My mom first noticed the book “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism” by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche because of the colors on the front cover. First, she read a few lines thinking to herself “later.” Months later she read more and with my dad decided to move to Boulder, Colorado to see what this Trungpa guy was all about.  After a couple of years, both my parents were very involved in the burgeoning Buddhist community there. They were serious practitioners: Trungpa Rinpoche was their guru, they meditated a lot, went on long retreats and spent most of their free time doing dharma programs.

This is how I grew up Buddhist from the very start. Even while my mom was seven months pregnant with me, she was doing a two week meditation intensive; I was swimming around in the cosmic soup of her womb, while she focused on her out breath. When I mention that I grew up Buddhist, people often imagine a commune or monastery, a beautiful setting and people in robes. But Trungpa Rinpoche always insisted in what he called “house yogis:” people who lived normal lives with jobs and houses and families, whose meditation practice was integrated into their everyday lives.

For that reason, there were plenty of aspects of my childhood that were as “normal” as any American childhood. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, a small city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in a house in a residential neighborhood. I went to public school a block away with kids from regular families, probably some Christian and others who weren’t religious at all. Every morning, I participated in the pledge of allegiance to the flag with the rest of my class (although I quietly omitted the word “God” because I didn’t believe in him). I had one Barbie. We had a Christmas tree in December decorated with many beautiful ornaments. We were not vegetarians.  I went to a YMCA afterschool program, watched cartoons on Saturday morning at my friend’s house and hung out at the neighborhood pool for many hours during the summer.

Other parts of my childhood were far from normal or American; but rather magical and strange. For example, we were always receiving special blessings whose meaning was mysterious: in all my baby pictures I have a red string around my neck, which was called a “protection cord” given out by teachers after they gave dharma talks. When I was a chubby eight year old girl, I was standing in front of Trungpa Rinpoche, looking into the mirror in front of me as he dipped a juniper branch into a bowl of cold water at his side and then splashed it on my head. Droplets sprayed on the mirror that held my reflection. At ten I took “refuge,” the ceremony in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition where you confirm your commitment to the dharma; I was given the name Completely Pure Dharma Lady.

There was a lot of waiting around. Us kids would be splayed out on the floor making rice rivers through the legs of our parents who stood for long hours in the shrine room before Trungpa arrived to give a talk. Other times we were waiting outside in the cold rain and bowed when a different, special, small, brown man from far away would walk by in his yellow and red robes. Starting and ending things always included lots of bowing and chanting (like before and after dinner every night).  Our summer solstice celebration called Midsummer’s day included Rinpoche riding up on his majestic white horse. And when I was eleven, my parents took me to his cremation: a huge affair with thousands of people who sat around all day long, watching him burn on top of a pyre.

Perhaps most magical of all was my experience every summer marching around an open field with a bunch of other kids and a guy named Willy. From age eight to sixteen, I went to a kid’s camp that the Shambhala community started in 1984, inspired by an adult program called Encampment.

The abbreviated history of encampment goes something like this: after Trungpa Rinpoche fled Tibet on foot from the Chinese communists, he ended up in England. While there, he fell in love with the English army — he was especially struck by its dignity and elegance. The army had order, was uplifted, and crisp. When he came to the United States he decided to create a Buddhist army, the idea being that it would utilize all the outside forms of a normal military  (i.e. uniforms, marching, hierarchy, order and discipline), but that its goal and vision would be to cultivate a gentle heart, fearlessness and a wakeful mind. After a few years of encampment, a few people got together and created a kids program based on the same teachings.

And so it was that in 1985, a few days into my first Buddhist summer camp, I ran up to my mom on visitor’s day and exclaimed, “Mom!! My heart is so open!!” The magic of Sun Camp was that nothing much happened. We ate gloppy macaroni and cheese and burnt french toast cooked over an open fire. We went without showers for days and stayed in tents lined up in a perfect three-sided square. When the word “awake” was called, we ran down to the open field just below the tents to stand still in our pre-assigned spots. Then Willy would take us for a spin, calling out left and right turns and reminding us to have “good head and shoulders” while we sang Buddhist marching songs. Sometimes he would take us to a special spot on the side of the hill and talk about warriorship. In the morning, he led an exercise where we all laid down on our backs and looked up at the sky. “If you’re itching, you’re not relaxed. Lying there like a corpse, not moving, eyes open, focusing on the vast, blue sky above, feeling the solid earth beneath you. Just relax.”

