Miami Dispatch: 11/20

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The fence is made of steel, in vertical sections mounted on a wide horizontal base so they cannot be easily tipped. Behind the fence, cherry pickers make elevated gun towers where armed police stand waiting to shoot at anyone who attempts to climb.

I am looking for a spot where the cluster can hold some space and do a spiral dance, and I am so tired from days and days of little sleep that I am half in trance. So I'm in a kind of duel consciousness, part of me alert and aware and scanning for danger and part of me watching the whole scene from somewhere deep below, seeing the energies and the spirits beneath the surface. We're right in the spot where two days ago I felt huge energies gathering, and now I feel nothing. It's as if the whole section is energetically dead, a blank spot in the universe. Of all the things that are to happen this day, this is probably the most frightening, because it is completely out of my experience -- as if the area were being bombarded with some kind of energy-dispersing ray, a field of gray cast by the dementors, a pall of apathy and hopelessness and dull despair.

Nevertheless, we form up a circle and begin singing and chanting. Some energy builds. I am drumming and Nix pulls out her finger cymbals and begins to dance. She's in her 60s, with bright red hair and a pointed, feathered hat, and she's like a spot of brightness and good humor in the midst of the gray, the metallic sound of her cymbals cutting through the haze. A corps of young drummers is nearby, and I get Geneva to run and recruit them and bring them into the center of the circle, and Ruby leads the spiral as we sing, "No army can hold back a thought, no fence can chain the sea. The earth cannot be sold or bought, all life can be free."

The energy inside our circle starts to feel good, and to build power. I am thinking we are going to have an easy day, that the strategy of the police will be to let us have this space but keep us away from other sections of the fence, and the big challenge will be keeping the group from simply getting bored and wandering off. So I decide to keep the spiral energy going instead of building it into a peak, and nod at Ruby to keep dancing in and out. I am drumming in the center to help keep the drum corps and the chanting in synch, and the energy of the group bathes me. I decide to use it to investigate the weird deadness of the area, and drop down into trance. (This is a kids-don't-try-this-at-home technique -- meaning I wouldn't recommend it for someone who isn't experienced in both deep trance and street actions, because it requires being able to make a major shift in consciousness instantly without getting the psychic equivalent of the bends.) What I see when I drop down are images of corpses, gray, bloated corpses, and a sense of an utter, soulless, hopeless lack of life. And I'm thinking about the Judgment card. Maybe our task is somehow to wake the dead. But there's a sickening feel to this energy. I start to cough and almost vomit, wondering if perhaps they are using some new neurotoxin on us or bombarding us with some sci-fi ray, but I feel more like I'm simply nauseated by contact with this energy. But I keep breathing it through, and releasing it, and calling on life energies to come in and cleanse it. There's an emptiness here so deep, like an energetic black hole, that I don't know what can fill it. I start invoking Oya, orisha of wind and fire, the sudden storm, and suddenly I feel power flooding through me and the energy of the drums and the chant begins to build and grow.

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