Everyday Is Halloween

Vegans are Witches!

Today’s Witches are Called Vegans 

“They try to hide behind phrases like “animal lover” and “animal rights advocate.” That is devil-speak if I ever heard it!”

Seriously?!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised…The witch is a prevalent metaphor linking women with disorderly and chaotic nature. A witch was said to embody, “…the violence of nature…(she) raised storms, caused illness destroyed crops, obstructed generation and killed infants. Disorderly woman, like chaotic nature, needed to be controlled” (Merchant 1983, 127).  To wish to eradicate a witch is to wish to force both nature and women into submission. This allows the value of both women and nature to be measured by their usefulness to the men and regimes in power. The witch hunts and trials of Europe and America are said to have claimed millions of lives, the majority of those executed were women. The witch hunts were a necessary step, to be able to claim domination over women and the earth to be able to create the new world order which can justify exploitation and domination.

Swollen Eyelids

I sent my best friend off to Peru yesterday. Where he will stay for the entire summer. Literally. So much sadness. Finding it hard to want to get out of bed today. Haven’t felt this sad in so long! I am badly in need of some cheering up.

Declaration of the Women’s Global Strategies Meeting

We are female human beings poised on the edge of the new millennium. We are the majority of our species, yet we have dwelt in the shadows. We are the invisible, the illiterate, the laborers, the refugees, the poor.

And we vow: No more.

We are the women who hunger-for rice, home, freedom, each other, ourselves.

We are the women who thirst-for clean water and laughter, literacy, love.

We have existed at all times, in every society. We have survived femicide. We have rebelled-and left clues.

We are continuity, weaving future from past, logic with lyric.

We are the women who stand in our sense, and shout Yes.

We are the women who wear broken bones, voices, minds, hearts-but we are the women who dare whisper No.

We are the women whose souls no fundamentalist cage can contain.

We are the women who refuse to permit the sowing of death in our gardens, air, rivers, seas.

We are each precious, unique, necessary. We are strengthened and blessed and relieved at not having to be all the same. We are the daughters of longing. We are the mothers in labor to birth the politics of the 21st century.

We are the women men warned us about.

We are the women who know that all issues are ours, who will reclaim our wisdom, reinvent our tomorrow, question and redefine everything, including power.

We have worked now for decades to name the details of our need, rage, hope, vision. We have broken our silence, exhausted our patience. We are weary of listing refrains on our suffering-to entertain or be simply ignored. We are done with vague words and real waiting; famishing for action, dignity, joy. We intend to do more than merely endure and survive.

They have tried to deny us, define us, defuse us, denounce us; to jail, enslave, exile, gas, rape, beat, burn, bury-and bore us. Yet nothing, not even the offer to save their failed system, can grasp us.

For thousands of years, women have had responsibility without power-while men have had power without responsibility. We offer those men who risk being brothers a balance, a future, a hand. But with or without them, we will go on.

For we are the Old Ones, the New Breed, the Natives who came first but lasted, indigenous to an utterly different dimension. We are the girlchild in Zambia, the grandmother in Burma, the woman in El Salvador and Afghanistan, Finland and Fiji. We are whale-song and rainforest; the depth-wave rising huge to shatter glass power on the shore; the lost and despised who, weeping, stagger into the light.

All this we are. We are intensity, energy, the people speaking-who no longer will wait and who cannot be stopped.

We are poised on the edge of the millennium-ruin behind us, no map before us, the taste of fear sharp on our tongues.

Yet we will leap.

The exercise of imagining is an act of creation.

The act of creation is an exercise of will.

All this is political. And possible.

Bread. A clean sky. Active peace. A woman’s voice singing somewhere, melody drifting like smoke from the cookfires. The army disbanded, the harvest abundant. The wound healed, the child wanted, the prisoner freed, the body’s integrity honored, the lover returned. The magical skill that reads marks into meaning. The labor equal, fair, and valued. Delight in the challenge for consensus to solve problems. No hand raised in any gesture but greeting. Secure interiors-of heart, home, land-so firm as to make secure borders irrelevant at last. And everywhere laughter, care, celebration, dancing, contentment. A humble, early paradise, in the now.

We will make it real, make it our own, make policy, history, peace, make it available, make mischief, a difference, love, the connections, the miracle, ready.

Believe it.

We are the women who will transform the world.

-Written by Robin Morgan, in collaboration with Perdita Huston, Sunetra Puri, Mahnaz Afkhami, Diane Faulkner, Corrine Kumar, Simla Wali, and Paola Melchiori, at the 1994 Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) Global Strategies Meeting.

Tom Robbins

“We, with our propensity for murder, torture, slavery, rape, cannibalism, pillage, advertising jingles, shag carpets, and golf, how could we seriously be considered as the perfection of a four-billion-year-old grandiose experiment?”

“Dense, penetrating, and modifying, the rain narrows the gap between nature and civilization. Forgotten longings are stir in the crack.”

“…Would you complain because a beautiful sunset dosen’t have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance lead anywhere? Passion isn’t a path through the woods. Passion is the woods. We’re not involved in a ‘relationship,’ you and I, we’re involved in a collision. Collisions don’t much lend themselves to secure futures, but the act of colliding is hard to beat for interest…Collisions are trans formative. A relationship can occasionally fulfill a person, but only a collision can transform them.”

“Nature has always set limits on growth: limits on the physical size of individual species, limits on the size of populations. Did we really believe capitalism was exempt from the laws of nature? Did we really confuse endless consumption with endless progress?”

“…The state uses jobs, or rather the illusion of jobs, as a mechanism for control. When their is a public outcry about some particularly vile instate of deforestation, wreckage, or pollution, the “pufftoads” hasten to justify the environmental assault by trumpeting the jobs it allegedly will create-and then the protests fade like the rustle of a warn dollar bill. Foreign policy decisions, including illegal and immoral acts of armed intervention, likewise are made acceptable, even popular, on the grounds that such actions are neccesary to protect American jobs.” HAIFP

“When the Naive young fool finally tumbles over the precipice, he falls into the world of experience. Now his journey has really begun. Along the way, he’ll meet all the teachers and tempters-the tempters are teachers too-and challenging situations that a person is likely to meet in the task of his or her growing. The fool is potentially everybody, but not everybody has the wisdom or the guts to play the Fool. A lot a folks don’t know what’s in that bay they’re carrying. And they’re all too willing to trade it in for cash. Inside the bag, they have every tool they need to facilitate their life’s journey, but they won’t even open it up and glance inside…The only ones who’ll ever reach that goal are the ones who have the courage to make fools of themselves along the way” -Q-JO, Half Asleep in Frogs Pajamas

“If Jean Paul Sartre had been Thai, Existentialism would have been a sitcom” -Villa Incognitio

“…Rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this intimate seductress, this goopy glory monger, this alchemist in a jar. Dickie, you see, understood the true beauty of the well-made sandwich. Those who allow dry, bare patches to show on their bread, who neglect to plaster the mayonnaise liberally to every edge, are triflers, artless hacks unworthy of the name “sandwich maker”.  - Villa Incognitio