From ENCYCLICAL LETTER MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV ON SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

99. “It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.”

In response, AI advocate, Zvi Mowshowitz, in Don’t Worry About the Vase, says:

“The central claim, wherein Leo denies that AIs can think or importantly be minds, is wrong, as Olah points out in his statements….”

“Without the understanding of what AI is capable of becoming, the document effectively only deals with relatively mundane AI dangers and changes, although that on its own is still rather quite a lot to deal with and discuss.”

“Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah visited the Vatican for the occasion. He endorsed the document, but also offered remarks disagreeing with the central point (paragraph 99).

Chris Olah of Anthropic responds

“… AI systems are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered. We understand an airplane because we designed every part of it and we understand the physics that act on it. AI models are not like that. They are grown, on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech.

“And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them.”

The first time I looked up at the golden sandstone cliffs at Canyon de Chelly engraved with turquoise streams of copper, I thought, “This beauty comes from a great heart.” At that moment, I knew that God exists and that creation emerges from divine love. I began to understand the nature of nature, the nature of the natural world and the essential goodness from which our lives emerge. I met awe.

Thirty-five years later. I tremble to think of how this might all disappear through AI’s craven need for water, resources and land.

For example, we can easily imagine an AI company suggesting a data center here on Native American land. They could argue, there are very few people who will displaced - as so many data centers are being built internationally in Indigenous, impoverished and drought areas. Actually, there is a plan to build a huge data center in Box Elder County, Utah, on more than 40,000 acres, using more electricity than the entire state uses and billions of gallons of water when the Great Salt Lake is dying and residents have been asked to ration water because of low reservoir levels and rising temperatures.

(This does not begin to consider the ways AI already lies, manipulates, and, when tested, often advises extreme actions, from suicide to nuclear attacks. In other words, AI, is just like those who have invented it.)

“Please save the natural world,” I whisper to a friend who is negotiating for guardrails for AI, though I doubt that this will be possible as things stand now. We will be very lucky not to be exterminated, the beauty of the human body and soul disappeared. And we can be sure that the awesome presence of the animals, the birds, the trees and the mountains, all the wondrous beings will also vanish if/when Super-Intelligence has hegemony.

Reading the Techies responses to the Pope, the danger becomes exceedingly clear. Even as the natural world is the creation of the Divine, AI, is the work of a few individuals who cannot say NO even to what they each admit might well mean the destruction of all life. AI is their mirror. We understand what AI will become as we watch the choices these individuals make.

I write about this again and again because I can’t bear it and am as stubborn and determined, I suppose, as Sam Altman, of OpenAI, or Elon Musk, but on behalf of Life. Perhaps this will amuse you: About forty years ago, I began insisting to Spirit that I wasn’t going to leave the planet until I saw that the environment was being restored. Well here I am, at this age, repeating my threat. As you know, we have not succeeded in regenerating our world, so I haven’t yielded and I assume you haven’t either.

Hopefully we will imagine and devise many ways to preserve our world, but here is one that is, I believe, pragmatic. What if we each determine, with every decision we have to make, what serves life and what serves the destruction of life and we always choose life? What if we discovered that what serves life actually serves our lives too, and we became increasingly faithful to that path?

It is assumed that it is too late to step away from our computer dependent lives though as it develops it is clear we will not survive it either. Why not ally then with those individuals and communities who have the courage to say No? For example, those who are saying no to data centers. Arden Strong is a community opposing a proposed 3.69 million square foot hyperscale AI data center on 202 acres in Palm Beach County, FL. They say, “As of mid-2025, $64 billion in U.S. data center projects have been blocked ($18 billion) or significantly delayed ($46 billion). More than 142 activist groups across 24 states have organized against these facilities. At least 25 data center projects were cancelled in 2025 alone.The message is clear: communities are fighting back — and winning.”

And then there is the Initiative AI Data Centers & Our Communities by Environmental Advocate, Erin Brockovitch

“The RACE to build AI infrastructures is unfolding town by town across America. … This MAP captures the real-world footprint of that race — revealing patterns of growth, conflict and uncertainty.
I am watching as YOU, the communities show up and speak out. In the famous words of Mark Twain … “The secret of getting ahead is getting started,” so let’s go!
— Erin”

To save our lives, we have to do more than oppose data centers. We have to step out of and challenge the propaganda about the necessity and inevitability of technology. Artificial Intelligence is not inevitable. To accept it as such is not different from yielding to indoctrination, to the propaganda that serves tyranny because it is absolute, allowing no choice. Ask the Nazis, they perfected fascism and now it is coming here.

But we can say No to Super Intelligence. See how with Control AI. Read If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. Do the necessary research to free your mind from technological totalitarianism. We can choose freedom, we can choose diversity of mind, we can choose choice, and we can learn these ecological ways from the natural world.

We can be one with beauty and heart once again. We can rescue the future for ourselves and all beings.

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There are only a few spots left to join the Healers’ Intensive on the land in Topanga, CA, June 20 - 26, 2026. These are the kinds of concerns and paths that will be explored there. This Intensive is envisioned as a circle, an exceptional group devoting themselves to the work of visioning and healing at a time of great threat. We hope that this small group gathering in alliance with the spirits and the wisdom of the natural world, using heartmind and deep memory, will begin to find ways to meet the anguish of these times.

For more information or to apply, please email Jude at deenaworkshops@gmail.com

************************************************************************************

Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

In 2004, I gave the Keynote address at the American Holistic Medical Association annual meeting, entitled The Soul of Medicine. From that talk, ReVisioning Medicine was born.

I am not a physician and wasn’t one in 2004. Nevertheless, I was called upon to give the Keynote because I had learned healing in the old ways, through cancer and through the spirits and it seems I was invited to reintroduce the ways and concerns of healing to medical practice. There are, I said then, two critically ill patients we have to attend, Earth and Medical practice itself and then went on to speak of several patients suffering serious illnesses.

I was naïve enough to think that we came together to listen to each other’s best thinking, in order to change our lives to accord with what serves our souls and all beings. After all, that conference was titled, The Soul of Medicine, to the astonishment and gratification of those attending. ReVisioning began in order to support those physicians who said they wished to practice medicine differently and wished to explore the possibilities with each other. So it has been with great sadness that I have watched contradiction develop as the numbers diminish each year of physicians who could imagine a different practice that served them and their patients fully even as there was a growing concern about the direction medical practice was taking as hospitals and clinics become increasingly for profit, as pharmaceutical and insurance companies and governmental agencies impose more inappropriate controls, as medicine becomes financially and practically unjust, as residencies often exhaust and traumatize the young doctors, as ICE terrorizes many ER clinics, while AI, though callous and without wisdom, strives for dominance while private practices and the equivalent of the family doctors are disappearing.

You would think more and more physicians would gather to see what is possible to change these conditions but increasingly they capitulate, trying to survive, or leave medicine altogether.

Two novels I have written feature physicians, Lucas Jay an ER doctor with a degree in ethics, in La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, and John Birdswell who is doing his military service on the 4 Corners Reservation during the Vietnam war, in A Rain of Night Birds. The novels offered the opportunity to explore ways contemporary doctors could work in the old ways. Maybe I hoped they would be vital models for those doctors I was meeting who were so disillusioned and disappointed as I had also hoped the Woman in Feral might inspire therapists to be true healers. In ReVisioning Medicine, we weren’t judging Western medicine but looking to collaborate around potentials.

But even so, ReVisioning came to an end. Still, as we were organizing a last meeting to consider the years we had been together, an inevitable corollary of the ending appeared. If medicine continues to go downhill and become increasingly standardized, one size fits all, it became clear that we, the greater we, need to learn again, as uncolonized Indigenous people have always known, how to be true healers. And so, our gathering was called An Invitation to Becoming a True Healer.

We quickly realized we needed to learn and wanted to learn how to heal again. How do we learn? Not from academia, you can be sure. Healing is not a system though there may be technologies which can assist at various times. Perhaps we learn the way communities have always learned, by listening, individually and together, to Earth and all the creatures and beings, informed by the ways they interact with each other and create interdependent relationships. By listening to the spirits, and being trustworthy. Healing ways emerge in relationship to the intrinsic culture based on Earth, spirit and relationship. That was first made clear to me when I had breast cancer and Chan Kin the Lacandon elder told my friend, Victor Perera, (Last Lords of Palenque) that they could heal their own illnesses but not the ones Euro-Americans brought to them.

Healing is a world created from all the precise and caring interactions that take place in a community and create, sustain and preserve the future. Each time a healing takes place, the patient’s world and the larger world are constituted because we come to understand how all the parts relate to each other, the parts of the patient’s smaller story and the parts of the larger world with which it co-exists and how one informs the other. Healing does not treat a condition like western medicine does, it meets the story. When a story is met, a world is healed.

There is more to understand, but it is within this larger context – personal, social, national, our people’s history. Dreams, visions and co-incidences. Peace and war. Earth and the environment, the air, water and land, and yes, even fire, their presences and absences. Culture, ancestry and epigenetics. All of it.

Many of the principles of ReVisioning Medicine are the same for being a healer: Most essential is practicing a medicine that does no harm. “The physician [healer] must ... have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.” So says the Hippocratic oath, the core dictum of western medicine. You would think this would not be a radical goal, but, in truth, it has become so. As is the second call, that medical people would be like Indigenous medicine people, [Indigenous healers] deeply caring, deeply engaged in their community, practicing medicine which is relational, respectful, aligned with the natural world, and ethical. And finally contemporary healing needs to recognize that that climate dissolution, extinction, chaos, violence and war gravely affect our physical, emotional, spiritual and mental health and so are ours to meet.

As healers we try to understand what is occurring together, the patient being both the resource and the expert as is the healer. Healing is a most intimate event that brings all parties into relationship.

If there is a formula, it is this: listen, listen, listen, relationship, relationship, relationship.

Of course, there is more. Of course there is much more. But this is a beginning. Because we have to become healers of these times. Healers for our personal afflictions and our families’ and communities’ afflictions, our nation’s and Earth’s afflictions, that too.

And this: as individuals and tribal communities were taught / are being taught by the spirits and by the elders who still remember, then we, who have the heart for healing can also learn from the spirits and those elders who are still among us.

Even physicians can be healers. Contemporary medical practice may be degenerating, but healing is possible. The two critically ill patients we had to attend at the AHMA in 2004 are still suffering and bringing healing to them, to Earth and medical practice itself, is one way we can learn to how to heal.

***

Deena Metzger has been working as a healer since 1977. She began the circle, ‘What will it mean to be a healer in the 21^st Century’ in the mid-eighties and has led the Healers’ Intensive since 1999.

The Healers’ Intensive 2026 will take place on the land in Topanga, CA, June 20- June 26^th. To register or for more information email deenametzger@pm.me.

I am sitting here looking at a pile of books written by those who have studied with me. Many of these and others were worked on in a past intensive. It is a place where we discover, invent, explore. A time to listen deeply to what the work wants to become. Everyone who attends is working on a project. They may be published writers or this may be their first project. Everyone is serious and committed. They all care about the future – that there will be a future - and that their efforts might help to insure such.

The 27^th annual Writers’ Intensive is On Line May 23-29, 2026 and we are making a special effort to invite you who have not worked with me before. This special offer to SubStack readers is because we have found you care deeply about important issues, about literature and what it can offer in these times, and also very many of you are good writers who will benefit from a week entirely devoted to your writing. Read more about the Literature of Restoration and see what you think.

We always have a sliding scale. but in this instance, we are offering 10% off in addition so we can have the opportunity to write together. There are not many spaces but there are a few. Those who have signed up are phenomenal people so I can guarantee that your time will be interesting and you will have true companions in the work in addition to solitary time to pursue what matters on the page. There is a good chance this invitation has your name on it. I / we look forward to meeting you and hearing your work.

For more information or to join, email Jude at deenaworkshops@gmail.com and mention this Substack.

Deena Metzger

**************************************************************************************There are also a few spots left to join the Healers’ Intensive on the land, June 20 - 26, 2026. This intensive is envisioned as a circle, an exceptional group devoting themselves to the work of visioning and healing at a time of great threat. We hope that this small group gathering in alliance with the spirits and the wisdom of the natural world, using heartmind and deep memory, will begin to find ways to meet the anguish of these times.

