“Hearing the Invisible” ~ Our Presenters (Session 2)

Symposium Panels, April 10th at 3:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Panel 3 “Other ways of knowing and relating: Animal-Plant-Divine”

Panel 4 “Restoring Right Relationships with Sentient Beings”

See the 2022 Symposium page for registration and event information.

Choose from between these panels on the event site. Remember–all recordings will be available for attendees for 1 year following the event, so you don’t have to worry about missing anything!

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Panel 3 “Other ways of knowing and relating: Animal-Plant-Divine”

Monica Mody: “When Yoginis Appear with Animals: Animistic Relational Elements and the Non-dual Matrix” 

Monica Mody

Monica Mody is a writer, poet, and trans-disciplinary feminist scholar from India.  Her doctoral dissertation, “Claiming Voice, Vitality, and Authority in Post-secular South Asian Borderlands,” was awarded ASWM’s 2020 Kore Award for best dissertation.

Emma Dymock

Emma Dymock: “The Living Cauldron: Transformative Landscapes in Celtic Mythology”

Emma Dymock teaches classes in Celtic Civilization and Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has published books and articles on Celtic poetry, prose, and drama, and edited collections of poetry and academic essays in the field of Gaelic and Scottish studies.

Barbara Crescimanno

Barbara Crescimanno: “Siciliian Nymphs. Animal, Human, Divine Creatures”

Barbara Crescimanno is a singer, percussionist and dancer, and researcher of practices of the sacred feminine in Sicily. She is founder and coordinator of the anthropological and ethnocoreutical research group TrizziRiDonna  with whom she conducted research on the female repertoire of traditional songs in Sicily.

Reagan Wytsalucy

Reagan Wytsalucy:  “The Land Still Bears Fruit: Restoring the Navajo Peach through Strengthened Community Traditions”

Reagan Wytsalucy, who holds a Master’s Degree in Plant Science, is an Assistant Professor at Utah State University Extension. She is currently working with community gardens in the Four Corners region to re-establish ancient food sources for Native communities.

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Panel 4 “Restoring Right Relationships with Sentient Beings”

 

Brenda Peterson

Brenda Peterson: “Silkies in Myth and on the Beach”

Brenda Peterson is author of award-winning books including Wolf Nation and I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth. She is the co-founder of Seal Sitters, a citizen naturalist group that, as part of the Marine Mammal Stranding Network, does conservation and field work to protect and educate about marine animals.

Melissa Rosati

Melissa Rosati:”The Horse: A Gallop through its Creation Myths and Agency as Visionary, Warrior, Savior, and Healer in Human Relationships”

Melissa Rosati, a horse enthusiast and former semi-professional barrel racer, is Creative Director at EcoCulture Productions LLC, in New York City. Previously, She served as editorial director of McGraw-Hill International. She has served on the boards of the International Women’s Writing Guild and The Women’s National Book Association.

Andrea Fleckinger

Andrea Fleckinger: “Frau Holle: In the Footsteps of the Great Goddess: Recalling Europe’s Indigenous Roots”

Andrea Fleckinger is a sociologist, social worker, lecturer on Modern Matriarchal Studies, and founder of the MatriForum, which aims to encourage constructive dialogue regarding egalitarian forms of society supported by findings from matriarchal research, sociology and political science.

Judy Grahn: “Insects in Our Everyday Lives” 

Judy Grahn

Judy Grahn is an internationally known poet, writer, and cultural theorist, whose works include Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World, Another Mother Tongue, and Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender and Erotic Power. She has written about interactions with insects and others in her latest book,Touching Creatures, Touching Spirit: Living in a Sentient World.

“Hearing the Invisible” ~ Our Presenters (Session 1)

Symposium Panels, April 10th at 1:15 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Panel 1 “Celestial Cycles and Earthly Rhythms”

Panel 2 “Listening to ~ and Speaking with ~ Animals and Other Sentient Beings”

See the 2022 Symposium page for registration and event information.

Choose from between these panels on the event site. Remember–all recordings will be available for attendees for 1 year following the event, so you don’t have to worry about missing anything!

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PANEL 1 “Celestial Cycles and Earthly Rhythms”

Ann Filemyr, PhD

Ann Filemyr: “Celestial Ecologies: Living within the Solar and Lunar Wheels as Rhythmic Cycles of  Change” 

Ann Filemyr is President of Southwestern College, a consciousness-based graduate school in Santa Fe, NM, where she serves as the Founder and Director of the new transdisciplinary, applied PhD in Visionary Practice & Regenerative Leadership. She has also served as Director of the Ecotherapy Certificate at SWC and a teacher of consciousness and visionary practice.

Annie FInch Portrait
Annie Finch, photo by Kate Warren

Annie Finch: “Riding Meter’s Magic Language Home: How an Ancient Poetic Technology Can Help  Reunite Us with the Earth, the Divine Feminine and Each Other”

Annie Finch’s books include Spells: New and Selected Poems, A Poet’s Craft, and Among the Goddesses (Sarasvati Award, ASWM). Her poems have appeared onstage at Carnegie Hall and in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. As Poetry Witch, Annie collaborates on multimedia performances. She offers community, classes, and rituals at PoetryWitch.org.

