“Belonging as Radical Revolution: Navigating the Care Crisis with Ubuntu“

with Andrea Fleckinger and Simone Plaza-Finis

Thursday,  February 6, 2025 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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Amidst the acute care crisis destabilizing almost all spheres of contemporary Western patriarchal societies, the need to explore alternative societal models has never been more urgent. This salon invites scholars and interested participants to delve into the potential of applying ubuntu: “I am because I belong.” This principle, as practiced by the Khoisan of Africa, sharply contrasts with the deceptive ideology of independence, portrayed as the elusive pursuit of happiness in patriarchal rhetoric. The ongoing application of the patriarchal principle of divide et impera affects nearly every facet of life, demanding a profound shift. In a world that values so-called independent individuals, addressing dependency as an inherently human quality becomes a revolutionary act.

In this salon, we invite participants to engage in an in-depth reflection and discussion on the principle of belonging, examining societies where individuals do not long for external validation or possessions because they inherently be-long. Insights from matriarchal societies will be connected to Joan Tronto’s concept of homines curans, exploring the multifaceted dimensions of care. The discussion will further consider how these matriarchal insights can illuminate pathways to fostering abundance and wholeness in Western contexts. By understanding what is necessary to nurture a care-centered society and exploring ways to establish these conditions consciously, participants are encouraged to reflect on how lessons from matriarchal cultures can support a transition from a mindset of scarcity to one of fullness and interconnectedness, aimed at creating future-oriented solutions.

 

Simone Plaza-Finis is one of the four founders of the Matriforum and a certified lecturer in Modern Matriarchal Studies. She holds a degree in Philology and is a translator and simultaneous translator. She has a son and grew up in Barcelona, influenced by German, Spanish, and Catalan cultures, though she has been living in Berlin since 2017.

Dr. Andrea Fleckinger is a research fellow at the University of Trento (Italy). She is also one of the four founders of the Matriforum and a certified lecturer in Modern Matriarchal Studies. Currently, she teaches alongside Dr. Heide Göttner-Abendroth at the International Akademie Hagia.

The Matriforum is an organization that aims to encourage constructive dialogue between science and the public at large regarding alternative, egalitarian forms of society supported by the latest findings in the scientific fields of modern matriarchal research.

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Our next Salon: To be announced

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

“European Mythology as a Remedy for the Amnesia of Whiteness”

with Hilary Giovale

Thursday,  January 23, 2025 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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In this interactive storytelling session, I will share about the journey that led me to discover that my ancestors were early colonizers and enslavers in what would become the United States.  Overnight, I became aware of my identity as a ninth-generation settler of European descent, whose ancestors have been complicit in colonial violence.  My relationships with Indigenous Peoples and cultures helped me to unpack my own whiteness, including the reality of systemic white supremacy and the ongoing harm of settler colonialism.

I will offer my process of healing that has entailed building respectful relationships with the land and water where I live, practicing ancestral reverence and communication, solidarity with Indigenous-led movements, a commitment to making personal reparations, and co-facilitating this work with white settlers communities.

At the request of my mentors, this journey ultimately led me to the archetypes, songs, and folk practices of my ancient European ancestors.  This session will include discussion about the reclamation of European mythologies, languages, women’s history, and plant lore as a source of strength and resilience for white-identifying settlers who wish to become better relatives to Indigenous, Black, and Immigrant communities on Turtle Island.

*Please bring a candle, a small bowl of water, and some dried mugwort (if possible) to this session.

“This is a profoundly brave book. In sharing her journey, in all its pain, revelation, and imperfectness, Hilary has woven both a reckoning and a calling-home. May her offering embolden many more of us with white settler lineages to do the work of becoming good relatives–work that is essential for a shared future of well-being and liberation.” —Joanna Levitt Cea, co-author, Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work”

“Hilary Giovale unpacks the legacies of historical harm that continue to afflict American society and shows us a way forward toward healing. Her lens is informed by indigenous concepts that encourage harmony between one another and the planet we call home. This book is for people who want to be better and do better for the sake of generations to come.” —Sharon Leslie Morgan, Founder, Our Black Ancestry and co-author, Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade

Hilary Giovale is a mother, writer, and community organizer who lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.  A ninth-generation American settler, she is descended from Celtic, Germanic, Nordic, and Indigenous peoples of Ancient Europe.  Hilary seeks to follow Indigenous and Black leadership in support of human rights, environmental justice, and equitable futures.  As an active reparationist, her work is guided by intuition, love, and relationships.  She divests from whiteness and bridges divides with truth, healing, apology, and forgiveness.  She is the author of Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers toward Truth, Healing, and Repair.  Learn more about her work here.