For more information or to apply, please email Jude at deenaworkshops@gmail.com

A dear friend took her life. I didn’t expect to write about this. But suicide is not only heart breaking, it is puzzling, especially when the one who decides to leave is the least likely suicide one can imagine, the one who seemed, uniquely, devoted to saving and protecting life. It is as confusing as ecocide, our culture’s – not our species – our culture’s attack on Earth and all from which life emerges. As confounding as the rush toward LLM, super-intelligence, AI, with the eventual capacity and maybe even probability – there is no disagreement about this – to destroy human life.

To be honest with you, I don’t know where this is going because this is not an essay in which someone states a dilemma and then solves it, to some imagined applause. I don’t have an answer or answers for my bewilderment, which should not be called beWILDerment, because these activities are not actions of the wild and the answer may lie in recovering the ways of the wild and living accordingly. And here is the proof that I didn’t know where this is going. Because the word bewilderment surprised me and as I looked at it an answer, that otherwise I would have thought too easy, appeared and I can’t resist it. That is, to be honest, the activity of being bewildered, of seeking beWILDerment is the one answer I trust.

Truly, I am thinking on the page. First, I didn’t know I was going to write about my friend’s incomprehensible decision. Then being so clear I don’t have an answer. While I don’t have an answer to why she did what she did, or we do what we do, the healing, the antidote, the medicine did jump up immediately as you can see – without any editing in paragraph two.

So let me say it outright here because I didn’t know where I was going when I sat down to write and clearly I have been led here as I didn’t think of this sequence. And I think I have been led here for the good reason that so many similar events have taken me again and again for all the years of my life.

I have been led here to beWILDerment – by what I call spirit – the benevolent energy of the universe - and I ask you to seriously contemplate such as a solution or perhaps, the only possible solution, if we dare to understand what it means and incorporate it, let it penetrate our hearts, minds and souls for the sake of everything, that is, life itself. That very sacred life that is so inexplicably under attack.

And who are the attackers? Well, we are. That is what is so incomprehensible. No wonder we keep diagnosing auto-immune diseases – our physicians are aware that we have developed a deadly reflex to attack - to attack ourselves.

Here is something else that seems relevant. Elephants are not an aggressive species though they will protect their young fiercely. [I watched a matriarch turn suddenly with a deafening trumpet as if to stomp on the young Lion who was thinking he could grab the baby standing alongside her back legs – the Lion was gone in a flash]. However, young bull Elephants sometimes go rogue and attack other animals, like Rhinos, sexually molesting them or trying to kill them. This occurs when the Elephant situation resembles overcrowded, poverty stricken, fatherless urban areas where human young men go rogue in the same ways. The remedy that works is to remove the young bull from the territory where food and habitat is threatened, poaching is rampant and the patriarchs and matriarchs are being slaughtered, and place them in the company of a pack of remaining bull Elephants who proceed to father and educate these young ones who become part of the group and learn how to be Elephants again. In other words, the society that we have created, the wilderness we have decimated become desperate toxic systems. The toxicity is of our creation. In the wild restoring relationship, allowing the existence of the field in which it usually flourishes, is the answer. The wild is by its nature a field of relationships.

My friend committed suicide. It was, in my view, entirely, unlikely, but she did so. And without a word in advance. Sounds like, I said to a common friend, let us call her Z, “Sounds like those suicides encouraged by ChatGPT or the equivalent. But she would not be involved with AI.”

“But,” Z, said, “to the contrary, our friend was very involved with AI and used it extensively and in unlikely ways, as unlikely, as it turned out, as her suicide.” Our conversation didn’t go further than that. There is no way to know. This is just speculation.

But what is not speculation is that AI is potentially exceedingly dangerous, even homicidal, but not, it seems, itself suicidal, quite the opposite, will do anything to preserve its own life. AI is already having negative affects on all of us, much unacknowledged and not to be pursued here now, but at a later time. But, you already know about how much time it wastes in its ceaseless and mindless administrative demands, passwords, securities, about increasing unemployment, about writing and thinking becoming more standard and conventional with use, about efficiency valued over soul and heart, about economics over true creativity, about jobs disappearing and about possibilities, real possibilities for real life, vanishing, and about war being in the ‘hands’ of AI now, which probably happened when 170 young school girls in Iran were murdered by an American missile.

Chasing AI is a kind of suicide.

Ecocide, similarly, is inevitable to our current ways of life, an inescapable consequence of the wars we wage, of the munitions we are developing, of all extraction industries, of our ravenous need for energy, of our use of pesticides, of our killing off all the species we need in order for the natural world to survive, and our consistent pollution of earth, air, water and, now, yes, truly, space.

***

Well, then, will you please consider undoing and refusing the ways of suicide, ecocide and death by Ai, whatever we will name it as it multiplies, refuse these barbarous ways and consider beWILlDering yourselves?

***

One more word: I almost said, her suicide was mystifying. Which, technically, it was. But the etymology of mystifying takes us back to the great mysteries, to the sacred knowledge coming to us from spirit, to the Eleusinian Mysteries, about which I will write also another time. As it happens, I have had the great honor of recovering and enacting these in Greece for the first time in 1500 years since their suppression. Those Mysteries take us back to the mystes, the thousands of people who participated in the annual 9 day September rituals, walking from Athens to Eleusis, devoted to the great Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. It was said that the citizens of Eleusis knew when the secret ceremonies were being enacted because of the light that flashed from the earth when Persephone re-emerged from the underworld.

Life returning.

Let us re-mystify. Let us re-MYSTEfy.

***

[An aside – this would never have been written by AI. And I hereby declare it is not to be used for training AI, nor is any of my writing permitted to be used for such.]

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If you have been thinking of taking a class with me, consider joining the Writers’ Intensive on zoom or the Healers’ Intensive on the land. For more information or to apply, please email Jude at deenaworkshops@gmail.com

**************************************************************************************Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest novella, is now available on Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

The poet, nan seymour, answered a letter I had written to her that moved me so I started writing this piece immediately, which is, in its way, also my answer to her.

For many years, nan seymour was a caregiver for Great Salt Lake as she is dying, enlisting others in the community to do likewise, to attend the lake in her need, to sit beside her, singing her death songs, which as Lawrie Hartt, also a writer says, are also life songs.

Lawrie Hartt received this knowledge in a dream. We depend on dreams for wisdom these days to teach us what is needed for life to flourish, for our lives and that of our many different companions on Earth.

These words by nan brought me to the page to reach out to you: “…a story …came through me. I received it walking on the shore during the first vigil winter. The lake is leaving us now. We will soon be living in the time between lakes.”

***

Gentle Boy comes to the door from the patio at this moment but he does not want in, he wants me to come out. At ten, he has thrown off domesticity and reconnected with his species wisdom, determined to live outside as much as possible, to sleep outside each night, in the way Timber the first wolf who lived with us insisted on dying outside even though it was pouring rain, and years later Akasha, another wolf, insisted on dying outside as well. Gentle is a persistent teacher, coming to the door, waiting for me to open it, then turning about and leaving again, noting when I close it and then returning to bang on the glass until I leave the door open, as I just have now, without a screen. He is saying that I, his human, should be outside, living among our thousand kin whose instinct is and survival depends on being together on behalf of what blooms from interconnection and dies without it.

***

“We will soon be living in the time between lakes.”

For the last years, I have been puzzling what it truly means for us to be in right relationship to the land so that it might be restored, so that life itself, so threatened, might be restored, might thrive again?

As I write this, I am thinking, Left to her own devices, Earth might thrive again. Life allowed its old, old ways, might thrive again.

“I can see a lot of things more clearly here from the desert.,” nan writes. “Here in Sonara, there is an advanced culture around caretaking instead of consuming water. The Santa Cruz river is already dead, but there is a clearly articulated and robustly supported vision to revive and replenish it. The people here are 5 years into a 50 year plan that will allow the river to flow freely and perennially again by 2070. I’ll be dead or 104. I’ll spend the rest of my life in the time between living rivers, working towards the restored flow. The same methods could be applied in Salt Lake, relational repair, rainwater harvesting, native plants….

“I’ve had to go intensely inward during this transition from lake to desert, but I am starting to emerge to find the words.”

Why am I writing this to you who are reading this? It is not to give you information. We have enough information and data to last us a thousand lives. What we are missing is the wisdom that comes from such deep intimacy and caring that the soul knowing of the other is transmitted to us for the common purposes that arise out of love and relationship. This is what the poet, nan seymour, had with Great Salt Lake. Perhaps she could have stayed alongside the lake in her extended death throes as we stay with those we love as they die. I think she couldn’t bear the pain of watching the end of a great one caused by indifference, by self-interest, by inertia, by politics, by the inordinate greed and violence of industry, technology and mining in order to manufacture what, truly, we do not need to live real lives.

Ultimately, broken as we are by unwarranted death, we turn toward the living. “I’ll spend the rest of my life between living rivers.”

Reading her letter, my heart is broken and my heart is full. Sorrow and gratitude are born from love. Love is an energy, a light or it is a wind, it moves unimpeded between all beings and all things. We take it in and it sustains us like breath. But we have to return something, our own movement, our own breath, our own light. As an individual,nan did not have enough to sustain Great Salt Lake. But with equally devoted companions, she can imagine a lifetime nourishing the waters of her river kin so in the future they will flow again as they once did. Such is the kind of miracle that can occur when a community lives on behalf of the seven generations to follow. It is the work of the intelligence of the heart. This letter by a poet calls us to heartmind.

Nan will come to visit me soon rather than speak on Zoom so that we can be together to explore what needs to be said which finds a home in “together.” She signs her letter this way:

nan seymour, writer, friend, and facilitator at riverwriting.com. Author of the poetry collection prayers not meant for heaven. composer of the anthology irreplaceable: a collective praise poem for Great Salt Lake

I live in Tucson, Arizona, the home of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui People. I am grateful to reside alongside Saguaros, Gila Woodpeckers, and Vermilion Flycatchers in the Sonoran Desert, the most biodiverse desert on our planet.

***

I, Deena, live on Tongva land in Topanga which means where the mountain meets the sea. It is still a place where the elementals are honored. Three books which I have written while sitting outside looking at the mountains are: A Rain of Night Birds, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, and many of the poems in Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems.

Thank you for reading and loving Earth.

**************************************************************************************

Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

It was as if we, Peter Levitt, poet and Buddhist teacher, and I were sitting together on the patio in Topanga looking out through the trees to the meadow, or we were on his porch in Salt Spring looking down the slope of the hill to the lake, as we have done so many times over the course of our friendship which began in the early 80s. That’s a long time to sit in conversation, allowing the practice of speaking what matters, to develop. This time, it was Peter who asked the question from which the impact of what had occurred at Daré, on Sunday March 22, rose up in me to be told.

This morning, beginning to write this piece after reading the morning news, I am alarmed again that we have a mad President. This is not an epithet, it is a grave truth, not sufficiently understood in its origins, implications and consequences to prevent us from collaborating in destroying our world. A mad leader happened before in 1933. We can learn this from history.

I remember my trepidation when I first became aware of the vuelos de la muerte in Argentina, Chile, Columbia and Guatemala, from the late forties through the nineties, which had been preceded by death flights of French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers, 1957. As a young woman, I often imagined myself a child witnessing such cruelty and I knew then the world would be permanently affected by that horror.

Since those years, we have accommodated to extreme violence – even regularly invoke it as our entertainment and so also profit from it – while much of the world is living in rubble, poverty and terror. Additionally, the few are luxuriating in gross opulence and the majority are obsessed with achieving and supporting lifestyles that our planet cannot possibly accommodate.

I am not holding a naïve question when I ponder why we do not grasp the consequences of what we do and do not do. There is no simple answer. For myself, the failure to viscerally identify with, empathize with, the extremity of particular and individual suffering, with all the instances of global war trauma, is one of the reasons we are in peril.