Marna Hauk, PhD

Marna Hauk: “Hygeia, Green and Shealing; Cultivating and Embodying Green Healing Energy with  Asteroid, Dream and Myth”

Marna Hauk is Founding Faculty and Associate Director of the Doctoral Program in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership at Southwestern College. She innovates learning circles and scholarship in regenerative futures, multispecies and ecological feminisms, arts-based methods, and climate justice.

Laura Shannon

Laura Shannon: “Basil, apple and rose: women, protection and plants in Greek folk songs”

Laura Shannon has been researching traditional women’s dances for 35 years, learning from village grandmothers in Greece and the Balkans. Founding Director of the Athena Institute for Women’s Dance and Culture, she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Gloucester. In 2021, Carol P. Christ chose Laura to succeed her as Director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual.

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PANEL 2 “Listening to ~ and Speaking with ~ Animals and Other Sentient Beings”

Dr. Barbara Mann

Barbara Mann: “Thinking Yours Doesn’t Stink: Dis/Respect for Others”

Barbara Alice Mann is Professor of Humanities, University of Toledo, Ohio, USA. The latest of her fifteen books are President by Massacre: Indian-Killing for Political Gain (2019). She is currently working on a book about woman-and-bear traditions in the global north. Mann was for twenty-five years the Speaker and/or Northern Director of the Native American Alliance of Ohio.

Dr. Kaarina Kailo

Kaarina Kailo: “The Woman who Married the Bear and Original Instructions”

Kaarina Kailo has worked as prof. or senior scholar of Women’s Studies in Finland and Canada. Her expertise includes Northern indigenous studies, ecomythology and bear spirituality. Her publications include Wo/men & Bears— Nature, Culture, Gender; Finnish Goddess Mythology and the Golden Woman; Mothering, GIft and Revolution and studies on sauna spirituality.

Susan Moulton

Susan Moulton:”WILD vs DOMESTIC”

Susan Moulton was a university professor for 44 years at Sonoma State University and visiting professor at additional universities in the U.S. and abroad. She has published articles and lectured on art, including Palaeolithic Cave Art, and Animal Behavior. She manages a small farm with diverse plants, heritage trees, and domestic and wild animals, including rescued American mustangs and burros. She is currently working on a book on Learning from Animals.

Rebecca Vincent

Rebeca Vincent: “Why We Need Selkies”

Rebeca Vincent is a writer, editor, and environmental educator with a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies. Her writing centers on water, nature, myth, and the intersection between myth and the environment. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in various publications, anthologies, literary reviews, and blogs.

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“Hearing the Invisible” Special Plenary Panel

Plenary Panel: Engaging Interconnectedness: Lessons from Sentient  Beings/Ecosystems

 We are honored to present this panel of women whose work advances the essential conversations of an interrelated world, protecting and fostering the unique contributions of ecosystems, people, and other sentient beings to the dialogue of life on earth. This panel will be followed by an opportunity for panelists to respond to one another, as well as a Q & A with attendees.

Asoka Bandarage, PhD: “Paradigm Shift: From Domination to Partnership”

Dr. Cristina Eisenberg: “Honoring Reciprocity: Collaborating with Indigenous Peoples on Traditional  Ecological Knowledge” 

Denise Mitten, PhD: “Blurring boundaries and disturbing dichotomies”

Apela Colorado, PhD: “Manuakepa ~ Reawaken Our Power to Connect”

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“Paradigm Shift: From Domination to Partnership”

Dr. Asoka Bandarage

Asoka Bandarage, PhD, formerly Chair of the Women’s Studies Program at Mount Holyoke College, is currently Distinguished Adjunct Professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies. She has also taught at Yale University, Brandeis University, Macalester College, Georgetown University, and European Peace University. She is the author of Women, Population and Global Crisis and Sustainability and Well-Being: The Middle Path to Environment, Society and the Economy, and other publications. Asoka is a co-founder of the Committee on Women, Population and Health, and served as guest editor of Political Environments and Woman of Power. She conducts workshops on social change and works with the Interfaith Moral Action on Climate.

 

“Manuakepa ~ Reawaken Our Power to Connect”                                    

Dr. Apela Colorado

Apela Colorado, PhD, of Oneida-Gaul ancestry, has dedicated her life’s work to bridging Western thought and indigenous worldviews. As a Ford Fellow, Dr. Colorado studied for her doctorate at both Harvard and Brandeis Universities and received her PhD from Brandeis in Social Policy in 1982. She founded the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network (WISN) in 1989 to foster the revitalization, growth, and worldwide exchange of traditional knowledge, develop an authentic interface with Western science, and safeguard the lives and work of the world’s endangered indigenous culture practitioners. In 1997, Dr. Colorado was one of twelve women chosen from 52 countries by the State of the World Forum to be honored for her role as a woman leader.

