Rivera Sun's Blog: From the Desk of Rivera Sun, page 7

Great News! Ari Ara Wins A Second Silver Nautilus Award!

Ari Ara Wins Silver Nautilus Award!
Desert Song is the second novel to win this social justice fiction honor.

Great news! Desert Song has just won a Silver Nautilus Award – the second book in the Ari Ara Series to be honored in this way! The Nautilus Awards are for socially-engaged fiction and I’m tickled pink to have two of Ari Ara’s novels be awarded this distinction.

Gift the Ari Ara Series to Yourself & Friends This Summer
Find the award-winning books here>>

I’ve been polishing and revising the fourth novel in the series. It brings together characters from both sides of the border to build peace and prevent conflict in an intergenerational peace team. The story is inspired by friends and colleagues who do this work in real life – it’s courageous, inventive, and sorely needed in our world. The Silver Nautilus Award is a reminder that weaving these kinds of great efforts into compelling fiction is exactly the sort of visionary fiction humanity is longing to read. 

In other news, I’m spending the summer co-facilitating some amazing online courses (see info below) on connecting across divides, nonviolent action, nonviolence and the earth, and much more. Enjoy and spread the word.

With love,
Rivera

PS Each week, Nonviolence News collects some extraordinary stories of nonviolence in action. This week has some stellar examples, including how Yacqui women dismantled an illegal pipeline and sold it for scrap metal. It’s a joy to edit this collection, and I hope you’ll enjoy the fruits of this joyful labor by checking out Nonviolence News here>>

Upcoming Webinars

Disarming Conversations, Connecting Across Divides: In this time of increasing polarization, ordinary people like us can help disarm hate, connect across divides, and decrease the likelihood of violence. This series will help you gain skills in communicating with people who hold views opposed to our own – whether they’re family members, neighbors, coworkers, or others. In this 8-week program, you (and an amazing cohort of participants) will explore practices for connecting across divides, disarming conversations, unlearning hate, dealing with toxic polarization, applying interpersonal nonviolence, de-escalating political tensions, unpacking misperceptions, opening space for change, peacebuilding, using radical empathy, and more. (May 25-July 10) Learn more>>

Nonviolence In Action – Strategy & Planning Webinar: Join nonviolent strategy trainer Rivera Sun for a 2-hr webinar that introduces strategy and planning for nonviolent action. This webinar is fun, friendly, and open to people of all experience levels. You’ll learn the guiding principles of how to make change with nonviolent action, how to think strategically, and how to design powerful campaigns for change. (June 3) Learn more>>

Reading To End Racism With Kids, Grandkids & Young People:  In this 4-week webinar, Reading To End Racism Cofounder Daniel Escalante will guide you through how to use personal stories and books to open up meaningful conversation about the impacts of racism and how to dismantle it. This course will offer trainings, practice sessions, and weekly assignments in applying the knowledge we’ve explored each week.(Starts June 10) Learn more>>

Learning From the Earth – A Summer Solstice Virtual Retreat: In this Summer Solstice Nonviolence Retreat, we will open our hearts and minds to the many ways that the Earth embodies and teaches us nonviolence. We sometimes think of our species as either the destroyer or the savior of the planet, but in this webinar we will reframe our relationship into one of solidarity and interconnection. From a place of humility and respect, we will remember the profound lessons of living systems. (June 19) Learn more>>

World Beyond War Book Club on The Way Between: Support the movement to abolish war AND get a free novel. Author Rivera Sun will join World Beyond War’s fundraiser bookclub for FOUR weekly online sessions in July to discuss peace literature, teaching peace to young people through books, and how stories can help us build a more peaceful world. Limited spots! Learn more>>

Ditch the Draft, Once and For All

It’s outdated. It’s dysfunctional. It’s hated by most of the populace. No, we’re not talking about the line at the DMV. We’re talking about the Selective Service and the military draft. For decades, young men have had to register. Now, congress is considering expanding draft registration to women. 

Here’s a better idea: let’s abolish the Selective Service and end draft registration for everyone. 

A new bill in congress calls for the repeal of the Selective Service Act. Introduced by a bipartisan group, it eliminates this outdated, immoral, and unpopular system. The Selective Service Repeal Act would repeal the Military Selective Service Act in its entirety; repeal presidential authority to order registration for a military draft; abolish the Selective Service System, including the data center, national and regional offices, and local draft boards that have been appointed and trained for every county in the US; and end all federal sanctions for nonregistration with the Selective Service System. 

Politicians from across the aisle are acknowledging that it’s time to end the draft system. 

“The military draft registration system is an unnecessary, wasteful bureaucracy which unconstitutionally violates Americans’ civil liberties. We should be abolishing military draft registration altogether, not expanding it,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), co-sponsor.

“If a war is worth fighting, Congress will vote to declare it and people will volunteer,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), co-sponsor.

“(The US Selective Service) has far outlived its expiration date, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars per year.” – Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR)

Even the former head of the Selective Service testified to a congress-appointed commission on the draft that the current database is so incomplete and inaccurate that it would be “less than useless” for an actual draft. Rather than continuing this system — or expanding it to young women — the option is on the table to get rid of it. 

If you hate the idea of a military draft as much as the next American (and most of us do), find out how to organize to keep young women — and young men — from having to deal with this. Tell your congresspersons to cosponsor or support the new bill to abolish the Selective Service. Now is the time to end this unjust, unnecessary, outdated system, once and for all. 

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Rivera Sun , syndicated by  PeaceVoice ,  has written numerous books, including  The Dandelion Insurrection . She is the editor of  Nonviolence News  and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

Visionary Inspiration and Practical Strategies for Direct Democracy: “Winds of Change” Book Review

By Marissa Mommaerts

“Winds of Change,” the third part of the trilogy that began with The Dandelion Insurrection, is so rich that I simultaneously want to share it with every visionary changemaker I know, while at the same time rereading it over and over until I absorb every drop of wisdom, hope and strategy into the fabric of my being. 

As always, Rivera Sun shines the spotlight of love into the shadows of humanity, inspiring readers with practical strategies to imagine and create a future beyond the pervading narrative of profits over people. But in this third book in the Dandelion Trilogy, the movement of activists, called the Dandelions, grow a powerful movement for direct democracy in the fertile soil of love and resistance they have cultivated through years of organizing.

Each poetic yet action-packed chapter presents an essential theme in the transformation of our culture, economy, and political system: the rights of nature, the rise of the sacred feminine, youth leadership, immigration reform, reparations, economic justice, reclaiming the commons, and community-based responses to climate change and natural disasters. All of these threads are woven into the struggle for direct democracy, “not just voting for smiling liars,” but actually governing ourselves in every aspect of our lives: our neighborhoods and communities, our workplaces, our schools, the lands we steward and our places of commerce, and so much more.

Reading “Winds of Change” opened my mind to possibilities and my heart to hope in a way that hasn’t happened since I took my first Permaculture Design Course. From envisioning urban neighborhoods that function as native ecosystems and urban wetlands that buffer the coastal impacts of climate change; to viscerally acknowledging–and even healing from–the legacy of patriarchy; to laying out a mass, creative, and strategic campaign to topple a christo-fascist presidential candidate (whom, by the way, feels uncannily familiar) and create the conditions for direct democracy to flourish, it is truly remarkable that “Winds of Change” can offer so many treasures to our growing movement for democracy, justice, and regeneration in just 347 pages. 

Please, pick up a copy, devour it, dream it, share it, pick up another copy, host a book club, and bring direct democracy more deeply into your heart, your life, and your community, as I plan to do. Rivera Sun reminds us that love and courage go hand-in-hand, and that any one of us could be the catalyst of a mass movement that will change the world.

Review written by Marissa Mommaerts, Transition US National Network Organizer, and originally published on transitionus.org.

Maine Farm Girl & Kansas Grain Farmer Talk Climate on The Train

Image: “Into the Night” by TumblingRun is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

A young Kansas grain farmer and I were riding on a train through Iowa when the subject of the climate crisis came up. He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed son of a multigenerational Midwest farming family. I’d grown up on a potato farm in Northern Maine. Both of us spent our teenage years in overalls. We compared tractor models (him, John Deere; me, 1960s FarmAll). 

We were passing under the towering windmills that dot the rolling farmlands in Iowa when I mentioned the climate crisis. He was a Christian conservative. I was a chip off the ole block of my Vietnam War-resisting father. I told him I was worried about the climate, that I had seen the snow pack shrink in Northern Maine throughout my 28 years of life. It hurt the crops. It made farming even more risky than it always was. 

He surprised me with his reply. 

“I’m worried, too,” he confessed. 

His urban friends from Oklahoma City just didn’t get it, he told me. And it made him mad. He’d seen the yields go down. He’d watched the entire crop get flattened by a late hard frost. He’d seen members of his grain co-op lose their farms because of summers of endless rain or scorching droughts or early freezes. He knew the climate was changing and it frustrated him that his urban conservative friends thought the climate crisis was a hoax. 

Farmers know the land. We have a telltale ache that’s tuned to the weather. We endure the usual battery of bad luck, wet seasons, insect swarms, untimely drought, crop disease. We wrestle the corporate agricultural giants year after year, trying to preserve a chance for the small farmer to stay independent. But the climate crisis is here. It’s no hoax. The young farmer and I — despite our wildly different politics — both saw it crashing down on our farms with our own eyes. 

