The Wild Reed: September 2024

Monday, September 30, 2024

Peter Kalmus on Fossil-fueled Climate Change and Hurricane Helene

The southeastern United States has been devastated by Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 Atlantic hurricane which made landfall last Thursday (September 26) in the Big Bend region of Florida, near the city of Perry, with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (220 km/h).

As of today, a total of 133 deaths have been attributed to Helene. The storm triggered coastal storm surges, catastrophic flooding, and tornado damage. Entire neighborhoods across Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and North and South Carolina have been submerged in water.

Earlier today, climate activist and climate scientist Peter Kalmus was interviewed on Democracy Now! Following (with added links) is part of what he shared about the connections between fossil-fueled climate change and monster storms like Hurricane Helene.

____________________

The planet’s overheating. It’s irreversible. It’s caused by the fossil fuel industry. And the reason I say “industry” specifically, not “fossil fuels,” is because this industry has been systematically lying and blocking action for almost 50 years, for decades and decades. And they’ve said publicly, testifying in front of Congress, that they plan to continue systematically blocking action.

And this will get worse as the planet continues to get hotter. It’s getting hotter every day. Every day we continue burning fossil fuels and allowing this industry to continue spreading disinformation and blocking action, the planet gets hotter. Hotter ocean fuels these storms, causes them to intensify more rapidly, causes them to get much more powerful. And a hotter atmosphere, because we’re living on a currently overheating planet – hotter atmosphere holds more water, so we get these intense, intense rainfalls, which cause the sorts of flooding that’s happening right now.

I think that this is the most evil thing that it’s possible to imagine, that fossil fuel executives and lobbyists will continue to lie so that they can line their bank accounts more at the irreversible expense of our planet and the future of humanity.

I feel desperate as a climate scientist. I’ve been sounding the alarm since 2006. Other scientists have been sounding it for far longer, Dr. James Hansen in the ’80s, even back before that. And we've been completely ignored. You get politicians, even like President Biden, even Democrats, [are] saying things like, “We listen to the scientists.” And then [at] the last presidential debate, we had Trump saying this is a hoax . . . and then Vice President Harris saying, “Climate change is real, but we’re going to expand fracking.” And that’s the cause of climate change. So, we’re living in this strange dystopia where scientists are being completely ignored.

So, I personally don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried a lot of different kinds of activism. Civil disobedience has by far been the most effective, the most effective in building the movement, inspiring other activists. We need the public to have two things before we’re going to be able to act, before we’re going to hold these politicians to account. We need urgency, and we need cause. And the public, in my opinion, doesn’t know those two things. They don’t have the sense that this is existentially urgent, that this is irreversible. However hot the planet gets, that’s how hot it’s going to stay for the rest of our lives, for our children’s lives, grandchildren, many, many generations. And they don’t know cause. There’s a lot of confusion.

This is caused by the fossil fuel industry. So, if we want to stop this, preserve what we can, we need to know that that’s the cause, that they’re blocking action. And we have to target that. Financing from the banks is a huge part of this. They’re still expanding new fossil fuel projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline in my state [of North Carolina] and in Virginia, which is creating natural gas for export that we don’t even need in America, just so these fat cats like Joe Manchin can get more rich. People don’t understand this. And they need to know urgency. This is irreversible. These storms, heat waves, floods, crop failures, migrants – all of this destabilization is going to get worse. It seems like we’re, as humans, more interested in blowing each other up than being grateful and preserving this absolute jewel of a planet that gives us, all of us . . . literally everything. And it seems like we’re not able to get our act together.

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Archangel Michael

It’s the feast of St. Michael the Archangel today, and to mark the occasion I share the above artwork by Talon Abraxas and the following excerpt from an online piece by Olga Rezo.

