Occupying Together (Once You Really Get Down to it) & Shadow

It’s getting late and we really should leave McPherson Park, but it’s hard to tear away from, even though every thirty minutes or so the cops pull up with lots of lights and sound and cars, park for a couple of moments, and then streak off in an equally abrasive and confusing rush.  There are at least 200 people in the park, many clustered in a circle near the main space playing music, singing, and clapping.  Banjo is on banjo, of course, giving the jam Americana-bluegrass sound, and I find myself torn between feeling like it’s completely incongruous or utterly apropos.  He’s wearing black jeans patched with screen-dyed patches and held up by suspenders over a plaid flannel shirt, giving him the look of a steampunk depression-era anarchist railroad worker. 

Around him, a couple of folks tap on drums and buckets or strum guitars, and after a final look I decide the street-music with a tinge of Appalachia is the perfect soundtrack for this scene, no question about it.  We are truly witnessing the birth of a new America, and a new generation of young people are guiding us towards our future by simultaneously recalling the ancient land-based culture we have forsaken and tapping the technology of the day: learning to grow and can food, raise chickens, and save seeds while using the democracy of the internet, the sacred witnessing of livestreaming, and maifestos written on blogs and published through facebook to spread the word of a new movement. 

A small circle of young men, clearly drunk, is in the center of the park, and occasionally the Occupy DC folks glance at them over their shoulders, grumble, and go back to what they are doing.  These four guys have just showed up tonight and already caused one physical altercation, but no one quite knows what to do about it.  Some folks suspect them of being provocateurs, but whether or not that’s true doesn’t get us any closer to finding a way to deal with them effectively. 

(Sometimes people believe activists are paranoid to be so worried about provocateurs or unwilling to see those who do commit acts of violence and destruction in their own midsts, and, well, maybe we are.  But just this week an associate editor of the right-wing rag American Spectator, Patrick Howley, posted in his blog an account of how he “infiltrated” Stop the Machine with the express intent of discrediting them and causing chaos and mayhem at a protest, which indeed did end when the guards he charged at sprayed the crowds with pepper spray.  His article is full of slander and lies, but one thing that makes it worth reading is that yours truly has a bit part in it, in which he flatteringly but mistakenly calls me a red-haired twenty something just out of grad school). 

The drunk ruffians pose an interesting dilemma in the midst of the sweet music-making scene because sure, many of us would be happy to toss them out of the park, but aren’t they also part of the “ninety-nine percent” we’ve been chanting about all week?  As far as that goes, aren’t folks who are mentally unstable, folks who exhibit tendencies towards sexism and racism, folks who speak with spite and anger about the police and politicians, and, perhaps the worst of all crimes, folks who refuse to learn and properly use consensus process – that sacred process that has been passed down from activist to activist for generations – aren’t all of these folks still part of the ninety-nine percent? 

Well, they certainly are, but on the other hand, they can make the lives of organizers and facilitators much more difficult and can turn quick thirty minute meetings into sagas that last for hours. Or, as in this case, they can pose various kinds of danger – physical danger, the danger of added police presence, a danger to our reputation and popularity with the media and with folks who generally aren’t amused by activists, which is where a lot of our power lies.  In the media, the Occupy movement is being billed as the first populist movement since the 1930s, but as with all popular movements and especially those that endeavor to work through non-hierarchical structures, it’s clear to me that the Occupy Together groups are starting to have to face the reality that it is downright difficult to reach our ideal of bringing together from all walks of life, with disparate belief systems, communication styles, education and cultural backgrounds, etc. into one force that can challenge those in power and lead to laws and policies that serve a united majority and our sweet garden planet home rather than the rich minority.  What’s even more frustrating is that in order to dissipate our movement, proponents for individualism and competition don’t need to do anything – the onus is on us to change the societal story, to override our cultural conditioning and personal vulnerabilities and make something transformational happen.

(If somehow you’re out of the loop and don’t get the whole 99% thing, the short version is that it’s a reference to the vast inequality of wealth distribution in this country, where 1% of the population holds 34% of the total net worth of the United States, and the top 10% of the population has 39% of America’s wealth, leaving 90% of us to divvy up a mere 27% of all of the money in the richest country in the world.  

