Imbolc, Despot, River

We arrive at Imbolc, a season of war. In many traditions in Old Europe, The Crone of Winter confronts the Girl of Spring, they battle for their lives. The weather swings, the storms come harder, the thaw tricks the buds into peeping open. Spring always wins, eventually, and Winter, like every avatar of Great Mother, is resurrected later in the year. The Great Mother also knows the right use of violence in service of life, she knows that even her abundance is struggle and most life balances on knife-edge of survival. She is not fond of unskilled and disrespectful rulers.

Imbolc is also Hags Day. ;-) Happy Hags Day all my long settled Crones sharing wisdoms, all my GenX Crones powering up for our work, all my future Crones on your still steep learning curves in this life.

This Imbolc, though, I live near the Potomac River not far from DC. About 12 miles from my house, the river is a graveyard for 67 of my fellow citizens. Ice skaters in their prime, chopper pilots tasked with our defense, so many human cousins lost. The site of the crash is about three miles as the crow flies from the White House, and we all know how disinterested that man is in their lives or their deaths, or the stunned grieving of their families. Can't be bothered to go honor them.

This man and his bosses have come to abandon us all. That's what their project comes to: slamming shut the institutions that have supported and shaped the life-blood of this nation for so long. We see this callous, aggressive disregard in the Executive Orders, the way they just END with no mention of how people or processes or institutions are supposed to shift from one way to another, or to no way at all.

This is an old thing, what is happening now. This is despot. This is god-king. This is a regime of death, it seeks death, it denies death, it will make more death than we have seen for some time here.

This is a coup. It's bureaucratic, technical, rather than military or insurgent. But it's a coup. We're in a war with Old Man Patriarchy dressed up as New Man Techno-Feudalism. But in both of their favorite books, the rest of us are tools and fodder and completely dispensable.

We’re gonna have to get a lot more boisterous, brawling, and kinetic. Marches are in the planning, but we will need to dig deeper than that. We might have to show them how much of what they need we're willing to break no matter how much it hurts us for while. We may have to out-pain them. We may need to align our beings and lives with Her rule: the unwise and disresepctful ruler is met with … disaster.

I don't think I'm ready for that. I will need networks, fellow travelers, seasoned rebels.