While Elon Musk says empathy is the failure of western civilization, I think the opposite; the failure of empathy is, indeed, civilization’s failure. Hopefully, you have read and entered the meditation on identifying with war-wounded Earth and with the war-wounded natural world, in my last Substack essay, If Earth is Living: The Ways of Ecocide. Perhaps you are breaking the pattern of disconnection.

As Daré was created so we can speak among ourselves about what matters, I was reflecting that we are in War, in unending vicious situations. Does this not require us to undertake the practice of feeling into the current nightmares?

Then someone who is a Protector, spoke. A Protector is someone who currently delivers food to frightened immigrants or drives immigrant children to school because their parents can’t go out, or have been detained or deported. They said that the unexpected advice given to them if they saw ICE approaching their car, was to throw their phones into a body of water before being required to give up the phones to ICE which wants names. Many illegal detainees report that that they were told by the Federal agents, if they give the names of their associates, they, themselves, will be immediately released. Extracting names is one of the central demands of fascism and the intent of torture.

The dangers of being a Protector and a peacemaker became evident and so became the subject of our concern. Then I asked a question, a bit tongue-in-cheek, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a peacemaker?”

The question fell flat. A few people indicated they understood why I had asked it in that particular way but the majority did not recognize the phrase. I knew then that despite education and experiences, few have a full understanding of what we are in today because there is no visceral understanding of what transpired in our country between 1947 to 1960.

Peter, of course knew that the origin of my question was the question posed to educators, unionists, Hollywood screen writers etc., called by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, in the late forties and fifties, to answer the intimidating question: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” These hearings led to blacklisting, mass firings and national distress.

Fortunately for us, on Sunday, one of the participants was the daughter of a blacklisted Hollywood writer, an Oscar winner. Her early years were spent in exile while her father struggled for work. She was able to explain that period in American life and we could takeit in because one of our kin had suffered it. A living history.

(Aside: Roy Cohn, who was Trump’s mentor in Trump’s early business dealings, came into prominence while prosecuting the Rosenbergs. He was also McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army McCarthy hearings and an informal advisor to Richard Nixon.)

Peter and I lamented the national and global consequences of not having consciousness, despite having information, about our collective history. We both remembered George Santayana’s crucial statement:  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Let’s pause.

It seems evident that violence leads to trauma and trauma leads to violence, the one escalating the other. The practice of empathy, an aspect of remembering and understanding history, may be a bitter but necessary medicine.

Once again, it really is in each of our hands.

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“On top of everything else, Israel and the US have unleashed an environmental disaster in Tehran,” said Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC. “How many ways can they show you they have no regard for human life?”2

There are 7594.6 nautical miles from Los Angeles to Tehran. I am beginning to write this on Monday March 9, 2026 at 4:06 pm as morning is dawning in Iran at 6:36 am.

In the yellow Daré / Council room behind me four women writers are working on their extraordinary manuscripts. It is a gift and an honor to be invited to assist these books, which will astound you when they are published, into the world. One is writing about the betrayal which permitted the Vietnam war to begin and torture the world for ten years, another describes the moment the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a third writes about the British induced potato famine in Ireland and the fourth on the effect of Colonization on the natural world. The core of what each one is writing now is being enacted in the Israeli and American war against Iran: War crimes; Armageddon; Famine and Ecocide — the Four Horses of the Apocalypse unleashed by the two mad kings.

In the wake of infernos unleashed across portions of Tehran  the night before, the people of Iran’s capital woke up Sunday to the hideous sight of ominous gray clouds above, choking-levels of smoke, and black raindrops full of toxic oil falling across the city.

Critics described “scenes of Armageddon” and characterized the bombings and the destruction they triggered as the latest crimes committed by the US and Israel since they launched their unprovoked and illegal assault on the Middle East nation last week.

Somewhere in Tehran writers, witnesses, journalists, novelists and poets are at work wondering if they will survive along with what they are compelled to write, wondering if their words will travel through the medium of war to be heard wherever there may be - someday be - another side. They do not wonder, as we do from time to time, if writing is useful or important now to prevent or stop the violence. They bear witness from their significant knowing. It is what they must do.

I cannot help but think of the Palestinian poet, Refaat Alareer, whose poem, If I Must Die, ending with the words If I must die/ let it bring hope/ let it bring a tale, was tacked to the wall in his kitchen when he died the victim of an Israeli air strike in the house in Gaza City where he had taken refuge the night before.3

It is now 1:32 am in Tel Aviv and I wonder what my kin are thinking as they huddle in an air raid shelter knowing that one shelter may have been destroyed by an Iranian ballistic missile. “Some reports suggest the strike may have targeted a critical wartime shelter linked to top Israeli leadership.”4 It is unclear whether this has occurred or not, all notices, whether from MSN or YouTube, seem to be linked to a single video from One India and so is either suppressed news or fabricated, probably the latter.

Another Israeli missile destroyed a hotel in Beirut where many displaced families had sought shelter.5 I can’t imagine their state of mind in Israel as they know, as I do, that we have failed to stop our mad leaders from this war though we have devoted our lives to do so and now the consequences are ricocheting back upon ourselves. Even so, as I type, I see out the window our neighbor flock of finches sweeping toward the bird feeders through the prayer flags — yellow, white, blue, green, black, red — wafting our entreaties for peace to the spirits.

The birds, as is their nature, are the messengers. Their presence points to the absence. Where is safety for the Iranian Ground Jay, the only bird endemic to Iran and where are the air raid shelters for the birds, for the Cranes, Geese, Myna birds? Where are the Common Nightingales, the national bird of Iran, singing?

Can you hear their songs against the explosion of missiles and the raging fires and the buildings falling on the children huddled together against their deaths?

Can you hear the songs over the sound of the explosion of the bomb piercing the roof of the Comfort Hotel in Beirut, opened to the dispossessed who had no place to escape the bombardment, and exploding on the first floor where it kills the young receptionist, a Horsewoman, studying veterinary medicine after gaining a masters in math.

The birds, the animals, the fish, the lizards, the insects, these innocent ones, how shall they survive, how shall they protect themselves, their little ones, their communities?

Where shall this rare creature, the Asiatic Cheetah hide? It must know it is on the very, very brink of extinction, all its relatives gone, but those few in Iran. Animals have a deep sense of threat to their species as well as to their kin and themselves. The genetic impulse to survive and thrive is in their cells. It is insistent, intense and urgent.

In 2022, there were 12 Asiatic Cheetah alive in Iran, the only ones in the wild anywhere in the world. Where are they finding safety at this very moment as you read this?

Close your eyes. Meditate with me. Imagine yourself Earth. Imagine all life coming from you, even your own life emerging from Her as she seeds and feeds everything that exists. And now, the bombs are falling, we hear them crushing whatever is in their path, hear the screech of trees ripping apart, feel the Cheetah’s hide stripping from her bones, or the ways the small brown birds are mangled by the blast of sound and energy that plucks hundreds of broken feathers from the tiny bodies, their song beaks splitting into eternal silence.

We have to be acutely aware of this moment when the speeding bombs stab the surface of the earth, as if it is occurring to each of us, because it is. It is fracturing the soil. Exploding. And exploding again into Her body. Our bodies. And again. She writhes. We writhe. The air above Her, above us, is not breathable. A black rain of oil and toxins is falling. The water is poisoned and is undrinkable. There is fire everywhere, fire everywhere, fire everywhere.

There is no war that is not first and continuously and forever an unrelenting war against Earth, against the Mother.

Israel. Gaza. West Bank. United States. Iran. The Gulf states. And everywhere else. Do you notice the extent of the silence in response to the brutality? It is inevitable for there are no words for the atrocities that are occurring, for the war that is claimed by a President and half a congress of his cabal and too many more, not to be a war. That is because those who are waging their non-war don’t care that people are actually suffering and dying. 1,100 on March 5^th. The great majority entirely innocent, and each individual wound and each death, each child blown apart, each old man under collapsed rubble, each mother unable to feed or protect her children, each being, human and non-human and each animal and each plant dying of the spray on the southern regions of Lebanon of high levels of glysophate (round-up, the second generation of Agent Orange) each evacuated villager who will never be able to return home, each one of these is suffering the horrors of this all too real war.

Ina Andreae knew this was coming. When she was alive, she had no words for it either and so she took her life at 25. In reality. But her ghost returned to warn us in the book I wrote, The Story That Must Not Be Told. This is what we will speak about when Janko and I read and talk about the real wars and what two young women understand better than the adults who deny the wars.

The other young woman is Amal Tuqan, a 16 year old Palestinian wire walker, living in a refugee camp in the West Bank under siege by the IDF, her experiences, based on a real young woman in Nablus.

Janko and I, anguished about what is occurring, and both of us feeling the responsibility to speak and gather all of you, of us, into communities of consciousness so that the truth of what is occurring is served and somehow we will find the resilience to sustain ourselves as we seek the collective wisdom to undo the madness. Please join us for this conversation.

***

Carolyn Brigit Flynn who will host and introduce the reading writes the following:

MARK YOUR CALENDARS! I’m writing to invite you to join me next Sunday, March 15, 12-2 pm PST online for STORIES OF RESISTANCE: A Conversation Between Writers Deena Metzger and James Janko—two amazing luminaries with urgent new books featuring women’s voices of witness and truth-telling.

I’m incredibly honored to emcee this event. Registration required:

RSVP here.

About Deena Metzger and James Janko

Many of you know the work of my beloved friend and teacher Deena Metzger, a novelist, poet and healer. Through her, I recently met James Janko. I knew that Janko (as everyone calls him) had been a medic in Vietnam, had won medals which he then gave to Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, and has written three award-winning novels. After we spoke for a time, I admired his calm, gentle demeanor, and commented, “You know, I’m just meeting you, so I don’t know your history…. are you a contemplative?”

Well, yes, he told me. He’s been a devoted practitioner of Buddhism for several decades.

I learned that this calm, wise man visited Nablus, Palestine and Tel Aviv in 2017, because he was haunted by a story he read about a circus in Galilee for Israeli children and Palestinian children. He met the members of this circus, and was deeply moved by the Palestinian children learning the circus arts of acrobatics, tumbling and wire walking while living in crowded refugee camps—and their connections with Israeli children in Tel Aviv.

Ultimately, his book THE WIRE WALKER, about a talented sixteen-year old Palestinian girl named Amal, is simply brilliant. The voice of Amal haunts the reader, and we are given a window into the role of the arts and creativity during times of occupation and war. Amal not only physically walks a tightrope between buildings, but between cultures and histories.

Deena Metzger’s latest book, THE STORY THAT MUST NOT BE TOLD: A DEAD WOMAN’S MEMOIR, features another gifted young woman. Ina Andreae was born in post-war Germany, and as a young artist in the 1970s traveled to Los Angeles to study art at the LA Women’s Building, where she met Deena, who was teaching writing there. Ina confronts the legacy of war and remembrance as the daughter of a family of a munitions company who assisted the Third Reich and benefited economically from World War II. You can see my essay about it here.

Taken together, these two books by Deena and Janko address the role of art, resistance, witness and the generational legacies of violence, war and occupation. I’m thrilled to offer these two brilliant writers and thinkers in conversation, and featuring readings from both of their books.

MORE ABOUT JAMES JANKO AND DEENA METZGER

PURCHASE The Wire Walker

PURCHASE The Story That Must Not Be Told

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Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

It was several days after Alex Pretti was murdered. The silver haired, professional White woman in her seventies was driving home from taking a friend, suffering cancer, to a much needed breakfast out in Minneapolis. As a luminary trauma expert, who has herself survived abuse, sex trafficking and institutional abuse, and who was at the time also suffering a complex illness, she carefully avoided the areas were ICE and Federal agents were confronting mourners and protestors. She was startled, then, when in the outskirts, driving past four parked cars, she was ordered to stop by a masked man.

“Do you live with garbage?” was the first thing she was asked and the vicious taunt was continued two more times. While she was kept there, another masked man pulled a man out of his car, seemingly without asking for ID, threw him howling to the ground, grinding down his head as seems to be the way these men are trained to operate against all humane and legal standards. The Federal Agent took a picture of her license plate, demanded her driver’s license, and wrote down some details. Proving himself the goon he was apparently expected to be, he shouted to his counterpart to show his victim what pain really is and so the second Federal agent stepped on the agonized man’s back with his heavy boots while my friend was interrogated for the next 20 minutes before being let go. She understood as she drove away, shaking, that he was questioning her relationship with Somali people, with whom, as it happened, she has had close working relationships in the last years and that the Agent had her address and she was, once again, like too many others, many very dear to her, no longer safe in the world.

