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.

The following quote is from the description on this video of Black Bloc violence:

It should be VERY obvious to everyone at this point, there is a pattern here. Massive crowds of PEACEFUL protesters show up to voice their opinions and concerns, and LIKE CLOCKWORK the Black Bloc comes out of nowhere and FU$%S UP THE WHOLE PROGRAM, EVERY TIME. This is a classic, PREDICTABLE tactic used time and again. And every time it happens the black Bloc gets away while the peaceful crowds are surrounded, harassed, arrested and worse. It is used to steer the public away from what LEGITIMATE protesters are out there screaming about, and is also used as a way to condition the public into expecting harsher police responses and HUGE security clampdowns (1 BILLION DOLLARS) every time there is a protest organized. The Black bloc is a tool of the Global Elite and there is plenty of proof if you are willing to look for it. REAL PROTESTERS DON’T WEAR MASKS, except gas masks, and by the time those are necessary it’s obvious who is on what side! I can guarantee that just like all the past G20 protests, it will come out that the Police (undercover, in uniform, and elements of the Black Bloc), were the ones burning and smashing things, so they have their excuse to rush in on the law abiding protesters! GUARANTEED

“$1 billion of security cannot stop a radical group as they smash a police rental van at University & College intersection, while dozens of police officers sit in rental vans across the street. The Black Block escapes proceeding the closing down the ‘free speech zone’ in Queens Park… G what? Hollywood Psy-Op!”

Video Credit To SupportLocalScene:

http://www.youtube.com/user/SupportLo…

REAL PROTESTERS DON’T WEAR MASKS, except gas masks, and by the time those are necessary it’s obvious who is on what side! I can guarantee that just like all the past G20 protests, it will come out that the Police (undercover, in uniform and elements of the Black Bloc), were the ones burning and smashing things, so they have their excuse to rush in on the law abiding protesters! GUARANTEED

EYEWITNESS REPORTS: Reported in THIS VIDEO – Police allowing destruction, not moving in…

THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING,THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, THAT IS WHAT HYPOCRISY LOOKS LIKE!

But this is the piece that shut down my celebratory mood for good today. It’s a very long, detailed, wrenching, excellently written story by a guy who was arrested along with hundreds of other bystanders, protesters, shoppers, locals and other innocents and detained in cages–yes, cages!–crammed with other prisoners for nearly 24 hours. It’s a hell of a story, the kind of thing you can’t imagine happening here. You just can’t.

But it did. It would make a hell of a documentary film. Paul Manly, I hope you’re on this one. Shame, shame, shame on this country today.

More stories from the mainstream media:

National Post photographers arrested & detained for 24 hours
From the Toronto Star, 20 people tell their stories

Here I was, all set to go downtown and join the community in its Canada Day party, but now all I want to do is cry. Or maybe break some windows and torch some police cars.

If they want to start a revolution, this is the way to go about it. How long are we going to let this crap go on? They’re strengthening the infrastructure of the police state. Will we wait until we’re all confined to cages to do something? What the hell CAN we do?

God damn it. I want my country back. I’m starting to feel like this.

Oh, and the HST kicking in today? I’m not even going to go there. It’s just adding insult to injury.

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

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.

We are learning that there are limits to what we may safely do; we are destroying our own habitat along with that of other species.

Now, as Uranus poises on the brink of Aries, we are poised on the brink of consciousness opportunity; literally, enlightenment is at hand. Now it may be time for humanity to individually (and therefore collectively) choose a new way to conceptualize its existence.

The glyph for Aquarius resembles two lightning bolts side by side; Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to humanity, thereby bestowing consciousness on them, is also an Aquarian tale. Astrologically, Aquarius is known as the Awakener. It acts to awaken, heighten and enlighten consciousness in all ways, good and bad (for there are bad, i.e. destructive ways to be conscious).

Currently, the Awakener passes through the final degrees of the 12th principle, Pisces. This is the final resting place of Dream, where everything, including awakening itself is submerged into the dreaming state.

Thursday, Uranus will pass from Pisces into Aries (1st principle), which is the Zero point of the zodiac. It will retrograde back into Pisces and then move forward again, and each transit will bring potential for shocks, but this first one is liable to be critical. It takes place the day of the Full Moon in Sagittarius, indicating that our collective emotional body will be feeling expansive and open to new ideas.

