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.

watercolor painting: Solidarity

Yay!  More artwork.  These paintings I've been doing are really the first time I've ever used watercolors, so this one is the first watercolor landscape-ish thing I think I've done since maybe middle school art class.  I like it!  There's lots of things I find wrong with the composition and I want to work more on refining my techniques, but watercolors as a medium are losing the scary imposingness that I've always associated with them.

I also feel like I'm channeling my mother when I paint with watercolors, especially since I'm using her paints.  Watercolor was one of mom's favorite mediums and I spent a lot of time as a kid watching her paint beautiful landscapes, and fiddling around with watercolors on my own little projects getting frustrated at how annoyingly unforgiving they were.  So, never having felt particularly excited by painting as a medium, here I am with tons and tons of sketches and doodles sitting filling up my life and my brain, screaming at me to make them into paintings.

I used to mostly be a photographer because frankly, I hated drawing.  I felt like I could never satisfyingly draw realistic landscapes, or representation of anything realistic.  Being able to paint and draw now comes very much from a place of letting go of expectations.  The less I think while working on a piece, the better.  When I do, I usually have to be in a near trance/meditation state.  The less I'm thinking, the more clean and sure my hand is in making lines.  I gotta figure out a little bit how to plan and execute more cohesiveness in my composition though.

The one thing I know for sure is, I gotta do more!!!

Scratchboard doodle

Based on a doodle that I drew during a mind-numbingly boring driving safety class at Snohomish County.

(this doodle)

OS self-care: Proposal for 2012

I propose that Occupy Seattle spend the FIRST THREE MONTHS of 2012 working to address internal issues of racism, protest tactics, organizational structure & stability, and  greater outreach to the community.

Since we started, three months ago, Occupy Seattle has accomplished Feats of Awesomeness we only dreamed possible. In that time we have been overworked, over-rushed, and faced with direct and targeted opposition from systems of authority... As we close the year, it feels appropriate to end 2011 with celebration of our new community. 

In the past weeks, and especially days, deep systemic issues of prejudice and internal politics have arisen within Occupy Seattle.  These issues divide us, block us from making progress together and making decisions together, and threaten to tear us apart. 

I want to be very clear: I do not believe that our movement will survive further "splitting" and "factions".  I believe that it will dilute our power, de-legitimize our messages, and dissipate the momentum we have worked to hard to build. 

The issues that we face within our community are no less than the kernal of what we are fighting against in the state.  They are the internalized prejudices of living our whole lives inside a society based on violence and oppression.  How can we think to fight against the institutions of violence without seeking to heal the underlying causes.  Holistic healing (and common sense) tell us that you can treat symptoms endlessly, and create an illusion of "wellness" - but until we have the patience to dig deep and seek to heal the root causes of our illness, we will never truly be well.  This can be painful and scary, but only by looking our fears in the face, acknowledging our demons for what they are, and working to create new patterns of love and compassion, we begin to effect the systemic changed and radical paradigm shifts that we all talk about fighting for. 

Where there is fear, there is power.  So let us face our collective fears together, and together work to find the power within ourselves to BE AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE OF TRUTH AND LOVE. 

To that end, I propose that Occupy Seattle spend the FIRST THREE MONTHS of 2012 focusing inward on this journey.  By means of teach-ins, community discussions, art & celebration, and outreach to Seattle neighborhoods, communities, and social justice organizations. 

There are already several days of international action planned in the next three months.  I propose that we continue to plan for and participate in those actions, but that we back off of planning additional marches and actions focused solely on Seattle.  The internal work of building our community, strengthening our organizational structures, and fighting our internal demons is TOO IMPORTANT to be put off indefinitely, or worked with less than our full attention. 

Three months seems like a long time.  It is equal to the amount of time that we have existed, which would be symmetrical.  I do not expect Occupy Seattle to solve all of the systemic causes of hate and violence in three months.  But it is enough time for us to dig in and make significant progress within our community.  It is enough time to start building understanding amongst our many activists, and create a shared vision for our future world. 

In the next three months, we will be establishing a new camp in which we hope to model our positive vision of the future.  We will participate in international days of action and protest.  We will work to build and create networks of cooperation with Seattle neighborhoods and social justice organization.  We will work to grow our numbers and our movement by being actively engage with our communities. 

Because I believe that the only way forward is together, in solidarity, with EVERYONE. 

This proposal is open to modification and suggestions.  I intent to present this for vote at GA on Wed, Dec 28th. 

Love,
Ginger

Paining: Journey from Tuscany to Andalusia

This is a painting from a sketch that I drew on the airplane ride home from Barcelona, ending a one month journey through Tuscany and Andalusia last Feb (2011).