The Red Line

Meeting an Election

"This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal."   — Toni Morrison                                             

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“What do you think of Western Civilization,” Gandhi was asked.  “It would be a good idea,” he answered.

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“If you do not have a moral question in your governing process, then you do not have a process that is going to survive.  ― Oren Lyons, Haudenosaunee Faithkeeper of the Wolf Clan

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Three days after the Election that has stunned half the country and is celebrated by the other half, I bring you these fragments, these broken pieces from a broken world. Perhaps you can cohere them to each other to form a path to survival for all beings.

We have held six councils since Election day.  The central focus has been:  What have we not understood?  What have we failed to understand?  Where have we been oblivious? Where have we failed to do what we were required to do? 

***

Seeking the right words for this essay today, if there are any for this time, I asked the I Ching, an impossible question for a Divination to answer: What are the right words for this time?

I received an impossibly precise response.  I can only assume the reality and presence of the spirits speaking to us in these most difficult times.

Hexagram 18 Ku: Repairing the Damage /18: Gu: Corruption and Pestilence¹

The Superior Person sweeps away corruption and stagnation by stirring up the people and strengthening their spirit. You are blessed with an opportunity to resuscitate that which others have abandoned as beyond repair.

This ruin wasn't caused by evil intention, but by indifference to decay. Just by addressing yourself to the problem, you exhibit a new awareness, a fresh perspective. This is a time of recovery, renewal, regeneration.

***

Jeanette Staine came to the Election night circle from her home in South Central Los Angeles and, for the first time in ten years ,she brought some of her children, three Black daughters, ages 23, 20 and 16.  As soon as I saw them, I knew what was required of us. They needed to feel welcome and sincerely respected though they were much younger than those who had gathered for Council and they needed to feel safe. 

In Council, they said, their peers had voted for Trump because they didn’t believe anything would change under Kamala. They said the time of the pandemic was awful and afterwards their generation was very hungry, but not for food.  They said they wanted things shaken up, they wanted change and they didn’t trust Kamala or the Democratic party to create it on their behalf.  They felt she was part of the elite and the establishment which would continue. They didn’t trust government to be on their behalf.  They also said, their peers did not do research before they made their choices, but listened to the Influencers and whatever was on social media. They have been embedded in social media.

Their mother said, she was very afraid, very afraid for her children and herself in the coming times. 

***

Hexagram 18 – Changing line 9 at the 3d:

Managing and straightening the father’s pestilence

You must deal with the corruption of authority.  There will be regrets that you cooperated with it in the past.

A woman reckoned with what she had always known, that stunned her now: she had voted for someone who had not put the climate and the Earth first.  That it had barely been mentioned in the campaign.  That it had not been the center in the discussion of the returns.  In the future, she would only vote if the Earth’s protection and restoration were at the core. 

In the Council, I asked, what is your red line?  What set of values are the red line which you will not cross because to do so is to defy or violate the furthest limit of what is tolerable, allowable or forgivable. 

Another woman, greatly distressed, realized she had voted for a candidate who had touted maintaining America’s greatest military in the world, that she had voted for someone who would probably not stop sending weapons to Israel, that she had not protected the Palestinian people, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. 

I am so tired of hearing – We will fight to win.  Or, we will keep fighting, send money.  We will win this war.  We will fight and we will fight and we will fight. Fight. War. Fight.

In my dream, the woman picked up a rifle so she could protect a child or an animal.  Then she trained to use the rifle. Then she discovered, the training induced competition in her and soon she forgot why she was using the rifle originally, as she focused on hitting the target again and again and again. In the dream, she wanted to convey the poison of this transition to us. 

***

Corruption/Renovating describes your situation in terms of poison, putrefaction, black magic and the evil deeds done by parents that are manifested in their children.  The way to deal with it is to help things rot away so a new beginning can be found.

***

A Native American elder said “We have dealt with this for 500 years. It doesn’t matter who is in power.  It is all the same. 

***

When people were expressing their fears for the rise of fascism and being the victims of revenge politics, I was thinking of the unmarked graves with the broken and starved bodies of tiny Native children who dared to speak their own languages.  These children had been forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in our government schools and in schools run by the Catholic church.  Did I say this occurred, until recently, in the United States and in Canada?

