The firehose

If you give up in the first 13 days, they've done their job well.

The firehose is directed at my face. The flurry of activity from the White House (and the media coverage of it all) is too much to bear head on. If I stand directly in front of the hose, I will be defeated! However, I can take one tiny step to the left and I can watch the barrage while still being able to move towards my own goals.

That’s what they want, I think, for me to turn away from overwhelm and disgust. A phrase that came up several times in my morning pages this week: see with your own eyes. The media giants can’t be trusted with tender hearts. One way to combat being utterly frozen by the blast of executive orders is to walk out the front door and see what’s happening directly in front of me.

Some additional that are working for me right now:

• Leave the house, there’s always someone at the library or community center

• Go to the beach (or public park, or whatever is nearby). It has people and dogs despite the ripping winds and 30 degree days!

• Talk to a new neighbor

• Take a trip to the grocery store, gotta see real people every damn day

• Have a party or four

• Go to the parties I am invited to

• Make a plan with a friend in the next four weeks and have something to look forward to

• Subscribe to News, Not, Noise and turn down media sources with twenty-four hour coverage. Try to get the news 2-3 days after it happens, many times the action was reversed or abandoned in that timeframe.

• Read books by wise people, I’m listening to Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer once again. Her traditional knowledge sows seeds for future action.

• Seeking out traditional knowledge from my own cultural heritage (Northern European). When I first started this quest many years ago, I was looking for authoritative history books. Turns out, the old stories are just that, stories. So reading books like Mists of Avalon and The End of Drum Time are the some of the ones that have little keyholes that allow me to see what it was like before Roman colonization of northern Europe.

• Also picking up Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters (more below) and picking a page a day to read.

• Embrace that winter can be a little boring, and boredom gives you time to dream!

• Write down my daydreams of utopia

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Making things has been my most fruitful method for combatting anxiety and for seeking ways to record my own experience here in case someone ever wants to read my stories.

Get your own copy of Folkweaver: Germinating Dreams of Community (I received this as a gift in December) and work your way through the year together.

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REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #22

what do you want
your kids to learn, do you care
if they know factoring, chemical formulae, theory
of numbers, equations, philosophy, semantics
symbolic logic, latin, history, socalled, which is
merely history of mind of western man, least interesting
of numberless manifestations on this planet?
//
do you care
if he learns to eat off the woods, to set
a broken arm, to mend
his own clothes, cook simple food, deliver
a calf or baby? if there are cars should he not
be able to keep his running?
how will he learn these things, will he learn them
cut off in a plaster box, encased
in a larger cement box called ‘school’ dealing with paper
from morning till night, grinding no clay or mortar, no
pigment, setting no seedlings in black earth
come spring, how will he
know to trap a rabbit, build a raft,
to navigate by stars, or find safe ground
to sleep on? what is he doing all his learning years
inside, as if the planet were no more than a vehicle
for carrying our plastic constructs around the sun

Diane Di Prima

Available at the Anarchist Library

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Mutual Aid Distribution

This round of Mutual Aid for artists went to a family in Los Angeles who lost their home. Lucy’s sister is a neighbor of mine here in New York. If you want to send a donation to Lucy and Kevin you can do so at their gofundme.

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That’s is for this one, see you in two weeks.

Bekka