An Activist’s Trajectory
This is a piece I wrote in 2013 for my comrades in the first arrest-action of my activist career. Thirty years earlier, The White Train was an unknown, a secret Pentagon train that shuttled nuclear warheads throughout the country, from Texas to Washington state. The Poudre Nuclear Freeze Campaign, Fort Collins’ local peace movement of the 80’s, got a call from a man who was then a stranger to us—Radical Catholic organizer, Jim Douglas—who’d been tracking the train’s progress for years. He told us what it was, and that it was coming the next night, over the downtown tracks of our Colorado town. He’d called every peace group in the hundreds of towns that the train would pass through to warn us all. “Do whatever you think is right” he said.
We decided to blockade it, & to stop the train. None of us had ever blockaded a train before, nor been arrested for peace. We called every media outlet we could, and the police as well so nobody would get killed. The train had gun-turrets running the length of it, with military sharp-shooters protecting the load. A blizzard moved in that night, and it had snowed 2 feet by the time the train came at 2a.m. We were arrested and put on trial that lasted over a year. Eventually, after many court appearances, defiant in the face of court charges and all their attempts to silence us, the charges were all dropped.
We decided to blockade it, & to stop the train. None of us had ever blockaded a train before, nor been arrested for peace. We called every media outlet we could, and the police as well so nobody would get killed. The train had gun-turrets running the length of it, with military sharp-shooters protecting the load. A blizzard moved in that night, and it had snowed 2 feet by the time the train came at 2a.m. We were arrested and put on trial that lasted over a year. Eventually, after many court appearances, defiant in the face of court charges and all their attempts to silence us, the charges were all dropped.
I was born in the shadow of the atom, at the dawn of a new cosmic age, and I came to call myself Activist. Spent my precious lifetime pressed up too close to history, and it twisted me, harshly.
My first home was a city of brick and iron, a land filled with slabs of brutal concrete—all of that grafted somehow below this skin, up against these bones—glazed and fired and fixed forever like the universes’s background radiation smoking though me. Somehow though I let go of the walls of the blast furnace. Learnt from the edge of human measurements of the nuclear threat, simultaneously finding love and joy with comrades. The whole trajectory of my life in retrospect feels like the slow turn of an old radio dial from childhood, reciveing two stations at once.
2013—On The 30th Anniversary of The Peace Blockade: We all wrote up our activist excursions for the past 30 years, to share. Here’s mine—
It feels like I’ve organized my whole life around not having too much age at the bottom. I’ve never had a Big Career with 40 hour work weeks and a 401 K. Never cared to invest my time in other people’s schemes to get rich—I was fabulously abnormal that way. Because of this refusal to trade the best years of my life for captivity inside florescent airless rooms and a decrepit, but well-financed old age, I’ve lived large and also, very frugally. I learned the basics of simple survival, and have managed to be surrounded by Nature and beauty most of my days. Having no children gifted me with an abundance of freedom and resources, and while I didn’t contribute humans to the future, I did plant trees and activists through teaching about Power and performances that were radical.
I try to live in integrity, as much as one can in the pre-future/post-modern world. I’ve had a life of wandering and wondering, of high ideas and great adventures. I’ve met amazing people and experienced true liberty and creative problem solving in communities of activists. On my best days I think my life is a model for alternative ways to function in the world. I’ve managed to work up enough writing to fill a hundred books, and I’ve published three so far, with more to come.
I paid for my house as I built it, and it’s safe in a land trust, protected from seizure by the state, so I can go ahead and make less money, have more freedom. I’ve got Medicaid, as I’m disabled, so I’m guaranteed health care, as long as the Republicans don’t totally destroy this tiny, socialist slice in the system.
What do I do? Such a strange question, which usually means—What do you do for money? I’m learning to think in terms of what happens through me. Mostly, I live in beauty; muchly, I move water. Having no plumbing, I haul water and I catch water. Now when the blessed drought snows are melting fast off my steep metal roofs, I move water from 50 gallon barrels to buckets. I carry water to the forest and water trees. That’s what happens through me, direct participation with my needs, in the final weeks of winter, in the final years of my life. Yesterday I went to the spring and gathered drinking water. It took hours. It always feels Holy to gather the life-giving gift of water from the Earth.