I’ve been thinking about his city friends and mine. We need them to know where their food comes from, to understand that swallowing the lies of the fossil fuel industry won’t put bread on the table forever. We need them to shift to renewable energy now, not 20 years from now. Our farms need our fellow Americans to take this crisis seriously. The land is not designed for the way we’re using it. The earth will not put up with human abuses for much longer. It’s time for humanity to make a transition to a way of life that gives back more than it takes, that puts care of the earth above profits for the rich, that lives respectfully in our only home. 

He and I craned our heads up at the giant windmills. I cracked a joke about newfangled inventions. He quietly reminded me that Midwest and Western farmers and ranchers had used windmills as water pumps for more than a century. Renewable energy is not foreign to rural communities. It’s been a source of independence for a long time. We need to lay down our political divisions and remember that we can find common ground. If a conservative Kansas grain farmer and a potato-picking farm girl from Maine can see eye-to-eye on the climate crisis, maybe there’s hope for the rest of the country. The future of humanity depends on it. 

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Rivera Sun , syndicated by  PeaceVoice ,  has written numerous books, including  The Dandelion Insurrection . She is the editor of  Nonviolence News  and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

A Blizzard. A Power Outage. A Failure of the Heart.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

A continent-wide snow storm swept across the United States last week. From Seattle to Baton Rouge and from Dallas to Minneapolis, people grappled with road closures, shutdowns, power outages, and freezing temperatures. 

From sea to shining sea, ordinary people stepped up to take care of one another. My brother volunteered to snowblow the Seattle offices of an autism support center. A colleague in Portland, OR, posted warnings not to walk under the snapping, ice-laden branches of city trees. Friends in West Virginia popped back online to make sure everyone was fine after three days without Internet. When Texas megachurches refused to shelter people, a mattress store opened their doors to those without power. Up and down my dirt road in New Mexico, people checked-in with each other as they walked dogs, drove to work, and dug out their driveways. 

This is the America I believe in. In a time of political outrage (and even more outrageous headlines), I believe the content of our national character is found in how we take care of one another. Especially in times of crisis. This spirit of neighborly caring is a widely-shared value, stretching from rural communities to urban neighborhoods, encompassing everything from faith-based relief efforts to mutual aid networks. 

Why don’t we see more of this from politicians, pundits, and wealthy elites? 

For days, 2.5 million residents in Texas were left without power, killing at least 17 people. Despite the fact that Texas runs largely on fossil fuels, the state’s politicians blamed the outages on solar and wind failures. (The Antarctic, Minnesota, and Norway all replied with proper instructions on how to keep wind turbines moving in below zero temperatures.) Profiteers gleefully chortled over $8,000+ electric bill spikes. As a quarter of his powerless residents struggled to survive freezing temperatures, Texas mayor Tim Boyd posted on Facebook, “Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish [sic].” 

This kind of cruelty makes me ashamed of my fellow Americans. We can’t say we “love our country” if we don’t put our love-in-action to help our entire populace. We praise our soldiers for being willing to sacrifice in times of need, but our words of honor ring hollow if citizens and public leaders don’t mobilize to make sure children have food, elders are warm, and families are safe. When the blizzard strikes and the power falters, heroism is shown by those who compassionately step forward to make sure everyone is okay. Our willingness to care amidst crisis is a form of patriotism, a way of showing loyalty to your country. 

When grandstanding politicians lie about windmills as fossil fuel failures freeze people to death, they should be ashamed of themselves. When a dangerously under-regulated power grid company fails to take care of millions of people, they have lost the moral right to operate a critical piece of infrastructure. When a billionaire gloats about hitting the jackpot as electric bills wipe out families’ life savings, something is rotten in his soul. When a small-town mayor snarls in disdain at desperate families, he does not deserve to hold public office. When we fail to reach out a hand to our neighbors — whether they live in the house next door or have no house at all — then we have also failed to live up to common decency.

What makes us strong is not our smug satisfaction that our own little house is safe and sound. Sneering in judgment at the suffering of others does not make us good, righteous, or powerful. It is our love and respect that make us strong. It is our heroic capacity to care for one another. It is the way we use everything from our snowplows to shovels to churches and mattress stores, back-up generators, city governments, public utilities, private companies, social media platforms, and more to make sure each and every single person in this country is safe, warm, healthy, and okay.

A blizzard. A power outage. A failure of the heart. In times of crisis, we either rise to our best … or we perish at our worst. 

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Rivera Sun , syndicated by  PeaceVoice ,  has written numerous books, including  The Dandelion Insurrection . She is the editor of  Nonviolence News  and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

8 Magical Stories Of How Peace Literature Changes Culture – And Lives

8 Magical Stories Of How Peace Literature Changes Culture – And Lives

By Rivera Sun

Four hours per day, six days per week, I take action for peace. It may not look like your typical nonviolent action – I don’t hold signs or block the gates of military bases. The way I wage peace is by writing. I pick up the pen that is supposedly mightier than the sword, and use novels to shift our culture away from war and violence. It’s a Sisyphean task, a Herculean effort, and a David and Goliath battle, for sure. Yet, if you recognized even one of those references, you understand why stories matter so deeply to our world.

Myths, epics, legends, folktales: these are what the human imagination is woven from. These kinds of stories influence how we see the world, and how we act in our lives. Yet, in large part, our epics teach that violence is a good way to solve our conflicts. War is the background upon which heroes prove their valor. Even in Hollywood today, we are bombarded with narratives of violent heroism.

If we don’t change these stories, they’ll kill us.

For nearly 10 years, I’ve been on a writer’s mission to prove that good stories do not require violence to deliver an action-packed, heart-thrilling adventure. First, I wrote the Dandelion Trilogy which features a nonviolent movement for change in a slightly fictionalized United States. Then I turned an eye to younger readers with the award-winning Ari Ara Series. Ari Ara is a young girl of mixed background. She is chosen as the apprentice in the Way Between, a blend of what we might describe as an aikido-like (non)martial art, nonviolent action skills, and peacebuilding practices. These series is fantasy – a genre overwhelmingly marked by its use of violence and warfare – but in these novels, the heroine doesn’t win wars . . . she stops them. Instead of leading an armed uprising (like the protagonists of the Hunger Games and so many others), she taps into the most effective forms of social change: nonviolent action. With her friends, she tackles bullies, racial injustice, migrant worker abuses, militarism, warmongering, gender imbalances, and more.

The series has won praise from parents, educators, and peace professionals alike. But it is the following collection of true stories about young readers that give the series its highest praise. These stories show that the Ari Ara Series activates the imagination in ways that change the readers’ hearts, lives, and indeed, the world.

#1 Playing The Way Between In the Backyard

How many times have we spotted the kids in the backyard stick-fighting or having imaginary Star Wars battles? Well, after reading The Way Between, multiple parents reported seeing their kids re-enacting the scenes in the book in the backyard, imagining themselves waging peace instead of war. Another mother told me she caught her daughter standing on one foot in the kitchen – just like Ari Ara in the first novel – building her skills in balance, perseverance, and focus. Young readers easily identify with stories about studying and learning; the motif of the hero-in-training captures the imagination of young readers. Only, in these novels, the story directs the reader’s mind toward the many ways we can build our skills for nonviolence and peace.  

#2 Dismantling Border Walls

In The Adventures of Alaren, a collection of fictional folktales telling the legends of the peacebuilders in Ari Ara’s world, there is a short story called The Brother’s Wall.  It tells the tale of a village that dismantles a wall built by feuding kings and uses the stones to build other things. After reading it, a 12 year old boy emailed President Biden with an idea: the federal government should tear down the wall Trump built between the US and Mexico, and use the materials to build housing for the homeless. According to his grandmother, who relayed this story to me, officials “responded immediately and said they liked the idea and that they would keep it in mind for future policy discussions. He responded to add that his idea offered them a way to show that they are keeping families together, not separating them.” Stories that teach us conflict resolution and social justice often inspire ideas for creative solutions to our world’s pressing problems.

#3 Refusing To Study Violence

Repeatedly in the series, Ari Ara is told to practice fighting or play war games by teachers who support the armies. Each time, she refuses to engage in attar (the word for war and violence). After reading one of these scenes, an elementary school student echoed Ari Ara’s stance during a virtual Phys-Ed class. When the students were supposed to participate in a “ninja workout”, the 10-year-old said, “I follow the Way Between, not attar!“

#4 Practicing With Dad

You know a novel has captured the reader’s imagination when they not only daydream about the scenes, they invite others into their games. A mother sent me an email one day, enthusing about how her daughter asked her father to “play the Way Between” with her. Together, the two tried to work out the moves described in the books. Child development experts have long understood how formative these kinds of games are for young people. They develop both motor skills and neural pathways. If these come from exercises in peace rather than violence, so much the better, for we need to train our fellow humans to wage peace.

#5 Ditching Video Games For Books

Teenage boys are an at-risk population for adopting violence and enlisting in the military. They are bombarded with the propaganda of the military-industrial complex, and targeted with video games as recruitment tools. So, it’s a big deal when two teenage boys eschew their obsession with video games in order to binge-read the Ari Ara Series, as one parent told me. It shows that a compelling story can intervene in the habits of the culture of violence. These types of stories remind readers that another path is possible, that war is not inevitable, and that violence is far from the only – or best – option.

#6 Skits & Folktales

From page to stage, a teacher has turned The Adventures of Alaren into a teaching tool that lets students stand in the footsteps of peace team members, inter-positioning scenarios, and peacebuilding endeavors. His assignment is to read one of these fictional short stories – and the real life example it’s inspired by – and convert the tale into a skit that can be performed in the classroom. This is a powerful example of how educators can use these books to offer creative and engaging peace education.

