I’ve been home with my family for 24 hours and because of the cold, wet, wintry days, we’ve been either cooking, eating, punching the keyboard or wrestling with the dog. My niece’s dog Taz — a German Shepard-Labrador mix — is less than a year old and looks as though she’s big enough to eat my sister.

Because she is a puppy, she still thinks when she jumps up on you that you’d be happy enough to let her leap into your arms. But at 75 pounds and growing, we’re a bit past that point.

Our days together are peppered with intermittent screams of “Taz, don’t eat my shoes!” Or “Taz why do you have to be under all our feet while we’re trying to cook?” Or that desperate, searching, panicked question, “Taz, what is that in your mouth?”

If you haven’t guessed by now, the family gathering at my sister’s house for the holidays is a warm mash of love and chaos. And we like it that way. We’re in celebratory mode. Both my sister’s kids are newly employed in the ‘real world’ while our generation — their mom, pop and me — beam proudly, with a big sigh of relief to the side. My niece’s young man is celebrating his birthday with us, a Solstice Eve natal return. His fourth one in a row here.

We’re a family that’s growing and expanding, and this week we’re experiencing our gathering once more at the solstice fire. A busy eventful year has come to an end.

Witnessing my niece and nephew grow into adulthood, I still hold on to mementos from phases of our family’s history. I have a picture I took with my niece when she was just three years old in a photo booth at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. In my bathroom, I keep a hand-built ceramic vase my nephew made in his middle school art class. It’s been broken in a few places over the years and I have re-assembled it each time, repairing it kintsugi style: using epoxy and gold mica powder to fill the cracks, the repair of the vase making it more beautiful than it was before. Perfect in its imperfection.

Approaching the year’s end, you can’t do anything but think about time. How far we’ve come. What has been. Time, for me especially, continues to be observed and measured in children — actual and creative. These days as a dramaturg I’ve been either writing, editing, or looking at everything from scripts to videos that cover twenty years of my working in the Medea Project.

Yesterday, I caught a glimpse of myself on stage in a video shot twenty years ago. As I looked at that me on the tape, and then looked up at a mirror close by, I had a clear opportunity to see on my face where time did its work. Because I have allowed the creative to be expressed all my life, I was happy to see that time’s work was gentle. I felt appreciation, not regret, for the life and the choices I have made. And for that, I am grateful I never had any kids. Not physical ones. All my creations were my children, and I’ve been pregnant for a long time.

For me, the measurement of time — because I now have a body of work to look back upon — has begun to include the trueness of the art. Do my creations still have relevance or were they satisfactory just for the moment? What does my work say to me now? Does it still even need to say anything? Does it still make sense?

Then I realize I’m not just measuring time in duration but in meaning. I realize there is a pattern forming in my work and in my life that’s moving outward and growing. A seed planted long ago has become the tree, branching upward.

I’m putting away the past, reminding myself to stay in the present. I am a work in progress, a self-exploring, often doubtful, volatile-minded woman who is still trying to open more doors inside, to see what mysteries await there.

How much love is there to have? How many notes are there to sing? Does everything have to be meaningful? Can’t life just be? And then you realize there are still more questions, bigger questions that you need to ask — and to answer for yourself.

Throughout my life I’ve always wondered how I would reconcile my love of and attachment to family with my aspirations outward. But my chart drew it out for me long ago like a map. My 5th house South Node, Jupiter and Uranus in family-loving Cancer was reaching across the wheel to my 10th house Venus in Sagittarius and 11th house North Node in Capricorn.

My familia. We’ve held ourselves together by tradition, love, down-to-earthness, fun and nourishment. Some days I feel like running away from them. Others, I miss them so that I need them like a flower needing rain. I come home now to recharge the batteries as well as to stay in touch. I then go back to the city and to my life, ready to take the reins back and drive. I don’t forget that because my family is such a grounding force, I can fly.