Today, I read a blog post by pagan author T. Thorn Coyle, who talks about her own experience working on Wall St. years ago and challenges us to look at both the dark and the bright in ourselves and our groups when dealing with issues of togetherness and cohesion with diversity. 

“Change is in our hearts and hands. Change is in my heart and hands. Change is in us all.  Can we come together?” she asks.  “There is a light and corresponding shadow everywhere. Nothing is clear, and clean, and in a little compartment. Life is messy and intertwined. Light and shadow are not discrete beings, but bound to one another.”

As the days pass here in DC, I see the light and shadow of unity and alienation overlaid in every interaction: those between Jason and me, within the beautiful witches in the Pagan Cluster, in the general assembly meetings at Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square, in the hesitation of friends who email me and ask, “Should I really bother to put myself out for this?  Is this going to be any different then all of those other things we thought we really change things but never did?” 

This week, people that I love and have worked with for years have suddenly without warning criticized me for taking too much leadership, for being in my power and stepping out as a trainer and leader.  I’ve facilitated meetings where people openly disparaged my skill and walked out rather than gently proposing process suggestions or taking a breath and waiting to see where it would go.  In conversations on the margins of the crowds, people admit sheepishly about feeling left out for being the vegan, the queer, the heterosexual, the anarchist punk, the suburban mom, the elder with decades of experience, the young kid stepping out into the world of activism for the first time.  These moments are the shadows of unity – moments that show us the growing edges of where we need to go and teach us the tools that we need to develop in order to get there. 

I’m not trying to air the dirty laundry of the Occupy Movement or even to offer gentle, loving criticism -- I lead a lot of transformational work in my life, at spiritual retreats and beyond, and one thing I’ve noticed is that we all want the deep work of great change but we are never actually prepared for how hard its going to be, or how our personal shadows can snake through even the most conscious intentions to ambush us from behind.  And that’s how its supposed to be. We can imagine what it would feel like to be our biggest, brightest selves, and we can envision what this world would be like if we could truly come together to heal, protect, and nourish our communities and ecosystems, but it’s the dirty, difficult work of wading through the shadows that gives us the skills, capacities, and tools to manifest them and get to the next level.  We may have a sense of the what, but the how comes with the journey, developed through the growing pains of evolution.  Part of that growth process is shining a bright light into the shadows, not to dis-spell their darkness, but to see what is there and what we can learn from diving deep into them. 

So, it makes perfect sense that in creating a movement based on unity-with-diversity, I’ve found myself experiencing and moving through my own stories about being the smart kid in class that always gets put down for being too much of an overachiever and, paradoxically, also those stories that I have about not being good enough.  And sometimes drunk young men show up at our encampments and we need to find ways to include them while also creating boundaries that keep us safe and safeguard the beautiful work we’re doing.  It means that sometimes we have to dump the sacred concensus process because people just don’t get it, and may even openly disparage us at meetings for trying to impose it upon them.  Sometimes we’ll have two different occupying groups in the same town with General Assembly meetings at the exact same time, and neither one will want to change it (hypothetically speaking, of course).  Sometimes we’ll have to ask ourselves if we can collaborate with a group that doesn’t share all our values.  This is just as much a part of creating the world that we want as showing up at Congress or blockading the banks – perhaps even more so.  It’s both the true potential and the vulnerability of a movement who, at it’s heart, is about uniting the ninety-nine percent.

“Changing culture is up to us,” Thorn says.  “Every action takes a willingness to risk… Nor does it all feel fated…It takes us all, each of us, to look inside and say, ‘Where can I begin?’”

Oh, and just so you know, we didn’t end up throwing the drunk kids out of the park.  We did what any good activist lefty group does – we held a meeting about it the next day.

