A little village called Berlin...

I'm sitting in the parklet in front of one of the most amazing cafes that I've ever been to, in the Prakrow neighborhood of Berlin, just a couple of blue streaks in a gray sky.  It feels right, somehow, to have gray Berlin skies.  And it doesn't dampen the magic for me at all.

It's not simply that I'm enjoying quite a delicious latte that I find this cafe so fabulous.  Next to the white picket fence that encloses the parklet I'm sitting in, a tiny girl with cocoa skin and an orangey-pink ice cream cone sits next to a slightly overweight German woman wearing a sweatshirt that matches the girl's ice cream exactly.  I doubt either of them planned it.  Between them is a white metal tables with a tin bucket on it planted with bright, spritely flowers -- I think they might be dahlias.  In the back of one of the three strollers parked in my immediate eyesight, a bouquet of dandelions (the German's call them "Lions Teeth,") wilts out of a netted pocket.  They were probably quite a bit more attractive when they were picked some hours back, but they manage to retain their cheer, probably because seeing them where they are, as they are, captures a sense of the exuberance with which they were picked by little hands.

Another young woman pulls up with a stroller, this one empty: it's white-capped inhabitant walks on unsteady little feet next to her mother, her face lighting up with joy as she spots two notably more sure-footed toddlers in the boat-shaped sandbox at the other end of the parklet.  I actually don't know if they call them that here -- that's what we call these small communal spaces in San Francisco, which are popping up with more frequency but are still uncommon enough to seem unique, even sometimes slightly mystifying.  I've walked past several, with seating and other features that seem very cleverly designed and yet not very comfortable looking, where once there was a spot to park a car.  In spite of the fact that they are far from cozy, they are almost always full. 

In Berlin, these parklets or small patios are not a rare sight -- they seem to be in front of every single store on the street.  Some have tables and chairs for eating and drinking; others have unordained raised garden beds dotted with blooming flowering plants or small trees -- still others are bare, like blank canvases, awaiting a gathering of some type.  I have often heard that in America our cities aren't designed for people and become less so with every passing year -- they are designed for cars and consumers.  (Consumers bear some resemblance to people but aren't, actually -- not in what their needs or desires are, and certainly not what the spaces designed to accomodate those desires would look like).  

Sure, I had heard that, but I didn't get it until coming here and seeing what it is actually like to have spaces that are designed to be community- and people-oriented, and to see what that does to the daily life of folks who live in such spaces.  It's a powerful thing for an American girl to see. 

I once had a French roommate who told me that in France, everyone has what they call, "the Third Place."  The Third Place is that place that you go, and maybe even belong to in some way, that is not your home or your work.  It's often a bar or cafe, where like Cheers, everybody knows your name.  I'm not sure if it's the same in Germany but I can see the shared thinking beneath both the Third Place in France and the many parklets here in Berlin -- people need places to gather and be together, as people.  When people have places like that, they come to use them and even depend on them.  They become an integral part life.  

I've noticed that people act differently on the buses and trains that we take to get around the city, too.  I hardly see anyone with their eyes glazed over, immersed in iPhone or Android business -- there are some, but it's not very common.  There are people with books, and people talking, and many standing around, simply being.  Being, but not immersed in the process of being anywhere but where they are now, as I so often am when I'm on BART or muni.  I like the presence.  It reminds me of when I was younger...actually, being here, I think I actually act the way I did when I was younger, instead of the stressed-out oblivious adult that I so often am now.  I notice what people are wearing and watch them talking to each other, even though I don't understand more than a couple of words in any given conversation, with curiosity and a feeling of easy contentment. 

One of my teachers, Matthew Fox, always talked about how we needed to reclaim Wonder as part of our spiritual processes and philosophies.  Wonder is an integral part of gratitude and humility, but it's also really enjoyable.  When we allow ourselves to be curious, and to wonder, and imagine, we stop thinking we know everything, and stop believing that everything and everyone else is ours to exploit, and a kind of sweet sense of mystery and even optimism infuses our lives.  I feel that in myself again, being here. 

Maybe that's because I'm on vacation, away from the pressures of my daily life, but it might also be because it's simply not as buzzy and hectic here.  The static energy that saturates the air in the nearer Bay Area, zinging with EMFs and anxiety and overarching 3G networks from five different service providers at any given point, simply isn't present.   I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of wireless internet all around me and that every one of these stroller-wielding mamas has a cell phone.  This is a major metropolitan city, after all, not some little village in Bavaria.  But nonetheless, I do not feel that same charged atmosphere.

Speaking of being present, here in the parklet, an apparently major dispute has just broken out between a little brunette boy with rosy cheeks and a dark-haired German woman who responds with firm yet gentle words.  The woman goes inside into the cafe and the boy, clearly deciding that the best solution is to try and worry her into acquessing to his wishes, batters at the latch of the white picket gate until he manages to get it open.   Uh-oh.  I rise to sweep him back into the parklet, but I'm too late.  Someone's dad is already there, ushering him back with a forced look of disapproval.