In Aries, everything begins for the first time. Our collective consciousness is poised to receive a lightning strike that may surge the zombies into a mad search for brains.

“Brains!!” we’ll cry, as we suddenly realize that we have been operating on automatic, without using our brains at all. But then, kabam, here we are…

“Igor, the brain please.” The recycled brain settles into its bony bowl, the switch is thrown, and ….

Yes, that is a good image for Uranus into Aries. The mad Dr. Frankenstein, an Aquarian himself, poises to close the circuits that click the brain into the ‘awake’ position.

Pisces is a realm of life-after-death, fantasy and nightmare (and subjectively real for all that), while Aries represents the triumphal victory of individual existance. Life burst forth from the Void, against all odds, yes!

Mars can be likened to the sperm that successfully fertilized the egg, its very existence implies supreme victory over millions of competitors. Mars can only exist if it has already succeeded in existing (if you can wrap yourself around that moebius thought).

Mars is thought to be associated with competitiveness and the need to fight for existence, but it is more accurate to say, Mars shows where we have already successfully competed in the universal sweepstakes derby.

We’re winners; we have to be, or we wouldn’t be here, riding these amazing computerized luxury vehicles (we call them ‘bodies’ rather dismissively), equipped with technology so advanced that our human attempts to duplicate it remain (so far) rather pathetic by comparison.

Think about how the body really works, how complicated it is compared to even the most advanced computer – it is to laugh.

Uranus’ entry into Aries has the potential to awaken us to the fact that we have already won the race. It’s all good from here on in, if we let it be. Maybe we can start to appreciate what we have, starting with our own precious successful bodies.

Maybe we can transform our conception of our existence away from something rare and precious that we must continually struggle and battle enemies in order to keep (which is the perspective of the sperm) into what we really feel in our Aries selves: exuberant delight at having succeeded at existing beyond our wildest imaginings.

Look at us! We are alive!

Aries is the sign of action; it represents the will to exist, and with our existence, to be active. Mars is energy, purpose, momentum, urgency and drive. When we transform our awareness of that part of ourselves that is represented by the Aries vibration, including Mars and the Ascendant, we can act in the direction of our urgency, instead of acting counter to our own interests, ie, doing battle with ourselves.

Saturn opposing Uranus in peace, justice and harmony-loving Libra will help; Mars, ruler of Aries, passing over Saturn and opposing Uranus in its sign, will help by making sure that something happens; Jupiter, moving in opposition to Saturn, and conjuncting Uranus, will help to balance and expand.

Most of all, we can’t forget the astrological elephant in the room, Pluto in Capricorn t-squaring the whole bunch.

This is nothing short of potential divine intervention, if we allow ourselves individually (and therefore collectively) to be reached by the divine intervenors, if we allow ourselves to be touched, rocked, awakened.

Some of us won’t have a choice. Some will dig in resisting; it’s our habit after all. But it doesn’t take a majority to start a revolution, anymore than it takes a majority of sick people to start an epidemic. The tipping point is sooner than you think. Watch for radical new inventions that change our social structure.

This transition has sent me into an ivory tower of smoke and mirrors, where I feverishly prepare my own consciousness for the strike of the lightning.

What do I need to do?

Breathe.

What else do I need to do?

Breathe.

Anything else? There must be something!

Oh, right. Breathe. Breathe.

Breathing.

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

And a powerful piece of work it is, I got big balls and I may
wear them inside but that doesn’t make them weak
and I may have spent my eggs in my plunge through womanhood,
these moonpausal ovaries are empty as space

but what grows in that fertile place you will soon know,
for it continues in its slow way to take over my play like
a cancer or a child in the womb, stretching its limits, straining
to break free of the cave it has been caught in

and then, the unexpected kicks in and can’t be changed,
The safety of the womb becomes the wild careen
to birth, and yes, if you’ve been locked in long enough
and you stay awake and don’t let yourself die, there’s no need to try

You will be born, and yahoo and holy fuck, and look out!
And ohhhh, and here I am, now, and here is my mother holding me
and everything changes and you are once again small
and all the strange is a blur of new while you slowly reorganize

When I am confined too long in the prison of my blind mind,
all I can do is wish for freedom, feed the desire fire until its
flames burn the building to the ground, another kind of birth
no room for love in that push come to shove

I am one willing to gamble, I say,
I welcome, you, child of truth,
I respect you to the moon and back
and I am the land you will land on,

there is no escape from your mother, children,
I need not seek to hold you to my breast, I release you
with every breath, while feeding the flames of desire
for the family I worked so hard to become worthy of

Only to discover that worthiness has nothing to do
with home, and that I am also okay alone, more than,
better than okay for I have a rich world behind this face,
and here you are, children of grace, wearing your

true faces, and these are the sons and daughter
I love and can never lose. You, the people,
may choose as you will and I may do nothing to
hold you, claim you, name you as my own.