In love and solidarity,
Riyana

Communique` from Occupied DC: Day Five

Yesterday, Jason, Martin and I were standing in front of the White House with our drums, wondering where the heck the march was.  It was the first time I’ve ever seen the White House and it’s overly vibrant green lawns, surrounded by granite and marble buildings that seem imposing and venerable, just as they are supposed to.  On one side is the Eisenhower building, which feels oddly gothic and gray, as if one part of Washington DC at one time was taken over by an ambitious Emily Bronte fan; on the other side is the white-columned Treasury Building, which, I kid you not, sits directly cross from a matching building that hosts Bank of America and PNC Bank.  With truths like these, you really don’t need to play anything up for the cameras – or, in this case, the blog.

Skipping meals has become the new diet craze for many pagan cluster folks here at Occupy DC, and as light-headedness is starting to set in, Jason and Martin suggest heading off to go get some food.  We begin to head off, but my spider senses are tickling, telling me that the action is somewhere nearby.  One of the things I like the most about doing this kind of thing is the way that my intuition seems to hone and flourish exponentially, and I dawdle behind them, trying to pinpoint exactly where the energy is coming from.  It feels like a sound that I can almost hear at the furthest range of my aural senses, but also a simultaneous fraying of the edges of my perception and a sense of being drawn one way, so that any movement in another direction feels off-kilter and wrong.  Yes, no.  Yes.  Over there, somewhere – no, too far.  That way.  A building.  Not dangerous.  A swelling.  Here it comes.  It’s coming this way.

“Wait!” I tell them.  They stop and look at me, and for a moment I feel foolish, wondering what I’m supposed to say. 

And then the march turns onto Pennsylvania Ave., way off down the street, a blur of people and signs and police cars and a pulsing sense of power and friction and hope all rolled into one.  As we get closer to them and they get closer to us, I see Banjo, a fellow who was in the non-violent direction action training that I helped lead at McPherson Park the day before.  He smiles widely as we join them, and then as we begin the first few beats of our drums the crowd erupts into cheers of welcome.

One thing I can say about the Occupy DC folks is that they are masters of cheers of welcome and unity.  Any time a car passes and honks, they cheer. Occasionally even some of the folks in the sleek black, probably bullet-proof vehicles will stick their heads out of the window and smile in encouragement, and they cheer.  If it’s a fire engine or taxi or work truck, the cheers are even more rowdy and exuberant.  As we march pass the cafes and restaurants and shops, people wave and give us the peace sign in greeting, and Occupy DC cheers.  They are cheery folks.  Literally.

“Occupy Wall Street!  Occupy K Street!  Occupy everything and never give it back!” the chanting starts up, and we drum.  Magically, Elaine materializes beside me with her bell.  A fella with a bass drum finds us, as well, and the next thing you know we have ourselves a band.  

We leave the White House and begin marching back towards McPhearson Park, where Occupy DC is based, and as we move down 15^th St., the chant shifts.  “We are the ninety-nine percent!  You are the ninety-nine percent!”

It’s a message of empowered unity and a shared desire for change more powerful than any of the other experiences I’ve had as an activist.  It goes beyond political parties, age, occupation (if you are lucky enough to have one at the moment) and how you feel about abortion or who you think should be eligible to marry one another.  It’s the rallying cry of a world that has finally noticed that those who would hoard power and resources have stepped beyond what is tolerable.  It has all the makings of world-revolution – even if it’s just in its fledgling stages.  Occupy Wall Street has swelled to marches with thousands of people.  Occupy San Francisco has actions planned everyday this coming week.  Occupy Raleigh starts next week.  Occupy Sydney – as in, Sydney Australia – recently sent #OWS (that’s the twitter hashtag – or search moniker – for Occupy Wall Street) a message of support and inspiration that quickly spread throughout the twitterverse. 

The march, which was hosted by the folks in McPherson park (Occupy DC) versus Freedom Plaza (Stop the Machine) came at just the right time for everyone who’s here protesting: earlier in the day, we experienced our first incidence of violence when the security guards at the Air & Space Museum pepper sprayed some 50-100 people who attempted to enter the building to raise awareness about romanticizing weapons and warfare (the action was much bigger than that, but only those at the front of the crowd were attacked).  Jason was there – he’s fine – but I was still back at Freedom Plaza, doing a consensus and facilitation training, because my entire life here has become about trainings and consensus.  Somehow, that rascally Starhawk has roped me into her nefarious plans of world domination through non-violent direct action trainings and educating people in effective consensus process. 

