SANCTUARY IN A TIME OF DREAD
On the day of the Inauguration, we called a Council asking what we wished to Inaugurate. We reiterated the persistent subtext: How shall we meet these times?
The circles that have met since, have had similar themes – the ways the government’s actions are affecting each person, their fears and the possibilities.
The Altadena, Pasadena, Palisades, Topanga, Malibu fires began with tiny embers, tiny sparks and swiftly became infernos. The first action required is to get out of the way. The second, to contain, extinguish the fires and limit the destruction. Then to repair and begin again. Beginning again is tricky. If we are wise, we will begin carefully and thoughtfully, avoiding what inadvertently led to these conditions. We will recognize that the Earth and the animals and all the beings suffered inordinately as well as the humans and reconstruction needs to consider the well being of all in order to avoid horrific reoccurrences.
There is a conflagration in the White House. It is happening so fast we don’t understand what is occurring.
When I began writing this, I made a list of what had occurred since January 20 beginning with
attempts to end or control gender diversity through edict,
rolling back gender protection and medical care,
ending DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion and
all the actions that make supporting Palestinians a heresy, threatening, for example, to to deport non-citizens who support Palestinians within 24 hours,
the mass firing of government officials,
rolling back environmental protection,
opening up leasing and drilling for oil and gas,
withdrawing from Paris Climate Agreement,
blacking out public communications from government health and energy agencies,
withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and on and on and on.
I was looking for a single event that would exemplify what has occurred in the last days and came upon this one:
The cancellation of a University of North Carolina legal scholar’s scheduled talk at a U.S. attorney’s office on the complicity of German lawyers in the creation of the Nazi state.
It looks like everything will burn. How do we protect this Earth from these fires?
Daré occurred on February 2, this year, 2025. Imbolic. Brigit’s holy day. Brigit the Goddess/Saint of Fire and Healing. This is what we are engaged in, isn’t it, Fire and Healing? But Brigit’s fire is very different from the one that threatens to bring all down.
We began Daré by reading from an essay about Safe Houses by Carolyn Brigit Flynn, one of those who, with a community, protects the sacred fire by keeping a candle burning, day after day, year after year. I first listened to her essay about 2007 when we were in the throes of the Iraq, Afghanistan wars and the early awareness of environmental collapse. And in response, she wrote these words about Safe Houses:
They are in cities, towns, villages, on mountains, and near rivers. They are small townhouses and large lodges, modest apartments with soft rugs and sacred paintings, or condos with swimming pools and hot tubs. They are log cabins in the woods, rustic cottages on the beach, tall urban skyscrapers. They are modern-day safe houses, and they can be found in suburbs, cities, farmlands, countryside, deserts and forests everywhere on the planet.
Together, they form an interlinking pathway of sanctuary, meaning, hope and healing. Each safe house exists within the Earth’s spirit. Each offers space for our love and grief, for truth-telling, and for the sacred to unfold. Each honors the privilege of being one among many on our planet of rivers, mountains, deserts, and endlessly diverse animals and creatures. Each carries our individual and collective stories. Lives are mended there, and hearts given peace. Safe houses welcome all religious traditions and require none, and honor all forms of creativity and healing. Here, women with kind eyes and strong hearts midwife souls. Men of gentle being and wise spirit gather others in sacred community. When we visit these places, we feel we have re-entered the web of existence. We have mended our part of the whole.
Then these words toward the end of her essay can guide us in these terrifying times:
During our time of planetary and institutional breakdown, this worldwide network of independently arising safe houses form an underground web, a foundation from which we can build a future.
... The network of safe houses will continue to expand as modern institutions unravel and can no longer sustain themselves. In our time of collapse and upheaval, humans everywhere are teaching ourselves how to live without the larger culture, for we have been and are creating our own.
One of the ways that fascism was undermined, was through sanctuary, through providing safe houses, secret niches, refuges, hidden shelters for people, beings, thoughts, ideas, connections, beliefs, visions.