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Our next Salon:

Scholar Salon #82, February 6 2025 at 12:00 NOON Eastern Time  

Belonging as Radical Revolution: Navigating the Care Crisis with Ubuntu

with Andrea Fleckinger and Simone Plaza-Finis

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

“The Amazons: A Five-thousand-year Matriarchal Resistance Movement”

with Vicki Noble

Thursday,  January 9, 2025 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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After 40 years of revisioning world history to include women, I am shocked to realize that most women still do not know the facts. History (his-story) is only about five thousand years old. These five thousand years have brought us war and violence through the agency of male dominance, and we have been socialized to believe that violence is innate to the human condition. Meanwhile, prehistory has been relegated to the dustbin. But prehistory is women’s history! It includes all the tens of thousands of years before the (now well-documented) Indo-European invasions into the peaceful Goddess civilization of Old Europe. If we do not know this ancient, peaceful, women-centered history, then how can we imagine that we will ever have peace on earth?

The Amazons were not a mythical tribe of women who hated men, but rather the remnant populations of Old Europe who fled the Indo- European invasions to protect their ancient matriarchal values and social structures. Their valiant existential fight carried them through the next few thousand years. Succeeded by the Classical Amazons of the Iron Age (first millennium BCE), these tribes, whose women were shaman-priestesses and fighting warriors, have left us stunning remains and artifacts from across Eurasia documenting their ongoing resistance to patriarchy.

Now that patriarchy has colonized most of the world, this stream of resistance has gone underground, continuously bubbling up in pockets and remnant populations here and there, as well as in individual women in every generation who tap into this ancient archetype of the courageous and sacred Amazon warrior-priestess. I have spent a lifetime owning this archetype and joining other such women in the ongoing fight for our birthright: the re-establishment of mother-centered, earth- centered values and peace on earth.

“Join me in this exploration and investigation of women’s refusal to bow to patriarchy through the ages, up to and including our own participation. Invigorate your inner Amazon to come into the foreground now!”

Vicki Noble is a feminist scholar and teacher, co-creator of Motherpeace and author of numerous books including Motherpeace, Shakti Woman, and The Double Goddess. For decades she has traveled and taught internationally; her books are published in various languages. Retired from teaching as a graduate professor in two Women’s Spirituality Masters Programs in California, she teaches workshops and speaks in public venues. At home in Santa Cruz, California, she facilitates private intensive tutorials with women from around the world who come to study Motherpeace Tarot, learn customized Tibetan Buddhist Dakini practices, or do customized intellectual inquiry.

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Our next Salon:

Scholar Salon #81, January 21 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time  

European Mythology as a Remedy for the Amnesia of Whiteness

with Hilary Giovale

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

“Truth, Lies and Possibilities: Writing the Story of Buddha’s Wife”

with Barbara McHugh

Thursday,  November 21, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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Recently, especially since the pandemic, many fiction writers have been soul-searching: In these times, why write made-up stories? Don’t we have enough of them already? Perhaps only narratives of actual people in real situations are important for our sense of reality. In this presentation, Barbara McHugh talks about what is unique to stories as an art form and why we need to keep making them up. Using her novel, Bride of the Buddha, and other examples, along with what she’s learned in countless fiction-writing workshops, she shows how stories—from folk tales told by grannies to modern narratives created by so-called solitary geniuses—embody our values and thereby enlarge our felt sense of who we are and what our relationship is to the
universe. She also discusses the necessity of story variants to keep us from getting trapped in any single narrative, including the ones we invent to make sense of our lives.