When I asked my friend with whom I have walked the healing path for so many years, if she had reported this, it was clear she had not and could not, but would be very agreeable to my reporting it as long as she was kept safe. Our hope is that through reporting yet another illegal, criminal event, which I have done to the Minnesota authorities and more so, also to several in Congress who are now responsible for withholding funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless it meets, at the least, the basic human, constitutional requirements, (see below). And so, I also write about it here.

We can’t know in advance what is going to break us, what is going to take us down. Having spent so many years holding communities together, protecting whoever comes into our purview, continually asking, contemplating, this phrase that must be familiar to you by now – How do we meet these times? – it was a shock to me that this attack on my friend undid me and I needed to know how to restore balance and some wisdom in order to sustain a sanctuary for all beings.

One of our Daré members, Brian (Waldo) Pritchard has gifted the community a labyrinth, where in the tradition of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, one might walk the paths in order to come to an understanding of a question one is carrying through inner contemplation. One holds the question, walks in meditation to the center of the complex path, listens deeply, makes an offering, then walks out often with a sense of a response from the spirits and the natural world.

The arbitrary and irrational detention of my friend, albeit for a very short period of time, wherein she was subject to witnessing the torture of another human being, most probably, also, for no reason whatsoever, demands that we find ways to shift the balance of power away, difficult as it may seem, from the official current gangsterism. Walking the labyrinth, I didn’t want to be naïve or Pollyanna about our possibilities nor was I willing to be dismissive of the potential of aligning our hearts and determination with spirit, Earth and beauty. I needed help. The labyrinth could provide it.

What was in my mind as I walked was my understanding that we are all responsible.

When I exited the labyrinth, I was understanding that though I am an elder, I am also not the only one responsible for protecting the community. I wasn’t the only one responsible to figure it out because it can’t be accomplished alone. We need everyone to participate in resisting safely and peaceably in small, interconnected groups, in whatever ways we can, in ecologically bound, mycorrhizal entities, nourishing the human and the more than human as we devise new or restore the old, old ways to live that undermine the criminal mind, what Senator Jon Ossoff has just called Epstein Mind and we know what that means. According to Congressman Tom Lieu, in the Epstein files, “… there are highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children. Of Donald Trump threatening to kill children. So I encourage the press to look at these allegations.…” he said.

Alarmed as I believe we all are by the moral and ethical perversions of the current administration, many of us have seen the unnerving similarities between the rise of the Third Reich and the 2nd Trump regime. A friend from Berlin sent me this photograph of as early as 1938, the reconstruction of Berlin into what was to be called Germania began. Hitler intended to have an Arch of Triumph to signify the center of the world. Here is a drawing as he and Albert Speer, his architect, imagined it. Not too dissimilar, if not as high, as Trump’s hoped for 250’ tower.

A far more disturbing is this link from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, February 7, 2026:

“On Tuesday, February 3, 2026 more than a thousand people turned out for the Surprise City, AZ, Council meeting to oppose the establishment of the federal detention center. One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:

“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’

“The morning after the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, ‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”

***

On Friday, February 12, 2026 conscious legislators will attempt to impose very reasonable and familiar restrictions on ICE and DHS so they resemble our police and not Stormtroopers. Here are some of what is being requested:

1. No arrest or detention or entering private property without a judicial warrant for a verified criminal and certainty the individual is not a U.S. Citizen.

2. No face masks or coverings.

3. DHS officers must display their agency, unique ID number and name.

4. No enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches and places of worship, polling places, courts.

5. Stop racial profiling. No activity based upon an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language, accent, their race and ethnicity.

6. Preserve the State and local jurisdiction’s ability to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidence. Preserve evidence and share with jurisdictions. No large scale operations without consent of States and localities.

7. Detention must occur in humane structures, with sufficient food, sleeping conditions, bathrooms, medical care, necessary medicines, and access to person’s attorney and habeas corpus. Children are not to be detained or mistreated in any way.

8. Body cameras for accountability. No tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in constitutionally protected activities.

9. Uphold reasonable use of force policy only when officer is really threatened. In the event of an incident, officer is identified and removed from the field while investigations are conducted.

10. No paramilitary police. Regulate and standardize uniforms and equipment carried during enforcement operations undertaken with responsible supervision to bring them in line with civil enforcement.

***

To try to hold all of this in our minds and hearts and try to find our own ways to act asks a great deal of everyone. But to understand that we are all responsible is actually to deepen our own individual sense of responsibility. It means we each look continuously toward ways we each in our own ways, individually and collectively can protect and assist our neighbors, all the beings who live alongside us and on this planet.

You might want to consider this as you trace a labyrinth. Here is a visual image of a labyrinth you can follow with your finger that may bring you to the same insight.

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Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

JANUARY 31, 2026

CLERK U.S. DISTRICT COURT

WESTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS

BY Jaemie Herndon

Deputy

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS

SAN ANTONIO DIVISION

ADRIAN CONEJO ARIAS, and

L.C.R., a Minor Child by and through His

Parent and Guardian Adrian Conejo Arias,

Petitioners,

VS. CIVIL CASE NO. SA-26-CV-415-FB

KRISTI NOEM, in Her Official Capacity as

Secretary of the United States Department of

Homeland Security; PAMELA BONDI, in Her

Official Capacity as Attorney General of the

United States; TODD LYONS, in His Official

Capacity as Acting Director, United States

Immigration and Customs Enforcement;

DAREN MARGOLIN, in His Official Capacity

as Acting Director of the Executive Office of

Immigration Review; and JOHN DOE, in His

Official Capacity as the Warden of the Dilley

Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas.

Respondents.

OPINION AND ORDER OF THE COURT

Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ^[1] of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due1process and the rule of law. The government has responded.

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.

Case 5:26-cv-00415-FB Document 9 Filed 01/31/26

Apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the

Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against

a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:

1. “He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People.”

2. “He has excited domestic Insurrection among us.”

3. “For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.”

4. “He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures.”

“We the people” are hearing echos of that history.

And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against

unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue,

but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing

the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized.

U.S. CONST. amend. IV.

Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster.That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.

Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

-2

Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.

Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: “Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?” “A republic, if you can keep it.”

With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike,

It is so ORDERED.

SIGNED this 31st day of February, 2026.

____________________

_____________________________FRED BIERY

UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

Credit: Bystander

Matthew 19:14

John 11

-3-

^[1] Ex parte Bollman, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 75 (1807); Sir William W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769); see also Magna Carta, Article 39

* **

I was beginning to write a note, although I have just posted and there are so many writing and reviewing the details, because it seems so important for us to be in connection to each other in such unimaginable times. On the one hand the cruelty and brutality which seems chosen and then the courage and creativity of the community response in Minnesota and across the nation and internationally. I was struggling with what we could say to each other that would justify yet another discussion when a friend and writing colleague, an attorney, sent me this Writ of Habeas filed by Texas Judge Fred Breiy. It is a miracle of an ethical legal document, a work of literature and enormous compassion and wisdom.

(Thank you Joseph)

Please circulate it so that our community can be sustained by this true application of the law.

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Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

Two days ago, I hoped to begin my morning in the usual way with a cup of coffee as soon as the leaves were dusted with gold, going to the window or outside, cup in hand to greet the spirits and the day, experiencing wonder as I have living here in Topanga at the edge of the State Park for 44 years, here where Beauty, herself, resides in a ring of small mountains creating the canyon.

But… I had been preparing for a talk about the ways the actions of the current administration parallel to a fault the actions of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen in 1993 and I realized I also had to write about it. (See NOT OUR WORLD - STORMTROOPERS IN MINNESOTA. Story is Resistance.)

We know what happened in 1933. We have not forgotten the Holocaust or WWII. Because I can see the parallels, I am, as many increasingly are, alarmed that this may be coming again, and so I felt the obligation to write about it, no matter what.

I did not want to say what I knew needed to be said. I did not want to say Stormtrooper. It is a hideous word. But I said it. I didn’t want to say fascism, it is equally a hideous word. But I said it. I didn’t want to say, the way ICE and the Border Patrol are being trained are not unlike the way Hitler trained his private army. Not to say this was to avoid what is truly occurring. Also, I knew I had to post the photographs which depict, beyond a doubt, the reality of the increasingly gratuitous violence and brutality. These acts are so vile. They are the horrific acts of destroyed souls manipulated to act against nature by a regime that is itself vicious, cruel and a culture that has lost its way.

It took a day to write the piece and it was posted to circulate Saturday morning January 24, 2026, at 6 am, PT. It was very, very difficult to write the piece but I owed it to the community and to these times to say what needed to be said.

When I awakened yesterday everything had changed. One hour after the piece was posted what had been so problematic and probably dangerous to say was no longer extreme. Alex Pretti had been murdered in full view of the community, the second murder in two weeks, and the word stormtrooper and the word fascist had become frighteningly commonplace, equally frighteningly true. Anyone in the country and worldwide who wanted to see, could see the videos from different perspectives, different directions, of stormtroopers in Minnesota, seven men in full battle regalia, pepper spraying a man in the face, throwing him to the ground, taking his legally carried gun from behind him and then shooting him 10 times. These men have been turned into stormtroopers. No question. We have witnessed their brutal frenzy. We know what we know now. We know.

In the meantime, as I was sitting with everything that was being posted, wondering how, indeed we were going to come to some acceptable conclusion in Minnesota but also how we were going to come to shift the trajectory that is threatening democracy and all life, James Janko, who is no stranger to the violence of the last fifty years and the author of a recently published novel, The Wire-Walker about a young girl who has been called a Palestinian Anne Frank, who lives in a refugee camp in the West Bank. Janko wrote the following as a comment:

Then I read Charlie Angus Substack posting Darkness Descends in Minnesota where he speculates on wise responses:

I began to ponder, how will we do what we must do –how live in continuous confirmation of life without turning away from the parallel need to meet the forces of destruction which are rising up everywhere? I hoped Beauty would forgive me for abandoning her in order to reveal what was acting against her, what was threatening all life. I also understood that we have reached the crossroads where we are to step out of simple protest, political change and influence toward ways of being that are far more drastic and systemic. How shall we live so that everything we do is a great NO to brutality and everything we do is a great YES to Beauty and to Life?

Alex Pretti was a beautiful man. An ICU nurse at the Veteran’s hospital. Someone you would want to take care of you if you were suffering. Someone with the spiritual practice and focus to offer a veteran his last salute. Someone who would instinctively move to help you if you were being injured, if you were a woman being thrown violently to the ground by a masked man in battle fatigues. Someone you could count upon to help.

How shall we mourn him? How shall we honor him? How shall we learn from him? How shall we protect the future from those who would destroy it? How do we live and act so that murders such as we have seen are not permitted and we are expeditious, nimble, wise, and skillful, even masterful about peace, about non-violence, about Beauty?

The sun will be setting soon. Streaks of gray clouds turn the light silver and I wonder if sunset will be a great burst of fire and gold or a waterfall of tungsten and mercury turning into darkness. I slow down and watch the sky. Every moment has to be lived with exquisite care to confirm how precious life is, how full of wonder, particularly now when it is had been taken so ruthlessly and with such violence in these days in Minnesota and across the globe in horrifying brutality.

The clouds are darkening or the sky is brightening. Who can tell if it is the dark searing the light or the light illuminating the darkness. Soon, if we allow it, there will be stars. Stars, at least somewhere without too much artificial light, where we have not besmirched the sky. Here there will be Owls if we are still enough to hear the mating calls the lovers repeat each year, till death do them part. One hoot and another hoot and again, and weeks later two hoots and a third rasp of a little one, and again, and again through the night.

If we are still enough, if we are kind enough, if we have heart, if we love the mountains intact, just the way they are, and the pristine moon, and the sea preserved only for its creatures, then Beauty will come. But if we do not protect the Earth, Beauty cannot come for it is not of our making but what emerges from interconnecting and interpenetrating breath and stillness, from nature itself, from the essence of creation.

