Happy Birthday, Occupy Oakland! Now where do we go from here?

Occupy Oakland showed us, in a concentrated, bite-sized for the media way, all that is the most desperate and the most beautiful in our culture: the veterans without their promised benefits, the homeless addicts, the laid off school teachers. We saw people living together, in public spaces they had reclaimed as the commons, planting gardens to feed themselves and helping save one another’s homes by putting themselves at risk of violence and arrest. We saw the savage means that the government, police forces, and corporations were willing to resort to in order to protect their interests and also the impunity with which they do it.

The Miracle of Chanukah Solstice

Last night, a miracle occurred for this Pagan-Jewish girl: the Winter Solstice and the first night of Chanukah, sacred holidays devoted to the coming back of the light, happened on the same night.
Last year’s Winter Solstice coincided with a full lunar eclipse for the first time in 400 years, and in that moment I felt a tremendous shifting of the energies of the planet and a powerful, beautiful dawning of a new era. This year has indeed proven to be one of seemingly unimaginable shifts and a global social awakening unlike anything we’ve seen before, which left me wondering – what does the synchronistic alignment of these two holy days portend for the coming year?