“…and if the species is to achieve its aspirations for justice, reduced suffering and transcendent life, and if it is to prevent the triumph of machinery that it so clearly fears, an unprecedented level of imagination is required.” Barry Lopez
“We discern that the urge of the times is not to fix a broken system, but to acknowledge our inherent power to summon other worlds.” Bayo Akomolofe
“We have to change our minds sufficiently to live differently and act in ways that will preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings. When we incorporate these ways of thinking, we will no longer be people who do harm. The changes we are called to make so that the earth and all beings might survive are extensive and extreme. They require comprehensive and global shifts of consciousness and activity… We have allies. They are not all human. The future is possible.” Deena Metzger, The 19 Ways
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Every day the news is darker and more alarming as it is clear that more and more people are suffering, as is Earth, as are all the holy beings of Earth. I do what I can. I sign a petition. I write a note to an elected official. I send money. I can’t go to the emergency demonstration at the border of Gaza today so I make a contribution and write a long commentary so as to feel part of the surge of conscience as we watch genocide and crimes against humanity being enacted before our eyes. But everything I do, inadvertently, reinforces, reifies the system we are living in from which these cruelties emerged.
I continue to edit, fine-tune, a novella I am writing, The Story that Must Not be Told. It will be published shortly in Germany and here in the US. This fact is part of its content. “This book began as a simple tale, a sad story, about a young woman whose life had a tragic end. But it morphed into the tragic tale which we are all living.” Every day the story becomes more entangled in the origins of Ina Andreae’s suicide and in the consequences of these events. Her family was a shipbuilding company involved with the 3rd Reich and we are living in the habits of equally horrific activities. We have become a cruel culture of unimaginable proportions. The story that must not be told, was hers originally, but now it is ours – we do not want to know what we do, who we have become.
I am finding myself peeking at images of the secret prison, CECOT, in El Salvador, to which immigrants were illegally sent by the current administration. These images, tragically are becoming familiar, like Kim Phuc, the napalm girl of the Viet Nam war, and Alan Kurdi, the drowned toddler from Syria washing up on the Turkish beach, but these images have no individuals in them, except we know Albrego Garcia is there, which is part of the horror. Also, I suspect for many of you, as for myself, we are not able to look steadily at them and really, really, really don’t want to imagine ourselves or our loved ones living there, what it is like for them on a moment to moment basis. The bunk beds that are metal sheets. The toilet visible to all, always. Clear torture is visible even as one is moved from one place to another One body bent over upon another. Impossible postures assumed on pain of worse. Most of these people if not all of them will never be released. This is their lives. And if they are released, who will they have become? Envision it. Oh, No!
These words do not transmit it.
I will show you one image – please go and look at the others. Stare at them, not until you can bear it, but until you absolutely can’t.
Well, I will show three images:
This is where I found them: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Secret+prison+el+salvador&atb=v113-1&ia=images&iax=images&iai=h
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Now what? Now the three quotes above are to be fathomed - and careful and loving activity begun to undo what we see before us which is the direct consequence of the culture we are inhabiting which we must change. What we have been living has come to this. We must change it. .
Andrea Mathiesen quotes Bayo Akomolofe this way, “There is no solution to the problems of the world, that instead we must develop new ways of seeing.”
We do not know how but we must act so the future exists. We must see how to meet it now.
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In a moment I will be reading at a Launch event for Dark Matter: Women Witnessing anthology, Dreams Before Extinction. This is the piece I will read which seems like the appropriate antidote and medicine for the now which is above and the future of restoration.
DREAMING ANOTHER LANGUAGE: SHE WILL NOT KILL
It is raining. I am writing in rhythm with the rain, and it is setting up a communication in another language.
I have been speaking to, praying for the rain, as I watched the land parch, watched the animals desperately seek water as the purple sage withered and browned
I began by praying that the rain would come. But we do not deserve it. Then I prayed on behalf of the rain. Such prayers require another language.
I am not writing in a straight line. I am writing in a circle. If you write in a circle there is a field within it. The field is the earth and the future
Here comes the rain. What needs to be offered, so the rain can be free to be itself?
We must change for the land to be free. For the rain to be free. We must change entirely. We must change so that we do not live against the earth and we do not live against the rain. We must give our lives to the rain.
I give my life.
This is what the dream requires through its language from another world. It is a sacred message from Spirit. The dream comes in its own language to remind us that we have to learn this Language so we will understand the dream. Understand what we are being called to set right:
Here is the dream.