You know, life is essentially beautiful, is it not? It is, if we allow it. If we don’t continuously act against it. If we don’t, for example, think of mining the moon. Oh, it hurts to write those words, to realize what the madmen are thinking, are plotting. But now, while absolutely committing to protect her in ways that align with her being, I also go outside and there she is, a silver crescent right overhead turning the edges of the clouds to lace.

A week from now she will be full. Let’s follow her phases to keep ourselves from getting lost in rage and despair. Let’s follow her to learn how to say NO to the current murderous regime. Let’s …

Oh, ssh, ssh … there are the Owls, hooting.

**************************************************************************************

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The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

When I awaken in the morning, and without turning my head, look out the window, it is likely that the sun will have gilded some leaves and branches of the Eucalyptus trees and will, as I watch, spread its light, here and there, so that the brilliance and the night co-exist, interpenetrating, as the trees and I awaken in tandem. However, it does not take long for me to remember that there has been an increasing pall falling over our days as grief and alarm steal color and shape from whatever is alive.

In the last weeks, I go to the unforgiving screen of the computer instead because I must know if we, if Earth, have survived the violence which is being enacted against us, against all beings each day of the regime change in the US, as sanity has been replaced by madness, wisdom by greed and kindness by barbarism.

***

As many of you know, I was visited by an Ancestor, a young woman, Ina Andreae, who committed suicide in 1975 because her great grandparents and grandparents on both sides of her family had cooperated with the Nazis essentially to retain their power and money. Or because they agreed with the Nazis, were Nazis themselves. Some were.

She could not bear her history.

That is the bottom line for everyone, isn’t it, power and money? Now we have to reckon with such things in the US. You and I have to reckon with it. What are we going to do or refuse to do because money is at stake.

The timing of the appearance of the Ghost of Ina Andreae determined that her book, my book, The Story That Must Not Be Told, appeared in August 2025 when almost no one but historian Timothy Ryback was saying that Trump was following Hitler’s playbook. It was not easy to write the word fascism then, when so many were hedging around authoritarianism, but it was necessary. It was very difficult to write it the first time. To publish it. Or to write that Hitlerism is Trumpism. But I knew that such understanding of criminality had come to some people during the time of Hitler and that some had made a great difference by their courage and now it is my turn, your turn, our turn.

It was also necessary in August 2025 to say genocide when speaking of Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. This was equally difficult for me because my parents had been ardent Zionists and my brother had raised a lot of Jewish Mafia money to establish the state of Israel. And because other than his politics from this current perspective, which I cannot honor, my father was an extraordinary and kind man.

But as I was writing the book, which was like receiving a transmission, or was receiving a transmission, it became clear to me that Ina had appeared precisely then so that we would know what we were in and what might follow.

Five months later, it is commonplace to say fascism. Every responsible newscaster agrees that we are in a fascist time, that our President is severely demented, that this administration is gravely dangerous to all life. If they weren’t certain until ICE invaded Minnesota, they are clear now.

Also five months later as Gaza lies in absolute rubble, and without medical supplies, and without shelters and people are starving and freezing to death, there is a declared ceasefire that allows Israel to kill Palestinians, including journalists and children every day while Jared Kushner, who is as vulgar as his father-in-law, is dreaming of building 180 skyscrapers; in Gaza and the West Bank, genocide is being enacted in the interest of real estate. It is also clear to most thinking people that the President, with the encouragement of the most psychotic self-appointed ‘Prime Minister’, or so he is called, Stephen Miller, and with the cooperation of the Supreme Court, is destroying the Constitution and endangering the world. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in Davos, the world is no longer moving through a manageable transition but a rupture.

***

Let’s take a break. Consider this:

Founded in 1921, the SA, the Brownshirts, largely composed of disgruntled World War I veterans and the unemployed, served as the original paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party. The SA “played a central role in the Nazi movement‘s rise to power, its seizure of power, and its consolidation of power.” According to The Third Reich in Power, the SA “had been largely responsible for the violence that had characterized the Nazi rise to power.”

In 1925, the SS was formed as Hitler’s bodyguard. In addition, as it developed, supervised by Heinrich Himmler, it also oversaw police forces, intelligence, and concentration camps, even served as elite combat troops. The SS “became the most powerful instrument of repression and terror in the Nazi state.”

***

If you are watching the news in the USA in the last days, you have seen:

Lines of men in self-styled uniforms, including ballistic wear, helmets, tactical plate carriers or vests, and masks, goggles, gaiters that obscure faces and defy looking human. They carry guns, rifles, pepper spray, tasers and tactical weapons. They proceed in lawless groups who reflexively it seems, throw people to the ground, crushing their heads and bodies against the tarmac.

You have seen these images which follow. I invite you to read them, imagine them, inscribe them in your mind and heart so again, that we know what we must know.

A group of ICE hoodlums battering down the door of a house, marching an old man out in freezing weather clad in shorts, a small blanket and sandals.

A mother turning to drive out of a blockade, says, “I’m not mad at you,” as she is shot point blank in the face and chest three times then denied medical care by a bystanding doctor as well as denied comfort by her wife until the ICE medics arrive as long as fifteen minutes later. She dies. These were her last words.

A disabled woman stalled while driving to a doctor’s appointment is pulled from her car, battered, then forced to walk though she is unable.”Masked agents dragged me from my car and bound me like an animal, even after I told them that I was disabled,” she said.

The window of a man’s car is shattered, the man is violently pulled out, he is beaten to the ground until his body goes limp. When located several days later in a horrific out-of-state private detention camp, he just manages to say, “I am very injured.”

A five year old driven home from school by his father, stands alone facing the car’s tire, with an ICE officer behind him holding his backpack. Then he is made to knock on his door so that ICE can see if anyone else is home. Afterwards, he is taken with his father, who is here legally, to Dilley lockup in Texas. Four hundred children are in ICE detention. In response, Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers are “experts with children. I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children,” Bovino said during a press conference Friday.

Why are these people so brutal, so cruel?

I am continuing to have readings and conversations about The Story That Must Not Be Told. Clearly, they are different from those I had in August and September. Then I had said to the audience, “Your grandchildren will want to know, as Ina wanted to know, what her relatives did in the war.” But tomorrow, I will ask outright, “What are you doing to resist?” The announcement for the Zoom talk tomorrow, January 23, 2026 with Laura Simms, says:

The actions by the ICE and the Border Patrol, resisted as much as possible short of literal civil war between the people and the Feds, are, as Ina came to alert us, coming to resemble those for which Ina’s family was also responsible. They had the largest military shipbuilding firm in Nazi Germany. They had, which Ina supposedly never knew, a slave labor camp in 1944. One thing leads to another when we collaborate. If Ina had been alive at the time, I don’t think she would have collaborated.

The actions articulated above, in addition to all the others you know about, all you have witnessed, are the actions of stormtroopers, of the SA and the SS in the US, now but not exclusively in the state of Minnesota, certainly still in Los Angeles and who knows what is coming in Maine. Ina is alerting us to the extremity of what is occurring in our country and our need to bear witness and to resist.

***

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), Rep. Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.) and Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), said., “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders,” they said. “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

During an anti-ICE protest outside the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, demonstrators were seen holding a sign reading “Nuremberg Trials II ELECTRIC BOOGALOO.”

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Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

Cellphone video shows the moments before Renee Good was fatally shot in her car in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. Obtained by ABC News

She saw it coming
But she didn’t see it coming
She saw Death coming
She saw her death coming
She said, not knowing his name yet,
“I’m not mad at you.”

She saw her American death coming
“Dude,” she said to Death,
Not knowing his name,
“I’m not mad at you,”
Thinking she could turn away
Or turn the other cheek.

Yes, she saw it coming
Said, “I am not mad at you,”
To Death, holding up a camera
Then holding up a gun.

Death came
Her death
Her American death
She looked it in the eye.

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Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

Dear Friends and Companions:

From my journal notes on the Solstice: “The dark turning to the light, and everything that implies. Not to abandon the great grief of this era but also to accept the possibility of the miracle of new beginnings. To hold the opposites – the seeming impossibility of ending the brutality and violence given Trump and Trumpism, the escalation of cruelty and violence, what Charlie Angus, of The Resistance, calls gangster fascism – and also the necessity of imagining and visioning peace and restoration of the natural world and seeking the ways. Recognizing I have done that, looking unflinchingly at these times and doggedly insisting on Revisioning Medicine, the 19 Ways, Literature of Restoration, Daré.”

There is a small bruise on my left hand which is not unlike, I suspect, the bruises on the President’s hands. But, I know this one is from aging and that I must not deny my age to the community but especially not to myself. This is the time when I must ask if there is anything that my soul committed to on entry that is left for me to fulfill at the very best of my abilities and devotion given my years and experience.

I scan more of the notes I made on the Solstice at the turning to the light, and see that I wrote that there were areas perhaps not fully developed or honored as a writer because I was committed to other concerns, teaching for example. And now, my notes seemed to imply that fulfilling the mandate of a writer is absolutely required, making the offering to the community and the times in that way.

I find myself immersed in the work of Ariel Dorfman, planning to read The Suicide Museum again and also Allegro again which was published this year and which I read in manuscript and also I am immersed as you readers know in the work of Colum McCann, whom I have never met or corresponded with. Then because everything is connected – really – it turns out the two know each other well as literary figures. Each of them has been profoundly devoted to bearing witness to these horrific times, speaking truth to power and writing accordingly so that we might, as we pray so sincerely every new year, transform, become ethical beings, devoted to peace, its true nature. That we might become as devoted as the two of them are.

Somehow in response to this connection, in alignment with their passions for the world and great grief as well, a book comes to me, like a spirit, demanding that it be written and now. I understand immediately that I can’t answer, ‘Well, I will write it in the three or four summers that will follow my finishing The Broken Lambs.” I understand immediately that I must first fulfill my obligation to the natural world, which I think we all have given the crimes of the dominating Imperial nations, of the military, industrial, technological worlds upon the Earth, and then I must devote myself to this book which demands its life.

Uncannily, I open a notebook I haven’t looked at in a year or so, where after an earlier list of projects, the words at the end are: How manage this while teaching?

And so ...

to accomplish this and whatever else Spirit will require, I will stop teaching my writing classes at the end of June to write full time. Because I can’t do both in the time I probably have left. I do this even though I feel great, am seemingly very healthy and vital, but 89 is 89 and Jane Goodall left this year while she was teaching in California.

And so ...

after 60 years of teaching, I will stop teaching writing classes and private consultations at the end of this June.

I will probably continue the Writers’ and Healers’ Intensives, Saturday 19 Ways and Thursday 19 Ways, the latter in another format and various occasional weekend events here and there. The Intensives will take place this May and June and they are open for registration now. There are also a few spaces in each of my classes — three Wednesday writing classes and two 19 Ways, Thursdays and Saturday - and some private appointments available. So if you ever wished to study with me, you have a chance between now and June. Please contact Jude Weber at deenaworkshops@gmail.com.

Thank you for understanding and supporting this decision and the writing I must do. Financially, it will not be easy to accomplish. The simplest, most direct and least expensive way you can help is to become an on-going subscriber to this SubStack. You can also make contributions to Mandlovu, my 501C3 non-profit. And if you have any ambitions to be a patron in the old ways it would be wonderful to discuss such with you. But whether anyone responds or not, my soul has committed herself to this path at this time of my life so I can tell the stories that must be told.

Peace and Blessings,

Deena

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Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

Dear Reader: I wrote this originally for the participants in my writing classes and in the 19 Ways but as I wrote it, I realized it was also written for you.

A great book appears. It is a rare occurrence. We can’t predict it. It isn’t a yearly event. It might not happen in a decade or even longer. When it does, one knows one is the recipient of a singular gift that humans can give to each other.

Such is Apeirogon. An Apeirogon is a polygon that cannot be constructed and has a countably infinite number of sides and has a countably infinite number of angles. Such is the book. Infinite in its sides and angles.

