I’ve fallen silent recently, mostly because a lot was stirred up by the workshop. Today I’ve been reading a lot of things that have been really inspiring–it’s so amazing to me how much the written word can do, how it can tear us and the world apart and then put us back together again. I want to share what I’ve read with you:

First, Hope in Common by David Graeber (which really needs to be read in full):

Consider here the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always act if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances, markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) …It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized communistically.

Next, The Love of My Life by Cheryl Strayed. One of the most difficult things about dealing with my father’s abuse has been the terrible loss–I can’t be close to him and, really, I never could. Strayed’s essay about her overwhelming grief after the death of her mother struck a deep chord in me, and made me cry. A lot. Here’s the opening:

THE FIRST TIME I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week. I was in a cafe in Minneapolis watching a man. He watched me back. He was slightly pudgy, with jet-black hair and skin so white it looked as if he’d powdered it. He stood and walked to my table and sat down without asking. He wanted to know if I had a cat. I folded my hands on the table, steadying myself; I was shaking, nervous at what I would do. I was raw, fragile, vicious with grief. I would do anything.

After reading this, I spent more time browsing through The Sun’s archives and came across this interview with Andrew Harvey, a gay man who’s been writing about spiritual and religious traditions for decades and now feels called to engage in sacred activism:

Harvey: …Sacred activism is the fusion of the mystic’s passion for God with the activist’s passion for justice, creating a third fire, which is the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve, and nurture every living thing.

Lawler: So mysticism alone is not enough? It must merge with activism?

Harvey: All mystical systems are addicted to transcending this reality. This addiction is part of the reason why the world is being destroyed. The monotheistic religions honor an off-planet God and would sacrifice this world and its attachments to the adoration of that God. But the God I met was both immanent and transcendent. This world is not an illusion, and the philosophies that say it is are half-baked half-truths. In an authentic mystical experience, the world does disappear and reveal itself as the dance of the divine consciousness. But then it reappears, and you see that everything you are looking at is God, and everything you’re touching is God. This vision completely shatters you.

We are so addicted, either to materialism or to transcending material reality, that we don’t see God right in front of us, in the beggar, the starving child, the brokenhearted woman; in our friend; in the cat; in the flea. We miss it, and in missing it, we allow the world to be destroyed.

I’ve been reading and really enjoying Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Here’s an interesting quote from it:

A political activist can take her answers from the current ideology of her movement, but an artist has got to dig those answers out of herself, and keep on digging until she knows she has got as close as she can possibly get to the truth.

What do you think?

I was just listening to BBC radio and the announcer said, basically, “The global financial crisis has led to the questioning of capitalism itself, by some.” I’m glad the BBC is acknowledging that this is happening, and that more and more people seem to be realizing, hey, maybe a system predicated on endless growth isn’t the best plan in a finite world. But, darling, some of us have been questioning capitalism for a long time. Have you met my friend Emma?

I wrote this in my diary a week or so ago, and I’ve been meaning to post it since then:

it hurts so bad but i can and will endure. i am deeper and stronger than the violence or the shame or my father’s twisted little games. i am a tree. i am a snake, an egg, a golden swan. i am ice and snow and change. i am spring’s green pull to the surface. i am the ocean, depths and sparkling surface at once. i am the goddess and i can assume a thousand forms, a thousand retreats and transformational havens in the face of violence, a maiden turned to tree, seeds hard and concealed ‘neath soil in winter’s razing spite. i am the goddess and i am reborn in a thousand ways under the sun’s warm kiss, seeds sprouting green and vibrant, bark turned supple and vulnerable once more, able to feel the sweet breeze beneath my toes, secrets unearthed, monsters welcomed home and made whole by love love love, the safe touch of a friend’s hand encircling my own. i am the goddess and i can not only live through hell; i can make flowers blossom there.

So, my post on becoming post-vegetarian has gotten the most hits of anything I’ve written here. It seems like there is considerable interest in the topic, and I haven’t seen much information about it online. If you do have any links of interest, please share them in the comments. I’m even more interested in hearing your stories. I’ll post the most interesting ones. Here are some questions to consider:

Why did you decide to start eating meat again?
What choices do you make regarding food?
What have your post-vegetarian experiences been like?
(How) has your identity changed with this dietary change?
How have other people in your life responded to this change?

This post is one day late.

Today, May Day, is a celebration of desire, of the sacred yearning of earth for sky, trees for air, fire for wood, flesh for flesh. As my emotions continue to flow out from my recent retelling of the full narrative of when my father molested me, desire has come through amidst the pain, pleasure and pain all tangled together like silk sheets and barbed wire, like water and poison. One of my tasks is to simply allow these emotions to be, as they are, in the wide open circle of clear eyed acceptance; another task is to learn to separate them, to strain out the poison, to unravel the lies, to dispel the trap he put me in. Both of these approaches are needed for my ultimate goal of reclaiming the sacred birthright of my sexual pleasure.

