Deena Metzger's Blog, page 2
April 8, 2025
SVEIG
PEN America list of banned wordsIn 1976, I dreamed that a matron who had worked in one of the Nazi concentration camps, Dachau, I believe, came into a torture room in Chile to apply electric probes to my genitals. I recognized her as I was dreaming because she had been arrested and filmed when the camp was liberated and now through the gift of documentary footage that Alan Renais used in his film, Night and Fog, she walked determinedly to the gurney to which I was strapped and whispered, “Sveig. Don’t speak.”
When dreaming, I understood that I was going to be tortured so I would speak, that is, would give names and information, anything the police wanted. And also, I was being tortured so the community, out of fear of similar treatment, would remain silent no matter what heinous crimes were enacted by those in power.
In 1976, the dream also informed me precisely about the presence of cancer and the way that particular illness was developing in young women who were systematically silenced in the culture. I hadn’t thought of myself as especially reticent. However, I had been fired in 1969 from a tenured teaching position after I taught a poem I had written in a carefully designed class based upon a textbook unit on censorship and pornography. I had learned what it meant to be a pariah and the toll it took on a woman and a single mother of two young boys. You would have thought it would be enough to silence me but it didn’t. The event was like a karate move; I used the energy of the attack to move, skillfully, I hoped, in a long thrust against censorship that continues to this day.
If silence kills, what needs to be said?
The wily Judge in Superior Court had had a sense of humor. My attorney had prepared me for the case, Deena Metzger vs The Los Angeles Community College Board, by training me to say as many of the “four letter words” in the poem as casually but quickly as possible in order to neutralize the atmosphere. However, the Judge, who had been a lawyer for the Longshoreman Union in another life and was no stranger to sailor talk, opened the proceedings by claiming to be “confused by four letter words,” and accordingly displayed a chart with the poem written upon it and a number over each word. We were to say the numbers, never the words: “What did you mean by 6, 7 and 8?”
The trial proceeded in this prissy manner until finally it was over and the Judge found in my favor. As did, ultimately, the California Supreme Court, and I was reinstated to the classroom three years later, in 1972. When the Superior Court case was over, the poem appeared and reappeared in various forms but particularly, for its humor, by the numbers. Even, I am told, on Saturday Night Live which I didn’t see because I didn’t have or watch TV and still don’t to this day.
The court case and cancer had been ordeals. You would have thought they would have been enough to silence me. To silence anyone. But it was the opposite. I continued to interview the many, too many, young women I kept encountering who had cancer and who one way or another reiterated that cancer was the body’s response to being silenced, to living in a culture that diminished and dismissed them. Something was breaking out of the restraints; it was the cancer. As it turned out, the medicine was the act of speaking out.
The dream comes back to me now because it is about Nazism and being silenced. We thought it could not happen here and we were wrong
PEN America, the writer’s organization committed to the freedom to write, published the above list of 250 banned words. As you know, the original restriction was to words that concerned diversity, equity and inclusion but quickly increased to include a range from vaccine, climate change, cultural heritage, to ethnicity, ideology, multicultural, from Native American, tribal, underprivileged to women. The intent is to neutralize the language as a way of eliminating any opportunities to undermine or challenge the bullying mind in power which is committed to White supremacy, privilege, money and power consolidated in a few hands.
My first response to this list, to the fact of such a list, was that we should say the words and write them as often as possible, to see how to honor them and what they truly indicate, to find ways to support and sustain what the administration is refusing. The more I said the words the more power they gathered to them. The words create a world.
I remember a ‘rosary’ I said of the names of those I knew who had been imprisoned under the terror of Pinochet, the ‘trusted’ general who had, with Kissinger and the US, engineered a coup in Chile in 1973, overthrowing and killing the beloved President Allende. I said the names again and again and, in response, they gathered love and energy to them. I don’t assume it resulted from my chants and prayers, but still all the names I said were alive eight years later when I was writing about this in my book Tree.
Words being prohibited; people being silenced. The administration is revealing itself each day more bluntly and brutally for what it is. The energy of the words we are being denied in our public lives can retain their intensity and significance. Clearly, what is denied is what is truly important. The words interact with each other to create a vibrant field of consciousness as happens also when people formerly unaware of each other gather in community, when a crowd transforms into a congregation.
Those, then, who are targeted may be revealed as conscious, as concerned for others, as courageous and members of our common-wealth.
I regret that I didn’t keep a list of all those who have been deported for academic and political reasons. That I haven’t acted upon our common interests and concerns. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, estimated that he had signed perhaps more than 300 letters revoking the visas of students, visitors and others to force their expulsion from the United States . “It’s a combination of visas. They’re visitors to the country. If they’re taking activities that are counter to our foreign, to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa.” Rubio is also expelling permanent U.S residents by stripping them of their green cards.
Short of that complete list, here are a few who are being targeted now. These are persons who may also carry our own deepest held values and ethics, particularly, but not limited to the right, the necessity for freedom of speech for which they have come to stand. The freedom to disagree. Even if we disagree with them — the necessity to have disagreement, to challenge and critique. To have that diversity. Oh dear, diversity, Ssh.
Mahmoud Khalil
Alireza Doroudi
Yunseo Chung
Rasha Alweih, MD
Badar Khan Suri
Momodou Taal
Rumeysa Ozturk
Rumeysa OzturkA colleague of mine asked me if I am afraid. Fear is a primary instrument of fascism and I have found that I am energized by camaraderie and grateful for the companionship of those brave enough to engage in the struggle and by the beauty and intensity of many of the words on the banned list. The more I recognize my responsibility as an elder to walk an ethical path as devotedly and consistently as I can, to guide a community to follow their values, the less I am unnerved by fear and distress.
Here is the beautiful contradiction: PEN America found 10,046 instances of individual books banned, affecting 4,231 unique titles. We could spend a lifetime reading all of them. Similarly,the 381 books just removed from the library of the Naval Academy, include as I browsed them, books about Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Anais Nin, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. We now have a reading list of a minimum of 10,046 + 381 books. The banned words create a field of awareness and intelligence that guide us in ethical behavior and toward developing a future for all beings. Many of those whom the administration want to ban may well be soul companions in these difficult times.
At the time of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the underworld, Hades, that the mystes (seekers) entered was known as Pluto in Rome, which means treasure. This did not mean gold or jewels, except metaphorically, the gold, jewels, treasures of the spiritual life, of the sacred. In this manner, as we may have to go underground, we enter the underworld for the treasures revealed to us and the instructions to follow the ethical life and the sacred.
***
RETURN
When you go
to the dark place,
you must come back
singing,
the note inscribed
on your palm,
the song written
on your hand,
the way trees
grow about the
shape of wind.
**************************************************************************************
NY Times, April 7th, 2025, “At least 147 international students were abruptly stripped of their ability to stay in the United States in recent days, according to universities and media reports.
From The Hill:
Mahmoud Khalil The first and so far most prominent target was Mahmoud Khalil, the lead negotiator of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian encampment. Arrested and transferred to Louisiana. His lawyers find it difficult to contact him. His hearing is scheduled for April 11, 2025.
Alireza Doroudi University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, who has a student visa, was arrested March 25. It is not clear where the Iranian student is being held or what he is charged with.
Yunseo Chung originally from South Korea, a green card holder has been in the U.S. since she was seven. She is a third-year student at Columbia University. She preemptively got a judge to agree to temporarily stop deportation efforts by the Trump administration when she found out authorities had a warrant for her arrest. She had previously been arrested by NYPD during a pro-Hamas protest at Barnard College.
Rasha Alawieh, MD kidney translplant specialist, assistant professor, Brown University Medical School, deported to Lebanon.
