Mental reservations

Commenting on the oath of office this morning, a friend wrote that "having' mental
reservations' would actually be a sign of wisdom." I don't claim wisdom, at least
not on behalf of the part of me that speaks in words, but I want to speak my own
mental reservations: I want to believe in Barack Obama. The significance and
power of a nation whose wealth was built through the enslavement of people
kidnapped from Africa electing the son of a Kenyan to be President is not lost
on me. Nor is the reality that the margin of difference between the policies
promised by the new administration and those enacted by the last is a margin that
represents life or death for millions. And who could not be moved by Rev. Joseph
Lowery speaking the benediction that evokes a god older and more loving and
more real than the God of bondage evoked by Rev. Rick Warren?

But there are truths that burn so hot that the veils that once covered them can never
be repaired. And they keep me from celebrating wholeheartedly.

Barack Obama intends to keep 50,000 -- 80,000 troops on the ground in Iraq
indefinitely. And he plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

Those wars and the dozen proxy wars our taxes will continue to fund are waged to
ensure the continuation of the mindless growth demanded by the system we live
under -- the growth that Edward Abbey called "the ideology of a cancer cell," the
growth that consumes forests and mountains and deserts and lives and whole
nations and whole species.I don't doubt that President Obama wants to reduce
the damage done, to render the system a little bit less brutal. And again, any
diminishment of brutality means less suffering .

But at the same time, the commitment to continuing that brutality means an
acceptanceof more "collateral damage." President Obama said "we will not
apologize for our wayof life or waver in its defense." But only when we do finally
apologize for the wayin which we have been living at the world's expense
(including apologizing to ourselves for the ways in which we have cut ourselves
off from the living Earth) can we "put aside childish things" and learn to live in a just
and sustainable way .In this country we tend to ignore the fact that systems have a
reality and mind of their own, and that they always operate to ensure their own
survival. In pledging himself to the idea of America, President Obama
surrendered a part of his own will to the systems of control that bind themselves
together under that name.

But a witch bows to no one. And I will not offer my own allegiance to that system.
I offer my love and support to a man named Barack Obama wrestling to hold
onto his humanity in a situation where great powers conspire to rob him of it.
But I have no loyalty to President Barack Obama as he undertakes the work
of attempting to guide and steer violent systems of control. My own allegiances
are to mysel(ves/f), the truth, and the living universe.Those loyalties may brand me
as an outsider -- but such has always been the way of the poet and the shaman .
Like Tomas the Rhymer I will kiss the lips of the Queen of F(a)eri(e) and be
transformed, given the gift of a tongue that will not lie that makes it impossible
to ever again be at home in a world woven from the enchantment of falsehoods
repeated so often that we no longer hear the din or imagine the possibility that the
imagination can stray outside the bounds set by that wall of noise. The tongue
that speaks the truth cuts a hole in that wall, revealing a road that leads into the
sweet, fierce ,loving wildness of the heart. I am setting out along that path.

Poetic fragments in progress

Maybe its the Scorpio rising
that makes the smell of
sex and death cling to my skin
when I slip between worlds,

reminding you of when
I let my godself rain down
where apples rotted
back into rich dark soil

watering seeds
broken open by the heat
of burning cities
and melting concrete.

Your body never quite sure
what to do with the feeling stirred
when you catch my scent on the wind,

never sure what to do with darkness --
the last time you tasted it
it all ended in blood and fire,

but something in you hungers
for the metalic pungence of that blood
and the searing blue
at the center of the flames.

And the crescent moon
you wore around your neck
was born from blackness
to which it cycles back,

but not before it shines
in silver fullness,

moving the waters in me
and calling down the rain.

This is the year . . .

"If every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year."

-- Martin Espada, Imagine the Angels of Bread

This is the year we were born to live in.

This is the year when we begin to live as who we are, who we always have been at the core, who we were born to be.

The year we have prepared for all our lives.

After so many lifetimes of believing that the path of liberation lay in going up and out of our bodies, up and out of the world, this is the year we finally begin to come fully into our bodies, to know that their skin and bone and muscle and blood and nerve and flesh are the instruments through which our highest aspirations can be realized,

that the pleasures of our senses feed a bright and fierce fire that rises within us

and that this time instead of burning ourselves at the stake we can set that fire loose in the world,

burning away the illusions that have made people believe that there is no alternative to a life based on the brutalizing assumptions of scarcity, danger, and fear,

already we are watching the fire start to burn away the screens onto which those illusions have been projected as markets crash and an empire comes up against the limitations of its power to subdue the rest of the world through the threat or reality of starvation or bombardment.