My father’s act of abuse twisted my desire in at least two ways. First, he literally told me that he was raping me because I wanted it; this victim-blaming burned the message into me: desiring men is dangerous and they will hurt you if they know about it. Of course, I didn’t actually want my father to have sex with me; it was his own desire, displaced, pushed away and bottled up by continuing internal violence and then projected onto me, that he saw reflected in my eyes. He made his illusion into a self-fulfilling prophecy though, touching me in ways that brought both pleasure and pain, forcing me to touch myself in those ways. This is the second way that he twisted my desire, wrapped it up with violence and sealed it with black waxy hate. By turning the natural pleasure of my body against me, he severed my natural trust in my body and made my inborn joy into something to fear, something to watch lest it betray me, something to push down and run away from, screaming, a monster.

These dynamics are, unfortunately, hardly uncommon. Many abusers intentionally inflict pleasure on their victims. One effect this has is to bind the victim and abuser together in a netherworld of shame and silence; my father told me that if I told anyone, they would know that I was a faggot and blame me for the abuse. Although I know now that any basically aware person would never ascribe responsibility for an adult’s abuse to their five year old victim, I did not know this when I was a five year old.

This is what my experience has been like, remembering: waves of pain, pleasure, and deep discomfort, feeling turned on and then scared and wounded, “I don’t want this to be happening,” and a voice responding, angry, forceful, my father’s voice inside my head, “Yes, you want it, you dirty faggot.” And the fact that, in a way, I did enjoy it creates emotional confusion, “Maybe he was right,” and of course that’s what he wants. It’s no accident that my father’s rape made it nearly impossible to trust myself, my own perceptions, my very reactions, my very flesh and bones, the world itself. If something so shattering could appear out of nowhere, how could I know for sure that walls would not melt, that teeth would not jump out of shadows to bite me, that anyone could be counted upon as safe? When I was a few years older, I had a persistent daydream that everyone in the world but me was an alien and they would revert to their monstrous, blobby forms when I was absent, assuming human shapes only when necessary to disguise their true nature from me. I imagined that there were secret sensors hidden under the floor tiles in our kitchen, in the stone path in our backyard, to alert the aliens to my approach. These fantasies made me feel anxious and slightly sick, but I felt compelled to create them. Yes, one of the reasons I write speculative fiction is because my own childhood felt unreal, because the only metaphors strange enough to bridge the as-yet-unremembered trauma, to bring as many of the fractured pieces of me as close to back-together as possible, came from science fiction and fantasy, horror and mythology.

Now, after memory’s return, I am trying to take this view: although my father should never have been sexual with me, the pleasure I felt was not intrinsically bad, anymore than the deer’s hunger for the poisoned salt lick is intrinsically bad, or the explosive exuberance of the minerals in gunpowder, though it may be used to kill and main and oppress. No, the pleasure I felt was part of that vast holy river, that rolicking orgasmic flood spreading out from the Goddess’s first orgasm, the Big Band, spreading out through time and space to create worlds and galaxies, spinning clouds and trees and fish and you and me. As I allow myself to feel all of my emotions, to inhabit all of my heart and mind and body once more, I release the pain and shame, the lies and distortions of my father and I reclaim my pleasure, my sex, my connection.

I am the kiss between earth and heaven
I am the song between sky and ground
I sing for myself
And for the world we’re making
Nothing is lost that can’t be found

Via Infoshop:

CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
2nd Annual FINDING OUR ROOTS: Anarchist Organizing in the Midwest

We are seeking workshop proposals for the second annual Finding Our Roots conference, to be held in Chicago April 25-27, 2008. This year’s conference topic is Anarchist Organizing in the Midwest.

Workshops should address any aspect of the ways in which anarchists do, can, or should organize in our region. Central questions to consider when formulating workshop ideas:

*How do we organize ourselves as anarchists?
*How can we organize across diverse communities and political tendencies?
*What does it mean to organize locally as communities, as cities, as a region?

We strongly encourage proposals covering intersections between anarchism and other communities of resistance. Potential topics include Queer resistance, anti-racist organizing, labor/workplace organizing, organizing by and with communities of Color, neighborhood organizing, gender equality, transportation rights, environmental justice, health care, housing and household-based organizing, anti-military/anti-recruitment campaigns, prison abolition and prisoner support, anti-hunger/food redistribution campaigns, organizing against sexual violence, media activism, student organizing, and any other area in which Midwest anarchists are organizing.

Proposals should be NO MORE THAN ONE PAGE and should include:

- Workshop title
- Your name and contact info (and those of workshop presenter(s) if this isn’t you ¡V though please make sure you have confirmed with all presenters BEFORE you volunteer them)
- Specific area(s) of organizing/activism covered (see above list)
- Detailed workshop description, including an explanation of how your workshop fits into the topic of Anarchist Organizing in the Midwest
- Questions to be posed/answered in the workshop
- Main workshop goals
- Workshop format (Will it be an open discussion? Panel/roundtable? Lecture followed by Q&A? **If workshop will involve a presentation followed by discussion/Q&A, please consider how much time you will devote to each.)
- Any special materials or equipment (ie, audiovisual) you will need
- BRIEF reading list [optional]

Workshops are one hour and fifteen minutes (75 minutes) long. Workshops will be scheduled in 90-minute blocks, which INCLUDES a 10-15 minute break between workshops. We ask that presenters be diligent about staying within this time frame. If you feel you need more time for your workshop, please explain why, and we will consider allotting a longer slot.