Badar Khan Suri an Indian national and postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University, was arrested by ICE in Arlington, Va., on March 17 and was told his visa was revoked. His attorney is arguing Suri is a target due to the Palestinian heritage of his wife, who is a U.S. citizen, as well as his critical views of Israel.
Momodou Taal a Ph.D. student from Cornell University, was asked to surrender to ICE and had his student visa taken away.Taal has been very active in the pro-Palestinian movement and was suspended from the university last year over his activities. The school ended up reinstating him. Taal filed a lawsuit against the government March 15, a day after his visa was revoked, challenging the executive orders the Trump administration is using to justify the crackdown on foreign students. “Given how they went after Mahmoud, who has a similar fact pattern, I didn’t want to be a sitting duck for eventually myself or other international students.”
Rumeysa Ozturk Tufts University Ph.D. candidate Rumeysa Ozturk, a green card holder, was also detained March 25 by ICE, with footage of her plainclothes arrest quickly going viral on social media.
A judge ruled Ozturk, a Turkish national, is to stay in the country for now, and her lawyers say she was taken to Louisiana. Action is being taken to return her to Vermont to a hearing in federal court. Ozturk was a co-author in an article run by the school newspaper that said Tufts needed to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was among those who spoke out on the case after footage of it was widely shared. The video showed half a dozen masked agents surround Ozturk on the street, take her phone away as she screamed, handcuff her and usher her into a van. “The video is really chilling, and this should matter to every single American,” Murphy said. The Author’s Guild and PEN America are supporting Ozturk.
Deena Metzger, Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems, Red Hen Press, 2009
February 28, 2025
Books Are Living Events
Books are not objects. They are living events that draw us into their strange knowing, into the vital dynamic that comes from the ways they hover over time and space and between the worlds. Two books, one published in 2022 and the other published in 1989 and republished in December 2023, insist on their exact and necessary relationship to this very moment. Two books who insist on having their say now.
I wrote an essay about my latest novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, on August 25, 2022. But it could have been written today, February 27, 2025. So below, I offer the opening and closing of that essay, with only a few changes needed for the current day. I am doing this because on March 16th I will be reading from La Vieja: A Journal of Fire at my first public reading since before the pandemic, in Santa Cruz, CA at 3-4:30 pm.
At this event, I will also read from my novel What Dinah Thought. It is as unnerving to realize its exact relevance to this moment as it was to understand that What Dinah Thought had to be republished in December 2023, that it was as necessary to be brought into the public dialogue, as it was during the first Intifada when I wrote it.
The original motivation for What Dinah Thought was to investigate a Biblical story, still unacknowledged, the ancient core of the inter-tribal conflict remaining very much in our collective DNA. The book set out to understand this story which has not been mourned, for which amends have not been made, to see if the retelling of it in a new way, the reliving of it, even if only in the creative imagination, could offer healing to the terrible history which was (which is) once again exploding in violence. In December 2023 What Dinah Thought was re-issued in order to inject a vision of possibility for this time.
I did not write these books. The books, the spirits of the books, the characters, history integrated themselves into Story and came alive.
Here is the paragraph from the essay “La Vieja in These Times,” as if being written now: If you click on the as you read the following words you will see that time and space co-exist and Story is the form of its teachings.
I am writing this from Topanga, where the mountain meets the sea in the Tongva language, a canyon village in Southern California. What inspired this essay was the raging Pacific Palisades wildfire which reached and encircled my land this winter, caused by historic weather conditions. The official fire season hadn’t ended yet, and there had been several vegetation flare-ups where I live. I had already packed my car to evacuate three times so I would be ready to leave in no more than 10 minutes.
La Vieja, the protagonist of my latest novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, (Hand to Hand, Los Angeles, March 2022) is an Elder alarmed by the Anthropocene, the consequent climate dissolution, our out of control burning planet. In the past, fire season raged from August to November and recently in California, it has been beginning in June and continuing and continuing. The Eaton fire and Pacific Palisades fire of January 7, 2025 became the largest, most destructive fires in Los Angeles history, only to be “relieved” by equally record setting rains and major floods. (But not sufficient to end the drought.) The debris, toxic waste, fire damage, flood damage are not close to being remedied.
I did have to evacuate this time and for eleven days. While I was with my son and daughter-in-law, several fires, believed to have been set by an arsonist, flared around us due to wind conditions and we thought we might have to rescue her mother and all of us evacuate. A minimum of 10 people. Go where? Colorado maybe. In 2002, the Marshall fire, southeast of Boulder, Colorado, had gusted 50-to-100 mph winds, burning more than 6,000 acres and destroying over 500 homes.
16,000 structures were lost in the joint Eaton and Palisades fires and an untold number of non-humans who burned to death and an untallied number of trees.
Ultimately La Vieja and the Writer, who having agreed to write the book understands she must take on La Vieja’s consciousness as well, are together concerned with all the fires, all the kinds of fires we set, and the work to gain the ecological intelligence necessary to subvert the oxygen of violence which our culture breathes so deeply.
Again, I am called to rewrite a paragraph from the essay in contemporary terms; it does not take much effort, requires only the addition of a word or two.
This year, I am not only looking for fires but following the horrific violence being inflicted by the wars against Palestine and Ukraine which are simultaneously wars against the Earth. It is important not to distinguish them. A single on-going war with different faces is being waged violently with many victims: humans, animals, birds, Earth. All those injured and terrorized call us to experience their on-going agony as if it is our own, as if we are suffering it, which we are.
And so, the final words of the essay,:
We can choose between the ongoing brutal assaults on the Earth, from war to extraction industries that support our life-styles, the forests burning, the devastating heat waves and floods, for which we are all responsible—all of us, you, the reader and I, myself, absolutely—and the peace and beauty that emerges from the vitality that is intrinsic to the network of connections between all beings of the natural world. Even or because We are responsible for the devastation, We can choose the alternatives; We can—and I pray will—find the beautiful ways toward peaceful co-existence and restoration of the natural world.
La Vieja retreated to a Fire Lookout in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest from which she could see fifteen miles in all directions, because she decided to spend the rest of her life in order to see. To truly see, not only to catch sight of incipient sparks before they blaze, but to see what has brought us to this time in history and whether it is possible to extinguish the fires we are currently setting before they engulf the future.
Please join me in Santa Cruz for a public reading and book signing on Sunday, March 16, 2025, 3-4:30 pm, at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. Information and ticketing information here. Event hosted by Carolyn Brigit Flynn.
My original essay “,” August 25, 2022
My essays “,” October 30, 2023,
and “,” December 12, 2023
Carolyn Brigit Flynn’s Substack essay on first meeting Deena Metzger and hosting this reading
February 6, 2025
SANCTUARY IN A TIME OF DREAD
On the day of the Inauguration, we called a Council asking what we wished to Inaugurate. We reiterated the persistent subtext: How shall we meet these times?
The circles that have met since, have had similar themes – the ways the government’s actions are affecting each person, their fears and the possibilities.
The Altadena, Pasadena, Palisades, Topanga, Malibu fires began with tiny embers, tiny sparks and swiftly became infernos. The first action required is to get out of the way. The second, to contain, extinguish the fires and limit the destruction. Then to repair and begin again. Beginning again is tricky. If we are wise, we will begin carefully and thoughtfully, avoiding what inadvertently led to these conditions. We will recognize that the Earth and the animals and all the beings suffered inordinately as well as the humans and reconstruction needs to consider the well being of all in order to avoid horrific reoccurrences.
There is a conflagration in the White House. It is happening so fast we don’t understand what is occurring.
