Message 3

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Today is Day 3:

A Day of Healing and Forgiveness

by Carol Hansen Grey
Emailed March 4, 2003

Dear Gather the Women Participants:
 

Today marks the third day of our sacred global retreat-- a day set aside for healing and forgiveness. My vision is that by observing the intention for this day, together we not only heal ourselves, we also spread that much needed healing energy in waves throughout the world. Preparing ourselves in this way readies us for our fourth day on March 6: A Day of Connecting and Visioning.

On this fourth day we invite women to set aside time for sharing from the heart, visioning, storytelling, listening to one another and being heard. Visit with or call a friend or family member to share this special time with you. Let this be a day when we open our hearts and feel our oneness with all women around the world, and from that place of oneness, envision a world in which all life is held sacred--a balanced world of harmony and peace. (Please use the interactive feature on the website to share your vision of the world that together we can create.)

On this day,
Share your stories.
Listen with care,
attending even to the spaces between words.
Take in deeply how unique life journeys bring each of us
to distinct ways of being in the world.
Imagine our dissimilarities as cells in a body,
each with specific and vital tasks.
Feel how we all together
--including animals, rivers, the teeming of space—
make up the whole.
Recognize prejudice and cruelty in any form
as errors in thinking.
Dream together what a partnership paradigm would look like.
Vow to be the change you wish to see in the world as
together we work for the well-being of all.

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THOUGHTS TO PONDER

The other side of the bridge to the future is not an objective, predetermined, static destination. In reality, it is a movable object, a set of probabilities, and most important, a karmic consequence of the lives we lived yesterday and the lives we live today. The bridge to the future is a bridge that moves -- and the land to which it is connected moves as well -- according to how we walk across the bridge and who we are while we are walking.

Our thoughts about the future go far toward creating it; our minds and hearts are like filaments that connect today to tomorrow, they are conduits for either the status quo or the emergence of different, hopefully more loving, possibilities. How we think and how we behave determine where we are going.

Marianne Williamson (Imagine)

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
- Gloria Steinem

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.
--- Alice Walker

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one.
- John Lennon

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
--- Albert Einstein

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.
--- Arthur C. Clarke
 

May we spend tomorrow in the magical state of imagination! Together let us dream a future of balance, partnership, justice and peace where everyone's gift is welcome and where all life is honored.

Only Love Prevails,
Carol Hansen Grey
Executive Director
Women of Vision and Action

Go to Message 4