MIAMI — I wake up too early, after only four hours sleep, still
charged with energy from the ritual. I go downtown to the
Wallflower Gallery to give a permaculture workshop for the Green
Bloc’s Solutions Forum.
It’s 1 p.m. I’m tired, so tired. I do fine on five hours sleep
but only four last night was pushing it. It’s been a long, good,
oddly calm day. The permaculture workshop is fun to do and I get to
show a short video Donna made about the Green Bloc and slides of
our ecovillage in Cancun and of some of the City Repair projects in
Portland where they transform intersections into plazas with
benches and community bulletin boards and giveaway boxes and
amazing sculptures. We just begin a conversation about where the
skills we learn in these mobilizations could lead — into
transforming communities and claiming spaces, neighborhoods,
villages, regions, as the Zapatistas have done in Chiapas or the
Movimiento Sim Terre in Brazil. And I would love to stay
all afternoon, go out to lunch and go on talking about community
building, but we have a meeting for the Pagan Cluster. So a group
of us walk over to the community garden, through the poor,
destroyed neighborhoods that surround us. Christy, who is local,
tells us that once this was a thriving African American community,
until they built a freeway through it and urban-renewed it into
oblivion. Many people pass us; all seem friendly but most also have
glazed, drugged eyes.
We get the cluster fairly well organized. Lisa and I have formed
an affinity group of two, No Rest for the Wicked, we call it. But
we decide to join in with the Vermont group, Burning Love. Lisa
will buddy up with Charles, because they both move fast and are all
over the place, collecting information, negotiating, if necessary
being liaison to the police. Nobody in Burning Love wants to be my
buddy, because they know if there’s trouble I will run toward it. I
ask Andy to be my buddy. We often end up together on the street.
While Charles and Lisa are slim and quick, we’re both big and solid
and slow, but we will wade into the midst of the fray, and shift
the energies.
We go back to the convergence center after a brief lunch of
Cuban stew and chicken gizzards, and lie down for a moment. Donna
tells me that food figures heavily in all my updates — but truly
it’s a challenge to find time to eat, so every snatched meal feels
like a small triumph. Just be grateful I don’t record every time I
take a pee — which is even more of a challenge in the convergence
center, with two toilets for a thousand people!
After the cluster meeting, we have a spokescouncil, the last one
before the action. It goes well. Truly, there is nothing much left
to decide, except to approve the action plan. Sara and I sing the
new song my brother and I have just written:
‘Come take back the streets, come one, come all,
To the Witches and anarchists masquerade ball.
For the power of the Empire is doomed to fall,
At the Witches and Anarchists masquerade ball.’
The action is as planned as it can be. I come home and nearly
fall asleep writing this. As always, this close to the beginning,
it seems like we don’t have the numbers we’d hoped for, that we
have a dumb and possibly suicidal action plan, that I’d rather be
home gardening. Lisa says, ‘I’m not doing this any more.’ She says
that at least once every action. I’m calm: I feel ordinary and
relaxed. At one moment, I think it will be a miracle if I’m not in
jail by the end of the day tomorrow. In another minute, I’m
thinking tomorrow will be calm and possibly dull, an ineffective
anticlimax to our weeks of work. But in any case, my own eyes are
glazing over as I type. Wish us well tomorrow — today. And good
night. May we be in the right place at the right time in the right
way, with the protection, the magic, the health, the energy, the
wisdom to due the work
Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of Webs
of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising and eight other books
on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality. She teaches
Earth Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and
activist skills, and works with the RANT trainer’s collective,
www.rantcollective.org
that offers training and support for mobilizations around global
justice and peace issues. To get her periodic posts of her
writings, email
Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
and put ‘subscribe’ in the subject heading. If you’re on that list
and don’t want any more of these writings, email
Starhawk-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net
and put ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject heading. These updates are
posted daily on: www.utne.com
and
www.starhawk.org