Sun Camp was my yearly retreat — every summer I looked at the open sky, stood on solid earth, watched my mind wander away and come back during meditation or marching or skirmish (a big game of capture the flag that we play in the mountains). And ever since the most consistently Buddhist thing I do is help run this camp for other young people so that they too can have that experience of open sky and just being. And after twenty three summers of practicing basic awareness (noticing I’m lost in thought and coming back to the moment of hot skin, hard bench, smell of fire, red flag poles on an earth-colored horizon) I also notice that basic awareness has seeped its way into my every day life.

The rest of my life currently takes place in a big, old colonial house in Bogota, Colombia. I moved here (again) last year because of the human rights work I do. I go to an office every morning from which I run a small team of volunteers who are doing international human rights accompaniment: through physical presence and political pressure we protect civilians who are threatened in the war. My email inbox is filled with communiques about a death threat someone received, an assassination attempt against the life of a human rights defender or the control paramilitaries are exerting on community-held land. I often receive phone calls like a few nights ago with the news that bombs were being dropped near one of the community settlements that we accompany and people were concerned for the safety of the civilians living there. In other words, my daily bread is the stuff of war and how to protect people in the midst of it. In my free time, I play music with my band and hang out with my girlfriend and housemates who are a bohemian-like mix of activists and artists.

Here in Colombia, I’m far away from that open field of Sun Camp. I try to make sense of my Buddhist self in this context — which part of me is Buddhist or Jewish New Yorker from my mom’s side or Christian missionaries living in Puerto Rico from my dad’s side or sprouts-eating hippies from both sides? What part of my upbringing made me think I could change the world? Maybe I am living out the life of a house yogi… but if that were true, I would have already meditated this morning.

A few years ago, I went to a dharma program called “Practicing Peace In Times of War.” One of the teachers told the story of a bodhisattva who travels through all the hell realms and despite witnessing the intense destruction, pain and suffering of this world, his face is serene and calm, with even a trace of a smile. My face is not like that, especially on the nights when I cry about the never-ending news of death and a feeling that things are going from bad to worse. But sometimes I think that maybe that serene Boddhisattva represents how Buddhism manifests in my life — the ability to have just a trace of tranquility in the face of so much suffering.

How many twenty-somethings get fired up about the injustice of the world, spending every waking hour trying to change it and then by the time they reach thirty, have moved on to a middle class lifestyle? It is so easy to become hopeless and overwhelmed. Lightening up seems out of the question.

A prominent teacher in the Shambhala community gave a talk about how to “touch and go.” It refers to the ability to touch in with your heart, the tender spot inside, accessing the deep pain there. And then “go” is an out breath or experiencing space in the midst of that tenderness. I asked her a question, expressing that I was very good at the “touching” part because I’m naturally a very sensitive person and most days I feel pretty connected to my own heart, but that the “going” is more difficult. It seems that the sadness lodges itself in the nooks and crannies of my body and I don’t know how to shake it. She responded saying “ah yes, you are a case of touch and clutch! You have no problem touching in, but then you hang onto that experience, thinking that the sadness you feel is the Real You.” This teaching has stuck with me: when I feel so upset about what I see in the world, I can remind myself that these feelings are like clouds passing through the vast sky.

One summer while staffing Sun Camp, I was up there somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, standing on a rock outcropping overlooking the continental divide in the distance and all the evergreen covered mountains below. We were waiting to begin a ceremony for sixteen year olds who had completed their last year of camp. One of my elders standing next to me handed me a sip of sake and stood in silence as the tears ran down my face. Looking out at this view I saw what the earth does when humans are not involved: it is simple, it is just being, it is vast and open.

