Tears. I love Reverend Billy. I love all who break my heart open again and again and again.This is the way more space is cleared for love. Yes, a moment of clarity. So many moments of clarity that are growing and growing. Our open hearts are the hope of the world. And the hope for all of the children of all of the species today and on into the future for the next seven generations and beyond.
Reverend Billy: "The transformation of Standing Rock needs to be carried to many towns and cities. The Earth’s response to its own fever is everywhere all the time, and our activism must use this as our map. We need to press up against militarized and consumerized citizens at all points, and then convert them to life. Can we pull them across the border between death and life?"
I pray it will be so! Bless us all! 
Molly
Molly
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| "The force that upsets entrenched power the most is this compassionate living, this community in plain sight," writes Talen. (Photo: Dark Sevier/flickr/cc) |
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| With Reverend Billy in Portland, 2016 |
Earth-force meets money-force at Standing Rock. I’m so relieved I’m here. It scares me to think that I might have missed this.
We get up at dawn. Four hundred people walk slowly in a light snow to the river by the camp. A teacher is talking. His headdress is a crisscrossing of long, narrow feathers. He is of the Havasupai, the people who live by the blue-green waterfalls at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He calls out across the river. “Water is life! Take me! My heart beats with you!”
It’s cold at 7am. The children don’t seem cold though. They run around in the mud and ice. There are 80 tribes here. Some say many more. As we stand on the shore with a slow drum beating, the people shout “water” in many languages.
The Earth-force is represented by this river and these eagles and these water protectors. We see the Money-force, standing over there on the bridge, just a couple hundred feet from the edge of long meadow of white tipis along the Cannonball River. The police look like a long row of Darth Vaders.
In the environmental movement, we have yearned for the success of the Civil Rights and the Gender Rights movements. Few of us, though, face the police like the freedom-fighters of old. Arrests and trials are only one indicator of a movement’s power, but an important one. As environmentalists we fall back on soft confrontation dominated by data. Data is bloodless. Lobbying, position papers, endless graphics and electronic petitions might as well be abandoned in the age of Trump.
Evidence points to the need for a quasi-religious transformation of cultural values. —Dr. Anne Ehrlich and Dr. Paul Ehrlich
Who has undergone this “quasi religious transformation” the Ehrlichs call for now in the time of the Earth’s crisis? I think of Wangari Maathai and her billion trees, Edward Abbey and Earth First and the dreams of freeing western rivers of their dams, Judi Bonds and Larry Gibson in their danger-filled opposition to mountaintop removal coal mining.
The transformation of Standing Rock needs to be carried to many towns and cities. The Earth’s response to its own fever is everywhere all the time, and our activism must use this as our map. We need to press up against militarized and consumerized citizens at all points, and then convert them to life. Can we pull them across the border between death and life?
Suddenly there is clarity for Earth activists. With extinction accelerating and climate changing, we must transform with the intensity that one associates with religion. If some of us wouldn’t be able to convert an actual faith, at least a new Earth politics must be strong enough to break up the over-scheduling, the debt, the traditional careerism - the things that make it impossible to freely act. We have the time if we take the time.
Three movements in recent years galvanize us. In these citizen movements we did take the time, took the risk, and made a difference. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock. The lesson in all of them, the thing they have in common is that so many changed their own individual lives in order that they could then change the rest of us. In all three, the spiritual element is carried by the act of living together, literally living together, without the supervision of the corporations or government.
Please continue this article here: http://commondreams.org/views/2016/11/26/standing-rock-moment-clarity-progressive-activists
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