This is more than $10,000.
This is a year’s rent — in some places
utilities included — to keep a woman housed.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a year’s mortgage payments — maybe
more, maybe less, depending on geography
and a thousand other factors — to put a roof over
the heads of children,
one or two parents, one or two pets.

This is more than $10,000.
This is artist supplies and studio space and
airfare and cost of living covered
to make room for the next emerging painter/scuptor/
illustrator who must take her show
on the road
to move forward and evolve as the goddess she is.

This is more than $10,000.
This is nine months of adequate health
and dental insurance for two women of a certain age
that keeps their bodies whole and their teeth
and lets them concern themselves with matters
other
than base survival.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a used hybrid car
that still gets more than 50 miles to the gallon — it’s not just
the down-payment, it’s a full price payment that
relieves the buyer of debt
so she suffers less each month.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a week in the hospital with a full battery
of tests for a sick child whose symptoms
are beyond the usual doctors’ explanations, plus
medications and follow-up visits
to ensure the child’s complete recovery.

This is more than $10,000.
This is 2,000 bags of birdseed — 20 years
of well-fed chickadees and cardinals and nuthatches and bluejays.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a new well and clean water and irrigation
for a village far, far away,
where drought and dysentery are rife.

This is more than $10,000.
This is bail money for a poor woman
who was in the wrong place
at the wrong time.

This is more than $10,000.
This is college tuition (at least part of it) for a working mother
who always wanted to finish her degree
but had mouths to feed instead.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a truckload — or more — of food
and medical supplies
that needs to get through 50 miles of
mountain passes before the first snows
of winter fall.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a year’s worth of property taxes
in a town that’s struggling to save its land
from developers.

This is more than $10,000.
This is several years of proper care
for magnificent, ancient trees
by educated arborists who do not use
trucks with cherry pickers or climbing spikes, and who
are losing business to “tree guys” who do.

This is more than $10,000.
This is the freedom to sit and think
and write and draw or dance and sing and grieve
and rejoice without interruption
till all that needs to come out… is done
and ready for the world.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a year’s hard labor, cleaning
or cooking or cutting or doing whatever it takes
to keep the world running, the children fed, the landlord appeased.

This is more than $10,000.
This is half a year’s work by a young woman just graduated
from college
who doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life,
but has found a job to make her parents
happy.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a month’s worth of work
by a geek-girl building technology
in a cutting-edge field that will change the world.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a week’s worth of professional services
billed by a highly-trained and experienced woman who is at the top
of her game
and at the height of her acumen and professional
powers.

This is more than $10,000.
This is a day’s work by a woman holding a seminar at $250 a seat,
training 40 people to improve their lives, further their careers,
survive in the world, or be far, far more than they ever
thought they could be.

This is more than $10,000.
This is possibility.
It is power.
It is choice.
This is the freedom to be the goddess you are,
the ability to support other women in becoming goddesses
in ways they never dreamed.
It is the right and the responsibility of conscious co-creators.

And it is just the beginning.

(c) 2007 By Kay Stoner