#7 Summer Camp

Harry Potter summer camps abound – and who can argue with the joy of pretending to enroll at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, shouting Expelliarmus!, and holding Quidditch matches on broomsticks? In a similar vein, a group of parents and homeschooling educators are working on a plan to create a summer camp program around the Ari Ara Series, using the magic of these stories to teach peace. The possibilities in this concept are endless – and they show how a good story can unleash a whole world of adventures, not to mention opportunities to teach peace education.

#8 Halloween Costumes

This is my favorite story of how the Ari Ara Series is bringing peace and nonviolence to life. For Halloween, a pair of friends decided to dress up as Ari Ara (black cloak, tunic, knee-high boots) and the street urchin Rill (colorfully patched vest and dozens of braids) from The Lost Heir, the second novel in the series. Whenever someone asked them what they were, they’d launch into a synopsis of the novel, including a description of how the two friends used nonviolent action to win a labor struggle. When a good book makes its way into other aspects of popular culture, you know you’re shifting hearts and minds.

In a world facing drones, nukes, and trillion dollar war budgets, the idea that my writings can counter the culture of violence is heartening. Scribbling away each day, these anecdotes shared by teachers, parents, and readers remind me that stories are powerful and that this form of peace action is making a difference. But I don’t do it alone – so many people help spread the word about these novels, recommending them to youth, parents, and teachers. This is another way of taking action for a culture of peace. It’s what turns 8 stories into 80,000 stories. It’s what shifts a few tales into a cultural movement. It’s how we use good books to actually change the world.

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Note: If you would like to republish this piece, you can! Simply link back to this original post. Thanks!

Author/Activist Rivera Sun has written numerous books and novels, including the Dandelion Trilogy and the Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent movements. www.riverasun.com

The Scale of Loss: 400,000 Dead

Image via Today, “Could The COVID-19 Memorial Become Permanent?”

Four hundred lights stretch along the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall. Each represents one thousand people in America who have died of COVID-19. It is only in their absence that we have space to acknowledge the dead–there is not enough space beside the pool for that many people to stand. It is only by symbols that we can understand the enormity of what we’ve lost.

If the living marched on DC in equal numbers, the sea of people would be as large as the DC Women’s March in 2017or twice the size of the crowd in the iconic photos of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech during the March On Washington in 1963. 

It is difficult to comprehend the silence around these 400,000 deaths. When 2,977 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the nation mourned and grieved, took off their shoes at airports, invaded two countries, formed new departments of security and surveillance, tossed out half our civil liberties, and posted flags commemorating the lives lost on 9/11 in airports around the nation. 

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of our failure to limit the spread of COVID-19. Many of us cannot even take the simplest action to respect this tragedy–not even wearing a mask to prevent the disease’s spread. Until the memorial of lights along the Reflecting Pool, we had no official mourning from the highest office in the nation.

Why is death by pandemic less worthy of our collective grief than death by terrorism? 

There is no foreign nation to falsely accuse and illegally invade this time. The culprits are ourselves, the lies of politicians, our gullibility, and the propaganda of media outlets. It is painful to think of all the ways we failed our fellow citizens in this crisis. Can we carve out the social space to regret how some prioritized privileges over the needs of others? Can we discuss why some of our fellow citizens felt their vacations and shopping were more important than others’ lives? Can we deal with the stark fact that the wealthy and politically powerful insisted upon business-as-usual, forced the workers back to work, and refused economic relief that would have kept each family safe and sheltered, fed and warm?

Can we bear to think–even for just one moment–of 400,000 families who weep over the absence of a grandmother, ache as they notice the empty chair of a beloved, or sob because their son or daughter was cut down too early in life? 

Can we imagine the pain of families who lost two, three, or more relatives to this pandemic? 

Can we acknowledge the ways Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples have had the heart of their communities carved away, leaving silenced wisdom and missing language-speakers? 

Can we remember the hundreds of thousands still struggling to recover from the disease, wrestling with relief at surviving it and frustration with the exhaustion that lingers in their bodies for months after being discharged from the hospital? 

Can we commend the teachers who stood up against hasty school re-openings and honor them for saving thousands of schoolchildren?

Can we offer a minute of silence for each of the 400,000 victims? That is a pregnant thought, as 400,000 minutes equals nine months. Of ghostly silence. 

We choose, as a nation, who we mourn. These choices are not weighted equally. We have used our national mourning for political gain. We have used grief to drive our country into illegal wars. Meanwhile, we ignore the grief of those whose oppression turns the wheels of our economy. We deem the losses felt by marginalized groups as somehow less worthy than the losses felt by the most privileged in our society. We decide by those weighted scales whose lives deserve acknowledging–and whose should be swept into a single statistic that is ignored. 

Each life, however, is born with the unalienable right to be seen and heard, honored and treasured, missed and mourned when it is lost. To fail to reckon with the losses our nation has faced from this pandemic is to fail to measure up to our basic humanity. The dead deserve far more than what we’ve offered them and their families. These losses will haunt us for centuries to come. We can only hope that in this haunting, we change the ways in which lives are counted or discounted, and souls are lost . . . or perhaps saved. 

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Rivera Sun , syndicated by  PeaceVoice ,  has written numerous books, including  The Dandelion Insurrection . She is the editor of  Nonviolence News  and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.

After The Fireworks – Winds of Change

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy.
Find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

It was a time of giddiness and babble, when the world seemed hopeful and lost all at once. Possibility lurked on the edge of each moment. Disaster loomed across every horizon. With humanity at a crossroads, the clock ticking in the earth’s heartbeat, the Dandelion Insurrection took a deep breath . . . and went flying on the winds of change.

The night hung dark in all directions. Across the pooling black of the lake, distant drunken whoops shot out. A pitched shriek echoed over the water. A crackle erupted in the sky. Starbursts lit up the night. Cheers lifted on the shore. An off-key anthem praised rockets’ red glare. The smell of charcoal briquettes swept past and vanished.

Back when that song was written, it would have been the stench of burning flesh, Charlie thought cynically.

He lay on his back in the bottom of a metal rowboat in the middle of a lake on the Fourth of July. Red and blue hues of fireworks electrified his features in brief flashes. Angular and aching, his face bore the lines of a youth who has seen too much and knows secrets that wake him up at night. His sandy hair gleamed green for an instant as a firework bloomed above him. The crackling pink trails of the explosion turned his blue eyes violet.

The light fizzled. Darkness dropped like a shroud. Charlie Rider disappeared from sight once again. Only the strip of glow tape and the solar lights attached to the stern and bow remained, bobbing like drunken stars stumbling in the black sky. The sound of splashing arose, rhythmic and confident. A murky figure swam up to the boat. The metal pinged with the slap of a palm. Zadie Byrd Gray’s laughing eyes lifted over the gunwale. The vessel lurched in the water.

“You should come in,” her breathless voice enticed.

“It’s too cold,” he answered, not budging from the comfort of the blankets layered in the hull. He grimaced. She’d soak him when she clambered back in, dripping and naked, teeth chattering and skin bluish under the cover of darkness.

“Makes you feel alive,” Zadie urged, releasing the edge of the boat and diving back into the inky waters.

The triple flowers of the next fireworks illuminated her face when she resurfaced. Her black curls were plastered tight against her skull by water-weight. Her pale skin gleamed for a second, limbs strange and froglike under the surface of the lake.

Typical Zadie Byrd Gray, he thought with a small chuckle, skinny-dipping under the Independence Day fireworks.

It had been his idea to row out and escape the mayhem of the shore. His massive extended family had all gathered at the gravely beach for corn-on-the-cob, hotdogs and burgers, and apple pie. His cousins had contributed a devastating vat of homebrew. Zadie’s father, Bill, launched into a tirade on the shortcomings of the Founding Fathers – a lecture they’d both heard a thousand times. When Charlie whispered in Zadie’s ear, she leapt at the chance to slip off. They shoved the boat into the water and rowed out to watch the fireworks. Charlie texted his mother so she wouldn’t suddenly glance up with panic thundering in her chest when she didn’t see him. She’d lost too many nights of sleep over her revolutionary son. He’d been shocked to see grey streaks in her hair when he had returned home to Northern Maine.

The boat tipped as Zadie heaved her torso out of the water. Charlie sat up and countered the weight. He handed her a towel as she rolled in, sopping.

“Brrr,” she gasped, “I swear there’s still ice at one end of the lake.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Charlie answered. Though the spring melt had long passed, the water in Northern Maine wouldn’t lose its frigid edge until August – and even then, only in the top few feet of sunlight-pierced waves.

A good metaphor for revolutions in this country, Charlie thought darkly. They never went deep enough to keep out the chill of centuries of injustice.

Another collection of fireworks boomed overhead.

They’d fought and struggled for so long, shining bold as dandelions, piercing the darkness of the hidden corporate dictatorship, making so much progress, and yet . . . the sheer weight of injustice still thundered like an oncoming train wreck through the lives of the people. The backlog of misery accumulated by centuries of rich people’s rule had a momentum of its own. A nation could only be neglected for so long before the moth-eaten holes of the social fabric crumbled into dust. It would take a hundred years to dig out of the mess of the hidden corporate dictatorship.

And they didn’t have a hundred years.