When I began writing this, I made a list of what had occurred since January 20 beginning with
mass deportations,attempts to end or control gender diversity through edict,rolling back gender protection and medical care,ending DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion andall the actions that make supporting Palestinians a heresy, threatening, for example, to to deport non-citizens who support Palestinians within 24 hours,the mass firing of government officials,rolling back environmental protection,opening up leasing and drilling for oil and gas,withdrawing from Paris Climate Agreement,blacking out public communications from government health and energy agencies,withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and on and on and on.I was looking for a single event that would exemplify what has occurred in the last days and came upon this one:
The cancellation of a University of North Carolina legal scholar’s scheduled talk at a U.S. attorney’s office on the complicity of German lawyers in the creation of the Nazi state.
It looks like everything will burn. How do we protect this Earth from these fires?
Daré occurred on February 2, this year, 2025. Imbolic. Brigit’s holy day. Brigit the Goddess/Saint of Fire and Healing. This is what we are engaged in, isn’t it, Fire and Healing? But Brigit’s fire is very different from the one that threatens to bring all down.
We began Daré by reading from an essay about Safe Houses by Carolyn Brigit Flynn, one of those who, with a community, protects the sacred fire by keeping a candle burning, day after day, year after year. I first listened to her essay about 2007 when we were in the throes of the Iraq, Afghanistan wars and the early awareness of environmental collapse. And in response, she wrote these words about Safe Houses:
They are in cities, towns, villages, on mountains, and near rivers. They are small townhouses and large lodges, modest apartments with soft rugs and sacred paintings, or condos with swimming pools and hot tubs. They are log cabins in the woods, rustic cottages on the beach, tall urban skyscrapers. They are modern-day safe houses, and they can be found in suburbs, cities, farmlands, countryside, deserts and forests everywhere on the planet.
Together, they form an interlinking pathway of sanctuary, meaning, hope and healing. Each safe house exists within the Earth’s spirit. Each offers space for our love and grief, for truth-telling, and for the sacred to unfold. Each honors the privilege of being one among many on our planet of rivers, mountains, deserts, and endlessly diverse animals and creatures. Each carries our individual and collective stories. Lives are mended there, and hearts given peace. Safe houses welcome all religious traditions and require none, and honor all forms of creativity and healing. Here, women with kind eyes and strong hearts midwife souls. Men of gentle being and wise spirit gather others in sacred community. When we visit these places, we feel we have re-entered the web of existence. We have mended our part of the whole.
Then these words toward the end of her essay can guide us in these terrifying times:
During our time of planetary and institutional breakdown, this worldwide network of independently arising safe houses form an underground web, a foundation from which we can build a future.
… The network of safe houses will continue to expand as modern institutions unravel and can no longer sustain themselves. In our time of collapse and upheaval, humans everywhere are teaching ourselves how to live without the larger culture, for we have been and are creating our own.
One of the ways that fascism was undermined, was through sanctuary, through providing safe houses, secret niches, refuges, hidden shelters for people, beings, thoughts, ideas, connections, beliefs, visions.
Native Americans have survived over 500 years of colonialism and genocide through preserving their traditions, cultural heritages, and interconnection with the natural world. Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, is a Place of Refuge on the Big Island, Hawaii which protected the kapu breaker, defeated warriors, as well as civilians during war who reached the boundaries of the Puʻuhonua. Many children, individuals and families were hidden during WWII. Various US cities have declared themselves Sanctuary cities to protect people from illegal deportation. Until very recently, churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, as well as hospitals, were safe places even during war. Terma teachings were originally esoterically hidden by eighth-century Tibetan Buddhists Vajrayana masters to be discovered at auspicious times by treasure revealers. We protect the treasures of this time and the past so that they can be remembered in the future.
Pu’uhonua o HonaunauOn August 8, 2010 I wrote . There I wrote:
I was born in 1936, the year of the Spanish Civil War and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. A few years later, when my father learned about the death camps, the gas chambers, the Holocaust, he had a breakdown. What mind could incorporate the realities of 1939 to 1945? After 1942, the Holocaust was the constant subject in our household. 65 years later, the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain in the air like radioactive poisoning and as a species we exercise no restraint on the horror we are willing to inflict on each other, on animals, on beauty, on the earth.
Well, as you know, this theme has repeated itself in my writing. This is inevitable. We have not healed this wound. But I did not expect that I would be writing thirteen years later about fascism coming to the United States. I did not imagine I would refer to an unelected, seeming representative of the US, the richest man in the world, making a Nazi salute to the right wing in Germany of all places. The conflagration in the White House is fascism.
In that 2010 essay, I also wrote the following paragraph that a member of our Daré quoted on January 20th because it provides him a path for this moment:
There are secret passageways to another vital life for this planet. You have to find yours and burrow through. You have a unique way waiting for you that belongs to you. It is the exact fulfillment of your life, experience, understanding, suffering and heart. As I have mine. Each of ours is distinct, but aligned with each other’s. We can help each other find the way. We can find our individual ways and support each other as we devote ourselves to them. Restoring creation is what we can do together.
… Spirit says there are hidden passageways to restore creation.
To restore our public lives, it is essential to protect all that is and all who are precious.
One of the 19 Ways is SANCTUARY. Honoring, providing, becoming sanctuary for all beings by learning the ways of the land. Be and provide Sanctuary.
Let us find all the ways to meet these times.
*****************************************************************************
Question to the I Ching: What is the energy for posting this piece on sanctuary and fascism?
50 – Fifty Ting / The Caldron changing to 19 Nineteen – Noble Calling
Fire rises hot and bright from the Wood beneath the sacrificial caldron:
The Superior Person positions himself correctly within the flow of Cosmic forces
January 15, 2025
FIRE and FIRE and FIRE and FIRE and Fi……….
From Summer Movies in Central Park, by Czeslaw Milosz as published in the New Yorker, January 2025
I remember a field where the radiance
Of the burning city colors the dry wormwood
And crickets play, red from the glow,
Through which an army of smoke marches.
The water rushing along the road flutters
The dress on the corpse of a woman,
As the city descends long days and nights
Into legend, which won’t compensate for its disasters.
This memory contains a warning for those
Who spend their nights on soft couches:
An errant fire will often burn right through
The rosy stains on bedsheets.
Whoever enters the human microcosmos
Where marvels are performed should know
That it delivers, serenely, on a daily basis,
The retributions of a malignant fate.
****
In my essay, , 11/9/2024 I wrote, “At midnight of Election night, after the Council, when the trends were becoming clear, I spent two hours packing my car as great winds were predicted, with gusts of 80 to perhaps 100 miles an hour. The last time something similar occurred, I sat in the living room listening to the wind, which sounded like a great god, and so I prayed to it, beginning, as one must, with praise, as it slowly and carefully lifted the roof from my house and folded it down on the other side.”
The morning after the election, I taught a writing class while listening to alerts for the Broad fire, fairly close to me in Malibu, which was contained to 50 acres and the Mountain fire burning toward Ventura which tonight on November 9th after burning 20,650 acres is 17% contained.
The Mountain Fire ultimately burned 22 days and 19,004 acres.
Today, January 13, 2025, the Palisades fire which burned very close to our home, which has been a sanctuary for so many since 1981, has at this moment, 1/13/2025 at 1:11pm, burned 23,713 acres and is 14% contained. This does not account for the Eaton, Kenneth, Hurst fires currently burning, contained and not contained in Los Angeles county and all the others torches being raised in recognition of our emotional and spiritual inflammations.
Warnings just posted:
A long duration Red Flag Warning remains in effect across much of Los Angeles and Ventura counties through Wednesday, expanding into the mountains of San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, as well as Ojai/Lake Casitas by tonight. THERE WILL LIKELY BE DAMAGING WINDS GUSTING BETWEEN 55 AND 70 MPH ACROSS PORTIONS OF THE RED FLAG WARNING AREA FROM EARLY TUESDAY MORNING THROUGH WEDNESDAY MORNING, LEADING TO THE PDS RED FLAG WARNING UPGRADE. AREAS IN THE RED FLAG WARNING (ESPECIALLY DURING THE PDS TIME FRAME) WILL HAVE A HIGH RISK FOR LARGE FIRES WITH VERY RAPID FIRE SPREAD, EXTREME FIRE BEHAVIOR, AND LONG RANGE SPOTTING. WHILE DANGEROUS PDS RED FLAG FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE LIKELY WITH THIS EVENT EARLY TUESDAY MORNING INTO WEDNESDAY MORNING, THIS WIND EVENT IS NOT EXPECTED TO BE AS STRONG AND DESTRUCTIVE AS LAST WEEK`S WINDSTORM.
