Lady Face

This lady gets her own post, all by herself.  

Marker series

Watercolors

Pen doodles

Variations on Pheonix Chicken

One in Four - Conversation & Criticisms

So, in posting my last article on facebook, a conversation sprung up about gender dichotomy and blaming... I really value a lot of the insights in this conversation, and I want to respond very directly in my next blog post. So, for the sake of fidelity, I am posting the entire conversation here.

Andrew Robins: I've read the "Schrodinger’s rapist" blog post a few times now. The more I read it, the more annoyed I got. Since this woman is using Schrodingers name (incorrectly) for her own cause, I'm now calling it "Schrodingers blog post" in that it's a blog post that's simultaneously anti-men AND anti-woman.

Ginger MacDonald: Andrew, first of all, it makes me super happy that you read my blog posts in the first place. Whatever disagreements we have about stuff, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy that you're interested in the conversation at all.

So: how do you see that post as being anti-human? She is pretty much just talking about her experience of culture and human interaction. And I think her experience is pretty common to a lot of women in North America.

Andrew Robins: With the idea of Schrodinger's cat being that eventually someone will actually observe the cat and the experiment will be over. With this woman's blog post and pretty much every conversation about rape culture with feminists is that there's a set belief that on a long enough timeline, every man will eventually become a rapist. Boyfriend, husband, male friend, guy on the street, all of them. This is bullshit. At no point in my life have I ever wanted to rape anyone, nor do I intend to, but every time this ladies blog gets touted as gospel, it's telling me that I have no control over my actions and I have to be treated like the boogyman by every girl I might interact with for any reason until the end of time because I *might* rape someone. But that's only the second highest reason on the list this blog gets elevated to hypershitty status. Enough blog posts and news stories have been written about how we as a society should teach men from day one that they're stupid beasts who have no control over their sexual appetites, that I can toss this one on the "Offensive to men in general" pile and not feel bad about it.

The number one is that this blog is also pretty anti-woman. You are a WEAK woman who can't help but get raped eventually. You have to treat every guy like he's a rapist, because you have no other choice. Live in fear, because this woman and the propaganda machine of rape culture is telling you that you will probably get raped by a man. So at every point throughout the course of a day, this woman (and every woman who reads her blog and blindly nods along) with it gets to treat every man they interact with for any reason ever like an eventual rapist. So conveniently, every mans role in society gets to be reduced and defined by women. That is not equality, that's pushing for female superiority and weakens the argument as a whole. I get to decide what my role in society will be, not you. I like the idea behind feminism generally, but when I have feminists as a group telling me I have zero control over myself, I find it hard to support their cause.

Additionally with this post (and yours), the entire focus is on men. We rape, we beat, we commit domestic violence, and we just rape all willy nilly whenever we have a drink. Where's the blog posts about women beating or raping men, and how wrong that is? The implication is that it has never happened, ever. Since we know that's not true, there's a ratio of women who HAVE beaten and/or raped men to women who have NOT beaten and/or raped men. However small of a number that might be, it's still there. I won't treat the majority of women like they're going to punch me in the mouth at every moment because it *might* happen. And no, just because the ratio of men wronging women is higher then the ratio of women wronging men does NOT make discrimination towards men more acceptable, because that lets *only* women define where this magical line that gets crossed where we treat a group as a whole like rapists during every waking moment. That's a hell of a tricky ledge to walk right there

Additionally, Domestic violence is committed by women too. I'd be willing to bet more then a small amount of money that female to male violence is a lot higher then reported. However, men don't get to call the police when they get slapped or punched or attacked by women, because they'll get perceived as weaklings by pretty much everyone who gets involved, from the reporting officer(s), the court system, the woman herself, and his friends and society as a whole. If the woman doing the beating IS actually arrested, she will invariably be released with no charges (She's just a girl you see. She's too small to do anything like that) OR even worse, gets a sentence that doesn't compare to what a man would receive in the same situation (Because she didn't REALLY hurt him.)

The same thing goes when it comes to reporting female on male sexual assault. Recently, a 29 year old famous singer (Carrie Underwood) brought a 12 year old boy on stage to give him his first kiss because of a sign he was holding. Everyone cheered and applauded and went on their way. Now, imagine the UPROAR, the ABSOLUTE indignation of women and pretty much everyone on the planet would have been if their genders were reversed. Carrie Underwood would have been crucified before he got off the stage. When a female teacher gets caught banging a male student, the reaction is 95% "Lucky kid!." and the woman gets a much smaller sentence then When the reverse is true. Recently, I went to see a movie with a female who I've had several conversations like this about rape and rape culture. During the previews of another movie, a scene was shown where a man says something along the lines of "I got fucked in prison ted. I was fucked." and it was in a comical notation. And the girl I was with laughed. So in societies eyes, rape is funny when it happens to men, and horrifying when it happens to women.

Maybe when this woman's blog post and posts like yours stop saying stuff like "men will rape and beat you no matter what eventually" and start saying things like "Violence and rape under any circumstance is wrong, regardless of the sex" then I'll start taking them more seriously.

Aimee Eddins: Hello Andrew, It's been a while; I hope you're doing well.

I appreciate your call for a gender-free definition of and social movement against any kind of violence and rape. I agree both are wrong in any circumstance regardless of the gender of the perpetrator or victim. I don't think rape is funny in any context.

It sounds like you don't appreciate the gendered focus on women's experience of possible threat. It sounds like you feel that this marginalizes the experience of those men who have been the recipient of these sorts of violence.

I appreciate you finding a current events example of the bias that exists in our society (with Carrie Underwood).

My understanding of Schrodenger's cat experiment is that before observation, we cannot know if the cat is alive or dead and so we must assume it is both at the same time until such time as we can observe it's actual state. After observing its actual state, we then know with certainty in which place it exists. I find this to be a pretty good analogy for my own experience of men in the world at large when I come into contact with them in potentially compromised situations. I have experienced very scary aggression from some men I know- even know well- and I have been trained by a lot of sources since early childhood to be wary of people I don't know. These things seem to correlate in my mind. It makes sense to me to be wary of people I don't (and do) know when they aren't paying attention to my own sense of safety and bodily integrity. Having this/these experiences, I find much in common with the article. I also have friends who have - by the literal definition of rape and sexual assault- raped and sexually assaulted people I know. These friends do not see themselves as having done so. Calling out men as being in the wrong is not helpful, as you suggest, however it does start to bring up the conversation. I think we need to re-frame it by focusing on creating a culture of consent and teaching men and women how to respect boundaries. How would you feel about having a conversation about that instead?