Native Americans have survived over 500 years of colonialism and genocide through preserving their traditions, cultural heritages, and interconnection with the natural world. Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, is a Place of Refuge on the Big Island, Hawaii which protected the kapu breaker, defeated warriors, as well as civilians during war who reached the boundaries of the Puʻuhonua. Many children, individuals and families were hidden during WWII. Various US cities have declared themselves Sanctuary cities to protect people from illegal deportation. Until very recently, churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, as well as hospitals, were safe places even during war. Terma teachings were originally esoterically hidden by eighth-century Tibetan Buddhists Vajrayana masters to be discovered at auspicious times by treasure revealers. We protect the treasures of this time and the past so that they can be remembered in the future.
On August 8, 2010 I wrote Why I am Writing a Blog. There I wrote:
I was born in 1936, the year of the Spanish Civil War and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. A few years later, when my father learned about the death camps, the gas chambers, the Holocaust, he had a breakdown. What mind could incorporate the realities of 1939 to 1945? After 1942, the Holocaust was the constant subject in our household. 65 years later, the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain in the air like radioactive poisoning and as a species we exercise no restraint on the horror we are willing to inflict on each other, on animals, on beauty, on the earth.
Well, as you know, this theme has repeated itself in my writing. This is inevitable. We have not healed this wound. But I did not expect that I would be writing thirteen years later about fascism coming to the United States. I did not imagine I would refer to an unelected, seeming representative of the US, the richest man in the world, making a Nazi salute to the right wing in Germany of all places. The conflagration in the White House is fascism.
In that 2010 essay, I also wrote the following paragraph that a member of our Daré quoted on January 20th because it provides him a path for this moment:
There are secret passageways to another vital life for this planet. You have to find yours and burrow through. You have a unique way waiting for you that belongs to you. It is the exact fulfillment of your life, experience, understanding, suffering and heart. As I have mine. Each of ours is distinct, but aligned with each other’s. We can help each other find the way. We can find our individual ways and support each other as we devote ourselves to them. Restoring creation is what we can do together.
… Spirit says there are hidden passageways to restore creation.
To restore our public lives, it is essential to protect all that is and all who are precious.
One of the 19 Ways is SANCTUARY. Honoring, providing, becoming sanctuary for all beings by learning the ways of the land. Be and provide Sanctuary.
Let us find all the ways to meet these times.
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Question to the I Ching: What is the energy for posting this piece on sanctuary and fascism?
50 – Fifty Ting / The Caldron changing to 19 Nineteen – Noble Calling
Fire rises hot and bright from the Wood beneath the sacrificial caldron:
The Superior Person positions himself correctly within the flow of Cosmic forces
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Just a tiny side note re "Pu'uhonua" from Hawaiian cultural understanding: Pu'uhonua: Unlike the lands outside of it, Pu'uhonua were not governed by the Ali'i (high class in the sense of hereditary nobility, or rulers...) but by the Gods they revered. One translation of Pu'uhonua is "rising/elevated lands" and alludes to the function a Heiau (temple) of this type served. (In a "Pu'uhonua...a temple of some kind was created to pray and mark place... often made of stones...) In a modern sense, it is interesting to ponder what kind of a place of prayer we/one could build in places of sanctuary...maybe it is only in the individual heart.! but culturally, it denoted a literal location.) I think about this, as i lived for many years in the hawaiian isles. xxx, margo
A related idea is that of refugia, small environments where it is possible for plants and animals which are extinct elsewhere to survive. I learned about this through the study of the metasequoia, a tree that was thought to be extinct but was re-discovered after millennia in a small valley in China, then brought back to life and spread around temperate gardens everywhere. You have created such spaces within so many of us both individually and collectively. We must use them to center ourselves, to keep ourselves sane, and to create actions that will be effective and meaningful, not just assuage our consciences that we are "doing something." Thank you.