Topanga Canyon’s view of the PalisadesObviously, this is not being written to comfort you or me. These words emerge from my first moments of silence since Tuesday, January 7th, when I and Gentle Boy evacuated. I cannot keep track of all the friends and community members who have lost their homes and the places we gathered and where we were nurtured and sustained.Several friends have had to evacuate several times as safe houses become endangered. We do not know if this, now assumed, very safe urban area will remain so if the wild winds manifest.
Those who have lost their houses will have to begin again. But, if we do not all agree to consider and act on how we must all begin again, any reconstruction will ultimately be useless.
Two words accurately described what many saw and experienced these last weeks: Inferno and Apocalypse.
My dear dear human relatives, all my dear dear human relatives – we are responsible: Climate collapse, inordinate and insatiable greed and War! All our wars are also the sources of these fires. Additionally, being prevented from extracting ourselves from life styles based on money money money which are also driving so many people mad. You know this. The madness has its dire consequences. All our actions indicate a significant inability to consider the others, the other beings, the other peoples, the more than humans, as we consider only ourselves.
However, a sane response has a simple infrastructure: WE not I.
I do not know how I will begin to rebuild my life when I return to Two Wolf Hill. I do not know how we will rebuild, how we will rebuild each other’s lives, how our rebuilding will equally consider all, we, the animals, the Earth.
My house is standing at this moment. As it happened the firefighters staged their remarkable response to the near fires from the firebreak turned meadow alongside the Eucalyptus and Oak sentinels that many of you know.
But still I must, we must entirely and willingly reimagine, revision, restructure, rebuild. We cannot restore. We must find new ways to continue. We must make amends. Each of us. Each of us.
What will we do to be in accord with all those who are suffering so greatly as is our Mother, Earth, from whom all things come and from whom we take through terrible surgeries what cannot be restored and what cannot heal? Let us heartstorm this.
This is the little, if anything, that I know at the moment.
If I continue to write this to you, I may finally be able to weep.
December 2, 2024
ReVisioning Medicine for a Healthy Future
Hello. ReVisoning Medicine! Why not? It is so badly needed by practitioners and patients. Some year ago, when giving the keynote for The American Academy of Environmental Medicine, I felt compelled to address everyone as a patient, both the victim of increasing environmental injury and the perpetrator. The question I have been asking for years was most pertinent there: What is the story and the path that illness is revealing and how do we meet them for the sake of healing all? In that instance, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the wounding of the earth through human activities was similarly enacted on the body of humans and also non-human and that true healing required meeting all. Since then, the ways that illnesses and healing affect and are affected by all aspects of life have become painfully obvious and call us into new relationships that need to be attended for life, and so health, to thrive.
ReVisioning Medicine has been meeting to address such issues since 2004 and we hope you will join us.
Recently, I spoke with a friend about her husband, a brilliant mathematician, renowned creative thinker and visionary beloved by many friends and students, about the agony of his last months of medical care in an enlightened community in California. Ultimately, despite insurance, but because of civic lack of medical and technological resources and as a consequence of corporate, for-profit hospital and rehabilitation practices, he died, according to the autopsy, of malnutrition. His inability to eat for complex reasons was dismissed or ignored by all the weary and over worked professionals who treated him, and who, to a person, did not investigate his wife’s growing alarm and inability to remedy the situation.
Within the last few months two colleagues who were prescribed stat MRIs in October and November were automatically scheduled for the test next March and April, 5 to 6 months later. They needed to use their energy, smarts and influence to change it to within two weeks. But they had the ability and were living in Los Angeles, had adequate medical insurance and primary physicians. What if they lived elsewhere, had far more basic health insurance or none, or were not educated regarding medicine or what they deserved or needed as people?
These are just two events … I could tell you dozens and sadly also about the physician’s, or the physician’s mother’s or father’s treatment, or the hospital’s neuropsychologist’s mother’s highly inadequate, or even dangerous treatment, or the like. And you can do the same.
But I can also tell you multiple stories of remarkable healings that occurred when conventional practices expanded to include wonders because the true story of healing is so much larger, deeper, more beautiful and complex than is ordinarily permitted.
One of my own stories occurred when the electricity failed at Cedar Sinai hospital, Beverly Hills, California, one of the largest in the world, during a 1977 winter storm, preventing me from receiving reconstruction surgery three days after a mastectomy. I had received major anesthesia three times in ten days and the surgery couldn’t be scheduled for six months. In that time, much understanding came to me so that instead, I had my chest tattooed at the same time as I was writing my book, Tree, about the experience of Breast Cancer. Both events assisted my actual healing and lead to the creation of the Woman Warrior Poster, which went viral internationally, beginning in 1981, and is still saving thousands of lives of women globally from a variety of dangerous implants, whose use remains threatening in current days.
[ Working photo of Woman Warrior poster for Italian and other language editions of Tits Up by Sarah Thornton, 2024]Healing stories are so different from what can be charted; they are intricate and blessedly tangled in the events, histories, relationships, insights, even dreams that more than describe and influence an individual’s life.
Accordingly, ReVisioning Medicine seeks to bring together medical intelligence with time tested indigenous ways and contemporary vision. Based on Council principles everyone’s unique intelligence, medicine tradition and wisdom are appreciated as cooperation between western medicine and non-western healing practices can be a source of needed wisdom.
ReVisioning Medicine is a spirit-based, earth-based medicine, as healing is a spiritual practice for medicine people. It promotes alliances between the patient and physicians, healers, the family and the natural world. If we are free to think differently about the nature of illness and healing, as well as the relationship between common illnesses and modern life, we will find ways that truly bring healing and do no harm to individuals or the planet. For this reason, in the 2004 Keynote Address for the American Holistic Medicine Association, I introduced Medicine and the Earth as our primary patients.
Gathering for ReVisioning Medicine is an act of hope and possibility. As downhearted as we may be about the state of medicine, we, who have been convening ReVisioning since 2004, see the possibilities that our explorations of mind and heart offer.
Please join us. Click the photo below to learn more.
(Just for our information -I had a mastectomy – by a very kind, mostly pediatric surgeon, “with a fine stitch” – no chemo, no other medical treatment – and have been entirely cancer free for 47 years.)
November 10, 2024
The Red Line
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” — Toni Morrison
***
“What do you think of Western Civilization,” Gandhi was asked. “It would be a good idea,” he answered.
***
“If you do not have a moral question in your governing process, then you do not have a process that is going to survive. ― Oren Lyons, Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan
***
Three days after the Election that has stunned half the country and is celebrated by the other half, I bring you these fragments, these broken pieces from a broken world. Perhaps you can cohere them to each other to form a path to survival for all beings.
We have held six councils since Election day. The central focus has been: What have we not understood? What have we failed to understand? Where have we been oblivious? Where have we failed to do what we were required to do?
***
Seeking the right words for this essay today, if there are any for this time, I asked the I Ching, an impossible question for a Divination to answer: What are the right words for this time?
I received an impossibly precise response. I can only assume the reality and presence of the spirits speaking to us in these most difficult times.
Hexagram 18 Ku: Repairing the Damage /18: Gu: Corruption and Pestilence
The Superior Person sweeps away corruption and stagnation by stirring up the people and strengthening their spirit. You are blessed with an opportunity to resuscitate that which others have abandoned as beyond repair.