Andrew Robins: I agree entirely. There should be a culture of teaching everyone not to hit or rape. There isn't one though. It's entirely focused on men on women. I'm not trivializing the violence that women receive, but in focusing on the issue solely in the way that I've perceived feministic culture wanting to, we are not only teaching boys that their body is violent, dangerous, and they have no control, but that they are incapable of being the victim. We are also telling girls that they will be a victim at some point, and they are incapable of being the perpetrator of such acts.

Teaching girls that they WILL be attacked and should always be prepared for such an attack (By learning Ju jitsu or carrying pepper spray) is totally acceptable when it's coming from women blogs, and other feminists, but if a guy gives practical advice like "Don't go to a shitty area wearing a tube top and a miniskirt" all of the sudden he's misogynistic piece of garbage who is perpetuating rape culture.

Finally, you're right about the cat. Except in the case, the door never gets opened, and every guy is treated like a dead cat, for all time and ever. With this treatment, all men are being asked to bend over backwards to accommodate a females potential feelings, and never once has anyone called for the reverse. That's how discrimination begins, not ends.

Creation Myth...

In the beginning, there was a mishy-mashy swirling lump of consciousness.  Or maybe it was a speck of dust... It had no form, no gender, only potential (potential equals love).

And, having nothing else to do with its (their) infinite time, the consciousness began to make love to itself.  For eons, upon eons, rolling waves of pleasure.  Waves upon waves, and torrents, streams, waterfalls, pools, and eddies of pleasure.

And all this action began to create forms.  Wave patterns of energy coalesce into echos of themselves, and these echos condense into spheres... And the spheres begin to move, and create patterns and currents of their own...

And the peaks of pleasure grew so great, the energy to hot, the vibrations so intense that...
         
thiny atoms of matter pop into existence... permanent echos of the orgasm of the great cost cosmic consciousness.  Billions of tiny pops... {...pOp...} {...PoP...} {...POP!...} so many the it might have sounded like one great big {...BANG!...}

[hmmm, Great Cosmic Consciousness is a little wordy... but oh, to find a name, or a title... Do we even have a word for a sexy hermaphroditic grandparent?  I don't think we do.  Maybe some other language, in some other time has/had/will have such a word...]

And in all that swirling of newly fissioned matter, our solar system began to swirls its own spiral sphere.  Began to coalesce itself around a glowing org of hot, orgasmic fission.  And our sun began to birth planets.  Let's call our sun Grandmother Sun, since she's about to do all this birthing.

And of all the planets that Grandmother Sun birthed, there was this one... this blue/green marble of joy.  And this planet, this mother/father sphere of consciousness, began to birth a million billion tiny bursts of consciousness.  Multidimentional beings of light, and joy, and... oh, let's call them SOULS.

And the souls began to birth unto themselves, out of the body of the Earth, into all of the creatures of the world; the mountains and the rocks, the oceans and the rivers, the plants and the animals and the insects.

And in the beginning, the creatures of the world took time, time to learn how to have bodies made of matter, and how to live, and die, and be born again.

And this learning tood another very long time (though not quite so long as the eons before...).

More drawings

Journaling doodle - about self liberation and being the story I tell myself about who I am... 

More doodling.  This one's not finished yet, but I really like it. Sort of the same subject matter. 

One in Four... and reincarnation of the collective consciousness

So in my last post, I made the following assertions:

"One out of every four women in the United States has been raped, or beaten by an intimate partner. New York Times, Dec 14, 2011" 

ONE IN FOUR WOMEN. To put another way, within a four generation cycle of women - 5yo daughter, 30yo mother, 60yo grandmother, 85yo great-grandmother - in EVERY family, one of those women has been sexually assaulted.

From another perspective: one out of every four men is a rapist or has beaten his intimate partner. ONE IN FOUR MEN. In your own family, sons, father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers... one of those men have committed a rape.

And more than a few people came back with the main question: 1 in 4 rapists? Do you really mean to assert a 1:1 ratio of rapists to rape victims?  Surely a rapist rapes multiple women and the actual occurrence of rapists in the general population is much lower...

Here is another blog post about a women's intellectual relationship with the possibility of rape:

While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?    I don’t.

from: SCHRÖDINGER’S RAPIST: OR A GUY’S GUIDE TO APPROACHING STRANGE WOMEN WITHOUT BEING MACED

First of all, let me say that her blog post is amazing, and you should read all of it.  It offers a very insightful window into the experience of women interacting with unknown men.  That said, she is making a different point than I am, and her statistical logic is fuzzy and unscientific (as much as it seems like a reasonable estimate).  Not that my statistical logic is better than hers, but I did look up a few more numbers - and I'm gonna look up some more other numbers to back up my unscientific assertions...

Unfortunately, there aren't any real statistics out there assessing the number rapists in the general population (not that I've been able to find).  Shockingly, almost all of the research seems to be focused on the victims... and how the victims can avoid putting themselves in a "risky situation..." as apposed to researching the people committing the crime and how those individuals could avoid becoming rapists in the first place...  And that is a point that Miss Lonely Hearts and I are in complete agreement on.

Ok, so: to start out with, some definition and defining.  The 1:4 number for women includes both completed rape and violent assault.  Being beaten by an intimate partner encompasses much of basic domestic violence - which is often a situational crime of passion, as opposed to a predatory act.  Specifically, this definition of rape includes force or coercion of any kind between married couples.

From the current Wikipedia article on "Rape":

In 2012, the FBI changed their definition from "The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." to "The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim." for their annual Uniform Crime Reports. The definition, which had remained unchanged since 1927, was considered outdated and narrow...
Some countries, such as Germany, are now using more inclusive definitions which do not require penetration,[17] and the 1998 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda defines it as "a physical invasion of a sexual nature committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive".[17] In some jurisdictions, the term "rape" has been phased out of legal use in favor of terms such as "sexual assault" or "criminal sexual conduct".[22] Other countries or jurisdictions continue to define rape to cover only acts involving penile penetration of the vagina, treating all other types of non-consensual sexual activity as sexual assault. Scotland, for instance, requires that a rapist commit a sexual assault with a penis, so only males can legally be rapists.