I need this reminder of a point in time and a place on earth where nothing is broken. I need to touch and go in the face of what is happening in the world and a trace of a smile as I walk through. So no, I didn’t meditate this morning, but when I rode that old creaky bus to work, I noticed my breath and felt my hands resting on my lap. I heard the sounds of the street and the grumble of the diesel engine.

Of course. War ruins us.

After the delegation, I wrote this song. It tells the story of a young man who went to war:

And this is a video about a young man who refused to go to war, even though his country thinks it is what he should do:

Revolution Live broadcasts this message today: may we work to rebuild the hearts that war has ruined. And may we support the young people around us to opt for life in the face of the death machine.

I was in the Colombian countryside two hours from the closest small town where one can buy water and canned tuna. And three hours (the third hour being by jeep) from the nearest small city where there were things like supermarkets and medical clinics, though still far from other warmer, more comfy things like movie theaters and hot showers. Because of the mere distance, the idea of a two hour trek down the mountain side to catch my afternoon flight in the pouring rain, wasn’t enticing. I didn’t fall back into a deep and relaxed sleep, but I slept nonetheless to the sound of fat drops on the corrugated tin rooftop.

In the morning it was still raining. The village psychic came by the house and said “there’s no way you three are crossing that river today. It will be death for sure.” We weren’t sure whether to believe her as she is prone to exaggerate, but soon afterwards a few more people stopped by the house to warn us: the river has swelled due to the tremendous amount of rain. It would be way too dangerous to cross. And just to be clear about the circumstances we found ourselves in — walking from where we were to where we needed to go included crossing the river three times.

But we had to go down some way or another. I had a flight to catch and that was our plan! In our conversations with various community members, they had mentioned an alternate route that didn’t include crossing the river at all. The only difficulty was the directions: walk that way, turn towards the right, up over the hill, through the cacao trees and at so-and-so’s house turn to the left and… (more directions)… and you will come out at the bridge where you can walk into town without ever once having to cross the river by foot. Hmmm…. Easy for a local to do, but might be another form of sure death if we tried it on our own. So we decided to look for someone who could take us. After asking around and being turned down a few times, we found our man: 60 years old and almost totally deaf. He was happy to do the job.

Off we went, down the regular path for a while and shortly thereafter veering off into unknown territory. Through grass fields and cacao plantations, we struggled up and down muddy embankments with our rubber boots slip sliding up and down. The rain continued, sometimes sprinkling, then pouring again. The wetness soaked in through my shirt and pants and after a while I tried to get used to it, reminding myself that I could relax with… wet. Be with… mud. In fact, Sean the FOR volunteer who was walking ahead of me, said that the longer he was on the FOR team the more he was used to getting “comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Seemed like a good idea, especially in these circumstances.

At times we wondered if our guide actually knew where he was going. He had planned on taking a different route until various community members convinced him that the one they were thinking of was shorter. They yelled to explain, but who knows how much of their directions he had understood. By the time we caught our first sight of the river, it really didn’t matter to us whether we might be lost in the jungle for days because at least we were not attempting to cross a river that was now three times its normal size and raging fast. We would never have made it across.

We kept walking. We stopped at a house to ask if we were going the right way. The directions seemed vague, but in locals’ terms I guess they were precise: just cross that small creek, up and over that field, down to the house below and you will be almost there. The “creek” we had to cross (thinking to ourselves that this route was supposed to avoid any water-crossings) looked a bit daunting. It wasn’t wide, just rushing fast and hard to tell how deep. We crawled along the edge for a bit looking for the best spot and then it was just — go ahead, do it, make the best of it and try not to fall in. Afterward we took off our boots to empty them and squeezed our socks: brown wet water streaming through muddy fingers. What a delight! Sliding my already wet, soggy feet back into my wet, dirty socks, down into my dark, dirty and wet rubber boots.

About half way through the walk, we realized that our guide was in fact, a superhero. In part, it was his appearance: he was wearing the typical wide-brimmed white hat and of course, rubber boots. Around his neck was tied a thick piece of black plastic, which may have had the unintended consequence of rain gear, but was actually his cape. Beyond his appearance, there was a mystique about him. He didn’t say much. From time to time, he would turn around and flash us a toothless grin, and then turn back and trek forward, much too fast for us to keep up with him.

