{"id":57,"date":"2006-11-01T05:19:15","date_gmt":"2006-11-01T03:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/?p=57"},"modified":"2006-11-01T05:19:15","modified_gmt":"2006-11-01T03:19:15","slug":"spiral-dance-ii-un-texte-de-starhawk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/2006\/11\/spiral-dance-ii-un-texte-de-starhawk\/","title":{"rendered":"Spiral dance II : Un texte de Starhawk"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Terrible Beauty<\/p>\n

For Brad Will<\/p>\n

By Starhawk<\/p>\n

It\u201d\u2122s the night before the Spiral Dance, our community\u201d\u2122s annual huge celebration for Samhain, more generally known as Halloween, the ancient feast of the ancestors and honoring of the Beloved Dead, which long predates the Christian feast of All Souls. \u00a0The Spiral Dance is the biggest, most elaborate ritual our community, Reclaiming, creates throughout the year, with intricate altars, a full chorus, dancers, singers, acrobats doing aerial invocations, and a spiral that might include a thousand people. \u00a0Into all this, we weave some deep magic, both personal and broader than personal, involving the mystery at the heart of our spirituality\u201d\u201ddeath and regeneration.<\/p>\n

Each year I take on different roles. \u00a0Some years I lead the trance, other years I might simply invoke the spirits of the land or play the drum and leave the \u201d\u02dcbigger\u201d\u2122 roles to others. \u00a0This year my role seems to involve carrying a lot of heavy objects and buckets of sand, building altars and decorating the front of the house. \u00a0Or not so much actually building and decorating, as providing the materials and suggestions for others to do the creative part.<\/p>\n

And this year I\u201d\u2122m calling the Dead. \u00a0So I\u201d\u2122ve been thinking a lot about death, and singing the song we will use to sing the Dead over into a place of renewal. \u00a0Just before bed, I check my email, and I learn that a young man has died, shot to death in Oaxaca where he has gone to cover the teachers\u201d\u2122 strike and the people\u201d\u2122s insurrection for Indymedia. \u00a0His name is Brad Will. \u00a0I stare at his picture, trying to remember if I know him from all the demonstrations and mobilizations and meetings we have undoubtedly been at together.<\/p>\n

In Miami, my friend Andy reminds me, after a wild ritual collaboration between the Pagan cluster and the black bloc, a young man stepped forward with a guitar and began singing Desert Rat\u201d\u2122s song about Seattle, \u201cWhen the Tear Gas Fills the Sky.\u201d\u009d \u00a0That was Brad\u201d\u201dalive, singing, defiant. \u201cI will wash the pepper from your face, and go with you to jail, And if you don\u201d\u2122t make it through this fight, I swear I\u201d\u2122ll tell your tale\u201d\u00a6\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

I didn\u201d\u2122t know him well, but I know so many like him\u201d\u201dmostly but not all young, sitting in long meetings in warehouses or donning respirators to gut flood-ruined houses in New Orleans, standing shoulder to shoulder as the riot cops advance, or as the bulldozer moves forward to destroy a home in Gaza. \u00a0Filing stories at midnight on electronic networks set up by young geniuses with duct tape and component parts in dusty, third world towns, eating cold pasta out of old yogurt tops and sleeping on floors. Hitching rides into war zones and crossing borders. \u00a0It\u201d\u2122s as if a whole cohort of souls had arrived on this planet imbued with the unquestioned faith that they were put here to somehow make a difference, to interfere with injustice, to witness, to change the world. \u00a0Ragged, intemperate, opinionated, passionate, and above all, alive.<\/p>\n

And now another one of the tribe is dead, shot down in Oaxaca where a five-month teachers\u201d\u2122 strike became a full-blown insurrection, the kind that radicals dream of, with streets full of barricades and ordinary people rising up against a rigged election and a corrupt, dictatorial governor. \u00a0It hasn\u201d\u2122t been much reported in the U.S. \u00a0papers. \u00a0But Brad Will was there, with camera and computer, to be a set of eyes.<\/p>\n

Now his eyes are closed, forever. \u00a0I put his name on our list of the Dead. \u00a0At the Spiral Dance, I see someone has set up a shrine to him on our North altar, where the dead are honored. \u00a0I meet another activist friend there, who tells me how he remembers Brad: running into a barrage of sound bombs in a demonstration in some foreign city. \u00a0\u201cI couldn\u201d\u2122t explain to people that they were harmless,\u201d\u009d he\u201d\u2122d said. \u00a0\u201cWe didn\u201d\u2122t speak the same language. \u00a0So I had to show them.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

