Here’s the second Evolve Love Story: LOVE VERSUS THE G-20. In the last week of June, 2010, the leaders of the G-20 nations gathered in Toronto, Canada, behind a 6 kilometre long security fence, to make decisions that would affect us all. In response, there was a week of activities counter to the gathering, including a People’s Summit, an indigenous march, a toxic tour of toronto, a queer “kiss-in”, prayer vigils, humour and more. Unfortunately, a small minority of protestors used the tactic of property damage to send their message, and the media focussed almost exclusively on that story. Behind the smoke screen of burning police cars and smashed windows, lies the stuff of a great love story, a story of people coming together in the name of peace, justice and compassion. The video features appearances by Maude Barlow, Kimia Ghomeshi, Judy Rebick, John Greyson, Mary Walsh, Jasmine Thomas and more.
Defiantly Hopeful
In the face of a world in crisis, I dare to care. In the face of materialism, consumerism, and me me me – ism, I recognize that I am because you are, that without you and you and you – plant animal mineral macro micro organism human- I would not exist. That we are all part of a brilliant multi hued tapestry, that we all add to the warp and weave and woof, that we all have a fierce light.
In the face of irony, cynicism, jadedness and despair, I choose hope. In the face of narrow empiricism, the confining corridors of quantification, of dogma of any stripe-rational, political, spiritual or religious, I choose to light a match to the fuse of possibility, and blow up all boxes, sending the church of reason, the church of ideology, the church of churchiness, into the air, with a deep and satisfying boooooom, so that emptied of their arrogance, these churches might offer us freedom, not more walls, love, not more hate, understanding, not more separation.
In the face of hatred, anger and fear, I choose love, compassion, and celebration. If I can’t party in your revolution, don’t put me on the guest list.
In the face of my own vulnerabilities and limitations, I choose to go easy on myself. I am not perfect, I am human, and that is a wonderful thing. My stumblings and fumblings make me real. I am simply doing my best.
In the face of my ego, which is always feeling either smalled or bigged, I smile gently and give it a little pat on the head, a kick in the butt, a nudge in the ribs and say,”hey we’re doing fine, we’re doing just fine. Get up off the ground, get down off of your pedestal and stand in the place of the real, neither inflated, nor deflated, just be yourself. That’s good enough.”
In the face of a sunny day, I cry out,”thank you! Thank you for this amazing world, thank you for 14 billion years of hard joyous miraculous work to get us to the point where we can really appreciate this magnificence. I’m going to stop pissing in my own pool and start truly loving this incredulous place, from the bottom of my toes to the tip of my tongue, gonna celebrate this one precious life, this next precious breath, this precious precious moment. To hell with the nay sayers and doomsdayers, the cynics and the pisspots, I will blow up the gates of the gatekeepers and storm the citadels of the power brokers with pure, unadulterated Love. Nothing-not anything- will stand in my way, not even myself. It’s the least I can do to say, thank you, thank you, thank you for the wondrous wonder of creative creation. And in case no one has told you this today, Universe: you rock!”
True Life Confession
I have a true life confession to make: I woke up this morning with Daryl Hannah’s pig in my bed. Snuggled right up. I have no recollection of the night before. Let me say one thing in my defense- Molly, the pot bellied pig, is a discerning, clean, pig, even if she is well….a bit of a pig. And even if she does have a pot belly.
(Editors note: just learned that technically Molly is not a pot bellied pig – she is a micro pig. Daryl rescued her from an unhappy life of being tossed from foster home to foster home).
I’ve been staying at Daryl’s place for the last couple of days, in the wake of my new feature documentary, Fierce Light’s U.S. premiere, at the Palm Springs international film festival. Daryl is featured in the film as an eco-activist, during the struggle to save South Central Farms, North America’s largest urban communty garden, from the developers bulldozers.
Her home is the stellar opposite of the usual movie stars pad – it’s in a treed valley, that she helped restore to its natural state, with a stone house, and surrounding smaller buildings, including a yurt, and a teepee. Her living room is outside, with a carpet of living moss. I stayed in the yurt last time, but this time around I’m in the main house, where the pet pig roams.
According to Daryl, the nomadic way of living is in fact the most sustainable. You leave a light foot print. Your structures do not destroy the earth – you step lightly, camp lightly, and move on, with a minimum of stuff, a minimum impact on the ground. I’ve always had a thing for nomadic structures. Maybe it’s because I’m such a nomad myself. I’ve lived in houseboats, and wall tents, cabins and campers, caves and squats, rooftops and hammocks, and the modern nomads half way houses of artists residencies and film festival hotel rooms.