When spirit calls me to this work, she isn’t always clear about what that means.  Since I’ve come to Washington DC, I’ve found myself in a dizzying schedule of meetings and trainings.  On Friday evening Jason and I volunteered to facilitate the General Assembly for Stop the Machine, which may be one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever done in my life, or at least in the last couple of years.  At 7:55pm, Jason was asked by one of the organizers to facilitate; at 8:05pm, we were standing in front of 300 some folks, many of whom had never worked with consensus before, and others whom seemed to be openly hostile about the process.  Beneath the harsh glaring lights of the stage and the omnipresent eye of the livestream feed, we proceeded to dissolve into chaos and confusion yet somehow came out again on the other side with a plan for the next day and a new sense of ownership of the process and our actions. 

Now it’s Sunday night and I’m sitting in a completely peaceful General Assembly being facilitated by Linda, another person who’s been running with the Pagan Cluster lately (it’s been almost an entirely PC lineup – last night Starhawk facilitated).  I’m struck, as I sit here, about how the demographic of the two groups Occupying Washington is becoming galvanized – the crowd here at Stop the Machine seems to be mostly older labor folks, Code Pink folks, and such, whereas the General Assembly that I just left in McPherson Square where Occupy DC is are younger and grittier.  I’m also struck how remarkably calm these folks are, given the fact that most likely the cops will come tonight to try to toss us out. 

Tonight, our permit runs out at midnight. So far the police have looked the other way about the fact that people are regularly breaking the law for camping in the federally-owned space along Pennsylvania Ave., but our guess is that when the permit for our day-time event here expires tonight, things will change. So the conversation shifts from announcements and committees to strategy and justice and revolution, and I find myself questioning my previous decision not to get arrested.   As usual.

Occu-Pee / Occu-pie

Tonight, as Starhawk, Eddy and I are finishing up planning the last details of the Non-Violence Direct Action Training we're teaching with a local DC organizer, Jason is talking on the phone with local farmers.

For some reason, he's having a hard time getting them to accept the offer of our very nitrogen-rich, urine soaked straw bales.

At this point, they are actually just theoretically urine-soaked straw bales.  Apparently, we don't yet own said straw bales, nor have we rented the truck we'd need to haul them to and from the event.

"Hello?  Oh, hi, my name is Jason and I got your number from so-and-so, who said you might be able to help us... You see, we have these straw bales we'd like to give you for your crops... no, no, they don't have any fire retardant in them... they have urine.  No, not my urine.  I don't know who's.  It's for this thing down at the plaza.  It could be anyone's."

Later, Jason tells us that he can hear the guy on the other end of the line, muffled because his hand is over the receiver, calling to his wife upstairs.  "Get a load of this," he says.  "This guy's calling to give us a bunch of straw soaked in pee."

Jason is shaking his head as he's telling us this, as if it's the weirdest thing in the world that the farmer won't take humanure from the masses.  Starhawk, across the kitchen table with her usual midnight cup of tea in front of her, is positively cackling in delight.  I don't blame her -- I'm laughing so hard that I feel like I might pee right then and there, straw or no.

"I tried calling a bunch of people, but none of them would take it," he says.  "You know, it's the hardest thing in the world out here on the East Coast, trying to get someone to take your pee-straw."

He has this deadpan way of saying these things that occasionally gets me even after all of these years, and poor Eddy is quite often deceived by it.  "You're not in the Bay Area anymore," she says, seemingly earnest.

"I think if I could just finish explaining to them what a valuable resource it is, they'd be overjoyed," he says, still deadpan, no mercy.  "They might even offer to pick it up themselves so we don't have to shlep it all the way down there."

This discussion eventually devolves into a conversation about Home De-poo, where you can drop off your humanure and get paid for it, and the Pagan Cluster's new affinity group Occu-pee, who's mission is to create a place for folks on Freedom Plaza (where the Stop the Machine encampment is) and McPherson Square (where #OccupyKSt is) to relieve themselves in an ecologically beneficial way.

