we are more like than not

Last week, on September 24th and 25th, the G20 held its summit in Pittsburgh. Friday, over 70 political groups held a permitted march from Oakland to the North Side, via Downtown. Several thousand people walked through the streets with signs, puppets and voices. I went downtown to see my city's familiar streets emptied and transformed into a police state. I went to take pictures of the spectacle: throngs of riot cops and protesters. In short, i went to--as Pittsburghers say--be nebby.

What resulted, though, was a portrait of humanity largely ignored in the media reports. Yes, thousands of cops decked out in their best riot gear lined the streets in formation, strung the streetlights with caution tape and cloaked the roads with fences, jersey barriers and SWAT vehicles. A spectacular show of force: this is what a police state looks like. Yes, twenty-something white kids covered their faces with bandanas and taunted police. Yes, people carried signs and puppets and wore costumes, chanted and rallied and sang, or walked silently under the banner of their causes. This is what democracy looks like.

After Thursday's violent demonstrations, news sites posted images of lines of cops facing lines of masked anarchists obscured by clouds of OC gas, voices and tempers and fists raised.

But in what i saw, the divisions were not so clear. I saw people walking the streets side by side, sometimes holding hands, people watching the happening. A peaceable assembly. A lot of Americans, and others, too. What strikes me most about the photos is how thin a line separates all of these people. Cops smile through their visors, reporters trudge along with tired feet, children snack mid-rally at their parents' knees, locals lean over the caution tape for a good view, a cop scratches behind the ears of a resting k-9, an anarchist poses for a photo with an officer. People grin, people glare into the lens. Above all, what i saw was human beings.

Reductive? Maybe. But what is the meaning of a group like the G20 if not that we are all connected--yes, by the elusive thread of breath that weaves us all into life, but also by the weather-like system of economies. The way the quality of air i breathe in Pittsburgh relates to the pesticides sprayed in Colombian Amazon. The factory worker in Taiwan who stitched the hem of those bandanas. The rest of the examples: coffee, french fries, lemons, Coca-Cola, automobiles, missiles. The exchange rate of currencies banks don't quantify: food for shelter for education for safety for peace for breath.

Pictured here are curious onlookers, Pittsburgh residents, a literal army of police, protesters, students, reporters and photographers, Secret Service and National Guard, a Black Bloc of anarchists, workers (and maybe delegates) watching from the David Lawrence Convention Center where the Summit took place, North Siders whose apartments neighbor the park designated for the rally. Pictured here are people.

We are standing in a circle, choosing sides.

. . .

we are more alike than not: delegates, protesters, cops.



we are more alike than not: riot gear, suit and tie, black bloc.



we are more alike than not: fences, streets, sidewalks.




we are more alike than not: motorcade, foot traffic, dogs.




we are more alike than not: euros, yen, dollars.




we are more alike than not: permits, tear gas, riots.


we are more alike than not: rubber bullets, communique, puppets.


we are more alike than not: hotels, dorms, projects.


we are more alike than not: NBC, CNN, FOX.


we are more alike than not: corporation, mom and pop.


we are more alike than not: barefoot, black hawk, road block.






we are more alike than not: morning glories, boxcutters, vox.

. . .

Go to flickr to view the entire set of photos, in chronological order, of the People's March that took place in protest of the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh on September 24th and 25th, 2009.

we move around the sun.

Yesterday at 5:18 pm marked the autumnal equinox, the sabbat Mabon.

Ann Moura in her first Green Witchcraft book, contextualizes the year's solstices and equinoxes with points in the goddess/god life-myth, and describes Mabon as when the god prepares to leave and the goddess rests. She suggests reflecting on the idea of harvest and thanksgiving and to remember those who struggle without....As i accept the gifts of the Lady and Lord, so do i pass along what i may to those who have need....As freely as I have received, may I also give food for the body, mind, and spirit to those who seek such of me.

North, east, south, west, north.