 Frankly, I lean more towards the Rwanda definition.  I understand that it seems important to some people to distinguish between assaults that involve genital penetration and those that do not, as a way of gauging the severity of the violation... but to me, it simply matters that the person's body has been violated in a sexual way.  That someone has said to them, "my sexual desires are more important than your personal autonomy."  That their wishes, their individuality, their sovereignty to decide for themselves how they will relate to the world and to other people... are less important than those of a person of greater power.  That the person of power is entitled to take what they want... that it is their privilege.  They deserve it. Conversely, that they cannot control themselves... that they are passionate, carnal people, and at a certain point of arousal, there's just no going back, and they could not stop...

And how did the men of our society come to be trained in such entitlement?

Genesis 3:16 Unto the woman [God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. (book of Genesis seems to have been written between 1400-800 bce)

Though the bible repeatedly announced that a woman who dared to make love to a man other than her husband was a shameful and profane degredation to the entire faith, Hebrew men went about honorably collecting as man women as they could economically afford. ... A lack of fidelity on the part of the man seems to have been taken for granted, unless the other woman was already married or betrothed.  This was regarded as sinful because it was a legal infringement upon the property of some other man.  It was hardly a romantic fidelity for both partners of the marrieage that was deemed as important or sacred, but only for the woman that premarital virginity and sexual fidelity became "moral" issues, attitudes we see reflected even today.  (pg 191 Shekina Mountainwater, "When God Was a Woman" 1976)

For nearly two thousand years, we have been living in a patriarchal society, with every facet of that patriarchy being reinforced and programmed into us by religious myth and law.
(Analysis of what the world was like prior to the rise of patriarchy and monotheism is for another blog post... suffice it to say that I completely reject the idea that male domination is "the way it's always been", and that that's how we evolved.  Current archaeological evidence and interpretation point more and more to dominant female deities, and matriarchal control from the dawn of human consciousness, 60,000 year ago, up until the the rise and takeover of monotheism and patriarchy, roughly 2,000 years ago.)

So, whether or not we think that we are religious... whether or not we even believe in god or believe that religion is a bunch of bullshit... we each carry the social programming of two thousand years of society ruled by religious priests and ideas.  Social programming.  And at the very core of many of those religions, is the assertion that God is male and men are supreme, and women are to be subservient to men.

And in reference to that legacy, feminism and gender liberation have made incredible strides in the past 100 years. That's about two or three generations. Maybe four.

And right now, today, 1 in four women has been raped or sexually assaulted.

Because men still feel that entitlement.  Because our society is still patriarchal, and men hold a power and privilege over women that is reinforced by two thousand years of cultural heritage.

The only statistics I could find about rapists is a series of information that seems to be based on surveys of college students done in the 1980's and 90's.  

• Between 62% (4) and 84% (1) of survivors knew their attacker.
• 8% of men admit committing acts that meet the legal definition of rape or attempted rape. Of these men who committed rape, 84% said that what they did was definitely not rape. (1)
• More than one in five men report "becoming so sexually aroused that they could not stop themselves from having sex, even though the woman did not consent." (8)
• 35% of men report at least some degree of likelihood of raping if they could be assured they wouldn't be caught or punished. (9)

http://www.oneinfourusa.org/statistics.php

So... to come back to my assertion that 1 in 4 men have committed a rape, or an act of sexual assault...  I would say that yes: 1 in 4 men is capable of getting a woman drunk and then having non-consensual sex with her.  Capable of coercing and pressuring a younger woman to sleep with him.  Capable of getting drunk and smacking his wife/girlfriend around and then forcibly fucking her in their bed in the middle of the night.  Capable of intentionally copping a feel on some hot chick as she unguardedly slides by him in a public place.  Capable of taking advantage of privilege and certain knowledge that there are no consequences for those actions.  Capable of doing all of these things without once thinking that he is committing an act of rape.

And perhaps, by my definition, the number for women experiencing sexual assault is more like 1 in 3, or 1 in 2, or damn near every one of us.

Because the point that I'm getting at, again, is that each and every one of us on the planet carries the cultural heritage of both the victim and perpetrator.  In my own family, both my grandmother and my grandfather.

In the Buddhist and Hindu religions, reincarnation is believed to be a journey on the way to enlightenment.  And on that journey, the one soul lives many different lives, sometimes as a criminal, sometimes as a victim, sometimes wealthy and comfortable, living each life with a specific lesson to be learned.  But if we take each of those souls, on each of their individual journeys, and we weave them into the tapestry of collective consciousness, collective knowing... then maybe there is a unified journey, across the planet, towards a shift... towards a world community of balanced energy.  Balanced between male and female, balanced between spiritual and physical, balanced human interaction with our environment and fellow creatures on the earth...

A more scientific explanation, as we connect more and more with population and technology, the computing power of our collective consciousness grows greater and greater.  The computer of human thought and connection gains more neurons every day.  And as our knowledge grows, our understanding of our place in the world and how to preserve ourselves, how to live truly free lives...

Anyways.  What we have right now is a world-wide culture of patriarchy and male privilege.  It is starting to shift, slowly, but it would shift a lot faster if men would start jumping ship... if we realize that the spark of consciousness needed to make the shift is in each and every one of us, and it begins with healing the wounds inside ourselves.  It begins with people in positions of privilege to begin to recognize their privilege and take responsibility for shifting the power balance.

It also begins with empowering people in oppressed positions... women, people of color, indigenous groups, those in poverty... empower those people to stand up for themselves and assert their rights, and to hold those in power accountable.

And love and compassion.  That just makes everything work better.

Follow-up thoughts on Cultural Appropriation...

So, back in April, I wrote this post about Cultural Appropriation.  And it was a new set of thoughts for me.  They were ideas that I had not spent time mulling over before that moment.  And at the time, I concluded that it was a grey area and I went ahead with the project... And at the time, that was a huge cop-out.

But I've been mulling it over all summer.  And in the meantime, I've been studying feminism, reading books about women's spirituality, and reading about religious archaeology.  And along the way, I've been noticing strong correlations between my own growing feminist sensitivity, and the expressed sensitivity of those who did think that a white lady making dreamcatcher artwork was tasteless and offensive.

And here's my #1 thought that is leading my growing sensitivity:

A person in a position of privilege does not get to define the parameters of what makes people in a position of oppression feel oppressed.  Period.  

To make the point as blunt as possible:

A person suffers PTSD from having been repeatedly violently and sexually abused.  The person is shamed as a result of this abuse and told to keep it a secret.  Told not to talk about it, because people will call you "bad" for making them feel uncomfortable... As a result of this abuse and shaming, the wound festers over time and gnaws at that person's ability to fully and freely be their happiest, most powerful selves.  

