That afternoon, we challenged ourselves to create three ‘hybrid’ zoom events:

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1. Charlotte Dennett talked about her most recent book., What Really Happened in Beirut? This took place outside on the lawn, with mixed audio reception.

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2. We interviewed Elizabeth Shackelford, a former State

Department official who has semi-retired to Rochester VT. She zoomed with us from across the valley. She served in South Sudan and became aware of the corruption not only in South Sudan but in the State Department under Susan Rice. She saw how the people’s needs and aspirations were denied and she wrote a book about it: The Dissent Channel.https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/broken-us-foreign-policy-portrayed-in-the-dissent-channel/Content?oid=31226435.

 

3. The next morning, we held a zoom conversation with Sameena Nazir, one of the founders of WILPF Pakistan, who had

visited us at the Gathering in 2018 but is now home in Pakistan. We discussed feminism and other verboten subjects.The conversation was edited into an article for our Peace and Freedom magazine which is on line only for the first time in WILPF history. https://wilpfus.org/resources/publications.

 

On Friday night, some of us gathered for dinner.

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Laurie told us  of a surprising family revelation. She recently did Ancestry.com and discovered that her father was not her biological father, her childhood dentist was. She found that her childhood classmate who had also registered with Ancestry was her half sister, as was her sister that she grew up with showing as a half sister.  That could only mean that her childhood classmate and she shared a father. Laurie had built some of her identity on her father’s Saami heritage, and had visited Sweden to do some genealogy there, as well as stay for some weeks in Jokkmokk with the curator of the Saami museum there….and now, how will she reorient her thinking about her heritage?  Laurie is a teacher of science and sociopolitics, but is also a spiritual person, more or less aligning her beliefs and practices with other pagans, viewing nature as sacred and our best teacher.  

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We also talked about our mothers. Barbara’s mother died when she was 19.  She had a dream that helped her adjust to her loss.

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Dorothy had dealt with the death of several friends in the last year.  She talked about the ritual of wiping their bodies with a special oil and folding them in a shroud.

 

 

The pandemic upended the formality of our meals.  On Saturday we made food together from the garden and added Dorothy’s delicious gazpacho cold soup, followed by more talking. Glynis stayed with us all the way. After dinner we walked around the barn and the Bone and Rag Shop and then we smoked a joint on the Captains Porch and went to bed at 10 pm.

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