Friday, June 17 -- which
happened to be my birthday, was also the last formal day of work at the Cre8
Summit, the garden project built on land slated for a motorway in the low-income
Glasgow community called the Gorbals. All week long, activists and a steady
stream of locals had beed building the garden, collecting rubble and building
new beds, filling tires with topsoil and planting hazels, berries, fruit trees.
The atmosphere was relaxed and happy, the police unobtrusive. We
even got some good press.
When anarchist organizing works, it’s a beautiful process to behold. Work
and play blur, and everyone chips in and does what needs to be done without
anyone giving orders or directions. The garden consistently had that feel.
People were doing hard, sometimes unpleasant physical work: hauling
rubble, digging out banks, picking up garbage—but all of it joyfully,
with something of the feeling of kids building a clubhouse or digging a snow
fort out of a bank. Addi, the slender, smiling woman from Ao Tearoa (New
Zealand), who had been at our training, decided to build a labyrinth, and soon
had devoted young men carting bricks. Jo, the magenta-haired videographer
I was staying with, along with Flee and others built a Sensory Garden, with
raised beds accessible by wheelchair devoted to Smell, Taste, Touch and Sight,
with tripods hung with chimes for Hearing. I had offered to lead a cob
session, but one day it rained, and the next day the clay was too wet. Finally,
on my birthday we had two tons of topsoil delivered, which proved to be a perfect
consistency for cob—which is a kind of adobe made of clay, sand and straw.
We mixed up a batch by dancing on the clay until it deflocculates—loses
its molecular structure and becomes a kind of glue holding the sand particles
together in a natural form of concrete. We added straw and rolled up big
balls, or ‘cobs’ then punched and pummeled them into a bench on
a base made of chunks of concrete. Rob and Uri and Harry, some of the
Earth Activist Training organizers and former students, joined in and we rolled
up balls and discussed anarchist theory.
When we broke for dinner, a young Quebecois woman named Miriam asked me for
advice. She’d painted a faery on the mural at the front of the garden,
and wanted it to say something. “I want a faery army,” she
said, “for the actions. Like the clown army.” There
is indeed a Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army in the works, which has been
holding clown trainings for months and hopes to field hundreds of clowns at
the actions.
“Do you realize that, on this land, if you call for a faery army you will
get a real faerie army?” I asked her.
“Yes, that’s what I want!”
“A faery army—let’s be a faerie army!” Others started
taking up the cry, and suddenly I realized that a faery army is, of course,
exactly what I want to see marching up the road on July 6, bringing alive
all the powers of the land and the raging earth to confront the power of the
G8. On Miriam’s mural, someone had painted, “Beneath the concrete…the
garden!” (A revision of an old Situationist slogan from the sixties: “Benearth
the concrete…the beach!”) Miriam added: “The faerie
army rises, Hidden power of earth.”
After dinner, I suddenly found myself confronted with a small blockade, keeping
me occupied until the Chaos kitchen produced five or six different kinds of
cakes, and some very sweet cards, a bottle of champagne and one of cider. A
group called Tapooka that teaches circus arts came by and completed the celebration
by teaching us to spin plates. I passed on the stilt-walking lesson, but
felt quite happy and touched. As a kid, I never had one of the those birthday
parties with clowns—only rich people did such things in those days. Now
I’d had one! Then we made cob again, and worked on the bench until
dark. All in all, I haven’t done so many creative projects since
art school, if not nursery school!
The next day, Saturday, was the closing festival and party for the first phase
of Cre8, which I had to miss as I’d promised to go up to Findhorn for
a talk and training. For that matter, I missed the train as well, in spite
of Rob’s valiant efforts to get me there, due to Glasgow’s maddening
layout of one-way streets and labyrinthine detours. But I arrived in time
to speak to a good crowd of people, many of whom are planning to come down to
the actions. Sunday I did a day-long training for the group—direct
action as a spiritual practice.
Findhorn is often perceived by activists as one of those apolitical, New Age
places where people are more likely to meditate than act—and I’m
sure there are people here who fit that description. But the people in
the workshop have an impressive record of political and social activism. They
include an old Rainforest Action Network campaigner, a Greenham Common woman
who was on a walk I took part in in 1985 across the military firing ranges of
Salisbury Plain to Stonehenge, an organizer from Australia who has helped to
save a mountain sacred to the aboriginals, another who is restoring the native
Scottish forests in the highlands, and many others. They are really excited
about coming down to Gleneagles setting up a neighborhood at the eco-camp, and
forming affinity groups to take part in the actions.
And we do seem to have a rural convergence site underway. The council
has signed a contract, the first tests to see if there is residual methane from
an old dump a few fields away have come back okay. We’re pricing
plumbing parts and tracking down barrels. Thanks to all who have sent
us energy, and special thanks to those local organizers who have been sweating
through various bureaucracies and negotiations literally for months, staying
up too late, making one more phone call, sending that last email and handling
that last detail. May they have enough strength left to enjoy it when
it happens. As for me, I won’t quite relax and be sure it is happening
until we’re on site, setting up those compost toilets we’ve been
obsessing about for weeks.
-- Starhawk
Donations to help support Starhawk’s trainings and work can be sent to:
ACT
1405 Hillmount St.
Austin, Texas
78704
U.S.A.
The G8, the annual agenda setting meeting of the heads of state of the eight
most powerful countries in the world, will meet in Gleneagles, Scotland,
July 6-8. For more information on the mobilizations, or to donate directly to
the action, see: www.dissent.org.uk
Indymedia Scotland page scotland.indymedia.org
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reserved.
Starhawk is an activist, organizer, and author of The Earth
Path, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, The Fifth
Sacred Thing and other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality.
She teaches Earth
Activist Trainings that combine permaculture design and activist skills,
and works with the RANT
trainer’s collective, that offers training and support for mobilizations
around global justice and peace issues.