Out of the Kettle, Into the FIre...

Yesterday was the most powerful day yet for me here at Copenhagen.  Jason and Tom left early to go on a scouting mission at the Bella Center and take a peak at the fences surrounding her, while I stayed home and wrote to you, dear readers.  ;-)  I’ve started to feel like I have a responsibility to let y’all know what’s happening here, as much as I can.  There’s so much I don’t know and don’t see, because there’s simply so much happening every moment of the day.  Aside from that (and let’s be honest here) I really don’t have the kind of skills that Jason and Tom do regarding fences and the like.  If you want to take down a fence, they’re really the ones for your team. 

After a rather long, meandering walk all over downtown Copenhagen where I seemed to run into every “Politi” in city but couldn’t find a group of a couple thousand drumming, chanting, yelling, dancing people, I was finally directed where I needed to go by an kindly old reporter.  (I was getting so desperate, I almost asked the police where I could find my comrades.  I figured, out of anyone, they must know.  Luckily it didn’t come to that… I mean, please.  How embarrassing.  “Excuse me, officer.  Can you tell me where the protesters are?”).

I found Jason with the Samba band, dancing and helping to hold the line around them, who had linked arms and had formed a barrier of people around the entire march in front of the column of police officers that walked along side.  A couple of moments later, Tom arrived with Jason’s drum and soon we were drumming down the street.  The hand signals and rhythms are finally getting more familiar, and I’m starting to really enjoy playing around with how I hold the drumstick to get different sounds on the drum without dropping the thing every ten minutes.  We were behind a large sound system on a truck, so we alternated playing and pausing to allow the speakers and music to be heard.  Eventually, we made our way to a plaza near the Defense Ministry. 

Copenhagen has been all dolled up in its anti-climate change finery, some of which seems genuine by genuine environmental organizations, and some of which is greenwashing for very destructive businesses (kind of like those Chevron billboards back home that say things like, “I will unplug stuff more” while they work to convert their Richmond refinery to process the most toxic stuff on the planet).  I’m not sure what was planned for the rally point, but what was very soon happening was that an enormous orange balloon – maybe a story tall and as much around – that had been tied to the ground as a measure of how large one ton of CO2 is, courtesy of some heinous European corporation that I’m not really that familiar with, was rolling down the street.  The police and the samba band, both equally laden down, went running after the crowd of people that were playing with it.  We managed to catch up before they did, and started playing a jaunty tune as the enormous orange ball rolled off onto a major byway of cars, followed by the crowd, the band, and the cops.

After that moment, I felt the energy shift.  As usual, Jason picked up on it a moment or two before I did.  

He was already looking around for an exit route.  “We should get out of here,” he said.

“Do you want to leave?”

He didn’t answer, and that, coupled with the fact that he said “should” instead of simply, “Let’s go,” told me he didn’t.  I didn’t, either.  I knew that this was a potentially arrestable situation, but it was hard to ditch out on the band in the midst of things.  And clearly, at this point, the band was directing the energy.  Folks were crowding around us, following us wherever we went.

After awhile, the police managed to get the enormous orange balloon away from the folks and turned us back to the plaza, where we circled up and tried jamming for a bit.  But the police weren’t having it.  They kept pressing us into a tighter and tighter area, and then out of the plaza and down the street towards the bridge.

Bridges are classic places for “kettling,” which is a sweet sounding word to describe closing in on you on both ends of a march and then arresting everybody within.  Jason looked at me again, and said, “We should leave.”

“Do you want to go?” I asked again.

He frowned.  I knew that he was feeling the same way I was – we still really didn’t want to go, even though we were clearly surrounded on three sides and being pushed towards more cops at the other end of the bridge.  I knew that most likely if we left at that moment we could find away for two of us to escape – but not the whole band.  It was either ditch them to stay safe, or stay and take the risks.

that moment I realized that I felt remarkably okay about being arrested.  I’ve heard a few horror stories, as you always do, but overall the police have been remarkably chill here compared to the US cops.  At one point during one of the marches earlier in the week, a line of cop cars came screeching directly into the Samba band in an attempt to split us in two.  I kept thinking they would stop before they got to us, but they kept coming, straight into the drummers.  I tried to skedaddle out of the way, but around me, the other drummers were pushing back at the cop cars, yelling at the drivers.  A couple of police officers jumped out and pulled the drummers off of their cars, tossing them into the street with slightly annoyed expressions.  Then they got back into the cars and left.  They didn’t beat anyone, or tear gas anyone, or even arrest anyone.  They just tossed us to the side as if dislodging a vine that got stuck to your shoe and then found someone else to pester.

Let me just tell you, if we’d tried anything even close to that in Pittsburgh, it would have become PepperSprayBurgh.  You just can’t do that kind of thing with American cops without them going apeshit on you.  And, in fact, they might go apeshit on you even if you don’t do anything like that (although, in my experience, San Francisco police tend to be more mellow).

At another march, the samba band moved off of the approved route into traffic on the other side of the street, and a line of cops filed in to the middle to stop those of us who hadn’t yet made it into the street from following.  As they filed in, drummers pushed past them –literally pushing them out of the way – to stay with the rest of the band.  Jason got through, and then Kiki, this really sweet sambatista from Italy who’s been very friendly with us for the last couple of days.  As I tried to follow, more cops came, blocking the way.  I stopped, but on the other side of the street, Jason waved to me to come with.  Without thinking, I ducked under the cop’s arm and then through, wondering if at any second I’d feel his arms pulling me back.  But I didn’t.  Suddenly, there were more sambatistas following me through, and then we were all together again, weaving among the cars drumming and chanting.  Again, no one was attacked.