It’s not always going to be like this. The kids will one day have their own kids and we will all be older. But today, reflecting on the past year this Solstice, a little love and chaos on the longest night on our half of the Earth isn’t at all bad, even with a dog with a history of questionable somethings in her mouth. It’s all family. And whether it’s your blood family, adopted family or preferred family, wherever you feel most comfortable being you in all your various facets, flaws and feelings, that is perfect even in its imperfection. It’s what I define as home.

See you in the comments.

More than 100 leaders are meeting right now to haggle over the details of a response to global warming that will not stem what is already happening: rising ocean temperatures are melting polar ice caps, increasing sea levels and changing global weather patterns.

This temperature rise is the cause of drought, famine, deadly storms, the drowning of small island nations and, in the case of Syria, may be the root cause of a deadly civil war initiated by internal struggles over water usage due to a savage drought. This war has ultimately led to a mass migration of 4.3 million Syrian refugees to countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas, creating immense economic and social pressure on all nations involved.

Yet, because of global warming, there will be more migrations to come. This is not an “if” or a “maybe” but a “when.”

We know current global economic interests cling to an energy infrastructure that world economic powers are loathe to dismantle. There is the elephant in the room: the achingly slow-moving train of the largest polluters — the US and China — to do something, anything, significant to change significantly or at least modify our energy consumption and production.

Any meaningful change is too far away on the horizon to stop what is happening to us right now on the ground. Not with a Congress in the pockets of oil and coal money, and a Supreme Court that made political money from corporations a form of free speech protected by the Constitution.

If this all seems to indicate the planet is in trouble, it is. And yet, people on the ground are rising up. Sunday, the day the Saturn-Neptune square was exact, more than half a million people worldwide participated in demonstrations in advance of the COP 21 Paris Climate Summit. The BBC reports that over 200 climate change protesters were arrested in Paris yesterday. Simultaneous protests occurred yesterday as well in Brazil, Colombia, Australia, the US, the UK, Chile, Kenya, the Marshall Islands and Australia. It was a global alarm clock waking us from our political slumber.

Given the results of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, I am far from hopeful that the COP 21 will be successful in stemming the political and actual tide in 2015. But perhaps the urgency of the matter is even more in the face of these global leaders, who are attending the talks in Paris just two weeks after an alleged IS attack on the city itself — and with the ongoing global humanitarian crisis facing millions of Syrian refugees still humming loudly in world news.

A global commitment to making change, even a half-hearted one, may be better than none at all. It’s just that the price seems to be going up with each passing day as we delay and compromise. Will we see real commitment for tangible results? There are many challenges and opportunities that face these leaders, specifically from the US, UK, China and Japan — the world’s biggest consumers and polluters. Will they see the big picture at all?

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In the title of her book When the Elephants Dance, Tess Uriza Holthe describes the struggle of Filipinos to survive while the US and Japan fought World War II in the Philippines. The big powers — the elephants — fight while the rest of us — the chickens underfoot — run so as to not be crushed.

It’s the same today. The big polluters are the elephants who are dancing while we chickens on the ground tremble in their wake, hoping, praying, protesting and fighting against the wheel that could crush us all.

But it will take that to prevent what seems to be the inevitable from happening; a mighty push from the ground below, as well as a change in the consciousness of those in the grand meeting rooms of the Paris summit. It already has happened and we must all act to prevent it from getting worse.

All our eyes are watching Paris this week and our arms are raised, ready. Even us chickens on the ground can get enough wing speed to rise up and fly. The time to do it was yesterday, but right now will do too.

“Nothing spoils tomorrow more surely than fear of it.” — Len Wallick

Never were more truer words said than what our colleague Len Wallick wrote in his Friday column. From the Mayor of Roanoke, Virginia to the 47 Congressional Democrats who broke against the president and voted with Republicans to place a moratorium on accepting a modest number of Syrian refugees — 10,000 women and children — we have become prey to the easy lie, denying a safer and more hopeful tomorrow for people escaping the terror of war.

It’s easy enough to get people who are only given a certain set of facts to believe a lie. Check out Donald Trump’s tweet: “Eight Syrians were just caught on the southern border trying to get into the U.S. ISIS maybe? I told you so. WE NEED A BIG & BEAUTIFUL WALL!”

