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Interview with Marna
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This interview is part of the “We’Moon Anthology Blog Tour.” What’s that? Well, We’Moon has just published a 30-year anniversary anthology titled In the Spirit of We’Moon ~ Celebrating 30 Years: An Anthology of We’Moon Art and Writing. This anthology includes the work of many of the authors who have contributed to their internationally acclaimed We'Moon Daybooks for the last three decades. They have invited some of us contributorss who have our own blogs to interview each other and then post these interviews on the blogs, which will be linked to their website. An “anthology blog tour,” right?
It was my great good fortune to be invited to interview We’Moon contributor Marna… so here goes:
Carolyn: What has been your connection with We’Moon?
Marna: I lived at We’Moon [We’Moon Land in Estacada, Oregon] from ‘92-’93, and helped produce the ‘92 and ‘93 calendars. My work has probably appeared in over a dozen We’Moons [daybooks] since, including this year for which I was honored to be invited to write the holy day writings. We’Moon [daybook] has been a great inspiration for my creative work, knowing that it was going out directly to other womyn and weaving into their lives.
Carolyn: What has been your connection with We’Moon?
Marna: I lived at We’Moon [We’Moon Land in Estacada, Oregon] from ‘92-’93, and helped produce the ‘92 and ‘93 calendars. My work has probably appeared in over a dozen We’Moons [daybooks] since, including this year for which I was honored to be invited to write the holy day writings. We’Moon [daybook] has been a great inspiration for my creative work, knowing that it was going out directly to other womyn and weaving into their lives.
Carolyn: What was it like living on the We’Moon Land?
Marna: I learned about solar and lunar rhythms… due to a donated library of astrology materials from Marcia Patrick from when she lived there. (She was one of the 13 womyn who cursed Wall Street back in the Second Wave.) … So many seeds of my current work and scholarship and spiritual practice are sourced in my We’Moon experience! I learned so much from living in intentional community with other woms, and had creative space to garden collaboratively, learn herbal medicine and gardening, cultivate relationships with the living ecologies and life of the land, a real opening experience! The womyn’s land movement and womyn’s earth-based spiritually have pivotally informed my work and life, inspiring us here in Portland [Oregon] to create for thirteen years a Womyn’s Temple and now inspiring me to heed the call to cultivate a land-based campus with sacred herb gardens, a Hygeian dream healing center, and designing certificate and eventually graduate programs weaving together earth-inspired (ecological) creativity, healing, and hands-on skills in service of earth regeneration.
Marna: I learned about solar and lunar rhythms… due to a donated library of astrology materials from Marcia Patrick from when she lived there. (She was one of the 13 womyn who cursed Wall Street back in the Second Wave.) … So many seeds of my current work and scholarship and spiritual practice are sourced in my We’Moon experience! I learned so much from living in intentional community with other woms, and had creative space to garden collaboratively, learn herbal medicine and gardening, cultivate relationships with the living ecologies and life of the land, a real opening experience! The womyn’s land movement and womyn’s earth-based spiritually have pivotally informed my work and life, inspiring us here in Portland [Oregon] to create for thirteen years a Womyn’s Temple and now inspiring me to heed the call to cultivate a land-based campus with sacred herb gardens, a Hygeian dream healing center, and designing certificate and eventually graduate programs weaving together earth-inspired (ecological) creativity, healing, and hands-on skills in service of earth regeneration.
Carolyn: Wow… Is there information about your work online?
Marna: Probably the more relevant website related to We’Moon is the work I am doing with Moonifest, a micro-grant nonprofit for women, the arts, and Earth regeneration. Also the graduate institute at the intersection of ecology, creativity, and wisdom traditions I am designing as my doctoral project in Sustainability Education .
