>> this year for “bioneers" we did what we could to bring those visionaries, artists and activists who had the greatest influence on us, whom we look up to the most and whose work has continued to grow and evolve over time. there is no one who inspires me, challenges me, and whose example strengthens my courage more than the incredible playwright, author and women's rights activists, eve ensler. [applause]

>> as a social artist and activist, eve has consistently grown her vision and strategy to adapt to the lessons life has brought her into respond to the global pandemic of violence against women. a strong argument can be made that no one in human history has more effectively used art to further human rights and justice. her play, "the vagina monologues ," has been performed by countless women all over the planet and is likely the most widely performed and impactful play ever written. eve parlayed the unparalleled viral success of that play into building perhaps the biggest and most successful movement to eliminate violence against women and girls the world has ever seen. v-day, followed by one billion rising.

savvy, humble and open sourced in her approach, she made her play accessible to women and girls the world over. then, made one billion rising contagious by not trying to own, control or branded. -- brand it. she helped raise over 100 million dollars to fund thousands of project around the world, including community-based anti-violence programs and houses in such widely disparate places as afghanistan, haiti, kenya, egypt, iraq, south dakota and the city of joy. the now world-renowned women survivors of violence that eve founded in the war-ravaged democratic republic of congo. eve has done far more as an artist and create "the vagina monologues." she has written other remarkable plays, produced films, won

countless awards and written wonderful works of nonfiction and memoir, including her incredibly timely new book, "the apology," which she talks about today. it is hard for socially engaged writers and artists to reconcile their literary lives with activism, but eve seems to do it more seamlessly than anyone i have seen. she channels her boundless creativity into both her art and her advocacy so organically, that rather than awkwardly coexisting, they feed and strengthen each other. the result is powerful but gracefully crafted, totally engaged, fully embodied, truly revolutionary art. when she was stricken with life-threatening illness, she discovered the healing power of nature and has been a devoted eco-feminist ever since.

all of us have suffered in varying degrees in a world in which one out of three women are beaten or raped in her lifetime. but i have seen her grow ever more confident, courageous and bold in her vision and affective in both her art and activism. even more impressively over the years, and despite the global horrors that she has tirelessly been combating, she has become without losing any of work -- any of her edge or caustic humor, never more centered, radiant, wise and compassionate soul. i am so very grateful to call her friend, and to the universe for providing us and all women and men everywhere at this time, with the one and only, eve ensler. [applause]

eve: thank you, thank you. good morning, family. good morning, family! that is better. a couple of notes before i start. this is an offering, not a prescription. if it does not work for you, release it would if it does, excellent. when i use the word woman, i mean to include women, straight, gay, bi, queer, agender,. i was sexually abused by my father from the time i was five until tenant physically battered and almost murdered several times until i left home at 18. someplace deep inside i believed my father would one day wake up out of his narcissistic,

belligerent blindness, see me, feel me, understand what he had done, and a step into his deepest, truest self and finally apologize. guess what? this did not happen. and yet the look -- the yearning for that apology never went away. i could not tell you how many times i rushed to the mailbox believing that finally today there would be a letter with an explanation, closure to explain and set me free. it is 31 years since my father died. for over 22 of those years i have spent and been a part of a glorious movement, end violence against women, struggling day in and day out to put an end to the scorch. i watch as women break the silence, share their stories, face attacks, doubts, humiliation. opened and sustained shelters, hotlines. i have been part of a movement

70 years old began by african-american women fighting against the rape from slaveowners and white supremacists. there was a powerful iteration of me too. i have seen a few men lose their jobs for standing, a few face public human liege and. -- humiliation. but i have not seen any man make a thorough and sincere apology for domestic or sexual abuse. in 16,000 years of patriarchy, and i have done a lot of research, i have never read or seen a public apology from a man for sexual or domestic abuse. it occurred to me, there must be something central and critical about that apology. i decided i was not going to wait anymore, that i was going to climb into my father and let my father come into me and i was

going to write his apology, to say the words, to spepeak the truth i needed to hear. this was a profound, excruciating, and ultimately liberating experience. i have to tell you i learned something profound about the wound. i do not understand there is anyone sitting here today who does not have a wound they carry that has in some ways defined, guided or determined your life. what i learned writing this piece, when we step outside the wound, the radiation pours the rest. but when we go through the wound, it is very painful and feels as though we might die, but if we keep going we come to a point of ultimate freedom. i have learned about what a true apology is. we teach our children how to pray, the humility of prayer, the devotion, the constancy. but we do not teach our children

how to apologize. or maybe they say the occasional meager, i am sorry if i hurt you or if you feel bad. but what i learned writing this book is that an apology is a process, a sacred commitment, a wrestling down of demons, confrontation with our most concealed and controlling shadow. i learned apology has four stages and all of them must be honored. the first is a willingness to self interrogate, to delve into the origins of your being. what made you a person capable of committing rape or harassment or violence, to investigate what happened in your childhood, your family, in this toxic culture. in my father's case, he was the last child, the accident who became the miracle and he was adored. but i am here to tell you, adoration is not love. adoration is projection of someone's idealized self image

