Deena Metzger's Blog

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 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, “” “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.”

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.

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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.)

, 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.

Collage by Tobi Fishel

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  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.

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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.)

, 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.

On Writing, The Story That Must Not Be Told Ina Andreae, on Paper, Exhibition Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, May/June1974

My dear friend, Sharon Simone, has lost most of her eyesight, and she is no longer able to read books or long texts online. Her husband, Pat Simone, is doing the kindness of reading my book, The Story That Must Not Be Told to her and they have reached page 40 or thereabout. As in all good marriages, Sharon and Pat have deep affinities with each other and also they are quite different. When Sharon asked Pat as they sat looking onto the waters of the Binney Park Brook having just finished reading a section, “Well, what do you think?” she had no idea if the book meant anything to him, if he had been affected the way she had been.

Pat said, “Well, the first thing that comes to me is the relationship between that time, Hitler’s time, 1933 and this time since Trump was elected.” He continued, that he, himself, had begun to recognize it just after the Inauguration, and it mattered to him to see it described in the way it was in the book.

I am stunned by these words. How did it happen that I wrote a book with this theme? Ultimately, these connections became a focus, a focus I could not avoid, but not in the beginning. The book began as the search for the cause of a suicide. Ina Andreae’s brother, Wolfgang, had come to Los Angeles to see what he could learn of his sister’s death fifty years earlier. As the circumstances of Ina’s life became clear, so did the history that had affected her. Even though it is a novella, a fiction, it is based on real events, best as they can be known and conjectured.

Ina’s great grandfather had founded a ship building company, Blohm & Voss, which built warships for Hitler. They also had aligned with Messerschmidt to build warplanes. Her grandfather on one side and another grandfather who married into the family, marrying Ina Blohm, had run the company during the war. Ina had not been born yet, not until 1949, but to understand her death, she led me, is leading us, to consider what she knew about those times and the family’s participation in them.

Because members of her family had been involved, I traced the development of events in Germany beginning in 1933 and soon perceived that they were repeating themselves here. Another grandfather, her mother’s father, had been the publisher of a newspaper which had been shut down briefly. Afterwards, it was taken over by the Nazis so that it presented the news from the regime’s perspective.

Trump sued CBS, ABC and the Wall Street Journal over content and barred the Associated Press from White House press conferences because the Press would not rename the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. These are just several examples of many similar actions to control the press and the nation.

Within a year or so, the book came to its conclusion, the revelations of what had occurred, the process of discovery, the reason for Ina’s suicide were revealed beyond doubt. But it was impossible to stop writing because the mirror images were multiplying. Also, it was unclear whether these connections were circumstantial or whether the past had become a playbook for the U. S. President. Concerned about our future, I began to write an Afterword that tracked ongoing developments as they happened.

Then we began copy editing with my publisher, Hand to Hand, in the U. S. and Wolfgang Andreae’s publishing firm, Lexxion Verlag, in Germany. But while the book was finished and Ina’s story had been told, I felt obliged to add one emerging, startling similarity after another. Accordingly, with each addition, the book had to be re-edited and adjusted accordingly. None of this had been in my mind, and certainly not in Wolfgang’s mind, in the beginning. The writing of the book was the means of revelation for both of us. So what was finished in May was continued, tensely, through July.

Finally, Wolfgang was overwhelmed by the need to read and reread as the text of this rather small book, shifted and shifted, and he demanded, “Stop.”

I answered, “We can’t. The parallels are too extreme.”

He said, “We must, or we will engage in this process until January 20, 2029, when the next President is (hopefully) inaugurated.”

I answered, “Then we must go to press immediately!” And so we did. The book is out in the U. S. and will be out in Berlin soon.

The range of the book’s concerns is fixed but new parallels present themselves and demand to be recognized whether or not it might become dangerous to do so. Noting the increasing correspondence between Hitler’s actions and Trump’s, I am reflecting on the mystery of the book appearing exactly at this time.

Wolfgang first wrote to me on October 10, 2023. If he had come to the U.S. when he was expected the following month, if he had not had a heart attack which delayed him, none of this would have been included. But he came in March 2024, and even then I had no interest in writing the book, but in November Trump was elected and somehow the book was inevitable.

It seems that invisible forces, which we have named or recognized as the Ghost of Ina Andreae, having foresight, were determined to tell this story, and to tell it exactly at this time in history, at this moment in Trump’s second term when the correlations are startling between 1993 and the rise of Nazism and 2025 and the rise of Trumpism.