So, as we were getting kettled in and my arrest seemed inevitable, I found a strange calm came over me and decided to just keep drumming and enjoying the music making for as long as it happened.  Alright, I was probably going to be arrested, and it was probably going to be cold for the eight or twelve hours or whatever they were detaining people.  But, there are much worse things.  I don’t mind getting arrested, as long as I don’t get chemicaled and beaten, too. 

We kept marching, out of the downtown area.  At one point, Jason came up next to me and expressed some concern – we were headed right towards Christania, and he was afraid that the peaceful behavior of both cops and activists might end if they came onto that already contested little piece of land.  Still, that’s where one of our major homebases is, and I’m sure that the warm lunch that would be waiting for us there if we did manage to make it held some appeal.  Aside from which, we were only half of the decision making power, at most.  The cops continued to block off many of the streets, allowing us some measure of choice, but not much. 

And then, suddenly, they were gone.  They just turned around and left.

We were at the gates of Christania, at least two hundred of us, samba band and dancers and people carrying signs and probably many of those who had unleashed the giant orange balloon and sent it floating off into the streets, and the cops opened up the kettle and disappeared.  A huge cheer went up among the crowd, and the band flowed into a circle and began jamming right there in the intersection of the street, much to the chagrin of the drivers of the cars around us, I’m sure.  People were dancing like mad and cheering and laughing, celebrating their freedom.  Relief, exultation, joy, and victory permeated the crowd. 

Later that night, Naomi Klein and two other speakers came to Christania to talk about the next day’s action, “Reclaim the Power.”  This is the big one, the one where we try to disrupt the conference for a time.  It seems like at every major action we try to do this, ever since Seattle.  It’s a tradition that no mass mobilization is complete without it, kind of like turkey at Thanksgiving.  And yet, I felt conflicted.  The whole reason that I came here is that I want the Copenhagen Climate Talks to be a success, to bring about a world-changing powerful treaty.  Disrupting the talks seemed antithetical to that goal. 

Listening to Naomi and Tadzio (an activist from London that I found very inspiring) reframed the issues for me, though. 
The gist of it is this: right now, the industrialized nations and
corporations are really pushing for market-based solutions at their worst are unlikely to do anything at all to help our planet survive, and at best would slightly help reduce CO2 pollution but at the expense of those nations most likely to be harmed by climate change and that have already felt the brunt of our economic policies. There are countries out there that are in danger of literally being underwater soon, or having their food supplies completely destroyed by climate change issues, and these nations have been repeatedly ignored, lied to, and condescended to during the last several weeks while those with money and power try to find ways to maximize their profits with carbon markets and carbon sinks. The idea of the People’s Assembly tomorrow is to bring together the people in the streets with the delegates, heads of states, and NGOs from the Bella Center that desire a very powerful treaty to truly address the issue of climate change without the influence of those with wealth who hold a deep desire to retain that wealth at all cost.

The meeting with Naomi and Tadzio and Michael Hart, which Lisa facilitated, was completely packed.  There were hundreds of people in the large tent at Christania, sitting on each other’s laps, on the floor, standing, on the rails of the bleachers, on the other side of the partitions.  And everyone seemed to hold their breath as suddenly, someone in the crowd, called out, “What about the police?  They’ll attack us if we try this.  Why should we let them?”

After a moment, murmurs all around.  Then, another voice called out, “No!  We have to stay calm.  We can’t do that!”

Oh great, I thought.  I can’t wait until the undercovers bring this back to their bosses.

Now, lots of murmuring, mixed with boos and cheers and a variety of guttural, indecipherable to the non-European ear responses.  Lisa grabbed the mike.  “Alright, alright!  Hold on just a second, everyone.  Let’s just hold on a sec.”

The power and conviction in her voice seemed to work, at least for the moment.  People did quiet down.  Naomi Klein spoke next, her voice passionate.  “I know you’re angry,” she said. “We all have every right to be angry.  People are being hurt, and that’s enough to make anyone angry.  But in this moment, we have to talk about what our intention really is here.  We have an opportunity here, a historic opportunity, to bring together delegates from the climate conference with the people.  And they won’t come if it’s not safe.  They won’t be able to.”

There was a round of applause, but beneath that, still plenty of angry murmuring.  Most people, it seemed, agreed with her.  But there were still those that wanted to break windows, break cops, break all barriers. 

Lisa told us later that its partly the denial of the role that violent forms of protest have played in revolutionary movements that makes people who want to engage in these forms of protest so obstinate when we have these sorts of “tactical” conversations.  The non-violent among us deny that the other forms ever have merit, and that’s frustrating to them.  At the same time, in this case more than ever, it was clear that we could not have a riot on our hands if we stood any chance of success.  We couldn’t even have a window-breaking kind of day, because there was no way that delegates and heads of states would allow themselves to be affiliated with that kind of thing.  We needed everyone on the same page.

In this moment, what she said was, “Tomorrow, we need to do what’s smart.  We need to find creative ways to protest.  This isn’t about diversity of tactics, though there is a time and a place for that kind of model.   We’re not trying to say that one way is right and another way is wrong.  We’re just trying to find a way that we can make this really happen.”

Tadzio stood up now.  “Listen, we have a codex,” he said.  “It’s not a concensus, I know, that everyone has agreed to.  It’s a codex that says how we will and how we won’t do things here in Copenhagen, and now is the time to understand what that means.”

The murmurs slowly died away.  It was clear to me that most people there wanted to stick to strictly creative, non-violent forms of action, but that some simply didn’t agree.  And I found it hard to believe that some sort of “code of honor” would keep them in check.

Which made me wonder, at this potentially amazing moment in history, are we going to screw it all up simply because we don’t have our own shit together?  Because we are still using ego-driven, violent modes of thinking?

Lisa, however, didn’t seem daunted by my worries.  “Historically, the black bloc honors these kinds of agreements,” she told us later.  “If there’s a codex, that’s what they’ll do.”