In silence and with what seemed to be no struggle at all, he brought us safely to our destination. While I was griping about how this was, “like, a real storm” and had to convince myself to relax and “be one with the mud,” he didn’t seemed phased in the slightest. When we made it to the bridge, delighted to be crossing well above the rushing water below, we shook his hand effusively, yelling into his ear “thanks” and “you’re great.” He just grinned.

Upon arrival at the village we changed out of our wet, muddy clothes and into some dry, dirty ones. Unfortunately there was no water so a shower was out of the question. We said our goodbyes and climbed into a jeep, already distracted by the next leg of our journey. Our superhero demanded nothing; the best of them never do. In a few hours, with no fame or glory won for his efforts, he would simply turn around and trek back up the mountain.

We were a few helpless gringos caught by the good ole’ phenomenal world in the midst of the Colombian jungle and an unidentified campesino superhero came to our rescue. The point being, these unremarkable yet extraordinary individuals are in our midst; we just have to pay attention. And more importantly when you are saved by one of them, don’t forget to offer something — like a soda — as a token of your gratitude.

LS: Tell me a bit about yourself. What was one thing that politicized you when you were young? Also, when did you first come to Colombia and why?

NU: I grew up in Virginia, it wasn’t anything exciting, just a military city. I got involved in all this stuff during university — was doing activism with some Zapatista groups and around local issues. The day after I graduated, I started hitchhiking south with a friend of mine. We visited the El Mozote massacre site in El Salvador, and villages in Guatemala where the war had happened — it was the stereotypical post-graduation Latin America tour! One time, I was in Tela, Honduras, hanging out with this kid who was living on the streets. We went with him to visit his father who was in jail. I saw what the jails were like in Honduras. Throughout the trip, I was talking to people on the street, in the countryside, in the villages and hearing their stories. I made it to Colombia and up to the peace community of San José de Apartadó in 2002. Five days after I showed up in La Union [one of several village that makes up the peace community], the paramilitaries came. It was a marker. It made me ask, what’s going on here?

LS: What happened?

NU: One day we were hanging out and I was teaching some of the children to read. A peace community member came in and took her son away. I went outside and all the kids were gone. I saw a guy with a huge machine gun and the letters ACCU [the acronym for a paramilitary organization] on his armband. I was like, “oh shit.” The paramilitaries were there for six hours interrogating people. They had a kid tied up who they took away and later disappeared. I yelled at them, “what are you doing here??” I didn’t know anything about accompaniment back then.

After that, I stayed there for two months. The community displaced down to the town center of San José and I would go up to La Union every day with them for the cacao harvest. During that time, I got close to people and decided that I wanted to go back. So I applied to the FOR project, went to the training in San Francisco and joined the team in July 2003. The year that I spent in the community was an amazing experience.

Around the end of 2004, a friend and I founded IPO (International Peace Observatory) and we started accompanying organizations in the regions of the Magdalena Medio and Arauca [departments in Colombia]. One time we did an accompaniment in the area of the Nordeste Antioqueño (the northeastern part of the department of Antioquia). We were told that the army had entered a farm where a campesino lived. They had dressed him up as a guerrilla and they were going to kill him. They had a knife to his neck. When we got there, they were holding him a little ways off in the woods. We demanded that the soldiers release him. It was a positive experience because we were able to do something tangible. After Luis Eduardo [and the massacre in the peace community in 2005], I felt really angry. I still wanted to accompany, but I felt frustrated. At least in this situation, I felt that that the outcome was very positive.

LS: What was different in Colombia than what you expected it to be?

NU: I’m not sure what I expected, but I was able to spend time in the countryside and be in a place where there was a war going on, where our tax money was being used to fight that war. And seeing the resistance, how people are just dancing in the midst of the balaceras (gunfire). Well, it’s not quite like that, but there is a lot of great energy there. I think Colombia is really important in the Western Hemisphere because it’s the thorn in the side of the U.S. I miss Colombia a lot.

LS: How did the Adios Uribe Coalition get started?