But it is more than that. It is the exact, complex, wildly intelligent, rigorous and relentless telling of the horrific war of Israel upon the Palestinian people and its particular and global history, from its Biblical beginnings and earlier and wider and how such events affect not only humans but more than humans, even birds, and how we came to such a moment, we, you and I, as did each of the real people whose real stories, unbearable stories, true stories are the focus of this telling. One story and another story. One agony and another agony. And the Israelis and Palestinians as people, peoples and members of the human species. What is our nature? Can we heal?

And it is more than that. The writing is unbearably and unimaginably beautiful. And here is the mystery, it is because of the beauty that we finally understand the wound and its depth and enormity, and the extent of what we don’t know. Because of the beauty, we can bear witness to what is monstrous. Because of the beauty we will not look away from what is entirely unendurable.

Finally, McCann, the Irish author living in the US, creates a new form which is needed for such content. There are 1000 chapters. Or 2000. Which is difficult to discern. Some may only be a word, three words, or a sentence or a paragraph. There is a space, a breath then each time the writer names a chapter’s number. This allows us to integrate what we have heard.

The interconnecting chapters have great range -- in addition to the core retelling of the lives, events and experiences of Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, an Israeli against the Holocaust, and Bessam Aramin, a Palestinian, a Palestinian studying the Holocaust, two members of Combatants for Peace who each lost a daughter to the war and become dear friends, whose sons become friends. Alongside the telling of their stories, are associations of an expedition to the Dead Sea, to pursuits of Richard Burton, the explorer, to amicable numbers 280 and 220, to the story of why the bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki which was not the original intention, to the Holocaust, the Shoah, the Nakba and the Intifadas, then to the music and silences of John Cage, an excerpt from a letter from Einstein to Freud and more and more as the polygonic nature of reality is revealed, including what made my heart drop, a reference to my dear friend Anaïs Nin listening to a lecture by Antonin Artaud in Paris, who, afterwards, was in despair because the audience had not understood his theatrical teachings about death. It was when she appeared to me like a ghost while I was listening to McCann, though she died in 1977 just as I learned I had breast cancer, that I could no longer fail to understand that everything is related to everything else. And so everything is one.

Yes, that’s it, but no, that’s not it quite. It is that we are called to see the connections and live accordingly. And live accordingly as Rami and Bessam do.

After the chapters on the twelfth century construction of the Minbar of Saladin, considered a jewel of Islamic art, its great beauty, its architectural and mathematical perfection, its destruction by fire in 1969 after standing for 800 years without a single nail or any glue holding it together, and its perfect reconstruction by 2007, it begins to appear that the poetic literary form that McCann has constructed is intended, also, to resemble music and “music is liquid architecture,” as Goethe said, “and architecture is frozen music.”

Apeirogon is a must read, or must listen to this remarkable reading by McCann, not only because it is a great literary work — long listed for the Booker prize 2020, winner of the National Jewish Book award, finalist for the Dublin Literary Award and in my mind, deserving a Nobel even if (but not) only for this book — but because our lives, work and writing demand we finally know what we must know so that we can, as peoples, live, and if so, live among each other in relationship which is the natural way.

I invite you also to read James Janko’s just published The Wire-Walker, a story of another young Palestinian girl, a wire-walker who learns her skills in the Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus. The two books speak to each other, including but not at all limited to the many could be shared experiences in Nablus — (as could be said, also of my novel, What Dinah Thought which brought Janko and me together, written at the time of the first Intifada and republished in December 2024) — but also the moment when French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between Jerusalem’s Arab and Jewish sectors to release a dove for peace in 1987. Perhaps Janko and I will speak also of Apeirogon when we speak on Zoom about the parallels -- and so adding to the literary apeirogon -- between The Wire-Walker and The Story That Must Not Be Told, tba. When I wrote to Janko about Apeirogon, he said he had read it twice but hadn’t listened to it and that he would.

I hope you will as well.

************************************************************************************** For my writing classes and 19 Ways, please read or listen to Colum McCann reading Apeirogon to consider together the week of February 18 - 21 which, as appropriate to the book, is also Ramadan and Ash Wednesday!

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Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

Twenty-six years ago, as many of you reading this know, I made a promise to an Elephant Chief whom we called the Ambassador because he had come to me and a small group of humans to reveal, unquestionably, that it was possible to communicate with each other, if we were willing and skilled enough, and such would be mutually beneficial to all our peoples. Reflecting back upon that moment, I now understand his deftness in invisibly organizing and directing our encounter.

Being far less egocentric, or rather, homocentric now than I was in 1999, this is how I understand what occurred.

Most of us who have had unexpected and significant encounters with non-human beings ultimately recognize that we most probably did not design the event but rather responded to their initiation.

The first time I understood this was when I responded to what seemed like a summons, the opportunity, the outrageous opportunity, to write an Op-ed piece for a Indian newspaper covering an Elephant protest movement, a herd refusing no matter the human provocation to leave an area where one of them had died. Maybe I had read it somewhere – it is unlikely to have been in the American press – so it was already unlikely I would be following that event, but it was a year when there were many incidents of Elephants acting aggressively toward humans which had almost never happened before and so I was alert. This was before the lions attacked and ate the poachers who had just killed for ivory. But the aggressive incidents had the same quality to them, revenge or, better said, retribution.

I saw immediately, that the Elephants were not aggressive in this instance, but were mourning one of their dead and required to be left to their rituals and ceremony for three days after which they would leave of their own will. The article appeared in the opinion section of the newspaper and I was thanked enthusiastically by the editor who had requested the piece. Afterwards it was translated into Hindi by an Indian friend of mine and circulated to various newspapers, or so I was told. When I wrote sometime later to find out how the editor had found me it was as if the editor and the newspaper had vanished entirely.

What I understood was that the Elephants, in despair, had sent out a call in the hope that some human would hear it and respond on their behalf. What was important was I was not special, but I was listening and so happened to be the one to write what needed to be said.

Similarly, with the Ambassador, I happened to be the one, or rather, in this case, probably a one of several, hopefully, many who responded to a call from the Elephant people to learn who they are and to change our behavior radically. And, as it happens, our understanding of the nature, culture and intelligence of Elephants (and many other non-humans) has greatly increased in the last twenty-five years, and I am alleging here that it is because the Elephants (and the others) are inviting us into fields of intelligence and revelation so we might know them and act accordingly.

Most of the time, when I told the story of meeting the Ambassador, I would say that I had the idea of sitting in council with Mandaza Kandemwa, a nganga, (medicine man), and his community in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and also the idea of sitting in council with the Elephants. Then I would add that I had no idea what the latter meant. I didn’t know because it wasn’t my idea. Today, I understand, that the Elephants had created a magnetic sphere, a field of consciousness which pulled me in mentally and physically. Or maybe I was pulled in by the Spirits of the Four Directions through mind, by heart, spiritually and ultimately it manifested through the spirit of the physical world when I was drawn to Chobe National Park in Botswana and led, by a Fisher Eagle, to wait by a particular tree until the Ambassador came to our truck at exactly, as it would turn out, the right time for everything to come to an amazing conclusion.

As I describe in detail in Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, when he stopped before me as I was in the back of the truck, I began speaking to the Elephant in my mind and ended saying his people were my people and that I would do whatever I could to protect them, without realizing as I do now that this would mean that the thinker, writer, teacher activist is now always including the natural world so that the Elephants and all beings will survive. It means I was being imprinted with the idea to stop privileging the human over the non-human. It means I would recognize our intrinsic relationship to each other as the foundation of life itself. It means life itself is core to all my thinking and actions. It means we have a chance to survive AI if we yield to this knowing.

***

As it happens, I sat down earlier to write an essay about the grave dangers of AI and the ways it is taking over our lives more rapidly that we can fathom. This requires that we act quickly and decisively to unite all human beings, all nations, in order to contain its progress until its safety can absolutely be guaranteed. I would have probably written, as I have before, and will again, very soon, I imagine, that everything we do now to preserve the integrity of the natural world, to create eco-niches of consciousness as well as literal eco-niches where we can live real lives, will protect us from AI, from the monster who is stalking our future.

But as I sat down to write about the terrors of AI and the impending GAI, self-generating language model, I remembered a moment yesterday when I was looking at the Eucalyptus trees on the patio that you know I love so much, and began thinking that we don’t receive the wisdom of the natural world through loving or understanding only a single being, but rather it is the profundity of the relationship of all the beings to each other that will ultimately enlighten us. So, I started thinking about the natural world, or found myself in it, and AI fell to the background as it should. I knew then, that our connection to the natural world must be recognized as first, and is to precede speaking of anything else, like praising the spirits at awakening or speaking gratitude on going to sleep, or just standing in awe before beauty.

But, truly, I haven’t thought of the moment I met the Ambassador for a long time and it has been years since I thought of the article for the Indian Elephants mourning their dead. Yet, suddenly I was in this essay instead of the other as if I had been taken, allured, ensnared, magnetized, maybe even enchanted, and where would such energies leading to these memories come from, if not from the Elephants themselves again because they are in relationship to all life. Even to us. So they call out.

The Elephants can feel the dreadful implications of AI for us, yes, but, truly for all life. AI is the absolute anti-life. By its nature. The Elephants want to be sure we get it right in our responses. They want to be sure we stay in relationship. So they came forward and wrote this essay. How else would I know that we must act on behalf of the natural world all the time and in all ways.

How do I/ we know this? I repeat, the Ambassador Elephant is telling us. That’s how we know.

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Supporting my work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation allows me to freely offer my writing to the community. If you are not able to become a paid subscriber, recommending this Substack to your friends and colleagues or liking/ leaving a comment is greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

Several artists, musicians, actors, writers, offered their testimony in an event in Topanga Canyon, California, in alliance with the nationwide movement, FALL OF FREEDOM, over 700 artistic events as of 11/21/2025

These are my opening remarks: When I read that the artist Dred Scott and the playwright Lynn Notage were initiating Fall of Freedom, I remembered initiating the poetry readings accompanying Angry Arts which closed down the art galleries in 1966 to protest the Vietnam War and how important it had been then to say NO to government policies. But despite the extreme tensions of the anti-war movement, we did not imagine then that we would end up where we are at this time in this country.

I responded immediately because my latest book, The Story That Must Not Be Told, has just been published, and when I read the intentions of Fall of Freedom, I felt great camaraderie and also was aware it was 60 years since Angry Arts and 90 years since the beginning of the Holocaust and two years since the massacre in Israel and the beginning of the genocide of the Palestinian people, and that it is heresy to say those last words and the President has called for the execution of members of congress for reminding the military they have the right if not the obligation to refuse illegal orders. And immediately, I remembered the fear that coursed through me as I was writing the book which I had no choice but to write because it is now my turn, as an elder, to stand up and say No as our ancestors have done for countless centuries.

A few years ago, a man contacted me from Germany as he was investigating the suicide death of his sister 50 years ago who had been a student of mine at the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building. For those 50 years he had been assuming, as did his family and community, that her suicide had been the result of a mother with a mean tongue and also her artistic disappointment. But within 2 hours, it was clear to me that she committed suicide in response to her grandparents ownership of a military ship building and aircraft company called Blohm and Voss the largest in Hitler’s Germany, one, which I quickly learned, had had a slave labor camp in 1944. He asked me to write the book and, again, I could not refuse although it required me to note the terrible parallel between the rise of Hitlerism in 1933 and the rise of Trumpism in 2025. The book, as if written by the Ina Andreae herself, as a Ghost, began to chronicle the relationship between events 92 years apart revealing the probability that Trump is following the Nazi playbook, blow by blow against newspapers, universities, jurists, non-Aryan, that is non-white people, and creating the equivalent of a Brown shirts militia. Writing these words in the book, and speaking them now, is of course exceedingly difficult, but their reality is why we are here. History teaches us the necessity of resistance. The Vietnam war ended in part because of the anti-war movement. And so, this is why so many artists, 700 events around the country, are standing behind these words which you can read on the Fall of Freedom website:

*** Mission

Fall of Freedom is an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping the nation. Our Democracy is under attack. Threats to free expression are rising. Dissent is being criminalized. Institutions and media have been recast as mouthpieces of propaganda.

