I have stumbled upon an amazing site called Baring Witness: a global partnership of men and women who create words of peace with their bodies.

“Our mission is to promote non-violent community-based action by educating the public through media, web, print and film venues. Our aim is to create a peace-based culture of partnership between men and women, without blame”.

An Excerpt from the website:

It is no accident that Baring Witness began with women. From Nigeria to Nepal to the United States, women are impatient with the endless cycle of violence and war between people, between nations, between human beings and the earth itself.

It is no accident either that women would choose to get naked for the sake of peace and justice. For Baring Witness is about using the greatest weapon women have, the power of the feminine, the power of our beauty and nakedness to awaken our male leaders and stop them in their tracks. In this way Baring Witness is about heightening the awareness of human vulnerability.

By risking with our nakedness – our charm and beauty and vulnerability – in service of peace we are exposing the flesh all humans share. We are casting off the old dominant paradigm of aggression and restoring the power of the feminine to its rightful place as the protector of life.

Important as this is, Baring Witness is not just a means to protest against war. It is giving women permission to initiate change. It is encouraging them to step into equal partnership with men and to take equal responsibility for what happens in our lives and in our world. What if the American cultural norm of men initiating everything from courtship to war were replaced with awareness of the frailty of humans and the planet? My vision is a partnership society instead of the existing patriarchal society of aggression.

The Baring Witness actions have the potential to make a long-term difference in the way we relate to each other, women to men, nation to nation and to the rest of life – the Earth and all its creatures. By restoring the feminine principles of beauty, kindness and nurturing we are bringing the world back into balance. Truly, life depends upon it.

Baring Witness is a force in favor of change in the world. As more peace photographs are created and publicized, the power of the images grows and it might just cause the critical shift of consciousness that will save us all.