What his 130-character summation does not tell you is that members of two Syrian families presented themselves to authorities at the Department of Homeland Security at the Southern Border. The women and children were taken to a family residential center while the men were transferred to a detention center, DHS said.

But because of our terror of ISIS, Syrians, Muslims, and the ghost of 9-11, our minds cannot absorb facts, and so when a lie is repeated, again and again, in various forms and variations, the surface gloss of an innuendo-loaded statement becomes solid evidence. See how easy and dangerous that is?

But we’re not only failing these war refugees. By the very truths that we hold dear, by the very foundation upon which this country was built, we’re failing ourselves. As best said in an editorial in The Cincinnati Enquirer:

The selective nature of the proposed moratorium — targeting refugees from only one country — is also troubling because there’s no confirmed, direct link between Syrian refugees and the Paris attacks. All the suspects identified so far hailed from France or Belgium. The call to block Syrian refugees is being made despite the evidence, not because of it. […]

Our refugee resettlement program — yes, even for Syrians — represents a core American value, one that reflects and continues our identity as a melting pot. We are a country founded and fueled by immigrants. We are a nation powered by the proposition that we value oppressed people — of all colors and creeds — who seek shelter.

I began last weekend heartsick with the familiar ring of politics ginning up people’s fears. When will we ever learn? It wasn’t helpful that the Republican presidential candidates used the refugee moratorium to rev up even more xenophobia on the stump, winning the news cycle in tandem with their Congressional compatriots. All we need right now is another fear-based political campaign to hoist a demagogue into the White House.

I have been tired of this since 2003, as are most of the people in my community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes I know we’re not middle America, and by all measures the view of us — correct or not — is that we are crypto-liberal extremists too willing to sell the country out to the Communists. Whatever. But throwing my shoe at a CNN news reporter on television was not going to help. Neither was yelling at the car radio on my commute home. My anger was nourished by the fear.

I tried to put my mind’s focus on other things this weekend: going to a play on Friday; and on Saturday, catering for the artists at the International Body Music mini-fest at Berkeley’s traditional music institution, Freight and Salvage.

There were forty artists, all “hyphen-Americans” representing various cultures — African-American, Mexican-American, Eastern European-American, and East Indian-American — representatives of the society that we have become. Pieces of our American multi-ethnic fabric. It was an evening of percussive, jazz, dance and traditional music all done without instruments.

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After our pre-show meal everyone circled up to be together before curtain. The house was packed. As the Festival’s co-director Evie Ladin said: “The world is in a shit storm right now, and the people out there need us to lift them up.”

People were looking for the same kind of relief I was from the last week’s xenophobia and each and every one of the artists stepped up. No one held anything back.

The finale was a gathering of all artists from their various ethnic traditions leading the audience out of the auditorium into the lobby for a wide open celebration of clapping, stomping and chanting for the audience and the artists. There was nothing but smiles in that lobby. The show was medicine.

Looking back now, this show was a living snapshot of what our core American values are and what the Cincinnati Examiner editorial referred to: inclusion and appreciation of the differences and similarities of our human experience on this planet. We’re all in one country that is a part of this one world.

I told my best friend Rhodessa about the show. As of right now she is flying east for Thanksgiving to visit her family in Georgia. Before she left to get on the plane, she said to me the same thing Evie said: “The world is in an uproar. Time now to give our friends, family and community our best and with love.”

We have so much to be thankful for: we’re safe, definitely food-secure, and we have a community of friends and family to help us shoulder our burdens and re-assure us with love and support. For us, the only war going on right now is for our minds and hearts to believe in a fear that could not only spoil, but end tomorrow. Even with that we can choose not to play.

When we open our mouths to pray in thanks this week, let’s work to open minds and hearts as well — ours and others. Love, fear and lies don’t mix. Love cannot exist with lies and fear cannot exist with love. Love conquers them both. Easily.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Sunday morning, Nov. 15. I’m writing 48 hours after the first explosions were heard at the Stade de France where France was playing Germany in a soccer match. In restaurants, a bar, and the Bataclan concert hall in the 11th Arrondisement of Paris people were attacked and killed by three ISIS teams using kalashnikov rifles and suicide vests.

