Magic, activism and theatre on the streets

For those of you who found that last post a bit of a ha ha, and slid off your keyboards laughing, here is what she is all about and what she believes in. In her own words:

No sane person wants to be an activist. Activism involves the risk of bodily harm, and when it is safe, it is often dry and boring. It shoves nasty truths about the world rudely in your face, makes your throat sore from shouting, and hurts your feet.

Nonetheless, if you believe that the Earth is a living entity that we are damaging past repair, that the child in Iraq and the farmer in India have as much right to health, independence and simple well being as you do, and that real freedom involves real responsibility, then at some level, you must act.

There are times when it is wholly inappropriate to feel good and content about the world. Now is one of them. At this time in our history, if you aren't angry, you're fast asleep. You simply aren't paying attention.

A common, unspoken assumption is that spirituality is about calm and peace, and that conflict is unspiritual. Truly spiritual people are never supposed to be confrontational or adversarial.I am often astonished at those well-meaning, spiritual 'leaders' and personalities who advocate beaming a healing, loving light toward world leaders, who scold activists for expressing anger on the streets and who define compassion as loving the enemy but somehow lose sight of the need to love those who suffer at the hands of the enemy. I refuse to beam love and light at Bush or Cheney or the directors of the International Monetary Fund. They do not suffer from lack of love. They suffer from a great excess of power, and I feel impelled to help redress that imbalance.

And that is active, dynamic, disruptive work. To equalize that power means changing an enormous system, finding ways to shake it up, disturb its equilibrium, push, pull, undermine, probe for the fault lines, until the stucture begins to teeter.

This is the high-energy place where power meets power, where change and transformation can occur. It is also a David and Goliath place, because what we seek to topple is so massive, it will rip the ground out from under our feet when it falls. And yet we must. Remember Gandalf, shrunk to the size of an ant as he faced the mighty demon Balrog: "You shall not pass. I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame. You shall not pass. Go back to the Shadow. You shall not pass!"

Activist spirituality is the summoning up of deeply personal yet archetypal energy, the creating of ritual that speaks directly to the real challenges we face in the world. Activist spirituality is what Diane Ackerman calls 'deep play', the deft use of humour and the skillful cultivation of hope. And on the streets, it is theatre. It is about bringing magic into action.

Last Fall, protesting water privatization, we invoked the magical element of Water and then marched, chanting "No FTAA, NO WTO, No Privatizing, Let the river flow!" For those of us who created the invocation, the privatization of water is a deeply spiritual issue. The water we hold sacred is not some abstract image or fantasy, but the very real stuff we need to drink and bathe and grow things, that is the Earth's literal life blood. If two-thirds of the people on the Earth don't have access to the water they need, as is predicted in the near future, it will be a physical and political crisis, but also, for all those who are awake, a deeply spiritual one.