Carolyn: That’s a fascinating idea… offering grants of $130, and asking applicants how many of them they need. As a playwright who has often needed to produce my own work, I can confirm how much mileage a motivated artist can gain with just a little financial support. Sometimes, for me, the isolation was as large an impediment as the lack of funds. Getting a grant was kind of like being alone on a life raft and being signaled to by a passing ship. It was a comfort to know that I had been seen, that someone out there was aware of my coordinates. It helped me to know that someone would be coming eventually. So, what about your second website?
Marna: Probably the more relevant website related to We’Moon is the work I am doing with Moonifest, a micro-grant nonprofit for women, the arts, and Earth regeneration. Also the graduate institute at the intersection of ecology, creativity, and wisdom traditions I am designing as my doctoral project in Sustainability Education .
Carolyn: That’s a fascinating idea… offering grants of $130, and asking applicants how many of them they need. As a playwright who has often needed to produce my own work, I can confirm how much mileage a motivated artist can gain with just a little financial support. Sometimes, for me, the isolation was as large an impediment as the lack of funds. Getting a grant was kind of like being alone on a life raft and being signaled to by a passing ship. It was a comfort to know that I had been seen, that someone out there was aware of my coordinates. It helped me to know that someone would be coming eventually. So, what about your second website?
Marna: It has two related informational websites, one related to Gaian Methodologies for research inspired by the living presence of the planet, and one I just developed last winter on Earth Empathy, which offers experiential learning adventures in cultivating planetary compassion (with riffs on spirit of place, body/planet, despair and justice work, and deep time). I am in the midst of developing a resource web page on feminist pedagogy and women's collaborations (Gynagogy), which will be released later in this summer.
Carolyn: I see your “Earth Empathy” site has a page titled “Hope,” where you link to a video of Joanna Macy, where she says, “… recognize that the anguish, the horror even, that we can feel over the devastation that we read about or see or experience—that it’s okay to feel that. We're tough. Because if we are afraid to feel that, we won't feel where it comes from, and where it comes from is love—our love for this world.” This is an issue I’m struggling with right now… the sense of becoming overwhelmed, especially with the situation of Fukushima… There is such a temptation to resort to denial or diversion. Your hope and your activism give me hope. Is there anything else you would like to add?
Marna: What I can offer about my experience both with We'Moon, the land and the Almanac, as well as my experience with the extended womyn's land communities, is to praise the deep fount of strength and nurture they have provided for my spiritual-ecological wholeness and deepening. The newly published We'Moon Anthology is a portal to the song streams of so many womyn artists and writers, sustaining us in hope and justice, what Joanna Macy refers to as the work of the hands, head and heart of the Great Turning. May we each receive this nurture and continue to weave these cultures of regeneration and inspiration and be woven by the spiral thriving of planetary Gaia herself. I look forward to celebrating the sixtieth anthology in another thirty years, 390 lunar cycles from now!
Carolyn: I see your “Earth Empathy” site has a page titled “Hope,” where you link to a video of Joanna Macy, where she says, “… recognize that the anguish, the horror even, that we can feel over the devastation that we read about or see or experience—that it’s okay to feel that. We're tough. Because if we are afraid to feel that, we won't feel where it comes from, and where it comes from is love—our love for this world.” This is an issue I’m struggling with right now… the sense of becoming overwhelmed, especially with the situation of Fukushima… There is such a temptation to resort to denial or diversion. Your hope and your activism give me hope. Is there anything else you would like to add?
Marna: What I can offer about my experience both with We'Moon, the land and the Almanac, as well as my experience with the extended womyn's land communities, is to praise the deep fount of strength and nurture they have provided for my spiritual-ecological wholeness and deepening. The newly published We'Moon Anthology is a portal to the song streams of so many womyn artists and writers, sustaining us in hope and justice, what Joanna Macy refers to as the work of the hands, head and heart of the Great Turning. May we each receive this nurture and continue to weave these cultures of regeneration and inspiration and be woven by the spiral thriving of planetary Gaia herself. I look forward to celebrating the sixtieth anthology in another thirty years, 390 lunar cycles from now!
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