I hadn’t been always impressed by the black bloc in Pittsburgh, and found myself skeptical.  But she went on to say that in Europe, the radical Left is different.  There are those that break things and those that don’t, and they all have legitimacy here (unlike in the States, where people who engage in property destruction and / or fight back against the cops tend to be seen as total wackos that do nothing but put us back twenty years).  Some of that legitimacy, however, comes from the fact that they do honor their agreements.  “Just look at the actions over the last couple of days.  There have been plenty of chances to get into rumbles with the cops and destroy all kinds of things.  There may have been a couple of broken windows on one day, but no riots.”

As Jason, Tom and I headed off to dinner, just across the street from Christania at a little gyro place, I mulled over her words.  As we ate, I’m not sure who – either Jason or the Indian fellows sitting at the table next to us – noticed a couple of blue Politi trucks pull up and turn down the road towards Christania.  Then a few more.

I was a little worried about Lisa, who was still there, but the others told me not to be.  After all, Christania is a huge compound of not only activists but also many radical residents, who would not take kindly to the police coming uninvited onto their property.  Certainly they weren’t going to try to raid the place with three or four trucks of cops.

But then we saw another truck go by, a much larger one.  It was the water cannon.

We jumped up and went to the door.  Soon truck after blue-sirened truck of cops was turning down the road, lining the one we were on, everywhere.  Cops with dogs, cops on bikes, cops in riot gear.  They closed off the street that led towards Christania, but a side street still remained open, and after a while of standing around watching the tear gas rise from several blocks away, Jason, Bird and I decided to move closer in to see what was happening.  We ended up right up at the front gates with the press, which actually, the cops didn’t mind at all.  They had ceased to lob cannisters of tear gas inside and were now bringing in the dogs (dogs and gas don’t mix, its either one or the other).  The rumor was that there had been some people -- whether the residents or activists, no one seemed to know – who had begun to lob glass bottles at the cops as soon as the raid began.  The rest of the activists, many of whom had soon been in the tent dancing to a DJ, stayed where they were – many of them just kept dancing, refusing to let the police ruin their night. 

We waited around for a couple of hours until Lisa was released, then went off to bed.  It had been a long day, and tomorrow didn’t seem like it would be any more relaxed.  We really were out of the kettle and into the fire.

Hot and Cold in Copenhagen

Christania is like a place out of a anarchist-collective fairy tale: it spans both sides of the canal running through the city, living spaces on one side, the other side housing several cafes, the large tent that serves as both temporary mess hall and workshop / speaker space, an art space, a playground – just about everything you can think of, all communally created and owned.  Last night, when we first walked the grounds lit by candles and small yellow lanterns and watched the dark, mysterious reflections of the trees reflecting in the black water, it seemed to utopian to be believed.  This morning when we headed over there for breakfast, the trash strewed about and disrepair of many of the graffiti-covered buildings, brought it down to reality – in a good way.  This place is not a fairy tale, but really, a work-in-progress on this plane, in this world.  Right in the middle of the biggest city in Denmark, a colony of arts and sustainability (they’re working on it) and shared ownership; a world unto itself.  As you’re leaving the compound -- which must be a couple of blocks square – the archway reads, “Now entering the EU.”

A couple of days ago, when Lisa was briefing us about what was happening here and where, she told us, “Copenhagen is like a post-apocalyptic city. When the shit hits the fan, these are the people that I want to be with me.” 

We headed down to Chistania for breakfast in the tent, which, like all off the collective kitchens, is completely donation-based no-one-turned-away-for-lack-of-funds (to get a sense of the generosity of that, consider that our hostel charges 65 dkk, the equivalent of about $13, for a continental-like breakfast.  And that’s cheap.  Getting a hamburger and fries at the little restaurant next door is about $20 US dollars, after it’s all said and done).  As we ate, a fellow from Chistania was giving a talk about their efforts to green the place in the workshop space next door, followed by a Sunday morning sermon by a Unitarian-sort of  preacher about the oneness of all people and faiths, at their core.  We listened for a while and then Jason and I headed off to the Farmer’s Rally while Tom broke off to go to the Bella Center for a scouting mission on his bike.

I didn’t realize we were looking for Rhythms of resistance – the samba drumming group we were with the day before – until I realized, with disappointment, that they weren’t there.  The farmer’s action that we were at, with speakers from agricultural people and indigenous folks from all over the world but especially the global south, was one of two major actions that day – the other was “Stop the Production,” an anti-capitalist action that aimed to blockade and shut down Copenhagen’s harbor.  Although potentially quite exciting, in my mind, any attempt to shut down a major port with civil disobedience sounds a bit like walking into a pepper spray shower.  Aside from which, I’m personally very interested in food justice activism and working with folks from developing nations.  Jason, it turned out, felt the same, and so we had both forgone the blockade in favor or the march.  But, alas, it seemed we were the only drummers who had.  There was a large, very static-y, sound system on a truck for the rally, but nothing for the march.  In fact we soon discovered that there was no march happening at all.  The speakers spoke, and then we were all standing around in the park, all dressed up and with no place to go and no drummers to drum with.  We didn’t know how many of them had been arrested the day before after we left them, but we knew that some definitely had been.

Just as we had grabbed our stuff to leave, a tiny whisper of sound – a pulsing, if you will – started to tickle my ears, kind of like when someone is talking about you nearby but you don’t see them.  I looked up.  Jason apparently didn’t hear it yet: he was watching the cops at the side of the rally, who seemed for the most part pretty bored and certainly very few compared to how many US police would have been at a rally that size in Pittsburgh or St. Paul.  I wandered over to the edge of the plaza, and as I did, I noticed the sound was definitely growing louder.  It sounded like drums.

