Embers Glowing Hope in a Very Dark Time: The Spark that Began Swimming in Gilead
By Cassie Premo Steele, written in February 2023
I love fire.
As an Aries, the first sign in the Zodiac, I am a fire starter, a lead taker, a fast beginner.
I love the spark.
The kindling of wood in the mind that means a new idea, a new poem, a new book is on the way.
And I especially love the way that when I’m writing, the fire begins to feed on itself, as page after page is lit by word after word.
Some people call it flow.
That’s too watery for me.
It’s a conflagration.
During the collective quarantine portion of the pandemic, I began taking a writing course with Natalie Goldberg that included sitting and writing and listening sessions by Zoom with people from all around the world who were attending the course.
Hundreds of people, strangers, ordinary humans in their homes, connecting through the light of video conferencing.
Like embers glowing hope in a very dark time.
I attended the first large group meeting on a Wednesday afternoon. We started out by sitting together, silently meditating with hundreds of people from all over the world. Then we were given a writing prompt and we wrote for 10 minutes in our journals.
After silently writing, we were divided randomly into small groups of six or seven people, where we were supposed to read our writing to each other, and more importantly, listen.
Natalie Goldberg says 90% of being a writer is listening.
I mentioned this little lit coal of wisdom in my book Earth Joy Writing, which I’d published years before, but I never really felt its blaze in my belly before listening to strangers from around the world during a pandemic.
During that first small group session, there was a woman who listened so hard to what I was reading from my journal that she cried.
I wasn’t saying anything out of the ordinary. Just talking about the virus and how my wife and I had both been sick in March after our daughter came back from visiting New York City and how cases were spiking in our very red and southern state and how Trump wanted to take our marriage away and our grief and anger at the death of George Floyd and how we cut out brown and black letters spelling Black Lives Matter and taped it up in our front window and what it means to live as married lesbians in the south.
Ordinary topics to me.
The prompt had been, “I don’t know . . .”
The woman, a few seconds later, reached out to me in the chat and told me she was very moved by my writing. I wrote back, giving her my email address to contact me, and as soon as the class was over, she did. Something was kindled.
It turned out that we were both lesbian mothers of daughters and that our daughters were around the same age, and that she was an American, but she was living in Canada.
“I just feel so sorry for you there,” she said. “It’s horrible what is happening.”
I had not had anyone from outside the United States express this to me: how sorry they were.
It fired up something deep inside me.
She then asked if I wanted to be part of a small listening group with a few other members of the class. She said she could post something on the course board (which I’d visited once but felt overwhelmed) to see if others wanted to join us.
I said yes.
She asked if I thought it would be a good idea to focus the invitation on LGBTQIA people.
I said yes.
In addition to being a lesbian and a mom and a writer, she was a teacher and a leader, too, and I was able to sit back and allow her to do this.
Her listening fire had started all this.
A couple of weeks later, the two of us met with four other women by Zoom. We used the same structure as Natalie did in her classes. After checking in briefly, introducing ourselves and saying where we were geographically, we sat for five minutes, wrote for 10 minutes, and then read what we wrote.
No comments. No evaluations. Just listening.
And as Natalie said in that initial large group meeting, “Listen without judgment so you can allow the other to be free. And in so doing, you can gain the courage to be free yourself.”
Ironically, three of the women were in Canada and three in the United States.
A few weeks into our meetings, one of the women in Canada started crying during her check-in, saying she’d been watching what was happening in Portland, protestors being rounded up in unmarked vans by an unmarked, and violent, police force.
The three of us in the United States were not crying about this. We knew about it. Two of us were even women of color. We were concerned, of course.
But it took someone from the outside to bring the ignition we needed to see and feel what was happening.
When you’re inside something, it can be hard to see clearly until someone else brings in a light.
We started calling ourselves Sisters of Gilead.
Gilead is the name of the nation that the United States becomes after it is taken over by a misogynistic, totalitarian regime in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which became well-known in the years of the Trump administration because it aired on streaming services and was watched around the world.
I first read the novel when I was in graduate school. It wasn’t assigned for a course. I don’t remember many books by women ever having been assigned when I was doing my undergraduate and master’s degrees.
I read it the summer between my two years of getting my master’s degree, and I remember feeling like my mind was on fire.
The woman’s body, I realized, is a powerful thing. So powerful that men fear it and hate it and want to control it.
Because it has a power that they can never possess.
The power to give birth.
But as I began reflecting on the power of women throughout history, and the power of that one novel to ignite women from all over the world to their own present condition, and the power of our tiny group of women and the deep compassion that we were sparking for each other and in ourselves, I also became curious about the word Gilead itself.
And I learned that in Hebrew, it means “a heap of stones of testimony.”
It is an actual geographical space, yes, but it is also about what happens when we testify, when we speak and write and read and listen and tell the truth about the stories of our lives.
What we know. What we don’t know.
What we feel. What we cannot feel because the heat is too great, and we must wear protective gear.
Gilead first appears in the Bible in the Book of Genesis when Jacob and Rachel seek refuge there: “Thus he made his escape with all he had. Once he was across the Euphrates, he headed for the highlands of Gilead.” (Genesis 31: 21)*
It was there that Rachel hid the images that were sacred to her faith, now being overtaken by a new faith: “Now Rachel had taken the images, and put them inside a camel cushion, and seated herself upon them. When Laban had rummaged through the rest of her tent without finding them, Rachel said to her father, ‘Let not my lord feel offended that I cannot rise in your presence; a woman’s period is upon me.’ So, despite his search, he did not find his idols.” (Genesis 31: 34–35)
The woman’s role in Gilead is to keep safe what is under threat.
And she uses her body and reproductive power to do this.
“A woman’s period is upon me.”
She was menstruating.
It meant she could isolate.
Stay safe.
It was the red fire of blood within her that saved her.
And the stories of it survive.
This is how we survive during times of fire: isolation, deep connection with the body, adherence to a women’s custom, gathering with other women, speaking our truths, and listening so deeply that our tears water the ground so we can plant seeds and start over.
*Both quotes from the Book of Genesis come from the Catholic Bible, Oxford University Press (1995).
Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D., is a lesbian ecofeminist poet and novelist and the author of 18 books. Swimming in Gilead is her seventh book of poetry and is being prepped for release by Yellow Arrow in October 2023. Her poetry has won numerous awards, including the Archibald Rutledge Prize named after the first Poet Laureate of South Carolina, where she lives with her wife. Find out more at cassiepremosteele.com.
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