I was at the birth of Leonie, who is the daughter of Sabine, our German friend who's hostessing us here.  Sabine told me the other day that in San Francisco, she felt like it was expected and necessary to watch your children at all times when you're out in public, but here in Berlin it's just different.  As I watch the rosy-cheeked little boy start shoveling sand in a boat-shaped sandbox, I realize that not only do these Berlinians have a much different lived experience of spaces designed for people, they also have a whole different orientation towards what it means to be kid-friendly -- and as I watch the kids and their mothers in this relaxed, easy space, I feel a sharp pang of jealousy.  

If I ever have kids, it won't be like this.  I mean, maybe I will be able to find one great place to go where I can write and drink a latte while my little one plays with some random kids their own age and be delighted and well cared for, possibly, but it would just be that one special place.  That's just not the same as a whole culture that nurtures and honors families.

To be totally honest, before being here I never desired my neighborhood, cafe, home, or anything else be more "family friendly" -- there's something about the way that phrase is used in American culture that kind of makes me nauseous.  When people say "family friendly," I think of stepford wives pushing BMW-sized strollers.  No, it's beyond that.  I think of people trying to restrict my sexuality, sometimes with rules and other times with frowns.  I think of garishly colored packaging that masks the chemical-filled "food" that my own stepchildren are clearly addicted to, something that inevitably leads to a fight whenever they visit, as I turn my nose up at even one Taco Bell meal and they complain of starvation in the face of my organic vegetables and wheat-free pasta.  I think of the $30 that Jason and I  pay per person to hang out with them at indoor play parks in Indiana, which are little more than kiddy-casinos: titilating, over-stimulating, and filled with uninspiring games that award tickets but lack any significant intellectual or physical challenge.  I think of the hotel we stayed at once with an indoor swimming park where even the bedding in our room reeked of chlorine, happy meals, Disneyworld, and movies like Scooby Doo whih lack any artistic merit whatsoever -- or even a remotely interesting plot to anyone over three feet tall.  Which is to say, that even though I've always wanted a baby of my own, I've never been remotely inclined towards anything "family friendly" -- but without an alternative in mind, it's been worrisome to me. What could our lives -- mine, Jason's, the baby -- look like if we eschew the saccharine consumerism that comprises "family friendly" in America but don't have something else to replace it?

In Berlin, I can catch a glimpse of what that alternative could look like.  Here, I can see what a truly friendly neighborhood looks like -- one that integrates children and adults and creates spaces for everyone to feel satisfied and their needs honored -- instead of the cloying shmaltziness that for some reason we Americans seem to think our kids want and which is a complete turnoff to any adult with intellectual, political, or artistic sensibilities.  Sabine's street is lined with beautiful stone and brick apartment buildings, tall and stately, with playgrounds in every backyard, bike stands in the front, and stroller parking in the foyer.  The cafe we are at, which gurgles with the happy laughter of children playing, serves quiche, gelato, and the fine latte I'm enjoying at the moment.  Yes, the ice cream cones are geared towards the kids, and the kids love them.  But that doesn't mean that their espresso comes pre-sweetened from powder, or that there are plastic flowers hanging off the walls, or that you can't also get yourself a bagel with arugula, brie, and plum jam.

It's so very inspiring.  Yes, a moment ago I did have that one pang of jealousy, a fleeting sense of defeatism.  But immediately following that, a warm surge of excitement and possibility comes.  Because this is possible where I live, in North Berkeley, where we already have Totland and Adventureland and many places that serve quality espresso.  We just need to figure out how to integrate the worlds -- not just of kids and adults, but of single people and families, artists and musicians and mothers and fathers, gardeners who cultivate rare irises and playground designers.  In doing so, we can create a culture where having kids is seen as something that enhances your life rather than apparently ending every aspect of it which is sexy and avante-garde, and also where people who don't have kids are happily exposed to them in ways that incorporates the entirety of our community into the raising of children (it takes a village, they say).  I know that in doing so, we'll create a better culture for both our kids to grow up in and for adults of every walk of life. 

And that excites me quite a bit.

Happy Birthday, Occupy Oakland! Where do we go from here?

Today, I’m thinking a lot about Occupy. 

No, I’m not simply being late to the party – I know that Occupy Wall Street celebrated its one-year anniversary some weeks ago with a glorious 135 or so arrests in New York and a smattering of media attention.  But today, October 10^th, marks the one-year anniversary of Occupy Oakland -- the most notorious and widely controversial “Occupy” of the nation.  And, in spite of all of its many challenges and inadequacies, the one closest to my heart.