We had seen something in [the Colombian newspaper] El Tiempo about former Colombian President Uribe being named as a Distinguished Scholar at Georgetown’s foreign service school. And we started hearing about it from other people as well. We set up a first meeting and about 40 awesome organizers came: unionists, church people, students and artists. People were bouncing with energy. By September 8th we had our first protest: Uribe was speaking at the faculty center so we did a banner-hang off the building and organized the Viva Colombia Fiesta, with drums.

Later we found out that he would be teaching in a Comparative Political Systems course.  We decided to go into the class. He was talking about how free trade is good and other benign stuff. Then came the Q&A part and things got interesting — he started talking about how he had brought social cohesion to Colombia, how his presidency was communitarian, how it tried to include everyone. And then he said that, “no one from the social opposition had been killed or displaced during his presidency.”

At that point, I thought to myself, this guy is just straight up lying. In the media, everybody was talking about Uribe’s position at Georgetown in the context of fairness or allowing for academic debate. But I knew what he was saying were lies. So, I stood up and started clapping. I said, “Thank you so much Alvarito, for bringing social cohesion, thank you for wire tapping human rights organizations.” I mentioned the mass graves in the Macarena and the people who had denounced them and thanked him for calling those people terrorists. I was trying to be as ironic as possible and at this point I had stepped up on stage. Two guys, who we later discovered were undercover cops, were pushing me back and the tension was mounting. Uribe said “can you get him out of here?” Then they pulled me off stage behind Uribe, arrested me outside and took me to jail.

The charges against me were assault on a police officer and unlawful entry. They were bullshit charges, I definitely didn’t assault a police officer. I was out on the streets by 2am and I walked back home without shoelaces or money! They dropped the charges, although I do have a Ban and Bar letter from Georgetown, so I’m not allowed to get back onto campus.

LS: What is the focus now of the Adios Uribe Coalition?

NU: We have done various teach-ins and the students at Georgetown had meetings with the Dean of the School of Foreign Service and they are waiting for a meeting with the President. There are rumors that Georgetown might let him go quietly. But as of now, he is coming back on November 3rd and we are planning a protest. If folks want to get involved, they can check out our website: uribe-georgetown.org

It is so disgusting that higher institutions of learning are bringing someone like this to teach. At SOA Watch [the organization that works to close the formerly known School of the Americas in Georgia where many Latin American dictators have been trained], we go down every year and protest the soldiers and military brass who are being trained at Ft. Benning. But people like Uribe don’t go to the SOA, they go to places like Georgetown and Oxford, where they can also train people, but in the neoliberal model. Both are part of a larger system. We were thinking of a banner for our November 3rd action that would say something like, “From the gates of Ft. Benning to the gates of Georgetown, no more training criminals!”

LS: I think that’s an important connection to make, that we have to protest all parts of these systems — not just the people on the ground who commit the abuses, but also the places like academic institutions where people are being trained in these models.

Yes, they are the intellectual authors and are helping to solidify another part of the system. When we go down to Georgia we are looking at the muscle. It may look innocuous to protest an ex-president of Colombia, but it is just as important as combating police brutality, doing anti-racist work, or protesting a base in Florida! It’s all connected.

Nico ended by saying that it would be great to party with the coalition… after it’s all over… after Georgetown University politely asks Uribe to take himself and his terrible human rights record elsewhere.

Almost everything you (and I) consume and use is a product made by a company. You thought you were innocently wandering down the yellow brick road and wham! a company made its way into your precious inner chamber and convinced you that it was the best option. Companies are not the only ones that convince us; governments organize societies with rules and regulations; individuals participate in controlling each other’s lives.

The way people, companies, governments, messages and ideas claim your mind is described in Patrick Reinsborough’s article titled Decolonizing the Revolutionary Imagination:

Colonialism is not just a process of establishing physical control over territory, it is the process of establishing the ideologies and the identities – colonies in the mind – that perpetuate control…. In facing the global crisis, the most powerful weapon that we have is our imaginations.

In the spirit of using our revolutionary imaginations to re-claim inner space (our minds) and outer space (the planet we share), I want to tell two stories: first, the recent People’s Congress in Bogota, Colombia.

