Monica Mody

For readers, writers, visionaries! Border-dwellers & convivial scholars! Students of complexity & holistic thinking! 

The Running With Wolves Reading Group is back. 

For January 14, we read the first five chapters of The Rainbow and the Worm by Mae-Wan Ho. 

Here I read an excerpt from my poem, “Homing Instinct.”

“Homing Instinct” was published in the other side of hope: journeys in refugee & immigrant literature, vol 2.2, online edition, winter 2022

Dear friends, I am only 45% away from my goal of raising $1200 in the next six days. Would you help me meet this goal?

WHY

I am reaching out for your support in going to the four-day national retreat of Standing in Our Power (SiOP) . The retreat is envisioned as the beginning of a yearlong Transformational Leadership Institute, where leadership models and paradigms based on the values, vision, and experiences of women of color could be reclaimed, shared, initiated, and lived.

By attending the retreat and the institute, I hope to build community, connections, and reciprocity with radical, spirit-led women of color across the world that are not afraid of their power and not afraid to see other women stepping into their power. I hope to engage deeply with personal and collective transformance and healing, so that I may fully step into and stand in my power—stand as a leader—in the company of my peer women of color, co-leaders. I hope for deep listening and intergenerational exchanges.

MY STORY

As a poet, writer, and scholar, I employ words, language, and ideas as a tool for consciousness-raising. My first book KALA PANI mediates and explores the entanglement between state oppression and intimacy. In poetry, I have approached themes as varied as menstrual taboos, urban use and deforestation, social protests and peoples’ revolutions, the shadow, wounding & healing, contact with spirit and the ambivalence this generates in the modern mind.

In performances, I have sought to imbue this poetry with the power of ritual. I have been trained in West African Dagara medicine and ritual, and offer divinations as part of my healing mandate. The last two years have found me conceiving and facilitating smaller rituals and other events for the community to come together in service of the Earth, the waters, and ancestors (such as through grief work). I continue to discern how I may serve those ones in humility. Through the past few months, I served as Assistant at the Office of Diversity, California Institute of Integral Studies, where I was involved in discussions and in generating resources around creating a more diverse, inclusive, and interculturally sensitive climate at the university; examining the privileges of whiteness and other structural positions assigned at birth; and facilitating difficult dialogues. More recently, I have found myself initiating dialogues on race and difference within my white-dominant spiritual communities in the Bay Area. My training and experience in these various roles has provided the foundation for the next stage of my becoming, where the sacred and the political entwine even more closely as I stand—in a circle of power, in my power, in my purpose, in trust, in relationship—my tools for contributing to social, economic, ecological, and consciousness changes at the ready, and being wielded—to create meaningful, necessary revolutions in the world. 

OPENING TO RECEIVE

As I begin to step into this phase of offering my gifts willingly and fully to the world, I must also receive.

This feels like a big step for me: turning to you—my community—and requesting that you hold this dream with me. With sponsorship and support from individual donors, Spirit in Action (the parent organization of SiOP) is able to offer a sliding scale structure based on organizational budget/individual income levels. 

For me, the cost of attending the retreat, including travel, would come to around $1200. I have already raised 55% of this amount, and need to raise the rest by Monday, Sep. 21. 

The retreat begins in Ossining, New York, on Sep. 25. With your assistance, I can become a more powerful agent for healing, liberation, and change. Would you help?

WHAT YOU CAN DO

✓ Contribute whatever you can. No amount is too big or too small!

✓ Share my campaign with your friends and networks: www.gofundme.com/monicamody