Vase of marigolds for the altar, their smell orange and spiced, sour. Red scarf for the red earth. Shroud, mantilla for the trees whose stained glass leaves i'll miss so deeply soon when they dry and drift groundward in Shiva's time of the year. I drink in their green before i thirst.

The locusts whirr to roar, their swoon. Their dirge a digital creak, the crickets a track skipping.

We both woke up before dawn. You told me your nightmare, and we laughed at my weird dream. As i drifted back, your hands whispered my skin to singing, and when we made love, i came at the instant of sunrise. In my mind's eye, flash of gold sun crowned the hills.

As the cats shied in the shrieking sirens, rushing engines, yowling kids in the park, i burned smudge sticks i rolled last year. Outside, on a glass dish in the high grass while i rolled fresh sage in paper cones to dry for next year. The seven-year-old plant i snapped the aromatic sprigs from was laced with thick white weave, tunnelling down into her labyrinth. In its center, tucked inside a rolled dried leaf, nestled the brown spider, fat and still, but i didn't disturb her web. Because i am unlearning that fear. Because she also needs to eat, and the sage is sacred, a habitat.

Today in the sun, i loved the sunflowers, grown taller than me and eight-blossomed since their cotyledon infancy at Cathie's graduation party. They open their moths wide to eat sky, yellow petals laughing and full of light. Every morning they live, their centers thicken with their ancient spiral of hardening seeds.

Something under my skin stretches to reach them.

My family laughed as tough acorns thunked from branches at my parents' house, where we gathered and ate to celebrate Jasmin's 14th birthday. We gave her gifts. We stood around the patio my dad built, with his hands, kneeling, at night after work, lights strung from tree branches. Skin-colored stones pressed into the ground. Do you see the pattern? he asks. Sparrows floof and splash in the birdbath in my mother's garden, their wingtips graze the stones she placed in the bowl, under the mirror of water, showing the clouds to themselves.

For the week, we feed the cats good canned wet food instead of their usual dried cereal. A new offering to them.

The moon is new. An equinox, a balancing, at autumn, an ending, at new moon, for beginning, new intentions. All axes marked at once.

Around my wrist, a mala of 12 bone skulls, a 13th quartz bead in its center, and olive jade to fasten it, on brown thread. To remind me of the skull laughing in my head.

North, west, south, east, north.

Balance. Harvest. Gratitude.

forest dwelling

The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland

But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless

While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming;

We have everything

Life is thundering blissful towards death

In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness

--Joanna Newsom

We tramp through the high meadow grass to cut uphill into the treeline. Watch out for snakes Chris warns, a pace ahead of me. I always do.

The woods are full of spirals--vines twining around each other like ropes, twisting up twisted trees; the fragile fern fronds unspinning.
A few yards in, scaling a steep hill, boy sits down on a felled pine, its bark long since stripped by the elements and small creatures. Its smooth bare surface glows rusty red in the shaded sunlight. He pats the trunk beside him for me to join. I do. We sit, drinking in the silence with the rush of our breath, and feel how nature immediately absorbs us into her pattern. A moment ago, we'd been arguing, but that's melted now, we smile softly at each other as our breathing recalibrates, easy, deep, to match the rhythm of this place. Wordlessly, we rise and continue uphill. Chris stops short and hushes Look. At the crest of the hill, deer feed, paused and alerted to us by the noise of our crunchy footfalls. Chris makes a deer call, blows into his fist to make a sudden whoosh, then grins at me. They listen for us awhile, as we lean and creep to spy them through the trunks. Then they leap away, buoyant and swift, and we keep walking.

Large birds i can't quite glimpse swoop among the highest branches, calling weird squawky calls. Their figures warp and morph as they flap and alight. Chris points out mushrooms: the puff kind that burst into a cloud of spores you shouldn't breathe, an orange and yellow shelf attached to a dead trunk. He leans on a tree whose trunk curves in an s: vertical, parallel to the ground, up again, its bark embroidered with lichen. I close in on him, our faces touching and warm, and keep my eyes open to see his closed eyes, whorl in his beard, the branches behind his shoulder diffused to green blur. He smells a little sweaty through the clean fabric of his tshirt, his skin tastes salty, his breath, my breath. We laugh when we catch a curious groundhog sneaking close enough to watch us making out.