Yes, the suffering around us is real. And yes, those still caught in fear lash out in terrifying ways as they falsely believe the fire has come to burn them instead of free them.

But at the same time billions are realizing they no longer have to surrender their wills to the disembodied spirit behind the burning curtain.

And the fire melts the pavement and the ash covers our feet and we take root again in the soil and draw up water from the Earth

and rain it back down to feed the seeds that have waited 500 years to be called back to life.

This is the year when we know for certain that those seeds will give rise to flowers and fruit again.

Rejoice!

Burning the robes

For most of my life, I have feared my own power and my own desires.

I have tried to suppress and deny and cloak them.

At a deep level, I have embraced the archetype of the priest in an attempt to contain them. I have worn that identity for so long that I began to mistake it for a second skin.

I sought an ideal of purity. I sought to lock my own desires away deep inside me, believing that I did not deserve to be loved completely and that there were parts of me that needed to be purified or burned away before I could show all of myself to anyone. At the same time I was afraid that allowing my core to be touched was a threat to my purity. Purity was my vestment.

The robe served to cloak my nakedness, to keep everyone from seeing the primal, virile, wild self that existed at my core, for fear that it might threaten or frighten or repulse people who came close to me. I did not believe that part of me could be loved or desired.

The robe also serves to shield me from the world, to keep out the air and sun and water that might feed that primal self while I tried to suffocate it out of existence.

Wearing that robe, I invited an intimacy that flowed in one direction. Come to me, show me all of who you are, and I will love you without judgement, I will support you through everything, I will take your pain as my own, I will pleasure you without expectation of return. But I will remain cloaked in my robe, hidden from you.

Sometimes, when I trusted a lover enough, I would shed that robe -- but the expectations and terms and dynamics of the relationship were already in place, and often those lovers would be confused or frightened when that all suddenly changed. And those experiences reinforced for me the idea that deep inside I was monstrous and hideous.

A very few saw through the robe from the beginning -- but convinced that if they saw deeply enough they would find something dark inside me I pushed them away.

It has taken me a long time to look deeply enough in myself to see all that I tried to conceal.

I see now that my wildness and strength are beautiful, just like the wildness and strength of the women who stir my desire.

I see now that in refusing to be seen and desired I have denied those who have tried to come close to me the very experiences I sought from them -- the pleasure of giving pleasure, the pleasure of feeling love and lust, the pleasure of touching deeply.

I see now that my wildness is at the core of my heart, that it is the wild part of me that is in love with the world and seeks to defend it, and that to tear out my wildness would be to tear out the beating heart that pumps my lifeblood.

Yes, I live in a culture that fears love, that fears strength, that fears wildness, that fears anything it cannot control.

But any fear our aggression I might trigger and inspire is far less a threat to my survival than my own attempts to sabotage myself.

I am throwing my robes on the fire.

And letting the rising flame illuminate me, revealing me in my nakedness.

The beginning is near . . .

Driving through Maine, "All Along the Watchtower" kept playing on the radio, seeming to capture the electricity in the air . . .

"Let us not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late . . . "

The Joker and the Thief.

It took Gary Shandling, of all people, to give a cogent analysis of the state of the nation during his October 3 appearance on "Real Time With Bill Maher." In a brief moment of lucidity, Shandling said that the economic crisis represented a victory for Al Qaeda, which with the September 11 attacks, provoked the U.S. into two disastrous wars that will ultimately cost us over a trillion dollars. Shandling said that the attack on the World Trade Center had been an economic attack that set into motion the events that led to the destruction of our economy. He then resumed slurring his words and leaning in uncomfortably close to Christiane Amanpour. The true Shakespearean fool.

As Daniel Pinchbeck observed, the attack on the Twin Towers was like a tarot card come to life -- the burning tower of the tarot representing the collapse of a world built on false premises.

Global capitalism would of course have come to this point on its own eventually. Any system based on the assumption of the infinite availability of resources -- and the need for massive military force to subjugate people around the world in order to exploit their labor, mine their land, cut their forests, drill their oil and water, and take their harvests -- will eventually come up against the limits of its own power.