I’m the long distance caregiver for my parents, who are in their 90’s in the final dark shadow of their lives.For them I carry and pour metaphor water. I am in charge, suddenly and completely, for years now my main job. I make long distance phone calls. I fly to Florida for one week each month. I speak to them several times a day. I try to stay calm. I feel terrified by overwhelm. Have you noticed how nobody prepares us for these momentous scenes, like menopause, or our parents’ dying?
These days I live in my beautiful straw bale-off-grid-recycled home, in the tiny town of Jamestown, in the mountains above Boulder. I've lived in this town for 30 years, a town of 250 residents—that’s less people than the building I grew up in in the Bronx. I live with my friend, Joy, a gifted potter, and this is a clay-covered straw house—like a giant pot she’s carved and sculpted. I have had and still do have girlfriends, but I don’t want to live with anyone. I am learning to be alone, solitary with my habits, and in peace. I finally have my hands in my own clay.
I teach Women's Studies part time, and I'm a writing instructor too. It’s strange to have begun this new, aca-demented career in my 50’s, but I did, and it’s been really good for my dendrites, as well as my spirit. Teaching Women’s Studies is perfect for me— I am women’s studies! Turns out I’m a good teacher.
For 22 years, I've been teaching from the stage as a member of the radical feminist theater group, Vox Feminista, a tribe of performing activists. We create and perform two new shows a year, each about 13 times across the Front Range before we fold it up, and write another one. I write, research, and perform standup comedy, and poetry.
I am also writing a memoir of my life, a book of radical theory and political connections, as well as continuing to hammer away on a book about my radical adventures living at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, for three years. This is the Great Adventure I left Colorado for, one year after our Peace Blockade action.
After 7 years of living a lesbian-separatist life at the peace camp and on womyn’s communes back in the states, I returned to Colorado for a Transpersonal Psychotherapy Master’s program at Naropa University. For five years after I ran the kid’s program at the Boulder Safehouse, where I learned more about battered women and children than anyone should have to know. It’s like overflowing with too much information on nuclear war, global warming, extinction, racism, fascism, and patriarchy in general. I worked as a conflict mediation trainer in middle and high schools, taught violence-prevention strategies, diversity, & conflict resolution. When I began to build my house in 2000, I dropped out of the system, and I’ve pretty much stayed out.
In 1999, I went to Seattle to the WTO protests, which was formative, and I returned re-energized for revolution after fighting the cops for six days in the streets—a stark callback to the direct actions at the peace camp—empowering, magnificent, hopeful—and then Bush won the presidency—and the next eight years, as y’all remember, were non-stop terrifying. I went to many protests for many more years, but I never was arrested again, having come to believe that symbolic protest is never as much fun as hands on resistance, civil disobedience and the thrill of property damage. I shouldn’t say that. Cover the children’s eyes.
Of late, I’m involved with young activists here in Boulder. I circle with my coven of witches, and I’ve returned to working on anti-nuke activism, inspired by the great Joanna Macy and her vision of Nuclear Guardianship. I’m now back at Rocky Flats, where I started this wild journey, working with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. Did y’all know that this government is in the process of turning R.F., this most radioactive landscape, into a Wildlife Sanctuary? If this is allowed to happen, Boulder and Rocky Flats will be the flagship for all radioactive government spaces, like Hanford and Los Alamos. The men in charge are so crazy!
Mostly these days, I’m organizing and protesting for environmental defense. I’ve been involved with a radical anti-civ group called Deep Green Resistance, started by a hero of mine, Derrick Jensen. I work some on fracking issues, which are the other local atrocity here, consider going to prison again. But, teaching and writing, performing and circling are safer than cops and bomb trains and jail cells, though I’m imagining creating a women’s occupation of a fracking site in Boulder County.
