a HOAX.
the globe
a country
circled by contagion, Global Warming, a warning by a girl
named Greta.
his Reality TV Show
2X impeached
Not Removed
Barr…No Rule Of Law. Black Lives Matter –
George Floyd.
Supremacy takes a hike, spitting disaster
faster than the speed of light.
We fight, we outnumber you, we see you, we call you out.
the liars you see are none other than yourselves.
We act, name, witness your position
posing with the Bible upside down in front of a church.
Protestors
bludgeoned by US army in Washington,
George Floyd’s death by chokehold cops in Minneapolis.
Every day a blank statement.
Every day a bank statement.
Every day a new tragedy.
Flip the flimsy strategy,
what is our protection?
See, hear, touch, taste, feel what’s real.
Your fear’s like any other.
Relativity is not a coverup.
Denial doesn’t obliterate the trial.
Blame doesn’t fix it.
You can’t clear up the swamp when you carry it around.
MAY 28, 2020
a boat on water
a Vessel, like
blood carrying oxygen
a vase containing emptiness
a book transporting meaning
plane carries people
a tree moves sap
We are a vessel for a virus, a vessel for freedom, a song for a voice
A spaceship between stars
A dance for the body
A body for time
A time being
Opening
Inside is outside
Form is not necessary,
Until then, when
we hold space and time in our lungs.
circle the neo cortex,
fire the synapse and stamp our feet.
no function but to make
purpose, doing, the doing, a secret,
like drawing on air.
July 4thI went to the parade in Round Pond with my friends visiting from Australia. We sat under a maple tree to watch the local parade pass by a sweet harbor town in midcoast Maine. Many adorned trucks, dressed up cars, a scary Make America Great Again truck until I saw Trump in jail on the back of a truck bed. The Statue of Liberty was a very old woman with a crown in an antiquated car. There were the local businesses and lobstah floats, kids throwing candy to kids on the side of the street, A make America Grateful Again Float, a Grateful Dead float and a serious preacher giving a solemn sermon into a microphone – Jesus Saves. What lurks underneath this American spirit? I think of the children separated from families, death of four kids at CBD while they improvise what to do with an influx of immigrants, no facilities set up for keeping them beyond 72 hours, (though they detain them longer), no facilities fully equipped for processing, no funding since February and a mandate from the President to deport them as soon as possible so they will let others know not to come. Immigrants are kept in cages outdoors, children are separated from their parents and sleep on floors in what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rightly called camps. She was told to apologize. While the slow process to find a fix is underway one would think helicopters should come to the rescue, this cannot be tolerated.
Felipe Gomez Alonso 8 years from Guatemala died December 4, 2018 Jakelin Coal Maquin, 7 years Guatamala died December 7, 2018, Juan de Leon Gutierrez 16 years died April 30, 2019 and a nameless Guatemalan boy 2.5 years died May 14, 2019
In our schools, kids die at gunpoint all the time. Multiple issues collide as ICE agents will round up over 1000 immigrants on Sunday who live in our neighborhoods, work on our farms and restaurants, hotels, do not have driver’s licenses and live in constant terror without access to a just system or help. Both outrage and a plan are needed to contain the chaos, a reform is not coming fast enough. We are hit on all fronts as the elections gather force. We need to vote and vote wisely.
We do have a deadline…Sunday Ice Round up, and ever lurking Climate Crisis. Health Care for all. Equal pay for women and Free choice. Stand up for LGBTQ communities, all races and creeds cuz they’re human rights. Police brutality, gun laws and prisons must protect and embrace the human race and our children’s future. Any religious organization that supports things as they are now has lost its way.
When I feel helpless in the face of all that needs to be done, I feel proud of what people are doing on the local level to make the world a better place. I started a Huddle- Women Move Forward after the first women’s march to meet face to face. Who shows up? Small groups of artists, administrators, activists working for the LGBTQ community, Planned Parenthood, educators and women who come to hear topics presented by women in the know. Wren, from Planned Parenthood has been running it in my dining room, office, healing room while I’m away. I was able to tell my Australian friends who have been horrified about what is happening under Trump, about this group and others going on – the underground, what we’ve been up to.