***

The Response.  The Shaman Speaks: Spirit works in those who lay out the offerings.  The ideal Realizing Person reflect this by rousing a sense of our common needs, strengthening the power to renew the Ancestral images. You are journeying into the world of the great symbols.

The Native American elder remembered what an elder had taught her: They had survived five hundred years of genocide enacted by this culture and government because they had remembered to be thankful and preserved their prayers, ceremonies and rituals and their relationship to the Earth and lived accordingly.

What she meant by they had survived, she meant the prayers survived and the tribal wisdom and their relationship to the Earth even when they were removed from it.

Now that we may be facing the dark times, we need such prayers, ceremonies and rituals, such relationships with the Earth as our primary way of being and to live our lives accordingly.  But we do not have these because we have yielded to the values and demands of a secular money driven society.  Because we are in the habit of voting for the lesser evil. Because we are taught to think “I” and not “we.” Because we are energy dependent and refuse to change. Because, first we want to preserve the status quo, that is our lifestyle.

***

At midnight of Election night, after the Council, when the trends were becoming clear, I spent two hours packing my car as great winds were predicted, with gusts of 80 to perhaps 100 miles an hour. The last time something similar occurred, I sat in the living room listening to the wind, which sounded like a great god, and so I prayed to it, beginning, as one must, with praise, as it slowly and carefully lifted the roof from my house and folded it down on the other side.

The morning after the election, I taught a writing class while listening to alerts for the Broad fire, fairly close to me in Malibu, which was contained to 50 acres and the Mountain fire burning toward Ventura which tonight on November 9^th after burning 20,650 acres is 17% contained.  The Fire Chief said, “The fire has laid down.”

Ventura County Animal Services said 115 horses, five ponies, three donkeys, seven sheep, 33 goats, four mini horses, one cattle, and 20 alpacas are being sheltered Friday as evacuees.

What is Earth telling us about how we live?

***

Lise Weil, Editor of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, wrote, “have to say I agreed with what you said at Daré about this being the most brutal and violent moment in our history. At the very least I think there's never been a harder time to be alive, for any sensitive being!”

Reading that, I thought, Yes, this is the darkest time even though it has happened before, again and again.  But the environment itself wasn’t at stake then.  But the Earth wasn’t being assaulted in the same way then.  It hadn’t been global, affecting every single person and being on the planet.  And it hadn’t been up to each of us before to radically change our minds and the ways we are living and what we are imposing on others.

But still, it has happened before and we can learn from the ancestors and other companions living now on the planet who were or are already struggling with these forces.

In 1972, I marched with hundreds of thousands in Chile in celebration of the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. One year, later we looked on in horror as General Pinochet with the support of the US government, bombed the Moneda and instituted a brutal fascist coup. It can happen so quickly.

As we do not know in any way how to meet these times, we can ask the ancestors to teach us what they suffered and how they survived as a people and to teach us the prayers, and the values and the relationships with the other beings, so we can survive, so a contemporary sustaining and beautiful culture might be born and it might survive.

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The 19 Ways asks us to change our minds sufficiently to live differently and act in ways that will preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings… so we will no longer be people who do harm…. we have to change our minds as we won’t fully know what to do or how to do it until we respond instinctively with different minds, values and reflexes. …

The changes we are called to make so that the earth and all beings might survive are extensive and extreme. They require comprehensive and global shifts of consciousness and activity. No one is exempt from such a challenge.

***

Hexagram 29  K’an Dangerously Deep   K’an Repeating Pit/Ghost River

You are facing a crucial trial along your Journey.
The danger of this challenge is very real.
It is a test of your mettle.
If you can maintain your integrity and stay true to your convictions, you will overcome.

            Repeating the Pit. Danger. The Ghost River

There is a connection to the spirits that will carry you through. Hold your heart fast.  An offering brings you success. Making a move in the face of danger brings honour.

***

Forget the elections.  And as may be necessary, forget the government.  We have to create the life and the ways together that we have asked government to provide for us. The way the people lived before the colonial mind took over.  We can create sanctuary for each other and for all the beings.  We can because we must.  Because Earth gives us sanctuary, we can live in such ways as to provide sanctuary for Her.

So, hold your heart fast and leap!

1. Stephen Karcher, Total I Ching, Myths for Change and IChing Online.net.

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