This ruin wasn’t caused by evil intention, but by indifference to decay. Just by addressing yourself to the problem, you exhibit a new awareness, a fresh perspective. This is a time of recovery, renewal, regeneration.
***
Jeanette Staine came to the Election night circle from her home in South Central Los Angeles and, for the first time in ten years ,she brought some of her children, three Black daughters, ages 23, 20 and 16. As soon as I saw them, I knew what was required of us. They needed to feel welcome and sincerely respected though they were much younger than those who had gathered for Council and they needed to feel safe.
In Council, they said, their peers had voted for Trump because they didn’t believe anything would change under Kamala. They said the time of the pandemic was awful and afterwards their generation was very hungry, but not for food. They said they wanted things shaken up, they wanted change and they didn’t trust Kamala or the Democratic party to create it on their behalf. They felt she was part of the elite and the establishment which would continue. They didn’t trust government to be on their behalf. They also said, their peers did not do research before they made their choices, but listened to the Influencers and whatever was on social media. They have been embedded in social media.
Their mother said, she was very afraid, very afraid for her children and herself in the coming times.
***
Hexagram 18 – Changing line 9 at the 3d:
Managing and straightening the father’s pestilence
You must deal with the corruption of authority. There will be regrets that you cooperated with it in the past.
A woman reckoned with what she had always known, that stunned her now: she had voted for someone who had not put the climate and the Earth first. That it had barely been mentioned in the campaign. That it had not been the center in the discussion of the returns. In the future, she would only vote if the Earth’s protection and restoration were at the core.
In the Council, I asked, what is your red line? What set of values are the red line which you will not cross because to do so is to defy or violate the furthest limit of what is tolerable, allowable or forgivable.
Another woman, greatly distressed, realized she had voted for a candidate who had touted maintaining America’s greatest military in the world, that she had voted for someone who would probably not stop sending weapons to Israel, that she had not protected the Palestinian people, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
I am so tired of hearing – We will fight to win. Or, we will keep fighting, send money. We will win this war. We will fight and we will fight and we will fight. Fight. War. Fight.
In my dream, the woman picked up a rifle so she could protect a child or an animal. Then she trained to use the rifle. Then she discovered, the training induced competition in her and soon she forgot why she was using the rifle originally, as she focused on hitting the target again and again and again. In the dream, she wanted to convey the poison of this transition to us.
***
Corruption/Renovating describes your situation in terms of poison, putrefaction, black magic and the evil deeds done by parents that are manifested in their children. The way to deal with it is to help things rot away so a new beginning can be found.
***
A Native American elder said “We have dealt with this for 500 years. It doesn’t matter who is in power. It is all the same.
***
When people were expressing their fears for the rise of fascism and being the victims of revenge politics, I was thinking of the unmarked graves with the broken and starved bodies of tiny Native children who dared to speak their own languages. These children had been forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in our government schools and in schools run by the Catholic church. Did I say this occurred, until recently, in the United States and in Canada?
***
The Response. The Shaman Speaks: Spirit works in those who lay out the offerings. The ideal Realizing Person reflect this by rousing a sense of our common needs, strengthening the power to renew the Ancestral images. You are journeying into the world of the great symbols.
The Native American elder remembered what an elder had taught her: They had survived five hundred years of genocide enacted by this culture and government because they had remembered to be thankful and preserved their prayers, ceremonies and rituals and their relationship to the Earth and lived accordingly.
What she meant by they had survived, she meant the prayers survived and the tribal wisdom and their relationship to the Earth even when they were removed from it.
Now that we may be facing the dark times, we need such prayers, ceremonies and rituals, such relationships with the Earth as our primary way of being and to live our lives accordingly. But we do not have these because we have yielded to the values and demands of a secular money driven society. Because we are in the habit of voting for the lesser evil. Because we are taught to think “I” and not “we.” Because we are energy dependent and refuse to change. Because, first we want to preserve the status quo, that is our lifestyle.
***
At midnight of Election night, after the Council, when the trends were becoming clear, I spent two hours packing my car as great winds were predicted, with gusts of 80 to perhaps 100 miles an hour. The last time something similar occurred, I sat in the living room listening to the wind, which sounded like a great god, and so I prayed to it, beginning, as one must, with praise, as it slowly and carefully lifted the roof from my house and folded it down on the other side.
The morning after the election, I taught a writing class while listening to alerts for the Broad fire, fairly close to me in Malibu, which was contained to 50 acres and the Mountain fire burning toward Ventura which tonight on November 9th after burning 20,650 acres is 17% contained. The Fire Chief said, “The fire has laid down.”
Ventura County Animal Services said 115 horses, five ponies, three donkeys, seven sheep, 33 goats, four mini horses, one cattle, and 20 alpacas are being sheltered Friday as evacuees.
What is Earth telling us about how we live?
***
Lise Weil, Editor of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, wrote, “have to say I agreed with what you said at Daré about this being the most brutal and violent moment in our history. At the very least I think there’s never been a harder time to be alive, for any sensitive being!”
Reading that, I thought, Yes, this is the darkest time even though it has happened before, again and again. But the environment itself wasn’t at stake then. But the Earth wasn’t being assaulted in the same way then. It hadn’t been global, affecting every single person and being on the planet. And it hadn’t been up to each of us before to radically change our minds and the ways we are living and what we are imposing on others.
But still, it has happened before and we can learn from the ancestors and other companions living now on the planet who were or are already struggling with these forces.
In 1972, I marched with hundreds of thousands in Chile in celebration of the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. One year, later we looked on in horror as General Pinochet with the support of the US government, bombed the Moneda and instituted a brutal fascist coup. It can happen so quickly.
As we do not know in any way how to meet these times, we can ask the ancestors to teach us what they suffered and how they survived as a people and to teach us the prayers, and the values and the relationships with the other beings, so we can survive, so a contemporary sustaining and beautiful culture might be born and it might survive.
***
The 19 Ways asks us to change our minds sufficiently to live differently and act in ways that will preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings… so we will no longer be people who do harm…. we have to change our minds as we won’t fully know what to do or how to do it until we respond instinctively with different minds, values and reflexes. …
The changes we are called to make so that the earth and all beings might survive are extensive and extreme. They require comprehensive and global shifts of consciousness and activity. No one is exempt from such a challenge.
***
Hexagram 29 K’an Dangerously Deep K’an Repeating Pit/Ghost River
You are facing a crucial trial along your Journey.
The danger of this challenge is very real.
It is a test of your mettle.
If you can maintain your integrity and stay true to your convictions, you will overcome.
Repeating the Pit. Danger. The Ghost River
There is a connection to the spirits that will carry you through. Hold your heart fast. An offering brings you success. Making a move in the face of danger brings honour.
***
Forget the elections. And as may be necessary, forget the government. We have to create the life and the ways together that we have asked government to provide for us. The way the people lived before the colonial mind took over. We can create sanctuary for each other and for all the beings. We can because we must. Because Earth gives us sanctuary, we can live in such ways as to provide sanctuary for Her.
So, hold your heart fast and leap!
Stephen Karcher, Total I Ching, Myths for Change and IChing Online.net.
October 3, 2024
Lebanon, Lake Lure and Things
Hello Companions on this wondrous and suffering planet:
We teeter on the edge of vision and crises. There is so much international violence, that a long view, let’s say from another people in another solar system, would necessarily determine with alarm that we are a rogue civilization of unprecedented danger to everything, to the universe itself. We have read about such times thanks to novelists like George Orwell, but I always wondered how it would be to live in such while desperately seeking ways out. Now I know. Unexpected what puts one over the edge: These last days, the view of the insane bombing of Lebanon with our weapons, partnered with what has been leashed against Gaza and the Palestinians in the West Bank, with our weapons, the unending war against innocent children, women and men, the aged, the youth, with our weapons, the future with our weapons, including whatever the strikes in Iran and the violent ping pong already evoked, all, did I say this, with our weapons.
