Oh Canada Day, my heart is aching and I feel the exact opposite of proud to be Canadian. The horror stories about the behavior of the police toward the people at the G20 keep flooding in and every one gets worse. Video, eye witness accounts, photos. And then I hear the Toronto Police Chief on the radio, pompously justifying the police actions because of the handful of so-called ‘Black Bloc Terrorists’ and their heinous behavior. Not a word, not a hint of apology or admission of any overkill or wrongdoing. I couldn’t believe it, not after what has happened. Do they really think we’re that stupid?

Apparently they do. The police were conspicious by their absence when it came to the vandals. They were allowed (encouraged? Helped?) to smash windows in the downtown financial district and to burn police cars. There was not a hint of police presence or interference in these activities.

How many of these black-clad terrorists were actually undercover police officers? It seems likely that some of them were. This has now become a time honoured police tactic: dress up like the bad guys, do bad guy stuff even if there are no real bad guys around who want to do it in order to get the bystanders fired up and into a mob mentality in order to justify the massive police crackdown that they’ve spent so much money on making possible.

It’s called incitement to riot, wait isn’t that against the law? Ah, you see, the police are allowed to break the law in order to encourage people to break the law so that they can arrest them. It all makes such perfect sense.
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Been a while since we had a poem. I found this one in a written journal (yes, I still write on paper, it’s my favourite in some ways) from a year or so ago:

Free Will

Breathe your breath, reprieve your death
and choose your pathway through
the evidence of obstacle,
it’s time to find what’s true
You think you can, you know you can,
and then reality
it’s all about the way it seems
that’s not the truth you see

Perception calls the truth to live,
but filters out the same

to know what’s real, and still to feel
is such a painful game

Play your cards although it’s hard,
you’ll know it when it’s real

you’ll know it by the way it seems
and by the way it feels

Please listen to the tiny voice,
it will not comfort you

it tells the truth, it offers choice,
but won’t say what to do

the moment comes, you hear the drums,
they shape reality

but there’s no drummer, no disguise,
and no identity

Some thoughts on the transit of Uranus into Aries, first pass tomorrow:

There are two mutually exclusive, co-existent states of consciousness: Dream and Waking.

Animals are Waking while awake and journey in Dream while asleep. Plants live mostly in Dream; birds, mostly Waking, though both spend periods of time in each state.

In nature, these two realms peacefully co-exist. But with the advent of human consciousness (associated with the sign Aquarius, the Water-Bearer) on Earth, we are creating a new reality here on Earth.

Humans are not like the animals and plants; we have a foot in each world, all the time.

All human art culture is an interweaving of the themes of the Dreaming into Waking reality. The Aquarian archetype suggests that an extra-terrestrial, or galactic consciousness guides humanity, and it would seem that this consciousness has not had the interests of Earth in mind.

So far, the reality we are co-creating has been increasingly Hell-ish, and though we may each find pockets of peace, clarity and abundance of our good (if only at times for some), we cannot truly be a healthy, viable species of life on the planet unless we find a way to co-exist with our fellow creatures in a sustainable way.
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Long live crazy poetry! It’s been a while since I wrote one, yay for me! – ph

witch came first

My eggs have all hatched and now the chickens
Are coming home to roost, let others take care of their world,
safety the only concern, best be behind locked doors,
shutter the blinds and blind the minds

Pay no attention to the one behind the curtain who
Seems so familiar. I see a mirror, no enemy,
I got no closed doors, it was a tough job but somebody had to do it,
I am the Queen of my life, director of my play, here and now
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It’s the one hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day today, and because I have been procrastinating writing so long, I’m going to use the day to motivate myself. And because I have been procrastinating writing so long, this is very long!

Tonight, there is an event on Hornby I’d love to be at, and if I still lived there, I’d be all over it. But instead, I am here, home alone (I did receive an invitation to read today at an event on Mount Washington, but my car isn’t mountain-worthy and I was unable to hook up with anybody else going, not knowing any of them and all.

