Grief rituals, one could argue, are part of the essential grounding for millennia-old cultures that orient toward far more ecological relations with the whole of this earth, including each other. For loss is part of the seasons of life, which ancient—and yet still here—cultures recognize needs to be honored through ceremony so as to remember what is loved and cherished, and continually reaffirm a duty to love and defend life.

It is little wonder that as colonialism and capitalism, heteropatriarchy and white Christian supremacy, grew into hegemonic death machines over the centuries, they tried to kill off innumerable life-giving rituals and ceremonies that humans passed along over generations to hold each other through transitions. They tried to make people forget that minds and bodies crave—and need—those rituals and ceremonies in order to sustain hearts and spirit. And without heart and spirit, humans become shells of themselves.

It is little wonder, then, that so many humans today, but especially human-made institutions like states and their police, are so hollowed out of heart—of empathy and sociability, solidarity and communal care—they all too easily acquiesce to or participate in killing off life.

It has been a week since Tortuguita was murdered in cold blood by cops within Weelaunee forest, where Tort gave full heart and loving spirit to defending life-giving ecosystems. May their memory be a blessing.

In that week, so many people have, in essence, “sat shiva,” a ritual within Jewishness that is about taking seven days to be with community (whether people or trees) to begin to honor and process loss of a beloved and grief at their murder. Shiva doesn’t mean doing nothing. It is a time to sustain our hearts and spirits.

So it’s remarkable—a testament to Tort as well as the big, amorphous, autonomous, yet interwoven circles of rebels—that this past week has witnessed an outpouring of remembrance that we do indeed need and can revive ancient grief rituals, as precisely the ground that allows us to keep fighting, not merely to #StopCopCity, but to stop all systemic theft of lands and life.

#RebelliousMourning
#MourningOurDead
#FightingLikeHellForTheLiving
#RitualAsResistance
#MendingTheWorld

(photo: sign with words “Weelaunee People’s Park” seen among the trees in October 2022 at @defendATLforest)

Sunday afternoon #FuckThePolice (and their allies) stroll amid signs of fresh snowfall and the fresh fallout of what allegedly was a #StopCopCity vigil for late last evening on the stolen Anishinabeeg lands of so-called Lansing, Michigan.

#MourningOurDead
#RestInPowerTort
#RebelliousMourning
#FightingLikeHellForTheLiving
#ForestsNotFascism

@defendATLforest
@stopcopcity
Atlanta Solidarity Fund

On this fourth night of Chanukah, auspiciously falling on solstice, I thought that by now, the increasing candlelight and promise of increasing daylight would have worked their somatic magic. That I would feel as if I’m on the other side of the darkness of these times, even if only a bit.

Yet I’ve noticed that my body isn’t responding, like it always has before, to the candles. I feel frozen, stuck, not able to offer or take in light.

It’s not just the accumulated trauma of loss and isolation, from and during the pandemic, though it is that too. It’s the shift that seems to have happened from a protofascist USA into, increasingly, everyday fascism. The fascistic horrors didn’t—and still don’t—come at once, but get added one at a time, strategically, like the methodical addition of a Chanukah candle daily, acclimatizing people little by little—until it’s too late to turn back from the conflagration.

So instead of journeying toward the growing light, I can’t stop thinking of anarchistic author Daniel Guérin (1904-88) traveling into what he called “the brown plague”—Nazism—in 1932 and 1933. For those two years, as a young closeted gay man, he wandered around Germany—just prior to and, a year later, just after the seizure of National Socialist power. What he noticed was not geopolitics but rather the minutiae of cultural politics, the stuff of everyday life. He wrote of the little things that added up to the “tragedy unfolding” and people’s “inability to recognize danger,” including because of the “seductive rituals” Nazis employed to win over the populace.

One year he’s staying at youth hostels, likely acting on his sexual desires in a place, Weimar Germany, that was the hub of gay life. The next, many of the same youths he might have comingled with are burning books by the tens of thousands across thirty-four cities, including trashing, looting, and burning the extensive library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s (in)famous, and (in)famously gay, Institute of Sexology.

Those books, once lit, grew quickly into flames that consumed people.

I want to see light this Chanukah. But all I see are ashes.

(photos: my night four candles in my menorah; a sign and me reflected in it at the Tucson Jewish Museum, 2019)

#RitualAsResistance
#MourningOurDead #FightingLikeHellForTheLiving #FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#AllChanukahsAreBeautiful