Daryl’s green oasis is home to a marvelous menagerie – two Alpacas, llama like beasts from South America, an assortment of rescued fowl with names like Andy Warhol and White Cloud, a cat named Flaco and a dog named Toto, and the aforementioned pig, Molly. Recently she snuck half the crowd into a motel room en route to Colorado – well just two dogs, the cat and the pig. But still.
All the animals have been rescued from scenarios in which they were abandoned or in danger of getting killed. Flaco, worlds most friendly cat, was once a feral cat, and the alpacas were going to be killed, cause they weren’t up to snuff as show animals – one had the right bangs, but the wrong coat, and the other had the right coat but the wrong bangs. Somehow or other, these animals find a second chance at life in Daryls place.
Daryls love of animals, and her intense love of nature has inspired her long and deep commitment to environmental activism. She has come to the stark realization that the planet is in a state of emergency, and the sanest response to that is to put everything you can, into trying to saving it. Parallel to her acting career, in which she became famous for her roles in such classics as Splash, Bladerunner and Kill Bill, Daryl has become an outspoken voice in defense of planet earth, as well as a committed activist. Daryl is always appearing at conferences and events, speaking out for sustainability and environmental concerns. She runs a regular on-line Vlog, dhlovelife.com in which you can follow her journey to the far corner of the worlds, searching out stories of sustainability in action.
Daryl has also been involved in direct action, most famously at the encampment in defense of South Central Farms, the largest urban garden in North America. When the call went out to help save the beautiful urban oasis from the developers bulldozer, Daryl found herself tree sitting (despite her fear of heights!) alongside veteran activists John Quigely and Julia Butterfly Hill, well known for her two year tree sit high atop the ancient red wood tree Luna, which she suceeded in saving.
I first met Daryl after she saw Scared Sacred during it’s theatrical release. It’s part of the Fierce Light Trilogy, the story of my five year journey to ground zero’s of the world, in search of stories of transformation. She called me up out of the blue to say how much she loved the film, and offered to help in any way she could.
A year later, she phoned me from South Central Farms, where she had gone to film for dhlovelife.com She ended up not only filming the story, but becoming part of it. She convinced me that this was an important story, one that would fit perfectly into my new project, Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action. Cher Hawrysh, my producer, and I had to make a quick decision – we had yet to raise a dime for the film, but it was clearly a breaking, powerful story. We decided to cover it, and I flew down from Toronto to join in the action to try and save the farm. This story became the back bone for Fierce Light. John Quigely called the struggle to save the farm the most important story of the last decade.
Watch out for Daryl over the next few years – she’s on a mission to throw a wrench into the machinery that’s destroying mother earth, and we need all the life loving warriors for the earth we can muster right now. Her central message is: Love Life. If we start from that place, everything else makes sense. From a place of love, of what Matthew Fox calls “biophilia” from a place of life centeredness, we will find the resources to stand up and be part of the solution. A force of positivity in contrast to the forces of necrophilia – the death forces of the Industrial Growth Society. This is the time to stand up for this beautiful world that we are a part of, that is part of us. We have the tremendous honour to have been born at a time of utter crisis, and have the opportunity to rise to the occasion, and reap all the incredible boons stepping into your true self offers – finding your purpose, your own calling in this time of crisis.
Step up, step out, and let your fierce light shine, for the love of life.
~ ~ ~
Watch Daryls Vlogs about the action to save South Central Farms
The Urge to Manifest
It goes something like this…
First, I just was. A void of pure potential. Shunyata. Emptiness – but pregnant with possibility. I had this deep, unspoken urge to manifest…you know the feeling. One thing lead to another, which lead to another and before you know it, I was over the edge: it was the Big Bang, the Big “Ohhhh” , the Divine Orgasm…and I let out a moan that was long and low and deeeeeeep – way below the range of human ears – this Kosmik boooooooming sound wave that slowed and thickened and transformed slowly – oh you don’t know nothin’ bout how slow I can go – slowly into matter. Slow – like a few billion years slow – a time of birthing galaxies, exploding stars, spiral nebulae, black holes, fiery intensity, and burgeoning solar systems. Me became We, a multiple orgasm of complexification and diversification that keeps on coming and coming with no end in sight.