Archangel Michael is the leader of all Archangels and Angels. With His blue flaming sword, Archangel Michael can free you from your bad karma, negative energy and restraints that bind you to other people, situations and memories from the past. He can give you strength, power and protection from the devastating thoughts, feelings and deeds of others. . . . If somebody is sending you negative thoughts or thoughts that confront your own will, your strength is going to weaken and this can undermine your success in life. Kindly ask Archangel Michael to stand between you and the sender of those negative thoughts and to protect you. That is the way to turn the negative into positive. Archangel Michael will make you braver and more resolute, so that you can resolve your problems more easily. He will strengthen the will of God in you, as well as the power of faith. Both of these qualities will feed your inner strength, and your motivation will become noble and selfless.

. . . [Ask Archangel Michael to pray with you] to be released from the emotional and other chains that bind you to other people or circumstances from the past. Pray so that you can be filled with love, and realize within yourself the power of Light. Feel this light in your heart [and trust its power to strengthen, guide, and protect you] from all the thoughts that are not compatible with the untainted Divine plan for you.

– Olga Rezo
Excerpted from “The Seven Rays of Light – Blue Flame”
SunnyRay.org

For more of St. Michael the Archangel at The Wild Reed, see:
• The Archangel Michael as Gay Icon
• St. Michael the Archangel: Perspectives and Portraits
• Michaelmas (2008)
• St. Michael: Archangel, Spiritual Warrior, Icon of Homoerotic Love
• St. Michael, “Wave Maker”

Image: Talon Abraxas.

Saturday, September 28, 2024

Anna Blaedel on the “Guidance of North Stars”

Over at enfleshed, Anna Blaedel has written a piece that beautifully and powerfully captures so much of what, collectively, we're going through. It's entitled “Under the Guidance of North Stars,” and is reprinted (with added links) in its entirety below.

______________________

Last night I dreamt of hurricane winds rushing through groves of olive trees. Though it did not storm where I live, so many storms are gathering, intensifying. In my dream, the sound was chaotic, loud, disorienting. Heartwood groaning under unrelenting, chaotic pressure. Ancient branches cracking like thunderclaps. The trees were crying, howling, moaning. A signal, a summons, a song. Within the tremendous intensity of the storm, a whisper: The trees know how to heal.

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of sitting in a sacred circle, part of a tender collective listening deeply into our lives to attune to the liberatory rhythms of wholeness, healing, and pleasure. What, and who, do you love most of all? What people, what values, what ideas, what experiences constitute the core, the throughline, the pulsing heart of all you hold precious, sacred, irreplaceable?

We were invited to imagine these things as our North Star. More than a destination, North Stars reveal possible ways. More than a map from point A to point B, they help us orient to the many ways we might make, and find, our way – through storms, in chaos, into healing.

There is raw power in knowing what, and who, you love, cherish. There is raw power in tapping into what, and who, guides and orients your life. There is raw power in confronting what, and who, guides and orients our collective life.

Last week was the autumn equinox. Darkness and light, rebalancing. Seasons, shifting. It is a season of shedding and seeding. Rupture and possibility.

Next week begins the month of Tishrei. Within Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashanah ushers in the holy days of the new year. It is a season of realigning. Toward sweetness, and accountability, and healing, and the raw and tender possibilities which emerge from reorienting, repatterning.

This last year has been a year of rupture, of pain. Of genocide, unfolding. Of storms, escalating. Of olive trees, crying out. Of watching elected leaders, including ones I voted for, sending billions of dollars of weapons of war to slaughter children, and elders, and mothers, and poets, and olive trees.

Prentiss Hemphill asks, “What will it take for us to heal?” This question, they suggest, reveals where we are headed and how we might get there.

We are witnessing the consequences of generations of occupation and displacement. Of violent disregard for precious, beloved life. Of collective life oriented toward the North Stars of profit, power, domination, and control. “What will it take for us to heal?”

Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective teach us that our spiritual and healing practices are necessary to our survival, and that our care for each other is – always, always – political.