Already, the concentration of more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands was creating tremendous instability. What remained of the middle class in the U.S. owed its continued existence to the easy availability of large lines of credit. Meanwhile, as a very small elite acquired unprecedented wealth -- to the point where they could afford to lose tens of billions of dollars, and so risk became a negligible factor, leading them to put huge amounts of money into the riskiest investments on the off chance of tremendously high returns. These investments expanded the credit bubble to the point of its inevitable bursting.

That was of course hastened by the siphoning of money into a substantially privatized war, rising gas prices as oil runs out, and the diminished ability of a military tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan to maintain "order" around the world.

George Kennan famously wrote:

"We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

We have now reached the next stage -- the stage where straight power has reached its limit. The U.S. is no longer able to force other countries to submit to its will. New power blocks are emerging -- like the alliance between the new governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru -- carving out space for social, political and economic experiments.

Empires don't die easily of course. As the economy collapses, there is fear of massive unrest at home -- and an ominous sign that we may be on the verge of seeing a level of violent repression not seen in this country since the early part of the twentieth century.

The Army Times reported on September 30 that:

"The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

"Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

"Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters"

This marks the first time in recent history that a full combat brigade has been assigned a long-term mission on U.S. soil. (Troops were sent to Pine Ridge Reservation in 1973 in response to the American Indian Movement's occupation of the site of the Wounded Knee massacre to protest the brutality and corruption of the tribal government on the reservation.)

The Brigade is subject to activation under an executive order that essentially authorizes the institution of martial law in the event of an emergency -- including an economic emergency. As Matthew Rothschild writes:

"'In Bush's National Security Presidential Directive 51, he lays out his authority in the event of a catastrophic emergency. In such an emergency, 'the President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government' and will coordinate with state, local, and tribal governments, along with private sector owners of infrastructure.

"NSPD 51 defines a catastrophic emergency as 'any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.'

"Notice the use of the word 'or' above. In our current circumstances, it might be more relevant to read the definition this way: 'any incident . . . that results in extraordinary levels of . . . disruption severely affecting the U.S. . . . economy.'

"President Bush could declare a catastrophic emergency today. And he'd have the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, well trained from its years patrolling Iraq, at his disposal here at home."

All of this marks the final phase of what Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos has described as the Fourth World War -- the war in which global capitalism, no longer restrained by opposition from the Soviet bloc, attempts to gain complete domination. Of course, in a universe governed by entropy, any attempt to obtain total domination courts disaster. As Marcos wrote in 1997:

"Unlike the third world war, in which the conflict between capitalism and socialism took place over a variety of terrains and with varying degrees of intensity, the fourth world war is being conducted between major financial centres in theatres of war that are global in scale and with a level of intensity that is fierce and constant.

"The ineptly-named cold war actually reached very high temperatures: from underground workings of international espionage to the interstellar space of Ronald Reagan’s famous 'Star Wars'; from the sands of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam; from the frenzy of the nuclear arms race to the vicious coups d’état in Latin America; from the menacing manoeuvres of NATO armies to the machinations of the CIA agents in Bolivia, where Che Guevara was murdered. The combination of all this led to the socialist camp being undermined as a world system, and to its dissolution as a social alternative.

"The third world war showed the benefits of 'total war' for its victor, which was capitalism. In the post-cold war period we see the emergence of a new planetary scenario in which the principal conflictual elements are the growing importance of no-man’s-lands (arising out of the collapse of the Eastern bloc countries), the expansion of a number of major powers (the United States, the European Union and Japan), a world economic crisis and a new technical revolution based on information technology.

"Thanks to computers and the technological revolution, the financial markets, operating from their offices and answerable to nobody but themselves, have been imposing their laws and world-view on the planet as a whole. Globalisation is merely the totalitarian extension of the logic of the finance markets to all aspects of life. Where they were once in command of their economies, the nation states (and their governments) are commanded - or rather telecommanded - by the same basic logic of financial power, commercial free trade. And in addition, this logic has profited from a new permeability created by the development of telecommunications to appropriate all aspects of social activity. At last, a world war which is totally total!

