Dear Tribe,
In honor of the massive nationwide protests against authoritarianism in the United States today – the Body Poetry workshop is cancelled.
Instead, GO to your local protest—show up, be seen and heard, be peaceful at all costs, and keep it embodied.
The most powerful form of protest is to be fully embodied—to claim and reclaim the sovereignty of your embodied self: your social identifiers are not state property, nor are they corporate assets, but we live in a world where your fingerprints, your face and your voice have all been commodified. We must stand in the integrity of our sovereign selves in service to each other, with every breath, and every step. Take up a gentle fearless space wherever you find yourself.
To that end we are being collectively manipulated and controlled more than any time in the history of the human race. This is the dark side of the technological revolution, which has led to such a consolidation of power that we—in the United States, yes, but also globally—now find ourselves walking, as Joanna Macy once described, arm in arm into the darkness together, as one human family.
We are also practicing ACTIVE HOPE. Hold this, and Joanna Macy’s voice in your heart as you go out to stand and sing and march in solidarity as one tribe, to uplift each others spirits:
My deepest heartfelt desire today is to be standing next to you, arms linked, and voices unified in chants for peace, disarmament, solidarity, protection for the environment and the oppressed. But I will share with you from this place of vulnerability that today I am home recovering from a seizure. So I will meditate and say many mantras for peace and compassion from the couch, and will visualize warm luminous lights of protection surrounding all the courageous, fearless, embodied beings on the streets today to march and claim your collective power.
Here is a poem from my heart for today, may you carry this poem in your heart, and may it inspire you to be fearlessly embodied wherever you are meeting your shadows:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or winding path?
The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is— Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
~ From “Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke”