[Scpg] [starhawk] Miami Update 11/19 anti-FTAA mobilization.

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

This is the one of the daily from Star Hawk, Permaculture Teacher , Pagan 
and one of the Teachers of The Earth Activist (Permaculture Design Course), 
from the Anti Free Trade of the Americas Gathering going on in Miama
check out her website below
Miami Update 11/19/03

I wake up too early, after only four hours sleep, still charged with energy 
from the ritual.  I go downtown to the Wallflower Gallery to give a 
permaculture workshop for the Green Bloc¹s Solutions Forum.
   It¹s 1 PM.   I¹m tired, so tired.  I do fine on five hours sleep but 
only four last night was pushing it.  It¹s been a long, good, oddly calm 
day.  The permaculture workshop is fun to do and I get to show a short 
video Donna made about the Green Bloc and slides of our ecovillage in 
Cancun and of some of the City Repair projects in Portland where they 
transform intersections into plazas with benches and community bulletin 
boards and giveaway boxes and amazing sculptures.  We just begin a 
conversation about where the skills we learn in these mobilizations could 
lead‹into transforming communities and claiming spaces, neighborhoods, 
villages, regions, as the Zapatistas have done in Chiapas or the Movimiento 
Sim Terre in Brazil.  And I would love to stay all afternoon, go out to 
lunch and go on talking about community building, but we have a meeting for 
the Pagan Cluster.  So a group of us walk over to the community garden, 
through the poor, destroyed neighborhoods that surround us.  Christy, who 
is local, tells us that once this was a thriving African American 
community, until they built a freeway through it and urban-renewed it into 
oblivion.  Many people pass us; all seem friendly but most also have 
glazed, drugged eyes.
   We get the cluster fairly well organized.  Lisa and I have formed an 
affinity group of two, No Rest for the Wicked, we call it.  But we decide 
to join in with the Vermont group, Burning Love.  Lisa will buddy up with 
Charles, because they both move fast and are all over the place, collecting 
information, negotiating, if necessary being liason to the police. Nobody 
in Burning Love wants to be my buddy, because they know if there¹s trouble 
I will run toward it.  I ask Andy to be my buddy.  We often end up together 
on the street.  While Charles and Lisa are slim and quick, we¹re both big 
and solid and slow, but we will wade into the midst of the fray, and shift 
the energies.
   We go back to the convergence center after a brief lunch of Cuban stew 
and chicken gizzards, and lie down for a moment.  Donna tells me that food 
figures heavily in all my updates‹but truly it¹s a challenge to find time 
to eat so every snatched meal feels like a small triumph.  Just be grateful 
I don¹t record every time I take a pee‹which is even more of a challenge in 
the convergence center, with two toilets for a thousand people!
   After the cluster meeting we have a spokescouncil, the last one before 
the action.  It goes well.  Truly, there is nothing much left to decide, 
except to approve the action plan.  Sara and I sing the new song my brother 
and I have just written:

   "Come take back the streets, come one, come all,
   To the Witches and anarchists masquerade ball.
   For the power of the Empire is doomed to fall,
   At the Witches and Anarchists masquerade ball."

   The action is as planned as it can be.  I come home and nearly fall 
asleep writing this.  As always, this close to the beginning, it seems like 
we don¹t have the numbers we¹d hoped for, that we have a dumb and possibly 
suicidal action plan, that I¹d rather be home gardening. Lisa says, "I¹m 
not doing this any more."  She says that at least once every action.  I¹m 
calm: I feel ordinary and relaxed.  At one moment, I think it will be a 
miracle if I¹m not in jail by the end of the day tomorrow.  In another 
minute, I¹m thinking tomorrow will be calm and possibly dull, an 
ineffective anticlimax to our weeks of work.  But in any case, my own eyes 
are glazing over as I type.  Wish us well tomorroe‹today.  And good 
night.  May we be in the right place at the right time in the right way, 
with the protection, the magic, the health, the energy, the wisdom to due 
the work

ustice activist and organizer, is the author or coauthor of nine books, 
including "The Spiral Dance," "The Fifth Sacred Thing," and "Webs of Power: 
Notes from the Global
Uprising."   She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to
anti-nukes, is a highly influential voice in the revival of Goddess
religion, and has brought many innovative techniques of spirituality and
magic to her political work.  She works with the RANT collective, that 
offers training and organizing support for peace and global justice 
movements, with Reclaiming, offering training in earth-based ritual, 
healing, and community building, and teaches Earth Activist Trainings in 
combining permaculture design and organizing skills.

www.starhawk.org
www.rantcollective.org
www.reclaiming.org
www.earthactivisttraining.org