Believe in miracles and healing wells

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
the utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

--Seamus Heaney.

It's unbelievable to me that it is less than a month since I left Blip to edit the blog for the revolution, at least as the revolution is manifest in Portland, Oregon. Since then, my mother died, which was a mercy, as she had long been demented and troubled; my first great-grandchild was born (premature, weighing four pounds, her life still hangs in the wind); I was swept away in the pure joy of hope and history called Occupy; and I was knocked flat with a virus like nothing I've ever had before. For a few days I wasn't sure I'd make it, but I am limping back to health, much weakened, having returned the Occupy blog  to its original editor. I am still under quarantine; my physician says this virus is the worst she has ever seen, I shouldn't spread it around.

I have learned this: it is terrifying to meet the force of riot police with their visors, shields, boots, batons, and pepper spray with my soft-boned, thin-shouldered, aging body. There is no reason on earth why a nonviolent demonstration composed of people like me should be met with such overwhelming violence. But that is what we have, even in supposedly "progressive" Portland. I suppose that means we are a threat to someone.

Arundhati Roy is one of a few writers I always attend to.  She says, "Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen."

For me, the Occupy movement is a global shift in consciousness in the direction of peace, compassion, and human understanding (even for the riot police, who themselves are merely human and stressed out, following orders which they surely don't understand).

As I lie in my bed, worn out and debilitated by an unnamed virus that set in after two clashes with riot police, I am for peace, for the metaphor of angels among us, for gratitude toward my local friends who have brought me food and left it outside my door for the past weeks, and for miracles and healing wells. I made this picture a little past 1 p.m. on this murky foggy winter day, as I drove my car for the first time in several weeks, past the cemetery to my son's apartment, where I had promised regularly to collect his mail while he's out of town. The angel seemed to beckon to me with her truncated arm and her hand over her heart. I am glad still to be this side of the grave.