The city is hollowed out by police and AI and luxury towers. If we have a dream of marching for the survival of the Earth, than we force outselves into a milaritized space, where men with guns surround us and our constitutional right to sing songs, denounce the poisoners of the Earth, glorify heroes of love, condemn the billionaire criminals – must be expressed with the risk of shame and arrest….
Then we make the decision to seek our rights through a crack in their wall, where the sun shines through. There is a vast landscape just beyond the flood of bullets and pixels. There is a dreaming place that we can find by walking through a fissure in the edge of the city, a path to the other side, beyond devices powered by fear. There is a glorious forest, we can feel it, a forest on a mountain with wild wind. The wilderness is just through that wall over there.
If we climb the fire escape to the sixth floor, than cross the roof and shimmy down the rainspout to the landing, then take the train toward Inwood, we can feel the wilderness churning with roots and airborne branches. Giant trees that carry worlds – we sense this and our mysterious instruction is to keep walking toward this presence…. The sun is shining through a crack in the wall. The light is full of new words and songs that the Earth has been keeping for us.
We walk through and we notice that the trees are flickering with birth, new life coming out as leaves, as shards of bark, as roots rising up the side of the mountain. And the green flashing of the leaves in the wind is flickering with life and death, everything is whirling in that circle, appearing and disappearing.
The intensity of all of this has us singing in spite of ourselves. We are walking up the path as each of us has a melody that we can’t stop. Walking and clapping our hands. We begin to have thoughts that when we return to the USA of cops and bankers, we will dancing into the space they stole with the power of these songs.
There is a vast landscape just beyond the last wall, and it holds secrets to new culture, new activism more powerful than the city’s fear. We will inherit the resistance to this modern fascism. We carry the joy of the Earth. We re-enter the city with each of us carrying a part of a super storm in our breathing. The songs that rise in our bodies stop and change the consumers around us. The Earth shall set all of us free.
Rev. Billy