Alongside these, the images of the fury which we have created called Helene, (and other current hurricanes, floods, extreme wild fires) in our war against the Earth and the natural world, a climate catastrophe, or is it climate collapse, fueled largely by fossil fuel use, fueled to a great extent by a world-wide crazed lifestyle we impose and won’t give up ourselves.
Today is Rosh Hashanah. It begins the High Holy Days for the Jewish people: The Days of Atonement. Atonement, yes. Will we ever be able to make amends to heal these gross injuries, all the deaths, the children under the rubble?
A dear friend, Illana Berger, wrote the following to me today, “Dearest Deena, happy new year to you. It’s difficult to call in a sweet year with so much difficulty, tragedy, catastrophe in our day today and especially for nonhuman beings on this earth.
There is something else I want to share with you – I am organizing a gathering with Mandaza on Sunday the 13th from 10 to 12.”
I wrote back, “My intention is to spend today (and tomorrow) pondering something I ask every day, but now, with an entirely different focus as a greater war and so many tragic possibilities are looming in the Middle East, a conflagration that cannot be contained, and should not be contained as we are also responsible: How do we meet this time? This is the most serious subject of this year which begins on Saturday. It is always the question, but I feel the spiritual demand to ask this and listen and change and act differently. (Listening called me to write this when I desired to sit outside with an iced cup of coffee, listening and contemplating.)”
Thinking of the many times I spent with Mandaza Kandemwa at his home in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and also in the US, since we met in 1997 and observed the way he lives his life within his family and among the people and entirely with the spirts. So, I went on to write to Illana that Mandaza’s great gift – in addition to transmitting the way of Daré – is who he is, and how he is, and how he lives every minute and every day in active yet quiet devotion.
He didn’t start off this way. He had been head of Education for the national police force, a very Western position. But, as he puts it, the spirits became heavy upon him and his life changed entirely.
For the last three months, I have been focused at the computer, writing a novel which I have referred to here before, Broken Lambs. Perhaps I finished a first draft yesterday which gives me the gift of two days to dedicate entirely to discerning, if I can, something of what is required of us, so we can run interference, do an intervention with a culture run amuck.
Sometimes, as a writer, one learns from the story as it appears on the page and from one’s characters. There are three characters in the novel, an environmental attorney, a Vietnam vet and a Ram. The inter-connection between the three of them, two humans and one more-than-human, is what makes real transformation possible. As the story develops, the humans find it increasingly difficult to live inside a Western environment, recognizing that the structures we create and live within determine the quality and content of our lives. They shape us. The Ram, of course, has no interest in the conditions that humans can offer him and his people.
What I perceived being with Mandaza is that his devotion is entirely unselfconscious and unlike the devotion I perceive among EuroAmericans, no matter how dedicated we are, his is not involved or concerned with things. THINGS. Things run and determine our lives. If we could give up things, or the ways we engage with them, their manufacture, purchase, and committed use, we would be able to diminish to a great extent, to the extent necessary for survival of our species and all species, the use of fossil fuels which is killing us — and so much more.
It is not a matter simply of saying one won’t drive this or that, or do this or that, or give up this item or that item. It is weaning ourselves from a pernicious cultural dependence on money, increase, profit, development, manufacture, and buying and selling and buying and selling things (also grievously, in addition to buying and selling things, buying and selling people, energy, land, animals, futures and the future.)
I don’t know if you will perceive the nature of the life that Mandaza lives from hearing him speak. We can say anything without its reality being conveyed as it is really lived. But when listening and trusting the veracity of what we hear, we can actively imagine detaching from this corrupt violent and commercial culture and what it would mean, and how it could be enacted, to live according to the spirits and the natural world.
Look at the image of Lake Lure. Then what we are doing to Lebanon. These are mirrors. Nothing more need be said.
My heart is broken under the rubble of an apartment house. The dead are in the rubble too. What does it feel like to be crushed by your own home?
© 2024 Al Jazeera Media Network. Members of the civil defense and firefighting unit at the site of an Israeli attack in Beirut. [Mohamed Azakir/Reuters]
A rescuer searches for survivors in a building that was hit by an Israeli air raid in Beirut. [Hassan Ammar/AP Photo] Israeli forces have killed 700 people, including 50 children and 94 women, across Lebanon since September 23. [Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters]
Debris floats following Hurricane Helene in the Lake Lure in North Carolina, September 29. Via Charlotte City Councilman Tariq Bokhari – Reuters
September 13, 2024
Lets Try Another Way
I was seated outside on the patio, a brisk wind had come from the northwest cooling the land after the terrible heat of the last week which has kept most of us indoors with AC. We lost power the first day for nine hours when the temperature peaked at 112. Fair enough. University of Empathy. Soon there would be thousands of unhoused people, suffering far far more than we would, many without any possibility of finding safety or comfort even as hospitals in areas like Phoenix (more than 100 consecutive days of temperatures over 100) find themselves needing to offer burn units, the sidewalks themselves like walking on fire. Efforts are being made to declare intense heat a federal disaster in recognition of the growing threat to life.
Here in Topanga, we only suffered such heat for a short time. Another of the many wake-up calls the spirits send. It is another story in the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains where several fires, (of too many burning up and down the west coast), are blazing without any containment, at so great a heat, they create their own weather of fierce winds and lightning, the fires expanding and expanding. More and more people are being evacuated while the trees, the birds, the animals, the insects, the wild who have no responsibility whatsoever for these fires, cannot go to a shelter but will burn in place.
The Buddha fountain had been a reliable instrument to assess the extremity of the heat. It was covered with bees, dozens and dozens desperately seeking water. Today the numbers have reduced to familiar small communities that stop to take a drink while at work pollinating the world. It was a great joy to be outside again, observing the great beauty of Earth and the dance of light and shadow as the sun crossed through the sky fields of blue and drew the patterns of leaves on the ground through the groves of trees.
Bees on the Buddha FountainBUT … I had an iPhone in my hand and could not resist the addictive pull, physical, emotional, social, to check the responses to the Presidential debate, seeking who knows what balm for the horror that a pathological liar, a sexual predator and verbally violent individual, without heart or morals, should not only have been President but has been authorized to run again by a huge cabal of power seeking individuals. This is our country? In this time in history? With so much wisdom behind us, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, ancestral, scientific, historic?
On the one hand, this beauty, the bowl of green, soil and stone which is this canyon, birds, wind, Bees, Roses, Oaks, the Sun moving toward setting, the Moon about to rise, and on the other hand, the programmed overpowering banality of social media and contemporary American culture. Not impervious to the lure, I fell into an older New Yorker article about Agnes Varda, who at least interests me very much as an artist, and pretended that reading about film, intelligent film, was a reprieve.
One thing leads to another, free-associating, I remembered hearing about Agnes Varda’s cousin, Jean Varda the visual artist, who Agnes Varda immortalized in the film, Uncle Yanko. He was a close friend of my friend Anais Nin, whose devotion to writing and to emotional intelligence, educated me as a young writer. One of his magnificent collages hung in her living room in shades of rose, violet, lilac and gold. One of Anais’ pieces about him was contained in her book of stories, Collages, clearly named for his artistry. Once Anais described his arrival at a social event where he spied a woman wearing a magnificent coat with a tapestry lining. Varda pulled his scissor from his pocket and proceeded without asking permission to cut a swatch for one of his constructions.
