Emu was a monkey. She lived on a small island with about a hundred of her kind. Barely visible on the horizon were other islands with more monkeys. She never saw them, nor did they ever see her. But they were of the same species and shared similar lives and behaviors.
Of course, it was not her mother who had named her "Emu." That was the scientists' doing. They arrived one day in a large ship and anchored a short distance off the coast. A few of them had gotten into a rowboat and paddled to shore. There they placed a pile of sweet potatoes and departed. From their ship they watched, as scientists are wont to do, and observed the behavior of the monkeys.
Now Emu and her clan had never seen sweet potatoes, but they soon learned to eat them and like them. Every day the scientists paddled ashore to drop off a pile of sweet potatoes and every day the monkeys would come to the beach and eat them.
One day, a wave splashed up and took a potato that Emu wanted. She went after it and retrieved it. She found that the salt from the sea tasted good on the potato. The next day, she took a potato and deliberately washed it in the surf before eating it. Soon, she showed other monkeys how to wash the potatoes. Before long, all the monkeys on the island were washing their potatoes before eating.
The scientists noticed how the monkeys on Emu's island had changed their behavior because of Emu's example. All along, they had been feeding the monkeys on the other islands as well and observing them in the same fashion. What surprised them, however, is that, soon after all the monkeys on Emu's island started washing their potatoes, monkeys on the other islands started doing the same. Somehow, the learned behavior of one tribe had spread to the others.
Far away from the islands of the monkeys, Emma sat in circle with the other women. They began by passing the talking stick and checking in with each other. In this way they brought themselves authentically present to the circle. By their attention, they validated and valued each other. They called the directions and invoked the Earth Mother. Emma felt nurtured here. The circle was a home of shared vision and love.
Yesterday Emma had listened to the presidential debate — men in suits contesting for the right to run her life. While they spent millions on campaign ads, she was knitting sweaters for the battered women's shelter. Her partner, Lena, was helping to clean the trash out of a small stream near their home. Rachel and Becky were working at the organic food co-op, while Ann was mowing the lawn for old mother Hilda, who was too frail to do household chores. "Mother" Hilda was reading stories to a clutch of bright-eyed children who laughed when she cackled.
Sometimes Emma felt powerless. The world of women around her seemed small compared to the blare of political rhetoric and the hierarchy of patriarchal domination. Miriam and Pamela were organizing activists for a demonstration. Barbara was out registering voters and Susan wrote letters to the city council. But what did it matter? What difference would getting involved make?
Then Emma felt the tug of a deep stirring within her consciousness. Images of suffragettes and abolitionists flashed in her mind. Brave women from history, and millions more whose struggles and courage were not recorded in books, called from beyond her time, her space. They called from some collective cellular memory outside Emma's personal experience. In circle, she felt connected to these voices calling from miles away and centuries past. In circle, she felt connected to all the other circles around the world and to the ancient circles of women from the pre-patriarchal past.
Emma felt strength and healing; Emu washed her potato. Both had tapped into the archetype of their species to change and to be changed by it. When a hundred monkeys washed their potatoes, a critical mass was formed which changed the behavior of monkeys. When a million circles of women meet to check in, to value themselves and validate each other, activists and nurturers, young and old, they will change the behavior of humans.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, is the author of The Millionth Circle. Drawing on the story of "the hundredth monkey," which inspired anti-nuclear war activists, "the millionth circle" depends on the simple hypotheses that when a critical number of people change how they think and behave, the culture will also and a post-patriarchal era will begin. She gave the keynote address to open the eighth Women of Wisdom conference last February at Seattle Unity Church in Seattle.
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