Thinking about Nazi Germany, and World War II, one thinks about the Holocaust and the concentration camps which were the means. In 1944, Blohm & Voss had had a Slave Labor Camp on the premises. In the last days, ICE has taken over Fort Bliss in Texas, the former Japanese internment camp, for its largest detention camp, and images have been circulating of a potential concentration camp in Gaza city. activities which have been unimaginable since the end of WW II, but here we are.

Nazi Germany depended upon a police state. Trump is threatening to militarize and control local police in cities he fears in order to police the entire country. Still, the timing of The Story and its publication in August 2025 allowed it to appear just at this right moment. But if what we think is happening, if what we chronicle as happening, is happening, then the ability to resist may become increasingly limited.

Telling this story is a form of resistance. This is also a way to honor the dead. It offers Ina, who conceived The Story and her brother, Wolfgang, who called it forth in an extraordinary act of personal courage and conscience, a form for making amends for the collaboration of their grandparents. If Wolfgang had not insisted again and again that I write Ina’s story, if he had not heeded the Ghost of his sister, this book would never have been conceived or written.

It is also possible that on my own, I might have been too cautious in my analysis of how exactly Trump’s actions resemble Hitler’s and not pursued it so doggedly. However, I was aware beyond any doubt that this story was being revealed through spiritual agency and allowed myself to be guided. Without the mystery, there would be no book. Perhaps the spirits will guide many of us. Spirit called Wolfgang and me to collaborate on this work for a reason though we do not understand it fully. Perhaps Ina is saying, “My family did nothing then to stop the escalation of terror, but they, and we can do something now.” Perhaps it is simply contained in the words that Pat said to Sharon as they finished their discussion, “This book could matter. This could make a difference.”

Blohm & Voss was part of KZ Neuengamme. This is the Memorial KZ Neuengamme: Sculpture “LeDeporté” from Françoise Salmon, 1965

I am reading several books simultaneously now because my latest book, The Story That Must Not Be Told, was just published – you can buy it now on Amazon – and it traces the parallel between Hitler’s actions beginning in 1933 and Trump’s in 2025. The correspondence, much to our collective shame and grief, is ongoing because both men carry a similar intention to consolidate Aryan and White political power until it is absolute and to dominate world politics as well.

This latest moment as the fate of Ukraine is being negotiated at the White House – when President Zelensky of Ukraine is told to suit up and shape up while representatives of France, England, Finland, Italy NATO and the European Commission stand by — looks a little like the Munich Agreement, or as some call it the Munich Betrayal, when after the paramilitary Sudeten German Free Corps under orders of Hitler began cross border terrorist operations into Czechoslovakia, Britain and France urged the Czechs to give up Sudetenland and ten days later Britain’s Neville Chamberlain, France’s Edouard Daladier, Galeazzo Ciano of Italy, Mussolini and Hitler signed the 1938 Munich Agreement dissecting Czechoslovakia. Or maybe the resemblance to the Munich agreement or the Anschluss of Austria of the same year, is not so much to Trump handing the Donbas region to Putin, but Netanyahu and Trump eying all of Gaza including the West Bank and woe to all the Palestinians who need to be eliminated for that to happen.

Writing The Story That Must Not Be Told required me to observe Trump’s actions when they are a repeat of Hitler’s actions and here is a short list that focuses on very recent incidents including John Bolton’s investigation by the FBI, the list of exhibits from the Smithsonian that don’t please the President, Hegseth’s firing of Lt Gen Jeffrey Kreuse, over 1000 deportation flights to hellholes like CECOT prison in El Salvador, Trumps continuous activities against Trans people and the recent disclosure that the President wishes to end same sex marriage, the astronomical sum of money designated for ICE, as well as the plan for 125 new detention facilities and and and ….

In order to understand the nature of our contemporary world and of Western mind, I am reading, Timothy Ryback’s, Takeover, Annie Jacobsen’s The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of Darpa, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency, Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, and I am listening to Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace. Yesterday, I heard how General Douglas MacArthur ignored President Herbert Hoover’s call for restraint and attacked the Bonus Marchers, the hungry. unemployed veterans seeking accelerated compensation during the depression. It seemed similar to the administrations callous disregard of the need for veteran benefits, including or especially medical, also to Trump’s military invasion of Washington DC which will be armed on August 23. Who knows how the national guard will be instructed to deal with the many homeless veterans, but we do know they will be forced to act against their own people and American soldiers will be looking at each other, eye to eye.