Marcellus Khaliifah Williams should still be alive. His poem, “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine,” should be read, by him, aloud, in schools full of books and not guns, in buildings that have not been bombed into dust.

“in the face of apex arrogance
and ethnic cleansing by any definition . . .
still your laughter can be heard”

Pain can consume us. Grief can suffocate breath. Unhealed trauma, ongoing rupture, endangers precious life. “What will it take for us to heal?”

In the days and weeks to come, as storms literal and metaphorical bear down, may you find shelter under trustworthy North Stars. May you practice aligning your life with what is precious, irreplaceable, and beloved. May we practice aligning collective life with what is precious, irreplaceable, and beloved. May we scream, and weep. May we hold, and be held. May we rage, and breathe, and sing. May our dreams bear sweetness, even when they are haunted and haunting. May, still, laughter be heard . . .

– Anna Blaedel
“Under the Guidance of North Stars”
enfleshed
September 26, 2024

Friday, September 27, 2024

Keiynan Lonsdale

Something special for "music night" this evening at The Wild Reed. . . .

It’s the beautiful music video for Nigerian-Australian singer-songwriter Keiynan Lonsdale’s recently released “piano version” of his 2018 song, “Kiss the Boy.” (To hear the original version and view its music video, click here.)

I don’t know about you, but I much prefer – musically and visually – this latest version of Lonsdale’s “Kiss the Boy” . . .

. . . I’m scared to show just how I feel
’Cause people talk
Don’t want to worry ’bout whatever
Just got to know your deal
See, half the time I’m wondering if this is real
Why not say somethings on my mind if I feel love
But when the moments right I freeze
That’s how I know my heart is his

If you want to kiss the boy
Then you better kiss the boy right now
You ain’t got to be afraid of the words you want to say right now
’Cause love is a game we deserve to play out loud
So you want to play then you better kiss the boy
Oh, you better kiss the boy right now

. . . I might not say the one thing on my mind cause it’s too tough
But we lose our chance when we don’t try
On second thought yeah, I think I might

. . . Don’t want to hide, don’t want to hide
Most of my life I’ve been terrified
Spending my days always questioning
Am I wrong to love a man
I realise I realise ain’t gotta hide this heart of mine
I’m gonna fight just to let you know to open
Your light and let it glow

So if you want to kiss the boy then you
Better kiss the boy right now (Oh, yeah)
You ain’t gotta be afraid of the words you
Want to say right now (You gotta say it, baby)
’Cause love is a game we deserve to
Play out loud (We deserve our love)
So if you want to play then you better kiss the boy
Oh, you better kiss the boy right now
If you want to kiss the boy
Then you better kiss the boy right now

For a “behind-the-scenes” look at the making
of the above music video, click here.

Thursday, September 26, 2024

Something to Think About . . .

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Butch Ware: “You Can Actually Vote Your Conscience”

Every effort to protect Team Blue, to protect the Democrats from facing accountability for the evil that their own hands have wrought is equally evil. If you are trying to shield them from the electoral consequences of 200,000-plus deaths in Gaza, of 11 months of genocide, of increasing police murders [of Black people] in every single year since they have been in power, of sending troops in riot gear in Democratic-controlled states to crack kids’ heads [as they protest U.S. support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza] . . . then you are part of the problem.

Wake up and unplug from the propaganda machine. Everyone is fearmongering around Trump as though fascism is not already here. . . . I have entered this fight alongside a lifetime humanitarian, peace activist, ecological conservationist and moral leader, Jill Stein, in order to shake America out of its stupor. You have more choices than just blue militarized fascism or red militarized fascism. You can actually vote your conscience, vote Green.

[T]he Democrat Party has already lost the swing states of Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, ISPU, has publicly available data, that the Democrats certainly saw before I saw it, that indicates that in [these three key swing states] Joe Biden received 65% of the vote in 2020, and the Democrats are polling under 15% in those states now. They could not have won the 2020 election without those swing states, and they could not have won those swing states without Muslim voters. Those voters are gone. They are not coming back. Dead man walking. The Democrats cannot win.