Jean Varda lived on a houseboat in Sausalito which he shared with the philosopher, Alan Watts. Watts’ side of the boat was painted black and white while Vardas side was painted in wild colors. It is this contrast which I have been reaching for, between one form of beauty and another, as between dark and light, or Earth and Sky rather than the conflict that is tearing us apart, between what truly matters, the natural world, the spirits, meaning, essence, and the opposing powerful draw toward the superficial cultural forms upon which we are increasingly dependent. Yet, If we individually disconnect from these, we risk our economic and social survival.
This thread of associations leads us to AI and its developing penetration of our lives, our relationships and even the arts and literature, which if it dominates, as it well may, will be no more. It is another great and inconceivable, perhaps ultimately mortal danger that we are facing, hinted at by the iPhone that held me captive this afternoon. This last week it was announced that iPhone 16 from Apple has AI embedded in it!
How shall we save beauty, mystery and the imagination, and also the wonders of all the beings in concert in the natural world? The next generations will need wisdom to negotiate these times and preserve the future for humans and for non-humans — how shall they access it?
I begin to muse upon all of this – the egregious consequences of phone, computer and the media, and the true value and resources of the natural world. What to do? There is only one thing for me to do. I begin a healing gesture, an antidote, a medicine for desperate times. I invite a conversation with the spirits who may be willing to speak a few words or gift an understanding, as we humans seem only to know the way to hell but not the ways out of what we have wrought.
It was a beautiful day in Topanga. We, I, this writer and all the myriad beings, were finally meeting outside. We live by the wild, at the edge of Topanga State Park. Looking from here toward the next rise, I can see the area where a Black Bear, bless her, was spotted a few days ago. Wherever exactly the Bear is today, I do not know, but there is a Falcon living in the pine behind the house and Coyotes, Deer and Rabbits and, careful to avoid both Bear and Mountain Lion, you can hike past the great old Oak tree to Eagle Rock.
The Oak in SpringFor several years, I have been calling us to cultivate the ability to listen to, to ask for the counsel of the spirits and of the beings of the natural world. On our own, we demonstrate no capacity to stop our trajectory toward absolute destruction. Earlier today, I heard a talk sponsored by Pachamama Alliance by the remarkable Peruvian Medicine person and Ceremonialist, Arkan Lushwala, whose last book is entitled,The Spirit of the Glacier Speaks: Ancestral Teachings of the Andean World for the Time of Natural Disorder. He spoke of willing and able to receive the wisdom from all the spirits, because, as he said, on our own we will probably not survive.
When I heard Lushwala’s talk, which itself felt like an invitation from the spirits themselves, he confirmed what I am trying to convey here — we are in great danger, and likely only alliance with and yielding to the wisdom of the Others will help us survive.
So, of course, as all of this was in my mind, I opened to the spirits as best as I know how. And it seemed, they responded. “Yes,” they said, ‘We are here.” Not in words, of course, you understand that. We hear them within, and what we hear is not our voice or our thoughts but something else quite distinct. As I write this, trying to convey the mystery, I am filled with amazement, gratitude and awe for the familiar and entirely remarkable communications that come from elsewhere.
I had asked them, as I always do, “How do we meet these times so the natural world and all beings will survive and thrive? How do we reverse extinction, climate collapse and social chaos and violence?” This is my repeating desperate inquiry.
The spirits answered repeating what they have said so many times, “What is being done is what needs to be done.”
The implication is that those of us who are trying to act on behalf of Earth are doing what needs to be done and should continue with devotion. But that did not answer the particular question, certainly not directly with information or instructions which is what I was hoping for. I felt downhearted, concerned that I will leave this Earth without being assured that we will save Earth, save the planet, her inordinate beauty and the glorious beings who reside here, save them from ourselves. We never know how much time we have, but I am of a certain age and I know something of age’s parameters and limitations and so my disappointment and rising concern.
Then I found myself falling into a prayer, a writer’s prayer, I suppose: ‘May I remember and record what needs to be remembered.’ It is a prayer about memory and history and preserving them, as needed, for the future.
Then it is was that the voice or voices said,
“Forget your memories. What matters now is vision.”
The lines startled me. Forget memory…?
“You got it,” they said. “Forget your memories. What matters now is vision.” They repeated, “You must learn to vision.” This means deep listening. Deep listening to what is beyond us.
These words are not only for me. Didn’t Lushwala just say we must form collective vessels to hear what the spirits have to say to guide us? These words are for you. They are for us.
Forget our preoccupation with our little lives. What matters now is vision. Vision, which is the gift we receive from the Others.
The words were suddenly punctuated by loud calls of four Ravens who came swooping into the old Oak. They waited for me and GentleBoy, my Husky companion, to stand up and come to where we could see the birds clearly. Then they rose up in lyric exultations of flight, circling and spiraling on the back of the winds which raised and tossed them in wider and wider circles, as if inscribing everything for us in the air. Black wings, wheeling and whirling, writing in their mysterious alphabet against the bluest sky. Then they were gone.
Without a seconds delay, I came into the house to write this to you.
Blessings for the future,
Deena
Classes beginning in October: for writers working on a project who would like to join a ; for those interested in studying the . For more information, or to sign up, please email deenaworkshops@gmail.com.
August 12, 2024
Testimony of Forgiveness: 19 Ways in Action
The receipt or transmission of the 19 Ways (for a Viable Future for All Beings) just before the end of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar felt like a great gift from the universe and a small version of the transformative events that had been predicted to help establish a new time. I could claim to have thought of them myself but I believe that creativity and vision are spiritual events based on reciprocity which can occur when we allow for a relationship with the spirits who act on behalf of the world, especially this broken world speeding toward extinction. The were announced as one guide to changing our minds significantly so that we would live differently and act in ways that preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings.
It is easy enough to read the 19 Ways and assume we understand them. But it has taken many years for me and for those of us who have been studying them to fathom what they truly mean so they are integral to our minds and hearts and integrated into all our responses and actions. It probably takes a minimum of five years to be aligned but several of us are still immersed in understanding since 2013 when we began. This attention is because we see that we are living differently and that our lives do not do as much harm as do the ordinary reflexes and assumptions of contemporary life.
Some of the 19 Ways are more difficult to live by than others and the one that classically challenges everyone is the No Enemy Way, the Way of Peacemaking. To imagine not making enemies, not identifying others as enemies, while living in such an aggressive, militaristic, combative, competitive, violent culture which is increasingly dominating the world, where, indeed, refusing to recognize enemies is considered, unorthodox, dissident, heretical, even criminal.
But to not have enemies is to engage in the marvel and wonder of forgiveness. which appearing in a time of increasing alienation and brutality guides us out of the violence and wars that follow endlessly until we open our hearts to the other.
Annie Licata joined the 19 Ways three years ago. Our original meeting had been entirely unexpected, actually magical. A young woman, thirty-three, she had been heartbroken about the world and the consequent limitations of her and her generation’s lives and future. Her family had been torn apart by a war between brothers. She could not forgive her father and certainly not her uncle for this schism and how it mirrored the many divisions on the planet. She could not possibly imagine how to heal the wars and armed conflicts that abound and neither she nor any of her therapists nor advisors had any idea of how to heal this split in her family. To the contrary, she was advised it was impossible.
The Turquoise GateIn this July, she wrote a letter to her colleagues in the 19 Ways to chronicle a remarkable event. It is reproduced here.
***
I remember the first Christmas alone in 2012, without the cousins I grew up with my entire life, raised down the street from each other and two classrooms over, kindergarten through high school. We had the same friends and the same family and the same childhoods and we were turned into strangers overnight. A battle broke the family apart; lost cousins, lost holiday gatherings, lost family stories. I could not forgive my father or my uncle for the loss…
By the time I walked through the turquoise gate to learn the 19 Ways, a conveyor belt of therapists shared failed solutions of a family reunited. My dad and his brother coming together? Impossible…two stubborn old Italian men who learned grudge-holding from their own father, whose own father did not talk to his brother because of a dispute over 11 dollars who learned it from his father, who learned it from his father. Romulus and Remus, repeating for 2000 years.