A year ago, Occupy Oakland started as a dozen or two dozen folks sleeping in a park – which is nothing much to shake a stick at, believe me, because people sleeping in parks is hardly news in downtown Oakland.  And as far as political activities go, I’ve attended dozens of actions with more organization, more arrests, more media, more puppets and far wittier banners.  But somehow, in a matter of months, Occupy Oakland became a driving force that helped sweep this apathetic nation off its feet.  

A little pinpoint of light that became a spark, and then a movement.  Like a wildfire.  Like falling in love.

Falling in love is about making a connection – and Occupy did that, it made the connection between the unemployed steel workers and the students drowning in debt and homeowners facing foreclosure in the face of nation-wide corporate bailouts.

Falling in love is about giving up the inertia of a disheartened life and opening to passion -- with all the delights and risks that anything that truly transformative holds.

The delights and risks of transformation seemed more tangible in Occupy Oakland than anywhere else on the Occupy map – it quickly showed itself to be a dynamic microcosm of the whole, as the whole was being inexorably, violently squashed by the powers that be. 

I remember one particularly accurate Daily Show moment, where Jon Stewart does his “daily round up” of all of the Occupy protests, set against idyllic easter-parade sweet music, finally “landing” on images of the General Strike on November 2^nd, 2011.  They literally look like pictures of ‘Nam under heavy artillery: hazy with tear gas, people scattering everywhere in terror, the sky lit from above by helicopter spotlights. That was the night that ex-marine Scott Olsen suffered a devastating head injury from a tear gas canister – the first infamous veteran to be wounded in the harsh police crack down on the Occupy protests here, but not the last.

“OAKLAND?  What the FUCK is happening in OAKLAND?” Stewart cries out in mock-surprise.   His flippant question was one echoed a thousand times in the coming months as the crowds of protestors, the brutality of the police, and the desperation of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan all grew in equal proportions. 

I’m not sure that any of us involved in Occupy Oakland last year ever truly understood what the fuck was happening here – not the protestors, or the police, and certainly not the city government.  We were swept up in a perfect storm of racial tensions, political ideologue and intrigue, passionate emotion, and a collective history of injustice and violence.  In the midst of it all, the Occupiers tried to organize together and the city (possibly due to pressure from the Department of Homeland security) did everything in its power to stop them.  

Sometimes it worked, at least for a little while.  I still remember the moment that I first walked into the beautiful commune in Oscar Grant plaza, with free food and medical services and childcare for anyone who wanted it amidst a vibrant pageant of nylon camping tents.  Occupy Oakland, more than being any one thing, was motley crew of sub-communities, from the People of Color Caucus to the Women’s Bloc to the Children’s Garden to the medic collective and groups of unionized and non-unionized workers alike, from truckers and nurses to domestic workers.  Perhaps one of the brightest lights of Occupy Oakland, the Interfaith Tent brought together leaders of different faiths to lead services to help heal the trauma the community was facing, speak out against oppression, and provide caring, grounded energy to a group of people rapidly spiraling into chaos.  (At some points, the “Interfaith Tent” was downsized to an “Interfaith Umbrella” as OPD discovered and /or created very specific laws to justify their repeated attempts and the methods use to shut down the Occupation).

When I think of that moment – the beautiful blue sky above, tents of every color, a pathway made of reclaimed wooden pallets leading beneath sprawling oak branches that shield children from the sun, the smell of food in the air, and the voices of people from across Oakland’s wide demographic spectrum – it still brings tears to my eyes.  In spite of many intense moments that had more airplay and retweets, when I think of Occupy Oakland, that is what I think about.  I think of the promise. 

While inspired by Wall Street protestors in New York’s Zuccotti park, Occupy Oakland quickly made a name for itself as something uniquely West Coast and specifically Oaklandish.  Occupy Oakland was unwelcoming to police presence from the start, in solidarity with communities that suffer at the hands of its notorious police force; early on, occupiers dubbed the plaza they had taken in downtown “Oscar Grant Plaza,” in honor of the young man shot by Bart police on New Year’s Day in 2009.  In a city where schools are increasingly over capacity and understaffed, activists rallied around teachers and schoolchildren facing school closures and held marches, sit-ins, and teach-ins in support.  When the media started quoting business owners and police sergeants more than activists, they created their own media complete with local celebrity bloggers and livestreamists, which quickly gained traction in the techno-savvy Bay Area.  They shut down the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest port in the richest nation in the world, not once, but twice – a feat local activists had often attempted over the years, and failed nearly just as often.

Occupy Oakland spent a month in December of 2011 wrestling the idea of formally changing its name to Decolonize Oakland.  Supporters of the proposal argued this move would express solidarity with the Chochenyo Ohlone and other Native American rights activists opposed to the term “occupy.”  Many activists in the Occupy Oakland community had also taken part in actions designed to protect sacred indigenous land in nearby Vallejo, where city planners originally okayed the development of Glen Cove but eventually caved due to pressure from local tribes and their allies.  Other activists feared such a move would further fractionalize the Occupy Movement, which across the country was suffering growing pains as it tried to organize 99% of the American population while also facing increasingly brutal municipal oppression.