Sure enough, as I got to the street I could see a fuchsia-tinged raucous headed towards us.  It was the band – and, from the looks of it, the whole 50 or 60 person band, making their way towards us in full festivity and intensity.  The police seemed to notice it at about the same time: the samba band was headed right towards us, taking over the street in spite of whatever traffic had wanted to get through, lively and drawing quite a crowd.  Jason and I smiled in relief, strapped our drums on, and fell into step with our tom-tom compatriots as they passed. 

And then the march was happening.  People just came – some of them particpants from the farmer’s rally, some of them people from the street – and followed us.  They were willing to go where we were going, wherever that was.  In front of us, samba dancers were dancing in the streets to clear the way for the band.  Behind us streamed people with flags of all colors and causes and nations.  And, of course, the cops were activated.  The grabbed their shit and started following along side us on foot and then by van.

They blocked the road in front of us with their vans, and like the sardines in the ocean move like one creature, the samba band inverted in upon itself to turn around and went the other way, and all the people followed.  Down the streets we marched, dancing and drumming, shouting for justice for the campesinos and food for all, food that cannot be grown if our soils are dried-out by rising temperatures and our water poisoned.  At one point, the police blocked the way again, and the person who was acting “maestro” (band leader) at the time put her hands in an “O” abover her head to signal it was time for a huddle.  So we all huddled together in the street, with the cops around us and the people waiting patiently.  It’s really quite amazing, really.  Here we are, leading a parade, when suddenly someone has news that requires a decision to be made.  So, because we operate by consensus, we all huddle up to make a decision while everyone – including the cops, apparently – waits.

The news was that the cops would allow us to go to the Klima Forum, that is, the Climate Forum for the People, but no further.  They were worried, it seemed, that we were going to try to go down to the Harbor to support the Stop the Production People.  And indeed, some of the drummers did want to do that.  Others felt that it was pointless, as the word on the street was that that action had already been kettled in and arrests were happening. 

We decided to go down to the Klima Forum and stop for lunch.  After lunch (another communal kitchen experience, but this one not as peachy – we waited in two different lines for food that kept running out on us, outside, in the freezing cold, for about an hour before finally getting lucky and getting a bowl of soup) we gathered back up with the Rhythms of Resistance band, who were planning a solidarity action for the people in the jail.  Because the people who had attempted to do a solidarity action the day before had been stopped at a bridge quite far from the temporary prison, we decided to form two bands – one to meet with the main bulk of activists and go to the normal way down to the prison and probably be stopped at the bridge again, and another that would go to a different metro stop and walk around another way, hopefully to get within earshot of the prison so that our compatriots inside would be able to hear us.

Remembering how disheartening and depressing it can be to be in jail, I decided that I really wanted to be a part of the smaller band, even though it seemed more likely that band would run into trouble.  Jason felt the same, and so in spite of our rather mediocre samba skills (we still don’t really have any idea what those hand signals mean) we headed out with them to the further Metro station to try and sneak around the side.

Unfortunately, we ended up at the wrong Metro station – not just Jason and I, but the whole second half of the samba band.  It started to snow.  We gathered in our huddle on the train platform, trying to figure out if we should head back to the main station and get on the train that would take us to where we really wanted to go, or just join up with the main band, who were only one stop away.  Our scouts, sadly, were nowhere to be found but word was that they were coming to meet us where we were.  Some people wanted to leave without them, to get as quickly as possible to where we were originally supposed to go.  Others wanted to wait for the scouts and walk to our destination, even though no one really knew how to do that, and it seemed likely that we’d just end up stopped with the first group at the bridge.  Consensus started to break down.  People started to get crabby in the cold.  And then the cops showed up out of nowhere and completely surrounded us, shouting for us to keep our hands up where they could see them.

In Denmark, cops can search you even there’s no evidence of any sort of crime or misdeed.  They separated us by gender and frisked us, went through our bags, checked our IDs, and took our addresses.  (Luckily, they didn’t also check to see if we had train tickets, because none of us did.)

The police showing up only made people more crabby and uncertain.  After quite a long while with more huddling, we decided to head back to the main march.  By the time we got there, though, everyone was heading back.  A group of activists had been kettled in by the cops, and everyone else (including the first half of the samba band) was going home.  It felt like a long, cold, frustrating night – distinctly different from our Utopian morning at Christania.

Jason and I went back to the Rag Center – short for Ragnhildgade – which is another compound of activists and communal kitchens and the main meeting space (it supposedly can house between 1000-2000 activists).  We grabbed another bowl of soup and headed into the Spokescouncil, which was meeting to discuss Wednesday’s “Reclaim the Power” action – the biggest action of the conference, in some ways.  In some ways, Saturday’s action with its 100,000 people was and is the biggest thing we could do.  But the Reclaim the Power action is big in its confrontation of the Climate Change Summit.   The meeting brought up all kinds of questions for me, like, what is really my intention being here?  What kind of actions do I want to support  -- those that attempt to cultivate and nourish the work being done at the Summit, or those that seek to disrupt it in order to bring more voices to the table?  What is my ultimate goal, that is, what would “success” look like?

With these heavy questions, I went to bed.  It was a long day, one full of both the good and the bad, and I felt more than ready to close my eyes and open myself to the wisdom and rejuvenation of the dreamworld for awhile.

Drums...

I’m being blown wide open.  Alphonsus warned me that this would happen if I came to Europe to protest: “It will blow your mind,” he said.  He didn’t mention that it might blow my heart and soul and sense of purpose apart, leaving veins of brightness shining among the shards.

