The concept of environment is one that has always felt very concrete for me. Until recently, when I heard that word I would think of things like recycling, Earth Day, whales, oceans and paper bags. I respect the environment, but I wouldn’t consider myself an environmentalist. However, when examining this month’s tenet, the idea of…
The journey through existence is always teaching us lessons. If we are observant, we can learn so much just from our personal experiences and those of the people around us. Interesting creatures that we are, people are often inspired by the stories of other people and their struggles and triumphs. Dramatic productions have entertained people…
Eve and I found a tiny bird egg while digging underneath a Blue Spruce this week.She carefully rolled the white egg over in her small grubby hands, tenderly inspecting each minuscule speckle. Then, looking to me for answers, she asked, “Where mommy-daddy bird go?” I could tell she was deeply troubled that the egg was…
April Tenet: “We live and promote a life-culture within the womb, the home, and our ecological environment. As women, we have the wonderful inborn capacity to create and therefore protect human life. We have the instinctive understanding that ALL life is unique and intrinsically valuable. This is our maternal power! Our simple yet refined model…
Our capacity to create and sustain human life is a tremendous power from which society can recognize and then begin to organize around.This framework challenges the current predominant social assumption that the sexed female body is less than fully human and therefore an inferior existence. Those words on the Big Ocean Women website stood out…
It was Barbara’s first child, and no one can tell the story better than she. “The pregnancy was a normal one. I was staying with my parents in New York while my husband, Sherm, was stationed in California in the Marine Corps. I woke up in the middle of the night. My parents took me…
The womb is the first environment every human experiences. When we were carried by our mothers, their bodies were our shelter. And when they breathed, they imparted to us the breath of life. During pregnancy mother and child exist together in a liminal space where they are simultaneously one and two. This is an exalting…
Carla Machado is the President of the World Organization of Prenatal Education Association in Brazil. Her organization carries the message throughout the world of the importance of the very beginning of life: conception, gestation, birth, breast feeding and taking care of children in the early period of life. In this video she discusses the gestation or…
The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women had a record number of registrants this year at over 9000. Big Ocean represented a small drop in that number, but I firmly believe that we were able to gather important information at the events we attended, make valuable connections with the women and men we met,…