The proposal was eventually rejected by the General Assembly.  For me, that day marked the beginning of the end -- though I didn’t know it at the time.  It was the last General Assembly that I attended.  The American Autumn was over. 

Winter came, with its constant rain and gray skies, and holiday gatherings heralding in the new year – an election year, more specifically.  Dinner party conversations shifted from occupations to nominations.  The credit cards that I had allowed to build up over months of working very little so that I could occupy and write started to send me notices in pink envelopes.  My withered garden, which had been terribly neglected, gave me dirty looks every time I walked past it on my way to the front door. 

But with all ends come new beginnings.  It isn’t that I don’t understand the frustration, the disheartenment, the “Where did Occupy Oakland go?”  I know those feelings and thoughts, and I’m certainly not immune to them – in some ways, they cut me to the quick even more deeply than my friends who, although interested, never made it out into the streets or a general assembly.  In those moments, right after Where did Occupy Oakland go? comes the next question: Where should Occupy Oakland go? What’s next?  

I’ve done my time in Occupy – sat through the endless general assemblies held hostage by the one crazy person who won’t shut up, been tear gassed and arrested, been “found” by the movement’s beauty and grace and lost to betrayal in the same day.  As I look back at it all, what interests me most is the deep yearning I felt beneath the jubilance and chaos and righteous cries for justice.  That yearning isn’t a sign of the failings that doom our work -- its the magic thread that leads to the heart of this work – which, beyond tents and protests and all the rest – is what the powers-that-be that rely on an apathetic American public fear the most.  If we get there, I think we’ll finally understand what the fuck was really happening in Oakland – and what is still happening, beneath the currents of election-year politics.

Occupy Oakland showed us, in a concentrated, bite-sized for the media way, all that is the most desperate and the most beautiful in our culture: the veterans without their promised benefits, the homeless addicts, the laid off school teachers.    We saw people living together, in public spaces they had reclaimed as the commons, planting gardens to feed themselves and helping save one another’s homes by putting themselves at risk of violence and arrest.  We saw the savage means that the government, police forces, and corporations were willing to resort to in order to protect their interests and also the impunity with which they do it. 

We fought amongst ourselves and undermined those willing to step into leadership.  We made grandiose agreements amongst ourselves and then broke many of them.  We sat in silence with prayer and loving-compassion, and we descended into anger and violence. 

For me, what I came to see most of all is that there is something beautiful and immanently possible that wants to be born, right now, during this time of worldwide planetary destruction and human suffering.  There is a rising of love, power, and hope springing up all around the globe – and it is this rising tide that we are yearning for, because we feel it just beyond our fingers and taste the first hints of it on our lips -- elusive and ephemeral, but ever so slightly less so, when we were in the streets with Occupy Oakland.  We catch glimpses of it on tumblr and twitter, when our over-critical rational minds have been hypnotized into a stupor by too much time on the internet.  Occupy is not the name of this upwelling of wisdom and connection – it is simply one spring that feeds something much larger, and it may return in the form that stormed the nation last year, or it may not.  There are many other springs, and many other names.  Joanna Macy calls it the Great Turning.  Martin Luther King called it the Beloved Community.  Given that it's 2012, it might even be what the ancient Mayans were referring to in "the end of the long count,"or what the acidic hippies called the Age of Aquarius.  

I don’t care what we call it – I just don’t want to go back to the old days, when the only choices the American public entertained were those on preprinted menus presented to us by corporate-controlled media and corporate-controlled politicians: democrats or republicans, capitalism or communism, Nike or New Balance.  I don’t want to fall into the sleepy days of inertia and despair.  Last year in Oakland, I saw that we are a people that are capable of passion, empowerment, and cooperation in spite of heartbreaking differences– and it turned me on.  Now, on the anniversary of Occupy Oakland, I find that I am still quite ready to follow the path of justice and passion and see where it goes -- and my guess is that I’m not alone.  Not by a long shot.

Such Singing in the Wild Branches

It was spring

and finally I heard him
among the first leaves -
then I saw him clutching the limb

 

in an island of shade
with his red-brown feathers
all trim and neat for the new year.
First, I stood still

 

and thought of nothing.
Then I began to listen.
Then I was filled with gladness -
and that's when it happened,

 

when I seemed to float,
to be, myself, a wing or a tree -
and I began to understand
what the bird was saying,

 

and the sands in the glass
stopped
for a pure white moment
while gravity sprinkled upward

 

like rain, rising,
and in fact
it became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing -
it was the thrush for sure, but it seemed

 

not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers,
and also the trees around them,
as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds
in the perfectly blue sky - all, all of them

 

were singing.
And, of course, yes, so it seemed,
so was I.
Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn't last

 

for more than a few moments.
It's one of those magical places wise people
like to talk about.
One of the things they say about it, that is true,

 

is that, once you've been there,
you're there forever.
Listen, everyone has a chance.
Is it spring, is it morning?