I was at a gathering a couple of weeks ago and had a little tiny glimpse of what I’m feeling now.   Someone I knew was performing “It’s a Wonderful World,” and something about that song, so unpretentious and heartfelt, and the fact that I was just beginning my moon blood, sunk into me in a way that it cracked the shell of my cynicism.  How often, these days, do I let myself think or see that it’s a wonderful world?  The skies of blue are clouded with gray smog, the red robins are dying.  It’s hard.  And yet, it’s still a wonderful world.  In spite of all that is so very wrong with this world, and in spite of all that will continue to fester and deteriorate in the coming years even if we do sign a Climate Change treaty at Copenhagen and move powerfully and unhesitantly towards the solutions.  This world is a miracle, and humans, too.   I began to cry when I felt my heart cracking open, cry with both the beauty of the truth that I was hearing and the realization of how deeply I’d been feeling hopeless.

Tonight, sitting in a huge tent at Christiana listening to a circle of women create a song of birds and ancestors, humans and fey, the land and something otherworldly too, I felt my heart crack open just as it did that day that I allowed myself to see that the world was still wonderful.  Using only Tibetan singing bowls and their voices, without words in any language known at this time, they filled the room with ancient beyond- time music who’s truth was all the more palpable because it could not be understood by my verbal-talking-self mind.  I had just finished eating a bowl of (free!) couscous and lentil curry with Lisa, Tom, and Jason, who were already trying to figure out what action tomorrow’s action.  Part of me knew it would be a good idea to start getting ready for all of that, but another part of me knew that I needed this immersion in song, needed it as much as anything that might happen in the streets.

It wasn’t only the bird-ancestor-land music that broke me open to possibility and hope, though – that was really simply the last unraveled stitch of my mask, you know, that one you wear sometimes that almost hides you from yourself.  The whole day was Initiation, going bright instead of deep in too the depths of depression and despair. 

The magic started with a crowd of hot pink drummers from Germany.  We stumbled upon them early in the day, gathering on the side of the road like a ragtag magenta army armed with snares and toms and bass drums.  Shyly, Jason and I approached and asked if we could drum with them.  Our shyness turned out to be completely unnecessary: the band of twelve or so was part of a larger group called Rhythms of Resistance, a non-hierarchical drum troupe that spans many different countries in Europe and Africa.  Their main premise is pretty simple: everyone can do anything in the troupe: play any drum, lead or follow patterns and marching periods, and everyone switches off.    As we’d march down the street, someone in front would lead the troupe with a series of hand signals seemingly more complex than ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.   Just when I thought that I had it, someone would step up and start leading with a whole new series of signals, often incorporating the ones that I thought I had, and I’d realize that I still had no idea what was going on.

It was in one of these moments of self-doubt and frustration that a young blonde woman with dreds wandered over to talk to Jason and me, her demeanor notably friendly in spite of the destruction I was currently wrecking on the poor song we were playing.  I felt like an ass, and asked if it was really okay that we continue drumming with them.  “Of course!” she said, not even thinking about it.  “You’re with the band now.”

Your with the band now.  That’s amazing.  Simply because you show up with a drum you just bought a couple of days ago and a desire to play. 

I looked at Jason, and she caught the look between us. “This is nothing.  Just you wait until the rest of the band shows up… they’re so professional.”

“The rest of the band?” I looked around at the band of drummers, which by this point had swelled to about fifteen or so.  “Where are they?”

“They’re at another action, but they’re on their way.  There’s… I dunno… maybe fifty more?  Oh, here they come.  See?”

I looked up.  Sure enough, a group of hot pink and silver was loudly headed our way.  Very loudly.  In a couple of moments, our group doubled, then tripled.   The rest of the march, all around us, was doing the same.  We pulled off into a plaza next to the road that the march was going down and circled up so that we could all see one another as we played, and as we did so, thousands and thousands of people continued to pass us by:  young women dressed as cows and pigs with signs that read, alternately, “fart,” “burp,” and “vegetarians against climate change;” a group of five or six people in khaki colored “bubble for one” costumes sponsored by Exxon and Chevron and the like; a group of clowns complaining that it was too cold anyhow; an amazing slate grey dragon carried by six people that danced dancing in the streets. 

That’s when I first started to feel it: the cracking.  Vandana Shiva was standing on the stage, though I couldn’t see her – I could only hear her voice echoing through the massive intersection the march had filled.  “Welcome to Copenhagen!” her stately voice rang out, echoing across the cobblestone streets.  “How does it feel to be marching with 100,000 people?  Look around.  These people care about the earth just as you do.”

I couldn’t see 100,000 people: I’m just one little human, and all I could see, everywhere I looked, were people.  Crowds of communists with black and red flags, Friends of the Earth with blue flags, people carrying life jackets and cardboard cut outs of rescue tubes for when the waters rise – everywhere, people.  The Rhythms of Resistance group began to weave through the crowd, using their signals and the power of their loud drums to get from one end of the plaza to the other, and still there were more and more people, with so many with creative expressions of their passion and anger and desire for earth healing that even listing all of the ones that I can think of doesn’t do it justice.  I still don’t know if I can answer Vandana Shiva’s question.  How does it feel to march with 100,000 people who love the earth, who care passionately about protecting her? 

It feels like cracking open, I guess.  Cracking open to hope – not light, fluffy, sweet hope but the serious kind, the kind that whispers, we might actually be able to do this.  That’s the scary kind of hope – the kind that’s sort of like disillusion, except that instead of losing my idealism (a word so often confused with naiveté), I’m losing the cynicism that makes it okay to drive instead of ride my bike, and okay to sit home and zone out on the internet, and okay to put myself forward somewhat but not all the way, which I prefer, because if I don’t put myself out totally than I can’t fail totally and I also don’t have to fear being totally rejected by you or anyone else.