Still, though you have grown and paid your dues, though you
push me away, though you see me irrelevant today, a
has-been as a mother, I can never choose to unbirth you,
one or two or three, you are all inside of me,

and what is in me must come out, this is the shout
I came into this world to spout, like a whale coming
to breach, like a baby crying its way from its womb, like a corpse
scraping its slow escape from its tomb, like my brain

no longer confined by my blind mind, hardlinked to
the cosmos through the closed and open circuits of
my dreaming body, my overarching spirit,
my longing heart and my strong intent, this is

the sense of why I was born and if you were born from me,
you are with me ready or not, love me or not, know me or not

The earth is the bottom line and we share a heritage,
a genetic imperative, an urge to fix the world
through being our true selves in our own spheres
And you owe me nothing, and the balance is even,

your life is a pure gift
you need never repay

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.

So, ain’t I a woman? On this day of days, let me speak for me and for all the women, as I have not for so long. I go dormant sometimes. It seems to be a necessary part of my creative (ie, life) process that certain inner spaces shut down for maintenance while others are focused on, then re-open sometimes months or years later richer and fuller and more productive than other.

I suffer from a surfeit of creativity. That’s a problem when you don’t have enough outlets through which to express, as has been my lifelong issue. I created this blog (in its original form) to give my writing / poet / activist / teacher / storyteller voice an outlet, but it’s expanded to become the place I exhibit my art and music as well.

So yes, here is my blah blah place, and I have held back because I don’t want to look too weird in case potential clients and listeners come shopping to see what I have to offer.

What I have to offer is me, and this is the place I let me hang it all out.

Well okay. One of the places. There’s Facebook too, and Flckr, and Tribe, and Twitter (though I don’t bother much there, which would change if I had followers, and yes, that’s a hint for ya) because it happens I have a lot to hang out.

I’m done being ashamed of that. I was the kid who tried to hide my ‘too-many-A’s’ report card from my parents. It wasn’t okay to be ‘smart’ or play the game of school too well. But I couldn’t help it. I suppose I was ‘smart’ in that kind of way, though virtually oblivious in others.

I have a lot to say and a lot of ways to say it, and that’s the way it is. That’s just how I roll, as the whippersnappers say these days.

It’s scary to say something like that and to realize that I’m old enough to. That it might not actually be a joke to somebody who thinks I am my number. Actually I’m pretty much a whippersnapper myself.

I’m having too much fun rolling with the times and keeping up with who I am now to be old, you see. How could I be old? How could anybody? I still feel as far away from old as I ever have.

It’s true, I’m doing that ‘men’ thing that my mother hates for me to talk about. (Menopause! There! I said it!)

But does that make me old? What is old, for a woman? It seems to be tied into our reproductive capacity. I am no longer in a position to conceive a child, and this in the collective belief system indicates that I’m past my sell-by date. It’s all downhill from here, they say. Whoever ‘they’ are.

I didn’t get heavily influenced by ‘them’ in childhood, which makes it easier to unplug now. I am from the North. I grew up without electricity, a television or a particular community to define myself by (though we always returned to Fraser Lake).

We always lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and I was always the new weird kid. I was the new weird kid in Fraser Lake several times, in fact, because we kept moving away, then coming back a few years later.

I’m once again the new weird kid. I liked this position because it meant I was outside the social hierarchy, though it terrified me too, because of what happened to Melody.

Melody was a beautiful blond girl who moved to the town I moved to at the same time Imoved there. She was stunningly gorgeous, I mean it hurt to look at this girl. Nobody had ever seen a girl that beautiful.

I was very pretty (at the time I believed I was hideous), but I was not in Melody’s league. The boys went mad for Melody. Even the ones with girlfriends. And one day, I saw a circle of girls, with Melody in the middle, and the girls were throwing rocks at Melody and yelling at her to get the hell out of their town.

