monicamody

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For readers, writers, visionaries! Border-dwellers & convivial scholars! Students of complexity & holistic thinking! 

The Running With Wolves Reading Group is back. 

For January 14, we read the first five chapters of The Rainbow and the Worm by Mae-Wan Ho. 

Register at the link above.

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Here I read an excerpt from my poem, “Homing Instinct.”

“Homing Instinct” was published in the other side of hope: journeys in refugee & immigrant literature, vol 2.2, online edition, winter 2022

Read the entire poem here: https://othersideofhope.com/homing-instinct-monica-mody.html

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The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality great beyond all the needs of his own living — an energy which no single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or whatever is its most natural medium of expression.

Pearl S. Buck (b. June 26, 1892) remains the youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature – here is her fantastic 1938 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  (via explore-blog)

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Poet Monica Mody in conversation at Lantern Review http://www.lanternreview.com/blog/2014/02/19/2-poets-4-questions-qa-with-monica-mody-and-cathy-linh-che/

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Marriage is sought and kept alive by a deep yearning to know another and be known by another.

John Pierrakos

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(via Saturday Morning Cartoons: Baopu #15) by Yao Xiao

words to remember

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And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers.... And new ones will find you and cherish you. ... And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

Audre Lorde

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When I dare to be powerful

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It Takes a Village to Stand in Our Power

Dear friends, I am only 45% away from my goal of raising $1200 in the next six days. Would you help me meet this goal?

WHY

I am reaching out for your support in going to the four-day national retreat of Standing in Our Power (SiOP) . The retreat is envisioned as the beginning of a yearlong Transformational Leadership Institute, where leadership models and paradigms based on the values, vision, and experiences of women of color could be reclaimed, shared, initiated, and lived.

By attending the retreat and the institute, I hope to build community, connections, and reciprocity with radical, spirit-led women of color across the world that are not afraid of their power and not afraid to see other women stepping into their power. I hope to engage deeply with personal and collective transformance and healing, so that I may fully step into and stand in my power—stand as a leader—in the company of my peer women of color, co-leaders. I hope for deep listening and intergenerational exchanges.

MY STORY

As a poet, writer, and scholar, I employ words, language, and ideas as a tool for consciousness-raising. My first book KALA PANI mediates and explores the entanglement between state oppression and intimacy. In poetry, I have approached themes as varied as menstrual taboos, urban use and deforestation, social protests and peoples’ revolutions, the shadow, wounding & healing, contact with spirit and the ambivalence this generates in the modern mind.

In performances, I have sought to imbue this poetry with the power of ritual. I have been trained in West African Dagara medicine and ritual, and offer divinations as part of my healing mandate. The last two years have found me conceiving and facilitating smaller rituals and other events for the community to come together in service of the Earth, the waters, and ancestors (such as through grief work). I continue to discern how I may serve those ones in humility. Through the past few months, I served as Assistant at the Office of Diversity, California Institute of Integral Studies, where I was involved in discussions and in generating resources around creating a more diverse, inclusive, and interculturally sensitive climate at the university; examining the privileges of whiteness and other structural positions assigned at birth; and facilitating difficult dialogues. More recently, I have found myself initiating dialogues on race and difference within my white-dominant spiritual communities in the Bay Area. My training and experience in these various roles has provided the foundation for the next stage of my becoming, where the sacred and the political entwine even more closely as I stand—in a circle of power, in my power, in my purpose, in trust, in relationship—my tools for contributing to social, economic, ecological, and consciousness changes at the ready, and being wielded—to create meaningful, necessary revolutions in the world. 

OPENING TO RECEIVE

As I begin to step into this phase of offering my gifts willingly and fully to the world, I must also receive.

This feels like a big step for me: turning to you—my community—and requesting that you hold this dream with me. With sponsorship and support from individual donors, Spirit in Action (the parent organization of SiOP) is able to offer a sliding scale structure based on organizational budget/individual income levels. 

For me, the cost of attending the retreat, including travel, would come to around $1200. I have already raised 55% of this amount, and need to raise the rest by Monday, Sep. 21. 

The retreat begins in Ossining, New York, on Sep. 25. With your assistance, I can become a more powerful agent for healing, liberation, and change. Would you help?

WHAT YOU CAN DO

✓ Contribute whatever you can. No amount is too big or too small!

✓ Share my campaign with your friends and networks: www.gofundme.com/monicamody

I so appreciate your taking the time to read this, and for your support! ~ Radiant thanks and love ~ Monica

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On returning to facebook

Your social media presence needs to be in the service of your gifts--purpose--inner wealth--creativity. Not vice versa!

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Book Pick: Daughters of Copper Woman

Daughters of Copper Woman is one of those books that carries such a strong spirit that you may call it subversive. Based on stories given to Vancouver Island writer Anne Cameron by the elderwomen of the Nootka indigenous peoples, the book takes us back to the dawn of Time itself, when Copper Woman learnt to Endure with the help of the Old Magic, Old Ways taught to her by the Old Ones. This knowledge and wisdom too has Endured through thousands of years, despite so much of it getting torn apart, silenced, and lost, when the system turned into one favoring domination, patriarchy, and abuse. And yet, here we are, being given the chance to read stories that are part of the continuity--the remembrance--we need if we too are to survive, to Endure, to subvert, to radicalize, and to create something new.

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If we don't understand the intense emotion that love engenders, then love will always be a scary proposition.

Sue Johnson

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And that means that I am avoiding the tyranny of the pentameter. I’m decolonizing my poetry… and in doing that I’m able to discover areas which would not have been possible… If you do no write poems about your family, you are not writing poetry. You can write about roses, about lonely pools, you can write about abstractions, you can write about pyramids in a strange way, but that intimacy, that connection between yourself and your roots, unless you can do that your poetry cannot grow

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'Endless possibility' is not just an abstraction; it is a yearning of the universe, an active force of constant and infinite elasticity. It responds not to your past, but to your present state of mind.

Marianne Williamson, The Age of Miracles

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