 

Are there trees near you,
and does your own soul need comforting?
Quick, then - open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song
may already be drifting away.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

 

 

(Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays)

Prana and Permaculture -- The Adventures of Having Pink-Eye at Earth Activist Training

I’m at Earth Activist Training right now, on my day off from student teaching here with Starhawk, Jason, Laura Maples, and Erik.  In spite of the fact that the training is so intense, I feel completely renewed and impassioned – I felt a shift happen on that first day, during our first brainstorm about what this course is about, as I listened to the course participants share what the word "Permaculture" meant to them.  Thrivability.  Restorative.  Spirals.  Food forests.  Earth working earth.  Living harmony.  Relationship.

Being here at Earth Activist Training and the feeling of renewal that it has brought could not have come at a better time for me.  I came here suffering from post-Occupation burnout, heavy financial challenges, biting and sometimes debilitating self-doubt, stress, and a bad case of pink-eye.  Even though I only have a couple of bucks to my name and it’s a fairly stressful situation here, with 14 hour work days the norm,  the pink-eye has cleared up and my heart feels listed.  I’m present to the beauty of the world again, the blue sky marbled by wispy clouds, the tapestry of green trees blanketed over the steep Cazadero hills, the warmth of the sunshine (even if does seem is a bit too-sunny for mid January), and the feel of the living earth under my feet.  She is not simply ground.  She is a being, and my feet touch and are touched by her skin of rock and herb and soil.

Starhawk told us during the opening circle that in studying and teaching permaculture, she found a “how-to” manual for living a spiritual path that centers on healing the earth and living in harmony with the earth's natural systems.  Synchronistically, during the many hours I spent lying on my back with chamomile and eyebright compresses on my teary, irritated eyes, the one thing that I productive thing I managed to do was to listen to a beautiful set of podcasts about Ayurvedic medicine by Jai Dev from Floracopeia.  Ayurveda is a holistic science (related to yoga) that studies how lifeforce – called prana – takes shape, moves, and manifests in nature. 

Both of these courses of study -- permaculture and Ayurveda -- stem from the natural human craving to understand the miracle that is our world.  For many of us in industrialized societies, this natural yearning has been exploited to bolster a mythology that tells us that humans are inherently disconnected and even at odds with the forces of nature, rather than nurturing and deepening an understanding of the inherent interconnection of all beings and the divine intelligence of life – which is my mythos, the story that I align my life with now.  It is also the mythos of indigenous people all over the world, and my own indigenous ancestors. 

That one thing – the act of aligning with a paradigm of interconnection rather than disconnection, life rather than mechanism  -- is itself an act of healing, a balm for body and soul.  Actually, I don't doubt that my heart is always present to the interconnection of life and the beautiful, overarching divine intelligence of the cosmos.  The issue is really that I become disjointed inside of myself: mind from body, soul from mind.  Ayurveda philosophy teaches that one of the most prominent causes of disease (perhaps, actually, the most detrimental) is that disjointedness, which they call “forgetting of our true nature.”

How can we forget our true nature?  What makes this happen?  It depends on so many factors, but for me, it is the things that spin me into a wobbly irregular orbit: electric lights overhead as I stay awake long into the night reading one day (only to fall asleep after a late dinner the next), flying on jet planes and going through radioactive security checkpoints, a sporadic but busy schedule, the addictive buzz of the internet and cell phones, anonymous relationships with most of the people that I interact with in my daily city life.  It’s a certain kind of crazy.  I don’t feel that kind of crazy here, in the hills of Cazadero, submersing myself in the beauty of this gorgeous natural place and the hopeful determination of the Permaculturists.  I can also see, delving deep into this science of sustainability and integrating ways to restore what has been damaged, a way out of the trap of craziness... a way out of this disjointed lifestyle that fosters the forgetting of my true nature.

I wonder what it would be like to interweave some of these systems of traditional healing with the cutting-edge world of Permaculture, which is so focused on earth-healing.  Wouldn't it be amazing to apply the study of prana and how lifeforce manifests into matter to a radical design system that focuses on the ways that plants help protect one another from pests, and how to recycle graywater, and creating alternative currencies and timebanks?  Sounds like a rich possibility, perhaps one to keeping thinking on.  Of course, it isn’t like David Holmren and Bill Mollison and the other founding members of the Permaculture movement birthed their ideas out of nowhere -- they too studied the methods of traditional cultures.

I feel excited about where this is all going: Occupy, Permaculture, the Transition Town Movement, and the plethora of people studying nature-based healing arts and spiritual practices around the world.  It’s the beginning of 2012, a year that for many hallmarks the beginning of the end of the world -- yet another thing we learned from an indigenous culture, and like many of those things, was butchered during translation (aka appropriation).  This is not the end of the world.  It’s the beginning of a new way of living on this earth that involves reclaiming the wisdom of our ancestors, healing the miraculous life-giving systems and our own sanity, and deepening our understanding of balance, relationship, and our truest natures. 