They’d ousted the corrupt politicians, replaced them with decent enough officials, thwarted a counter-revolutionary take-over, and halted the corporatists’ continued efforts to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. It still wasn’t enough. He and Zadie had worked non-stop to get bills passed through Congress, held an emergency election for a single-term transitional president, and ensured that hundreds of corrupt officials were prosecuted by the legal system. It had been a herculean effort, worthy of a thousand medals of honor, but the reports kept rolling in, bad and getting worse. Drought in the farmlands. Corporate businesses declaring bankruptcy and vanishing to avoid penalties on a decade of unregulated abuse. Global banking sanctions. Threats from other superpowers. A military on the verge of mutiny. Crumbling infrastructure. Debt balloons collapsing with a pffftzzing whine. Turmoil and chaos.

And now, the rising rumble of fear was triggering a backlash. The law-and-order crowd was calling for stability, traditions, and the good old days. Behind them, the good old boys lurked in the shadows, trying to regain power. There were no easy answers to the problems anymore. It had been so simple to oppose the tyranny of the old regime – everyone despised the hidden dictatorship – but it was so much harder to get people to agree on the solutions and next steps.

Charlie flexed his aching fingers. He’d been writing all afternoon. Dusk had fallen, unnoticed, by the time Zadie unexpectedly slapped his laptop shut. He glanced up, bleary-eyed from staring at the glaring screen.

“Time’s up,” she declared. “It’s a holiday, remember?”

“Humph,” he snorted.

“Don’t start that,” she warned, shaking her black curls. “Suspend your cynicism. Enjoy the fireworks, for once.”

Charlie groaned, but rose to his feet. They had a deal: he could scribble away the afternoon, reflecting on revolutionary themes for his next essay, but then he had to watch the fireworks over the lake with her. Charlie had agreed to come only after she threatened to throw his laptop in the water and run off with one of his cousins who knew how to have a good time.

“We’re national heroes, Charlie, m’boy,” she teased him. “Come grin-and-bear the Fourth of July. At least we didn’t have to go to any parades in DC.”

After his series of blistering rebukes to politicians about the lack of progress on social reforms, their public appearance schedule had cleared out considerably.

“Keep criticizing Congress and we can finally retire,” Zadie joked.

But it was no laughing matter. Revolutionary truth-tellers rose and fell on waves of change, propelled or repelled by the opportunists of the hour. The same people who applauded them for tackling the hidden corporate dictatorship detested them when Charlie turned his mighty pen toward their shortcomings. Charlie never forgot that Thomas Paine, for all his Common Sense, died obscure and alienated from his peers, disillusioned by counterrevolutions in France and the constitutional conservatism in the United States.

As it was, both he and Zadie had been politely disinvited from the Fourth of July ceremonies in Washington, DC. It was an honor they neither sought nor mourned. Instead, they came north to spend time with family – or at least, Zadie had. Charlie cloistered himself in the back bedroom of his grandfather’s camp by the lake and tried to ignore the patriotic fervor of the weekend. It nauseated him. Though he loved his country fiercely, he couldn’t stomach its shows of patriotism.

A starburst of a crackler erupted as they settled down on the bottom of the boat. Zadie curled tight to his side, the chill of the metal muffled by the towels, scratchy wool picnic blanket, and his churning furnace of body heat.

“Did you ever wonder,” she asked, “if we wrote the Constitution today, would we do it the same way? I mean, that was two hundred and fifty years ago. People rode horses to send messages. Most people couldn’t read – heck, most people weren’t even considered people – enslaved Africans were counted as three-fifths human. Indigenous Peoples were considered ‘savages’ that needed to be conquered or controlled by white people. White women were considered the property of their husbands and fathers. The poor, including indentured servants, couldn’t vote or run for office.”

“Most of our political history is the story of how we rewrote our Constitution to include more of us,” Charlie answered.

“Yeah, but if all of us could have participated in the crafting . . . if we designed a new system, right now, what would we, the People, create?” Zadie rolled onto her side and leaned on her elbow, cheek propped in hand, eyes aglow with thought. “Would we stick with a representative republic? Would we include more direct democracy? Would we add anything to the systems of checks and balances? What about consequences – like docked pay or getting fired – for officials who refuse to enact the demonstrated will of the people?”

Charlie could almost see the ideas exploding in her mind as she spoke, fireworks of possibility lighting up the darkness for brief, vanishing flashes. He’d spent plenty of sleepless nights mulling on these same concepts. They always fizzled out by morning. Crumpled paper littered his writing area like fireworks casings on the Fifth of July shores.

“People don’t even know what democracy is,” he reminded Zadie. “They’ve been taught that the unparalleled brilliance of the Founding Fathers gave us the best system in the world, and there’s no need to change it.”

“American Exceptionalism is such a deadly brainwashing technique,” Zadie grumbled, flopping back down on the blanket and setting the boat rocking. “It makes us unwilling to improve.”

“If we rowed back to the beach and asked anybody – except your dad, he doesn’t count – if we should rewrite the Constitution, they’d throw a hotdog at you and dunk you in the lake.”

That was the irony of the Fourth of July: there was nothing revolutionary about it. The nation celebrated patriotic loyalty to an unjust system rather than the revolutionary willingness to upend the world in search of greater equality and justice. On the day that honored the courage of those who defied global superpowers, their descendants followed rote patterns of tradition without deviation, year after year.

Charlie might not have minded if it happened on September 17th, Constitution Day. Then, at least, the obvious self-worshipping rhetoric wouldn’t be hypocritical. But a day commemorating revolution ought to be, well . . . more rebellious. People should spend the day asking the very questions Zadie had just raised, thinking critically about the political system, and working to correct outstanding injustices so that the “truths held to be self-evident” could be reflected in the politics and practices of the nation. They should spend the day advancing the quest for life and liberty. They make sure the pursuit of happiness could be actualized by every citizen, not just by some.

And then, he admitted with a chuckle, after a long day of making meaningful strides toward liberty and justice for all, then we might set off a few fireworks and slice up the apple pie.

“This holiday is the same as all our others – militarized, commercialized, corporatized beyond recognition or meaning,” he grumbled. His bitter comment hung on the summer air, hollowed by the metal boat and softened by the lapping waves. “If we want a deeper kind of democracy, it’ll take another revolution to get it.”

He could feel the curl of Zadie’s smile even in the dark.

“Good thing,” she replied, “we know a revolutionary or two.”

A trio of fireworks lit up the sky, red, white, and blue, one right after the other. Charlie watched the colors illuminate Zadie’s face in shades of warning, hope, and possibility. The red faded last, an uncanny glow of rockets’ glare, a reminder that tradition did not die easily and that patriotism sometimes fought against change.

____________________________

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy.
Find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

The Phoenix Moment – Winds of Change

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy.
Find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

By morning, the smoke had swallowed the sky. The day dawned in an eerie orange glow. The Council of All Beings disbanded and evacuated. Charlie and Zadie drove north, shoulders twitching and tensing as the fire tripped their evolutionary signal wires of animal unease. Charlie cast anxious glances in the rearview mirror. At the clearings, Zadie stared nervously at the thick plume towering like an eruption behind them. The wind spun around and licked their bumper, hurtling smoke and malice at their heels. Charlie fiddled with the radio and caught a brief report of the fast, roaring fire devastating hundreds, then tens of thousands of acres. Tiny mountain towns were evacuated then consumed. Asphalt roads heated into tire-melting rivers of molten tar. A gas line exploded in a boom louder than a bomb. The air turned toxic in the region. Hardware stores had long since run out of masks. The birds refused to sing, shrieking sharp warnings as they desperately winged north. Deer, skunk, raccoon, and all the larger mammals crashed through the underbrush and bolted across the road in front of their car, wild-eyed and half-crazed with primordial terror.

Around noon, the radio crackled and went dead. Charlie and Zadie threaded through one mountain ridge then the next. They passed caravans of firefighters headed south. At a gas station, the clerk watched the news, jittery. Prisoners, soldiers, and fire jumpers had formed a defensive line to the south, turning the fire away from the populated cities.

“But they won’t stop it running from there to here, all the way up to Oregon,” the clerk spat out bitterly. He turned to them and cocked his head. “My advice? Get as far from the smoke as you can.”

They did, wondering what happened when forest fires and gas stations collided. By the next evening, they had traveled to the thinning edge of the smoke. The sky returned to hazy blue. The clerks and townspeople stopped staring warily at the southern horizon. They breathed deeper. The radio reports came through clear. The news channels showed heartbreaking footage of the fire. Giant fir trees transformed into blazing torches hundreds of feet tall. Helicopters with puny loads of water rushed back and forth from lakes. Yellow flame retardant dumped in showers of disturbing chemical plumes.

Thirty miles from the place of the Council’s gathering, the town had been razed, reduced to blocks of ash and rubble. Strange, lone trees had survived. Seventeen people had not. The smoke choked people to death even when the flames were miles away. Two firefighters died when the wind trapped them behind an unexpected pivot of the fire. A family of campers had been caught in their car when the asphalt road scorched their tires to shreds. Thousands of people had crowded into the nearest towns and cities. Refugee camps had been set up in parking lots. Charlie sat on the edge of the creaking hotel bed with his elbows on his knees, staring at the television in wide-eyed horror.

“Zadie,” he began.

“I know,” she answered.

They checked out before dawn, heading south back toward the fire zone, to offer whatever aid they could.

