I received the following in an news email yesterday. I thought it 
appropriate to pass on...

This Holy Season...Let Us Give Pause A Space In Our Lives...


All Praises to the Pause 
By Alice Walker In These Times Wednesday 22 November 2006 

One of the many gifts I received from strangers after writing The 
Color Purple 24 years ago was a bright yellow volume of the I Ching. 
It opened to the 63rd hexagram: "After Completion." This is a time 
when a major transition from confusion to order has been completed 
and everything is (at last!) in its proper place even in particulars. 
Interestingly, according to the I Ching, this is a time not of 
relaxation, but of caution. 

 The I Ching is a compass of great value. Uncanny in its ability 
to share its Wisdom at just the moment it is required. How many 
friends, even best and closest friends, can do that? 

 What it is referring to in this hexagram is something that I am 
going to call "the pause." The moment when something major is 
accomplished and we are so relieved to finally be done with it that 
we are already rushing, at least mentally, into The Future. Wisdom, 
however, requests a pause. If we cannot give ourselves such a pause, 
the Universe will likely give it to us. In the form of illness, in 
the form of a massive Mercury in retrograde, in the form of our car 
breaking down, our roof starting to leak, our garden starting to dry 
up. Our government collapsing. And we find ourselves required to 
stop, to sit down, to reflect. This is the time of "the pause," the 
universal place of stopping. The universal moment of reflection. 

 I encourage you not to fear it. And why is it important not to 
fear the pause? Because some of the most courageous people on earth 
are scared of it, as I have been myself. Why is this? It is because 
the pause has nothing in it; it feels empty. It feels like we have 
been jettisoned into wide open, empty space. We can not see an end to 
it. Not seeing an end to it, or for that matter, not even 
understanding a beginning or a need for it, we panic. We may decide 
to make war, for instance, in the moment the Universe has given us to 
reflect. By the time we recover from our hasty activity a thousand 
small children may be lying dead at our feet. 

 Sometimes there is a feeling of not being able to continue. That, 
in this pause, whichever one it is, there is no movement. No 
encouragement to move, at all. 

 As a culture we are not in the habit of respecting, honoring, or 
even acknowledging the pause. (Culturally the most common reference 
to the pause was given over to Coca-Cola, which promised "The pause 
that refreshes." In other words, whenever there is a moment you are 
not busily doing something, Eat. Drink. And here's what we want you 
to eat or drink.) Women know this very well. At menopause, a time of 
extremely high power and shapeshifting, we are told to behave as 
though nothing is happening. To continue the "game" of life as if we 
are still girls. We are not girls. And to continue to act as though 
we are robs the world and the coming generations of our insights - 
insights readily available to us during this particular time, which 
is a highly significant universal moment of reflection. 

 I am convinced that in earlier times women during menopause 
drifted naturally to the edge of the village, constructed for 
themselves a very small hut, and with perhaps one animal for company -
and one that didn't talk! - gave themselves over to a time without 
form, without boundaries. They were fishing in deep waters, 
reflecting on a lifetime of activity and calling up, without 
consciously attempting to do so, knowledge that would mean survival 
and progression of the tribe. 

 During the pause is the ideal time to listen to stories. But only 
after you have inhabited Silence for long enough to find it 
comfortable. Even blissful. There are stories coming to us now from 
every part of the earth; and they are capable of teaching us things 
we all used to know. For instance, I listened to a CD 
called "Shamanic Navigation" by John Perkins. In it he talks about 
the Swa people of the Amazon. These are indigenous people who've 
lived in the Amazon rain forest for thousands of years. They tell us 
that in their society men and women are considered equal but very 
different. Man, they say, has a destructive nature: it is his job 
therefore to cut down trees when firewood or canoes are needed. His 
job also to hunt down and kill animals when there is need for more 
protein. His job to make war, when that becomes a necessity. The 
woman's nature is thought to be nurturing and conserving. Therefore 
her role is to care for the home and garden, the domesticated animals 
and the children. She inspires the men. But perhaps her most 
important duty is to tell the men when to stop. 

 It is the woman who says: Stop. We have enough firewood and 
canoes, don't cut down any more trees. Stop. We have enough meat; 
don't kill any more animals. Stop. This war is stupid and using up 
too many of our resources. Stop. Perkins says that when the Swa are 
brought to this culture they observe that it is almost completely 
masculine. That the men have cut down so many trees and built so many 
excessively tall buildings that the forest itself is dying; they have 
built roads without end and killed animals without number. When, ask 
the Swa, are the women going to say Stop? 

 Indeed. When are the women, and the Feminine within women and 
men, going to say Stop? 

 I used to be suicidal. I grew up in the white supremacist, 
fascist South, where the life of a person of color was in danger 
every minute. For many years I thought of suicide on an almost daily 
basis. Other than this, and severe depression caused by the 
inevitable childhood traumas and initiations, I am not a person 
innately given to despair. However, it has been despairing to see the 
ease with which women, after over thirty intense years of Feminism, 
have chosen to erase their gender in language by calling each other, 
and themselves, "guys." This is the kind of thing one can reflect on 
during a pause. Are we saying we're content to be something most of 
us don't respect? Conjure up an image of a guy. What attributes does 
it have? Is that really you? Is this a label you gave yourself? 

 What does being called "guys" do to young women? To little girls? 

 Isn't the media responsible for making it "cute" to be a guy, as 
if that's all the Women's Movement was about, turning us into 
neutered men, into guys? For guys don't have cojones, you know. They 
are men, but neutered, somehow. So if you've turned in your breasts 
and ovaries for guyness, you've really lost out. 

 And does this make you remember that when we were trying to get 
the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, passed, which would have assured 
equal rights to women, suddenly the market and our television screens 
were flooded with a new dishwashing liquid called, you remember, Era. 
A not-so-subtle message that equal rights for women was still 
associated mainly with the kitchen and a sink full of dirty dishes. 
And it must have been in the '60s, when women were claiming their 
freedom to have a good time, that the dishwashing liquid magnates 
came up with a concoction called Joy. 

 The intuitive part of us, the deep feminine, whether in male or 
female, knows when we are being ridiculed, laughed at, told to forget 
about being women, or having a Feminine, being wild, or being free; 
led to sleep if not to the slaughter. In those small areas where we 
do have some control, the words coming out of our mouths, for 
instance: 

 When are we going to say STOP? 


Women Of The Blue Rose