Thrivability.  


Restorative.  


Spirals.  


Food forests.  


Earth working earth.  


Living harmony.  

Blessed be.


* * * * *

Want to be inspired?  Here are some good places to start:
Earth Activist Training
What is Permaculture? from Penny Livingston and the Regenerative Design Institute
Another article on Permaculture by my co-teacher Eric Ohlsen, owner of Permaculture Artisans
A good article on the Transition Town Movement at Huffington Post
Permaculture at Occupy Wall Street
A beautiful page about Edible Forest Gardens
More of Mona Caron's beautiful utopian images of the future

Rebecca Solnit: Compassion is Our New Currency

I'm out in Indiana right now, which may be one of the few places that still feels untouched by the Occupy Movement and the other social-justice transformational activism we've seen this year.  As I take time to rest, reflect, and be with family, I'm also getting a chance to catch up on all of those things I bookmarked but didn't get a chance to read when they came out.  This one that I read today is from the amazing and always articulate Rebecca Solnit -- "Compassion is our New Currency."  It's beautiful and powerful, and I just had to share it.

"Perhaps the greatest gift that it and the other movements of 2011 have given us is a sharpening of our perceptions - and our conflicts. So much more is out in the open now, including the greed, the brutality with which entities from the Egyptian army to the Oakland police impose the will of rulers, and most of all the deep generosity of spirit that is behind, within, and around these insurgencies and their activists... One thing couldn’t be clearer: compassion is our new currency."

Happy New Year's and looking forward to sharing more writing and thoughts with you soon,
Riyana

* * * * *
Compassion is Our New Currency: Notes on 2011’s Preoccupied Hearts and Minds 

By Rebecca Solnit

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.

The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas.  The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation -- “occupy the river” -- in little ones below.

The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them. Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated, each of us for ourselves.

Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, ouroperating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other. And this movement, he’s saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva, the politics of affection.

If it’s a movement about love, it’s also about the money they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us -- and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the American heartland, people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness, renegotiation, and debt jubilees.

Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins.  One morning late last month, 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert, who ran a daycare center from her modest San Francisco home, returned after dropping a child off at school only to find that she and the other children were locked out because she was behind in her mortgage payments. True Compass LLC, who bought her place in a short sale while she thought she was still negotiating with Bank of America, would not allow her back into her home of almost four decades, even to get her medicines or diapers for the children.

We demonstrated at her home and at True Compass’s shabby offices while they hid within, and students from Occupy San Francisco State University demonstrated outside a True Compass-owned restaurant on behalf of this African-American grandmother. Thanks to this solidarity and the media attention it garnered, Tolbert has collected her keys, moved back in, and is renegotiating the terms of her mortgage.

Hundreds of other foreclosure victims are now being defended by local branches of the Occupy movement, from West Oakland to North Minneapolis. As New York writer, filmmaker, and Occupier Astra Taylor puts it,

Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it can also lead to swift and tangible victories, something movements desperately need for momentum to be maintained. The banks, it seems, are softer targets than one might expect because so many cases are rife with legal irregularities and outright criminality. With one in five homes facing foreclosure and filings showing no sign of slowing down in the next few years, the number of people touched by the mortgage crisis -- whether because they have lost their homes or because their homes are now underwater -- truly boggles the mind.”

If what’s been happening locally and globally has some of the characteristics of an uprising, then there has never been one quite so pervasive -- from the scientists holding an Occupy sign in Antarctica to Occupy presences in places as far-flung as New Zealand and Australia, São Paulo, Frankfurt, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Reykjavik. And don’t forget the tiniest places, either. The other morning at the Oakland docks for the West Coast port shutdown demonstrations, I met three members of Occupy Amador County, a small rural area in California’s Sierra Nevada.  Its largest town, Jackson, has a little over 4,000 inhabitants, which hasn’t stopped it from having regular outdoor Friday evening Occupy meetings.

A little girl in a red parka at the Oakland docks was carrying a sign with a quote from blind-deaf-and-articulate early twentieth-century role model Helen Keller that said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” Why quote Keller at a demonstration focused on labor and economics? The answer is clear enough: because Occupy has some of the emotional resonance of a spiritual, as well as a political, movement.  Like those other upheavals it’s aligned with in Spain, Greece, Iceland (where they’re actually jailing bankers), Britain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Chile, and most recently Russia, it wants to ask basic questions: What matters? Who matters? Who decides? On what principles?   

Stop for a moment and consider just how unforeseen and unforeseeable all of this was when, on December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable vendor in Sidi Bouzid, an out-of-the-way, impoverished city, immolated himself. He was protesting the dead-end life that the 1% economy run by Tunisia’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali and his corrupt family allotted him, and the police brutality that went with it, two things that have remained front and center ever since. Above all, as his mother has since testified, he was for human dignity, for a world, that is, where the primary system of value is not money.