They traveled to a town just outside of the fire zone where a relief center had been set up. The box store parking lot resembled an unruly flea market, laid out hodge-podge in a jumble of serpentine pathways. At the entrance, donations were arriving by the truckload: blankets, tents, clothes, camp stoves, canned goods, children’s toys, stacks of diapers. Volunteer relief workers scurried in ant lines, sorting through the overwhelming array. In front of the store, the frazzled manager argued with the police, gripping his mousy hair with one aggrieved fist and slapping the other palm against his thigh, helpless. He’d called the cops on the open air relief network, only to be told that, since the mega-corporation had suckered the town into constructing a giant municipal lot as part of the deal to lure in the store, the citizens technically owned the lot. The mayor, up for re-election, could be spotted passing out baby formula and teddy bears to families.

Charlie and Zadie parked a quarter mile down the road and walked along the grassy ditch, fingers entwined, hands swinging. Smiles burst across their faces at the sight of a familiar gold, green, and white flag flapping in the smoky breeze, an iconic flower emblazoned on it. On the chain link fence, a hand-printed banner boldly declared: The Dandelion Insurrection is here!

They checked-in with a distracted coordinator caught amidst too many phone calls, text messages, and queries. She barely turned her head at their offer to help, simply pointing to where they could lend a hand unpacking a truck. She had a roll of toilet paper under one elbow and a clipboard in her other hand. She raced to the back section of the ever-growing mounds of donations, hollering that – no matter how much the kids loved them – that crate of week-old puppies had to go to the animal shelter in the next town.

Charlie and Zadie had been passing boxes and bundles for twenty minutes before the guy next to Zadie tossed her a flirtatious wink and asked her name.

“Zadie,” she answered with a grin, catching the box of toothpaste tubes as he dropped it.

He stared agape at the slender woman in her faded rock band T-shirt and fire engine red skirt. Zadie bit back a laugh as she shoved the cuffs of her hooded sweatshirt past her elbows and passed the box to Charlie.

“And that’s . . . that’s,” the volunteer stammered, craning around her mane of black curls to stare at Charlie as he waited with a bemused smile.

“Yep,” Zadie replied cheerfully. “Now, keep passing the stuff before everyone starts hollering.”

Too late. Pivoting at the hold-up, the other volunteers spotted the duo. Soon, an excited cluster huddled around them. The pair deflected questions, politely refused to sign autographs, and tried to get everyone back to work.

“What in Goddess’ name is going on here?” a voice bellowed.

A short figure waded into the crowd, tapping shoulders and snaking between people to get to the center. A poof of frizzy and silvered honey-wheat hair encircled her face. Her skin hung about her knees as they stuck out of her shorts. She’d cut the sleeves off her T-shirt and a slather of sunscreen whitened her leathery skin. A tan line at her biceps hinted at long hours outdoors. The callouses on her hands and darker streaks in her fingerprint whorls suggested a lifetime of gardening. She peered up with the imperious, no nonsense attitude of all crones who claim their rightful place in human culture, and scrutinized the young pair with her squinted brown eyes.

“Well, that explains it,” she remarked. “Back to work, all of you.”

She snatched Charlie and Zadie by the elbows and pulled them along with her as the rest of the volunteers re-formed their bucket line.

“Bramble Ellison,” she introduced herself.

“Are you in charge then?” Charlie asked.

“Not really. This community is like a bunch of ducklings I fuss over,” Bramble answered with a twinkle in her eye. “Nice little flock, eh? Dandelions, the lot of them.”

Her voice burst with pride as she gestured to the crew of volunteers.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” Bramble declared, shoving her frizzy hair off her exertion-reddened face. “Needs to be written down and I haven’t the time.”

“What does?”

“The miracle unfolding in the wake of disaster. The phoenix moment!” Bramble exclaimed, gesturing around. “I tried to tell the reporters, but they just wanted to take photos of towering flames and burnt houses. That’s not the real story.”

The most eye-popping, heart-grabbing tale to be told wasn’t the forest fire that flattened their town, but how years of preparation had readied the town to rise from the ashes, stronger – far stronger – than ever before.

“The corporate news chased the fire crew up the melting roads,” Bramble griped, “I suppose this couldn’t compete with the images of an apocalyptic inferno.”

She gestured ahead of them to a grassy area running along the edge of the parking lot. Shade tents sheltered small groups gathered on picnic blankets and in circles of mismatched folding chairs. Conversation rose and fell in murmuring waves. The atmosphere’s calm settled in Zadie’s heart like beeswax balm on chapped hands.

Peace.

It was the last thing she expected in the wake of a disaster, but it swept over her like a breeze. Not a bland, monotonous peace, but the peace that comes after the tears spill and the heart empties its anguish like the libations poured in a healing prayer.

“What is this?” she asked.

“A world cafe on how to rebuild,” Bramble explained as she guided them through the clusters.

They had held empathy circles and listening sessions, too. When fire devours your home, you don’t just need food, water, and shelter. You need community, understanding, and empathy. You need space to express fear and grief. You need a chance to comfort and be comforted.

“Typically, our society treats anything but happy productivity as a disease, an individual failing, and sends those who do not conform to therapy,” Bramble said, shaking her grey hair, “but collective grief, mourning, anger, and shock is a different kind of tidal wave. We can’t outsource it to specialists. We must cultivate ways for our communities to cradle each other as we grapple with our human emotions.”

Our inner world was an ecosystem, entwined like mycelium and tree roots. Human beings were more than bundles of flesh. The emotions of one affected the whole, not just in families, but in entire communities.

“This is . . . incredible,” Zadie said, looking around, awestruck.

Charlie nodded, his head bent over his pen and notepad, taking notes for their next essay. This was, without a doubt, a story everyone needed to hear. The world cafe facilitator rang a bell – a salvaged wind chime pipe still clinging to a string – and the small groups stretched and laughed, shook hands and exchanged hugs. They rose and looked around, then found a new group. Notetakers flipped to a blank page in their notebooks. The facilitators posed another discussion question on how they should redesign and rebuild. One person in each group began to speak.

“I’m a veteran of Occupy Sandy,” Bramble shared proudly, “the Occupy protest-inspired disaster response to the hurricane that slammed New York City.”

She pushed her glasses back up her nose and eased into a fluorescent green beach chair, gesturing to the two young people to sit as she continued her story. Bramble had been visiting her sister when the storm struck, battering the coastal city built precariously on backfilled marshland. Photos of flooded taxicabs in lower Manhattan shocked the nation, giving an image to the scientists’ statistic-ridden warning about rising sea levels. But the disaster struck hardest in areas the news cameras never focused on. The shattered beachfront vacation houses evoked the concern of the nation, but it was the neighborhoods cut off from power, water, food, and medical care that bore the brunt of the storm. Shades of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana haunted them, specters of people on roofs awaiting rescue, dead bodies floating in the street, poor hospitals abandoned while wealthy neighborhoods were evacuated. If Katrina brought out the worst of the nation, Occupy Sandy was determined to empower the best.

“We weren’t a charity organization,” Bramble told them. “The organizers detested the ways that the charitable-industrial complex’s relief efforts demoralized and disempowered people. We were survivors. We had skills. We didn’t need to sit around wrapped in Mylar blankets. We dug in our heels and got to work.”

Collective organizing, mutual aid, self-designed relief systems, volunteer squads, barter networks, communal kitchens, and pop-up medical centers: there were dozens of ways people rose up to take care of their neighborhoods.

“Many of us wondered why we’d ever go back to ‘normal’,” Bramble mentioned with a sigh. “The life-as-usual downtown Manhattan was rebuilding was a disaster for poor people. In digging out from the storm, we found strength, resilience, and alternative systems that actually served our communities.”

But the disaster of corporate capitalism was unrelenting. It never abated, even when the skies cleared, the floods retracted, and the mud was swept out. The drive to go back to business-as-usual swallowed up the neighborhoods again, leaving mere traces of the changes – a tool library, a renters collective, a mutual aid network – but nothing on the scale that erupted in the wake of disaster.

Bramble returned home haunted by two things: one, that the bigger disaster was the economic system, and two, that there must be ways a community could prepare the response that Occupy Sandy unleashed – not during a crisis, but before. Could they actually deal with the on-going economic disasters in ways that built their resiliency for other kinds of disasters?

Bramble looked around at the pop-up relief center that had reclaimed the box store parking lot for public use. It was astounding, really. The tents, the supplies, the mutual aid network, the world cafes, and empathy circles . . . with these, the people in her town were holding a revolution against the automatic defaults of the corporate empire, right in the shadow of the box store, right on top of the pavement the citizens had been duped into paying for.  Well, they were taking it back! Not all revolutions happened with guns. Bramble Ellison’s took place with volunteers and sharing, conversations and ideas.

Haunted and inspired by what she’d witnessed after Hurricane Sandy, Bramble began prepping – but not in a canned goods, basement-loaded-with-guns sort of way. She saw the handwriting on the wall. Fire was the disaster waiting to happen to her mountainous community. Drought plagued the region, worsening by the year. The conifer trees yellowed at the tips. The carpet of crackling orange needles thickened. Beetle-killed dead trunks dotted the mountainsides. The creeks dried up and took longer each season to return. Climate change turned up the heat and evapotranspiration sucked the moisture from the earth. She looked around her community and started asking: Disaster is a question of when, not if . . . so what will make us all stronger, together?

“I asked everyone: could we do what Occupy Sandy did? What would stop us?” Bramble explained.

The answers were surprising.

Fear. Isolation. Distrust.

“The default setting of US culture is individualism. We’re socially organized around atomized families and isolation,” Bramble declared with a disgusted snort. “It’s terrible. We all stay home, scrolling the Internet or streaming videos in our dark little rooms.”

To make a resilient community, she decided to start breaking the rules of social culture.

“Hostess with the most-est, that’s me,” she stated then laughed uproariously. She’d lived through the last vestiges of the wasp-waist, jello-laden nonsense. Her idea of hosting was more like convening potlucks and telling her neighbor to spread out picnic blankets in her front yard for everyone.

“It’s amazing how much bossiness you can get away with when you’re old,” Bramble told Charlie and Zadie. “Meddling is part of the crone’s ancient duty.”

Bramble convened events every day of the week and circulated the schedule. She was the invoker, the outreach coordinator, the cheerleader, the catalyst for the social needs of the community.

“When people come together, they can do anything. We had to ditch our social dependency on corporate culture, replace movies with game nights, and Internet with interaction.”

Before long, Bramble deepened the conversations from “get to know your neighbor” to “figure out how to take care of one another”. From there, she challenged them to envision their collective future in ways that corporate culture never dared.

“We had visionary futures dinners and storytelling evenings and problem solving brunches,” she reported with a gleeful chortle.

Connection was the key that unlocked everything, but, in the beginning, the people who showed up surprised Bramble.

“The people I thought would be at the top of the list to help weren’t. They were too busy; caught up with the rat race, with careers and ambitions, hectic schedules and daily concerns.”

The people who were interested in making immediate change were the ones already struggling to survive the economic disaster: the poor, students, the unhoused, migrants. That’s who showed up to help. That’s who wanted the communal kitchen, the tent medical centers, the bike repair shops, the clothing resale pop-up stores.

“But every system we tried, every idea we test-modeled, every seed we planted has born fruit this week. Look around.”

When the fires struck, the marginalized of the community weren’t forgotten: they were at the heart and center of organizing the community’s response.

“The quiet lines of connection we’ve been laying for years suddenly catalyzed into widespread action. The question some of us asked after Sandy is being asked by everyone now: should we go back to what was? Or should we go forward?”

Along the grass strips, under the trees, the world cafe brimmed with conversation. The wind chime bell rang out once again. The facilitators gathered everyone to “harvest” all of the ideas that had been shared. On large sheets of paper, scribes wrote down the comments as the notetakers reported back what they had heard from mothers and fathers, students and small business owners, artists and workers and activists, city planners and engineers, mechanics and teachers, nurses and doctors.

The ideas were visionary and practical, wide-ranging and sensible. Instead of rebuilding rows of big houses from flammable materials, some people suggested pooling land into a housing co-operative and reviving the commons. A team of architects wanted to design tiny houses made of less flammable, locally-available materials like rammed earth, adobe, cob . . . and at a fraction of the cost of the previous houses. The town officials were explaining how to put the schools and public libraries in the center of neighborhoods rather than on the outskirts. The department of public works was hoping to finally implement their plans for a citywide water catchment and management system.

“We are evolving. Here and now,” Bramble declared to Charlie and Zadie, chuckling as she listened to her community’s ideas.

They would take the fertile ash of disaster and compost tragedy into possibility. The old system had failed . . . and the next chapter was an unwritten book.

“It’s time for courage,” Bramble said, “for vision and for change.”

A community would always rise to its potential in the wake of a disaster, for better or for worse. The seeds planted beforehand would grow. Disaster capitalists would exploit. Disaster collectivists would empower. People would rebuild in the shape of their imaginations, narrow or wide, cookie-cutters or visionary, inside the box of the old culture or outside the lines of the past.

“What we do today matters to our future,” Bramble told them, “and your democracy challenge is helping us navigate this disaster together.”

At their surprised smiles, Bramble nodded.

“Oh yes, we were one of the places that picked up on your essays after the Fourth of July. We started a Democracy School, a street assembly, and a participation challenge,” she boasted proudly. “Come on, I’ll tell you over lunch – or brunch or whatever meal we’re at – I missed breakfast and am feeling peckish.”

She rose in a creak of joints and a groan of muscles, and led them through the corridors of stacked boxes to the wide tent that served as a community kitchen. The core staff had run the Food Not Bombs group for years, making meals and sharing them with anyone who dared to throw off class distinctions and be human with one another. A sign-up sheet for chopping, cooking, and washing dishes was full of names of volunteers. The kitchen bustled with lunch preparations, but snacks of fresh fruit and trail mix sat next to the coffee dispenser. Bramble collected an assortment and settled down at the edge of the tent, where she could survey the terrain, keeping an eye on the kitchen, world cafe, and pop-up relief center all at once. She let Charlie bring her a cup of coffee and then told the young couple about how the Democracy Challenge had inspired her community.

Bramble had issued an adaptation of the Democracy Lab’s constructive program called the Participation Challenge. She reached out to every group in town – everything from the Boys and Girls Club to writing groups to the Small Biz Association – and challenged them to try out one inclusive, participatory process. It might be a yearly agenda survey, a stakeholder discussion on the direction of the organization, an across-the-aisle dialogue on a divisive issue, a poll on what products to stock the shelves with, a mock participatory budget for the town – the list was endless. Hundreds of groups joined in, including the school sports teams whose listening circles revealed a surprising youth message: winning wasn’t as important to them as having fun. They’d rather lose while having a great time than win under a drill sergeant of a coach.

“The Participation Challenge activated our community,” Bramble reflected, eyes wide as her smile. “It was as if we suddenly woke up . . . like a field of golden dandelions blooming in the spring.”

Bramble had taken the flash of interest in those experiments, and issued a wide invitation to hold wisdom councils on the town’s 500 Year Vision Plan.

“We had just started the first of thirteen gatherings when the fire hit,” Bramble said with a shake of her head.

In some ways, they just picked up where they left off . . . but with a sense of urgency. The visionary exploration suddenly became a very real question. They were in a phoenix moment, rising from the ashes. Redesigning had become designing anew. Redevelopment now had an unexpectedly clean slate. Previous attachments and fears had been burnt away.

“No one alive today was involved in making the blueprint of the town. It grew hodge-podge,” Bramble explained, “but we’re still a community. We know our strengths and weaknesses. We have a guess at our coming future needs. We can plan for them and fix problems that were literally built into our town.”

Local democracy was about hardwiring resilience into the community. It was about being prepared to counter the inevitable predatory response of the worldviews that caused the disasters to begin with.

“Look at them,” Bramble said, gesturing to the people in the world cafe. “This community is coming up with a vision and a plan. When the disaster capitalists try to sneak in and snatch up real estate at rock bottom prices or steal reconstruction funds and contracts, each person here knows that there are other options. They know who to talk to if they want to order bulk building supplies as a co-operative. They have already pooled remaining resources – and their larger resource web – to meet immediate needs. In this kitchen, there are plates for and from everyone.”

The predatory vulture capitalists that would inevitably swoop in, trying to pick at the carcass of the burnt town, wouldn’t find isolated, shell-shocked families huddled in despair. They would find an active community ready to shoo them away as superfluous annoyances.

“But the old representative system weren’t the ones that made this happen,” Bramble stated emphatically. “Our town councilors and county commissioners, the mayor; they would have made backroom deals with speculators. We stopped that with our real democracy project.”

To politicians and officials, “getting back to normal” and returning to business-as-usual were often considered the only options. They felt the pressure of expectation. If Bramble Ellison’s hadn’t launched the local democracy initiative, their local officials would have had no idea that the populace was not only ready for a redesign, but already brimming with plans for it.

Fires devoured ailing woods – the Southern Rockies had burnt like a row of matches, one beetle-killed tree igniting the next. Scraggly, overcrowded stands of clear-cut regrowth ignited from lightning strikes. The sparks of electrical wires in drought-weakened undergrowth set the Sierras ablaze. The forests kept burning year after year. But there were also species of mushrooms that flourished after forest fires, erupting from the ashes to begin the process of returning life to the woods.

“We are the mushroom spores,” Bramble chuckled, “building the soil for what comes next.”

Forest regrowth would take time. City rebuilding was a process.

“But we can grow differently, in ways far better suited to this place,” Bramble insisted.

They could. They would. They must.

It was the only way forward for them all.

_____________________________

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy.
Find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

The Council of All Beings – Winds of Change

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy. You can find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>

They drove south from Oregon along the winding coastal highway, craning their necks at the explosions of surf and stopping every half hour to admire the wild coast. Craggy mounds of eroding sandstone skulked in the fog. Twisted trees clung to cliff sides. Grass-capped sand dunes sported wind-blasted comb overs. Charlie had seen the Atlantic Ocean’s shores with sturdy pines and enduring granite coastlines. The West Coast was another world.

Zadie and Charlie had been working on a new essay at the Democracy Lab, brows furrowed in thought, heads bent close together, the rain pounding on the slate roof, when Zadie’s phone rang. She glanced at the caller id and broke into a smile.

“Kinap!” she exclaimed. “Great to hear from you!”

“Kwey, nitap,” her friend greeted her in the traditional language of the Wabanaki People. “I have a democracy story for you.”

“Sure. About what?”

“Why it’s long past time for you newcomers to Turtle Island to learn how to include non-human people in your notion of democracy.”

Zadie nodded. She’d been wondering how to remind her fellow Americans that, when Benjamin Franklin and the Founding Fathers borrowed their ideas about democracy from the Haudenosaunee, but when members of those nations observed the United States’ system, it was incomprehensible to them. Where were the women? Where were the non-human creatures? How could a democracy that excluded most of the human population and allof the other relatives succeed? It wasn’t democracy. It was simply a new set of rulers.