And Melody went. Her family moved away shortly after. I don’t know how badly Melody was hurt, but they obviously took it seriously. And that was the power of women, to me. The circle of girls made up the social hierarchy at every school I went to, but because I was always new, I never belonged to it.

The circle of women in my family was my social net, one that followed us from town to town, as there was always a relative nearby, an aunt, an uncle, cousins. The men swapped hunting and fishing stories while the women gathered in the kitchen, and that’s where the life was. The laughter, the wit, the magnetic centre of life was with the women.

Men had their own magnetism, for they were the ones who played the music at parties, which drew me equally strongly (not to mention the other thing), and so I perched on the thread that connected the men to the women in my world. Neither one nor the other, I have always felt like the outsider no matter where I was.

The weird new kid, in other words. Which can be fun some of the time.

The world of people outside my family circle was a chaotic swirl of strange events, for everything was changing, my context kept shifting, it was like living in a kaleidoscope. Moving that often was profoundly disorienting to a child of my disposition. I often had fugues where I didn’t know where or who I was. I imagine I could have benefited from counseling, but alas. It was the North.

And so, to age. It’s taken me this long to begin to feel myself poking my eyes outside the inner coils of my own mystery. The feeling is one of youngness, of unfolding potential. I know I have only begun to become who I am, and I expect to live a good long time. I am living as if I will live a good long time. Longer than most people would imagine possible.

I challenge the beliefs of my time, for I know just how malleable reality is and how temporary most laws, even the apparently immutable physical ones (like the law that humans couldn’t fly) turn out to be.

I believe I can alter my life expectancy by altering how I live, what I believe, what I eat, what I do and how I relate to myself, the earth, the ones I love and the ones I am coming to know. Astrology opens the door to learning how to live better, in order to live longer, but not for the sake of being old for a longer time.

If we are to increase life expectancy, we must increase the proportion of our lives that we spend growing. As long as I am growing, I don’t have to be dying. I prefer the feeling of growing to dying.

Growing does not have to occupy more physical space. I don’t need to live in a mansion or have a big footprint on the land. I am growing in my creative potential. Yet I don’t need to produce anything until I am ready, and the longer I wait to become ready, the better. I don’t believe I will die anytime soon, and I see no reason to behave as if I am on the decline in any way.

I expect to be dancing in my nineties. I expect to be reading slam poetry and speaking the word and singing and following my faerie path into greater and greater life right up until the day I die (assuming that happens, which I refuse to do).

What have I got to lose?

So that’s the current status of me. I’m turning fifty-three in a month, and I used to think that was old. The wrinkles in my face do show that I’ve been around a while, but I can’t really see those lines as being about anything except how I look right now. I can see beauty in those lines. I feel I’ve earned them. And I care less and less about my packaging. It’s what’s inside that counts, and the world is going to find out more, when the time is right.

I am officially coming out of denial about my personal confidence and power. I watch myself on video and I radiate a confidence, an angry power that has very difficult for me to own. My mother is a very nice lady. She is sweet as all get out, in a self-effacing, kindly way. You’d like her.

I am nothing like my mother, but not because I haven’t tried to be. Most of my life I believed that I was. Just like her, I mean. I’m not, though, and that’s the way it needs to be. Because this is who I am; I am an Aries, as she is a Cancer. We’re very different people. I have six planets in the fire element, and two fire planets on angles. That adds up to a lot of life force.

If anybody can do this, I can. And my body self has always been confident and self possessed, even when my emotional, mental and spiritual selves have been insane.

Oh yes, didn’t I mention that? I have journeyed through that dim mirrored halls of insanity; you might say it runs in my family.

I have learned how to be sane, and that is to align myself with my body. My body is the part that knows what is best for me. My body is the wisest part of my being. My body is my most loving self.

My emotional self, when aligned with my body, has no pride, is all puppyish desire for petting.

My mind and spirit, on the other hand, have been holding back from this shameful pleasure, for aren’t we here to work and struggle and pay the debt incurred by Adam and Eve who were evicted from that play place? Weren’t we all born in sin, and all that blah blah? This kind of religious guilt feels positively genetic, for even though I was raised an atheist, I come from a long line of religious fanatics.

Um, I mean ‘good Christians.’

Well, what if the debt has been paid already, a thousand times over? What if God has forgiven the debt as He has realized what a fucked up thing that was to do to His children, what if He’s much smarter now, what if He’s learned a thing or two?