The assailants all spoke perfect French.

As I write this, CNN’s “Paris-Terror Attacks” coverage drones unendingly on the television. Paris is stunned, in a state of shock. Authorities fear the crisis is not over. The word “fear” is liberally dispersed throughout the coverage, amplifying the general atmosphere in France and abroad as a low-lying hum of horror. At least to the viewers here and elsewhere CNN provides coverage.

I am certain the people of France and Belgium — where some members of ISIS terror cells allegedly are based — are apprehensive. I am certain major cities of Western Europe are on high alert. At this moment, the investigation is uncovering an even wider range of suspected ISIS activities beyond France. There are questions about security risk of the Syrian refugees entering Europe, as they try to escape from the devastation wrought by their country’s civil war.

It all breathes, feels and tastes like Sept. 11, 2001. If we haven’t had enough of the march towards war, the news media makes sure we work ourselves up into an appetite for more with hints of it. Fear is as much a social and political nutrient as rainwater is to weeds, providing as much fuel for our current political discussions as Donald Trump’s bluster, Ben Carson’s inanity and Hillary Clinton’s emails.

I am certain of one thing: There are enough of us who are plenty fed up with the bullshit orchestrated these days in the era of asymmetrical warfare. We have proof that the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were a lie. A lie used to begin a pointless, expensive and stupid war. That was attested to by George W. Bush himself, admitting as much in his memoir Decision Points.

What makes ISIS any different from Al Qaeda? Same game, different players. We know that ISIS was a direct result of the instability of our installed regime in Iraq and our support for the anti-Assad rebellion in Syria. Countries in the midst of civil war are fertile ground for insurgents of all stripes. Al-Qaeda, once America’s bete noir, has been taken backstage as ISIS rises to play the lead of terrorist du jour. Our initial impulse is to stamp them all out by the cudgels of war, but you can’t kill a movement with a cudgel. Not when young, disaffected and disempowered men and women are attracted to the seductive online recruitment provided by ISIS.

Yet France’s President Francoise Hollande uses the words “act of war,” similar to what Mr. Bush said after the twin towers fell — raising the apprehension of possible NATO involvement, or further incursions on the ground in Syria. France had launched airstikes in Syria earlier in September.

Again and again, it all feels so hauntingly familiar. Are we on the highway to making another stupid mistake? Or are we hovering nearby, cruising at less than highway speed from a frontage road following the events and their aftermath in Paris?

I am waiting for news that the investigation by French and other international agencies will focus first on the cause before an easy, immediate and impulsive answer is implemented. I hope for measured response and reasoned examination. A brink of some kind was reached — you can see it in the chart of the event, at the bottom of this post (you can also view a simpler chart on Eric’s Facebook page). And we have a choice to blindly accept what is being fed us or to question our choices beginning now.

While we’re at it, perhaps we should remember that while Paris was attacked, so was Beirut — a vibrant city that still struggles to find stability, but knows no end of violence. Are they consigned to our neglect while the jewels of the Western world burn?

I am certain of this: the people of France want and deserve answers, as does the world. I know this seems simplistic and naive, but while investigating ISIS as a credible and dangerous threat, perhaps we should re-evaluate what has been wrought through our economic and military adventures and their impact on the rest of the world this last decade.

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Regional instability in the Middle East has gone on so long that it has formed new and ugly flowers in Europe, Lebanon, Iraq, Kenya and Palestine. Action creates reaction. Is this how we want the world to be?

I found this parable, posted by a friend of mine on Facebook the morning after the attacks:

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt,resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.

“The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

I don’t know what comes next with these ongoing investigations in France and its neighboring countries. I know I am hoping for better than what our recent history has shown us. I know I am sending a heart-load of intention on this sunny Sunday in California that we find out what really happened Friday night, and deal with it with as little bloodshed as possible. This world has had enough.

