CALLING ALL WOMEN:

For centuries, women have been the heart of the family, fostering the uniqueness of each individual while holding the family together as a whole. Now we must assume a role as the heart of the entire human family. In our capacity to see the big picture with compassion and understanding, and with our gift of fostering individual identity in relationship to the whole, our participation in healing this world of divisive, polarized cultures and nations is critical.

As women, as the mothers and grandmothers of the next seven generations, we must join together and assume a major role in leading our nation and our world out of crisis. In outrage and despair, we must step up with our total commitment and assume our role as leaders. Women cannot do it alone and neither can men. We must join in equal partnership with men to save the children, the earth, and one another, or we shall perish.

This is not about women assuming leadership roles in the established patriarchal system. If the world is to be healed, feminine values and principles must be brought with boldness and courage into all systems of government, institutions, corporations, and education. Collaboration and co-operation must replace domination and control. Forgiveness, compassion, sensitivity, and the ability to love and nurture life and one another are essential now. Women do not have exclusive rights to these feminine strengths; many men embody them as well. We must turn this tide of global destruction into a landscape of generative life for all—one family, one community, one business, one country, one environment, one earth at a time.

When women come to the center of any organization, from family to institutional, the entire system transforms. Women need to lead the way towards a quantum shift in consciousness that transforms divisive systems of destruction into creative and creative systems that serve and sustain the sacred inherent in all life.

This is the message that Iroquois Chief Jacob Ezra Thomas left behind. It is a message rooted in the deepest beginnings of our democracy in which the balance between men, women and all of nature was honored and respected. It is this balanced way of life that creates peace and prosperity for all peoples and all life on earth.

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