 And this person is going along their daily life, the one in which they mostly pretend that everything is fine, and someone who fits the basic socioeconomic, racial, and gender category as their rapist, makes a rape joke.  Maybe it's only something as simple as, "Oh man, that bitch was asking for it".... it's a joke... it's not serious... The person making this offhand comment is Not A Rapist.  And our dear PTSD sufferer is triggered with shadows of violation.  They try to respond to say, "when you say things like that, it really upsets me, and I would like you to choose different words to express yourself with."  

And how often do you think that Not A Rapist replies with a respectful, "oh, I didn't realized my words... I will be more conscious and respectful of that in the future..."  How often do you think that happens?  VERY FUCKING SELDOM.  A much more likely response is, "Oh, you just need to be less sensitive.  I didn't mean anything by it.  It was just a joke.  What are you, the Thought Police?"  

Having experienced both of these responses from men and sometimes women at various times in my own life, in various situations, I can say that even in a progressive, "liberal" community, even in a community of activists fighting against oppression, the "fuck off, bitch" response is WAY MORE COMMON.  Plenty of times I have been the one expressing offensive jokes.  And as often as not, when called on it, my own responses were dismissive of other people's lived experience... I think that I have gotten better at accepting and respecting the experiences of others, even when it means that I need to check myself...

So, to come back from the blunt, and move towards the more subtle; to view the whole system in a unified way...

Why is the sensitivity of that one victim so important...?  Why do we have to tiptoe around those few injured people...?  Because it is not just a few injured people.  It is ALL OF US.  Every single human on the whole planet...  What???  Surely I am expressing an obnoxious hyperbole, you might say... but let's look at some numbers:

One out of every four women in the United States has been raped, or beaten by an intimate partner.  New York Times, Dec 14, 2011

 ONE IN FOUR WOMEN.  To put another way, within a four generation cycle of women - 5yo daughter, 30yo mother, 60yo grandmother, 85yo great-grandmother - in EVERY family, one of those women has been sexually assaulted.

From another perspective: one out of every four men is a rapist or has beaten his intimate partner.  ONE IN FOUR MEN.  In your own family, sons, father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers... one of those men have committed a rape.

[I have had several people question me about the statistical accuracy of this assertion.  Rather than come up with a quick correction or defense, I feel the content of a follow-up blog post brewing in me... to be posted in the next few days.]

The statistics for the rest of the world are not better (And prevalence of rape does not appear to correlate strongly to whether or not a country is "developed" wikipedia article of rape statistics).

So worldwide, we have this gaping wound of trauma... trauma of violating the sanctity and sovereignty of another person's body.  A trauma of acting without consent and a trauma of victimizing and torturing ourselves.  We see it reflected in our relationship with the land... our relationship with our brother and sister creatures of different species.  A trauma of universal self-destruction and self-punishment.  And the first step in healing is to begin naming and acknowledging the wounds.

In my own family, my maternal grandmother was abused as a child.  She never spoke about it in much detail but she spoke of physical violence.  As a child at the turn of the century in Richmond, VA, it is a fair assumption there was sexual abuse.  Later, in her marriage to my grandfather, there was again physical and sexual violence, leading her to eventually run away in the night to the home of friends, as her only safe option for leaving my grandfather.  And how could I expect that this violence and abuse did not affect my grandmother's children; my mother and my aunt and my uncle.  Even if they were never the direct victims of his anger and abuse, to grow up in a home where their mother is in fear of their father... would have a deep affect on anyone's identity and psyche.  This story was spoken of very little in my own memory.  It is only in this past year, on a journey of healing and seeking, that I have begun dredging up these memories, talking with my sister about them, and thinking about how the legacy of that trauma has impacted my own life.  And it has impacted my life very deeply...

So rape jokes are not funny because we all, every one of us, carry the victim/perpetrator legacy of rape.  The jokes are not funny because they trivialize and minimalize the wound instead of letting it heal...

So back to the dreamcatchers I made... those are different, right?  My thoughtful artwork that happens to appropriate the styles and motifs of a native tradition are not equivalent to a rape joke, are they?  Except that they kinda are.

Because Mt Rushmore is roughly equivalent to the Nazis having carved a giant portrait of Hitler into a cliffside of Mt Sinai (sacred mountain of judaism...).  Ok now, before you get revved-up to accuse me of hyperbole again (because yes, I am sometimes prone to it...): in this statement I am 100% earnest and serious.

The "final solution" of the North American Indian problem was the model for the subsequent Jewish holocaust and South African apartheid

      Why is the biggest holocaust in all humanity being hidden from history? Is it because it lasted so long that it has become a habit? It's been well documented that the killing of Indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere since the beginning of colonization has been estimated at 120 million. Yet nobody wants to speak about it.

      Today historians, anthropologists and archaeologists are revealing that information on this holocaust is being deliberately eliminated from the knowledge base and consciousness of North Americans and the world. A completely false picture is being painted of our people as suffering from social ills of our own making.  By Kahentinetha Horn, MNN Mohawk Nation News Jan. 30, 2005

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”  – P. 202, “Adolph Hitler” by John Toland 

And the death tole of our holocaust is 100 million people.  To put that in perspective compared to the WWII Holocaust:

That is the destruction of an entire continent of hundreds of thriving civilizations.  "Of course, as the scoffers point out, regardless of the true number of indigenous inhabitants in North America at the point of contact with Europeans, the great bulk of them died, not as the result of direct military action, or at the hands of some Euroamerican equivalent of the nazi's killing squads, but as the reult of famine and disease.  This is said as if such a type of death were a purely natural phenomenon, a matter absolving the invader of responsibility for such an outcome.  Far from naturally, however, the mass starvation at issue was largely induced through he deliberate dislocation of indigenous nations from their traditional homelands, the impounding of their resources, and the destruction of their economies through military or paramilitary action. (The State of North America,  Introduction: The Holocaust in North America by M. Annette, Jaimes)

So... here we are with this gaping open wound in our Great American Collective Unconscious... No one talks about it, because it is uncomfortable... no one feels responsible for it, personally, because that happened hundreds of years ago... Actually it happened between the last 1-500 years, is still happening today.  If you need proof of the ongoing reality of this oppression and trauma to native peoples, just read the latest issue of National Geographic: "In the Shadow of Wounded Knee" August 2012.