This was not the booklist you would expect of me but The Story is not the book you would expect either, except that the publisher, Hand to Hand, cites it as a Literature of Restoration book. That is because it is a book that spirit, in the form of the Ghost, Ina Andreae, the German woman, who committed suicide in response to her family’s manufacturing warships and fighting planes for Hitler during WWII, insisted that I write it. A Dead Woman’s Memoir is the subtitle.

And also The Story carries a fundamental understanding: war is ecocide. War is first and foremost against the Earth.

Writing this far, I needed to ask spirit – because I don’t know – How do we meet this for we must? I leave the computer and go outside to the patio surrounded by 18 trees – I have planted many dozens since I moved onto the land – so it is cool here though not far away the heat is very intense. At this moment, I received an alert: Extreme heat warning extended through at least Sunday. Nevertheless, a Goldfinch and a Hummingbird give each other turns at the fountain which is shared by Bees and Yellow Jackets clinging amicably to the wet head of the Buddha. Jays and Finches sweep toward and away from the bird feeders and will be joined as the sun goes down by Mourning Doves who will eat the seeds the other birds drop. A young Bobcat strides across the outdoor kitchen entirely disinterested in us. When it is dark, the music will be the harmony of the various ground and tree crickets.

The difference between the concerns of the Body politic and of the Beings of the natural world is extreme. Two different universes. One destroys and one sustains.

Here is the poem that came yesterday to speak of this:

YESTERDAY THE RAVEN

Yesterday the Raven

was chanting his mating call,

though out of season.

Perhaps his mate has died,

as there is no infidelity,

nor is there assassination

among the animals,

though we attribute

murder to Crows.

We could learn from these

who observe day and night,

and birth and death,

and raise their little ones

soberly and in song.

Even Coyote selects a singer

who leads the pack in harmonies

every hungry night.

***

When I went outside, I had the question in my mind that I am always addressing, but I needed to gaze at the bowl of the Santa Monica mountains which surrounds me in order to receive a credible answer. The answer had to accord with the land and that, indeed, was the answer.

We may not survive the national obsession with power, violence and munitions. It affects everything, even our language, so that we regularly weaponize whatever we can, in spirit and in action. But we can provide each other the means to endure by focusing our thinking differently. If every single decision we make considers its effect upon the natural world – and we refuse to do harm – it will save our lives and souls.

Imagine it: If nothing you do harms the natural world ….

Such a perspective implies thinking WE rather than I. And life flows as a consequence.

***

SANCTUARY

I would learn from the animals

who live within

this circle of mountains

where the Deer graze

and Cougar hunts,

and so it is that Mama Bear

has brought her three little ones

to the Ark this land has become

while waiting for rain.

***

We have to choose – ecocide or the environment. Actually, we do have to choose!

***

Bismarck (German Battleship, 1940-41) Afloat just after launching, at the Blohm & Voss shipyard, Hamburg, Germany, 14 February 1939.

It seems to me that I haven’t written here recently especially as I am on a writing sabbatical with more time than usual. Once I began writing here, I took on an obligation to try, at least, to regularly bring something of substance to the page. You, I imagine, have a similar if not obligation, at least inclination, to read. [Some of you even subscribe which helps makes everything possible.] In this way between the many of us, we participate in the creation of what we hope will become a significant culture at a period in history when it is desperately needed. What we are thinking about matters more than ever before, I believe. And what develops when we are thinking together, matters very much as well.

One thing I was doing when I stopped teaching on July 1st was helping to bring the novella which I have written, The Story that Must Not Be Told, to completion. Consequently, it should be available in two weeks or so. It is a strange book, unlike any I have ever written. It follows a spate of revelations and recognitions through which a particular story came to be and also came to be known. First it was speculative and then it could not be denied.

I could not deny The Story … the time required this summer to fathom its mystery of events which began long before the protagonist was born, but affected her, nevertheless. The story began in 1933 and she was born in 1949 and the book focuses on the years 1975 and 2025. You must understand that these events with which her family, the Blohms, was involved began in 1933 and related to the rise of Hitler, and what developed from his regime through the end of WW II in 1945. Ultimately, the pressure of these events, long after the fact, was still so great that this lovely, young artist, Ina Andreae, committed suicide. It was and continues to be a great loss. Every suicide is more than a great death because it occurs outside of the natural order. And because it calls us to account for ourselves even though we may not have known the ones who took their own lives.