 

“Honoring Reciprocity: Collaborating with Indigenous Peoples on Traditional  Ecological Knowledge” 

Dr. Cristina Eisenberg

Dr. Cristina Eisenberg is graduate faculty at Oregon State University in the College of Forestry. An Indigenous woman scientist, she is the principal investigator on two major on-the-ground projects with First Nations (Alberta, Canada) and Native American (Montana, USA) communities to integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) into plant and wildlife conservation in Western North America. The former Chief Scientist at Earthwatch Institute, Cristina oversaw a global research program focusing on ecological restoration, social justice for Indigenous peoples, and sustainable production of natural resources. She serves on the board of Society for Ecological Restoration, where she chairs the TEK Working Group. She has written two books about conservation and  keystone predators and is at work on two more under contract, one about climate change and wildlife and another about bison conservation.

 

“Blurring boundaries and disturbing dichotomies”

Dr. Denise Mitten

Denise Mitten, PhD, is professor of the graduate program of Sustainability Education and Adventure Education at Prescott College, Her work is informed by an interdisciplinary background that includes parent education, forest ecology, outdoor leadership, complementary and alternative therapies, and health and wellness. She studies the intersection of health and wellness while being in nature including spirituality, a sense of place, and the effect of outdoor activity participation on body image. Internationally recognized for her innovative scholarship in outdoor and environmental pedagogy, gender, and compassionate leadership, Denise has developed award-winning outdoor leadership programs for women, women felons, nuns in recovery, and socially and economically disadvantaged women and children.

See the 2022 Symposium page for registration and event information.

Right Relations with Horses, Insects, Seals, Goddesses (2022 Symposium)

“Restoring Right Relationships with Sentient Beings”

2022 ASWM Symposium Panel

April 10th at 3PM Eastern Daylight Time

 

This panel addresses issues of crucial importance today: the survival of our ecosystems and wild animals, manifesting meaningful change, and reweaving the bonds among spirituality, nature, and human beings.

Seal pup, Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge

Brenda Peterson, “Silkies in Myth and on the Beach,” delves into silkies and seals in legend, song, story, and science. Her focus is on those stories that call us into a sustainable and more spiritual bond with these beings.

Wild horses, US Bureau of Land Management, 2014

Melissa Rosati,”The Horse: A Gallop through its Creation Myths and Agency as Visionary, Warrior, Savior, and Healer in Human Relationships,”  highlights the opportunities for the reawakening of divine feminine values through the equine archetypes of visionary, warrior, savior, and healer in myths surrounding Demeter/Ceres, Artemis/Diana,Athena/Minerva, and Epona/Rhiannon.

 

Windswept, JW Waterhouse (1903)

Andrea Fleckinger, “Frau Holle: In the Footsteps of the Great Goddess: Recalling Europe’s Indigenous Roots,” draws on Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s work on Matriarchal Landscape Mythology, examining how the ancient sacred meanings of landscapes can be decoded to restore the relationship between humans, spirituality, and nature.

honeybee

Judy Grahn, “Insects in Our Everyday Lives,” will present information on the importance of insects to the ecosystems of the earth, and tell some anecdotes about their intelligence and interactions with each other and with humans.

See the 2022 Symposium page for event information.

REGISTER HERE:

Relating to Animals, Plants, and the Divine (Symposium 2022)

“Other Ways of Knowing and Relating: Animal-Plant-Divine” 

2022 ASWM Symposium Panel

Sunday, April 10th, 2022 at 3:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time 

This panel explores relationships at various levels: the non-dual relationship between animals and divinity, the interconnections between humans and the landscape, the fluid relationship (that is possible) between humans, the divine, and the animal and plant worlds when the natural world is not objectified, and ancient relationships between the human and plant world, and how they can be re-established in the present day.

Yogini Vrishanana, 10th century, National Museum Delhi

Monica Mody “When Yoginis Appear with Animals: Animistic Relational Elements and the Non-dual Matrix,” weaves together scholarly commentary and original poetry to wonder at some of the likely dimensions of the relationship between animal and Yogini.

Emma Dymock, “The Living Cauldron: Transformative Landscapes in Celtic Mythology” explores the interconnected relationship between humans and the living landscape through the lens of Celtic mythology, with specific focus on the story of the Goddess Cerridwen.

Nereides, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Barbara Crescimanno, “Siciliian Nymphs. Animal, Human, Divine Creatures”  traces the survival of Nymphs–Goddesses who can appear as sacred trees, medicinal gardens, caves and sacred waters as well as herbalists, beekeepers, and midwives in the still living cultural traditions of Sicily.

photo by Julien McRoberts, 2020

Reagan Wytsalucy, “The Land Still Bears Fruit: Restoring the Navajo Peach through Strengthened Community Traditions” recounts her journey to return an important traditional food source, and its cultural story, to her people’s land in the Four Corners region of the Southwest.

See 2022 Symposium page for registration and event information.

REGISTER HERE: