This month’s Natural Awakenings is a celebration of women and the feminine spirit. With it, I would like to honor a very special woman named Dana.

I reconnected with Dana when we moved next door to her parents’ house a few years ago—the source of many blessings, including the happy discovery that their grown daughter and I had been in the same high school class. Although we weren’t close in school, I remembered Dana as one of the really nice girls, a bit quiet and incredibly smart.

Unsurprisingly, Dana had become a remarkable woman. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she worked as a successful attorney in Washington, D.C. She married her college sweetheart, was a loving mother to two terrific boys, and still somehow managed to find time for regular yoga practice. We always looked forward to reconnecting during their family’s visits to Milwaukee. Our children became friends, and I found Dana a continuing inspiration as we chatted and found humor in the shared challenges of being working mothers raising active boys.

My last memory of Dana was of her cart-wheeling with the kids across the summer lawn and demonstrating favorite yoga poses. A few months later we found out that she was ill. Within 15 months she was gone, after a battle with adrenal cancer, on May 22, 2011.

Dana was on my mind when I recently met another remarkable and inspiring woman, Kathy Bero, founder of NuGenesis Farm in Pewaukee. Bero, in remission from three aggressive forms of cancer that threatened her life six years ago, discovered the power of “food as medicine” which inspired her to establish the farm for purposes of research and public education about angiogenesis-based medicine and angiogenic-inhibiting foods.

We are delighted to also share our conversation with Jean Houston, one of the principal founders of the human potential movement.. Houston has first-hand knowledge of the power of the feminine spirit and explains why women’s empowerment is pivotal in awakening humanity to an enlightened way of being.

So I would like to dedicate this issue to Dana, and to all the amazing, beautiful, loving and compassionate women I have been  privileged to know. Cheers to good women everywhere.

Embracing you all in love, joy, health and peace,

Gabriella Buchnik, Publisher