It was a nighttime visit to Deena’s land where we planted the seed. “It is not your father’s fault,” she told me, nearly a decade later. Her words hung in the air, “and you need to read Nadine Gordimer’s novel, My Son’s Story.” With those words, moonlight illuminated the pathway to forgiveness, the hands of spirit prying my chest open and planting this heirloom seed in an otherwise forgotten hole in my heart.
That was two years ago, the moonlit path having some twists and turns. So this summer, when my littlest brother was about to turn 18 years I offered to throw him a graduation party at my house. As I was planning it, my brother and I started talking about our estranged cousins. Perhaps my dad and my uncle would never reconcile but the kids—the cousins—I was not ready to give up on them yet. “Don’t get involved with this,” my sister warned me. But I had this little seed.
I took on a 19 Ways approach. All were welcome! Only one rule: no guns. I tracked down phone numbers from this cousin to that cousin, I invited aunts and uncles that I have not spoken to, I ordered a lot of antipasto and rented chairs and tables and held onto this wild idea that the family would come. No one would be turned away. Every time I found a new relative to invite, we would all sit around and say, “Noooo way, no way that person will come.” And then the person would answer with a Yes!
There was a lot of talk whether he would come….my father’s brother. I wanted my aunt to come—his wife—who had this great laugh and used to rock me when I was a baby. I had not seen her in almost 13 years so I told her that he was welcome in my home. The brother who I always blamed for tearing apart the family. But I have been talking about healing and looking for healing and praying for healing for me and my family around this for so long that it was time to apply what wisdom I carried from the 19 Ways and ask the spirits for help. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to heal myself, my father, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and the ancestors.
If my dad was willing to forgive his own brother, so must I forgive my father and then his brother. We all guessed with nervous excitement and apprehension, what would it be like if my uncle came? Hugs? Tears? Fisticuffs?
Well, my uncle did come to my house and he walked right up to my dad in the driveway and they embraced. At the party, I caught my uncle with his hand on my dad’s leg, squeezing it lovingly. My dad and his two brothers told stories together to all of the children. The last time they were together, their kids were heading off to college. Now, they were all grandparents.
It turned out that every single person who was invited showed up to the party at my house. Time had passed—time lost—and we all cried, we met new family, the cousins introduced their own kids to each other. I looked around, saw the hugging and the tears and saw my ancestors standing around laughing, smiling, healing.
Everybody kept asking me, “How did you do this? How did you pull off this miracle?” I told them it was Spirit. With gold crosses and Italian horns hanging around their necks, I told my family that the Tarot led us here. Spirit led us here. Our own ancestors led us here. But in truth, I do not know how the sky opened up. How did this happen?
I walked with the possibility that we might all be together again, and I tried and failed for many years. Just like we are trying and failing to meet this moment of extinction. Maybe it was that I believed in my heart that the ancestors needed to heal as much as we did. You see, my family, they do not forgive. They do not forget. And yet…. here they were. Forgiving and forgetting. Not to mention they were all donning Trump hats and Trump shirts and asked, “who are you voting for” to everyone who walked in. And here I was, a house full of Trumpers and a house full of liberals, laughing, listening, uninhibited and together.
The work of the 19 Ways, my elders and the community taught me what is really possible when we believe in another future. We have the power to change our lives and the events in it when we walk without rancor, without bitterness and instead with the possibility that we can be something else. Maybe my family came together on that fateful summer afternoon because I never give up on them. Just like I will never give up on the Natural World and Earth’s healing.
(To contact Annie Licata, write licata732@gmail.com)
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Here is the evidence of possibility. The joy in the piece is equal to the level of despair Licata felt for so many years and her anger at all of us who are adults who have failed to stop violence and have so abused the Earth that so many of Annie’s generation, Millenials, believe they have no future and question bringing children into this world. Now Annie is the one to bring us hope, Annie and her unlikely father and less likely uncle, all reconciled.
In the last eleven years since we received the 19 Ways, we have experienced the possibility of change and restoration and are living according to its forms, grateful because we have seen that consciousness is contagious. As we understand that it would make an essential difference for the Earth and all the beings if the 19 Ways were widely practiced, I am offering a new class online, An , beginning in . For further information please contact Sarah Velez deenasassistant1222@gmail.com. Please join us and bring a friend.
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On another note: I have been freely offering my writing to the community for about 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022 and earlier for many years on WordPress (and will continue to do so). My intention was and continues to be to provide support, understanding, vision, and the wisdom, as I receive it from the spirits, in all the ways I am able. But the current grave urgencies and also the possibilities are calling me to post more often, perhaps twice or more times a month. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated and make it easier to meet this summons which I cannot deny. (It helps the work circulate if you leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)
Thank you and Blessings,
Deena
July 31, 2024
The Ancestors Protect the Future
This essay site, these desperate love letters to the wounded earth, seek ways to meet these terribly broken and dangerous times. Truly, I am unable to understand how we became so murderous and brutish. I don’t know if I will find an answer to that question this summer while I am working on a new novel, Broken Lambs, but, I do know that I am learning more and more deeply the soul anguish that our power struggles, violence and militarism inflict upon us. And also that it is our sacred task to create cultural niches of consciousness, like Terma, in Tibetan Buddhism, the hidden teachings that are revealed when they are needed and can be received, to inform and protect the future.
The last essay, Protecting the Heirloom Seeds of Consciousness, began by speaking of Miklós Radnóti a Hungarian Jewish war poet who was murdered by the Royal Hungarian Army during the holocaust. When his friend saw him on the streets of Budapest mumbling ‘Du-duh-du-duh-du-duh, he said, “Don’t you understand? Hitler is invading Poland!” Radnóti said, “Yes, but this is the only thing I have to fight with.” When I read about Radnóti in Wikipedia, I imagined that he was walking through the city, reciting a new poem and it’s rhythm under his breath, so that it would be preserved for the future. I was moved to consider the wonder, as with Terma, (hidden treasures), from Tibetan Buddhism, that the past safeguards the future.
The Shona Nganga, (healer) Mandaza Kandemwa told me that the task of the dead, of the ancestors is to protect the living. That’s why we create ancestor altars – so the dead can have proximity to us. He said our lives are our training so that when we cross over, we can take good care of our descendants. It is always about the future. Similarly, Native American wisdom calls us to consider the welfare of the seventh generation when making any decision.
I was not surprised when my dear friend the poet, Marc Kaminsky, wrote in response to these words about Miklós Radnóti because I think of Marc as the quintessential Yiddish poet. However, for me, Marc’s most remarkable text, is The Stones of Lifta. The first lines, from the opening poem, Hinani, reveal why it is clear to me that Marc would also respond to a contemporary essay honoring the work, the gathering of Palestinian heirloom seeds in the West Bank by the Palestinian artist and visionary, Vivien Sansour.
Lifta from aboveHINANI
Unworthy as I am, when I saw
Footage of my friend Menachem climbing beneath
The Jerusalem hills with an old man—
A displaced person – an Arab
Who guided him into the ruins of his home
In Lifta, I felt something
Become so clear and actual to me
As if for one pulse I heard
A voice speaking to my heart
… it said to me, Go
To Lifta….
Marc Kaminsky is also an elder, so it is no surprise that he wrote a letter to me and sent it by post, the old way, and not by email. Accordingly, that letter, in which he honors the ancestors, is reproduced here and concludes this essay.
My students have been with me for many years and have grown in unimaginable ways both in their lives and in their works. This fall I’m opening up attendance to new students who’d like to join a writing circle. I’m also now taking new students into the . For more information, or to sign up, please email deenasassistant1222@gmail.com.
Dos Madres Press, 2019