Personally, I'm not all that into Occu-pee, but as the night winds later and later, I find myself getting rather excited about the idea of Occu-pie.  Occu-pie was originally conceived as a way to keep folks who want to put the lid on the Occupy Together actions' recent flood of popular media as folks have become more and more convinced that anything with the word "Occupy" in it is being systematically negated within internet search engines like google and yahoo.  That may or may not be true, but the real treasure in the solution that more savvy and paranoid individuals than I have come up with is the possibility it presents for some serious kitchen-witchery-activism.  I'm imaging a sweet cob oven arrangement at Freedom Plaza that could serve up Occu-pie Pecan, Occu-pie Dutch Apple, and of course, Occu-pie Chocolate Mousse.  If we had Occu-pie Chocolate Mousse (gluten-free Occu-pie, of course), I'd feel pretty darn happy about being there whether or not it was for a good cause.

Soon all four of us are holding our sides laughing, probably keeping up the upstairs roommates who had enough sense to go to bed early.

Given it's the night before the big action, it only makes sense that you'd want to sleep, but as with many Action-eves, I find it hard to feel sleepy.  The giddy, zany laughter and discussion is the only thing I can imagine working for me right now -- it takes the edge off of my nervousness.  There's still so much we don't have planned, and so many dreams still to realize.  Is it really starting tomorrow?  Will our sacred waters purification system work?  Will we have enough pretty altar cloths and prayer flags to create the space we want for healing and ritual and magic?  How many people will come?  What will we do once we get there?

And, of course, will we have a place to pee?

No one can say for sure -- it's all a mystery.  For now, stay tuned.

In love and solidarity,
Riyana

The Holonic Shift Will Not Be Televised - But You Can Glimpse it on YouTube

I woke up to the sound of sirens getting closer, confused, wondering where I was and if they were coming for us.  After a moment of tense listening, the fire engines passed. I realized, as I raised up my groggy head from the thermarest and the cold air of the tent helped clear my head, that I didn’t have any reason to be afraid of sirens.  There have been times, in times past, that there were pre-emptive raids and snatches off of the street.  There have been other actions that were like that, where they came in the middle of the night and rammed the door and came in with weapons drawn.

But those are other days, actions of the past. 

Whatever is sweeping the country right now is different.  There have been no preemptive raids, no tear gas canisters stinging the air with their metallic flashing, no horses with hooves pounding down the road.  Certainly there have been some bad moments.  Overall, though, with the freshness of the crowds and the slightly mystified reactions of the press and US populace, the powers that be seem stunned into inaction.  People have criticized #OccupyWallStreet for not having a clearly defined message, but that may be because the intensity and reach of their message is incomprehensible to many people, even those who in the past thought they were in the know:

We do not want your dirty capitalism, your backroom deals that have stripped us of our homes and jobs, your power-over based purely on a financial system that is essentially a house of cards stacked in favor of those who have always had the power and the money anyway.  We have woken up from the slumber of the American Dream that you used to keep us complacent for so long.  This was an experiment, this thing called Liberal Capitalism, and it has proven a failure for 99% of us – the many to your few.

The entire country seems to be waking up to sirens and full of confusion, just as I did today from my post red-eye nap, hearing the wail getting closer and closer and then just as suddenly seemingly disappearing into nothingness.  And as the threatening keening of those sirens dissipates, in the silence that follows we are finding ourselves with the opportunity and responsibility to ask, “What do we truly desire, and what do we believe in?  What do we stand for?  What is the biggest dream collectively we can envision that will serve the people and the planet, and how can we get there?”

Well, when you’re asking questions like that, it only stands to reason the answers may seem obtuse at first. 

These are the kinds of questions and answers that wind their way down the foggy and mysterious path of the Third Way, or as we witches sometimes call it, the Good Road.  It may not be easy to navigate, but it is the only way to get where we need to go.  We’ve used up the luxury of time available for greed, oil, and wars.  We find ourselves suddenly dedicated to figuring out how to navigate the Third Way because we’re realizing that the other two lead off to certain destruction for humans and planet. 