In this case – and this is why I am writing this to you now – the way the woman’s process was revealed to us, showed, indubitably, that the same process is occurring here in the U.S. at the present time. I am not the only one who is greatly fearful of its consequences. So, of course, I had to follow this wherever it was leading.

But here is the question that I would like you to consider because I am thinking about it incessantly: How did I come to this understanding of the relationship of 1933 and 2025 and why am I writing it to you now instead of waiting for the book to come out? Actually, I started to write something quite different today, but though this is only a novella, a small text, it is obsessing me. Why? Is it possible that the spirits who are very present in The Story … are introducing us to this story of this very sad young woman so that we will consider how to meet these parallel conditions in our own lives?

Well, there are enough daily revelations of human-created horrific circumstances in the daily news from the criminal famine in Gaza to the destruction of all protections for Earth, the elementals – that is earth, water, climate, air – and the essential welfare of the animals and all beings – for us to realize the extent of the disaster which is afflicting us. So I don’t think the spirits think we are ignorant and need to be made aware of the great suffering being unleashed on all of us. Why then are they so adamantly awakening us?

Is it possible, the spirits think, though we don’t see the evidence from our legislators or institutions, that there are ways we can, really can meet these situations, that there are ways of refusing and disallowing them, ways of confronting or transforming them which have not occurred to any of us yet. Yet! And so, if the spirits are calling us to consider and recognize such ways, then perhaps they are, indeed, here for the discovery.

Perhaps we review the lines I wrote above not knowing I was going to end up here, when I was considering another line of thought altogether which may appear next time I write: What we are thinking about matters more than ever before. And what develops when we are thinking together, matters very much as well.

As I write this, I suddenly think of Herman Melville’s remarkable story, Bartleby the Scrivener. After a series of circumstances which cause Bartleby to be asked to leave his place of employment where he has taken up residence, he responds, quietly and politely, but firmly, “I prefer not to.”

What, I wonder, as we are taxed with complying with increasingly Draconian policies that harm all beings, might be our collective “We prefer not to.”?

Euthanized at Phoenix Zoo. This memorial was organized by In Defense of Animals on July 9, 2025.

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Indu, your friends are gathered on your behalf.

In the very last days of 2016, I was at Thula Thula Preserve in South Africa. I had wanted to visit the Elephants there and also Lawrence Anthony, known as an Elephant Whisperer, who had created this refuge for them when their lives were threatened on their native lands further north. He had had to fence his entire land and so confined the small herd in a Boma while that work was finished and they accommodated to the land. They were not happy and kept trying to escape and he realized that he and a ranger needed to live just on the other side of the fence until the Elephants adjusted. They did so, 24/7, for many weeks. During that time a very deep bond formed between Anthony and Nana the Matriarch and also the rest of the Elephants.

As it happened Anthony died suddenly while receiving an award in a nearby city, and before I could come to Thula Thula. You probably have read of how the Elephants gathered at his house at the moment of his death as they had whenever he returned from a journey, even if he had changed the date or time of his return, they were there when he arrived. And so we might assume his spirit came home when he died and the Elephants met it. His spirit and their spirits interconnecting and giving evidence of Elephant’s spiritual nature. Let us then see the possibility that Indu is also here with us, that she knows we have gathered on her behalf and she has joined us.

Many of you know of my meeting with the Ambassador Elephant at Chobe in 1999 and in the years afterward whenever I was in Botswana, he appeared with his herd or family at the last hour of the last day, at the Chapungo (Fisher Eagle) tree where we had first met, repeating confirmation of the range of the spiritual nature of Elephants. When I was planning to visit Thula Thula, a thought was planted in my mind that I assumed came from the Ambassador. I was to greet the Matriarch of the herd, Nana, and her Matriarch in training, Frankie, as I would an Indigenous Elder whose tribe or territory I wished to visit. I explained this to the Ranger at Thula Thula, who was, to say the least, skeptical or amused, but yielding to my certainty and seriousness took us to a place where, if she wanted to engage, Nana might appear. She did. You can read the details of this meeting in my novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire. I introduced everyone in the truck and communicated the equivalent of the following. I suggest you listen to this as if we are speaking a version of this to the spirit of Indu who is with us.

