Brigid in New York
It�s 8 AM on Saturday. The march starts at noon: already we can hear
helicopters circling. For days, every McDonald�s and Starbucks in the city
has had an honor guard of three cops. The streets around the Waldorf are
blocked and guarded.
Last night we had our ritual in the park. I missed the setup because I was
speaking at the students� CounterSummit, and by the time I got down there
were already hundreds of people gathered and more cops than I could believe,
long city blocks full of vans crammed with police, a helicopter circling
overhead, police on the street and forming their own sort of welcoming
committee at every entrance to the park.
We also had more media than I had ever seen at a ritual. ABC, Fox, the BBC,
every IndyMedia reporter in New York, every graduate student doing a video
project, they were all there and all wanting to talk and interview and
photograph and record.
Ruby had done a tremendous job actually organizing the ritual and the
complex art making, and people were setting up the shrines of grief,
healing, rage, vision, and the forge, which included a huge cardboard
cauldron filled with flames and a cardboard anvil and hammer. I hope
someone else will describe them all more fully, because I only got, at best,
a quick glimpse between the crowds and the reporters. Rosemary had done a
spectacular, simple, elegant stature of liberty out of wheat. We had a
wonderful Brigid�s well with waters of the world, and the GAPatistas brought
a triptych of the vision of the future. A friend of Harvest contributed a
voudoun altar. Considering we couldn�t have tables, wood, posts, poles, or
living flames on any of them, we created some very powerful and beautiful
images.
Lisa and Charles were negotiating with the police, who originally were
saying we couldn�t have any drums because we had no sound permit. They got
permission for one drum: we gathered a circle, and explained the ritual much
to the media as to the participants. We called in the elements very
simply: "Repeat after me: Air." "AIR!" "Fire!" "FIRE!" Then we sent
people off to visit the shrines. That was the signal for every media person
in the world to come up and ask me how I spell my name, and what the Pagan
Cluster was. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Communist Party set up below us
and started screaming and haranguing the crowd, people wandered among the
shrines, and the Rhythm Workers� Union, our drummer friends, just set up and
began drumming.
In spite of, or because of, the chaos and the sheer absurdity of police
overkill, I was having a good time. At one point, Ruby and I just looked at
each other and laughed. The level of noise, distraction, interruption, and
physical threat was so over the top it just became meaningless. As Juniper
said afterwards, your usual standards for ritual just disappeared.
Microphones in your face during an invocation off during the cone of power
with the police our permitted space to a larger area for the dance, and
between the cops and
the RCP it was a challenge. There were probably a couple of thousand people
there. We finally decided to just do the spiral where we were. We got the
drummers to quiet, opened a space in the center of the crowd, and Indigo
stepped in, lit her fire chains, and began a dance of invocation with living
fire swinging in beautiful circles and spirals around her. Lisa valiantly
kept the cops from barging in: she finished the dance, let the fire sit for
a moment in the center of the circle, and then Ruby taught the chant, call
and response style:
"We will neverS
"WE WILL NEVERS"
"Never lose our wayS"
"NEVER LOSE OUR WAYS"
"To the wellS"
"TO THE WELL"S..
"Of Liberty!"
"OF LIBERTY!"
"And the powerS"
"AND THE POWER!"
"Of her living flameS"
"OF HER LIVING FLAME!"
"It will riseS."
"IT WILL RISE!"
"It will rise againS"
"IT WILL RISE AGAIN!"
With the help of the entire cluster, we managed to get everyone into the
spiral relatively seamlessly, and navigate it around trees, cops, cameras
and passersby. We wound it up, and raised power then a sweet, sustained
tone to feed the forces of liberation, in spite of
nonstop flashing cameras. When we ended, everyone looked happy. We sang
"This little light of mine, I�m gonna let it shineS"
And then we opened the circle, just as our permit was running out.
In its own odd way, it was a wonderful event and, I think, great
magic midst of all of it bodes well for today�s actions, which essentially
have no
plan except to do the legal march and then trust to creative chaos.
May Brigid spread her cloak over this city, so that all the actions work
toward transformation.
Love Starhawk
