The morning after Halloween I awoke from a night of dreams that bordered on the stark disquiet that is nightmare. I felt as though my spirit journeyed along the thinning veil between the worlds that separates the here and now from possible futures and pasts lived by all who came before us.
I started on this journey in a an apparently symbolic borrowed home of my two grand-twins, girls aged almost 4, but who slipped between baby, toddler and child status in the first part of the dream that was at a vacation home of their parents. My husband was knocked down by cattle who had pushed into a ramshackle, un-renovated part of the home. We spent a very long time attempting to get the cattle out of our house and taken away.
Animal rights activists were trying to get us to not turn them back to their owners. Livestock was everywhere, climbing stairs, and asking for attention and kindness as though they were companion animals. They were mindlessly, unknowingly trampling people and possessions in their attempts to masquerade as pets.
We, who had blossomed into a small community, had to protect our kids and grandkids. But we watched in horror as the room we were in changed to a train car traveling along an elevated rail over cattle cars destined for the slaughterhouse being loaded with the cattle we had evicted. I spoke to someone in the car saying that the area south of Amarillo was nothing but fields of death, slaughterhouses.
The next several scenes all took place in the freight car. More and more people including activists who had symbolic street theater gags in their mouths along with anonymous others crowded the car until there was a press of people standing. The car doors would open but there was no way out. At the doors was a press of more people being shoved into the cars. Guards took boxes and planks and squeezed us back until we were stacked on each other, knowing the people below were smothering. At one stop the people who were to enter the car were concentration camp internees, it was at this point that all individuality was lost and no one knew anyone else. Even the relationships that I cherished at the house, before the train, were dissolved into nothingness with neither memory, recognition, or concern.
At times guards entered and walked over the tops of us with packs of dogs trained to sniff out the remnants of the street theater protest props such as pink fabric gags or specific individuals for whom they were still searching.
I woke before any destination was reached, although one of the last stops I remember was the train station of a city known for producing beautiful hand blown glassware. and boxes of this beautiful product filled every in of the platform.
I had thought that my dreams from where Halloween Night bumped into All Souls Day and Dia de los Muertos might bring visits with departed family and friends, but instead I found metaphor and allegory.
Obviously, at least I think it is obvious, I am concerned about the future of the world and the un-sustainability of our consumption practices. I hear the activists and scientists telling us what will come to be, but I am on that train car along with everyone else and out future could be as bad as the Holocaust was to those in concentration camps. But the ray of hope I see in the dream is that we haven’t arrived, and that wonders like the City of Dresden, represented by the glassware, still exist.
There is still time. But we have to get off the tracks we are on and begin sustainable living right now.
After writing this post to record my dream I found out that yesterday, the day I awoke from the dream, was International Vegan Day. The coincidence, synchronicity, message from the ancestors, call it what you will, was quite powerful and I am now convinced that it signaled a need for turning away from meat-eating in order to keep us from sending ourselves into the mass extinction occurring on earth at this moment.
International Women's Day 2014
One thing I admire about women’s activism is that it is like a session on a trampoline or the net beneath a high wire acrobatics. I visualize it as women standing on a web or net that overlays a map of the country or globe. As individual women change activist levels to attend to family, work, and community matters, and she sinks down a less active level, others raise up with outrage and vigor, and a small few are bouncing like mad up to the sky in near manic activity. The later activists are often bounding from place to place across the network as well.
This “sproing-ing” network is how I first became aware of International Women’s Day. On March 8th, 2003 when I marched with CODEPINK Women for Peace in their first mass action in Washington D.C. I stayed active with this group from then until 2010 when I last traveled to D.C. to join with other CodePinkers for an action.
I was not among those arrested. I was among the 10,000 supporters who rallied in Malcolm X Park (Meridian Hill) and marched and rallied with them. For a good review of this march and the peace and IWD history and linkage, go to Jo Freeman’s site.
I guess I am one of the one’s who has sunk down into a less active state, but I am part of the network that connects women across the U.S. and the globe to act in coördinated fashion per issues of importance to us all. At a conference I attended last fall, Tear Down the Walls, the women of the conference called for recognition of the need for women’s integral participation in united action in the peace and justice movement by including IWD or Mother’s Day into a global season of action. What emerged in altered form is the Global Climate Convergence which is great, but includes neither International Women’s Day or Mother’s Day. What emerged was from (Mother) Earth Day to May Day.
I love and respect the dedication of the international labor rights movement, but, always the outsider, I cannot condone the emphasis on what I consider outdated socialist iconography and language. If our goal is to energize old and activate new participants into a process that creates a new planet-round infrastructure we have to focus on women, women’s concerns, and women’s condition in the world and not traditional male dominated political narratives, including socialist and communist ones. Working from the triple bottom lines model that integrates people, planet and profits and refashion our human culture into a peaceful one that supports a sustainable society then we must make women focal to the structure as the basic human state, defined by numbers, is the female.
Celebrate an commemorate women everyday, not just today.
So, in this spirit of unity, I am calling upon all of my sisters of the earth to look for the avenues we already walk together that can lead us toward not only a livable, but a sustainable, future.