Kinap brought word that another kind of revolution was brewing, half-hidden, long overdue. The Earth, herself, was speaking, haunting the dreams of humanity. The rivers sang with the rocks. The forests whispered stories into the wind. The animals stared into the startled eyes of humans and would not look away. The land was alive, living, and refused to be objectified and exploited any longer. Nature in all forms – animal, plant, mineral, elemental – demanded that their rights be acknowledged and honored. It was the sacred contract, long ignored by certain strands of humanity, long defended by others.

As the climate crisis showed the dangers of destroying humanity’s one-and-only planet, more and more humans were listening. Indigenous Peoples had never stopped. Humans ignored the beingness of non-humans at their own peril. When they die, we die. It was better to respect them and live.

“A global movement for the Rights of Nature is picking up steam,” Kinap had told Zadie over the phone. “There is a resurgence of these beliefs among people who ignored the beingness of non-humans for centuries. It’s happening at last – and it’s beautiful. Lake Erie has laws that assert the lake’s beinghood and limit the pollution of nearby cities. The Whanganui River in New Zealand has legal personhood status. Ecuador granted Rights of Nature to the entire nation’s ecosystems. Even small towns are doing this; Crestone, Colorado passed a law recognizing the rights of the Crestone Creek. The wild rice beds of the Anishinaabe in Northern Wisconsin have rights as an ecosystem of species. The original inhabitants of Hawai’i are defending sovereignty for Indigenous People and for the islands, themselves. The bioregion of Cascadia is asserting its beingness in the Pacific Northwest, extending beyond state and national borders. A massive revolution is underway – no less profound than the abolition of slavery or overthrowing dictators – it’s about a Democracy of All Beings. Come to the Council and see for yourself.”

She thought Kinap was going to haul them back to Maine to talk, but instead, the Penobscot organizer said she’d be in Northern California for a gathering called the Council of All Beings. She invited Zadie and Charlie to attend. This was not an Indigneous tradition, but rather a way for the newcomers to the continent to begin the long process of learning how to relate respectfully to the community of beings that lived in these lands, too.

As they drove south, Zadie waxed poetic about the possibilities of a democracy that included both humans and non-humans. Charlie wrestled with his skepticism. He doubted the average American was ready for the revelation of equality between humans and bears, let alone with moss or gnats or a riparian woodland. Humans still had trouble seeing other humans as equal. Were they ready for Kinap’s revolution?

“Ready or not, here it comes,” Zadie pointed out.

“Here we come, anyway,” he answered.

The gathering was held at a coastal wilderness area where redwood giants carpeted the mountains, drinking the moist ocean fog. Beneath their hushed canopy, the banter of human voices rose and fell. Thick mats of needles made the earth springy underfoot. The shade cut the dry heat of the September day with delicious coolness. Steep slopes stretched along a dry creek bed. Upon arriving, Charlie and Zadie wandered the forested area in search of Kinap. At a designated campsite, tents were set up. Small groups sat in clusters, talking in easy tones; faces serious, intense, and smiling in turns. At the edge of one such circle, a tall, straight-backed figure spotted them and waved.

“Kinap!” Zadie called out, bursting into a run. She crossed the glade and flung her arms around her friend. Kinap’s laugh ran bell-like through the grove, clear as the hidden birds calling out in the overstory. The first lines of silver touched Kinap’s dark hair. She carried herself with stillness and weighted presence.

Kinap Crow was a protector of water, an Indigenous rights lawyer, a member of the Penobscot Nation. She, too, came from Maine. She, too, traveled the continent helping people protect their communities. She and Zadie had met in Arizona, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as they blockaded a bridge to keep corporate extractors from plundering the water in the underground aquifer. Zadie and Kinap’s friendship touched upon the sacred and transcended the short time they had known each other. Her deep brown eyes focused over Zadie’s shoulder and caught sight of Charlie. She lifted her hand in greeting as he neared. Kinap recognized the strain of years of struggle in his face. She knew the weight of that. Kinap and her people had been fighting for survival for six hundred years. They were from the Dawnland, the place of first contact with European colonizers. The burdens of their souls ran deep. The sorrows they carried were genocides and generations wide.

He will need to learn when to put his burdens down and when to pick them up again, she thought. He did not yet realize how long this road would be. Charlie Rider was sprinting down the first leg of a marathon. If he didn’t rest, he would collapse long before the finish line.

Kinap saw the gaping hole of understanding in the newcomers, the immigrants and descendants of colonists. Millions of people in this nation held the delusion of a settings-and-object landscape. They saw ecosystems as ideas, rocks and water as objects, landscapes as backdrops to their lives, plants as scenery, and animals as dumb creatures of a lesser order than humans. At best, they saw themselves as stewards. More commonly, Americans saw themselves as masters and owners of this land, individually with private property, collectively as a nation, and by divine right according to Bible and arrogant superiority.

They would never survive this way. Any of them. Not the collapsing ecosystems, not the endangered species, not the descendants of colonists, and not the Indigenous Peoples. Unlearning these attitudes was no longer a luxury. Dispelling these beliefs was critical to survival. Kinap had joined both Indigenous-led gatherings and non-Indigenous workshops to help guide this culture back to sanity. The Council of All Beings was one of these.

“Come,” she invited them, “let me show you around.”

They started in the main grove. The gathering place was nestled in the natural amphitheater of the steep slopes of a redwood grove. The “floor” reverberated with impassioned poetry and prose, praise and promises. Charlie and Zadie sat on the soft carpet of needles next to Kinap and listened as one human after another conveyed the messages of mountains and the reflections of bogs. The Council of All Beings brought the world to life. It was a ritual, a ceremony, a creative summit in which the voiceless were given words in human speech. Rocks, rivers, estuaries, bays, kelp, humpback whales, plankton, moss, meadow grass, wild orange poppy, roe deer, spotted owl, blotched tiger salamander; hundreds were given voices through creative imagining and biological science. People translated the whistling bird songs of flocks. Those representing insects brought word from hives, nests, and swarms. One person brought the fog to life, chanting a tidal incantation of the poetry born of water, air, time, and tide.

Barefoot in the dusty carpet of cool earth speckled with redwood needles, a semicircle of speakers gave voice to the western forest trees: Sequoia, Live Oak, Madrone, Jeffrey Pine, Sitka Spruce, Coast Redwood, Douglas Fir, and more. Together, they came from a community of overlapping ecosystems that stretched from Alaska to Northern Mexico, crossing three nation’s borders, encompassing a span that housed millions of humans and trillions of non-human beings. Red Cedar spoke, her voice lilting, words rising in prayer, prophecy, and promise.

“Once, the People sang to us,” Red Cedar said. “Then the sounds of shouts and saws came, cut by the crash and boom of our sisters falling, followed by the silence, the long silence, of clear-cut ground. Humans are short-lived, but we live centuries. We were here before Columbus touched the eastern shores, before the conquistadors and colonists brought the diseases that silenced the original people’s songs. We will be here after today falls into silence. We will hear tomorrow’s music begin. But will you?”

On the slope, Charlie sat stunned, silent and intense, imagining the earth through different eyes . . . or antennae, or echolocation, or senses that defied human conception. Slowly, his human-centric perspective surrendered its stranglehold on his mind. He felt the clenched tightness in his chest that preceded tears. He would never think about his country in the same way again. As the messages went on, the Council of All Beings knocked him off his feet, captured his heartstrings, and swept him away into a world of perception so different from his usual worldview that there was simply no comparison.

“It’s like I was . . . dead . . . or blind,” Charlie stammered as he and Zadie lay curled together that night. “Like I’ve been sleepwalking through my life, a cardboard actor in front of a flat backdrop. I never realized how lonely it is to be human in a world full of mere objects or lesser animals. It’s completely different to see oneself as part of a community of species.”

The next day, they joined the small group sessions. Most of this Council came from the West Coast, but a few, like Kinap, came from further afield to share their expertise. Delegates from the Pacific Northwest came to learn from the riverkeepers of the Southwest. Coastal wetlands defenders exchanged stories with inland water protectors. Forests, deserts, mountains, mammals, fish and fowl, moss and shrubs, prairies and tidal zones: the list of beings was endless. They gathered in different circles, passing talking sticks, listening, sharing knowledge, expressing concerns, and brainstorming solutions.

Representing the Penobscot River – a being she considered her kin – Kinap joined not only the council of rivers, but also the circles of estuary dwellers, the headwaters summit, and the watersheds gathering. She sat in on the mammals discussion and the aquatic plants dialogue. She gave voice to her Indigenous perspective and reminded the descendants of colonizers to acknowledge the wisdom of the original knowledge-holders of the continent. She shared with – and learned from – biologists. She offered legal advice and traditional wisdom.

In all of the conversations, the Earth came alive and rose up with towering beinghood. The planet brimmed with personality and power. A river was not a flat ribbon of water, but an ancient creature that lived over eons, carving the landscape and forming an enduring community of fish and fern, reed and rock, serpent and sand, deer and muskrat, otter and algae, and more.

All those voices had been denied by the conquerors and colonists as surely as Indigenous Peoples’. By relegating beings to objects, creatures to resources, and “nature” to a status separate from “human”, Westerners had killed off the fertility of their imaginations and now strode across barren moonscapes of the mind.