Some days, this world feels so heavy— the sublime anxieites of nuclear war, climate change, extinctions, fascism—how to best live, sane and open-eyed? Sometimes I feel like I’m more confused, but on a higher level, as the decades pass. Sometimes, moving water feels like a crazy response in a world where everyone’s on the phone. Sometimes, I feel freakier than any 57 year old oughtta feel—with 2 masters’ degrees and all this life behind me, I should have a more elevated lifestyle- I’m the first in my family to go to college, earn a graduate degree—(twice!)—and the only person in my family without plumbing. I pray to be a good animal, or a good seed.
It’s so good to step back and admire the creation of this specific existence, so incredibly privileged and beautiful, and so I give thanks to you, dear ones, for the opportunity to reflect. Life is short, but it’s deep and our collective activist cord, back to the train tracks, to that snowy night, is long.
THEN: 1983
In the early 80’s, I was just coming out of many years of confusion and drug addiction. I migrated from the Bronx to Ft Collins in the mid 70’s, and was still fairly unconscious, and on the path of least resistance. I think I always knew the hidden horrors of nukes, having grown up under duck-and-cover desks in elementary school, and maybe that was a piece of my drug use, a way to deal with the anxiety.
I joined the Poudre Nuclear Freeze Campaign in 81, and my life deepened. One great memory is the encirclement of Rocky Flats. Another is going with Jo, Josh, and Dan to Pine Ridge Reservation to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Uprising. I was just learning to perceive the contradictions, to analyze power politically, to place myself in the matrix—I was waking up, and then, Jim Douglass called with the news of The White Train carrying it’s nuclear bomb cargo across the land.
My memories of my very first illegal act are still crystal clear. We had a few days to plan an appropriate action after a stranger’s voice on the phone told us about the bomb train. We decided after a few long meetings to Do Something Big. Kneel on the tracks and stop the train. We’d get media coverage and shine a light into those nuclear shadows. The White Train—our larger-than-life symbol of nuclear war. It was coming.
I remember the night of our action, it was snowing hard. We'd found out in our pre-internet researching, that you can't actually just stop a train. It takes one mile’s warning to begin the braking process. And so we called the police, we called the train people, and we called the media people. We told everyone we planned to be on those tracks, and the eight of us, surrounded by a crowd of beautiful supporters gathered out there in downtown Ft. Collins at 3 a.m. Gathered under the lights of Safeway’s parking lot, we faced the cold, the snow, the darkness lit with cameras and boom lights and then, that one single, round, white light, very slowly advancing.
The sound of a train still quickens my heart, and I still can feel the cold wet jeans stuck to my knees, feel & smell the creosoted timbers and rails beneath me. Still see that light, hear that whistle, so slow, coming on from a great flat distance. And there were all of you, and I remember all your faces, and the cops that pulled us off, and John—now Senator Kefales— I remember you going back there, again and again, being dragged from the tracks over and over, and I thought you'd be hit for sure, but you weren’t, and I remember playing hacky sac with a rolled up sock in the jail cell, and then the rest is sort of a blur.
Into that blur, many months of meetings with generous, radical lawyers, of studying anti-nuclear defenses, a multitude of pre-trial hearings, where we resisted Motions in Limine, orders to be silent on questions of International Law and the Nuremberg Principles, and I remember knowing that they knew that we wouldn’t stop resisting and so they stopped prosecuting, and dropped the charges, and then it was over.
What a thing. What an initiation! This is what I know of initiation—if you're not terrified, it is not initiation. Sitting on the cushion will not do it, reading about it will not do it. You need to kneel in the snow on the rails next to your wild fellows in the desperation of history, in the time of Ray-gun and our youth, in the throes of passion and moral purpose, and face the question with no answers. The question—how to save Life-on-Earth—still sits in the center, sits at the heart of the headlight, and eight of our hearts, shining a light on that secret white train—sits in a circle of silence, so very full with itself, and waits.
Here we are for the 30th anniversary photo. From the left, Ken, Shelby, me, Roxi, Alison, Billy, Marie, Nancy, Dave, David, Cherie, Planet, and Jo.
Deep Green Resistance, Intensive Workshop
2011
“As Individual fingers we can easily be broken, but all together, we make a mighty fist.” — Sitting Bull.
