the elephants called - they want their image back

I've arrived in St Paul, and have immediately fallen in step with the pagan cluster. I'm currently staying with two enormous dogs, a big drooley St Benard and another English Setter-St Bernard mix. They shed like woolly mammoths in the paleolithic spring-time, they seem to be abandoning the fur-strategy without any obvious signs of diminished coat capacity.

Two days I've done magical activist street training at Coldwater Springs, a local sacred site that's been a focus of activist energy for many years. It's always such a playful learning edge at these trainings, ritual magic as the Reclaiming tradition practices it is still new to me and my edges of energetic awareness are always being pushed. The new exciting skill I've discovered is wide-awareness, a way of seeing and sensing that takes a much broader and intimate approach to the surroundings. It's apparently based in wilderness awareness methods, but it reminds me a lot of the wide focus that my sensei was always describing in regards to sparring. I never quite got it, but maybe now I have a new understanding to work with.

As for the conventions, the convergence space is a buzzing hive of organizing activity. It's inspiring to see, not only because people are taking such an active stance against the steam-rolling war-and-profits government machine (and the RNC is a great time to shout it out), but because through this process we are trying to find new ways to organize ourselves without reasserting the same oppressive dynamics that we seek to oppose. Process-oriented decision making is such a challenge of personal and relational growth, which is why for me personal confrontation and inner transformation is such a vital component of political action. And pedantry should get mashed up into fish food, joy should be a revolutionary tool, and we should all be a whole lot more tolerant and interested in the well-being of all humans.

I'm on so many edges, magical-political-spiritual-radical, I'm having a ball. It's fun simply to notice which moments I am articulate and well-informed and which moments I feel strongly but trip over my own words. In many areas I'm still silent and observing, absorbing new views like a Mississippi Sea Sponge, gathering threads, listening, listening. But sometimes I let my voice out, and sometimes I'm pleased with how it feels to be heard.