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For
twenty-five years, Kate Green — a leading empowerment coach — has helped
hundreds of people, nationwide, to discover their true paths. A North Carolina
resident, she spent two years living in a Cherokee log cabin, chinked with river
rocks. This is the same cabin which Clarissa, one of the characters in her first
novel, The Hundredth Woman, grew up.
Kate
has roughed it all over the world, often living with indigenous people for extended
periods of time. Over the years, she was fortunate to concoct a rich stew of universal
truths from her gatherings of their secret wisdom. Ultimately, she was able to
discern what’s necessary for a women to claim her unique life purpose. In
fact, gender expectations for both sexes were highlighted in a number of intriguing
ways.
Learning
from Indigenous Women
When
asked why she went to such lengths, Kate let loose an easy laugh. “Maybe
I’m a slow study, so I had to make my quest challenging and dramatic in order
to get it!”
Her dark-rimmed
gray eyes turned serious. “At first I didn’t realize I was studying
the difference between what the male spiritual leaders were saying and doing with
their followers, and what the women who tended them had to say, behind the scenes.
I certainly didn’t know that what I was learning would create the basis for
a novel.”
Whether
patting chapatis or tortillas or fry-bread as they laughed, minded the children,
fed soup to the elders, and gossiped, these brown-skinned women were slow to make
eye contact. But their apparent shyness didn’t stopped them from joking about
most of what Kate had to say as they slowly drew her into their warm circle.
Their
kindness soothed Kate’s aching heart with a restorative balm she had longed
for — but missed — in childhood. In addition to this marvelous healing,
she was also being gifted with an incredible honor. In a variety of different
situations, she would learn that a tribe was extending to her an intimacy and
a level of participation in their ceremonies that they had never before been offered
to a white person--and certainly not to a white woman.
Yet
as she sat with the women, whether they were squatting on dirt floors in the desert
or sprawled on metal chairs with bright, torn seats and trailing stuffing, at
plastic-covered kitchen tables, the women couldn’t help giggling at nearly
everything Kate said and did.
At
the same time, Kate says, “they tenderly guided me — as if I were a
very small child, though they treated me with great respect. They recognized that
I was a healer, too — long before I did, actually — one with whom they
would share their deepest secrets as I slowly came into my own. I fell in love
with the dry, permeating, fragrant heat of the fires — whether wood or dung
or mesquite.
“I
bounced babies, tended fires, swept dirt floors, and sliced so many vegetables
I was sure I’d turn into one. Yet something else was going on too, something
so profound and deep that at first it slid right past me.
“It
took awhile,” Kate says, “for me to understand that that was where the
most powerful healing was — the truest shamanism. It was with the women.
“And the men didn’t
even seem to get it. For the most part, it seemed to go right over their heads,
as if it weren’t even happening.
“As
if they were living in a parallel universe.”
How
The Hundredth Woman Began
With
her clients in a psychotherapy practice that evolved into coaching, she gratefully
utilized much of what she’d learned from her native friends. But Kate was
sworn to secrecy about revealing the origins and details of much of what she’d
learned. So she kept her vows of silence for many years.
Then
she found out that the time had come to share more.
When
she received this message, the characters in what became her novel, The Hundredth
Woman, began “visiting” Kate. At first they popped up here and there,
but soon she was besieged with their increasingly insistent demands to be heard.
It was a tricky period. During it, she reflected on her early days with native
people, including the following story.
When
she was gifted with some of the most important of her Native American teachings,
Kate was still in her twenties. At the end of a visit with them, the shamans who
had taught her so much of their wisdom wept when it was time for her to go back
to the city. This couple, a man and a woman, were white-haired, gentle people,
slow to speak and with faces that were deeply lined, like cracked clay.
Their
lifestyle was utterly simple. Homesteaders, their greatest treat was singed possum
tail cooked in the wood stove, from a possum that was tracked on foot and snuck
up on from behind. They were the most revered shamans in the tribe, the shamans’
shamans, the ones the less senior shamans went to when they needed help.