And again, how can I personally take responsibility for this history?  What resources do I have at hand to begin healing this wound within myself, the wound that is within all of us?  For starters, I can resist the sexist oppression that works to silence my voice, works to convince me that my body and my image do not belong to me.  I can stand up as a strong and self-realized feminist.  And from my position of white, middle-class privilege, I can begin to be a conscious and proactive ally for cultural minorities, victims of genocide... through my artwork and my speech, through my lifestyle decisions and how I choose to spend my money.  I can choose to respect the art forms of those traditions and leave them to the people they belong to.  Not to keep them stagnant, in a museum case, but to re-interpret and evolve those symbols in reference to their own cultures and their own lives.

And to be more specific about why it is offensive for a white person to make and sell something that is obviously a dreamcatcher, in any medium:

"They came for our land, for what grew or could be grown on it, for the resources in it, and for our clean air and pure water.  They stole these things from us, and in taking the also stole our free ways and the best of our leaders, killed in battle or assassinated.  And now, after all that, they've come for the very last of our possessions; now they want our pride, our history, our spiritual traditions.  They want to rewrite and remake these things, to claim them for themselves.  The lies and thefts just never end."  Margo Thunderbird, 1988 from The State of Native America pg 403

 "The term 'whiteshaman'... belongs to the apparently growing number of small-press poets of generall white, Euro-Christian American background, who in their poems assume the persona of the shaman, usually in the guise of an American Indian medicine man.  To be a poet is simply not enough; they must claim a power from higher sources." pg 403

"Whiteshamans and their defenders, assuming a rather amazing gullibility on the part of American Indians, usually contend they are 'totally apolitical.'  ...  They often add the insulting caveat that American Indian writers know less of their ancestral traditions and culture than non-native anthropologists.  Finally, most argue that 'artistic license' or 'freedom of speech' inherently empowers them to do what they do, no matter whether Indians like it (and, ultimately, no matter the cost to native societies).  Native American scholars, writers, and activists have heard these polemics over and over again.  It is time to separate fact from fantasy in this regard."  pg 405
"The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on Whiteshamanism" by Wendy Rose from The State of Native North America 

So in conclusion... there are about thirty of my bicycle Dream Catchers floating around the world now, five for six of which are hanging in public, in bike shops around Seattle.  I didn't end up making any monetary profit off of the project - possibly due to my own growing discomfort with the offense of the composition.  But what do I do with them?  Shall I run around Seattle collecting them all and destroying them?  Shall I take all of the images of them off of the internet?  That feels scary... like killing a part of my own fragile, budding artistic expression.  But maybe it would be a ceremonial killing of that part of myself that was unknowingly complicit in cultural genocide... I have not decided.  I do know that moving forward, if I choose to continue doing weaving work in circular compositions, I will try very hard to make them look distinctly different from dreamcatchers.  And I am now very conscious of my responsibility as an artist to resist the temptation to engage in whiteshamanism.  When one starts to become sensitive to such a thing, you begin to realize how sickening prevalent it is...

Moving forward, I am working on naming the cultural and psychic wounds that I carry in myself, as victim and perpetrator of oppression and genocide.  Moving forward I can begin to create my own proactive strategies for healing these wounds in my life and my communities.

Orange & Caper

Some photos of my sister in very late stages of pregnancy. 

(here is a link to a photo gallery with more pictures)

bigger than a basketball...

a friend's 1 yo son came over to play, and this was left over...

Elemental

This is a concept sketch for a tattoo sleeve on my left arm. 

Phoenix Chicken...

see my earlier piece of writing, in which the idea of Phoenix Chicken was born...
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2515473991962288783#editor/target=post;postID=2940955378017051089

Fetal Power (watercolor painting)

Fetal Power

Culture Hacking (pencil drawing)

Culture Hacking

The year of Letting Go... (receiving more)

Small Disclaimer:  this post might not make any sense.  I am okay with that.

The theme of my life this summer has been "Letting go... (and receiving more)".  Letting go of... possessions, letting go of career, of the security of steady income.  Letting go of expectations, and letting go of attachments or concerns about the ways that others see me, judge me, fail to fall madly in love with me.  But in return, I have been receiving so much more...

The process of letting go of possessions has been particularly challenging.  It has been happening in stages.  There is more than a bit of the hoarder in me... hoarding Future Potential Art Projects and never getting around to the doing.  But in getting rid of more and more baggage, I feel immensely free.  Free to re-create my self, my destiny, to become the vision of myself that I see in my dreams.  And let me tell you, that woman in my dreams... she is really something.

Letting go of clutter.  Getting rid of fluff... Stripping myself down to the core marrow of identity and self and soul.  Working on letting go of this shiftless, itchy dissatisfaction with a hundred small parts of my life that don't quite fit... Moving towards action, satisfaction, fulfillment.  Moving towards a quiet stillness of being content with myself and confident on my path.

Breathe.

They tell me it is the Return of my Saturn... I've never been a huge astrology buff, but again and again people would pause in mid-conversation with me and say, "oh yeah, you're in your Saturn Returns...".  Excuse me?  And just what the effing eff is a Saturn Returns?

Certain astrological patterns occur universally--that is, everyone gets them at approximately the same age. One of those astrological patterns is the "Saturn Return" which occurs when transiting Saturn (where it is in the sky now) returns to the same position in the zodiac which Saturn occupied when you were born. Everyone experiences a Saturn Return around age 28-30. http://www.tellmylife.com/saturnReturn30.htm

 Ok fine, whatever.  Astrology is a big, broad fortune cookie wheel of gooey fake "woo-ha".  Except that as a discipline/body of knowledge, it's also gazillions of years old and uses basic human archetypes that seem to reflect common reality rather accurately... So maybe there's something useful there to give me some context and framework from which to understand this phase of my life...

So here's an outline of the whole shebang in a nutshell:

1. Some people picked the right path in the first place, and at 29-ish, they just level up on responsibility and success... that was definitely not me.
2. Some people actively went out searching, trying on lots of different possibilities.  Most of these kids go ahead and pick something around age 30, decide to stick with it, and generally settle in...  
3. Some people spent their twenties fucking around and partying.  And then they get to the end of their twenties and think, "holy shit, I have no Life Skills... what am I gonna DO WITH MYSELF?"  They might embark on a holy quest to maintain that party indefinitely, and they might actually come out of the haze and pursue something (anything) of substance. 
4. And some people made a career choice early on and ran with it... Or maybe the choice made them and they went along for the ride without really thinking about it... But they've been on that path for a good long while now... long enough to know that it's not working out.  "Hello, Life and Career Up Until This Point... I afraid I'm going to have to break up with you.  You see, it's not you... it's me.  It's just not working out...  I don't really know what I'm looking for (or maybe I do...), but I do know that THIS ISN'T IT.  So long, I'm headed to Bermuda [insert fantasy vacation spot] to do a little soul searching while I figure it out..."