So far this year our Huddle has had presentations by women from Planned Parenthood to inform us of Title X and what we can do to protect women’s reproductive rights, from Riverkeeper to inform us about the Barrier Gates proposed on the Hudson by the Army Corps of Engineers and artist Ronnie Farley who is walking in a traditional water ritual carrying a bucket tracing the Aquifer from the Adirondacks to Central Park. Manna Jo Greene, an activist from Clearwater, spoke to us about the urgent need to stop Fossil Fuel before it’s too late. She recommended Drawdown, by Paul Hawken – 100 solutions to Reverse Global warming https://www.drawdown.org. The difficult news is if we don’t get off fossil fuels now, it will be too late. No reason to stop activism. Manna Jo suggested we find a common value with the opposition and take it from there.
Since I left for Maine, Lisa came to speak about local elections and getting out the VOTE. Lisa has steadily spearheaded the significance of local elections to transform communities and she has done just that. There was a seismic shift in the last elections in Beacon, NY and in Maine, so I can see it works. The most recent meeting was Tina who came to talk about immigration and the local organizations – Project Greenlight and Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson. Tina became active in NLMH via the Sanctuary movement, as a Jew she’s outraged by the Border concentration camps and traveled to the Border with Grannie’s Respond…founded by Dan Aymar-Blair. https://www.wamc.org/post/ny-gov-cuomo-signs-green-light-bill.
Welcome to the underground. We must stand together
“Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green.”
Helena Blavatsky Seer in the 19thcentury
Was this a mythical Avalon or a vision of melted ice? Madame Blavatsky said this over 200 years ago. What does it mean? Flooding seems Biblical. With the flooding in Missouri we can see what is ahead of us now. Now it is clearly science. The earth has gone through former extinctions. Bad weather is a part of it. Bad solutions won’t solve it.
I live on the Hudson River. I lived in New York City for years. The Army Corp of Engineers has a plan to create in-water barriers in NY Harbor and other locations. Storm surge Barriers will affect 16 million people along the shores of the Hudson River. They are giant ocean gates, which will cost 119 Billion and more to maintain. The gates do not address tide rise up and down the river. The gates will choke off the life of the river, cleaned up over the last few decades.
The tide risk will affect the shoreline communities all the way up to Troy. It makes no sense to invest in a project that may not work. There are currently other flood control projects in development, which are not as catastrophic for the communities on the Hudson, which will receive no benefit from costly surge barriers that will cause environmental damage which will affect life for humans and animals and fish and plants. What does this have to do with you.
We cannot put our heads in the sand, but need to work together to come up with some immediate solutions. It is not simply – do something. We have to look at the consequences. How we do it sustainably and effectively?
It is important to work with nature not against it. The only solution is to work together with nature. A solution: Riverkeeper suggests building shoreline dunes, berms and levees in addition to the flood control projects that are currently being developed. The shoreline measures can be heightened as the river rises and will protect against surging storms like Sandy as well as sea rise. It is important to work together in municipalities along the river to address flooding.
What would Margaret Fuller say? You are a part of a big history. You cannot stand by. Women’s time has come.
“Such beings as these (women – Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame Dudevant, commonly known as George Sand ),… rich in genius, of most tender sympathies, capable of high virtue and a chastened harmony, ought not to find themselves, by birth, in a place so narrow, that in breaking bonds, they become outlaws.”
Margaret Fuller – Woman in the Nineteenth Century, written in 1844
Don’t miss the Day of action in Albany, NY March 12th.
Today I will draw your attention back to Women’s Reproductive Rights, which have always been the cornerstone of women’s rights in America, since Roe vs Wade protected the constitutional right for abortion and became law of the land in 1973. The erosion of women’s reproductive rights is a determined backdoor policy-making method, to avoid the snares of the real ‘church bound’ objections, which run contrary to our constitutional separation of church and state. Pro choice, in contrast, allows for women’s decisions based on their circumstance, without neglecting their world or religious views. Not all of us follow a religion, or are Catholics, Evangelicals or Baptists. So it is to my mind, a bigger picture. Roe vs Wade states that abortion is protected by the constitution.