. . . [The] Yaqeen Institute will release [data] this week [showing] that over 53% of the Muslims that they surveyed nationwide are now supporting third-party candidates, with something like 80% of those going to the Green Party, that the support for the Democrats in the Muslim community is at 15%, and it’s at 4% for Trump. So, this effort to try to pin an inevitable defeat of the Democrats upon third-party candidates or upon Muslims is at best disingenuous, and for those with a clear sense of moral integrity, it is obviously gaslighting.

– Dr. Rudolph “Butch” T. Bilal Ware III
Excerpted from “Green Presidential and
Vice Presidential Candidates Jill Stein
and Butch Ware on Gaza and Fighting
'Two Zombie Political Parties’”
Democracy Now!
September 25, 2024

Related Off-site Links:
Vote Against Genocide; Vote for Jill Stein and Butch Ware – Doug Rogers (River Reporter, September 25, 2024).
Dr. Butch Ware: American Muslim Political Power, Ending Genocide, and Voting Green Party – The American Muslim Dialogue Podcast (September 22, 2024).
Jill Stein’s VP Candidate Butch Ware Stuns Liberal Talk Show Hosts – Dangerous Ideas with Lee Camp (September 21, 2024).
Dr. Butch Ware on His Green Party Vice Presidential Campaign – Black Agenda Report (September 20, 2024).
Green Party Candidate Jill Stein Selects Dr. Butch Ware as Running Mate – NewsNation (August 16, 2024).

UPDATES: “Democrats Lost the Muslim Vote”: An Interview with Jill Stein and Butch Ware – Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs, September 26, 2024).
The 2024 Elections and Ending the Gaza Genocide: An Interview with Jill Stein – Kshama Sawant (On Strike!, October 1, 2024).
MSNBC Demands Purity in Political Parties, No Third Parties Can Exist – Kit Cabello (Hard Lens Media, October 2, 2024).
“Voting for Democrats is Wasting Your Vote”: An Interview with Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware – Briahna Joy Gray (Bad Faith, October 3, 2024).
Jill Stein Wants You to Rethink What’s Possible – Amani Al-Khatahtbeh (Amani On Air, October 4, 2024).
Yes, They’re Really Voting for Jill Stein – Aymann Ismail (Slate, October 30, 2024).
U.S. Elections: Why We Must Be Radical – An Interview with Professor Butch Ware – Muhammad Jalal (The Thinking Muslim, November 1, 2024).
Jill Stein and Butch Ware’s First Post-Election Interview – The Katie Halper Show (November 19. 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The “Green Smoothie” Option
• “Americans Deserve Choices”: Jill Stein on Breaking Points – 4/30/24
• Butch Ware: Quote of the Day – September 12, 2024
• Butch Ware: “I’m Not Here as a Spoiler”
• Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate Butch Ware in Minneapolis
• Demolishing the False Narrative About Jill Stein and the 2016 Election
• Peter Bloom on the Unmasking of the “Democratic Charade”
• When Democrats Undermine Democracy
• Politics 101
• Something to Think About – August 15, 2024
• Voices on the Issues That Really Matter
• “It’s a Systematic Slaughter That We’re Funding”
• Chris Hedges on the End of the American Empire
• Breaking Down Kamala Harris’s DNC Speech on Gaza
• Progressive Perspectives On an American Coronation
• Marianne Williamson: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win in November”
• Centrist/Corporatist Democrats Have Just Launched “Left Punching” Season
• Progressive Perspectives on the Crisis in U.S. Electoral Politics
• Hope Over Fear: Voting Green

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Meditation and the Life of Nonviolence

Peacemakers throughout history testify to the need for quiet meditation if we are to live the nonviolent life of peace.

