[Mb-civic] THE FABRIC OF THE FUTURE

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THE FABRIC OF THE FUTURE

So: on the eve of the new millennium, does  quote this strike a nerve? "I 
think the biggest wound in our contemporary  psyche is fear. What cripples 
us from daring the New Day is unconscious  fear, the worst kind of fear, 
fear without content."

You can apply  that to the environment, the divorce rate, the stock market, 
the book  industry or your latest bout with an HMO. But as Jungian analyst 
Marion  Woodman puts it in THE FABRIC OF THE FUTURE (Conari; 460 pages; 
$25), the  fear people feel today is often "the loss of personal freedom" as  
corporations grow bigger and jobs fewer, as nations force people off the  
land, as "the reliance on reason and technology split head from body in our  
culture," as the old hierarchies dominate and go under.

Like a  billion other people, Conari Press publisher Mary Jane Ryan had been  
thinking for years that "the old forms were breaking down and the new had  
yet to emerge" when one day she sat down and wrote an impassioned letter to  
every woman "visionary" she knew, ranging from Caroline Myss and Joan  
Borysenko to Gloria Steinem, Starhawk, Jean Houston, Margaret Wheatley,  
Joanna Macy and Shakti Gawain.
To say that everyone wrote back with an  essay that will blow your head off 
is an understatement about the stunning  book that resulted. Here 40 writers 
from as many different fields tell us  that "most people know what is wrong 
in the world," as West African writer  Sobonfu Some writes, and most people 
know how to change it. But the way to  transformation must begin internally.

"The nuclear bomb everyone is so  impressed with begins in every cell in our 
bodies. We sense intuitively the  power we have to oppress whoever gets in 
the way . . . Whoever is our  'enemy' . . . the one to whom we have not 
surrendered. It follows us  everywhere, sleeping and waking, like a shadow." 
Thus reasons poet and  author M.C. Richards, who points to another emerging 
disaffection - "the  sensation of becoming a separate person, no longer 
identified with the  lover, the parent, the brother and sister, the group of 
friends, the place  the time, the society."

Ryan confesses that she wanted to bring 40 women  visionaries together in 
one book for the new millennium because "I became  tired with all the 
breaking down - I wanted to know what was breaking  THROUGH." Well, one 
inspiration after another certainly breaks through here;  one redeeming 
vision after another "birth of a new dawn." Browse in it,  think about it, 
read it to friends, give it as a gift: Ryan has published a  lot of women 
writers in her 10 years at Conari: This book is the culmination  of many 
careers and a thousand years of thinking.
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