Margaret Fuller is called the first feminist in America and her book Woman in the Nineteenth Centurywas written in Fishkill Landing, where I live…now Beacon, NY. I am writing a novel about her. What was the challenge in the 19thcentury when women’s rights were looked at for the first time, comes forward to greet us now in the 21st. “Let them be sea captains, if they will…”, was her comment to Waldo Emerson as she imagined the possibilities that would be open to women in the future. We are the future and we rest on her shoulders.
Now that we have women in government, a terrific win across the country, perhaps we can rebalance the gender gap by implementing the thinking and concerns of women into a culture still intent upon their degradation. Margaret Fuller could only imagine what we have now. Along with this good news, we are facing a crisis for women’s rights in health care along with a cascade of dystopian issues handed to us by the Trump-Pence administration that vie for our attention.
The Trump-Pence administration has just issued a Gag rule on Title X, which was founded 50 years ago during Nixon’s administration to help provide contraception and reproductive Health Care to millions of Americans. The Gag Rule is a step taken to take away legal right to choose. There are other efforts in US to make the fetus a person and to criminalize mothers seeking abortion or for neglected care of the unborn. I want to make it clear these groups do not condone life, or care for it with public programs after the child is born, they are only interested in controlling birth. This is a woman’s right, not the states. By rewriting the requirements for application for HHS grant-funded federal program, saying that any recipient for funds can’t provide, refer or educate on abortion is a bill that gives preference to providers that suggest abstinence and the rhythm method. It will most harm women of color, poor people in rural areas. If this Gag rule goes into effect, and Roe vs Wade is overturned, it is estimated women seeking abortion will need to travel to the states that allow it and will need $10,000.
The time to act is now. Once the Title X rule is published in the Federal register there are 60 days to contest before it goes into effect. Once it does there will be legal challenges. Planned Parenthood is not closing its doors and abortions are still provided.
Our message: Don’t sell us out to the Trump/Pence administration.
Sign the petition #NoGagRule https://www.istandwithpp.org/no-gag-rule?_ga=2.80890580.236959983.1551545347-1787062696.1551545347
I can’t help but see a shared sisterhood with what is going on now in Afghanistan because of President Trump’s military withdrawal. Women’s rights are an ongoing battle, not only in America. NYT article Friday: 700 Afghan Women Have a Message: Don’t Sell Us Out to the Taliban. It is about Women in Afghanistan, 700 women standing up to weigh in on their rights as Trump has our military pull out and negotiate with the Taliban! If anyone should know the loss of freedoms, it is those women who are standing up to the Taliban now. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/world/asia/afghanistan-women-taliban.html
What would Margaret Fuller say? You are a part of a big history. You cannot stand by. Women’s time has come.
I am writing about forgotten women. After seeing Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim, who was a Theosophist and channelled the first abstract paintings, recently disclosed, not to be shown until 20 years after her death, I want to bring to your attention my muse. She was the 19th century Seer who influenced the luminaries – Thomas Edison, Gandhi, William Butler Yeats, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Mahler, even Einstein kept her Secret Doctrine on the table next to his bed. She is forgotten now. Her name was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and she founded the Theosophical Society with the bearded Yankee Colonel Olcott, who was investigating Spiritualism and was utterly convinced by what he saw her do. She like many Spiritualists could produce magic phenomena, a byproduct of the state achieved by spiritual adepts. That’s how they spoke of it in the 19th century when they were curious and not shut down on the subject. She worked with a group of eastern adepts from various religious faiths and parts of the world. She might be considered one of the first multiculturalists. She lived an extraordinary life and traveled around the world several times until she joined her teacher Master M. in Tibet.
In 2001, I created a dance theater piece at Here Art Center in New York City’s SoHo called ‘Voice of a Seer’ about Madame Blavatsky and now I have just finished a novel about her called — Messages from Master M. I will be speaking about her from time to time.
She was the 19th century Seer who influenced the luminaries – Thomas Edison, Gandhi, William Butler Yeats, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Mahler, even Einstein kept her Secret Doctrine on the table next to his bed.
