Foot. in. front. of. former. foot.
Pain-staking precision.
Test to see
That the ankle is stable
Lest it give way under the swollen mind;
Lift the arch, in pitiful attempt to lift the spirit;
Balance on the ball for a beat - hoping for the clarity promised by the summit place,
But no mosaic parting;
Release, with a weary sigh,
Tow the leaded leg up from behind,
And repeat.

All this trouble just to get from the bed to the bathroom, not three paces.

That's where I've been.
Learning to walk again.

Dispatch from the Copenhagen Climate Summit

Entering the second week of the Copenhagen climate negotiations, several things are clear. Firstly, the negotiations are very confusing and close to deadlocked. At a time when all countries need to stand together to face the global threat of the climate crisis, many nations are still using every tactic they can to avoid and delay reducing their own greenhouse gas pollution, while asking everyone else to take the burden. Worse still, our leaders are tossing blame back and forth in an endless cycle – rather than focusing on what is required for the world as a whole.

An additional complication has been that this week, civil society’s access to the conference center will be dramatically limited (only 90 of the 20,000 accredited civil society delegates, people like me, will be allowed to enter the Bella Center on Friday). This is bringing up hard questions about citizen access to decision-making on climate change and is helping build momentum behind a counter-UN “People’s Assembly” that will take place on Wednesday.

Secondly, it is clear that the time for intellectual argument regarding climate change is over. The climate crisis is a moral issue. Slavery didn’t end because of compelling economic arguments. Women didn’t claim the right to vote with scientific data. These moral struggles were won because people, like us, finally listened to the still, small voice that perks up when something is amiss, and then took action to right the wrong.

When one person breaks something and a different person gets in trouble for it, it is wrong. It’s unfair. This is a cross-cultural principle and this is precisely what is happening with climate change. The communities least responsible for greenhouse gas pollution are the communities that are at the highest risk from the effects of climate change. As it stands, we are being warned by scientists, economists, even the U.S. military, that millions will lose their lives due to preventable and involuntary hunger, disease and conflict resulting from greenhouse gas pollution. If we don’t act to remedy this state of affairs, we are complicit in this crime against humanity.

On Thursday, Dec. 17, a global action called Hunger for Survival, will lead the way in cutting through the endless back-and-forth to sound a moral call to action. Inspired by the members of Climate Justice Fast!, now on their 41^st day without food, thousands of people from around the world, including President Mohommed Nasheed of the Maldives, world-renowned physicist and environmental justice advocate Vandana Shiva, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mary Robinson, will unite in a day of fasting and reflection on climate justice.

While fasters will be calling for moral action from our different governments, the fast is also an expression of collective commitment to examining our own lifestyles and priorities. It is an expression of our desire to challenge the idea that excess is virtuous, and use our daily economic and political choices to reward those who promote nourishing and life-sustaining policies, rather than those who abuse the planet and its people.

Gandhi used fasting as a tool to unseat the British Empire's powerful grip over India. The American, English and Irish women suffragists used it to gain the right to vote. When people unite behind an intention, and seal it with fasting, history shows that powerful things happen. If you would like to join the fast, please visit www.climatejusticefast.com.

Struggles for justice are often aided by government intervention. To those who decry such intervention, I say, if we don’t want the expansion of government mandate, then let’s not wait on the government to mandate us doing the right thing.

Regarding this point, here is some good news: the third thing that is clear here in Copenhagen is that the best solutions to climate change are coming from regular people who are not waiting around on government to mandate doing the right thing. All around the world, people are realizing that economic failure, environmental and health crises, and spiritual confusion and dissatisfaction are all connected. People from Lexington to Hong Kong are taking action to put control of food and energy production back into the capable hands of local communities, to strengthen local businesses, and to forward the process of healing the divisions within our communities and between humanity and our home. These people are the real climate champions. My deep and abiding gratitude to you all.

Climate Justice Fast! enters fourth week without food

Seven climate justice activists from around the world have entered the fourth week of a water-only hunger strike, having gone totally without food since November 6. They have been joined by hundreds of solidarity fasters, from 22 different countries, including Romania, Honduras, and the Central African Republic.

Recent announcements from world leaders – including President Obama – indicate that a legally-binding international climate treaty won’t be signed at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen this December.

The members of the ’Climate Justice Fast!’ remain resolute, insisting that both world leaders and the global public must use the much-anticipated summit as an opportunity ‘to shift away from business-as-usual and start addressing the root causes of the climate crisis – fossil fuels, overconsumption, and a socio-economic paradigm that rewards abuse and exploitation of people and the planet.’

Anna Keenan, a 23 year-old Physics graduate from Australia and one of the key organizers of Climate Justice Fast! explains, “I am doing this hunger-strike because I am inspired by the philosophy of Albert Einstein – that problems can't be solved at the level of awareness that created them.”