*How could it be that we are giving up the future of all of our descendants, and the past of all of our ancestors in exchange for oil that powers our consumerism?
*What will it take for concerned individuals to get seriously involved in stopping the destruction of our only home?
These are really the only two questions, and have been my constant companions over the past couple of years as global conditions get increasingly grim. In an effort to move towards some type of action, my closest friend and I decided to get a Deep Green Resistance workshop to come to our locality with the goal of bringing together like minded individuals who are ready to form a culture of resistance.
The Deep Green Resistance Movement has been a great force in my life and has worked to further radicalize me to take action against the destruction of this planet. To me there is no other choice. We must resist or die. This DGR workshop focuses on how individuals can get to this goal by cohesively aligning our powers and focusing our anger on the appropriate targets. Throughout the workshop, the participants collectively learned about what resistance movements have accomplished in the past, and what the factors crucial for success were, as well as what factors led to defeat. In learning about these past resistance movements, we became empowered to emulate them and move forward to stop the madness.
During the workshop, I came to understand the challenges involved in becoming a focused unit working together to accomplish the critical goal of saving life on this planet. It became obvious to me and many others that the biggest obstacle for the resistance movement is the inability to work together and become a community when all of us come from such traumatic pasts since most of us have been raised in a culture of privilege and entitlement, a culture founded solely on the sanctity of the individual, and on money.
A tremendous paradigm shift to a cooperative, collective mentality must be one of the central goals in forming a culture of resistance. We must form direct and reciprocal relationships with the land, embodied in alliances and real communities with like-minded people. Such communities must learn how to grow their own food and become self-sufficient within their specific localities. We must learn to rely on each other and our land base for every need. And our wants must be limited to what the land and community can sustainably provide.
Once we begin to detach, we need to unify and get on with our mission to save the planet and to recognize what Derrick Jensen states in his book, Endgame— “The earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything”. If we do not rescue this planet from its abusers, in the very-near future, not a single one of our disagreements factions will matter. We must unite and become a cohesive resistance movement. We also need to ensure that each and every one of us is ready to become a leader in this movement.
As Leonard Peltier writes in Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sundance— “One good man or one good woman can change the world, can push back the evil, and their work can be a beacon for millions, for billions. Are you that man or woman? If so, may The Great Spirit bless you. If not, why not? We must each be that person.”
With 200 species going extinct every day, 98% of the world’s old growth forests gone, 99% of native prairies gone, the oceans dying, climate change at the tipping point, it ‘s time to come together to stop the destruction. If we don’t do it, who will?
from Deep Green Resistance— A few hundred people, well-trained and organized, have reduced the oil output of Nigeria by a third. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND, has said to the oil industry, " Leave our land while you can or die in it."
MEND stopped 1/3 of Nigeria’s oil production. The vast majority of people in the US have more resources individually than all of MEND put together when they started. Resistance is not just theoretically possible. It is happening now. The only question is, will we join them?
Why haven't activists here accomplished that? Why keep using tactics that have not stopped the destruction and leave the planet at the point of biotic collapse? For all our
precious, hard fought victories, we are losing this war, horribly, painfully, and almost completely.
We’re out of soil, we’re out of species, and we’re out of time. Catastrophic climate change has begun. The only thing that matters now is being effective. Anything else is unconscionable, suicidal, and insane. Deep Green Resistance invites us to consider a new strategy that involves the use of effective aboveground and underground tactics. DGR’s strategy was developed by evaluating strategic options for resistance from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare. It is time to build a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Effective resistance is possible.
We had explored the difference between Liberal and Radical, between alternative culture and oppositional culture. Forty people showed up to a Seventh Day Adventist camp in Colorado to train to fight back against industrial civilization, which we all agreed was killing the planet. Using role plays that divided us into aboveground and underground, we explored the organization and facts of resistance.
Derrick doesn’t want to lecture. He thinks we learn better experientially. And so we’re going to play a game for the rest of the weekend.
In self-selected groups, we were given 6 choices—Transforming Culture, Lobbying, & Building Alternatives were the Above-ground, and Individual Saboteurs, Underground Cells, and Paramilitary were Below. Nobody chose lobbying, so there were 5 groups. They had to come up with operational goals and actions, they had 3 days. And, they had 3 chances. We had to effect the six most urgent categories of our survival. The list on the board read—
Oceans
Forests
Species
Population
Carbon
Toxins
The point was to convince the masses of public to stop the destruction. Turns out, we couldn’t do it. Over and over, in bold, wild actions, we failed in this mission.
There were 3 presenters: Derrick, Aric, and Lierre, the authors of Deep Green Resistance.
Derrick played Joe Public. He put earplugs in, had a remote in one hand and shoveled chips into his mouth with the other. He wore a big hat that read “The Public Never Thinks.”
Aric played the corporation, Omniv. He wore a big hat that said “Omniv Never Blinks”.
Lierre spoke for the earth, who always bats last. She had a big white board that measured the categories of importance for the earth. There sat a whiteboard of the six categories, for three days and nights— Oceans, Forests, Species. Carbon, Population, Toxins.
The point of the game was to liberate our homeland, Feralia, and destroy Omniv, a corporate imperial oligarchy. We’d been turned into a colony and our land, air and water had been taken over and were being poisoned for its profit. All other culture had been destroyed, and Feralians were now dependent on Omniv for everything. And, worst of all, the average Feralian identified psychologically with Omniv in a Stockholm Syndrome nightmare reality. (Sound familiar?) Derrick said, “If we lose, the world is dead. And we can argue about whether bacteria will survive, but I’m not interested in that.”
Three times a day, for an hour each time, we went out in our groups to organize a serious resistance within our chosen categories. Every action was brought before the 3 presenters: Joe Public—who ignored us all—Omniv or arrested or fired or disappeared us, Lierre—keeping score on that whiteboard. And nothing we thought of in our wildest minds changed the facts of the earth’s score-board. Oceans, forests, species. Population, carbon, toxins. Turns out, most of what we’d been told to do is useless to the planet.
At the start of the game, only 3 people had chosen to work with the militia. People could switch groups after each action was presented, and by the end of the weekend, 90% of them had joined the militia.
I had moved to an underground cell. Our last action, desperate and impossible was— blow up a dam, a big dam, and free the river that would rush to take out two railroad bridges, an oil refinery, and a port on its way to the sea. It was outrageous, it was violent, not symbolic, it sounded great! This was it— now we’re on the right track. We proudly presented it to Derrick, Aric, and Lierre. And nothing changed. Oceans, forests, species. Population, carbon, toxins.
When we left, I felt more hopeless than I ever had before in my life. Here’s a poem—
The Underground
2011
After a workshop on taking down civilization
bouncing off firewalls and barbed wire
for 3 days
and losing
everything
I walk into the woods
The trees take me
bite
by bite
Late May green shines
on all the stories told so far
& our questions
braiding into silence
Generations of humans
splitting atoms
splitting eves
Budding trees hypnotize the high prairie sky
full of daylight
hiding flowers of starfields for later
and — (you know this) —
we need a different ending
Empty your pockets of impossible wishes
this culture won't shift without a shove
And i’ve hidden my longing
to hand myself over to this land that's learned me so well
Carbon-based primitive
in a silicon world
But i can name green unfurling kites
of willow, dogwood, alder, aspen
memory coded by spaces and shapes
head stuffed full patterns, rituals
revolutionary strategies
tactics of the underground
Be the fulcrum, the pivot
and the fuse
and I wanted to be your servant, Life
I been keening a spiral song
junkyard dog orbiting a rusting stake
wearing a circle
at the end of steel links
pacing
till i drop the chain on bare earth
with the grass all worn away
rush into the fray
sword drawn
Arrive.
It's a time of thick cocoons stretched like bats
hung between flowering sticks
heavy with spring-thumping life
and i can feel my tail stronger now
My heart wants escape from the real world
my guts the guts of an animal
stare at
the cocoons' worms working free
Sun beats on a thrillion sticky strands of ten thousand chrysalises
ready to hatch out and eat chokecherry leaves
who are ready to die to be part of this miracle.