I didn\u201d\u2122t know him well, but I know how it is to walk into a situation that is dangerous, even life-threatening, how it feels to weigh the risks, to accept them, to tell yourself that you can be at peace with any consequence, and then to walk out into the street in the firm if unconscious belief that you will be lucky that day, once again. \u00a0I can only imagine how it feels when the bullets rip through flesh, and your severed spirit stares back at a broken body, and in a blaze of light a different journey begins.<\/p>\n

We Pagans have no dogma, no official Book of the Dead to outline the soul\u201d\u2122s journey. \u00a0If we share any belief in common, it is simply this: that death is part of a cycle that includes regeneration and renewal. That just as the falling leaves decay to fertilize the roots of trees, each death feeds some rebirth.<\/p>\n

Death transforms us. The tribe of world-changers has its list of martyrs\u201d\u201dthe short list of those who are known in the first world\u201d\u201dCarlo Giuliani, Huang Hai Lee, Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall\u201d\u201dand the much longer list of names in some other language\u201d\u201dSpanish, indigenous, Arabic, and so many others–who die every day. \u00a0And the world\u201d\u2122s religions each have their concept of that transformation, for those whose death is somehow special, powerful and meaningful: martyrs, saints, boddhisatvas. We Pagans don\u201d\u2122t like to glorify martyrs, but we know that \u201d\u02dcsacrifice\u201d\u2122 means \u201d\u02dcto make sacred.\u201d\u2122 \u00a0\u00a0In an instant, that ordinary comrade you remember singing at the fire or arguing at the meeting, someone you might have been charmed or irritated by or attracted to, or not, someone who showed no mark of doom or prescience of what was to come, becomes uplifted into another realm, part symbol, part victim, locus of our deepest love and rage.<\/p>\n

William Butler Yeats expressed it best, writing about the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, the friends he admired and the ones he disliked, shot by the British.
\n\u201cBeing certain that they and I
\nBut lived where motley is worn,
\nAll changed, changed utterly,
\nA terrible beauty is born\u201d\u00a6\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

And death transforms the living. When someone close to us dies, we become someone else. \u00a0When my father died when I was just five years old, my mother was transformed from a beloved wife to a grieving widow. I changed, overnight, from a blessed, fortunate child to someone set apart, marked by a tragedy, missing something deeply important that other children had.<\/p>\n

And so one day you are someone with a job and a family and a neighborhood in which you and your kin have lived for generations\u201d\u201dand a day later the waters rise and you are homeless, \u00a0a refugee in a strange place dependent on the kindness of strangers. \u00a0One day you are a mother filled with hopes and dreams and pride, and the next day you are bereft, with a gaping hole in your heart that can never be filled.<\/p>\n

Yet we, the living, have some choice in how we respond to death, and what transformation we undergo. \u00a0My mother, out of her grief, became a counselor, a therapist, an expert in loss and grieving. \u00a0Cindy Sheehan, out of her grief for her son Casey, killed in Iraq, became a woman on fire, a modern prophet calling the powerful to justice, who galvanized the movement against the war. \u00a0Mesha Monge-Irizarry, mother of Idriss Stelley who was shot dead in the Metreon by the San Francisco police, became an advocate for all the victims of police violence. \u00a0Rachel Corrie\u201d\u2122s parents took up the cause of justice for the people of Palestine. \u00a0Grief can open the heart to courage and compassion; rage can move us to action. \u00a0\u00a0Out of loss comes regeneration: a terrible beauty is born.<\/p>\n

A death like Brad\u201d\u2122s calls us all to deeper levels of courage, to be eyes that refuse to shut in the face of oppression, voices that sing out for justice, hands that build a transformed world.<\/p>\n

Starhawk<\/p>\n

www.starhawk.org<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Terrible Beauty For Brad Will By Starhawk It\u201d\u2122s the night before the Spiral Dance, our community\u201d\u2122s annual huge celebration for Samhain, more generally known as Halloween, the ancient feast of the ancestors and honoring of the Beloved Dead, which long predates the Christian feast of All Souls. \u00a0The Spiral Dance is the biggest, most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maria.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}