“Compassion is our new currency,” was the message scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan -- held by a pensive-looking young man in Jeremy Ayers’s great photo portrait.  But what can you buy with compassion?

Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and even pizza, which can arrive at that movement’s campground as a gift of solidarity.  A few days into Occupy Wall Street’s surprise success, a call for pizza went out and $2,600 in pizzas came in within an hour, just as earlier this year the occupiers of Wisconsin’s state house had been copiously supplied with pizza -- including pies paid for and dispatched by Egyptian revolutionaries.

The Return of the Disappeared

During the 1970s and 1980s dictatorship and death-squad era in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Central America, the term “the disappeared” came to cover those who were kidnapped, held in secret, tortured, and then often executed in secret. So many decades later, their fates are often still being deciphered.

In the United States, the disappeared also exist, not thanks to a brutal army or paramilitaries, but to a brutal economy.  When you lose your job, you vanish from the workplace and sooner or later arrive at emptiness in your day, your identity, your wallet, your ability to participate in a commercial society. When you lose your home, you disappear from familiar spaces: the block, the neighborhood, the rolls of homeowners.   Often, you vanish in shame, leaving behind friends and acquaintances.  

At the actions to support some of the 1,500 mostly African-American homeowners being foreclosed upon in southeastern San Francisco, several of them described how they had to overcome a powerful sense of shame simply to speak up, no less defend themselves or join this movement. In the U.S., failure is always supposed to be individual, not systemic, and so it tends to produce a sense of personal devastation that leaves its victims feeling alone and lying low, even though they are among legions of others.  

The people who destroyed our economy through their bottomless greed are, on the other hand, shameless -- as shameless as the CEOs whose compensation shot up 36% in 2010, during this deep and grinding recession. Compassion is definitely not their currency.

The word “occupy” itself speaks powerfully to the American disappeared and the very idea of disappearance.  It speaks to those who have lost their occupation or the home they occupied. In its many meanings, it’s a big tent. It means to fill a space, take possession of it, employ oneself, busy oneself, fill time.  (In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the verb had a meaning so sexual it fell out of common use.)  It describes the state of being present that the Occupy movement’s General Assemblies and tent camps have lived out, a space in which -- as Mohamed Bouazizi might have dreamed it -- the disappeared can reappear with dignity.

Occupy has also created a space in which people of all kinds can coexist, from the homeless to the tenured, from the inner city to the agrarian. Coexisting in public with likeminded strangers and acquaintances is one of the great foundations and experiences of democracy, which is why dictatorships ban gatherings and groups -- and why our First Amendment guarantee of the right of the people peaceably to assemble is being tested more strongly today than in any recent moment in American history. Nearly every Occupy has at its center regular meetings of a General Assembly. These are experiments in direct democracy that have been messy, exasperating and miraculous: arenas in which everyone is invited to be heard, to have a voice, to be a member, to shape the future. Occupy is first of all a conversation among ourselves.

To occupy also means to show up, to be present -- a radically unplugged experience for a digital generation. Today, the term is being applied to any place where one plans to be present, geographically or metaphorically: Occupy Wall Street, occupy the food system, occupy your heart. The ad hoc invention of the people’s mic by the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, which requires everyone to listen, repeat, and amplify what’s being said, has only strengthened this sense of presence. You can’t text or half-listen if your task is to repeat everything, so that everyone hears and understands. You become the keeper of your brother’s or sister’s voice as you repeat their words.

It’s a triumph of the here and now -- and it’s everywhere: the Regents of the University of California are mic-checked, politicians are mic-checked, the Durban Climate Conference in South Africa had occupiers and mic-check moments. Activism had long been in dire need of new modes of doing things, and this year it got them.

A Mouthful of Truth

Before the Occupy movement arrived on the scene, political dialogue and media chatter in this country seemed to be arriving from a warped parallel universe. Tiny government expenditures were denounced, while the vortex sucking our economy dry was rarely addressed; hard-working immigrants were portrayed as deadbeats; people who did nothing were anointed as “job creators”; the trashed economy and massive suffering were overlooked, while politicians jousted over (and pundits pontificated about) the deficit; class war was only called class war when someone other than the ruling class waged it. It’s as though we were trying to navigate Las Vegas with a tattered map of medieval Byzantium -- via, that is, a broken language in which everything and everyone got lost.

Then Occupy arrived and, as if swept by some strange pandemic, a contagious virus of truth-telling, everyone was suddenly obliged to call things by their real names and talk about actual problems. The blather about the deficit was replaced by acknowledgments of grotesque economic inequality. Greed was called greed, and once it had its true name, it became intolerable, as had racism when the Civil Rights Movement named it and made it evident to those who weren’t suffering from it directly. The vast scale of suffering around student debt and tuition hikes, foreclosures, unemployment, wage stagnation, medical costs, and the other afflictions of the normal American suddenly moved to the top of the news, and once exposed to the light, these, too, became intolerable.

