Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:00:00 +0000

How could the title of this book not hook you? Power. Women. Heart. So, maybe I was biased from the beginning. Honestly, I was hoping that the book would be “all that.” It was.

By page fifteen, not having gotten past the editor’s introduction, I was pulsing with energy. I was ready to get my lazy butt up off the couch and pitch in. I was jonesing for my old “activist” days when I used to join in pro-choice marches and volunteer with the NW AIDS Foundation handing out condoms on the streets of Seattle.

Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart is a collection of essays that were originally presented as lectures to attendees of the annual Bioneers conferences. Nina Simons, the editor and a co-founder of Bioneers, describes it as “a nonprofit educational organization that highlights breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet.” These essays cover a vast range of topics from truly knowing one’s self to finding your inner leader to mentoring, partnering, and imagining innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems as women see them. Some of the authors are household names such as Alice Walker and Julia Butterfly Hill, and others are simply women who are spending their energies learning from and teaching others to live authentically and purposefully. They will undoubtedly be household names in their own right soon.

Each and every essay contained in Moonrise is inspiring, touching, and revitalizing to the reader. Not all of the authors are women, but each and every one of them celebrates the unique gifts that women bring to the world in the form of their vision and perspective as caring, compassionate individuals who have found ways to rise above feelings of powerlessness and living in the minority to honor their communities, societies, and, indeed, the entire planet.

There are humorous tales of women fumbling their way through, led only by their instincts and their resolve to make a difference, painful stories of loss, and everything in between. This book truly offers something for everyone and I, for one, have decided to take the bait. If there are this many strong female voices out there clamoring for a change in the way we approach our collective challenges, it’s the least I can do to join in the march.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, August 12th 2010

Beyond the Icarus Factor: Releasing the Free Spirit of Boys

admin — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:21:00 +0000

By Richard Hawley

Park Street Press

It seems that every year for the last fifteen or so, children of one gender or another are considered neglected, voiceless, constrained by social mores. In neither case is the notion wrong, but rarely are all the social implications put together. Richard Hawley, for many years the headmaster of a boys’ school in Ohio, attempts to create - through his precious book, Beyond the Icarus Factor - a wider social theory using the myth of Icarus - that all men who have moved away from their “puer spirit” (“puer” meaning “boy” in Latin), whether by choice or by social pressure, are dissatisfied and live a life mired in, if not self-disgust, certainly self-distaste.

Richard Hawley’s book is poetic without being purposeful, idealistic without actually becoming interesting. The thesis he attempts to construct around the tragic myth of Icarus and Daedalus (and Daedalus’s oft-forgotten foster son, Perdix, whom Daedalus had killed before Icarus’s birth, lest Perdix’s talent threaten Daedalus’s established reputation) is vague and uncompelling. Hawley muses on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry as the ideal balance of “puer spirit” and adulthood, trashes psychoanalysis for destroying transcendence, but at no point does he move his (admittedly well-researched) work from the realm of the fluffy to the realm his students actually inhabit on a daily basis. His final chapter exudes us to appreciate the “ecstatic spirit afoot and aloft in the world,” but aside from keeping boys safe and loved he offers us little guidance on how this change, which he seems to view as a social revolution, is to be achieved.

Hawley’s social application of the myth of Icarus does have a strange poetic appeal to it, and my mistake may have been to come to the book with the expectation of rigorous social critique or social science. Instead of thoroughly addressing what he seems to consider a pressing social concern, Hawley explains how various works of literature (from Peter Pan _to _The Little Prince) are fantasies of boyhood, without delving into that fantasy’s relationship to reality. Hawley clearly has the knowledge for and interest in that relationship, but the connection sadly makes minimal appearance in his book.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, June 9th 2008