Mark’s image of lift is filled with wonder. Something was “lifted like a scarf on the wind,” he writes, and his grief went silent and he felt whole. He uses the words to capture a moment of grace. I recently came across the phrase “moment of lift” in a book by Mark Nepo, one of my favorite spiritual writers. Those moments always gave me a thrill-especially that moment of lift when the engines ignite, the earth shakes, and the rocket starts to rise. How can we summon a moment of lift for human beings-and especially for women? Because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity. “Twenty seconds and counting, T minus fifteen seconds, guidance is internal, Twelve, Eleven, Ten, Nine, ignition sequence start, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Zero. I can still feel in my bones the suspense of those countdowns. On the day of a launch, we’d all pile into the car and drive to the home of one of my dad’s friends-another Apollo engineer-and watch the drama together. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, in a Catholic family with four kids, a stay-at-home mom, and an aerospace engineer dad who worked on the Apollo program. When I was little, space launches were a huge deal in my life. In this introduction from The Moment of Lift, she talks about the significance of ‘the moment of lift’. In Melinda Gates’ debut book, Melinda recounts the many people she has met along her journey towards helping to empower women across the globe, and how this narrative has shaped her outlook on how a society with empowered women helps to shape humanity.

The moment of lift