There is so much we haven’t been told. I am also certain that there are many, many people here and around the world tired of being fed the easy answers. The people of this good, beautiful, tumultuous and complicated planet deserve so much more. For once, please, let the good wolf win.

Chart for the Nov. 13, 2015 ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris. View glyph key here.

Last week, four blocks away from my old neighborhood near downtown Berkeley, Berkeley High School students staged a mass demonstration over the appearance of a racist epithet posted on one of the high school’s library computers. Two thousand of Berkeley High’s 3,000 students walked off campus en masse to march through Berkeley’s streets in protest.

Yesterday, 1,000 students marched and demonstrated in a planned gathering of civil disobedience in Washington DC, demanding “racial, immigration, and climate justice reform for a ‘broken’ political system.”

Also yesterday, Tim Wolfe, system president of the University of Missouri, resigned his post after months of pressure from the university’s student body, who were pushing their administration to act on what was described as a climate of fear and racial intimidation on campus.

What finally pushed him to resign was the boycott by the university’s football team of the school’s upcoming football game this next weekend. Their boycott was in solidarity with the campus anti-racist movement, and had the absolute support of the team’s coach. The boycott and the game’s cancellation would have cost the school a financial loss of $1 million.

But there was plenty more than just a football game leading up to Wolfe’s resignation. In what the campus’ newspaper, “The Maneater,” described fatefully as “An Historic Fall”, the university had been a focal point for social unrest and is a microcosm of what is happening across the country.

It started with the cutting of health care for graduate students, many of whom work on campus; a grad student walk-out; student demonstrations over threatened discontinuation of abortion and other women’s health services; and demonstrations against an increasing climate of racism on campus. Graduate student Jonathan Butler spearheaded the graduate student movement earlier in the fall, and bumped up the stakes by waging a hunger strike until President Wolfe resigned.

The students’ demands — presented in a meeting earlier in the fall with campus administration — were handled sluggishly at best, if at all. President Wolfe was slow and dismissive of the students’ call for the administration to make the campus a “safe and inclusive place.” That meeting was then followed by a racism-based attack — the smearing of a swastika made from human feces in a campus residence hall.

It was Butler’s hunger strike that spurred the football team’s boycott, the final straw leading to Wolfe’s resignation. Apparently, concern for human rights and safety needed the help of college athletics to help the blind see the light.

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If it appears that President Wolfe refused to see the big picture, the students knew it all too well. Their demands: removal of Wolfe as UM president; that UM meets the demands of the Legion of Black Collegians first presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community — a promise unkept for nearly fifty years; enforcement of a mandatory comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments overseen by students staff and faculty of color; and an increase of the percentage of black faculty and students campus-wide by 10%.

Their demands also included a 10-year plan to increase retention rate for marginalized students; sustain diversity curriculum and promote campus safety and inclusivity; increase resources to include mental health professionals — particularly those of color for outreach and programming campus-wide; and establish social justice centers on campus.

To complete our frame of reference, the University of Missouri is located in Columbia, a two-hour drive from St. Louis and Ferguson. Both cities have been at the epicenter of the Black Lives Matter movement in the Midwest, protesting police aggression against African Americans following the deaths of black people at the hands of police.

From my view — at four blocks, 2,500 and 3,000 miles away — my heart is a mixture of pride, apprehension and hope. Some of us have been focused more on survival and — if we were lucky — comfort. We were too bogged down by the distractions of day-to-day reality to peek over our newspapers and hand-held devices and understand what has been happening to us. But these kids in Berkeley, Washington DC, and Columbia — and our kids everywhere — have been watching it all too closely.

They are about to enter their adult lives. They’re trying to blossom into adulthood as young people should, even in what sometimes can mildly be called a dark and dangerous world. These demonstrations are a sign of hope that our youth are actively working towards a world better than the one we are leaving them. They are fighting for the world we promised them, long ago when we were young. Send them support, encouragement and a light to help them continue safely on their way.