If the solutions to the nightmares being named are neither near nor easy, naming things, describing reality with some accuracy, is at least a crucial first step.  Informing ourselves as citizens is another.  Aspects of our not-quite-democracy that were once almost invisible are now on the table for discussion -- and for opposition, notably corporate personhood, the legal status that gives corporations the rights, but not the obligations and vulnerabilities, of citizens. (One oft-repeated Occupier sign says, “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas puts one to death.”)

The Los Angeles City Council passed a measure calling for an end to corporate personhood, the first big city to join the Move to Amend campaign against corporate personhood and against the 2009 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling that gave corporations unlimited ability to insert their cash in our political campaigns. Occupy actions across the country are planned for January 20th, the second anniversary ofCitizens United. Vermont’s independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been speaking the truth alone for a long time, introduced a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United and limit corporate power in the Senate, while Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) introduced a similar measure in the House.

Only a few years ago, hardly anyone knew what corporate personhood was.  Now, signs denouncing it are common.  Similarly, at Occupy events, people make it clear that they know about the New Deal-era financial reform measure known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which was partially repealed in 1999, removing the wall between commercial and investment banks; that they know about the proposed financial transfer tax, nicknamed the Robin Hood Tax, that would raise billions with a tiny levy on every financial transaction; that they understand many of the means by which the 1% were enriched and the rest of us robbed.

This represents a striking learning curve. A new language of truth, debate about what actually matters, an informed citizenry: that’s no small thing. But we need more.

We Are the 99.999%

I was myself so caught up in the Occupy movement that I stopped paying my usual attention to the war over the climate -- until I was brought up short by the catastrophic failure of the climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There, earlier this month, the most powerful and carbon-polluting countries managed to avoid taking any timely and substantial measures to keep the climate from heating up and the Earth from slipping into unstoppable chaotic change.   

It’s our nature to be more compelled by immediate human suffering than by remote systemic problems. Only this problem isn’t anywhere near as remote as many Americans imagine.  It’s already creating human suffering on a large scale and will create far more. Many of the food crises of the past decade are tied to climate change, and in Africa thousands are dying of climate-related chaos. The floods, fires, storms, and heat waves of the past few years are climate change coming to call earlier than expected in the U.S.  

In the most immediate sense, Occupy may have weakened the climate movement by focusing many of us on the urgent suffering of our brothers, our neighbors, our democracy. In the end, however, it could strengthen that movement with its new tactics, alliances, spirit, and language of truth. After all, why have we been unable to make the major changes required to limit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The answer is a word suddenly in wide circulation: greed. Responding adequately to this crisis would benefit every living thing. When it comes to climate change, after all, we are the 99.999%.

But the international .001% who profit immeasurably from the carbon economy -- the oil and coal tycoons, industrialists, and politicians whose strings they pull -- are against this change. For decades, they’ve managed to propagandize many Americans, in and out of government, into climate denial, spreading lies about the science and economics of climate change, and undermining any possible legislation and international negotiations to ameliorate it. And if you think the eviction of elderly homeowners is brutal, think of it as a tiny foreshadowing of the displacement and disappearance of people, communities, nations, species, habitats. Climate change threatens to foreclose on all of us.

The groups working on climate change now, notably 350.org and Tar Sands Action, have done astonishing things already. Most recently, with the help of native Canadians, local activists, and alternative media, they very nearly managed to kill the single scariest and biggest North American threat to the climate: the tar sands pipeline that would go from Canada to Texas. It’s been a remarkable show of organizing power and popular will. Occupy the Climate may need to come next.

Maybe Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of spin-offs have built the foundation for it. But perhaps the greatest gift that it and the other movements of 2011 have given us is a sharpening of our perceptions -- and our conflicts. So much more is out in the open now, including the greed, the brutality with which entities from the Egyptian army to the Oakland police impose the will of rulers, and most of all the deep generosity of spirit that is behind, within, and around these insurgencies and their activists. None of these movements is perfect, and individuals within them are not always the greatest keepers of their brothers and sisters.  But one thing couldn’t be clearer: compassion is our new currency.

Nothing has been more moving to me than this desire, realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to embrace each other. This desire is what lies behind those messy camps, those raucous demonstrations, those cardboard signs and long conversations. Young activists have spoken to me about the extraordinary richness of their experiences at Occupy, and they call it love.

In the spirit of calling things by their true names, let me summon up the description that Ella Baker and Martin Luther King used for the great communities of activists who stood up for civil rights half a century ago: the beloved community. Many who were active then never forgot the deep bonds and deep meaning they found in that struggle. We -- and the word “we” encompasses more of us than ever before -- have found those things, too, and this year we have come close to something unprecedented, a beloved community that circles the globe.