By day, Margot Adler is a highly professional National Public Radio Correspondent. In her life, the sacred and the secular are both aspects of the same reality - our simple, daily lives actually reflect a profound spiritual beauty.
Ever since September Eleventh, she's been reporting on the crisis in New York City, bringing to the airways the stories of people who lost homes and jobs and loved ones, as well as attempts of the city to recover. In her private life she's been filled with rage and sadness. "I'm furious at the `religions of the book,' and I feel that few are willing to confront the fact that the foundational texts of all the `Great Religions' contain words that justify the violence of the suicide bomber, that promote martyrdom and heaven above the love of this earth, that generate a hatred of women." At the same time, she says, she's felt a deep sadness that the dreams we've had for the future seem to be on the back burner and may be so for generations.
Once our insights and our critique of society felt original, vast, luminous. We learned many things that many have tried to get us to forget: the government lies, so you have to find the truth for yourself, and in yourself; you can't perfect yourself before you act, for without action, we are less than what we can be; the world is more complex and ambiguous than we ever imagined.
"I've spent much of my life thinking about the odd intersection of science, science fiction, feminism, and ecology. I'm horrified at the prospect of spending the next decades fighting old religious battles we thought were over hundreds of years ago. My mental furniture is being rearranged. I have no answers. I hate coca cola and corporate culture, but I hate fundamentalism and the burka even more."
Let's come together to share stories, to engage in loving discussion, to read poems, and share the feelings we've had over the last eight months. Let's see if we can formulate a middle path. This retreat is for people who are genuinely trying to struggle in this new reality and want to share stories, lives, song, and ritual. We'll share how our lives have changed, where we are going, and create rituals to see our path clearly. Let us create a place filled with honesty, clarity, and humor, a place that recognizes the complexity of life in these exceptional times, a place where we may not have answers, but we can begin to ask the right questions. Let us create a place where we can reclaim the juice and mystery of the wild and free, where our own transformative energy can be renewed for the future. Come with open minds and open hearts, ready to join in creating a spring celebration of magic and ritual, laughter and play, teachings and stories. Please bring instruments, drums, rattles, and personal objects to place on a community altar.
Margot Adler is a Wiccan priestess and elder in the Women's spirituality movement who has spent the last two decades walking in both the sacred and "mundane" worlds. An ace National Public Radio correspondent, as well as one of the first Wiccan priestesses to "go public," she wrote the renowned Drawing Down the Moon and her excellent memoir, Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution. When she was young, she was arrested in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and was politically active in stopping the American invasion of Southeast Asia.