“WE DON’T NEED GUNS, WE NEED FIRE EXTINGUISHERS” —The EMT shouting this while police held his gun on Aaron as he burned. That is what we’re all screaming.
It is clear: the world is aflame, and only our sacred grief and unlawful love can put the fires out.
From the burnt skin of Hind to the burnt skin of Aaron—these are the fires around which we must gather to return to the web of life.
It is clear: only our creative maladjustment to evil systems can move us off the extinction trajectory.
It is clear: only our gratuitous disobedience can take us off this Highway of Death.
It is clear: only our divestment from Empire can call the hungry ghosts home.
It is clear: we must be dissenters of ‘law,’ in order for sanity to return.
It is clear: Only by becoming traitors to this system, can a new system grow.
It’s clear: only our deep noncooperation with ‘authority’ can put the fires out.
It is clear: the world is aflame, and only our sacred grief and unlawful love can put the fires out.
Dear treehuggers, river goddesses, forest bathers, redwood worshipppers, ecogrievers, earth whisperers, sacred ritualists, nature connectors, and wilderness peeps:
Happy Martin Luther King Day!
100 days (and 75 years) in and many earth lovers and eco folks are still too silent about GENOCIDE.
We need more (white) healing practitioners courageous enough to offer their medicines in ways that speak truth to mass suffering & move us toward collective liberation from Empire. We need more of us listening to people of color, voice of the Global Majority, more of us making the connections between imperial policy at home and violence abroad, BOLDLY speaking & showing up to STOP THE MADNESS.
We need of us dropping deeper into our sacred roles as Great Turners in this COLLECTIVE INITIATION.
As Tibetan Penpa Dolma, of Decolonial Yoga of Inconvenient Truth says, “To the white kin showing up for collective liberation – we see you. Thank you for remembering. To the white kin on the edge of waking up – we welcome you. We NEED you in this Great Turning of Hearts.”
The Great Re-Arrangement underway. Earth needs our heart, wisdom and skills. Helping us re-learn HOW TO FEEL. How to RE-CONNECT. How to Stay with the Trouble. How to hold our hurt together thru healing the inherited severances, the accumulated debris of colonial traumas. Isn’t that part of what we’re up to?
As decolonial therapist @dr.rosalesmeza says, “It is our sacred duty as healers to stand for truth, justice, to offer true healing that brings forth balance & harmony & liberation.“
We all know daily the enormity of the human toll of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. It would take 177 school buses to carry the Palestinian children killed by Israel/United States in Gaza.
How about the obscene destruction of the land? What about the 100,000s of ancient olive trees burned & uprooted? How about the Israel/U.S. war creating more planet-warming emissions in 100 days than the carbon footorint of 20 climate-vulnerable nations do in a year? (A big chunk of that from US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel) Water being desecrated, treated with contempt? Or white phosphorus & missiles Made-in-the-USA poisoning the soil for decades to come?
Yes, colonialism & racial capitalism is inherently destructive of our more-than-human kin. The costs of our allegiance to militarism and Empire can no longer be ignored. The land always suffers. Which means WE ALL SUFFER.
Which means the principled orientation for earthy folks is one that is decolonial, anti-racist, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist.
To serve Life and Liberation we must compost Empire.
A livable planet runs through a FREE PALESTINE.
As liberationist Jaiya John invites us, “Acquiescence to the status quo is easy. The struggle of collective freedom is a spiritual odyssey of a lifetime. Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it: Reorder the world order.”
And since it’s King’s birthday, let’s end with one you won’t hear Politicians read today:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in his strike toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku
Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”
—Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Let’s not be comfortable moderates dedicated to oppressive order, let’s be the re-ordering healers honoring our sacred calling in this Great Turning.
I have it on good authority. Now it’s just a matter of tending the compost pile with the moisture of our grief and the heat of our truth-telling, and connecting our imaginations buds together to grow those wild wings of Butterfly Earth, flowing our holy longings as compass.
Wonder will aid in the metabolizing. Invoke the sly joy of our gratuitous re-enchantment as an essential sur-thrival skill.
Every time we say “WOW’ with our whole bodies, a hungry ghost comes home.
Rumi and the Shadow 