(This list of categories is my interpretation of the description within that website linked up above.) 

I'd say that I'm a mixture of Option #2, leaning heavily towards Option #4.  But my career path is not what I want to write about.  I'm writing about what I'm DOING, right now.

In addition to all this Saturn stuff that I've been hearing about, my 28th birthday was on a Full Moon.  I didn't end up doing anything particularly special for it, but it felt like a Big Deal at the time.  It felt like... time to work on becoming that glorious woman I see in my dreams... That was back in November last year, and that was about the time that I begun really planning how to Break Free... But even as I started thinking about shaking all that up... I was still so very stuck.  Stuck in the paradigms of needing safety, security, needing STUFF and needing to play the rolls that people in my life expected me to play.  The archetype of my self that I had been living out was that of a HOT MESS.  Someone who's always got big ideas and lots of talk, but when it comes down to the doing, is always too tired, too overwhelmed, too just barely treading water, to ever actually commit and run with Big Things.  Too much of all that will drive a person insane... and that's just where I was headed.

I spent January through March (prime seasonal affective months...) coasting through the throws of a semi-serious mental breakdown.  Coming out of that time, I only really knew one thing: I had to get the hell out of town.  And the process of getting out of town wasn't at all like ripping off a band-aid... it was like slowly unwinding a poorly applied bandage... layer after bloody, festering, layer... a bandage that you stuck on there in a quick moment when you didn't realize how bad the wound was, and then you just kept adding more layers on top to sop up the oozing blood... and now the wound is hot and angry, and pulling the bandage off hurts, but it hurts in that good way... the way where you know that once the bandage is off and the wound is cleaned, it will FEEL SO MUCH BETTER...

And it did feel better.  I was still lost.  I still kept getting all up in my own way.  But getting  out of the city I grew up in, embarking on the great and mythical Leaving Home For Lands Unknown, getting out into the country... (in this case, Denman Islan, BC Canada) to a place where cell phone coverage is spotty and wi-fi networks, electricity, and running water are all a luxury that many people decide they can live better without...  or at least, they decide that it's not worth the money to install the infrastructure for them... It's not like all of the problems and conveniences of modern living weren't available; it's just that in that place, it was easy for me to choose to avoid them.

In that place, I could take a breath, and decide to not be overwhelmed.

Breathe.

I can decide not to be overwhelmed.

And now I'm still not sure where I'm headed, but I feel a little less lost.  And I continue to work on Letting Go.  Because the more I let go of, the more of myself I find.  The easier it is to see the path.

And here I stand, nearing the end of the summer, staying at my sister's house and waiting for her to joyously give birth to her first baby; the first baby of its generation in our own nuclear family.  I am still sore and healing from that psychic/spritual wound... but it is actually starting to heal now.  Things are starting to feel less fuzzy and less hazy.  I feel like less of a mess.  I don't suppose I've become a more organized person, but I have drastically reduced the number of possessions with which to create messy piles and right now, that feels like a huge accomplishment.  I am working to reduce the number of little undone tasks ticking away in my mind.

I'm running away from the Death By A Thousand Tiny Pinpricks.  But I can't run away from the world.  There are Big Things I want to accomplish and no matter where I go, the world is always there.  But those Big Things will have to wait because right now I'm still healing.  Right now I'm still lost, and I'm just starting to find the still and quiet place inside of being lost.

Right now I'm still learning how to breathe.

Breathe. 

Bicycle Dream Catchers and Cultural Appropriation

*** After a lot of intense community discussion, I have realized that ultimately, this was not ok for me to do. 

The answer is that it's not about me. It's not about stifling my voice, or my spiritual journey.  It's about listening. It's about the fact that when I speak, my voice is amplified by my privilege. And out of respect, I need to modulate my voice. And when someone tells me that something I'm doing is violation, it is my job to listen and respect - not to start explaining to them why, "well actually, I have every right to do this thing [insert examples of every time I try to call-out a guy for violating my boundaries and he gets defensive]".   

Here is a link to my full apology to the community who called me out. ***

About a month ago, an invitation to something called the Pedalers Fair floated through my Facebook.  Ooooh, a bicycle-themed craft fair!  That's some hot shit!  And at that point, an art project idea that had been bouncing around in the back of my head popped-up and demanded attention.  "Bike wheels!  Dreamcatchers!  Make dreamcatchers out of bike parts and they'll look super awesome!  Make me, make me, make me!!!"  I am unemployed right now so I really had no excuse not to.  And, with a vague email to the organizers about how awesome my art is (I'm actually still a little surprised that worked...), and $65 later, I am suddenly on the hook to make enough artwork to fill a booth at a craft fair for two days (just to clarify, I've never ever sold my artwork before...).  Whooo!  A deadline!  I love deadlines.  For some sick reason, deadlines and motivation are inseparably yolked in my brain/being/existance.  One does not work without the other.  Anyways... 

So... I set about making a bunch of dreamcatchers out of bike parts. And they look totally effing awesome (here's a link to the whole gallery).  And about halfway through the project, I actually took the time to stop and think about what I was doing.  I had taken the composition and style and device of a dreamcatcher out of its original context and meaning, and used it for the basis of my art.  And that's fine, right?  No art is really original, and all art steels from the past, and a celebration of cultural memes within art is a great thing, right?  Except that cultural appropriation feeds cultural genocide.  And cultural genocide is a real thing that happened.  That happens.  Is happening.  It is still happening right now, every day.  Except that I am a very privileged white lady with no real personal/spiritual ties to the people who originally made dreamcatchers.  Because native people have been undeniably oppressed by white immigrants to this country, and today I benefit from that privilege and I participate in the culture that perpetrates it.  Well, shit.    

What does cultural appropriation really look like?  Well, it seems to have a lot of faces.  For starters, let's looks at something that is obviously obscenely racist: sexy indian halloween costumes, for example (the link is to a blog by Adrienne K, a cherokee lady who writes about cultural appropriation).  This here is an even better article she wrote about all about why it's racist.  It looks like the "bohemian" theme for Miley Cirus's birthday bash... 

And that pretty much says it all...