I’m tearing up as I write this.  I’m not kidding.  So much in our lives tells us that we’re doomed, or that we may as well not bother, or that we’re crazy for thinking we need to do anything at all, or that the only real heroes are the ones in storybooks or made-for-TV-movies.  But let me tell you, I saw 100,000 heroes in the streets today, wearing super-hero capes that read “Climate Justice” and drums held together by duct tape and puffy bubble-for-one suits and black masks.  I saw them march peacefully, but fiercely, from downtown to the Bella Center to have their voices heard.  And I know, because Jason and I being here represents such a tiny percentage of the people in my community that care deeply about this issue, that the 100,000 people that I saw represent just a fraction of the people on the planet that believe that climate change is an issue that threatens the survival and wellness of all beings on this planet and who want to create sweeping changes to protect life on earth.

Eventually, it came down to us through the rumor mill that some of the march had been separated by the police and corralled onto a side street, and were being held there and possibly arrested.  The fellow leading the troupe made an “O” over his head with both hands, and we circled up to talk about what to do next.  As quickly as possible, he relayed the information and we broke up into affinity groups to discuss what we wanted to do.  The results were surprisingly unanimous: we wanted to go there to support those being arrested. 

We continued marching with the main march a little ways longer, and then as subtly as possible (considering the seventy-odd drummers and drums, some the size of a Great Dane) broke off down a side street and ran a block or two over, then cut back again and found ourselves – as we had hoped – on the other side of the police line.  There were already some people there, watching and calling out for their friends to be let go.  We circled up again, the sounds of our drums and our voices filling the air with a new vibrancy and authority. 

BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM, “LET THEM GO!” 

BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM, “LET THEM GO!”

BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM, “LET THEM GO!”

More people started to come, drawn by the drumming and the thick energy of the space.  Their voices joined ours.  “Let them go!  Let them go!”

But as we continued to drum and play, the police presence also started to get thicker.  At some point, I can’t say exactly when, I felt the energy shift – its something that happens at these mass demonstrations, I’ve noticed, ever since the RNC in St. Paul: I can feel the energy shift in a way that feels unambiguous, as clear to me as reading a street sign or sensing a car speeding up beside me on the road.  Something is different now.  Something is about to happen.

Jason came over to me just at that moment.  “I think its time for us to leave,” he said.

I nodded.  We grabbed Tom and headed off down towards the end of the street just as a police car drove up, then away.  It seemed very likely they were about to “kettle” in the crowd that had gathered to support those in their first corral.  Which almost made it harder, for me, to leave.  I didn’t want to leave those I’d been drumming and making magic in the street with all day; but at the same time, I didn’t want to be arrested.  Not here, now, for such a minor reason.

(We found out later that they arrested nearly 1,000 people today, including many of our drum troupe.  Some have been released, but others are still detained, chained to benches and being denied food, etc.). 

We joined back up with the rest of the march, where we stumbled upon a drum circle of a much different sort: a group of Native Americans, holding a sweat lodge in the open area next to the Bella Center, drumming and chanting.  There’s more about today, but I’m about to be thrown out of the café, so this is what I’m going to leave you with: tonight, in Copenhagen at the end of a long night of protesting, I found myself immersed in the indigenous wisdom of the land I live on being used for the good of the earth, for the healing of this beautiful garden-planet.  I don’t think you’ll see it reported anywhere else, these tribes that have come thousands of miles to speak for Her.  But they are here.   They came and spoke at Christania, too: but that’s another story, perhaps one I’ll be able to tell you about tomorrow.  Until then, thank you so much for reading this, and please know how very grateful I am for all the love that you send and the work you’re doing at home.

Copenhagen: Arrival Part Two. The Church.

It’s late, way too late for us, we who have been traveling for twenty three hours and who’s biological clocks believe that its close to dawn, rather than a misty and cold evening.  Our dinner weighs heavy in our bellies, the first real food we’ve eaten, and walking feels good in spite of how exhausted we are.  Besides, Copenhagen almost feels like an overgrown and even-more-charming Santa’s village, fully dark at four o’clock, streets crowded with bikes and pedestrians but only a car or two, who’s headlights seem out of place among the crumbling stone buildings and cobbled brick streets.  So many bikes!  They whiz by in breathtaking bunches, swarm on sidewalks, throng in the streets like tribes.  


Beyond its natural charm, Copenhagen has put on its eco-finest for the Climate Summit, with signs that read “Hopenhagen” and catchphrases urging a powerful change at the conference everywhere and large, beautiful demonstrations of alternative energies. It’s tempting to feel like we’ve stumbled into utopia.  The occasional sirens and blue-lit “Politico” cars rushing by, followed by ambulances, reveal that there is also something fierce beneath the sweet surface.  Most of the people here seem oblivious to it, wandering with hearty druken cheer down the cold street, enjoying their Friday night.  There is a man playing bagpipes in front of an Irish bar for tips, surrounded by pale-skinned, slight Danish women, and a motley crew of rowdy young men hauling Christmas trees down the street and swinging them at each other. It feels sweet to be surrounded by their liveliness, even though my exhaustion makes it hard for me to feel much of my own.


Jason and I follow a trail of golden lights to an old church, one that has sat here for hundreds of years, remaining quietly stately and powerful even as the cosmetic stores and clothing boutiques and bars edge ever closer, their neon signs whispering that someday the candles that light our way will be forgotten, overpowered. The candles, flickering magically in the dark night, seem uninterested in such mundane matters.   We follow them through the wide double doors and into the ancient chapel to an altar to Jesus, who’s head is ringed like Buddha’s with the golden halo of enlightenment.  Without a word, we both kneel down, breath deeply, and begin to pray to him and to Mary Magdelene, who seems to have been forgotten in this church but who’s presence is so intimately, innately tied to his.   I’ve never prayed to Jesus before, but here in this ancient church, I can feel his power and purity and the way he inspires so many to desire goodness and justice.  It simply feels right.  


