The Art of Women’s Connection

by Amanda Dunham

Women weaving between each other, adjusting candles, pouring water, adorning the table with beads and bowls and silver statues – It had me think, a Women Over Dinner includes the whole magic making experience. Deeper than that, women are constantly making magic.

I sat at an intimate table of three other women as I guided us through the questions. Each woman opened so quickly, tears and smiling. There was something about the dusky lighting of the room, the energy of all the women who’d answered yes to connecting over dinner to each other, vibrancy of the joy and the hushed tones of the hunger still unmasked.

The ladies would share about what they didn’t know what they were hungry for, or how to answer to its call. They’d share about their experience with their mothers, their children, the men in their life. They’d share their creativity, how they express themselves. Each woman had some synchronistic connection to another woman.

One woman was certain she knew the other: crossing paths through the same towns, was it getting her hair done or maybe at a bar? The other tells a story of the darker parts of her life, losing her daughter over a custody disagreement — the table is all mothers. One woman says to us all — she only knows how to make sure everyone else has what they need first. Everyone sighs a knowing tension of not being sure how to love the right way. Another woman on a journey for over a week of synchronicities from quitting her job to finding herself in this room with us, had delighted amazement bursting from her eyes — that feeling of constantly tumbling into the unknown washes over our table. We drink each other in, it’s like a salve on cracked skin from being out in the world of dehydration from connection.

After dinner was over, the room was drenched in a soft radiance. A rich phosphorescence, each object in the room having absorbed the heat and magnetism of woman connection.

The kind of relief that comes from expressing power, receiving power, and acknowledging power carries a substantial gravity. Like finally getting your feet on the earth, and anchoring into your body.

Of course, there is the ineffableness of an experience with women sharing their power. You have to feel it to know it. But it can move mountains.

Amanda has been a volunteer for Unconditional Freedom since 2016. She has worked with Free Food, the Prison Monastery Project, the Earth Program, and now most recently, the Women’s Movement.