Recently, this little blue planet called earth popped out of the Kosmik womb. This I of the great Me was a quiet baby, for a long long time. But finally, I caught my breath, found some air molecules, then some of My H’s found an 0 and voila – I had my blood. The first oceans were a sexy soup. Slowly rock turned to flesh.
Way late in the game, those early twinkling splashes of stardust turned into human beings. I began to awaken into consciousness. I disovered spirit. I discovered matter. The two went hand in hand like lovers, and I revelled in this manifest realm, I worshipped Her as a Goddess, as a Lover. Good times!!!
Then a new kid on the block arrived, a part of Me named Christ, and at first everything He said jived with what I knew. But a short blink of an eye later I lost Him to dogma and digression, and I was severely dissapointed. Huh, we’re original sinners? What, pleasure is bad? Wait – you’re saying I can’t talk to God by Myself any more? And you’ll kill me if I beg to differ? Weird. Scary. Disturbing.
Tired of the churchy hyporcrisy, my ancestors became Mennonites, a pacifistic utopianistic tightly knit religious community that was trying to live by the true core tenets of Christ’s teachings, rejecting the excesses of what they saw as a corrupted Christian faith and a violent culture at large, refusing to take part in war and bloodshed.
When the Dutch government asked them to go to war they refused, and to avoid forced service they moved to the shores of the Caspian Sea. They lived in peace for several hundred years, maintaining their isolation and their ideals, until again they were told that they would have to kill. This time they moved, en masse, to the New World: Canada.
My grandmother was raised in Alberta in the strict Mennonite fashion. And as usual with my peeps, she was a trouble maker. She didn’t like the patriachal structure of the religion. She especially resented the fact that as a girl she was not allowed to ice skate. She left as soon as she could, on the arms of a ne’er do well from down south named Missouri Jack. She raised her eight children without any religion.
In the late fifties the religious void was filled when, one by one, my family became Bahai’s. Baha’u’ll’ah, the founder of the faith, taught that humanity is undergoing a process of spiritual evolution, similar to the growth of an individual. We are in a state of adolescence, albeit a stormy one, but Bahai’s possess an unshakable belief that we will make it through to global maturity, to a time of global peace. They believe we are on the verge of a great leap in consciousness that will bring humanity to a future where, ‘world peace is not only possible, but inevitable.’
As a child I was deeply committed and pious, a little holy roller, which culminated in a pilgrimage to the Baha’i holy city of Haifa, Israel, when I was nine. But as a teenager I found that I was unable to embrace a single wholesale program. One tenet of the faith is ‘the independent investigation of truth.’ You need to come to your own understanding of truth, instead of just following the path of least resistance, succumbing to the pressures of family or culture. So I left, to ‘independently investigate truth.’
Today, I realize that I will never belong to a single belief system. What I look for are the universal truths,the mystic heart, and I do my very best to live by these truths. I believe the true heart of the sacred is accessible to us all,not just for the experts. We can all be “mystics without monasteries” if we so desire.
Alongside my spiritual investigation, from a very young age I had a strong sense of social responsibility, and all my life have been an active agent of change, on the front lines of the planet, working as a media activist.
But like many people, my two sides – political and spiritual – have been deeply divided. In progressive circles, there has long been a deep distrust of religion, that opiate of the masses, which has been used and abused in the name of power and domination. It takes tremendous courage to ‘come out of the closet as a spiritual person’ in the activist world.
On the spiritual side, there has long been a distrust of politics, with it’s biting cynicism and tendency to focus on the negative. In the extreme, there is a belief that this world is an illusion, a place of sin and temptation, and the best we can do is get the hell out, as fast as we can, to that pie in the sky when we die, however you might envision it. I have to wonder: 14 billion years of evolution, so we can simply transcend it all? Hmmm….
Today, I feel that the need to merge the power of action with the depth of spirit is urgent, crucial, in fact, the direction we need to go if we want to have any hope of coming through the “Great Turning” with our precious small blue planet intact. But I dream of much more than survival – I dream of utter transformation.
I try my best to live my truth, to build true power from within, so that all my actions come from a place of deep, deep authenticity. The means are the ends. Transformation begins this very moment, not in some distant future. It is personal, it is political, it is spiritual, it is global. The journey begins with this very breath.
– Velcrow Ripper
Toronto Island, Canada
www.fiercelight.org
Fierce Love 