“In order to solve the climate crisis, we must challenge the assumptions that fossil fuels are ‘cheap’ forms of energy, that infinite economic expansion on a finite planet is possible, and that people and places are expendable commodities.”

Diane Wilson, a 61-year old fisherwoman from Texas who is participating in the strike, adds that “by rectifying the root causes of climate change, we are confident that our political demands – like commitments from wealthy, high-emitting countries to reduce the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere to 350 ppm and to pledge 195 billion USD per year for adaptation efforts in countries most vulnerable to climate change – will be met as well.”

As the global hunger strike enters its fourth week, the diverse members of Climate Justice Fast! show no sign of abandoning their fasts or easing their moral call for immediate, effective action on climate change.

The hunger strikers intend to fast at least until the end of the Copenhagen talks, which conclude on December 18. A number of the hunger strikers will be present inside the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

Something I cannot name

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I – I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.”

My eyes go a little watery when I consider the distance it seems I’ve traveled in four years, miles and miles of heart wanderings, mind meanderings, and foot marches. Many of the pit stops made along the way – Madagascar, the Hague, the United Nations, Congress, TIME magazine – seem a little surreal to me now, living quietly on a homestead in North Carolina. I am proud of myself though, because in recalling each of these pit stops, I am reminded that in the past four years, I have faced down some of my angriest fears, asked many of the questions that make me feel most vulnerable, and weathered some uncomfortable forms of resistance in doing these things rather publicly.

Over this distance, the essential message of my advocacy – that is to say, my life – changed several times. It is now changing again, and I know the shifting is far from finished. It is borne of a collection of recent intellectual, emotional, and spiritual encounters. I have a difficult time articulating where I think I’m headed. Language seems inadequate. I keep waiting for the inspired moment, when clarity will dawn and I can finally explain myself and explain the hunches that constitute my current rationale for decision-making. I have to frequently remind myself that though I can’t describe the full scope of the systems, correspondences, and connections that I sense, I am complete, I am sufficient in this moment. The words will come, if they need to.

I know at the very least, though I can’t describe its full profile, that I’m seeking the wisdom of the mater: the intuitive, the spontaneous, the emotive, the connotative, the mystical, the cyclical, the material, the peripheral, the lunar (which will not burn your eyes), the wet, dusky north face, the sinistr southpaw, Said’s Oriental, Beauvoir’s Other, the raw Goat milk drinkers (who don’t wipe their mouths), the unsanctioned elixir-mixers, the illiterate priestess-bards of the wilderness, joyful old folks with their wrinkled, dirty fists in the air holding militant carrots, hyper-sensitized infants hearing colors and tasting noises as I no longer can. I’m seeking that which the Industrial, alienated mind, the self-designated ontological core around which 'lesser-developed' beings orbit, has discredited as base instinct, mocked as madness, dismissed as irrationality, ignored as un-testable, maligned as evil, and scorned as simple-minded, weak, and imitative. I’m seeking the wisdom of all the beings fighting desperately to reclaim their legitimacy and their agency: that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for it because I suspect that it will reveal, in ways more profound and complete than previous explanations I’ve been offered, why humanity turned so savagely upon the breast that nourishes us, instructions as to how to heal the innumerable (and terrifying) divisions and imbalances within and among ourselves and our neighbor species, and a picture of what my life needs to look like in order for me to be an agent of genuine reconciliation between, in broadest terms, the yin and the yang.

I haven’t come up with a slogan for what I’m seeking. I don’t know how to sell it to an Affluenza-stricken, comfort-over-conscience, machismo-obsessed audience. I haven’t figured out how to monetize it, commodify it, list deliverables for a campaign to promote it, or wrangle it into a headline, Congressional bill or UN negotiating text. I haven’t found a serious graduate program that offers a PhD in it. To be frank though, these ‘traditional’ means of delivering messages, assigning value, establishing norms, and gaining insight seem to contradict its very essence.

Though I can’t tell you what the hell it is, I feel like I’m contradicting it less than I used to (contradicting it less, I presume, is one step closer to finding it). For one, on the homestead, I feel like I’m living on a saner and healthier scale. While I still make my forays into the Industrial world through international conference calls and reading the UNFCCC negotiating text like a bedtime story, my days are extraordinarily different from those led by most of my ‘colleagues’. Victories are raising the hoop house or saving the cherry tomato plants or watching the kale babies grow. Disasters are named powdery mildew and scaly leg mites (on the chickens, not on me). Good fun is lighting the burn pile or potlucks at neighbors or going swimming in the pond. The homestead reminds me (and I hope reminds my many exhausted peers) that being an agent of change doesn’t mean sacrificing my physical, mental, and emotional health. Secondly, my fingernails have dirt under them and a lot of my pants now have grass stains on them; I’m particularly gleeful about these things. I’m using mind and body in tandem, moreover, in inauspicious ways that aren’t interesting to the media. Thirdly, I have found something – plants and the rhythm of the earth – on which I must defer to the experience of my mother and grandmothers and ancestors. We have found the common, neutral ground where we can meet, where I can be taught and they can teach, where we’re all empowered (although this common ground, right now, is on telephone, since I’m in North Carolina and they’re still in Kentucky).