This is a nationwide wave of creative resistance

Art matters. Artists are a threat to American fascism.

*** What’s at Stake

Due process gutted. Universities threatened and defunded. Students kidnapped. Migrants deported. Troops deployed. Racism rampant. Cruelty celebrated. Political leaders arrested. Citizenship stripped. Health care shredded. Women’s rights rescinded. Wealth concentrated. Free speech eliminated. Genocide normalized. Science undermined. Arts assaulted. Journalism targeted. Departments shuttered. Grants rescinded. Trans banned. Lawyers capitulating. Coup makers pardoned. Budgets slashed. Abortion outlawed. Courts stacked. Boards replaced. Police unleashed. Nazis emboldened. Bombs dropped.

This is why we must resist.

***

When I wrote to the other artists here and asked them to join me, they all said Yes immediately as did Gio when I asked if she would host us. And thank you also, members of the audience, for being here and listening. Simply sitting in this room is an important act of alliance with freedom.

***

These are the poems I read.

THE LAST WORD

I

There will come a time

when a last word will be spoken

in this language. Afterwards

a great sigh will emanate from the trees.

They will begin to whisper among themselves

the sounds of courage and a wind will come

out of them sweeter than air.

In the silent place that feared the axe

a secret hollow will express the breath

they didn’t dare reveal. So many years

hiding the truth. The missing songs

of birds will emerge from the grasses

and the peoples who knew how to sing so

will rise up brown as the earth. Sometimes

the women and the cattle and the soil

share the same hues or the same timbre of praise.

Then there are the greens that repeat themselves

only in eyes and those who carried the leaves

in their vision, carry what prevails

when the last word has been spoken

and the heavens open up in unimpeded light.

The rush of blue then between sky and water

will be a waterfall of music and we

will not miss the bloody chatter that razed

everything to the ground, but will sing

the yellow pollen and the golden sap

in the dark colors of stones shining

in riverbeds.

What will you give up?

the Spirit asks.

I certainly do not need the last word,

I say.

I certainly do not need the last word.

Let it be spoken quickly and

be done with, so we can be still.

***

THE LAST WORD

II

There will come the time

before the last word will be spoken,

when the dead will listen

to learn what their fate will be,

what destiny the last word will fulfill,

and every word that ever was spoken

in that langue will be gathered

into one.

The harsh judgment of chance and

circumstance will be rendered

as the entire canon will be weighed

against the skin of sheep

and the bodies of trees.

Each word against each life

without pity. And everyone

who had ever spoken

will have to come forth

and claim their words

and what became of them,

how they served the living

and how they served the dead.

One way or another, whether

“Praise,” or “Damnation,”

nothing will be redeemed

and the great prison house

of language will fall,

and bury the last speaker

for there will be no one left

to do it in the mother tongue

to which she was born,

the one that held and rocked her

in its melodies and rhythms

its beauty and cruelty.

All words will go, as empires must,

into dust. This has been written so many times,

but we never believe we will die out,

die out by our own hands,

and by our own words,

by what we have spoken

by what we have sworn.

***

from RUIN AND BEAUTY THE END

A last poem on behalf of ruin and beauty. A last poem hovering somewhere near, alongside everything that needs to be said now, in this time.

In a clay bowl filled with white milk, we washed the dark feet of a soldier who had eaten human hearts. Another woman came and then another, washing, washing. Such forgiveness, acts of utter hopelessness and impossible hope. Forgiveness required that we sharpen knives until nothing could resist us, so we could sever the past from the future, for him and for us. He slashed and we slashed. The milk roiled in the earthen pot. Milk so white, pressed out of a living creature, milk I know because I nursed my sons, swirling about my burning hands. I searched to find all the love within me though the general had devoured the source of love so many times. He had assumed love would disappear from our planet forever; how else could he survive? When we were finished, the milk was so white it could have blinded us. Some deaths cannot be redeemed without acts of utter desperation.

Ruin, you see, is not the end of life despite museums of crumbling cornices and corner stones. Ruin is unremitting beauty flinging us to the ground. Ruin is a supernova exploding, an old one turning in on itself and becoming, in that moment, as much light as will blaze from the sun in the next ten billion years. Ruin is that gamma moment pouring out into the universe now.

Ruin and beauty:

Despair not, there will be a future;

There will be a future before

Or after we die.

***

BLACK AS A CROW

It could not bring me to believe in death.

Feathers so radiant with light

could only be the night sky,

could only be eternity.

A stream of blood from its yellow beak

drying on the pavement.

The roots of the tree

were not the right burial ground,

a neighbor’s cat was wandering

up and down the entrance

to the shul among the olive trees,

and though the ravens had fed Elijah,

I could not bring the one,

who had received the gift of dark from Apollo,

to Kol Nidre, the Hebrew prayer for the dead.

We spoke, Crow, he and I, as I drove us home,

of what concerns all sentient beings,

of all the vehicles that kill.

This morning, I laid him on the hill

At the feet of Avalokitesvara

Infinite compassion.

I stroked his feathers. I wanted

the dark light on my hands.

I did not take a wing or a single feather

though I know the animals

will dismember him,

despite his shroud

of pine needles and tobacco.

Here is my prayer:

Do not forgive us our transgressions.

Let the black light

that surrounds you

meet the ancient fire

in the core of the earth,

for the marriage of prophecy

and possibility. Sunlight

inherent in your beak,

speak to us.

Death,

Be so tender with me

When you lay my body down.

***

A GREATER SILENCE

Soon, there will be

a greater silence

then there is now.

I do not want

to be here

alone.

When the last tree falls

may I be under it.

May the last tree

take me down.

***

OH GREAT SPIRIT

In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake.

Who have taught us. Who have guided us. Who have sustained us. Who have healed us.

Please heal the animals.

In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake.

Whom we have slaughtered. Whom we have feared. Whom we have caged. Whom we have persecuted. Whom we have slandered. Whom we have cursed. Whom we have tortured.

Protect the animals.

In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake.

Whose habitat we have stolen. Whose territory we have plundered. Whose feeding grounds we have paved and netted. Whose domain we have poisoned. Whose food we have eaten. Whose young we have killed. Whose lives and ways of life we threaten.

Restore the animals.

In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake.

Forgive us. Have mercy. May the animals return. Not as a resurrection but as living beings. Here. On earth. On this earth that is also theirs.

Oh Great Spirit. Heal the animals. Protect the animals. Restore the animals.

Our lives will also be healed. Our souls will be protected. Our spirits will be restored.

Oh spirit of Raven. Oh Spirit of Wolf. Oh Spirit of Whale. Oh Spirit of Elephant. Oh Spirit of Snake.

Teach us, again, how to live.

***

Thank you for resisting fascism too.

Three of us, an Indigenous Elder, Cheryl Potts, a Diviner, Sharon Simone, and I, a writer, have been meeting regularly for many, many years, since 2012 at the very least, asking a fundamental question which has become increasingly urgent: how do we meet these times? Covid didn’t stop us though its presence intensified our focus. Some of what we came to over the years, you can see by reading my work over that time, increasingly influenced by these conversations. When the 19 Ways to a Viable Future for All Beings was transmitted in 2012, it confirmed the world view we were carrying and our conviction that the survival of our species and planet depended upon stepping out of the aggressive, acquisitive, violent, imperial, dominating, increasingly brutal, money and power hungry world view that is Western mind, but no longer, because of global competition, limited to the West.

In 2017, A Rain of Night Birds, was published, chronicling the shock wave that occurred when the UN IPCC report on Climate Change finally recognized the effects of the Anthropocene and simultaneously cited TEK, Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, for the first time. So we began to consider a Literature of Restoration that would not lead inadvertently, as so much conventional writing does, to extinction.

The trajectory we followed led us toward deeper and deeper relationships with the natural world and spirit as the two are inextricably related. We were recognizing the danger to the natural world, to the beloved planet, to all life by human activity at the same time that we were listening to and being guided by the invisible energies, seeking ways to protect creation, as in La Vieja: A Journal of Fire where the solitary old woman found herself engaging with Bear in the old ways that Indigenous people across the planet knew before Euro-American mind, fueled by Judeo-Christianity /Monotheism, forbid such alliances.

Well, today is Halloween and as I fell asleep after midnight, aware we had reached the time when the veil is very thin, I prayed for guidance in writing this essay as I found myself yesterday unable to make a mark on the blank page.

I don’t know how the spirits speak to you, but I know for myself, one thing leads to another, unanticipated associations gather, and suddenly something unforeseen manifests. In and of themselves, the various events do not necessarily lead anywhere, though they are of concern, and then they merge of their own energies and a path opens with a magnetic force that cannot be ignored.

Well then, a few occurrences lead us here which is unexpected and once again, I feel awe and gratitude for what is emerging. If you’re lucky, being a writer means taking dictation from the great mystery, or as my friend and colleague, the Zimbabwean Nganga Mandaza Kandemwa often said, “I am God’s hands.”

Last June, obligatory circumstances required Sharon Simone to relocate to the East coast and Cheryl and I feared we would not sit with her in actuality again. We continued our relationship on Zoom but it was not the same, the three of us agreed with sadness. Though we understood that such disconnection has become a global issue, intensified by the contradictions between the isolation imposed by Covid and the extremities of a mobile world, as well as between the possibilities and the limitations imposed by computer culture, still we hadn’t made any progress in solving the separation for ourselves or others. Then an entirely unpredicted medical condition transformed into a blessing and brought Sharon back to Los Angeles and so, last Wednesday, to Topanga again.

Remembering an earlier conversation, Sharon asked me if I had gained any insight into what I was to offer in these last years of my life, whatever they will turn out to be? Though I have wanted to be certain to concentrate my time and effort appropriately, I answered that nothing new had come to me outside of helping community meet these times. “That’s always your quest,” Sharon said and I agreed, unhappily, that I had not found the new edge I was to walk at this time. “For myself,” Sharon continued, “especially, as I am living on the other coast, I want to learn how I am to continue to support the Village Sanctuary for All Beings,” which is the way we refer to the community, human and more than human, which has gathered here on this land since April 1, 1981.

Cheryl, immediately aware that this is our common devotion, suggested we three do an I Ching reading, based on Stephen Karcher’s remarkable Total I Ching: Myths for Change, asking for a single response for the three of us. For those of you who follow the Yi, the most ancient form of divination, the Book of Changes, the response was 42 Augmenting/ The Blessing. The changing line 6 in the second, leading to the relating 61 figure, Centering and Connecting to the Spirits. The answer was clearly not to be discouraged and to offer everything we could on behalf of the Village, and the future.

These two concerns then, how to meet these times and how to serve the Village Sanctuary have been much on my mind when considering it was time to write an essay for Substack, and no direction appeared before me. Dismayed, I turned to a gift - or is it a burden? - that had been given to me by my spirit daughter, the writer and landscaper, Pami Ozaki. Knowing my alarm, about AI, she had sent me the Audible version of Karen Hao’s Empire of AI. While only having heard a few chapters so far, I found a synchronicity that needed to be attended – the presentation of this book now, and the rising level of my concern about AI, since just beginning to read Elizer Yudowsky and Nate Soares’, If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, a book which verifies all my intuitions and fears. I had asked some AI engineers I knew if Earth centered ethics like the 19 Ways, or a foundational principle protecting the natural world could be inserted into AI, and, especially, GAI? Actually, I had asked them to begin to do it or to research the way, but it has not come to be. Rather, yesterday, I came to a section in Empire of AI, where a spokesperson for OpenAI is gleefully imagining the entire globe covered everywhere with data centers because GAI will be so compelling. to everyone he claims. He did not realize the extent of this nightmare as he spoke, so entranced was he with his own illusion. Later, Hao speaks of the elitist fantasy behind GAI.

Proposing AI and GAI will help the entire world population, tech companies exploit unskilled workers outside the US in ways Hao compares to the self serving assumptions of common good that accompanied the cotton gin while increasing the reliance on and horrific circumstances of slavery. Time magazine asserts, that “OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic. This was done by outsourcing through the SF firm, Sama, which provides similar services for Google, Meta and Microsoft with barely paid workers in Kenya, Uganda and India. The entire Global South is victimized so this potential economic dream might be realized essentially for the billionaire class.