Or what if that story is just something somebody made up in order to justify their own bone-deep fear of pleasure? What if our path to consciousness from our prior existence as bipedal animals took us into some kind of a profound species neurosis that has grown to plague the planet?

Or! Or what if we are doing exactly and precisely the right thing to express what the Earth herself is feeling? What if?

Oh such a question is this. I can only answer from my own perspective, and because the title of my blog is ‘Spreading the Gaia Word,’ I will presume on my mandate as translator here.

My body is a part of the Earth, in fact, is made of Earth’s stuff. So in listening to my wisest self, I can also hear the voice of the living planet.

Earth is an entity. She is a woman, to be precise. She is a fat, wrinkled, ancient child-woman, and everything we are doing is Herself doing it. If we suffer from a plague as a species, it is one of hubris, which is a sin (or sickness) of believing ourselves to be separate from our context.

We think that people are the cause of what we see around us, when the truth is, what we see around us, and we ourselves, are simply what is happening now. We cannot, as individuals, control what we do as a species.

Regardless of our political system, we always end up ruled by the few, and these few make up the patriarchy. The patriarchal system and its relationship to the Earth reflects on Earths own crisis of evolution. It’s a crisis. We’re in trouble all right, but it’s the trouble of a changing organism. Earth is in upheaval. She is becoming conscious now.

This craziness can’t last; change is coming, but who knows when? She’s got her own timetable, and we don’t have input, no matter how important we want to think we are.

How do I know this? I just do. I am her, in a way, I think her thoughts. This is a bold claim, but really, I don’t think I am alone in this. I believe many think her thoughts, but most people don’t know that is what they are thinking.

Here is my theory: Earth is still very young, and she is just learning to think coherently. We as a species, along with our inventions (which are really Her inventions), create the structure through which her thoughts flow, as our own synaptic systems form the structure through which our own thoughts flow. We are infinitesimal holographic models of Earth, but we are at best tiny parts of an unimaginably vast whole, and our brilliance is beggared by her potential.

But she’s young. She’s still growing. She’s confused and in a crisis. And we can help her by learning to think ourselves. By harmonizing with our bodies, with our feminine selves. Everyone, men and women alike, is half feminine. We all got half of our chromosomes from our mothers. Half of what we are is her essence.

We can help the earth by helping ourselves. By pulling out of the insanity of the patriarchy, which is going to go down just as the dinosaurs did, and for the same reasons: they were not sustainable–their behavior did not honour the balances of nature. So they had to go.

That’s what I think. And ain’t I a woman? It’s my day, you know.

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!

The Cardinal Climax is a long-term cycle that began with Pluto’s entry into the cardinal earth sign Capricorn, back in 2008, and that signaled a global economic crisis and a collective wake-up around the planetary ecological / climate crisis. Capricorn represents the reality check, the place where the ground meets the falling object, the real bottom line. We’ve been struggling with that one for a while.

Most recently, Saturn (which, with an approximate 30-year cycle, moves much more quickly than creepy-crawly Pluto’s 240 years around the sun) moved into cardinal air Libra this autumn, squaring Pluto. Truth, justice, balance, retribution, struggle, and death and endings are the theme of the day. We are collectively immersed in this particular transit right now, and it’s a harsh one.

But the real kicker waits for late spring when Uranus (with an 80 year cycle) moves into cardinal fire, Aries. Aries is the first sign of the cycle and represents new beginnings, birth, and explosive emergence of life from the void. Uranus has been dissolved in the final stages of Pisces for a while now, and as it is the Awakener, the principle of sudden, shocking, unexpected change, its transit into Aries is bound to rock and roll us all.

The ruler of Aquarius, Uranus holds the potential for a rebirth of true loving global Heart, a new consciousness of connectedness and kinship among all life forms. It also holds the potential for global conflict of unprecedented proportions—a revolution that explodes in violence, an uprising against oppression and global tyranny.

We each have personal responsibility, which (hey, I’m an Aries ya know) means me. That’s right; I’m the one who can change the world. And so are you. We are each and all the one and only being responsible for our personal reality. Even if we feel powerless and victimized by all the Big Deals going on behind the scenes, somewhere in the back rooms of our own heads, our own personal sordid compromises and deals with the devil are our own place to start.

