At the Root of This Longing by Carol L. Flinders

Author:Carol L. Flinders [Carol Lee Flinders]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061738210
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 1

Hindu Myth and Petaluma Reality

If that first instance of synchronicity felt like a gentle nudge—the coincidences around Julian’s age and mine when we wrote and rewrote—the second was more like being mugged.

I had been invited to take part in a conference on the Berkeley campus that was to commemorate Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. The planners of the conference were faculty members and students from a variety of backgrounds who had come together the previous spring, heartsick at the murder of a student, a young woman who had thought herself safe working late one evening in the Associated Students’ offices. (Her killer is still unidentified.) The conference had been envisioned as a means of extending Gandhi’s teachings on nonviolence out into the campus community—a kind of “seeding” operation. As it took shape, however, its focus had become broader and broader and more and more cerebral. The stated topic was “Finding Unity in Diversity: A Dialogue Between Religion, Science, and Social Action.” High-minded, but hardly relevant, it seemed to me, to the concerns of women students fearful about leaving their dormitory rooms after dark and angry at having to feel that way. I wasn’t sure what I was doing there until I discovered that I had been invited because a friend who had founded Berkeley’s Peace and Conflict Studies department, and who speaks knowledgeably about Gandhian nonviolence, had begged off and suggested I be asked to speak in his stead, presumably because I’d thought a lot about nonviolence, too, especially with regard to women.

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