"One of its first victims has been the national market. Rather like a bullet fired inside a concrete room, the war unleashed by neoliberalism ricochets and ends by wounding the person who fired it. One of the fundamental bases of the power of the modern capitalist state, the national market, is wiped out by the heavy artillery of the global finance economy. The new international capitalism renders national capitalism obsolete and effectively starves their public powers into extinction. The blow has been so brutal that sovereign states have lost the strength to defend their citizens’ interests.

"The fine showcase inherited from the ending of the cold war - the new world order - has shattered into fragments as a result of the neoliberal explosion. It takes no more than a few minutes for companies and states to be sunk - but they are sunk not by winds of proletarian revolution, but by the violence of the hurricanes of world finance.

"The son (neoliberalism) is devouring the father (national capital) and, in the process, is destroying the lies of capitalist ideology: in the new world order there is neither democracy nor freedom, neither equality nor fraternity. The planetary stage is transformed into a new battlefield, in which chaos reigns."

Chaos is a dynamic force, allowing the emergence of the space where the "intercourse between creation and destruction" allow the emergence of new worlds.

The New Yorker ran a cartoon last year in which a fish with legs emerged onto the beach holding a sign that said "The Beginning is Near."

For most of us, no matter how radical our politics, imagining life outside capitalism is no smaller a conceptual leap than it would be for a fish to imagine life outside water. For five centuries, capitalism, and its underlying ideology which defines the world as a machine has defined our culture's shared reality. Even socialism accepted the basic assumptions of capitalism -- the assumption that the ideal path for humanity to take was the maximization of production, disputing only the questions of who should control the means of production and how the fruits of production should be distributed. We are now entering an era where it is abundantly clear that living a life based on those assumptions is a recipe for disaster in a universe where matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, and where the only economies that are truly sustainable are those which honor and embrace our places in cycles of life and death, give and take, where the survival of the individual is deeply dependent on the survival of the community and the planet.

Elements of the new world are already taking shape: growing resurgences of herbalism, homebirth midwifery, homesteading, permaculture, gleaning, and localized barter networks in the U.S., the creation of liberated autonomous zones by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and even aspects of the national projects in Bolivia and Ecuador where socialism, indigenous traditions, and participatory democracy are interwoven in the fabric of a different kind of society. Ecuador's new Constitution outlines concepts essential to the formation of sustainable and just institutions in a post-fourth world war world. Helga Serrano and Eduaro Tamayo outline some of the key provisions of this Constitution:

"The constitution combines a series of progressive traits that overcome some of Ecuador's current inequalities, discrimination, and injustices, such as the following: the balanced living concept (sumak kawsay), which implies living in harmony with oneself, society, and nature; nature's right to assure 'the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes'; national diversity and collective rights; the right to water and the prohibition of its privatization; food sovereignty and the permanent right to secure food sources; the right to communication, and access to public, private, and community media.

"The new constitution also has a chapter on the prioritization of national production in its economy. In regards to development, it recognizes the 'group of economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental systems that guarantees the realization of the balanced life, sumak kawsay.' This means that economic growth is not the only priority as a means to reach development; instead, it is considered an integrated vision. It proposes, among other things, 'to build a fair, democratic, productive, solidarity-based, and sustainable economic system founded on the equitable distribution of development benefits, means of production, and the generation of dignified and stable work.' (Article 276)."

All of this, of course, describes only a process of transition, a framework that creates the space for something new to emerge -- animated by something very old, the pre-capitalist understanding of the world as alive that was shared by Earth-based cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. An idea that was suppressed but never completely destroyed by the Enclosure movement and the witch burnings in Europe, the genocidal campaign against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the kidnapping and enslavement of countless millions of Africans.

As the culture that perpetrated that violence falls and its myth of domination and control begins to disintegrate, older worlds that never completely died are beginning to regenerate and re-emerge. Cultures driven to the edge of oblivion won't re-emerge in their original forms -- they will evolve in new forms that arise from the conditions of their re-emergence. In many places those forms will be hybrids that reflect the history of people ripped away from different places and different traditions interacting in new places. Exactly what will emerge is beyond our imaginations.

But it is abundantly clear that the beginning is near.

Fertile Darkness -- Fragment of a cosmology

In The Book of Herbal Wisdom, Matthew Wood writes:

"The lower world is spoken of in hushed tones. It is called the Underworld, a dimension apart from ordinary consciousness. Here, if we entertain the old tales, the root essence of each creature is found in its unblemished origin and potency.