Until we clean up our own basements and back rooms and call on our own corporate leaders to clean up their acts (you know, stuff like health and finances and dietary / exercise change, walking our talk, being in integrity with ourselves, crying our tears and feeling our fears, facing our demons and recognizing their faces in our own mirrors, all that boring yet critically important crap), we don’t have a single leg to stand on when it comes to finger pointing ‘out there’.

We’re all living in a glass house this year, and it’s time to pull back the pointing finger and breathe our own breath, keep our own feet on the ground and stand up for what we personally require, giving what we are personally empowered to give, and see what changes from there.

We might be very, very surprised. Strike that: we are guaranteed a surprise, with Uranus’ movement into Aries, but the more personal responsibility we take for our own situations, the more we’re going to like the surprises we receive. The world is becoming ever more fractally complex, new and exciting, and who knows what waits down this shining highway?

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling positively upbeat about this coming climax. Oh yeah. It all starts with this breath, inhale, exhale, this body, muscles shifting and moving, this skin, sensing, touching, this heart, beating.

Nice. Happy New Year, new decade, new life to us all. And bright, grateful blessings to the year we have just been through. What a ride it was, with the full range of joy and trauma, as Saturn’s square to Pluto manifested in the death of our dear TemPeSt Gale. My photos in this article are from that terrible time, showing just how far behind I’ve gotten in blogging. That will change, or so I intend.

TemPeSt was killed on the day the Saturn-Pluto square was exact, providing Hornby Island (and possibly the world, for who knows what she could have become had she been allowed to blossom unplucked?) with a crisis of 9/11 proportions.

In fact, the last contact between Saturn and Pluto was back in 2001 when the opposition between Saturn in Gemini (the planet of buildings and financial authority in the sign of the twins) and Pluto in Sagittarius (the planet of deep, compressed emotions such as rage and terror in the sign of religious fanaticism and dogma) blew a hole in the world as we knew it.

It was a dark and terrible time, as the photos above illustrate, but as dark times do, it passed. The memories remain along with all the footage of her music and poetry, performance and vitality. In a sense, TemPeSt lives on in more than mere memory, for the internet and the technology of audio and video recordings keeps her alive and in our eyes and ears, as well as the she that will always live in our hearts.

2009 was a beautiful and potently positive year for me personally, aside from that hole blown in it in November. So many of my dreams and desires have come true, so many openings are flowering, I am deeply grateful for my life now.

Blessings to you all in this new year, new decade, new life. Blessed be to us all.

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

Feel your feelings,
live the tale as it unfolds inside,
find the powers that can heal and help
you and yours to open the doors,
and find the locked one
Go patient and slow for she is shy
and terrified of sensory input
and she delicate beyond belief.
She needs that you go slow
That’s the only speed she can sustain
as she clambers gravid
from her scattered tombs,
graves, barrows and
watery deeps
so cold,
stone
bone
alone

(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.

What about the girls who want to be world leaders, who want to put an end to war, who want to bring the Goddess (ie, the feminine principle, the Earth) into greater prominence, to balance with that old white beard in the sky? Where are they?

I’m sure (in fact, I really am sure) that big changes are happening, have happened, will happen. I’m just feeling sad right now. Grieving still, not just for what happened so long ago, but for what has happened so recently, and what will happen.

All the boys who have to grow up to fight and die even though they might rather be dancers or housewives. All the girls who grow up to be soldiers because they think that’s the only way to be equal. Gawd.

Here are the lyrics:

The Women Are Rising

With every living cell in our bodies
every beating of our hearts
we’re living on levels beyond what we knew
as we pick the old patterns apart
of our souls and our lives.
But oh, the patience and the pain
and the too many pointless losses with every gain.

Link to the audio: listen here

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.

The Artist’s Child

The artist’s child sits
staring at Mother’s
canvas, growing
magical brushwork
effortlessly flowing.

“O Mummy, will i?
can i ever? who
will i be?”

she whispers
but Mummy does not hear
Mummy is in her creation
and nothing can reach her.

The child is alone yet
somehow filled
its body is lit
from within in
pinpoints of diamond light
the night full of stars
is inside

knowing something yet
pierced by mystery
he longs and sighs
and waits to grow up.

I stopped being a ‘good mother’ when I said yes to the past and demon Memory clattered into my world like a rattle of skeletons.

