Oddly enough, I went shopping this morning. I’d
come to a point where every piece of clothing
I owned was either torn, stained, or lost, and
I was down to one pair of jeans which were really
going to have to get washed someday, and there
was nothing left to do but whip out the credit
card, close my eyes to the “Made in a Madagascar
Sweat Shop” labels, and find at least one
other pair that would fit. It’s what I need
to face the prospect of riot cops and jail: a
good pair of jeans with deep pockets, and a good
haircut.
Then I was faced with a painful choice between
the women’s march across the Brooklyn Bridge
and the garden actions in the Bronx. I went
up to the Bronx, just in case the Green Bloc needed
support from someone else with experience organizing
garden work parties. They were transforming
a small, overgrown lot owned by a church, cutting
some of the trees and vines to open it to the
sun, laying out curving beds and sheet mulching
with cardboard to create a garden. In a
second lot a few blocks away, they were sheet
mulching a vacant lot with a sheer rock ledge
that will become another garden, and in a third
lot which is already planted and graced with a
giant tree house, Mia from Sebastopol and Scotty
from Austin were leading a workshop on bioremediation
with mushrooms. It was sweet. I spent
an hour or two pruning trees, not thinking about
cops at all, or solidarity demands or action logistics
or even magic, just about which branch should
come off and where to make the cut and how each
cut affects the flow of energy through the tree.
In every action now since Sacramento, we’ve
left a garden behind. The media never cover
it, and most people don’t know it, but I
feel good about it, and good about supporting
the struggles of people in the South Bronx and
the Lower East Side to keep some green spaces
in their neighborhood, some possibility of growing
food and flowers and self-reliance. Each
tiny garden amidst the concrete is like a glimpse
of a beautiful otherworld, a more relaxed place
where people sit among trees and visit and barbecue
food and eat together in the open air.
My own garden, I’m told, has been ravaged
by the deer who have eaten all the squash and
tomatoes.
I’m also told the Women’s March was
wonderful, spirited and beautiful with women chanting,
“This is what a feminist looks like!”
Then the Pagan Cluster,more than fifty of us,
met at Enchantments, an occult store a block from
St. Mark’s that kindly loaned us the use
of their garden—s. We started by teaching
the songs for the evening full moon ritual, and
we filled the garden with energy. We shared
information and then tried to form people up into
affinity groups. We ended up with seven
or eight affinity group—if they stick.
The Full Moon Ritual was in St Mark’s yard,
which is the de facto convergence center, It
was crammed full of people and I was wondering
how we were ever going to clear it out, when the
clouds burst and gave us a sudden flurry of rain.
The weather reminded me of Cancun, hot and sultry
with occasional cloudbursts that clear the air.
We set up the space, rolled up balls of
yarn, and eventually began.
I was having trouble ‘seeing’ or even
feeling the ritual, but I felt like the top of
my head was about to pop off from the energy of
it all.
‘
I was somehow prevented from being at either ritual
planning meeting, and kept my strong opinions
to myself except for saying I would like to do
one piece. Some of the other Pagans formed
a gate for people to walk through and be sprinkled
with sacred water and smudged with incense for
purification. We called in the elements
very simply, with just a word or two for each
and because there was so much noise and it was
so hard to hear, people began doing ‘repeat
after me’ with everything each person invoking
said: “We call the ai.” “WE
CALL THE AIR!” a thundering chorus would
echo. “Welcome fire!” “WELCOME
FIRE!”
When it came my turn, everything I tried to do
to explain what our ritual intent had to be repeated
by the Chorus of All and the whole thing began
to feel like a religious service of responsive
reading. The oddest phrases would be echoed
and re-echoed and turned into little fragments
of chants. We had lots of balls of yarn
and I was encouraging people to begin weaving
them into a web. People were calling out things
they wanted to weave into the web, “Truth”.
”’Justice”. “Clean air.”
“Health care” Somehow a fragment
of the explanation took hold as a chant: “The
weaving is the center of the magic of the web.”
“THE WEAVING IS THE CENTER OF THE MAGIC
OF THE WEB.” “THE WEAVING IS THE CENTER
OF THE MAGIC OF THE WEB.” “THE WEAVING
IS THE CENTER OF THE MAGIC OF THE WEB.”
I would have liked to explain a lot of things:
to talk about all the web rituals we’ve
done over the years, to talk about the web as
a model of connectedness, the web of life, the
web of roots and micorrhyzal fungi that holds
the soil and grows the trees, the web of connections
we’d woven and would continue to weave.
But I couldn’t be heard well enough
to say anything beyond the simplest of instructions.
It was a strangely perfect model of power.
I as the leader of the moment was utterly
powerless to be heard, unless everyone chose to
help me by echoing what I said. And when they
did, a different creative process came into play,
one that was not mine but the collective’s,
making poems out of phrases, chants out of snatches
of words.
Everyone began weaving and several moved into
the circle to help move balls of yarn along and
then suddenly everyone was in the web, dancing
and weaving yarn around each other and above each
other’s heads. I moved back to join
the drummers and just watched. I’ve
done many web rituals but never seen one like
this. Everyone was weaving so intently,
so seriously, as if they really were weaving the
web to link us all, the web of connection and
protection, the web to bring the Empire down.
And it had to be tight, and knotted well.
The web grew in intricacy, somehow lifted above
people’s heads and it appeared to me to
be truly a silver, gleaming spiderweb, shimmering
in the moonlight and the streetlights, with people’s
heads poking out like seals scanning the air above
the sea.
I was drumming and just let myself go into the
energy, letting it move through my hands and my
body and pumping it into the web. The chant
wove and shifted and changed and grew until finally
it swelled into a huge, roaring cone of power
that became an echoing. strong chord. We
held the web above our heads, suspended, and charged
it with power. Then we brought it down, and carefully
cut pieces from it to tie onto each others’
wrists for protection and energy, tying the cut
threads back together so the web itself would
remain intact.
At the very end of the ritual, Seth Tobocman who
is a New York artist, a genius of graphics and
cartoons and visuals, brought eight huge banners
on big poles of cardboard tubes (the NYPD won’t
allow poles in marches) and presented them to
us. They were made for the life after capitalism
conference and four show the world as it is, four
as we want it to be. They are stark, strong
images: a pyramid with an evil eye, people
with linked arms in a heart, a dam with water
breaking through. He said they were a gift
from the Revolutionary Artists’ collective
(and forgive me, I probably have that name wrong
but will get it right for whatever permanent form
this ends up in), the group of awesome local artists
who are supporting the actions. He said
they wanted to welcome us to New York City, a
city that is said to be ugly but that they believed
was a revolutionary city. It was one
of the sweetest, most beautiful gestures, an act
of healing for whatever tensions might still linger
about New Yorkers and outsiders coming in.
And it gave us something stunning to carry in
today’s march, for which I’ve got
to stop writing and get going. Today
is the big one, and we’ll find out if the
campaigns of intimidation worked, or not.
Donations for the action can be sent to:
RANT
1405 Hillmount St.
Austin, Texas
78704
U.S.A.