We ask them to come into us, to bring compassion and forgiveness and strength in the face of adversity to us during this week.  And love.  The love they felt for one another, the love they feel for their people, who are the people we will be in the streets with during the next seven days and the police as well, and many of the politicians and policy makers… Throughout the last couple of hundred years, so many have called upon these two loving bodhisattvas during their deepest times of need.   Well, this is the eleventh hour and we must all come together to solve the troubles that we face – that’s what this summit, in its essence, is about.  Even good Jewitch girls like myself.  I’ve had issues in the past with the things that Jesus’s followers have done in his name, but now, in this time, I feel peace and love and unity praying in his church.

After our prayers to Mary Magdelene and Jesus slowly ebb to silence, we get to our feet and I slip a candle from a bucket near the altar into my purse, getting an intuitive hit that at some point this week it will become a major part of our work.  Then we wander back to our hostel and make our way up the stairs to our room, which is a dorm we’re sharing with four other activists: a man from Germany, one from Canada, one from England, and one who slept the whole time.  All men, except for me.  The German fellow, who never told us his name, talked about working with the Black Bloc in Europe and gave us an anti-fascist flag from his homeland, “because you came all the way from America.”


“Fighting the nazis and fighting the corporations isn’t really that different,” he says. “Perhaps the corporations have a nicer face, but really, they do the same things – they kill so many, they suppress our freedom, the turn harshly against you if you try to speak out against them.   We still have so many problems with fascists, even today.  You still have problems with racism.  It’s all the same.”

I tried to resist writing tonight, but its simply too exciting and too magical to put it off. We haven’t “officially” begun, and yet, its all happening.  So much so, that I simply must go to sleep.  I’m filled with curiosity and excitement for what lays ahead… and I really want to be over my jetlag so that I can be present for it.

Lotsa love,
Riyana

Copenhagen: Arrival...

I'm is sitting in a cafe next to her hostel in Copenhagen after a very long travel day yesterday.  I would love to create a compelling, rich blog entry for y'all about what this city is like with the Climate Summit here... but I'm just too exhausted.  Short version: its amazing. And amazingly cold.  More later!

Herbs and Gardens

This week my marks the end of my first “What’s Your Tree?” group, which is a circle that I’m co-facilitating that meets weekly to help us clarify our purpose and find ways to act in the world that align with our deepest callings.  (It is not, however, based on some sort of Celtic Tree Oracle thing, as my friend Esse had thought when I first mentioned it to her.  It’s based off of the work of Julia Butterfly Hill, who became famous for sitting in Luna, an oldgrowth redwood tree, for over two years and thusly saved the tree from being cut down by Pacific Lumber).  Last week, we created collages for the future that we want to create, and rather than sit around and think yet again about the state of the world, I found myself drawn to images and words about the coming winter that I want to create for myself.

I’m the type that’s prone to the wintertime blues.  For the longest time, I had no idea what was going on – it simply seemed a fact that every so often, inexplicably, I would fall into heavy bouts of sleepiness, loneliness, sorrow, and an inability to concentrate.  It was my ex-boyfriend Jack, who I dated for seven years, who pointed out the connection with the seasons, which was a truly illuminating insight, however irritated and exasperated he seemed about it at the time.  But even after getting a sense of this, and learning that there was even a diagnosable name for what was happening to me (SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder), I still couldn’t figure out how to change it.

In the last couple of years, however, I finally realized that what I need to do to stay balanced and sane is to simply slow down and let myself breathe and be in the sun as much as possible.  Forget the weird “Happy Lights.”  What a SAD girl needs, at this time of year, is less commitments and more slow-cooked meals, naps, reading novels in bed, and movie-watching snuggled up with her lover.  That’s probably what we all need, really, but for the seasonally-affected it’s the only way to keep from spiraling down into what can feel like having PMS for three months instead of three days.

My collage was all about the desire, even the anticipation, of this slowing down: it began with “doing less creates more,” a clipping that came from a magazine article about a modern-day reworking of the ancient idea of the Sabbath; moving into an image of a chicly bohemian woman leaning against the doorjam of a farmhouse kitchen with copper pots hanging from the ceiling, to express my deep yearning for afternoons full of from-scratch chicken soup; but it was the illustrations of garden plans from Sunset magazine was the centerpiece of the whole thing, the crux of the issue.

And so plan we did.  This weekend, on a Saturday morning so early that even the farmer’s market was not open yet (can you believe how much I’ve changed?), Jason and I went down to Nomad Café in Berkeley and, over lattes, visioned and planned and dreamed and wrestled with the small square footage of the yard of the house we’re moving into at the end of this month, somehow managing to find room for vegetable beds, an outdoor dining area, a graywater from-the-washer irrigation system, a clothes line, and fruit trees.  Then, and only then, we hit up the Farmer’s Market and got ourselves our leeks and greens and pears for the week, even splurging for some grass-fed pork sausage and free-change chicken legs (just the legs, though – the breasts are too expensive).

That night at home, I was going through my favorite gardening book, Golden Gate Gardening, when I noticed Mallow, a plant we’ve been studying my herbal medicines class, in the chapter, “Growing Like Weeds.”  I kept flipping.  Chickweed, another one.  Dandelion.  Burdock. Curly Dock.  Plantain.  Wild Onion.  They were all there, every last one.

I’ve known for quite some time that some “weeds” are actually medicines.  It wasn’t until looking through this book, however, that I realized that almost all our weeds are actually medicines imported from Europe.

Suddenly, in a single breath’s time, a vision came to me: I saw an ancestors woman in a bonnet, on a ship moving across the cold waters of the Atlantic with her “pot herb” seeds carefully packed away, not knowing what her future held but hoping desperately that the medicines she was bringing with her would take root and grow in this new, unknown land.  She must have treasured those seeds, guarded them carefully against the salt sprays and the sun in the long months of the journey.  These seeds might be the only hope for her and her family in this untamed place, as essential as the food stores and seeds they brought with them.