Today, August 18, 2018 is the 98thanniversary of the 19th amendment – Women’s right to vote. Today, I was reading Margaret Fuller’s ‘Women of the Nineteenth Century’, written at a time we can call the beginning of the battle for equality in 1845, though it’s first publication was in The Dial, a transcendentalist magazine, and was written after she’d retired as its editor in 1843. It was then called The Great Law Suit, Men versus Man, Women versus Woman. Today, it is still going on in the age of #MeToo and #Timesup, with the attack on women’s reproductive rights, the issues of equal pay and justice.
After the global Women’s March protesting Trump’s election, I started a Huddle, in Beacon, NY where women met twice a month in my home to speak and decide what actions we could take to fight the onslaught. We were not alone, there were many initiatives taking place and our small group was a part of it. I’m proud to say that the actions of these women to see through our mandate — get out the Vote, changed the city council by a landslide. I watched in wonder from a distance because I vote in Maine, a pivotal state. I learned from that winter of meetings that the local level of politics set up the foundation for Trump’s election. I also discovered that our resolve at the grass roots definitely produced a change in what seemed a hopeless situation. Most importantly, I found that taking action was a remedy for the despair many of us felt, as the democracy we were accustomed to, the rights we’d won, and the rule of law and common sense, were upended by ruthless narcissism and hubris of our President.
I am inspired by Aretha Franklin, who died the day before last, leaving us with her defiant, soulful rendition of RESPECT. In my own world, I’m inspired by the women in our Huddle like Ginny Scott who ran for office in Newburgh; Peggy Ross who while on City Council got solar panels into the fields of Beacon’s Transfer Station for city power; Claire Nelsen who started ‘Grannies Respond’, left for Texas last spring, with a cry to join the bus to McAllen, Texas on August 6 to unite children with families in the wake of Trump’s Zero Tolerance Policy at the Border; Wren Longo’s work for Planned Parenthood; Audrey Mosley’s work in Washington; Amanda Mean’s relentless protest of the Pilgrim Pipeline and the rest of us who went to marches, wrote congress, knit hats, left food for the homeless, cleared up the river and stayed informed. In Maine, I’m inspired by Sherri Mitchell and the Penobscot Nation; by Joy Vaughn who sits on the board of the Damariscotta River Association and is a steward of Stratton Island where eagles nest; Deb Soule who started and herb farm for women called Avena Botanicals; by Chris Sprague and Pam Hansen who have dogs that teach children to read, and all the rest of us who garden, look after animals, sing and dance, make art, raise children, raise consciousness, teach, and heal. We all have ways to contribute. Ways that will not insist upon denial or turn hard truths upside down. You can make your own list of inspirers. Women are powerful.
Margaret Fuller wrote in 1845 – “…Of all its banners, none has been more steadily upheld and under none have more valor and real sacrifices been shown, than that of the enslaved Africans, and this band it is, which partly from a natural following out of principles, partly because many women have been prominent in that cause, makes (it), just now the warmest appeal in behalf of women…” She went on to say that the society generally was not ready for the changes set into motion, and the perpetrators would be regarded coldly as (Jacobins) were considered radical extremists after the French Revolution.
These are prophetic words from the woman Ralph Waldo Emerson called a sybil. Frankly, I never thought I’d witness the reversal we are experiencing now. Trump sides with dictators against the country he leads, using his powers to fire his critics, who have also btw been prime witnesses for Comey’s allegations in the Russia investigation, meanwhile global warming can not be named on the EPA website, there’s tampering by the Russians in the elections, corruption is rampant, and all normalcy is revoked as the show goes on and oceans get warmer and the ice caps melt. Make America Great Again could very well be the end of it.
The North Star compass in each of us might be our way to navigate out of these toxic seas of destruction. The earth is our planet. We need clean water, air, food. Women are half the world. Privatizing war, health care, the moon, water is a bad idea. Profiteering off of catastrophe is the reckless risk and is no way to rule a country. The first step is waking up to our responsibilities in time to make a difference in the elections this fall. We have to empower ourselves as positive forces in the world and join with others on the same track. Finding our inter-dependent humanity is essential for a sustainable future. This is a close call. If we get that far we may find our true power and potential as human beings. Vote.