As my mentor Joanna Macy says, is time for a new level of human consciousness on this planet: the holonic shift.  To Joanna, who for many years studied Living Systems Theory and ecospirituality, the time is ripe for the next evolution of consciousness.  

Consciousness as we know it was born when little particles bonded together to living cells, which then bonded together to become simple organisms, followed by more complex organisms with organs bonded into body systems.  Now, it’s time for us as separate organisms to develop a consciousness where we as individuals can bond together to be able to respond rapidly and effectively to the crisises on our doorstep, which is different than succumbing to mob mentality or fascism.  Like every species and every ecosystem, either we will evolve or we will be lost to the sands of time.  But we have a special opportunity, as well, because we can actively co-create our world and our destiny in this process of evolution.  We just need to be present enough, and brave enough, to do it.  

“It would seem that such a holonic shift is necessary for our survival,” she says in her essay, The Holonic Shift and How to Take Part in It.  “Since Earth's carrying capacity is limited, and since the ecosystems supporting us are threatened with collapse, we must learn to think together in an integrated, synergistic fashion, rather than in fragmented and competitive ways.”

As I’m sitting here in an unfamiliar and yet sweet home in Takoma Park, which is lush and green and swathed in brick and stained glass and quirky 5-way intersections, I feel like I’m on the edge of a precipice into something equally unfamiliar that I’ve been waiting for my whole life.  And that’s okay, because I feel like I at least have a road map.  It's a twelve-step process, and as I think about it, I realize that we've already mastered some of the steps...

The Holonic Shift and How Occupy Wall Street Fits In

By Joanna Macy & Riyana Sweetwater

1. Attune to a common intention. Intention is not a goal or plan you can formulate with precision. It is an open-ended aim: May we meet common needs and collaborate in new ways.

We are occupying everything, in cities and towns with a single voice calling for justice for our stolen homes and retirement funds and hopes.  As the Official Statement from Occupy Wall Street states, “As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.”

2. Welcome diversity. Self-organization of the whole requires differentiation of the parts. Each one's role in this unfolding journey is unique. 

It is exactly this diversity that the pundits use as fodder for their assertions that the new wave of protests are “disorganized” and “confused,” but that shows more about how stuck they are in old paradigms than about what is going in the streets and the city centers across the nation.  Dan Gainor, who writes for Fox News, claims, “The protest began with no stated goals, no public spokespeople and many of the most ridiculous attendees you could imagine – socialists, Code Pinkers, anarchists and more. (Anarchists are notoriously poor organizers.) Their slogans (they have many) include: ‘We are the 99 percent’ and ‘This is what democracy looks like.’

What folks like Gainor don’t realize is that yes, we have different ideas about how to create the world we want, and different priorities, but this diversity is our strength and not a weakness.  Many of us have born the brunt of greed of wealthy corporations, but in many different ways: some by the criminal destruction of the environment, others loosing their homes, still others fighting for their very lives as they demand safe accessibility to healthcare and healthy food.  Some of us have felt the brunt of the misdeeds of these transnational institutions here in the United States, and some of us have felt it in other nations around the world.  Some of us have been victimized for our skin color, our choices in who we love, our ages, our genders, our political affiliations, and more.  But our diversity is not the “reason we will never win,” as some conservative writers are claiming, hoping to dampen the collective spirit that is rising. 

3. Know that only the whole can repair itself. You cannot "fix" the world, but you can take part in its self-healing. Healing wounded relationships within you and between you is integral to the healing of our world.


Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Together protests have been criticized again and again for not putting out a specific list of issues of redress or agenda as their ancestors, the Students for a Democratic Society did (the Port Huron Statement), did forty years ago.  

What mainstream conventional political analysts, who seem to have a kind-of middle school crush on the movement-- simultaneous fascination mixed with constant, unremorseful bullying – miss again and again is that the fact that the Occupy actions are not claiming to have all the answers, or an instant fix, is part of their strength and one reason why they are succeeding and might continue to succeed where their worthy predecessors did not.  Combining the open-minded experimentalism that comes from the youth movement and the wisdom of experienced activists who spent years getting beat up and burned out before taking time off to study less ego-driven belief systems like yoga, Buddhism, earth-based spiritual paths, and deep ecology, these groups truly moving out of the American mindset that claims that the only way to get ahead is to use callous rationality to create systems of oppression and dominate those that don’t agree with your ideas.   