on you, forcing you to live up to their image at the expense of your own humanity. my father, like many boys, was never allowed to be tender, vulnerable, full of wonder, doubt, curiosity and yearning. he was never allowed to cry. all of those feelings had to be stifled, pushed down, and in doing so they metastasized and became what he called the shadow man, this buried creature who later surfaced as a monster. the second stage of an apology is a detailed accounting and admission of what you have actually done. details are critical. because liberation only comes through details. your accounting cannot be vague -- i hurt you or i am sorry, for i am sorry if i sexually abused you just does not do it. those words do not mean anything. one must say would actually happen, then i grabbed you by your hair and beat your head

over and over against the wall. this investigation into details includes unmasking your real intentions and admitting them. i belittled you because i was jealous of your power and beauty, and i wanted you to be less. survivors, and i know there are many here today, are often hunted for years by the why. why would my father want to kill his own daughter? why would my best friend drug and rape me? there was a difference between explanation and justification, this predates understanding which ultimately leads to freedom. one of the hardest things about writing this book was how deeply i did not want to feel my father's pain. i did not believe he had earned the right for me to feel his pain, but to be honest with you, i have remained connected to my father since the time of the abuse through my rage.

i was a permanent victim to his perpetrator and i want to say about my anger, i was very able to be compassionate to so many people in my life. and all sorts of countries and places, i always had compassion. but i found the way i talked about white men very just compassionate. -- dis-compassionate. i was stuck in a paradigm my father had designed and as my father's mother says to him in my book, anger is a potion you mix for a friend, but you drink yourself. feeling my father's pain and suffering, ironically released me from his paradigm. the third stage of an apology is opening your heart and being and allowing yourself to feel what your victim felt as you were abusing her, allowing your heart

to break, allowing yourself to feel the nightmare they got created inside her and the betrayal, and the horror, and allowing yourself to feel in c and no the long-term impact of your violation -- and see and know the long-term impact of your violation. who did she become or not become because of your action? and the fourth stage, making amends and reparations were necessary. all of this indicating you have made a deep and profound experience that changed you and made it impossible for you to ever repeat your behavior. what and why should one want to undergo such grueling and emotional process? the answer is simple, freedom. no one who commits violence or suffering upon another on the earth is free of that action. it contaminates one spirit and bidding -- being, and often

creates more self-hatred and violence. the apology frees the victim, but also frees the perpetrator, allowing them deep reflection and an ability to finally change their ways and their life. my father in my book wrote to me from limbo. it is strange, he was present throughout the entire writing of the book. i truly believe the dead need to be in dialogue with us, that they are around us and often stuck and they need our help in getting free. with this exercise, i believe now that my father is free. and because he was willing to undergo this process, he has moved to a far more enlightened realm. as for those of you who cannot get an apology from your perpetrator, i believe writing an apology letter to yourself from them is one of the most powerful things i have ever done and it can shift how the perpetrator lives inside you. once someone has violated you,

enters you, demeans you, they actually occupy you. we often know our perpetrators better than ourselves, particularly if they are family. we learn to read their footsteps of the sound of their voices to protect ourselves. by writing my father's apology i changed how my father lived inside me. i moved him from a monster to an apologist, a terrifying identity to a broken little boy. in doing so, he lost power and agency over me. [applause] eve: we cannot underestimate the power of the imagination. i have to say in these times we are living in, our imagination is our greatest tool. it is shifting trauma and karma that has numbed or frozen our life force.

in my imagining and conjuring in this book, the more liberation i experienced. when finally at the end of the book, my father or me or both of us, i am so not clear who wrote this book, my father says to me, old man, begone. it was exactly like the end of peter pan when tinkerbell says goodbye and goes into the ether. my father was gone and to be honest, he has not come back. [applause] i want to talk about forgiveness because i think often we survivors are all kinds of things, whether it is racial oppression, or physical oppression, for economic oppression, or sexual violence. we are told we have to forgive and get over it. i do not believe the mandate is ever on the victim to forgive, ever. but i do believe there is an alchemy that occurs with a true

apology, where your rancor, bitterness, anger and hate releases when someone truly, truly apologizes. people have asked me throughout the tour of my book, what will it take to get men to apologize? this is the $25 million question. i have to tell you it is a question underlying everything we are experiencing on this planet right now. at one point in the book, my father tells me that to be an apologist is to be a trader to men -- traitor to men. once one man admits what he did was wrong, the whole story of patriarchy will come tumbling down. [applause] so i say to all the men here, what we need now is for men to