I’m back in a snow storm in New York after attending the San Miguel Writer’s Conference in February, where there was sunshine, color, good food and inspiration. Though I was very busy, because I took the “whole enchilada”, I did manage to go to the pyramid of the 13 heavens – Cañada de la Virgen, to La Gruda Spa, and on a Beat Poet pub crawl. I was also told by one of the many ex-Pats from Canada, you can go to the Opera for $20. The city was beautiful, though this may be its downfall as people flock to it in cars on narrow cobblestone streets. It was a big relief to be free of our U.S. political chaos with all its diversionary subterfuge, and enter a human scale life.
I went with Anna — also a dancer, filmmaker, writer and we shared an airbnb close to the conference. We could walk everywhere. What happened for both of us I think, is a commitment to writing as a path and a practice as well as an ambition to see our words in print. It was easy to feel this, listening to renown authors and poets, being around so many writers and teachers, when we’re usually alone at our desks or trying to find the time. Now that I’m back in a snow storm and I’ve sent my novel out to be read, I am looking to begin another. I have started a memoir but have seeds for a new novel as well. Since I am impatient, it helps to have several projects going. After years of dance, I am accustomed to studio discipline and since I choreograph, I know it all begins alone in an empty space.
This is an old poster, an old story. It’s hard to imagine my mom, a school teacher, wielding a gun or acting as a human shield. She is dead now. I wonder what she would think about Trump’s offer to pay teachers “a bit more” for their service. She was a Republican.
It’s clear the NRA owns the White House and the Republican Party. This is a plan for idiots, people who’ve sold their souls for a pay check, demolished common sense and clearly have no regard for human life after birth. The agenda of these dogged individualists is pure, unadulterated ego driven greed and power – the stuff of the deranged and deluded. The rational details such as hand guns slung by teachers can’t stand up to a nut with a semi automatic. Has the agenda shifted to arming the country? There’s a lot more money to be made. Do we want this? VOTE. Go teenagers, wake us all up!
Last night was a Harvest moon rising up over the treetops – also called a Hunter’s moon. I am making a new dance piece called Mining the Moon, so I spend time watching the moon in her phases, knowing it is a short time before her mythical stature will be subjected to tourism and exploitation of resources just as we have managed with Gaia – Mother Earth. The use of the feminine is intentional, not as sentiment but as power that needs to be evoked at this time of constant crisis. I believe the balance of masculine and feminine is at play, just as the focus will inevitably change to renewable energies as time goes on. The backlash of the men in the current administration that would take women’s reproductive rights and general freedoms back to the dark ages to assert their malevolent control is a constant onslaught since the election. It is not something to be quiet about or indifferent. We should not adjust our sensibilities to accommodate these preposterous assertions.
That the same affront is offered to environmental policies is not surprising. It has long been evident to me that women’s bodies, the earth, the arts, the intuitive process are right brain functions of cognition and not accessible to left brain dominance that appears to have taken over the role of authority. It is appalling to witness the level of denial going on now. I would be happy to sit in meditation and do yoga and make dances, but God and Goddess won’t let me. There is something so wrong about the agenda this country is trying to foist upon us. The insanity that we cannot even pass gun legislation, after mass killings in the U.S. too numerous to count, is a testament to how stuck we are. Women want the rights to determine how many children they bare and under what circumstances and men (to risk the stereotype) want the right to carry weapons anywhere without any restrictions. The gateway to birth and death is an old disagreement. It is not a current agreement, and does not take in how far we’ve come with human rights, animal rights, and consciousness. Dominance has its roots in an old world past of power and conquest, not a new world vision of interrelationship and harmony. It is devoid of spiritual resurgence, benevolence, justice and the free choice and dignity at the underbelly of our democracy. Until recently women didn’t have a voice. Now we appear on TV and radio delivering in upbeat neutrality the news that would destroy our freedoms.
It is a fact, we are each unique and interrelated with each other in surprising ways. Life is a journey that involves inner and outer dimensions. Creativity is our inheritance. It is what is divine in us. If we live within balance and the earth ends tomorrow, we can at least have lived for something besides our fear and our power, our greed and misapprehensions. It is work to stand up for ourselves, to not be silenced and dismayed, to see beyond the conditioned spin of subterfuge and embody what is real.
skydancewriting 