Submit proposals to: chicagoanarchisttheory@riseup.net
Proposal deadline: March 1, 2008

www.mayfirst.wordpress.com

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I was displeased when I saw this Google Analytics map of the site visitors to The Bilerico Project, because of it’s inaccurate depiction of Michigan as a single, strange lump rather than two peninsulas separated by the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. Now, I can imagine that Google Analytics choose to depict Michigan in this way in order to avoid confusion about the two peninsulas being separate states. And I admit that it is partially native pride in Michigan’s unique shape that inspires my concern. But, seriously, in a nation that is embarrassingly geographically illiterate and dangerously ecologically unaware, do we really want to create maps that inaccurately erase enormous, irreplaceable lakes that are facing multiple, serious crises?

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because I can’t find my own

John Ross: On Being a Zapatista Where You Live

Treesong: Light My Fire

What would the suburbs of Chicago have done with a young ecstatic pagan anarchist revolutionary? They probably would have given me psychiatric meds against my will and crushed what little spirit I managed to pull through those times of suburban isolation.

So, I put my passions in a bottle and cast them out to sea…

…Finally, a year and a half ago, I had a spiritual experience in which I let go of the final major barrier to embracing my heart’s passion. Ever since then, I’ve felt various shifts in my life as I’ve started bringing more and more of that passion back into my body, my personality, and my social and community life…

…with each passing day, I feel it more clearly. I feel it more clearly because the flame within is burning more brightly than ever, and it’s the flame that sets me free. No chains can bind me now; no walls can contain me now; no amount of corporate and government influence can convince me that the love in my heart should be extinguished. This love is who I am, and it’s what I have to offer to the world. It is wild and untameable, and it’s only a matter of time before I find myself once again reinvented by the burning of this flame within. Everything that is real about me will shine more brightly… and everything that I’ve held back — everything that is holding me back — will be consumed by the flames…

Barbara Ehrenreich: Reclaiming What Makes Us Human (via Hecate’s blog)

This is the real bone of contention between civilization and collective ecstasy: Ecstatic rituals still build group cohesion, but when they build it among subordinates–peasants, slaves, women, colonized people–the elite calls out its troops.

In one way, the musically driven celebrations of subordinates may be more threatening to elites than overt political threats. Even kings and colonizers can feel the invitational power of the music. Why did 19th century European colonizers so often describe the dancing natives as “out of control”? The ritual participants hadn’t lost control of their actions and were in fact usually performing carefully rehearsed rituals. The “loss of control” is what the colonizers feared would happen to themselves. In some cases, the temptation might be projected onto others, especially the young. In the fairy tale, the Pied Piper used his pipe to lure away the children from a German town. Rock ‘n’ roll might have been more acceptable to adults in the ’50s if it could have been contained within the black population, instead of percolating out to a generation of young whites…

While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music invites everyone to the dance; shared food briefly undermines the privilege of class. As for masks, they may serve symbolic, ritual functions, but, to the extent that they conceal identity, they also dissolve the difference between stranger and neighbor, making the neighbor temporarily strange and the stranger no more foreign than anyone else. No source of human difference or identity is immune to the carnival challenge: cross-dressers defy gender just as those who costume as priests and kings mock power and rank. At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses–of gender, ethnicity, tribe and rank–and into a brief utopia defined by egalitarianism, creativity and mutual love. This is how danced rituals and festivities served to bind prehistoric human groups, and this is what still beckons us today.

Starhawk: Four Years Ago Today

To be absolutely honest, I hate marching around in the street chanting the same slogans I’ve been chanting for forty years. I’m going, anyway. I’m so tired of die-ins and sit-ins and predictable speeches shouted over bullhorns that I could scream if I weren’t hearing in my ears the far more bitter screams of the dying. I’m even tired of trying to drum and sing and make the protest into a creative act of magic. It’s not creative—it’s a damn protest, and I have real creative work to do: books to write, courses to teach, and rituals to plan. Nonetheless, Sunday will find me trudging along on the peace march and Monday will find me lying down on Market Street in some picturesque fashion with a group of friends and our requisite banners.

Why? So I can look myself in the mirror without flinching, and answer to those hundred thousand ghosts. But more than that, because it’s time, friends. Public opinion has turned—now we must make it mean something real. It’s time to send the Democrats back to their committee meetings saying, “Hell, I can’t even get into my office—the halls are blocked and the streets are choked with people angry about this war.” Time to send the Republicans off to their caucuses murmuring quietly “If we continue to support this disaster we’re going to lose every semblance of power or popular support we once possessed.” Time to let the rest of the world know that dissent is alive and well here in the U.S.A. Time to regenerate a movement as nature regenerates life in the spring, with the rising energy that alone can turn our interminable trudging into a dance of defiance.

You come, too. You can skip out on the boring speeches and make cynical remarks—but get your feet out on the street this weekend, somewhere.

This spring, may you find balance, inspiration, and new growth.

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via There Is No Box

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