We are here on pilgrimage to make a bond between the human realm and the elephant realm. We take this seriously. Even more seriously than I would take a similar diplomatic visit to any other greatly respected leader of a human community.

I don’t know what we will do, how we will present whatever we gain or understand from the intimacy we hope will be possible but we will be responsible, committed as we are to the Earth and your people benefiting. To accomplish this we hope to forge a true connection between you and us, between the members of your community and ourselves. We want us and then all other humans, to return to true connection, common concerns and right relationship with you and your people. We would like to give back something of what you have given us

We believe we are trustworthy. We believe Spirit has sent us to each other. These words are sincere. Please allow us to form alliances with each other.

Dear Indu, I speak these words now on behalf of everyone on this call to you, and I speak on behalf of right relationship in the spirit realm. We may not have met you, Indu, person to person, but we are gathered because you are in our hearts and because we recognize the being that you were and the mourn the tragedy of your life in confinement and the tragedy of your death before you could be released to a different life in the natural world among your peers. But in your honor we carry such a hope for all Elephants now in captivity. Recognizing that you are, as they are, spiritual beings, we devote ourselves to a free future for all Elephant people.

Let us take a moment of silence to be with Indu. If you can feel her presence, please open your heart to her.

Thank you.

Logan Navar, 8th grader, offers us wisdom for these times

As it is said, a little child shall lead them. Not such a little child, but a young leader who offers us the essential wisdom and direction for this time as we try to heal the madness that has afflicted us while we don’t know what we do.

This young man confirms the truth of the wisdom of the natural world from his stated life experience even as we violate it on a daily basis, leading, inexorably toward extinction if we do not heed the seers, human and non-human when we are privileged to encounter them.

As Logan Navar speaks, the war mongers with their bombs vie with each other to create the largest bomb. These l14 bunker buster bombers, 30,000 pounds each, with which the US attacked Iran’s buried nuclear sites, bragging they are the only ones which could wreak sufficient violence, were designed to penetrate concrete and steel but also limestone, dolomite, our Earth, to 60 to 76 meters, 200 to 250 meters.

Imagine it, let yourself feel how She, the Mother, sentient in ways we do not understand, is assaulted in this way.

During the Healers’ Intensive, all the participants except the four elders who tended the central fire — candles because of the danger of having a fire, another sadness of this time — spent two nights and one day fasting in silence, on the land. I had asked them to put their bodies on Earth as a loving gesture of protection. As we would, instinctively, put our bodies between our loved one and a danger speeding toward them. As we would embrace our loved one who was injured so they might heal. As we might acquire the energy for healing that our landbased, earth based, spirit based ancestors once had, that energy and that wisdom. The profound transmission from Earth herself which he offers us from the poetry of his being. As you might receive such as you move to ease, to heal, to protect Her. The reciprocity that comes from interconnection and true and vibrant relationship.

I was going to post a closing photo of the trees here in Topanga where I live when this photo from Botswana appeared. This moment, I had the privilege of witnessing and recording — the ultimate peacemaking — the equivalent of the lion laying down with the lambs, only in this instance, the lion laying down among the giraffes. And Earth in all her beauty. May we protect her with our fierce love and courageous actions.

The US has just bombed Iran. The only medicine I know for such a crime is to develop a fierce and peaceful heart that is stronger than, more resilient than, more enduring than war. Maintain the No Enemy Way as if your life depends on it. It does.

My friend and colleague, Mary Fillmore, An Address in Amsterdam, considering why she was continuing to write about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and the many forms of resistance that had existed there, said that while she understood she would probably not change the minds of those who support the administration’s actions, she could encourage those who do understand how critical these times are to resist, to stand up.

This reminded me of Dan Berrigan’s essential statement when so many of us were protesting the Vietnam war until eventually it was brought to an end, “Don’t just do something — Stand there.”

We are, once again, being called to stand there. In the last days, Donald Trump has done everything he can to incite activity to which he can respond by militarizing and controlling this country. Over the last almost 6 months his actions have been increasingly called, autocratic, dictatorial, fascistic and even Hitlerian.