4. You are only a small part of a much larger process, like a nerve cell in a neural net. So learn trust. Trust means taking part and taking risks, when you cannot control, or even see, the outcome.

These Occupy actions are springing up across the country, like a web, bound by their common intentions and yet often not having any more connection with their counterparts than a twitter hashtag.  Folks from all walks of life are gathering in large actions, from unions to college students to out-of-work mothers and children.  They are not embroiled in constant debates over strategy or priorities – and again, this is part of their strength, because in moving slowly yet with trust they are able to move out of the false-beliefs that have been cultivated by the powers that be to keep us constantly separate and therefore constantly disempowered.  Of course the actual steps towards creating the new structures and systems do need to happen at some point, and it will mean difficult conversations and choices.  Yet, in spite of knowing that, we can stand up together now – because we know that together, with our many minds and hearts, we will come up with those answers.  Our collective wisdom is stronger and smarter than the cunning of the CEOs who are as ruthless in their attacks on one another as they are in their attacks upon the poor and working classes.

5. Open to flows of information from the larger system. Do not resist painful information about the condition of your world, but understand that the pain you feel for the world springs from interconnectedness, and your willingness to experience it unblocks feedback that is important to the well being of the whole.

For a long time, we in the US have had a cultural blindness to the harms of the worlds, but as the markets have collapsed and the corporations and wealthy watched as our numbers of hungry and unemployed have risen and folks without access to medical care have died, we are waking up to the voices of our allies around the world whose journeys for liberation and equality are bound up with ours.   For a long time, we believed in the American Economic model and basked in the privilege and relative wealth that the ultra-wealthy allowed us, all the while avoiding thinking about what would happen if those people who so eagerly exploited the needs, rights, and lands of others became so powerful that they no longer felt the need to keep us moderately satiated or decided on a different strategy: that of crippling us so deeply that we were willing to take whatever scraps they wanted to toss down.  What they didn’t see coming is that this new strategy has backfired, and our eyes and hearts are open now.  We know that American businesses, when headed by greedy uncaring CEOs who are willing to profit at our expense, are not our true brothers and sisters (not to mention that those businesses are no longer truly American businesses, but international institutions who would rather plunge this country into some of the worst unemployment rates and the largest financial inequity we have ever known).  We are interconnected with the many people around the world who are fighting this same fight: London, Greece, Spain, Egypt are just a few.

6. Speak the truth of your experience of this world. If you have persistent responses to present conditions, assume that they are shared by others. Willing to drop old answers and old roles, give voice to the questions that arise in you.

(more from the "We Are the 99% Project here… )

I'm not claiming that we have mastered the holonic shift just yet -- but as I get ready to try to drift back to sleep, thinking about what tomorrow and the Occupy DC and Stop the Machine Actions may hold, I feel restful and filled with hope.  I want to commit to memory - if not in the exact words, at least the impressions that resonate so deeply in my heart -- the rest of the map that Joanna has laid out for us, which promises so much, if we're willing to go there.  I know that her words may be the best advice there could be in the days to come:

7. Believe no one who claims to have the final answer. Such claims are a sign of ignorance and limited self-interest.

8. Work increasingly in teams or joint projects serving common intentions. Build community through shared tasks and rituals.

9. Be generous with your strengths and skills, they are not your private property. They grow from being shared. They include both your knowing and your unknowing, and the gifts you accept from the ancestors and all beings.

10. Draw forth the strengths of others by your own acknowledgment of them. Never prejudge what a person can contribute, but be ready for surprise and fresh forms of synergy.

11. You do not need to see the results of your work. Your actions have unanticipated and far-reaching effects that are not likely to be visible to you in your lifetime.

12. Putting forth great effort, let there also be serenity in all your doing; for you are held within the web of life, within flows of energy and intelligence far exceeding your own.

In love and solidarity,


Riyana