From the top of the hill, we can see the clusters of ferns that spread over the floor of papery leaves, can watch the sunlight flicker over limbs, overlapping and intertwining with one another. A breeze stirs then, and the stained glass and sky mosaic shifts and sways, whispering. The arced shelter of canopy curves like the ribs of a cathedral. We stand at the roots of the sturdy pillars, dwarfed, awed, in its holy green shade. The birds quiet, either used to us or fled. Leaf tongues lick the wind, telling secrets, dirty jokes, wild lies, laughing. Acorns fall, clacking off of branches the whole way down to the last thud--each a message or a warning. Swift winged things flit in and out of sunlight, flaring momentarily. The light and lilting air brushes, soft, against our skin. Blood hums, hungry then sated, its prayer said one beat, answered next beat.

I am crouching among the green fronds, admiring their ancient intelligence--their shape hurricane, galaxy, pine cone, riptide. Before me, beyond me, etched into the loops of my fingerprints. Boy calls me. On my way to him, a flash of movement at my feet catches my attention and i pick up a gorgeous striped bluejay feather--one i've been looking for. Later, i collect another i've been waiting to find, deep clay-grey and iridescent. It makes sense that they appear here, after days of edging my thoughts, circling in. Subtly different magic that i'll learn.

He stands surrounded by white masoned pillars spiking through overgrowth. One in the center, the largest, is inscribed with the name of a family. Does this mean they're buried here? he asks.

Is this their property, their ground? Is this theirs? Because the sound of the word that calls them forms shapes carved on a stone, or because their bones dissolve into the dirt below us, turning to any common sediment? If i say it's mine, say it out loud, does my claim outlast the sound as the air swallows it back into its folds and eddies of echoes?

Sometimes the locusts overpower the sirens. Fleets of them, drowned, two boots to an engine.

A misshapen, rusty fence encloses the area, bowed and broken open by fallen trees. A glass-clear, nearly invisible web spans the space between its gap, as intact as the fence is decayed. I remember what Julia said in another wood a week ago, as we wove through another fence: We've been through this fence and back so many times, i can't tell whether we're inside or outside.
I said That's the way it is with fences.




Eventually, we head back. Chris spots another doe, fully aware of us, her large alien ears perked, satellites, eyes wide and locked on us, her every muscle stiff. Vibrant, still. More than she is and only what she is. We stand and watch until she flees, and then we go. We leave her to the space that is hers.

leaf halo, hunter halo, prey halo

Chickpea and i were talking, unravelling something, winding it back up again, spiraled, when wide white wings flashed into the sycamores. A juvenile red-tailed hawk perched on a lower branch, talons clutching a tiny rabbit whose paper-thin ears glowed red, backlit by the afternoon sun. We watched the hawk awhile as she sat above us, shrugging her shoulders and cocking her head, peering at creatures too small and far for us to see, but not eating. We circled below, watching the bird's subtle, precise movements, admiring the rich cream, deep brown of her feathers, the red flare of her tail. We took pictures and watched the sun halo the creatures--hunter, prey, tree--in breathy white streams of light flickering through the mosaic of leaves. We know that to see a hawk means there is a message coming. After a long while, i left chickpea sitting alone under the tree with the hawk, who was there to see her, anyway. Finally, she watched her start on her prey, and understood why she'd taken so long. It must have been one of her first catches, because she nearly dropped the rabbit several times trying to bring it to her beak, and, when she finally bent to bite it from her talons instead, she awkwardly tore into the rabbit's ear rather than at the meat of the body. But she ate it, brilliant wet blood warm on her beak, flesh piercing under her young talons' fierce peaceful skill.