One action after another by the President resembles Hitler’s activity in 1933 as Timothy W. Rybeck wrote in the Atlantic, January 2025, “Hitler dismantled the democracy in 53 days.” From his first days, this President has been governing by fiat, by executive orders, through rulings which like Hitler’s, systematically disables and dismantles this countries democratic structures and processes.

It took twelve years and global action to end Hitler’s rule. We don’t want our situation to escalate as Germany’s did. We don’t want to wait so long for the restoration of our freedoms. I was in the GDR in 1989, having passed through Checkpoint Charlie in order to be able to visit Ravensbruck in East Germany and take a train to Poland to make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Berkinau and eight other Death Camps. I didn’t know in May 1989 that the Wall would come down within months as the countries in the Soviet Bloc were liberated. But the GDR had ruled oppressively from 1961 to 1989. We don’t want to wait that long for our freedoms to be restored.

For the last days, Los Angeles and now the entire country have been protesting the flagrant, brutal, illegal actions of ICE who wants a free hand to terrorize, arrest, detain, deport, without due process, hundreds of thousands of hard working, mostly dark skinned person with a Latino cast. people upon whom we depend for most of our necessary labor, including food production, hospital services, construction, day laboring, etc. This is a reign of terror in the way the President bullies and terrorize anyone who might oppose him. But it isn’t ICE, really, who is doing this. It is the President. To support and ‘protect ICE’ the President has federalized the National Guard in flagrant opposition to the will of the Governor of California and is bringing 700 marines into Los Angeles. Even though they are not authorized to fight against their own people, they will be be given the authority to detain protesters. All of this against the will of the Governor, the Mayor, the Chief of Police, all of whom have jurisdiction and against the will of the great majority of Californians.

Over last twenty years, I have been able to support the grassroots peace building organization everyday gandhis, first imagined by Cynthia Travis, with Liberian peace builder, trauma specialist Bill Saa. Many of the current leaders are ex-child soldiers. I have heard them speak of the moment they were taken into the rebel camp, or the militia, or a gang, or even the then Liberian President’s army. Their initiation as child soldiers was to kill a member of their family, or their best friend, or a pregnant woman they knew, or a respected Elder. And if they didn’t, then the gun would pass immediately to the person next to them or one who knew them well and who would be required to kill them on the spot. What happens to the soul of those who are intimidated in that way?

There is another accompanying story to this one. One of the original ex-child soldiers graduated from medical school yesterday, June 11, 2025. He asked Travis to bank the money it would have cost to come to Gambia to witness his graduation. “We will use it to build a medical/Indigenous clinic here in Voinjama, Liberia,” he said.

Voinjama, during the brutal civil was considered the most dangerous place on Earth. The first action of the nascent everyday gandhis was to sponsor a mourning feast so that the dead, who could not have been properly buried during the war, could be crossed. Just as the war weary women of Liberia rose up in unexpected numbers, and unexpected relationships, the former ‘enemies’ gathering together Christians, Muslims, Traditionalists to literally take the guns away from their fathers, sons, brothers, uncles to such an extent that they brought down the brutal government of Charles Taylor, so did a thousand people, who had been warring with each other, gather for a Mourning Feast where the ceremony requires them to eat together from a common bowl without being enemies, Muslims, Christians, and Traditionalists of the many tribes and languages of Liberia.

On the one hand, we may not be able to persuade those who do not recognize the violations occurring to Democracy, and on the other hand we may in time find the ways to transform so as to be in relationship with each other and with the land as the times require. And so we speak out and we stand up and we stand there.

I look at the weapons and uniforms of those in the military and the police force and ICE. What happens to their souls when they are required to act against their families, their kin, their people? For we are their people and so they are ours. I believe we are also called to stand up on behalf of these ones who, surely like so many from the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, will surely suffer extreme cases of PTSD from the requirement to act against their soul knowledge, against what is legal, ethical and kind.

In the face of such disruptions as are already occurring or to augment them, the President has planned an event which he hopes will overwhelm, intimidate and subdue the citizens of our country and the nations of the world, North Korean style, through a vulgar military display, expected to cost $45 million. It is scheduled for Saturday June 14th, his birthday. Accordingly and inevitably, over 1500 No Kings rallies are already planned in response to the parade.

You know all this. Why am I repeating it? Because writers have to speak out. It is our sacred responsibility. And in alliance with the writers, all of us need to stand up. Because the task of the writer is to meet the times with words, to break the silence that fear imposes, it is all of our responsibility to stand up together, peaceably to break the larger silence that the administration wants to impose.