become willing gender traitors and stand with us and apologize so we can all get free. [applause] there are so many apologies that need to be made. our entire country rests on on reckoned landfill. that is why it so easily becomes unraveled. think of the massive apology and reparations do -- due to the first nations people, furtherrape, genocides, destruction of cultures and ways. [applause] think of the apologies and reparations due african-americans for 400 years of diabolical slavery, lynching, rapes, separations of family,

jim crow and mass incarceration. i honestly believe that apology, deep, sacred apologies, are the pathway to healing in the new world. as i was preparing the stock, -- this talk, something difficult and miraculous happened. i realized there was an apology i needed to make. an apology that would force me to confront my deepest sorrow, guilt and shame. an apology i had been avoiding since i moved out of the city to the woods, where i now live with the oaks and weeping willows, lydia the snapping turtle, running water, fox, deers, and my precious dog pablo. this is my offering to you this morning. it is my apology to the earth herself. dear mother, it began with the

article about the birds. the 2.9 billion missing north american birds. the 2.9 billion birds that disappeared and no one noticed. the sparrows, the blackbirds, the swallows who did not make it, who were not even born, that stopped flying or singing, making their ingenious nests, pecking their beaks into moist earth. it began with the birds. hadn't we commented in june that they were hardly here? an eerie quiet descended. later they came back, the swarms in the huge ravens landing on the gravel, one by one. i know it was after hearing about the birds that afternoon i crashed my bike. suddenly falling and falling, unable to prevent the catastrophe ahead, unable to

find the brakes or make them work, unable to stop the falling. i fell and spun and realized i had already been falling, that we had been falling, all of us. crows and conifers and icecaps and expectations, falling and falling. i wanted to keep falling. i did not want to be here anymore to witness everything falling and burning and disappearing and choki and never blooming. i did not want to live without the birds or bees or sparkling flies that like the summer night. i did not want to live with hunger that turns us into desperation and gives us claws. i wanted to fall into the deepest, darkest ground and be still, finally, and they read -- and buried there.

but mother, you had other plans. i was 10 years old. fallen in the road, my knees scraped and bloody. i realized earth was something foreign and cruel that could end would hurt me because everything i had ever known or loved that was grand and powerful and beautiful became foreign and cruel and eventually hurt me. even then i had already been exiled, for so i felt, forever cast out of the garden. i belonged with the broken, contaminated dead. maybe it was the sharp pain in my knee and elbow or the dirt embedded in my new jacket. maybe it was the shock or realization that death was preferable to the sick tar coagulated in my chest. or maybe it was the lonely rattling of the spokes of the bicycle wheels still spinning without me. whatever it was, it broke, it broke inside me.

i heard the howling. mother, i am the reason the birds are missing. i am the cause of salmon who cannot spohn and butterflies unable to take their journey home. i am the coral reef bleached and the sea boiling with methane poison. i am the millions running from lands that have dried, forest burning or islands drowned in water. i did not see you, mother. you are nothing to me. my trauma-made arrogance drove me to that city, chasing a dream, chasing the pride, achievement to prove i was not bad or stupid or nothing or wrong. my mother, i had so much contempt for you. what did you have to offer me that would give me status in the marketplace of achievements and ideas?

what could your bare trees offer but the aloneness of winter? i reduced you to weather and inconvenience, something that got in my way. dirty slush that ruined my overpriced city boots. i refused your invitations, scorned your generosity. i ignored all the ways we use and abuse you. i pretended to believe the stories of the fathers who said you had to be tamed and controlled, that you were out to get us. i press my bruised body down on your grassy belly, breathing in and out, and i inhale your sc ent. i have missed you, mother. i have been away so long. i am sorry. i am so sorry.

i know now i am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bones, whispers and claws. i am part of you, this. nothing more or less. i am petal, stame, hide, stone. i am what has been here and what is coming. i am energy and i am dust. i am wave and wonder, impulse and order, perfumed peonies in a tree in the african savanna. i am lavender, dandelion, chrysanthemums, pansies, bleeding heart and rose. i am all that has been named and unnamed, all that has been gathered and all that has been left alone. i am all you are missing creatures, all the sweet birds never born.

i am daughter, i am caretaker, i am fierce defender, i am griever, i am baby, i am supplicant, i am here now, mot her, in your belly, on your uter us. i am yours. i am yours. i am yours. [applause] thank you. thank you. o7ñ;ñ;?k■ú■ú■úóçóçt■t■oóoóoóoóo■

peter: hello, and welcome to “focus on europe.” and we begin in russia, where each may, people mark the end of the second world war in europe. festivities highlight the country's role as a great liberator from nazi germany. but now, russia itself is pushing ahead with a brutal onslaught against its neighbor, ukraine. heavy fighting continues, especially in the east of the country. russian forces have stepped up their relentless attack on kharkiv, leaving ukraine's second city devastated. many smaller settlements across the east of the country are