Each of these things is evidence of reconciliation in some form or fashion, and each has hummed a few bars of the larger theme that I’m trying to hear. But they are only a few of many, and I suspect there are still many changes that have yet to work themselves out within the listener. So, please, hold these words here only very loosely and apply to them an ample margin of error. As Alice said, “I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly.”

Military Robots and the Future of War

"Mankind's 5000 year old monopoly on the fighting of war is breaking down in our very lifetime."

A brilliant, but disturbing, description of the role of robotics within modern military operations and the general dehumanization of warfare generally.

Imaginal Cells and the Body Politic

A lovely metaphor for the transformations of our time.  Author unknown.

When a caterpillar nears its transformation time, it begins to eat ravenously, consuming everything in sight.  The caterpillar body then becomes heavy, outgrowing its own skin many times, until it is too bloated to move. Attaching to a branch (upside down, we might add, where everything is turned on its head) it forms a chrysalis — an enclosing shell that limits the caterpillar’s freedom for the duration of the transformation.

 

Within the chrysalis a miracle occurs. Tiny cells, that biologists actually call “imaginal cells,” begin to appear. These cells are wholly different from caterpillar cells, carrying different information, vibrating to a different frequency – the frequency of the emerging butterfly. At first, the caterpillar’s immune system perceives these new cells as enemies, and attacks them, much as new ideas in science, medicine, politics, and social behavior are viciously denounced by the powers now considered mainstream. But the imaginal cells are not deterred.  They continue to appear, in even greater numbers, recognizing each other, bonding together, until the new cells are numerous enough to organize into clumps. When enough cells have formed to make structures along the new organizational lines, the caterpillar’s immune system is overwhelmed. The caterpillar body then become a nutritious soup for the growth of the butterfly.

 

When the butterfly is ready to hatch, the chrysalis becomes transparent.  The need for restriction has been outgrown. Yet the struggle toward freedom has an organic timing.  Were the chrysalis opened too soon, the butterfly would die.  As the butterfly emerges, it opens its “right wing” and its “left wing,” and then flies away to dance among the flowers.

 

The awakening of the global heart results from transforming the body politic from the unconscious, over-consuming bloat of the caterpillar into a creature of exquisite beauty, grace, and freedom. This coming of age process takes us to a new mythic reality, a larger story, ripe with meaning and direction. It takes us from the naïve egocentricity of childhood into a larger reality of interdependent reciprocity. It is not a passage that ends in the gray grimness of adult responsibility, denying the colorful spirituality of childhood innocence. Rather, it is a reclaiming of wholeness that denies little, and embraces all.

 

 

Catalysts for the Coalescence of Consciousness

The awakening of consciousness happens first in individuals.  It is a shift from third chakra, ego-based consciousness to fourth chakra, relational consciousness, a shift from I to We.  It is a realization that we are in this together, that we are interdependent, integral agents, part of a larger unity that needs each of us as individual agents. This awakening could result from spiritual practices such as yoga or meditation, psychotherapy, workshop experiences, disenchantment from one’s “normal” life, or any manner of doorways through which we awaken from the trance of consumption and exploitation to a higher vision of perpetual reciprocity, compassion, and unity. At first such individuals might feel alone or isolated; they might be misunderstood or even attacked by others for their strange ideas.

When these individuals find others of like mind, they are strengthened and reinforced. They feel less alone, more empowered, and inspired. They literally “vibrate” at a higher frequency.  They catalyze each other. This is how the imaginal cells come together, organize amongst themselves and become centers of awakening in the new body politic.

 

 

 

On the Disorienting and Abrupt Character of Video Skype

Walking away, 

You slowly fade and become the earth and sky.

I know you will slide off the horizon 

at some moment, but it will be indistinguishable from

the one before or after.

And while my heart aches

I feel like the pace at which we move apart

is just.

These days, continuous spectrums 

of presence and absence

have gone discrete. 

You live in machines

and I turn you on and off, and

with a precise-enough instrument

I can determine the exact time at which 

Your voice and your face vanish.

These days, there is no slipping away;

There is only sudden death. 

It is a threat to the color grey, imagination, rainbows,

all that is in the business of blurring lines

and uncovering wholeness.

But I should not forget my own message.

I should not neglect the natural and obvious corollary:

The miracle of the unexpected resurrection.