I am grateful for deep, deep sleep during this Twelvenight. How blessed it is to rest well and soundly.
The consequence, of course, is that I do not remember my dreams, except as impressions, or fleeting images. Last night when I went to sleep, I asked for a word to come to me in the night. I would like a word to contemplate in the coming year, and I was hoping that the deep-self Fool might cast one up out of a dream as it sometimes does.
This morning I woke up not with a word or a narrative or images, but with a sense of the small standing up to the big, pushing back the tide of largeness that threatens to overwhelm the tiny.
Of course my subconscious would toss me such a morsel after yesterday’s meander with anxious demons. This potential for war with Iran has me panicky and anxious. I think I am managing the worry, mostly, but it takes a lot of deep intention and careful breathing. Of looking for news and analysis. Of ignoring news and analysis. Of connecting with others who believe that the people must stand up and say that we do not want war, that we have no quibble with the people of Iran and Iraq, that we want peace for our children and for the children of Iran. That the big powers must not have the last word about the world where the small ones will live.
And so the message of the morning is of the small ones pushing back the big ones. This coming week, Women in Black, a local Lancaster group connected to a worldwide peace movement, will stand silently on our courthouse steps with signs expressing our desire for peace. We may read Iranian poetry. We may weep. We may simply stand silently, as women have stood for decades, for centuries perhaps, in the public square, to tell the powers that be that we do not sanction sending the young ones to die in old men’s wars.
Then we will walk down the block to join in a larger community protest against war with Iran.
They will tell you that you are unrealistic.
They will tell you that you do not understand.
They will tell you that we must kill before we are killed.
They will tell you that world affairs are for the patriarchs to decide.
They will tell you to go back to the hearth and the kitchen and the children.
And then they will take those children and turn them into machines for their wars.
And we must be ready to stand between them and our children.
A flowing river of women, of grandmothers, of sane men, too,
standing between the powers of the angry old men
and the children of the US and Iran.
Take my hand. Hold the line.
Gratitude List:
1. The women, and men too, who are pledging to be Love in the face of hatred and war.
2. Despite appearances to the contrary, reason and humanity do often prevail against the powers of the angry old men.
3. Interspecies relationships. I love waking up curled into a ball with a small creature tucked into the circle of me and purring.
4. The poetry of Rumi and Hafez, from Persia, modern-day Iran. And for the poetry of modern Iranian poets. Yesterday afternoon, I read poems by Forough Farrokhzad.
5. Morning mist is magical.
May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 