International Women's Day - To Those Who Tend and Mend

I noticed last weekend when I turned the calendar over to March that today is International Women's Day.  I immediately thought of specific slides I had taken in the 80's while traveling overseas.  My calendar also noted that tomorrow is the start of Procrastination Week.  So I got a head start and postponed looking for the slides thinking it would take a long time to sort through the carousels and find what I needed.

I finally sat down an hour ago and immediately found what I thought would take hours (that's what I get for thinking.) In no time at all, I found the women (and girls who are now women) whose faces have been with me since hearing of International Women's Day.

These are some of the people who made me feel welcome as a twenty two and twenty five year old often when I didn't even know their language.

Like the babushka who listened to my Russian phrases and only frowned when I accidentally told her I was a Russian man.

Or the young Russian girls in the Orel hotel who gave me a beautiful macrame owl necklace that I still have. I had been thinking of it just last week when I happened to find it or it found me.  Did they know I would come to have a relationship with owls in my 50's?

Yesterday as I heard a bird sing, I thought of the women who sang in the church I attended on Sunday's in a South African homeland.  Those women, with whom I could not speak due to a language barrier, spoke to me through music.

This photo of some of the children of the area as stayed with me as well.  I had a copy made of this because of the exuberance of these children in the midst of having nothing compared to all our 'stuff.'  It seems our stuff so often drains our energy in subtle ways as it requires time, care, a place and then it's sold, given away or thrown away.  And where is away?  I have wondered what these girls did in the ensuing years and where they are today.   With the enthusiasm displayed in this photo I imagine them doing great things.

Then there was Kriti who would now be in her early 50's.  We traveled Europe on a bus for three weeks.

Do you ever have thoughts that you don't know you have until something occurs and they're revealed?   I didn't even know I was expecting a bus full of Americans until I met my group in a Brussels' hotel lobby.  I was one of five Americans on a bus with representatives of the world. What a gift!

I don't think I had ever met anyone from India at that time in my middle TN home.  Kriti was my room mate. She was traveling with her aunt and uncle.  Now I go to the grocery, to music events or to walk and it feels as if the world has come to me.  

As a sheltered young twenty year old, these are just some of the faces that helped me realize

The world is vast. 

There really are no strangers.  

We are so much alike than different.

And this photo taken while looking up from a boat in a Venice canal reminds me of something a friend said recently.  We were talking of the myriad of things that mothers do daily and she referred to the thousands of invisible hands that make the world run.  

Here near the end of International Women's Day I honor the millions upon millions of hands especially the hands of women that tend and mend this dear world. 

And I offer an heartfelt thank you to the women pictured above as well as the many women since who have loved and supported me and those who surrounded me as a child.

It is an honor to walk Earth in this time. 
 

-Dawn Kirk, The Good News Muse  8 March 2014
dawn@imaginetheshift.com