I will fight.

While engaged in breathwork today, attempting to access that which needs to be expressed and integrated within myself, I found a reservoir of anger.  I’m not a stranger to anger.  There’s clearly plenty to be angry about.  The depth of it, though, and the accompanying imagery, was startling to me, and a powerful impetus towards clarity and action.

Certain phrases kept repeating themselves in my mind.  You have forfeited your privilege.  I will fight you.  I will fight you.  I will fight you.  I felt as if I was saying those phrases aloud, directly and seriously, with a bamboo stick clenched in my hands, feet on the ground, like a member of the Gulabi Gang.  Whom was I addressing?  An entourage flashed before me: every adult who had ever exploited or harmed a child.  Every man who had ever wronged a woman.  Every greed-driven profiteer, every rhetoric-filled politician, everyone who ever regarded an ocean full of plastic or an atmosphere full of greenhouse gases as a reasonable cost of “progress,” every instigator of war, every perpetrator of soul-killing, mind-killing, body-killing.  All of them driven by that same desire to dominate, to colonize, to use, to destroy, believing that they are triumphant conquerors, standing on columns of despoiled people, animals, landscapes; believing that they are held up instead by their own righteousness; believing that they can maintain the majestic fiction even as the horrific foundations beneath them creak menacingly.

An image came to me: that of mistletoe.  Mistletoe is largely regarded in this culture as a plant that’s suspended from the rafters for people to kiss under.  Innocuous and flirtatious, right?  Consider, then, that mistletoe is a parasitic plant.  It sends a sort of root system, called haustoria, into its tree host, sucking nutrients away, weakening and sometimes killing the tree.  The vivid image of mistletoe that came to me was that of a parasite penetrating its aggressive feelers into the tender wood of a vulnerable victim.

image from http://gibsonlandscape.typepad.com/gibson-landscape/2011/08/parasites-part-ii-the-kiss-of-death.html

I realized that mistletoe was appearing to me as a symbol of colonization.  It’s not just trees that are having the life sucked out of them.  Our cultures are colonized.  Our bodies are colonized.  Our minds are colonized.  Everything we have ever depended on for sustenance is colonized.  The haustoria have penetrated so thoroughly that they can’t be removed.  What would healthy tissue even look like?  We don’t know anymore.

Facing down this imagery of a mass of insidious rootlets infiltrating all that I hold dear, including my own heart and body and mind, I gripped my bamboo stick tighter, sensed the resolve expanding within me, and felt the anger concentrating like a laser.

You have forfeited your privilege.
I will fight you.