And i was ready to die already
but no such luck, sucked back with
so much work to do
Caterpillar rises to devour what she can reach
What can i reach?
Arms and heart extended
tiniest toeholds calling me to act
What physics of devotion to bring
which furious silver waters
down like who's blessing?
The three teachers split us into groups,
posed simple questions
How To Stop Them, in many iterations
and off we were sent to midwife answers
(so sure of our minds' power to find answers)
Blasted down from heights
we laddered our unhinged minds to climb
girders of imagination, scaffolds of daring
our hugest unmasked urgencies
beating a clock inside and outside
our fragile bodies
And nothing
nothing to stop them
and the world dies all day long while we reach to stop them
creatures, land-bases, air, watersheds die
For 3 days we reached and flung our spirits
high as we could
got hung up there
part of me
up there dangling still
and forever.
Today i'm reaching alone
Testing the lever of my own arm and heart
saying Us and meaning it
these trees, this river and me are Us
and it’s time to get serious
Cos i been sideways in this world too long––
A greenhouse isn't a garden.
A garden isn't a rainforest.
Unquiet inside as leaves
I go underground in my mind
crawling through darkness, practice pivots in my cells
be a winch, an assassin, a silent vapor
Wanna throw the night around my shoulders
throw myself over the loudest rapids of May
yell my life out in one long call
not knowing if what returns is an answer
or an echo
Moving out, pollen on the winds
from a workshop that shattered certainty
detonating this next level of struggle
wrapped inside a prayer for magic
Moving out to defend
geranium, butterfly, bear
new spring leaves in every forest
Thorns on roses glitter
skyscraper of mountain
dares me in vast verticality
to stop them
Tower of trees vibrating messages in code
to pass along, not alone
Stop Them.
Coded explosives
viruses uncoil
hurricanes roar through the nests
Stop them! Stop them! Stop them!
Just blood pushing against thought
How many years? How many decades?
How much will be left
when we finally decide?
My heart turning over and over in the spring-somersaulted air
Here is redemption — pay your rent
The how is harder now, the fear more meat
pit of questions shoveled in with brutal details
History and the future converged in that room
a faint current connects us still
like being stuck to an electric fence
neither able to let go nor hold on
simply present
Lifted
to be ancestors
Witnesses
of a world where martyr means witness
to take our future place among the incoherent buds
felled in summer drifts beneath the ancient sun
I catch sight of the question limping behind us —
Was it worth it—
the torn-open veins, the brutalized hearts?
one drop of my blood the crimson dew on every blade of sprouting grass
And I would trade my life for any tree in the forest
so much safety in our world that safety's become the source of danger
universities teach the unified theory of nothing
our best youth crawl through those doors, emerge contaminated
greedy, indebted & numb
completing that journey
begun with one
bright
green
breath
By the awakened river
broken spruce sprouts a new crawl of trunk
pumps out cerise nipple cones
breath stacked in stones
red-green-red-green-
It’s all code i crack between aging teeth
Moss waits years to exhale
and begin again
I step into the form of fighter
again
familiar archetype
like river, chrysalis, evergreen
Life’s a rolling explosion
if you're awake
truth smashes into you like an iceberg
and even if your heart's built like a Mayan pyramid
you go down
Haunted by lost things with false stories whispering
i want.. i want..
I bed down most night, satisfied with this life
while the lichens lie down
in defiance of gravity
How to press into home like that
heart-first to stone?
Mother, lover, lie down with me like this
tap coded victory stories out of my bark
let it flow like maple syrup into pails
squeeze me till it all comes out sweet
and true
Building warrior culture
with buds of books
with spring words, summer words
to keep the people warm in winter
Give me my muse
and a passion that does not pass
this is my chance
to climb through the flames till i am the fire
smooth as a tube to listen through
what old land is calling?
Decipher messages of ancestors
not necessarily mine
a chorus of voices asking
how far down can one person reach
from the edge of too late
towards the luminous bones
of some dreamt-of
homeland?
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