She will not kill:
The dream came in another language. it came in a rhythm from another language and, spoke of another world than the one we inhabit. An unknown world.
I am the Mother in a Spain of the Imagination and I am going to the Teacher. I fall to my knees before her as one falls to one’s knees before someone one trusts implicitly. We are women in a Spain of the Imagination. We have dark hair, our faces are strong and clear, we wear black skirts and white blouses. But if we wore only black you would not be surprised.
I tell her that I have come about my daughter. She is the Daughter. She will not kill. I will not allow it. She is a revolutionary, as we all are, as we must be. I tell the teacher with whom I am now collaborating, who understands everything, I will send the daughter away. She will go to another country. To a country of such women as we are or we have become, A country that forbids killing.
Now I am, or she is, speaking to him. I am, or she is, saying, “No, you will not kill.” He is a revolutionary, My daughter and he together, they will do what they must. They are here in this country, this Spain of the Imagination, and they will leave without killing. Killing will not be the last act.
I speak this to the Teacher. She is seated on the single wood chair by the windows in a classroom empty of children. I fall to my knees and then I rise up. It is possible that I am also the teacher. It is possible that there is only one person in this dream and it is myself. I am everyone in the dream as I must be, because it is a dream and that is how the dream teaches us. There are no others in a dream; there is only what is being told to us by the dream—which, ultimately, knows what needs to be known.
This is the dream. A dream from a world of the imagination that birthed me when I was a young woman, and when killing (despite Guernica, despite World War II, despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki) was not killing a person, but an act that created another world. In such dreams of language, killing was a word, not an act. A word that led to another world, an act that had to end in a dream of Life. To kill and not to kill were the same, because they created the world we had to create so that the killing would be over.
It was a world I recognized in an imaginary literature of Spain where I have never been. It was a world I was born into through dreams I do not remember that have rhythms that might be flamenco.
In these dreams that are not dreams so much as patterns in other worlds where the women know what they have to know, the daughters are straight and tall, are revolutionaries in black skirts, have red lips and carry red roses and will not kill. So killing is forbidden. That is how strong they are.
The women say, “This is what we taught you in dreams you have forgotten you dreamed, the dreams that surface at this time in your life when you are asking what is to be done,?”
The rain is here again like the tap of the heels of a woman who is dancing flamenco. She is dancing her life and her death to the music of the guitar whose chord slides down from heaven to earth, from her wild black hair into her pulsing groin, the bud of her clitoris within her red rose. Arpeggio. Crescendo.
This is why she will not kill. Why she will prohibit killing. She is like the rain. She returns. She persists. And so the earth will be restored by the insistent and persistent rhythm of her dancing heels, one phrase after another, in her secret language of the dream and the imagination and the rain,
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I offer you this as a beginning. And this: Rain is an act of imagination. As are rivers and oceans, are they not? And mountains and sand dunes and forests. Even fire. And wind, certainly. Think about it. Unimaginable and wondrous.
Let us learn from them how to be and live and act on behalf of each other, Earth and rain.
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Healer’s Intensive with Deena Metzger on the land – why not? Same dates as announced – June 14 to 20th. A small and intimate, informal group seeking the necessary insight and transformation to meet these unprecedented and difficult times. Some of you remember the extraordinary changes and visions that came with the Intensives in Pine Mountain and in Topanga before Covid. Let’s see if Spirit wishes us to enter that field of knowing and being again. If you are game, please register asap. Contact Jude Weber at deenaworkshops@gmail.com.
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I have been freely offering my writing to the community for 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and / or recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate if you share or leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)
Ty Deena- this kind of aligns with what I’ve been trying to do with the writing and also spending time with Jungian thought, thinking we’re going thru a necessary dark passage back into the self. In my lighter moments I think maybe this is the way that we need to have in the forefront of our minds to stop climate change and face reality. At least we’re all getting familiar with this country and what democracy might-could mean. Partly we need safety and I’ve been bold enuf to think that your profundity is our safety bec I do think it’s possible that we all could be imprisoned. We need deeper layers of language that can keep us united-connected that AI is not able to figure out. I’ve recently found out that my career as a psychotherapist is one of the least likely to be ended. We’ve got somehow to stay true to ourselves which has always been the value to me of what you’ve been teaching.🙏
Just incredible. THIS: "Such prayers require another language." Yes Deena, and you wove it all so wonderfully...giving us access to a deep wisdom that we have never ever needed more. ❤