Description:
Anthology of essays, poems, & artwork by women in response to ecological devastation from the online journal Dark Matter: Women Witnessing
Brief description: Gillian Goslinga is a cultural anthropologist, feminist science studies scholar and ethnographic filmmaker. She practices shamanic and systemic constellation healing. Her first essay for Dark Matter: Women Witnessing in 2015 coincided with the beginning of her healing journey from cancer, Lyme, mold, electromagnetic and chemical neurotoxicity, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Her academic essays on gestational surrogacy in the US and spirit possession in South India and her award-winning Ph.D. dissertation The Ethnography of a South Indian God can be found through Google Scholar. Her films The Child The Stork Brought Home (1996) and The Poojari's Daughter (2006) are at www.der.org. In recent years, Gillian has successfully led community efforts to keep cell towers out of her valley, a rare high desert greenbelt in Arizona that is also a ceremonial First People's landscape. She lives with her old horse Feather Spirit and her cats on sacred land.
Review Quotes:
Dark Matter: Women Witnessing is the most important literary magazine today.Vibrant voices connect us to the sacred relationship between body, Earth and spirit. Like indigenous praise songs that bring down empires, the essays, poems, and stories in this collection prepare us for a changing world-inspiring radical joy and compassionate action.-Laura Simms, award-winning storyteller, author Our Secret Territory, The Robe of Love, Becoming the World
In a time of ecological endangerment if not collapse, Dark Matter shores up our courage, makes and restores habitat for growth and sharing of stories, dreams, brainstorms, and knowledge. This stunning collection gathers diverse works from the journal as it also gathers us, with far-sighted guidance on how to be in these times.-Jane Caputi, Ph.D., author Call Your "Mutha'" A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene and Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture
This is a deeply soulful and mythic collection of essays and art, offering profound reflections from women who bear witness to the devastating consequences of the modern materialist paradigm-a worldview that severs Spirit from Matter and denies the sacred interconnectedness of all existence. This transformative work radiates Beauty, Mystery, and Magic, inviting readers to open their hearts and minds. It reminds us of who we truly are, why we are here, and that we are made of stardust. It is an essential transmission, urgently needed in these times.-Judy Tsafrir, MD, author Sacred Psychiatry: Bridging the Personal and Transpersonal to Transform Health and Consciousness
Every morning I get up in the dark to wait and watch the sunrise and say my prayers for the new day. When another issue of Dark Matter appears I bring with me my computer. I sit in the dark and enter the journal. That is what it is like. Like entering the real, enchanted, beloved, painful, expansive world that we live in through those who are able to put words to it. It is a way of breaking the spell of modernity, to read these words. It helps me to let myself feel what I feel, as Deena Metzger says, "the love and the whole catastrophe".-Laurie Markoff, retired psychologist, devoted reader of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing