Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens For Leadership by Nina Simons
Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens For Leadership. Bioneers have some answers. Nina Simons has been absorbing, promoting and formulating them.
Published 22 June, 2023 in The Berkeley Times as “Bioneers: We ARE Nature,” Knox Book Beat.
Part memoir; part feminist, de-colonialist, anti-racist self-help workbook for activists, and a LOT of stories of her interactions with leaders in the ecology, spirituality and social justice worlds; this book is by a woman who not only listens, but pays attention, CHANGES and then expresses her life of growth and learning through sharing, ritual and action.
Unafraid of experiencing and admitting a lot of mistakes, “uncomfortable” discussions and “paradoxes” along the way; she threw herself into challenging situations, beginning with leadership in a still-very-gender-biased world of the 1970s. “A healthy system requires diversity to survive trauma and thrive,” however, and she knew they had to be “curious, brave and experimental.”
More thematic than chronological, Nature repeats her pivotal learnings that congeal and accumulate powerfully by the end, from personal to interpersonal to whole. Grounded in the body, she moves from inner balance to social biases; “breakthrough and breakdown” experiences, lists, prompts and questions; pulls through to “Gender Equity, Full Spectrum Leadership & Racial Justice;” Exploring Privilege, Allyship, Death, Grief and how Ritual Creates Relationship.
“We have to allow ourselves to feel the loss and the pain of witnessing as what we love is diminished and threatened,” she says. Friend Terry Tempest Williams replies “we really do have to stand in the center of authenticity and realize…community is very important…We cannot do it alone.” Simons replies “One of our deepest human needs is to belong.”
At Bioneers in Berkeley, we sang the “Warrior Woman” song for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. We heard from McKenzie Long about This Contested Land: The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America’s National Monuments; a brilliant younger rock climber, biker and hiker who writes like the wind, envisions like John Muir and tells truths “like a mountain.” We welcomed the words of gentle elder john a. powell of thOur Cal Othering and Belonging Institute, author of Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.
Storytelling, vulnerability, love, imagination. All part of the journey. “We cannot do it alone…” But I believe, together, we CAN…
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