And this here is a blog post regarding cultural appropriation in fine art.  Which leads me to Gauguin In Polynesia.  Frankly, I can't find any articles explicitly discussing Gauguin's cultural appropriation (and/or racism), but I probably haven't looked hard enough.  Without going too deep into something that could be its own treatise, here's my thoughts; Gauguin In Polynesia museum exhibits have very carefully and proudly congratulated themselves for showing authentic contemporary artwork, parallel to Gauguin's paintings of Polynesia.  It seems to be an attempt to totally blow the lid off of the deception inherent in Gauguin's work, without actually talking about racism or cultural appropriation.  This feels deeply disingenuous and annoying.

But, but, but... my happy artwork is not cultural genocide is it (I ask, with big fat Disney princess eyes)?  Well, that is a gray area.  At the very least, this is something that I need to think deeply about as I move forward with my artwork.  

Where do dreamcatchers really come from and what is their context?  Nearly every article on the internet quotes the same couple of paragraphs from a book by Francis Densmore.

"In Bulletin 86, plate 24 from the Smithsonian Institute Bureau of American Ethology is a photograph of an early, authentic Ojibwe dream catcher and on pages 51, 53, and 113 she described articles looking like spider webs that were usually hung from the hoop of a child's cradle board.  She said that 'they catch and hold everything evil as a spider's web catches and holds everything that comes into contact with it'. These original 'dream catchers' were wooden hoops with a 3 1/2 in. diameter, woven with a web made of nettle-stalk fiber that was dyed red with the red sap of the root of bloodroot or the inner bark of the wild plum tree.  This information can be found in her book, Chippewa Customs, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press (St. Paul) in 1929."

"The common dream-catcher weave seen today is the traditional weave used for other articles, most commonly the hoop for the hoop and stick game of many tribes. Woven with strong rawhide with a hole in the center, a child would roll the hoop along the ground and another would try to throw a wooden spear through the hole in the center.  Stories of the dream-catcher legend that describe the dreams going through a center hole are of recent origin."

 From the website, www.real-dream-catchers.com

It would seem that the meaning of dreamcatchers is already muddled, but that doesn't make it less offensive to appropriate them.  But why are they so ubiquitous?  Why is it that they have become such a compelling cultural meme and spread so thoroughly throughout the aesthetic unconscious of American culture?  My answer is geometry.  Because geometry is EFFING AWESOME and obviously the Ojibwe/Chippewa people knew it before white dudes ever showed-up to steel their country and afflict them with 'civilization'.  . 

The dreamcatcher weave (well, the one that you see most often today) is an elemental geometric shape.  The word for it is a 'toroid' (which is essentially a doughnut).  And this basic shape is repeated over and over again in nature; pine cones, broccoli, sea shells, leaves, etc... Nature knows geometry.  No shit... But you know what's cool about the dreamcatchers?  It's not just drawing the toroid geometry... it's weaving it.  It's getting all up inside that shit and playing with how it functions.  And it's easy to manipulate.  And, no matter how you eff it up, it almost always works, which is fascinating.  So very quickly, you get to weaving cool funky shapes.  I'm not sure why it works, but I suspect it has to do with the math that this lady here is talking about... 

Conclusions...  I am not re-creating the tradition of dream catchers; I'm taking the aesthetic form of dream-catchers and making something removed from their original culture and tradition (not just the geometric weave).  Some key thoughts from a long discussion on Facebook...

"It seems like the point of the work is to to take a symbol of tribal community and perpetuate it using materials that are meaningful to the bicycling sub-culture, with the intent of applying knowledge from their way of life to your own -- to me that does the opposite of continuing the pattern of oppression... 

I'm guessing the Obijwe would be fine with it, but you might get flack from self-righteous haters within the dominant cultural group who want to keep the Obijwe way of life static in a museum case.

" - Adrian MacDonald (my brother)

This argument certainly resonates with me and my intentions.  In this age of open source [everything], the internet constantly serves to break down barriers of ownership, especially ownership of ideas.  "Everything For Everyone".  It is hard for a white kid, steeped in the politics of open sources-ness, to understand making a voluntary barrier on ideas - limits on cultural technology.  Much of my own anarchistic philosophies involve breaking down as many barriers as possible and a focus on individual autonomy.  But they also involve a drastic restructuring of cultural values.  It is possible to have equity within a system of inequity?  The circular question, over and over again, is "where to start?"  The chicken... or the egg?  Do we break down the barriers as a step towards equity?  Or do we work towards equity as the process of breaking down barriers?  And within the process of building equity, there are contradictions, paradoxes, and double-standards.  People in positions of privilege hate it when they get the short-end of a double standard.  We whine and complain and squirm "but it's no fair!!!"  But those with un-earned privilege have been benefiting from double standards all day every day, and we don't complain about that.  Contradictions and paradoxes and double-standards exist... people gotta deal with it.  

Most discussions I have had with people of color or people of native decent, who have spent any time thinking about this issue, expressed the plea/rebuke "just don't do it".  Expressed the heartfelt belief that there is no "non-damaging" way for someone of the dominant culture to appropriate from an oppressed culture.  This quote is the most eloquent, but I got this answer from a multiple people.  

"I think part of recognizing racial, class, gender, and sexual privilege is not only knowing when said privilege is coming into play, but being willing to not act on that privilege. Getting tribal permission could be one step in the right direction (many tribes do have processes for something like this). But honestly, while I know your heart is in the right place, I don't think there is anything you can say or do to make your art any less appropriative of a tribe's culture. So I think the best way to recognize and challenge your racial privilege in this case is to just not go forward with the piece, and find some other way to turn the bicycle wheels into art (which I think sounds like a cool idea, by the way). I think you've done a great job in illustrating the power inequality behind your work and, while I know it's a hard decision to make, I think the best solution is to just not do it." - Anna Hackman

The two answers don't feel parallel or analogous to me.  They respond to slightly different facets of a very complex question and I want to think that they are both right at the same time.  In this case, I am too emotionally  attached to the project to back out.  I have certainly modified the style of the work as I went to try and be less appropriative, but the echo of my original design intent is definitely still there in every piece.  I hope that by making reference to the origin of the dreamcatcher, I can show proper respect to culture I have appropriated from.

Writing the narrative of interdependance...

Some humans sit around a campfire on the beach, bathing in the shadows cast by a full moon.  We pass thoughts and insights around the circle, feeding each other's ears and hearts with the nourishment of listening and understanding.  We are sharing space and time and ritual.