Bride of the Buddha began as a response to the refusal of many of the author’s women friends to bother with Buddhism at all, because its founder had abandoned his wife and child. She wanted to explore the story from the point of view of the deserted wife in a way that, even if the Buddha isn’t exonerated, the practice of Buddhism is. The more research she did, and the more she wrote, the more she felt compelled to make a radical change to the story. She ended up having the Buddha’s wife disguise herself as a man in order to join her former husband’s all-male monastic community. That got the author into trouble, but it also convinced her of the importance of story-making in all its forms.

Barbara McHugh is a poet and novelist with an interdisciplinary PhD from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. To support herself as a student, she did everything from assembly line jobs to door-to-door sales and social work in all kinds of neighborhoods. She also has worked as a book doctor/writing coach and taught graduate courses on subjects such as the relationship between evil and the attempts to annihilate it. Her novel Bride of the Buddha (Monkfish Books, 2021) won awards for literary and general fiction. Her poems have appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, The Magnolia Review, Steam Ticket, Brushfire, Straight Forward Poetry, and others. She enjoys hiking, traveling, and chasing total eclipses of the sun.

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Save the date and watch for details :

Scholar Salon #80, January 7 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time, 

with Vicki Noble

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

 

“Goddesses of Healing of Ancient Greece”

with Eftyhia Leontidou

Thursday,  November 7, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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Anyone who has visited Greece would probably be familiar with the most common Greek expression, «γεια σου», meaning “to your health!” This phrase is used as a greeting, as a wish, as a blessing, or as a toast when raising glasses. «Γεια» or -more correctly- «υγεία», meaning health, is personified by the ancient Greek Goddess Hygieia; and is the root of many words used in different languages in association with health, cleanliness and sanitation, e.g. hygiene. Hygieia is the most well-known ancient Greek Goddess of healing, but there are quite a few more, e.g. her four sisters, daughters of the god of medicine Asclepius (Panacea, Iaso, Aceso and Aegle). Other healing Goddesses are exclusively associated with birthing/childbirth, e.g. Eileithyia, or with decent and painless death, e.g. Artemis.  I will unfold their stories and their symbols, particularly the snake, whose venom can kill or heal. These Goddesses of medicine promote health on the physical, emotional and spiritual plane; but emphasis will also be placed on the healing needed by our relationships, our societies, and our planet, Mother Earth, all of them wounded by millennia of patriarchy. 

Since the earliest matriarchal human societies of prehistory, healing has been a women’s art. Nowadays, although female healers outnumber their male colleagues, they still fight to earn their rightful acknowledgement in the health system. But the medicine women of our times also have to be warriors, as they fight for women’s rights; against the trauma of violence against women; for the healing of the planet and against destructive acts and practices. In this war they are guided by the archetype of the Goddess Athena, who was worshipped as healer and warrior, among her other qualities.

Dr. Eftyhia Leontidou MD, is a Greek Obstetrician- gynecologist, who has spent all her life healing and empowering women, as a health professional, as an author and as a feminist activist. A lover of music, archaeology, mythology, travel, photography, and Tai chi, and a member of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, she owns a well- informed archive of various kinds of documents on women’s issues. Eftyhia has written and translated many articles on women’s rights and health issues for medical and feminist magazines in Greece and abroad. She has also coedited and contributed as an author, translator and photographer in many collective women’s books. Her activities include lectures, seminars and workshops for doctors, medical students, women’s groups as well as battered, unemployed, immigrant and socially excluded women, in collaboration with women’s and cultural organizations, groups, schools, parents’ unions, local authorities, and the European Union; in addition she has taken part in training programs for the police on violence against women.

For more than 50 years she has been active in the autonomous women’s movement being a member of self-examination, feminist activist and feminist spirituality groups in Athens. The last two years, 2023 and 2024, she contributed to the Glastonbury Goddess Conference as a presenter. Her latest project, called Feminist Gynecology, consists so far of three books: 1) Goddess in Action – Childbirth, 2) Female Sexuality – From Flesh to Spirit, and 3) Female body – A Mystical tour.

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Scholar Salon #79 November 21 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time

Truth, Lies and Possibilities: Writing about Buddha’s Wife 

with Barbara HcHugh

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Save the date and watch for details :

Scholar Salon #80, January 7 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time, 

with Vicki Noble

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.