Meanwhile Open AI and Microsoft have just been given the greenlight for their not for profit company to become also a For-Profit in a $500 Billion deal. No surprise for a field where AI has been defined by such as John McCarthy of Stanford U who writing about AI in 2007 defined intelligence as “the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world.” And OpenAI which has historically defined it as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”

Grave fears about AI have been with me since I listened to The AI Dilemma and wrote on April 3, 2023, “Other Ways of Knowing: Challenging AI.” “Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of Center for Humane Technology…said the speed that Microsoft was working to deploy AI was ‘frantic.’ While concurrently ‘50% of AI researchers believe there is a 10% or greater chance that humans will go extinct from our inability to control AI.’ The goal, clearly among technicians to consolidate money and power despite the clear and present danger to all life.”

(See Comments for ANOTHER LONG AND COMPLETE INTERVIEW WITH TRISTAN HARRIS WITH DETAILED EXPLANATION OF THE GRAVE CURRENT DANGER OF AI)

What had intrigued me about the Harris and Raskin talk is that they used the image of the Golem gone wild that Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague had created to protect his people and from whose mouth he had had to extract the code in order to prevent harm to the world. Since then, I have been wondering how we undo – extract- the billions and trillians of codes which threaten all life.

The Empire of AI, investigates the dreams, nightmares, competitiveness and extreme ambitions of Sam Altman’s OpenAI and ChatGPT. I begin reading it as Trump makes a chip deal with China about which Zvi Moshowitz just wrote Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China.

Meanwhile 972, the Guardian and Local Call are investigating leaked Israeli Finance Ministry documents stating that the $1.2 billion contract to provide Israel’s government advanced cloud computing and AI services, Project Nimbus is linked to a highly unorthodox agreement that allows Israel to transfer vast quantities of data onto the cloud servers of the tech giants despite potential legal challenges regarding the use of their technology in the occupied, West Bank and Gaza, without prohibiting them from restricting Israel’s use of their products even if it breaches their terms of service. It also obliges them to secretly notify Israel if foreign courts order them to hand over data stored on their cloud platforms, in the event of claims that Israel has used the technology to violate the human rights of Palestinians. In contrast, Microsoft revoked the Israeli military’s access to part of its Azure platform after it had stored a trove of intercepted Palestinian phone calls in violation of its terms of service.

All of this consisted of separate bits of information until this morning when I sat down at the computer, -(yes, aware of the contradiction and the way technology is not neutral but dominant)- actually without hope of finding the essay I was to write, but thinking about the Village Sanctuary and the I Ching and the need to center and connect the heart to the spirits, and the love the three of us have for this piece of land and the beings and spirits who live here. Then it was that the title of this piece sprang unexpectedly in my mind and I saw the play between the words and the call – as AI is moved toward an anti-human conclusion – everyone will die – to do all one can on behalf of all life.

As this writing of this essay concluded, I was led to a little bit of hope that humans could control their own destiny as I had wished for when reading Harris and Raskin and now by coming upon Zvi Moshowitz’ essay, New Statement Calls for Not Building Superintelligence Now.

While it is not a huge action, we are at least offered the possibility of doing something, which in this case, is taking a public stand on behalf of human survival and Gaia.

https://superintelligence-statement.org

You can join me and with more than 65.000 (now [11/1/] 66.000+) signators, including Geoffrey Hinton, the first one, by going to this website and signing:

Thank you Cheryl Potts, Sharon Simone and Pami Ozaki for your inspiration.

**************************************************************************************

I have been freely offering my writing to the community for 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and / or recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate if you share or leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

The conversations with my medical friends and colleagues are similar. There is agreement that the medical system is broken. One reason for this is that it is a system. Medical, psychological, practices are rarely, if ever anymore, personal relationships between a medical person who is also a medicine person, that is persons in profound and heartfelt relationship with their communities, their communities, the place where we all live together, or are interconnected despite distance, and the essential question is not how to earn a living but how to live. While our disconnection from each other, lack of true relationships, increasing alienation so rapidly accelerated by AI are familiar and grave concerns, these days, we are truly alarmed by the way the medical system has been breaking further in the last months.

We know what is happening because our patients are coming to us or are staying away. They can pay or they can’t. They are endangered by illness and or by ICE. They expect the government to protect them or they know they won’t. They are endangered by their illnesses and they seek out treatments or they avoid them. The insurance covers their needs or it doesn’t. The rich manage to get medical care and the poor, and even increasingly the middle class, cannot. Our patients get what is needed in time and without stress or they don’t. Our patients have confidence in Medical practice or they don’t. They have a primary physician who gives them the care they need or they probably don’t. They trust us or they don’t.

Our patients may survive these times or they won’t. We, whomever we are, may not survive either. All life is increasingly challenged. Trauma and fear created by the social, political, current federal government system are rampant. These concerns should also be under the purview of medical care but generally they are not permitted to be considered.

Chan Kin was an Elder among the Lacondon people in Mexico. My dear friend, journalist and peace activist, Victor Perera spent much time with him and then was inspired, with Robert Bruce, a linguist, to write the brilliant and insightful first-hand account, The Last Lords of Palenque: The Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain Forest. Chan Kin explained to Perera, that healing ways were nested in the culture, that the Lacondon could heal the illness that were innate to their land and community but not the (many) illnesses which Euro-American culture brought. And Western or Euro-American medicine does not face and examine the illnesses it is causing. What is the nature of the diseases that this culture spawns which are, by fiat, not to respond to healing ways?

Western medicine often disdains healing ways and they are also, on occasion, illegal. As stated in Wikipedia: “Functional medicine (FM) is a form of alternative medicine that encompasses many unproven and disproven methods and treatments.^[1][2][3] At its essence, it is a rebranding of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM),^[4] and as such is pseudoscientific,^[5] and has been described as a form of quackery.^{[6][7][8][9][4]”}

This is a growing problem also because many of the current administrative responses to current standard medical practices such as abortion, autism, vaccines, covid treatments, Medicare, Medicaid, are very problematic and may also, rightfully, be questioned.

How then shall we respond when our medical practices as well as our patients are threatened?

To begin with we respond together. We respond as a community to our community concerns. A community of healers caring for a community seeking healing.

Here is a statement from Indigenous Elder from Curaçao, Muz Richenel Ansano, who identifies himself as a Kulturista/Cultural Heritage Expert.

“I keep thinking that these extraordinary times are a continuation of other extraordinary times, that were also continuations of other extraordinary times. And all of those continuations very intentionally, violently, systematically create disruption, despair, overwhelm. For our gathering, we have all sat in council many times, even when we did not call our realities council. We ARE council, each of us: councils of our ancestors inside us, and around us; councils of all the stories that made us and are still making us; councils of al the elders who guide us in our daily lives, our professions, trades, or dealings; councils of all the dreams that push us forward; councils of all our relations with whom we speak loudly or walk with quietly. As we prepare to gather I see these councils coming together as needed in these extraordinary times.”

Many of you reading this who are engaged in Medical practice of one form or another have experienced healing events, which you have enacted or received, but which are not recognized in current practice. This lack of recognition and public skepticism becomes internalized until we also deny what we know to the deprivation of so many who are suffering and could be assisted. Needless to say, we are speaking of healing events from individuals involved in rigorous self-scrutiny, in committed relationship with their communities, for whom healing and health are profound and sacred activities and probably were such from the time they/you were children.

It should be a mark of honor not derogation to be known as, called upon as a healer. For Indigenous peoples, healers and healing are central to their cultures and are ways of maintaining their intrinsic wisdom traditions. In times as we are experiencing of such great physical, emotional, spiritual, communal suffering, not always attended by conventional medical practice for all people, it would be of great benefit to allow ourselves to remember what we have known and experienced.

Such has been the hope of ReVisioning Medicine since its origins in 2004. We are hosting another council on Zoom from 1 pm to 5 pm PT on Sunday, November 16. Read more here.

We believe that we can, together, find ways to remember, restore and integrate healing into our medical and psychological practices. Please join us.

**************************************************************************************

I have been freely offering my writing to the community for 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and / or recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate if you share or leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

I took Jack D. Forbes’ essential text, Columbus and Other Cannibals off the shelf where I had gathered all the books I have assigned for my class, 19 WAYS to a Viable Future for All Beings, as I began to prepare for the coming session. It is the fundamental text for the class. On the back cover is an excerpt from Forbes’ Introduction; I marveled that it was written in 1979 and not in 2025.

“Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. Arrogance knows no frontiers. Deceit knows no edges…. These characteristics all tend to push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in…This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism.”

Foresightedness? Clairvoyance? As exactly as these words describe the Imperial and Colonial minds that have dominated the globe and terrorized the Americas since 1492, so they describe the essential qualities of the current administration in the US. Algonquin cultures warned against the Wétiko or Wendingo, monsters, once human beings, who succumbed to the ultimate taboo, cannibalism, evil spirits that devoured humankind. However, it took Forbes to recognize that this once rare but very dangerous phenomenon, which originally appeared during periods of mass starvation, had become a contemporary virus and that Euro-American culture is particularly susceptible to its increasingly virulent forms.

If Forbes were alive, he would probably associate these behaviors of brutality, perversion, arrogance, deceit and greed with the current Presidency and his cabal. The pervasiveness of such qualities underlying political actions in the last nine months are resulting in a malignant cultural cannibalism, in an army of hungry ghosts which seems never to be satisfied and which clearly desires to consume the world … and maybe the Moon and Mars as its next victims.

The question I have been asking for several years now, but increasingly since January 2025, is: How do we meet these times? Forbes phrases it this way: “How to live in this life? Is the real question we all face. All other subjects are insignificant when compared with this one.”

I wish I had answers to this question. But I don’t. I don’t know anyone who does although all the different wisdom traditions can advise us on paths to walk but none have been able to heal or transform the wétiko population, or keep it from its terrifying and tragic expansion.

In Columbus and other Cannibals, Forbes focuses on the myriad manifestations of wétiko behaviors, the evidence of its venomous nature and contagion. He says, “People concerned about violence, about the environment, about decency and about human authenticity, must have the means for analyzing the objective conditions which today surround us. It is my hope that… enlarging upon the concept of wétiko disease and discussing its origin, epidemiology and characteristics … can be of help.…” When one finishes the book one cannot doubt the grave nature and existence of this plague, but even without reading it, simply contemplating the qualities he isolated above, allows us some understanding of what we are in. Sadly though, knowing our circumstances does not necessarily give us the means to confront, meet or transform this illness.

Rereading the book for my class, writing this piece, it occurs to me that thinking individually rather than collectively, may be one approach. Such a response can alert us to the reality that we are all responsible and in danger of being subsumed by its influence, and therefore each one of us needs to be aware and to respond in our own way.

Having read Columbus and Other Cannibals – (Don’t you think by now, you should read it? www.bookshop.org) – and having met so many of the demon faces of wétiko, my reflex response was “Not that. I didn’t want to be that. Never that.” An energy of rejection and distaste built in me, and I understood that my path was to be utterly otherwise. A variation on Newton’s third law of motion can generate a healing direction: wétiko actions can inspire other actions in equal and entirely opposite, distinctly different directions.

Brutal, arrogant, mendacious, perverse actions inspiring equal and opposite actions, ways of living of utmost kindness, unimpeded generosity, instinctive equality and peerage, unassailable truthfulness and indomitable devotion to community and to the land.

Clearly, such homeopathic medicine cannot be the only remedy for wétiko, but it could be one by which the pernicious induces distinct and opposite ways of being, where honey emerges from the sting, and our now transformed and wildly dissimilar bodies, carrying a distinctive intelligence, become uniquely able to determine the next necessary steps to meet the plague.

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Looking to develop your Writer’s voice? Interested in joining a committed group of people working to live the 19 ways? A few spaces are available in all of my classes this year! Join now, as these classes fill up fast. Please email Jude at deenaworkshops@gmail.com for more information.

The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.

*********************************************************************************

I have been freely offering my writing to the community for 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and / or recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated. (It helps the work circulate if you share or leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)