The [ministry] of the nonviolent Jesus, according to Luke’s account, begins with him sitting in silent prayer by the Jordan River. In that quiet time of contemplative listening and opening to the Spirit of peace, he heard that he was God’s beloved [Luke 3:21–22]. In this sacred space, he was able to take that message to heart, to claim that truth as the core of his identity.

Like the nonviolent Jesus, we too need to sit still in silent meditation and open our hearts and minds to the Holy Spirit of peace and let the God of peace call us God’s beloved. We need to give God permission to love us, name us, and claim us if we want to be disarmed, healed and freed to practice loving nonviolence.

That is why quiet meditation is so crucial to the life of nonviolence. In that silent meditation, we can hear God say to us, “You are my beloved.” We learn who we are, we remember who we are, and we are strengthened once again to be who we really are. In that strength and confidence, we feel liberated from our inner violence and freed to get up and walk outside into the world of violence to offer the hand of peace and nonviolence.

– John Dear
Excerpted from The Nonviolent Life
Pace e Bene Press, 2013
pp. 34–35

Monday, September 23, 2024

Summer’s End

This past Saturday, September 21, was the last day of summer, and I spent much of it with my friend Adnan.

It was a beautful day here in the Twin Cities, and after running a few errands, Adnan and I visited the Prayer Tree, a sacred place for me located by Minnehaha Creek in south Minneapolis.

Following are some images that Adnan and I took on the last day of summer. They’re accompanied by some writings that I find very meaningful. Perhaps you will too. Enjoy!

In many indigenous spiritualities, including the indigenous or pagan spirituality of Europe, any tree can be representative of the tree, that is, the World Tree or Cosmic Tree. In numerous religious traditions the World Tree is represented as a colossal tree which supports the heavens, thereby connecting the heavens, the terrestrial world, and, through its roots, the underworld. The Tree of Life, which symbolically represents and connects all forms of creation and is mentioned in the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis, is an expression of the World Tree.

To get to the oak tree at which I regularly pray, one must go off the paved pathways. There is a track, but no doubt for many, it’s a hidden, unknown one. And yet it’s one that leads to the “Tree of Life.” All of this brings to mind the Beloved and Antlered One, “seeker of the forest’s hidden paths,” a powerful and beautiful way of acknowledging all the different, unorthodox ways that one can seek and find the Sacred.

– Michael Bayly
Excerpted from “The Prayer Tree”
The Wild Reed
September 18, 2017

When you touch one thing with deep awareness,
you touch everything.

– Thích Nhất Hạnh

Seasons come and seasons go
No matter what we choose
A thousand names, a thousand roads
All lead to one simple truth
Thank you for life
Thank you for everything
I stand here in grace and gratitude
And I thank you

– Olivia Newton-John,
Amy Sky & Steven Mackinnon
From “Grace and Gratitude” (2006)

Your light shines brighter with every step,
Courage born from trials, your soul’s depths.
The universe sees your heart’s desire,
Connecting you with love, like a burning fire.
Keep shining, dear one, you’re on the right path,
Guided by love, through life’s joy and aftermath.

– Malik Arshad Awan

Holy One, Your Mind created all that is, Your Spirit entered into it, Your Love gave life to it. And would I look upon what You created as if it could be made sinful? I would not perceive such dark and fearful images. A madman’s dream is hardly fit to be my choice, instead of all the loveliness with which You blessed creation; all its purity, its joy, and its eternal, quiet home in You.

– Adapted from Lesson 263
of A Course in Miracles

Great Spirit,

I pray for the fearful and broken world of humanity.
I pray that all may seek and find deep within,
the flame-like seed of compassion

May this compassion be lovingly cultivated
by each one of us so that it blooms
as desires and actions for justice,
community, and a sustainable world
for all living things.

And may the fragrance of this blossoming
be recognized and celebrated
as peace in our lives
and in the world.

Amen.

– Michael Bayly

The Wild Reed