They had to know. The skeletons were always there, hiding behind smiles and normal, loaves of homemade bread, hand-sewn jeans with heart patches on the knees, cunning preserves and careful focus on life that revolved around children, devoted solely to meeting their needs, talking about their needs, befriending only mothers with kids the same age needs.

I bit the dark all for my own, it slipped through in late night whispered fights.

Yes, I speak of forbidden things. I am driven to grow, to become my best self that my chldren may benefit from my existence. They, in the abstract, continue as my prime motivator. It is the way of life, to seek evolution, improved survival, for following generation.

I am no longer one who may step aside to provide for the needs of offspring, and since the storm rose, I have had to bid them bye bye and hope that I have given them strength and pride to weather it well.

Alas, I failed to factor in their indifference to my existence and disinterest in my offerings. Even so, complaint is unfair for I directly offer naught, nor have I discerned their desires besides imaginally. I must needs plead Mars in Gemini, compelled to bleat from its Midheaven pulpit mea culpa, mea explica, mea blah blah.

None of this is their fault, yet still, I must speak of forbidden things. Hidden shards and shavings of blame chew like broken glass and must be consumed most discerningly.

Pluck out such sharp splinters, my children; in the name of the love I bear Life itself, I invite you to hold your own hearts blameless and innocent of shame. I am deeply and growingly grateful for the privilege of serving Life through mothering. I take it not for granted, nor do I hold you to account. 

Your births, childhoods and continued existence, as yourselves and as my children, have cost me dear. Still I asked for you, and I welcome cost and consequence, and so you owe me nothing.

I am a free will parent. I honour my children’s choices insofar as having a relationship with me as mother or individual is concerned. I write about them in this blog only because they are the living embodiments of the precious babies I bore, and this preciousness has abated not in the slightest from the moment of their births. I can’t not feel them, speak to them in my heart, be pressed upon inwardly by their existence on a near-steady basis.

Is that creepy? I try not to be, but this is who I am. I speak to my children, the ones I am Mother to, and to whom I owe the best job of parenting possible, without identifying them, for their identity is nobody’s business. They are an archetype, the paintings of my babies, innocent receptacles for my love.

I have studied parenting from all directions, and my urgency to become a more effective parent has guided my choices, yet I have had blind spots. I continue to. I live in a strobe world of swiftly alternating clarity and confusion, and when confused, I make errors. Now, I often choose inaction when confused, prefering non-consequence (or consequence for lack of action) to inflicting harm.

O yes, I am a harmo-phobic. In particular, pricked perhaps by evolution’s fork, I dread hurting my children.

I have slowly withdrawn from their sphere over the years, preferring they toughen, grow strong outside the sticky web of me than that I harm them in any way. Yet my withdrawal risks its own harm.

I wonder whether I’m even capable of not harming them with my spider mother weirdness. I wonder whether it would be better to swallow such words, contain my refrain. And often I do, but to maintain silence for too long causes its own strain on my brain.

I am okay they’re living their own lives. I speak not, nor imply, criticism of their absence from my world, for I have faith in their choices, feel deep trust for evolution’s guiding force.

“Time is my friend, I have plenty of it”. This feeling may be deceiving; it is certainly soporific and so I remain passive for years.

With passiveness comes fear of action. When decision time arrives, I dither. I do not reach, I absent myself not understanding that maybe my absence is hurtful. I forget how to make connection in order to keep family alive.

Family is what this is all about. Species survival, genetic survival, is about family. I bear a history, a lineage, and it seeks to be inherited, and the ones who must be the inheritors are those who bear my genetic material. I am driven by the forces of evolution to pass on the memetic imprints which I participate in developing.

My creativity is lunar, with Leo Moon; this means, I express my maternal self, my Mom-personality, creatively, as an artist. This is not very personal for children–it can not have been easy to be my kid–see poem above.

Christmas is coming, and this year I do not plan to spend christmas with them. I was there last year, but not the year before. I need to give them breaks from me. But I also confess to fear of reaching out, fear that contributes to the falseness I feel in my face when I am face to face with them.

I do not fear them.

They are wonderful, good hearted, alive people. They are everything I wanted them to become, and they are that because I saw them, I knew them, I welcomed them in. Their pain may look at me with hardness, but behind the surface, they are still who I know them to be. I knew what I was doing and I am not surprised by who they have become.

Here is my fear: I fear them not liking me.

How can our genetic lines survive if our children do not like us?

Bah. This is just me, plain and simple.