiritual strength and the spiritual strength of the Women he abided.

  Anna belonged to the Green Shrine of Thought. Anna saw destiny and that destiny was change. Anna did not belong to destiny.

  Before the Split, Ike belonged to his daughters, women all. Ike also belonged to destiny and that destiny was change.

  Ike’s daughters belonged to destiny and that destiny was change.

  Life Before the Great Split The Daily Deed – In the Wideness

  Indeed, long before the split, the Daily Deed was a crucial instrument and voice of Daily life, not only for women but for their families as well. The Daily Deed, before the Great Split, provided true unity for women. It was thanks to the Daily Deed that children were cared for even when the mother couldn’t fulfill her lawful job as caretaker. It was the Daily Deed that provided the women assistance, advice, a safe place to vent. It was the Daily Deed who finally got the men to understand the need for the physical wellbeing of their women and the need for them to listen to their women when it came to the decisions concerning their children — even if they never could get this into written law; the tradition of mothers having input had been established.

  When the world was just the Wideness, men had their jobs and the women were all expected to take care of the needs of their families, act on the demands of their husbands, fathers and brothers — and if they so dared to have a place of employ, answer to the demands of their jobs and employers. The responsibilities of the women were to provide sustenance, a comfortable home and happy husbands; to keep the population of the Wideness alive and help sustain this population. If a woman needed or chose to work, during this period, she was expected to work the same hours and at the same pace as the men, and still keep things smoothly afloat in the family home. The men thought this very logical, since the women bore the children, nurtured them in their womb and then continued to nurse them after birth, it seemed to the men of the Wideness only natural that a woman’s role of caretaker and homemaker should continue after her child was born, no matter what other roles she took upon herself in the workplace.

  In time, the Daily Deed brought the notion and discussion regarding some level of equal pay for equal work to the forefront of women’s awareness and, much to the dismay of the men of the Wideness, to the forefront of their lives. Negotiations with many women of exceptional capabilities, experience and groundbreaking thought became bothersome and much too commonplace and many of the men in higher positions did what they could to squash these ideas. The women, they reasoned, were their property — so the thought that they could have a worth greater or on par with their owners was ridiculous.

  The Daily Deed was made up of wizened women. The Daily Deed was the container of the women’s reality in the Wideness, the vessel of each woman’s life. This container was growing in size, much the way a living being grows in size. The Daily Deed’s size was noticed.

  Reality exists only if noticed and one notices it, reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

  The Daily Deed was the incubator of women’s thoughts. Almost all thoughts having to do with living and the betterment of the individual woman and child originated within the minds of the Daily Deed and then came to bear fruit through the discussions and actions taken by her members. Before the Great Split, the great thinkers in the Daily Deed were focused on improving life for women and families within the Wideness. This did include speaking to and advising the men, since the men were ultimately the ones who made life for the women and their families good, just bearable or a horror.

  The Daily Deed revolved around how to best incorporate the women’s needs and values into the male-dominated working society; a society where value was measured by the ability to earn. And earning was obviously something that the men, who had far less obligation to the children they spawned, were much better at than the women especially, given that the women did not actually have the right to earn, to be paid. Needless to say, this was a difficult subject for the Daily Deed to broach. So many counted on them to advise, facilitate and encourage; the Daily Deed had to be prudent in their quest to better the lives of the women. They couldn’t risk having the anger of the men be so great as to interfere with their efforts on behalf of the women. So, while the Daily Deed provided the answers for many of the welfare needs of the women and some old mother wit for the men, it was a difficult and rocky path navigating between the two aspects of their labor.

  The interesting thing is that for the women, it was clear that the reason they were not as strong earners as the men was because of their role raising the children. The women knew that their worth could not be measured by their earnings — but they were completely blindsided by the men’s need to establish and declare their superiority in the Wideness with restrictions on those who earned less. Less or none, as was the case for most of the women. Even the women of the Daily Deed received no salary but lived with their families, financially bound and dependent on their men. The irony is that many of the men had gotten so high up the Echelon on the backs of the guidance given to them by the women of the Daily Deed.

  For sessions upon sessions, the women of the Wideness had accepted and assumed their role of caretakers of the young ones. The women were proud and took this task and responsibility seriously. Most felt that this was, indeed, the most important job they could have and that the future of the Wideness was in their hands to cultivate and grow the children with love and self-worth — to care for their siblings and the world was their goal.

  Of course, many women saw their role in life in two phases. The first and earlier phase: to bear children and raise them up from infancy. The second phase came later on — when the children were grown and off at school — these same women then became strong workers and sometimes earners in their own right. Sometimes these phases were not one after the other but in a mix. For example, a woman might become an earner and then bear and raise her children and then go back to work and earn. Those women were considered strange and generally not liked by the men. Those women were generally considered fair bait and generally humiliated by the men, every chance they had.

  And then there were other women with different goals. Women whose understanding of their place in the world dictated that they chose differently for themselves. Some women decided that bearing children was not for them at all. These women became strong competitors in the work world of the Wideness. These women were not readily welcomed into the earning world. As much as these women worked to earn, their salaries never came close to their male counterparts. They were allowed to be a part of this earning and sometimes even hold the same jobs, but they were never to have the same benefits. There was always some reason, some excuse for their advancement to be denied. And then there was the fact that reality always crept in. The women did not have any legitimate rights. There were no laws stating how to treat a woman in the workplace. The empty space that the laws did not fill gave the men the final word. The men decided and controlled the worth of these women, of all of the women. It was never worth it for these companies to increase their women’s earnings. The women who succeeded, succeeded on their own, despite the men who owned and controlled their lives, their jobs, their homes and their families.

  This went on for long sessions of time. The Wideness was in its 4th or 5th session of time before the women began to speak out about this imbalance, first in their earnings, since this was where the impact was most felt and most easily discussed, carrying less weight than many of the other inequalities that had become so horrific and difficult to discuss. Indeed, for the first session of times the women were so happy and felt so self-rewarded being allowed to be part of the workforce, they either didn’t notice or just accepted their earnings and positions without question.

  But this is not about those times. I will not go into detail here about life in the first 4 or so sessions of time. You who read this must already understand. What happened here is what happens when the bal
ance between the men and women is so tilted. What happened here is what happens when a part of any society cannot even see the reality that exists for their counterparts. Eventually, the ones whose earnings and fairings are less do ultimately resist and seek change. The seekers of change, the resisters in this time, were the women. The women who resisted found their voice and support from the organization that had been their support for generations. The Daily Deed.

  The Daily Deed was the natural hothouse, a conservatory, for both thought and the discussions that followed the thought. Like any great movement of social change, the first to resist were small in number and in action. It began as thoughts verbalized and presented to those most affected. The women who were earning began to compare notes. The men, for the most part, accepted that these women existed. They accepted that there were women who wanted to earn and who could be very good at their places of earning.

  In most places of earning, if the women were accepted and allowed to work; that was considered nice. The men were, after all, raised by women in a culture that nurtured acceptance, which is the acceptance of the nice woman who could also be smart and accomplished as long as she understood her place and deference to the men. This fact was not to change. The culture of the time was one of unruffled calm. It was, after all, a culture that was not openly violent. It is this appearance of calm that explains why the women were so surprised by the events that were to follow. It was just the beginning of the Daily Deed’s speaking and stepping out of their places with their thoughts and ideas and requests for change, requests that later turned into demands and the call to resist.