The People’s Congress was a meeting, a gathering, a convergence if you will, in Bogota, Colombia from October 8-12. 17,000 delegates from 220 organizations and movements traveled 24 hours by bus to the nation’s capital. They converted the campus of the National University into a tent city where large vats of soup cooked over open fires and people gathered in the sports stadium for long hours to hammer out their collective vision of an alternative present and future for Colombia. They claimed the city streets twice in large marches — space that is usually controlled for the “productivity” of cars, buses and businesses. The guardia indigena (indigenous guard) marched at the front: a form of protection that certain indigenous communities in Colombia use — they reject the “security” of the police and military and prefer to protect their sacred space with wooden sticks wrapped in red ribbons. The time spent together in long meetings, hanging out in the tent city and on the streets of Bogota resulted in a collective declaration that the “official” Colombian Congress did not represent them. The People’s Congress described its own proposals and declarations for a country based on the values of inclusion and justice.

This video collage tells the visual story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgLRSbLQbnI

The second story about re-claiming space is coming in a few days… In the meantime, I invite you (and myself, always!) to think about how you could carry out a small act of resistance to re-claim a space in your life. Whether that means sewing your own t-shirt, finding a no-brand apple to pick off a tree, sitting down in the middle of your day to listen to the sounds being carried through the wind or stopping traffic for just a brief moment — there is nothing about our existence that is business as usual! The space we occupy on this planet is so precious, just like this present moment, and it is up to our revolutionary imaginations to make it what we want it to be.

Indeed.

We are bombarded with bad news everyday: the gulf oil spil, the war in Iraq, the situation in Palestine, the ball of plastic garbage spinning in the ocean. I know for myself, after 10 years plus of doing activism around the human rights situation in Colombia, I can’t digest more bad news. In fact, I’ve begun to think that staying abreast of the news (which is almost always bad) is part of a vicious cycle: it makes us overwhelmed at how huge the problems of the world are. We become depressed, cynical and paralyzed into non-action. I recently read an interview with environmentalist Alex Steffen who says “Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.”

We all get stuck in the gooey tar of paralysis and contribute to the appearance of nothing changing. “It’s only getting worse,” we say, as we turn to entertaining distractions: 3-D movies and a tasty morsel of fresh mozzarella usually do the trick for me. Anything to ignore the grim reality of what is going on in our world.

But bad news is only one side of the story. In the book Domination and the Arts of Resistance, the author describes a common dynamic throughout history: “the powerless feign deference and the powerful subtly assert their mastery.” We, the people, play a game with those in power: they remind us who’s in charge and we remind them that we are dutifully following orders.

In the meantime, we’re not.

There are many people, all over the world, who are not following orders in big and small ways. Just in the past few months, I’ve been privy to a number of examples: my good friend (and new neighbor in Bogota!) Laia makes her own mustard so as not to support the multinationals who produce it and ship it half way around the world to get to her table. Folks I met in Ocracoke, North Carolina this summer were starting their own community radio station because commercial radio just doesn’t cut it. While visiting New Orleans, I heard many people talking about the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and also of the creative rebuilding: like the community garden my friend took us to. After rummaging around in the dark, humid night she pulled out eggplants, tomatoes and a bunch of basil that I stuffed into my bag for lunch the next day. At the US Social Forum in Detroit, I met formerly incarcerated women who are going into jails and doing art projects with female and trans inmates. All these people are cogs in the wheels of a system that hopes we would spend our days glued to the tv or at the shopping mall. All of these people insist on something different. And none of them are being televised.

I am looking, smelling and listening for these stories — stories capture the richness of our work and the inspiration we feel. But those of us working on changing the world end up being just like news casters talking about how terrible things are, assuming that if only you (our lovely audience) knew how very, very, very, terribly bad and awful things really are, that you would be more likely to do something about it.

Here I attempt to make a community space where you are invited (and I challenge myself) to post stories, songs, essays, videos and podcasts about how the revolution is live, alive, lively, growing, sprouting and flowering in many different shapes and sizes all over this planet.

This blog hopes to broadcast live versions of the revolution to you, with you and through you. Let the mayhem begin.

hasta pronto and with love,

liza