The Iris Fund

For over a quarter-of-a-century, women have been creating community each year at Rowe’s WomenCircles. At Rowe, women’s spirits are honored, nurtured, and celebrated.

The Iris Fund, a WomenCircles’ project, is an outgrowth of a vision to honor women’s spirit and creativity. The focus is multi-faceted. The fund provides support for art projects that emerge directly from WomenCircles with the ultimate goal of funding the creation of a “Women’s Room” at Rowe Camp & Conference Center.

The Women’s Room will be wheel-chair accessible and will be a nurturing space filled with women’s art, women’s literature, videos, and most important of all, women’s spirit.

To fund the creation of such a space, WomenCircles is sponsoring a series of art projects that will be used as fundraisers to fund “The Woman’s Room.”

Profits from the sale of the art funded through this project will be used as seed money for additional projects and serve as an on-going fundraiser for the creation of “The Women’s Room” to honor women.

The First Iris Fund Project

Mother Earth: Revisioning the Sacred Video

Mary R. Hopkins has degrees from Smith and Bryn Mawr Colleges where she learned how to use libraries. For almost thirty years, she has been exploring the content of our culture in search of women's point of view. In 1990 four videos of her work under the title, “Woman and Her Symbols” were made. They sold globally.

These videos have now been compressed into one thirty minute work, Mother Earth: Revisioning the Sacred. This work is in three parts. The first discusses how deeply the male point of view dominates our culture, and then leads us to the realization that along with a male god, there also are divine qualities in the archetype of the human female. The second part uses art history as a tool to understand how Western civiliation lost the Goddess and how this loss compromises the quality of our lives, and the third part shows the work of modern women artists restoring the balance the divinity of male and female. Women's spiritual circles, women clergy, Comparative Religion and Women's Studies instructors, and individuals who feel cultural dissonance will find this material to have an integrated point of view where they may enjoy spiritual support and comfort. This video is also excellent for discussion groups.

The production of this video is sponsored through the Iris Fund of Rowe Camp & Conference Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Donations to the Iris Fund are welcome, and the video, Mother Earth: Revisioning the Sacred, is now available for purchase.

To make a donation to the Iris Fund, donate online by using the online donation form , by calling us at 413-339-4954 or by mail to us at Rowe Camp and Conference Center, Kings Highway Road, PO Box 273, Rowe, MA 01367. To order the video, see our Gift Shop.

The above Art work on this page is featured in Mother Earth: Revisioning the Sacred. Artist Eclipse Fey Falconbridge is an activist, healer, ritual artist, founder of the Magaian apprenticeship program and has been co-director of WomenCircles for 18 years.

The Syringa Project

Syringa: Poems by Laura Davies Foley

Laura Davies Foley’s poems have appeared in Inquiring Mind, The Georgetown Review, The Newport Review, and in the anthologies, In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief, and The Still Puddle Poets. She received the Grand Prize in the 2005 Atlanta Review’s International Poetry Contest. She holds graduate degrees from Columbia University and is the honorary Poet Laureate of Valley Insight Meditation Community. We are pleased to offer Syringa, her first collection of poetry. Mapping the Fourth Dimension, Harbor Mountain Press is due out in the fall of 2006.
More info available at: http://lauradaviesfoley.com

Who is Syringa?

Syringa is a bird with a broken wing who survives long winters on the edges of a frozen pond in New England. She is joined each spring and fall by other birds who stop for a while before flying off to their summer breeding grounds in Canada or to their winter shelters to the south.

A wild friend, she appeared one day near the woods where I walk. Seeing her was a privilege and I thought I was going to experience watching her die. Early on, I pitied her and requested help from a wildlife agency. They advised euthanasia, but that was years ago. The bird has been my teacher, constant and serene. I call her Syringa because I like the cadence of the word, its soft swan sounds, its evocation of lilacs, exotic trees, and fragrant, faraway places. But she is just a simple, ordinary goose.

Syringa

I thought I would see a flutter of feathers,
a streak of blood,
maybe some bones.
The fox in the night would be satisfied,
or the hawk, or the eagle, and I would lean against a tree,
and I would feel the loss, the empty space.
Instead, she greets me from a spot far off on the lake.
She stretches out her broken wing
as if to question my intention,
my coming, my watching.
Her body shines in the copper light.

It is difficult for both of us,
the endless floating in dark water,
the waiting eyes,
the pale, cold sky
and ice.
Every day the clutching branches of ice.

And I have come to love her. It is difficult,
the ice like lace, the glow of her neck
as she arches back upon herself,
the desolation of the sky, and joy,
the wild joy that blossoms toward us in the dark.

—Laura Foley

laurafoley@valley.net

Wing & Bough

Artwork and Words by Eclipse Fey

Wing and Bough transports us to a quiet place, deep within ourselves, where the stillness of the soul of nature and the beauty of the human heart commune.

ECLIPSE FEY'S love of nature and the mystical is evident in all her work as an artist. At an early age she began to draw images of birds, the forest and the mysteries of nature. She is the author and illustrator of The Singing Forest Deck, The Journey To The Heart Divination Cards, and The Moon In Hand. She has exhibited nationally and has received a variety of grants for her art programs and work. Prints are available and she can be contacted through Rowe Camp and Conference Center or at Eclipsfey@aol.com.