Our discussion starts with naming and release of fear and frustrations.  We see war on the horizon, and we wonder if it might be inevitable, avoidable?  But we all feel it... the shifting.  The turning.  Are we on the cusp of an evolution in our collective unconscious?  A shift that will enable us to avoid these wars?  How do we fight the oppression of media, the oppression of isolation, the slow and seemingly deliberate undermining of the skills of every day life?  The oppression of this system we have created seems like a finely tuned machine directed with all of the skill and intention of a criminal mastermind.  The dictatorship of the church of Profit and Consumption. Cognitive dissonance gnawing at the psyche of our collective consciousness.

Stories.  We carry our collective identity in the stories we tell.  Movies, Television, novels, science fiction... And that narrative whispers to us the myths of our culture over and over again.  Whispers it so often that it weaves into our unconscious and feels like the fabric of reality.  The story of The Savior.  The Hero.  The One Who Will End All The Injustice & Make It Right.  Who Will Slay The Demon / Dictator / Evil King.  This story permeates our media and our society and our religion.  As children, we are taught that police and military are our heroes.  That these brave (mostly men) people go fight the fights to keep us safe.  Fight on our behalf, for our interests.  Fight to keep us safe.  Fight so we don't have to.  So that we can enjoy the benefits of our gloriously won freedom.  But the story is just that - a story.  A bit of programming.  A piece of computer code in our collective processor.  But it is the root of our decision making processes.  The story tells us how to behave, how to treat one another, how to organize our societies.

Oh gosh though, that Hero story doesn't match up with the daily reality of shopping malls and cubicles and gas pumps and the stifling bureaucracy of school and government.  But didn't we tell you?  Oh yes, we did.  There are campaigns for patriotism floating around every day.  We live in the spoils of victory.  That shopping mall is the American Dream that our soldiers fight and die for.  That shopping mall, full of plastic, manufactured, chemical, poisonous merchandise shipped from halfway around the world so that a consumer can purchase it, use it for a while and then discard it in a landfill.  That shopping mall is OUR AMERICAN RIGHT.  The rosy future that our heroes fought [are fighting] to protect.  DYING TO PROTECT.

And there is another story that we tell ourselves.  It is the myth of The American Dream.  The delusion of American Independence.  Suburbia is founded on this dream [nightmare].  The dream that we can be independent of each other.  The dream that we can move out into the country, set-up a homestead, and get away from all them "asshole" neighbors.  That all we need for survival is our own wits and the resources at hand.  But the 'country' became the suburbs.  And our 'wits' became the automobile and the cell phone.  And the 'resources at hand' became acre after acre of box stores filled with cheaply made products manufactured thousands of miles away and shipped to us on a daily basis, in a never ending supply of consumable goods.  What we got with our victory was isolation [desolation].  We got a culture of people who are dependent upon those box stores and mass-produced, over-processed, ever-plentiful consumable products.  Dependent upon the ability to go and buy the necessities of life in a store.  And all we have to do is work 40hrs a week, every week, and buy buy buy, and if our jobs don't pay us enough to keep buying, well we'll just buy some DEBT!  This is not independence. No, this is NOT in-de-pen-dence.  This is DE-pendence.  Chemical dependence.  Consumption dependence.  Convenience dependence. Take away those box stores tomorrow and what would happen to our society?  It is unthinkable.

"American independence" is the greatest cognitive dissonance of our history.  We are independent of nothing. We are DE-pendant upon the poverty of the 3rd world to manufacture our consumable goods at ever-decreasing prices.  While we sign away our freedom and security to corporate lobbyists one by one, and it becomes more and more evident day by day that we are not free.  We are slaves to consumption.  Because we have learned to be dependent upon the teat of petroleum... that collective addiction.

So here is our greatest challenge.  There is no dictator.  There is no evil king.  In reality, the demon to be slain is only the story that we tell ourselves about what is real.  And even if there is a hidden conspiracy of evil men pulling the puppet strings of our society... they are not the demon.  We can kill them, but they will only be replaced by a new conspiracy of control and domination to fill the power vacuum.  Because violent revolution breeds chaos, and we will thankfully welcome the new, more blatant dictator who can restore order if only we give up some freedoms...  Because we are still telling ourselves the same story.  The story of the Hero Who Will Save Us.  The false story of individualism and patriarchy.  The isolation of top-down power-over hierarchy.

We slay the demon of Power-Over by weaving a new narrative.  A narrative of interdependence. Inter-deepen-dance. Dependence on one another, together, and on the land, and the creatures who help nourish us.  A narrative of working together to build balance and plenitude.  The revolution is not only a confrontation of power-over authority by protesting in the streets.  A vegetable garden is a protest.  A bicycle is a protest.  Sharing tools and resources with neighbors and community members is a protest.  Working together to share experiences and learn new ways of relating to each other is a protest.

Learning to make decisions together, with diversity and respect for each other, to make time to work through our thoughts and ideas - that is a protest.  Working together with friends and family to create an economy of giving and sharing is also a protest.  For those arbitrarily given a position of privilege: to support and promote individuals of marginalized groups, those who have been experiencing the most intense oppression for the longest time, is a deep act of protest.  One so deep that it may start out feeling uncomfortable - like a protest against our own selves.  But only in learning to let go of that power-over privilege can we really be free to find the power within ourselves.  The power of interdependence and individual autonomy.

On this moonlit night, we are still a group of people on a beach, sharing time and space.  We share a ritual of carrying water and holding our intentions.  And this non-religious ritual of open symbolism and intention is a joyful protest.  As I carry the vessel down to the lapping waves to claim my small cup of water and intention, I see a vision in the sky.  The clouds are making shapes and the moon makes them glow.  I see a phoenix rising from the horizon.  The head of this phoenix is distinctly chicken.  I see it as an omen of the coming shift.  The coming resurgence of life and vibrancy in our city cultures.  The resurgence of the skills to build and make our own goods within our own small, local economies.  The resurgence of chickens in our daily lives, because no longer will it be "efficient" to centralize farming and egg production.  Because as we free ourselves from the oppression of processed food, stripped of real nutrition, we free chickens of the horrible oppression of factory farms.  Because improving the lives and happiness of the chickens that help nourish us, improves our own health and quality of life, and re-affirms the value of our own humanity.

As we conclude our sharing we give the collected water, pregnant with our intentions, back to the ocean.  Practicing interdependence through giving and letting go.

Phoenix chicken.