Therefore, it is simple. We speak out and we stand up. Speak out and stand up. And thereby, we protect the life of the community, the people, the nation, the natural world, the wild, Earth and the future. Speak out and Stand up and Stand there.

On June 22, 2025 Deena will present at Uprising Together to explore how to meet the most difficult times with wisdom, integrity, and heart. Reflecting on extinction, climate dissolution, and rising fascism, she will share insights on how we can respond with ethical action and vision. Want to join in person or online? Register here.

The eye of Sebastião Salgado Yanomami people from Maturaca village look at the sacred Yaripo – or Pico da Neblina – mountain, the highest in Brazil, in 2014. Photograph: Sebastião Salgado/NBpictures.com

In my last post, Desperate Acts of Imagination, May 17, 2025, Martin and I had an exchange after I, with much pain and thought, posted films of CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador to which immigrants have been sent illegally. I have learned since that the images from CECOT are indeed staged, but nevertheless they are not less true and the staging, in my mind, adds a vicious aspect to them and so increasingly I think we need to be aware of what is being done in our name. So many turn away … but the prisoners can’t.

This is some of what Martin and I said to each other. I do not know him beyond the words exchanged on the Comments in the other posting. I have continued to contemplate what he has said, wondering if this is one of the occasions, as one of the participants in the writing intensive was considering today — ( I am teaching now, writing while they are writing )— when sometimes one does harm by describing harm?

From the exchange:

Martin

… When we have no social power in a horror, we most often delude ourselves by arrogating that violent and destructive power to being within our control.

We as onlookers could not stop the holocaust in Gaza, not even with a heightened power of knowledge. We as civilians cannot get these men out of El Salvador. We cannot save the women condemned either to death from forced birth or to endless suffering from being unable to provide a decent life to their forced birth children.

To mix a 60s metaphor, we don’t need photos to know which way the wind blows. We don’t need snuff films or staged prison photos to know the very real mass murder being done by powerful entities in our name. Social reality is beyond awful, and while awareness is valuable, so is disavowal.

Deena Metzger

Dear Martin: I hear you and have been thinking about what you are saying. My fear is that this is not staged. So the question i will carry is, does showing such images even though I do not in any way think they are the equivalent of snuff films, which like so much media were designed to titillate, add to the neutralization of horror and suffering? Or does looking at these images and not looking away as so many would like to do so they don’t get upset and can live their lives despite others’ suffering, does facing such images, which are real, even as they say they are staged, the staging is real, which people are suffering this moment, bring us to self scrutiny about our values, about the rabid individualism, for example, that is part of what leads to this, and the fear of ‘the other’ and hierarchy, might it get us to ask how our life styles created the conditions in their countries ( and ours) so that they had to leave, why do they have no alternative but gang activity, if if if some of them were part of that …. why why why. To establish change one doesn’t have to engage in a great action and see a great result, but individuals living and thinking differently will coalesce, or can coalesce into other ways of being. My hope at least. Interesting, is it not, that this exchange, ostensibly about difference between us, also reveals an alliance. I will be considering what you are saying …. i do, personally, hold the ordinary familiar media writers responsible in part for this horror, by depending on depicting violence, those who write films and shows, those ‘good people’ who brought us here in pursuit of their livings and ‘success. I do not want to fall into a similar situation of inadvertently adding to the violence in the world rather than doing what i can to make such untenable. Again, thank you so much for thinking and writing.

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This particular photo by Salgado who just died is, for me, one of the great photos of all time. It is what he came to after spending so many years of life photographing, bearing witness, documenting war, and the great suffering of humans and the devastation of Earth. This photo shows us human beings in the presence of the Holy. In the presence of the Holy and recognizing the existence of the Holy. The sacred mountain. We are ourselves, if we allow it, transported as well into the dimension where the Divine comes to meet us, allows us into the field of its being.

As medicine for brutal torture, as the antidote for the viciousness of our culture, here is Salgado’s remarkable vision. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said in a statement. “Salgado didn’t only use his eyes and his camera to portray people: he also used the fullness of his soul and heart.”

May your life be restored by Salgado’s spirit: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2024/feb/08/i-photographed-the-world-the-art-of-sebastiao-salgado-in-pictures?CMP=share_btn_link