Then another vision: a portly, middle-aged man is spraying Roundup on his lawn, cursing the dandelions that are growing there.  Inside, his young son (though no one will know this for a few years yet) has cancer.  The medicine that would have helped him strengthen his liver to be able to filter out the deadly toxins is just outside – also being killed beneath the spray.  Next door, another green, homogenous lawn.  And another.  All of the dreadful “weeds” eradicated by poisonous substances that can supposedly can somehow tell the difference between broad-leaf plants and narrow-leafed grass, between humans and animals cells and those of the “undesirables.”

Sometimes, I can’t even handle it…any of it, this whole messed up world.

Instead of ending with that thought, however, here’s another: in some indigenous tribes, an apprentice herbalist was only allowed to work with an herb once he had dreamed of it.  If that were the case for me, up until last night, I’d be two months into my program without learning about a single one.

But last night I finally dreamed of an herb.  In my dream, I was walking up a road in the hills where I lived, and came across a little white dog that was very wounded.  At first I thought it had been hit by a car, but then I saw what looked like massive puncture wounds or bullet holes in his third eye, his heart, and somewhere else (I can’t remember the third).  I took the dog up to the house, where my friend Ginnette – who has been appearing in a couple of these “animals in distress” dreams – was, and who incidentally is also in my herb class.  She was not nearly as worried as I was about the little dog, who seemed to be in good spirits in spite of its wounds, licking us and carrying on as little dogs do, saturated, concentrated little brainless bundles of love.  Then she, or someone or something else, said something about the herb Yerba Santa, which happens to be my herb of the week for class this week.

So, there ya go!  I wonder what the native herbalists would have said about such a thing?

November morning...

It's early, not as early as I'd like, but just the same the pale blue light of the sun cresting over the eucalyptus hills slants in through our window, making the beige walls seem violet.  Jason has already left for work, but Emily is curled up at my feet, and with her keen feline intuition has sensed the change in me from dreaming to waking -- she begins to purr, and then, as I stretch and my toes get too close to her tummy for her liking, gives me a couple of warning swats to the feet.  I adjust accordingly, stretching in a more diagonal fashion across the bed, then sit up and cup my hands in front of my heart, fingers outward.

"Karagre vasate Lakhmi.  Kara mule Saraswathi, Kara madhye Guari.  Prabhate kara darshanam."  This is my morning prayer.  At the tips of my fingers, fortune and beauty.  In the middle of my hands, knowledge and wisdom.  At the base of my hands, the creativity of the cosmic mother.  In the morning, a vision of light in my hands."

I brush my fingers lightly over my face, my body, and the space immediately around me.  Then I get up and patter over to the stove and put on the tea -- chai, to help my digestive juices start flowing and to wake me up a little bit.   Emily swirls around my ankles in a graceful puff of fur and purrs, reminding me that she's hungry, too.  I drop some dry cat food into her bowl which lands with a soft tinkle against the ceramic bowl, and she immediately sets to a contented munch.  The tea kettle sizzles, its version of whistling.  Its an old thing that came from a place I lived a couple of places back, in the redwoods.  I still have the tea kettle, and a rusty iron triangle and beater that hangs over our deck, and the memory of the trees at night under the moon.

I pour my tea, add a bit of oat milk, and then use the rest of the hot water to a pyrex dish with a jar of coconut oil sitting in it.  The hot water desolidifies the oil, and it turns into a thick warm yellow syrup.  I carry it into the bathroom, lay a smudged white towel on the ground, and light the candles.  Then I open the jar of warm oil and use the first couple of drops to anoint my crown chakra, feeling the energy open up and come awake there with my awareness of it.  Next, my third eye.  I close my eyes and feel my inner senses open up, as well as my ears -- my vision feels clearer as I open my eyes and begin to butter up my face and throat and shoulders.  From there, everything flows towards the heart.  Hands to heart, solar plexis to heart, womb to heart, feet to heart.  The oil warms me and grounds me at the same time, as if all the distractions of the November morning vata energy is being swept away by my hands on my body.  It's also a self-blessing time, a prayer of gratitude towards my knees and feet and elbows and tummy, all those parts of me that sometimes get  overlooked and unappreciated. 

The self-abhyanga has been a transformational change in my life, on that deepens with every day as I do it.  I have always had a problem getting grounded, being dedicated.  But this is different.  I look forward to it everyday.

I step into the shower and let the hot water pour over me, dispersing some of the oil, but even so my skin feels soft and nourished.  I don't use soap -- I simply let the water touch me and purify me in its own way.  A song rises, unbidden, to my mind and then I let it come out: The river is flowing, flowing and growing.  The river is flowing down to the sea.  Mother carry me, your child I will always be.  Mother carry me, down to the sea.

After a few moments I step out, feeling really awake now, and renewed.  In ayurvedic philosophy, morning is a time to cleanse of  ama, the staleness that clings to us like moss.  I feel sparkling and new, yet present. I dress and go out onto the deck to sit in meditation for a while, and feel my breath and hear the birds and the open up to the wind blowing across my face after dancing among the long sage green eucalyptus leaves.  This is a further settling in to myself, to really being present and peaceful and loving in my own skin and in this world.  From this place, I can pray.  I pray in gratitude for this morning, for the people in my life, for the blessing of life itself.  I pray to be more and more present to the great mystery in everything and to the great spirit that is in all things.  I pray in love and in connection.  I open to the visions in my mind and heart, but do not focus on them, instead letting the beauty of the world around me on this plane be witnessed and honored within me.

One more song rises from within me, and my voice joins that of the scrub jays and the wind:
Beauty above me, beauty below me
Beauty to my left side, beauty to my right side.
Beauty behind me, beauty before me.
Beauty all around me, beauty within me.
Beauty all around me, beauty within me.