The delegates were a mix of backgrounds. They were scientists and poets, activists and ecologists. One without the other was insufficient. The poets tended to anthropomorphize. The scientists habitually objectified. The two balanced each other, poets dreaming into the beingness of forests and moss; scientists lending detailed research into the ways ferns live, birds migrate, and frogs transform from tadpoles. Geologists spoke for the rocks, thinking in terms of eons. Entomologists spoke for dayflies that lived entire lives in a single day. Both poets and scientists were needed.

“Indigenous Peoples,” Kinap pointed out, “have never separated the two, nor divided the spiritual from the scientific.”

Indigenous Peoples were the original natural scientists, biologists, astronomers, and pharmacists of this continent. The lie of primitivism overshadowed the fact that Indigenous Peoples held both ancestral knowledge and detailed sciences of place. Their cultures and ways of life, forged by millenniums of living interconnectedness, had never separated science from spirit and story. Newcomers to Turtle Island would need to build ways to respect this knowledge . . . and create their own practices for living in right relationship with the rest of the living world.

“You cannot simply adopt our Indigenous customs,” Kinap reminded them. “It doesn’t work like that. That’s why the Council of All Beings – created by Joanna Macy and others – is so helpful. It is an emerging ceremony that helps repair the splintered, or unforged, connection between newcomers and this land.”

Six hundred years of colonizer culture had to be uprooted. Entire ecosystems needed to be protected and repaired. Regeneration and restoration had to be a priority even amidst the climate crisis – especially amidst the crisis. The invasion of the Europeans drastically altered the continent, triggering an environmental shift as dramatic as an Ice Age. Entire species were wiped out, from the passenger pigeon to the bulk of the bison population. Old growth forests were razed to the ground. The Great Plains were turned into corn and soy fields. Cattle grazing replaced antelope and deer. Cities grew like barnacles on whale skin.

“The Council of All Beings would not be complete without the cities,” Kinap told Charlie and Zadie. “For better or for worse, they are some of the most impactful beings on the planet.”

They devoured the resources of a globe. They churned out pollutants into the air and the water. They built mountains of their garbage and riddled the underground with holes in their consumption of minerals, oil, and coal. They sprawled for miles, creating concrete deserts where complex ecosystems once stood.

“We have to include the cities if we want to make change,” Kinap explained as she steered Charlie and Zadie toward a cluster of people sitting on logs. One stared at a signal-less phone then put it in his pocket, shaking his head. Another gaped up at the cathedral of trees. A third nervously joked and wondered if there were bears around here.

“Not with all the noise,” Kinap told him with a wry smile. “Charlie, Zadie, these are the people speaking for the urban cities.”

“Los Angeles!” one said proudly.

“San Fran,” another chimed in.

“Portlandia,” said a third.

“Seattle.”

“Vancouver, Canada.”

“Vancouver, United States,” said another person with a grin. “It’s like having two girls named Sally in the same class.”

At least a dozen cities had come to the council. Like mountain ranges or watersheds, their needs, choices, and behaviors weighed on every other system they touched. Their sewage, electricity, garbage, delivery and transport, heating and cooling, all connected to the surrounding ecosystems. The choices of those massive, human-centric beings rippled like shockwaves through trillions of other creatures, ultimately affecting the entire planet.

“These brave souls have come to learn and bring back the process to their regions,” Kinap explained to Charlie and Zadie. “San Francisco does not stand alone, after all. She is part of an entire region of urban cities: Oakland, Berkeley, Marin, Richmond, and more. In these places, too many humans have forgotten the knowledge of the original peoples and beings: the Chumash, Ohlone, sturgeon, otters, pelicans, and so on. Once, these people and beings far outnumbered even the millions of humans who live there now, oblivious.”

Charlie had never thought of cities as beings before, but if a river or an ocean or a forest was a being, then the behemoth of Los Angeles certainly was one, too. How would a city manage its beinghood in a manner that respected the existence of all others? Would they fight for survival like cornered bears, trapped by lack of food and water? Would they intentionally adapt, and perhaps shrink to a sustainable scale? The questions were endless.

And, Charlie mused, if a city was a being, what about corporations?

“Corporate personhood is not the same as beingness,” Kinap clarified when Charlie brought it up. “Corporate personhood is how rich people push for their companies to enjoy all the privileges of the world’s most entitled people, while avoiding all of the responsibilities borne by regular humans. When I talk about beingness, I’m speaking about honoring our rights and responsibilities in equal measure.”

Kinap gestured to the group of urban representatives. If cities were beings, they had to take responsibility for their impacts even as they asserted their rights. At the Council of All Beings, people could start to think about what rights and responsibilities a human, a city, a bioregion, an ecosystem, a corporation, an element or a non-human being had.

Zadie plunked down beside them on the log and leaned forward, elbows on knees.

“So, how does one represent an entire city?” she queried. It seemed like a daunting task.

“We were just talking about that,” the Latina representative from Los Angeles answered.

Every city’s process was different. One used polling. Another used poetry and art. A third held public conversations. A fourth circulated statistics and studies. They asked similar questions: what does a city need to survive? What is enough? What is too much? How does a city harm others? How does a city help them? What emerges in a city’s dreams? What wakes a city up at night?

They had no right or wrong way to answer those questions. There were no rules when it came to imagining the consciousness of a city. The residents were like gut bacteria dreaming of what a human thinks when she sees an apple. Today, the twelve cities compared notes on how to listen to a being called a City. Yesterday, they had met with the rivers and continental plates. The Seattle Fault, a 50-60 million-year old being (you lose count after that many trips around the sun, the Fault admitted), warned the City of Seattle about the rising geological pressures under the ground. Are you ready for the Big One? the Fault asked. How will you shelter your people when the earthquake of the millennium hits?

In a few days, they would return to their cities with knowledge, warnings, and more questions. Los Angeles would invite the Colorado River to give talks about how she longed to reach the Pacific Ocean once again, how sad it was to dry up and vanish amidst the desert, siphoned off by the city’s thirst. Portland and the Columbia River would gather the watersheds to offer State of the Union addresses. The Pelicans would go on a poetry reading tour, delivering poetic messages up and down the coast, following their migration route.

In other cities, regional convenings would take place every few months. Smaller gatherings and artistic expressions would pop up weekly. In Monterey, the sea otters and humpback whales wrote weekly blogs. In Olympia, the fog and tides planned to spin off that idea and launch a column in the newspaper.

“The goal of the Council of All Beings,” Kinap told Charlie and Zadie as they thanked the cities and moved onward, “is to find ways to bring the voices of the rest of the Earth into human awareness.”

For too long, humanity had objectified and ignored the beingness of all. It was killing humanity . . . and everything else.

“If our species is to survive, we will need to reawaken everyone’s sense of community with the interconnected web of existence. Our process with the Council of All Beings has its shortcomings, but it is a start. Imagine these gatherings in twenty years . . . or a hundred.”

The thought staggered Charlie and Zadie. It was hard to imagine their culture after a hundred years of practicing and using Councils of All Beings. They’d spent over six hundred years denying the beinghood of non-humans (and most of humanity). Envisioning their culture actively uprooting those delusions pushed their minds to the breaking point. They could see how the Council of All Beings served as a training ground, a school for stretching atrophied imaginations out of the narrow constraints of the human-centric worldview.

They crested the slope that served as amphitheater and returned to the full assembly. Sitting down on the soft carpet of pine needles, they listened to the speeches. The messages surprised Charlie. He had expected a litany of sorrow: collapsing ecosystems, species extinction, poisoned rivers, dead forests killed by beetles, extreme droughts and vanishing lakes. As he looked around, he couldn’t see one single being that wasn’t suffering because of humanity’s behaviors. And yet, much of that had already been addressed in small groups and one-on-one conversations. In the full assembly, the messages centered on love and hope. The Beings had more to say than simply haranguing humanity. They had solidarity to offer one another. They had visions and dreams for a new way forward. They remembered the best of humanity from the times before extraction and conquest.

Delivered one after another, these messages moved Charlie more than the pleas of succor against destruction and exploitation. He heard the gray wolf speak of how close the packs came to vanishing, and how they felt when they finally heard the howls of mates in the distance after traveling thousands of lonely miles. He laced his fingers together with Zadie’s and thanked all that was holy that they had found each other. He heard the humpback whales express gratitude tohumans for the web of protections that allowed their numbers to return to the levels of pre-whaling days. He wiped his eyes as the acknowledgement made him choke up with emotion. When the humpback whales sang in solidarity with the endangered blue whales, the tears fell down his cheeks. The rivers stood in interlocking connection, telling the epic story of how the dance of water extended around the entire planet. Shivers shot up and down his spine. Charlie dug out his notebook and pencil, scribbling down fragments of thoughts for later writings:

Who knew that plate tectonics had prophecies about collision?

Moss spoke about restoring mine tailings.

Fungi dismantles toxic waste as a love token for the world.

Eagles are taking down drones.

The marine sanctuary issued an open invitation to the ecosystem to come move in.

The grizzly and polar bear celebrated the birth of their baby pizzly, a new species emerging out of climate pressures.

As the afternoon stretched on, he and Zadie fell into a near trance state, the cumulative weight of the speakers shredding the veil of ordinary thought. They sensed a world hovering on the horizon of reality, a world where humans would pour their time into relearning the extraordinary beauty and mystery of the Earth. This world wasn’t impossible. It hung on the edge of reality. The Council of All Beings helped dream it into existence.

____________________

This is an excerpt from Winds of Change, the third novel in the Dandelion Trilogy. You can find it through our Community Publishing Campaign here>>