The
only time she saw them fight was when they were deciding whose medicine Kate should
have, his or hers. They shouted at each other, both in tears. But the old woman
was adamant, and finally her husband surrendered his will to hers.
By
now Kate was also sobbing. “Why do you give me your medicine?” she wailed.
“There are so many young people on the reservation who would be honored to
have it.”
“That
is true,” the old woman said. “But we have searched all our lives for
one to carry on for us, and this we know. Though this wisdom has never been entrusted
to a white person, you are the one who will make the best use of it.”
Looking
back, Kate now knows that the old woman was foretelling the book, The Hundredth
Woman. She was being gifted with medicine that had been passed down from woman
to woman for hundreds — perhaps thousands — of years. And the reason
this was done was so that women, and the men who are ready for it, could read
The Hundredth Woman.
“Why?”
Kate says. “So that women can have a chance to wake up to who we really are.
And make a stand — for ourselves, for future generations, and for the beloved
earth. Before it’s too late. Right now, it’s almost too late for us.
Certainly it’s too late for the species who are already gone, dying off at
a rate of one every twenty-five minutes instead of the norm, which not too long
ago was one every two thousand years or so. But we do still have a chance. And
that beautiful old woman clearly thought we can still do it, but only women can
lead the way.”
Big
Mom, Clarissa’s grandmother, is a character in The Hundredth Woman who
is loosely based on that beautiful old Indian woman who entrusted a confused white
girl with a very big task.
Hardships
and a Deeper Healing
In
order to have the time to write The Hundredth Woman, Kate had to give up
most of her private coaching practice. Simultaneously, a lifetime of chronic illness
began to overtake her as vital organs were seriously compromised, one after another.
She’s had to sell
her Cherokee log cabin chinked with river rock at the place where two sacred rivers
meet. Then she mortgaged her house in the city — probably for more than its
worth — wiped out most of her retirement funds, and doubled her client rates.
Why? To pay for astronomical medical bills — both alternative and traditional
— and the costs of creating time for additional rest and, of course, working
on The Hundredth Woman.
For
a recent year of particularly grueling treatment — that didn’t work
— she was incapable, physically and mentally, of working on the book. She
wondered if she would ever again have the strength she would need to get it out
into the world.
Yet she
states with undeniable conviction that that was the best year of her life, for
it was the year she had to give up on independence and learn receptivity. She
relied on friends (“my angels,” she calls them) to provide her with
the basics of life.
If
her friends were going to feed her and clean up after her when she soiled herself,
Kate decided, the least she could do was to accept that their kindness was based
in a deep, fierce love that she needed to let in. All the way in.
“Letting
in love completes me,” she says. “I could give love and then some, but
letting in — all the way in — that I am precious to those I love has
been the most amazing lesson of my life. Bar none. The circle of love is now complete,
spiraling and expanding with each inhale and exhale.”
Now
she has the energy to get The Hundredth Woman out, increase her coaching
practice to a more normal level, and reach out to the readers who are inspired
by The Hundredth Woman and want to take what they’re learning to the
next level.
All of which
has fulfilled the promise of one of Kate’s earliest memories. When she was
three, Kate remembers being in her sandbox in the woods on a clear summer day.
The sun filtered down to her warm cheeks through the trees high above and everything
around her seemed infused with light and trembling as she came to a terrible realization.
Kate’s
parents were very ill, emotionally and spiritually, from alcoholism and drug addiction.
Even at her young age, it seemed to Kate that the only sources of nourishment
they had were anger and the pleasure derived from inflicting pain.
Kate’s
naturally buoyant spirit had managed to propel her out of their reach most of
the time. But that morning in the sandbox, she knew she was succumbing to the
sickness surrounding her.
So
she shook her baby fist at the sky and made a vow that she would come out of it
some day. She would come back into the sunlight. Not only that, but she would
study how she’d done it and teach others how to do the same thing. Her life
would be about liberating herself and others from the darkness she would soon
be drowning in.
And, to
Kate’s eternal gratitude, it has been.
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