The night that I met M., when I heard her speak of learning to listen to the plants, I imagined her with her ear to the ground, listening for something stirring, and I saw the dark world beneath the snow and frost where seeds lay waiting for water to melt into the soil and awaken them. I feel in love with that sense of openness and belief and listening.

In that strange moment of opening and discovery we had access perhaps also to the root essence of our own beings and the connection between them, in its own "unblemished origin and potency."

Time would change that and leave the origin unrecognizable.

But I hunger again for that same kind of opening, for the moments in which the fertile darkness of the underworld seeps into our own reality, and something takes root, the rhizome winding through the crack between worlds, pulling up water from outside of time.

I don't want to be that gringo . . .

Coming back from Oaxaca in December, 2006, I wrote "I don't want to be that gringo, bleeding all over the page . . ." And I still don't. . I was supposed to be in Oaxaca to tell the story of people living under an occupation, not to write about myself.

But its all coming back. In Minneapolis, when police in dark uniforms walked through the hall of our hotel, my heart raced and my whole body tensed and in mind they became indisinguishable from the Mexican Federal Preventitive Police (PFP) I had seen in the streets of Oaxaca. And last night, watching the video of Amy Goodman being roughed up by police in riot gear, I felt an uncontrollable rage coming over me.

I tell myself these are normal reactions. But in my gut I know there is something more going on.

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We arrived in Oaxaca shortly after the last street battles, when the barricades fell under the onslaught of riot squads and tanks.

Just over a month earlier, a plainclothes police officer had shot and killed an American journalist, Brad Will, who was trying to tell the story of how the people in Oaxaca had risen up against desperate poverty and violent repression. Just before we arrived, police announced plans to arrest other gringos who they accused of fomenting rebellion.

Oaxaca was tense and strangely alive. Tanks controlled the central square, the Zocalo. By day we met with people in hiding -- the sister of a man shot by police, members of the teachers union who had been beaten and jailed, human rights workers trying to find missing people.

By night we stood on the roof of the hostel where we were staying, drinking mescal and watching white pick-up trucks roll by carrying men in black uniforms armed with automatic rifles on their way to kick down doors of people suspected of taking part in the uprising, beat them, and fly them across the county to distant prisons where they would be tortured.

On our last night there, walking home from a restaurant, one of the white pick-up trucks passed just a dew feet away from us. The PFP officers had taken off their badges and covered their nameplates and wore masks over their faces. Their rifles were cradled in their hands. The truck stopped at their corner and I locked eyes with one of the cops.

For a split second I was certain he was about to point his gun at me and put me under arrest. But the truck pulled away.

I felt a wave of relief -- followed by the sickening realization that that someone else was going to be flown to the prison in Nayarit that night, someone who didn't have the protection of the U.S. consulate, someone whose torture would bring no Congressional inquiry. I was embarassed at my selfishness and fear.

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The next night it was all I could do to remind myself that the State Trooper standing next to me in the airport bathroom in Boston wasn't PFP.

For months afterwards, every time I saw a police car, my heart would beat furiously and every muscle in my body would tense. One night, passing a cop on a dark road in rural Maine, with one headlight of my van out, I flew into a panic. I concoted an entire scenario that I was thoroughly convinced was about to unfold -- cop pulls me over, brings up my record on the computer in his car, sees that I am an activist and pulls me out of the car and beats me, then writes in his report attacked him and he acted in self defense. The cop never pulled me over to begin with. I was three miles further down the road before I realized that I had never been in real danger.

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I am telling this story because my very resistance to telling it tells me it needs to be told.

I am telling this story because when I am gathering stories in Latin America and I get together with other journalists and human rights workers at the end of the day we drink too much.

And I normally hardly drink at all.

I am telling this story because often when I get together with veterans and hear there stories I remember Oaxaca and Colombia and Bolivia and the same thing happens.

I'm embarrassed to say that because my own brief forays at the edge of war zones are meaningless in comparison to a year or more spent in combat in Iraq.

I am telling this story because these past few days my body has felt very much like it did right when I came back from Oaxaca.

I am telling this story because there must be something compelling me to be sitting at a computer at 11:47 after days of not enough sleep.

Every bit of judgement I have is telling me this is all melodramatic and self indulgent. And every bit of sense I have tells me to delete everything I just wrote.

But instead I am clicking on the bright orange box that says "publish post."