2002 Winter

Item: September 11, 2001: Full-scale disaster. Hijacked passenger planes topple the two World Trade Center towers, killing thousands. A third plane plows into the Pentagon, a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania. Fingers point to Afghan- harbored Muslim extremists as the culprits. Calls for war and pleas for peace mix with expressions of shock and grief. Events commence that for the foreseeable future will throw the country into varying degrees of chaos, crisis, and turmoil. Everyone and everything is affected in some way by this Day That Changed Everything. It appears that the Apocalypse and/or World War III may finally have arrived--that the worst nightmare scenarios of Y2K may yet become manifest, just not quite on schedule.

Months earlier I had an eerily similar yet worldly different experience. I was lying on a hard surface, ingesting medicine as healers stood above me and "sucked" the spirits out. The medicine these healers gave me knocked me out though. I could feel nothing as they sliced me open and zapped me with hi-tech instruments. They cauterized and flushed my insides with warm liquid and charged me thousands of dollars for a procedure that had to be repeated three weeks in a row and still left me in a good deal of pain. That time though, I got to keep the video.

It comes from my book Organic Prayer, a kind of "gardening companion" to a spirituality connected with the earth. The chapter is part of a section devoted to "Pests"--those things which keep our planet from flourishing. From among the many possible candidates, I chose emptiness and greed, self-righteousness and guilt, and despair and burnout. I dealt with the last two in the following paragraphs, slightly altered here in the interests of inclusivity. These words are but one part of the truth, of course, but I hope that they are helpful to the reader.

We circle with a workshop assistant, waiting for the four child-women to join us for an intergenerational dialogue. He breaks the ice, "I've been wondering, why are you here?" Upon our arrival, we have learned that the other fourteen participants are here for "personal growth." We, on the other hand, are here simply to see our children, young women who have chosen this intentional community in Oregon as their home. "Because we love our daughters and they asked us to come," we speak with one voice, connected at some primal level that surprises even us.

i.

So it goes. The moment she appears on stage, I feel a certain brilliance charging through me, and become aware of the blissful grin that has sprung rambunctiously across my face.

The first time I saw Ani Di Franco perform, in the summer of 1996, her joyful radiance surprised me. What had I been expecting then, knowing as I did a few of her albums just a little, mostly familiar with her proud, reckless strength; her firm, political, no-nonsense lyrics? I remember how her smile and her light but passionate exuberance almost knocked me off my feet.

Here and now, even after years of touring before an ever-expanding international audience, Ani's fresh radiant energy continues to light up the stage. As for me, I just laugh, straight from my belly, at the sweet nuances that are the absolute pleasures of life--at the way the music and the moment have whipped me so shockingly into joy. Now I am here, with the music-makers before me, with the people around me--we are community for one evening, under the dynamic sky that envelopes us all. I give myself to this moment and ride high on the funky rhythms of the opening song.