I miss my island! I miss my community. That’s the truth. Still, I feel so many exciting openings beckoning in this community, I don’t imagine I will be lacking for opportunities. But. It’s not Hornby.
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It’s a new day, a new year, a new decade in a next-to-new millennium, and I must be excited by this at a purely body level because I woke very early this morning (before dawn) despite going to be very late and have not been able to fall asleep again. I surrendered at last, and rose at 8:30 to consider this thing, this new thing I’m in, this new life.

This could be the beginning of something utterly unprecedented in my own life and in human history. Then again, it might be more of the same old, same old stuff on a greater scale. It’s entirely up to me and up to us on a macro / world / political level.

There is something coming up this year that astrologers have been calling the ‘Cardinal Climax’ and I’ve been talking about it to my astrology students for a few months now. It’s an opportunity for a profound new awakening, or perhaps disaster of epic proportions. Yikes!
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The 365days photos are piling up, indicating that I’m not posting enough here. I like to peruse my archives seeking inspiration, and I regularly discover things written in the past that had gotten filed away under ‘forgettery’. This one from 2006 needed a fair amount of editing, so it’s partly new again.

This is one of those channeled, deep, talking-to-me-as-much-as-anybody-else type pieces that tend to baffle the part of me that just isn’t that smart yet (partly why they get filed away for so long). As much puzzle as poetry, it can take me years to own a particular piece. When I do get it, though, they tend to make a profound kind of sense.

While there are a lot of levels, verse 2 of seems appropriate for this global warming conference in Copenhagen.

Your Suffering Savior

Body, breath, life isn’t cheap
lion in jungle crouching to leap
Boogie’s in the shadow, she never sleeps
So mothers, kiss your kids goodnight
This electric dark draws nightmares
too stark for sweet child minds
who always should stay safe and blind,
and aren’t you Momma’s precious babe? (more…)

I haven’t forgotten. What a shock it was, all our fears manifest at once. Fourteen young women, massacred for no other reason than being female! We were rocked to the roots by the proof of the pudding of fears our generation of women was fed, to wit: ‘don’t dare pursue your dreams, you’ll be killed if you do‘.

(In case you’re American or too young to remember, you can read all about it here.) Murder sucks for any reason, but random, gratuitous slaughter of the young, ambitious and promising is particularly horrifying.

The tragic irony of Tempest Gale’s murder in November just a few weeks before the twentieth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre just serves to stir the pudding. But dammit, change must come.

I recorded this song last night. It’s raw and rhythmically ragged, but a powerful version, I think; I was alone in the room and feeling emotional at the time. I wrote this just after the Montreal Massacre.

Actually, it was on the following International Women’s Day. Anne Cameron had come to Hornby and given a rockingly powerful talk at the Hall, after which I went out and bawled my head off in my car then wrote this song.

It hurts to sing, because after twenty years, so little has changed. Still, so many pointless losses, so few gains, politically speaking, socially speaking. Oh, women now have the right to go die with the boys in the sands of Afghanistan, I suppose. It was never my ambition to be Sgt Rock.
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Once again, I find myself thinking of, feeling for, wishing for my children. I speak to this feeling on this dark night as we move toward Scorpio New Moon. There is a time and a place for such a subject, and here we are, now.

It’s not their fault that they are who they are (ie, my children). They didn’t ask to be born, nor did they ask for the storm I called into being partway through their childhoods.

It’s true, I confess, at my behest a tempest tore through the fabric of my family, sundered children from ancestors. To become a better mother, I chose to face my demons.

I knew not what I did; I was not ready; they were not ready.

They raged like escaping a cage, or Pandora’s box. And lock, stock and shock, I was overwhelmed, underwater, lost in an inundation of pain, an avalanche of tears, a phantasmagoria of multidimensional experiences. I saw my schizophrenic brother in the hospital, and I knew that could be me.

I was careful, I channeled my crazy into songs, stories, poems, drawings, tears, personal growth study and creative conversation.

Still, it had to have been hard to be my kids. I feel for them. Not that it was so easy to be me, but it was their needs I most longed to meet, and I grieved as I washed away on waves of creation.

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As promised, I made a vlog for Blog Action Day. And as usual, I’m uncomfortable with how it came out. I want to rebut myself, add points I missed, edit, change, do a sequel. Put on a costume, makeup. Tell funny stories.

Bah. This is just me, plain and simple.