I experience my deep relationship with the land where I live as a truly sacred partnership. And now, in the winter, is when I most appreciate the depth of that relationship. When I most clearly feel the essence of this Place. The strength, stillness, and solidity that hold me steady throughout the movement and change of the rest of the seasons.

During the rest of the year my perception of that steady essence drops into the background of my awareness. I’m teased by color, movement, and light. Scent and sound distract me. I follow the rhythms into bursts of movement and creative flow of my own.

Then late autumn eases to the foreground. In an annual botanical striptease the essential strength and stillness of this land is revealed again. I’m mesmerized every time. My own body rhythms yearn for the same gracefully stark leanness emerging around me. Stillness and solidity begin to sing in my bones.

Visually late autumn and winter in this Place can seem a bit monotone. No more brilliant leaves or flowers. The noisy insect bands have all found warmer places to be. Other than the occasional murder of crows or passing flock of geese, even the sounds are more spare.

Oh, but like the subtle beauty revealed as a work of art is cleaned, each day the bones of the land quietly surface a bit more. Bare trees. Exposed stone in stream beds. Pods and cones, seeds long dispersed. Leafless gnarled twigs. Tan and silver grasses. I imagine this Place is showing me its Crone face.

I have cultivated my relationship with this Place. Opened my heart and spirit to our relationship every day, sometimes every moment. Given as much as I have received. Loved constantly. Respected. And, as I would with any beloved, I’ve sometimes chosen the needs of the land over my own.

At this naked time of year, resting into our relationship, I can feel my very breath infused with the stillness, solidity and strength this Place embodies. I am held with exquisite perfection so I can enter the dark stillness of the winter womb. I’m offered strength and steadiness so I can gestate, and ultimately birth, the powerful work I’m called to do in the world. Without this partnership, my work wouldn’t thrive. Without this relationship, I couldn’t live.

What’s your relationship with the Place where you live?

Tracie Nichols, M.A. helps compassionate changemakers become more effective at what they do by forming a sacred partnership with the earth. She blogs, mentors and teaches at http://alchemyfortheearth.com (and loves comments on her blog posts!!)

Photo Credits:  Photos courtesy of Tracie Nichols.

Is the snowflake responsible for the avalanche?

Since my last entry (see it here, or scroll down:  http://rebeccahecking.com/?p=627 ) I’ve been considering how we as individuals can cope with the possibility (inevitablity?) of ecological collapse.  In the last post, I pondered that our present state is the ultimate result of evolution.  Our big brains, linked together through collective learning, enabled us to dominate our environment in a way that no other species has ever done.  From the point of natural selection, we are an evolutionary “success.”  Our species has spread across the Earth, and exploited the planet’s resources so successfully that we now threaten the existence of many other species, as well as the well-being of our own.  We have been true to our nature. We are what we are.  In the end, Gaia may have the last laugh as homo sapiens sapiens (an ironic name if there ever was one) flames out and collapses into extinction over the next few ten-thousand years.  If we do, we would be a mere blip in the big picture of the 4.5 billion year history of life on Earth, albeit a quite spectacular blip.

Sounds simple enough.  A species evolves, adapts, lives a while, and ultimately goes extinct.  Of course, it’s not that simple.  As blog reader Nellie pointed out a few posts ago, those of us who are awakened to ecological reality may find ourselves deeply grieving for the Earth, and the ecological tragedy unfolding before our eyes.  The same minds that enabled us to create the circumstances of this present ecocide also enable us to consider meaningfully what our species has done, its implications and our own culpability in it all.

Like Nellie, and probably like many of you, I also grieve.  But being the human animal that I am, I don’t grieve at abstract computer models of climate, or charts listing environmental toxins.  I grieve on a smaller scale.  I grieve at finding a styrofoam cup on my path through the woods.  I grieve seeing a fox dead on the side of the road. I grieve seeing an oily slick amongst cattails in a wetland.  My grief is intimate. Palpable. And very human.  There are times when I simply sit with the grief, allowing it to wash over me like a wave.

But I find that I can’t stay with that grief indefinitely. Sometimes it morphs into anger at the Powers That Be.  Sometimes it fades away and is replaced by bittersweet joy at the beauty that yet remains.  That joy is sustaining.  Sometimes my thinking self reasserts itself over my emotions, and I find myself asking the question I posed at the beginning of this post:

Is the snowflake responsible for the avalanche?

We are all snowflakes, along with those who came before us. And we have gently fallen into our lives, drifting down without forethought onto the mountain, only to find ourselves part of the avalanche of humanity threatening destruction.  Snowflake me landed (at my birth) in 20th century America with all its messy history and cultural baggage.  I didn’t ask to be born where/when I did.  I didn’t ask to be born at all! And neither did you. It just happened. And here we are, snowflakes together, drifting.

When I consider this, I become more gentle with myself, and with each of us as individuals. I find my grief softening a bit, and my anger slipping toward compassion toward my fellow snowy companions.  There are so many of us now. Seven billion and counting.  Even the most powerful among us can do precious little to stop the avalanche, or change its direction.  Humanity is an abstraction, but a guilty one, that collectively brought us to where we are now. But you and me, and each one of us… well, we’re just sort of along for the ride.

So facing the future, I will nurture the spirit of  kindness within me. I will cultivate compassion toward all beings. And I will recognize that I am a snowflake, and stop blaming myself for not stopping the avalanche.

Rebecca Hecking is the author of The Sustainable Soul:  Eco-Spiritual Reflections and Practices, available from Skinner House books, Amazon, and local bookstores, and also available as an e-book for the Amazon Kindle.  She writes from her home in northwest Pennsylvania, where more snow is predicted for later today.

Photo Credit:  flickr user ViaMoi  at www.creativecommons.org

I think the realization of planetary reality is an existential question similar in type if not in magnitude to the personal existential questions that come when we consider the finite nature of our own lives, and our eventual death.  Religion has provided a cathartic answer to existential questions by offering concepts of heaven or reincarnation. Death isn’t really the end in this view, but rather a passage to a better future (either a quick trip to  paradise or through the longer karmic journey).  Looking at death as a natural event, where matter is recycled (supernovae seed the galaxy, decaying leaves provide for next year’s growth) also offers some comfort, perhaps not so personal, but comfort nonetheless.  As humans, we need to rationalize our own death and the deaths of our loved ones, to make sense of it somehow. Whether we do this through belief in an afterlife or not is beside the point.

Looking back at the planetary scale at the present time, we are left with fewer options. I see no happy outcome equivalent to an afterlife to comfort us in our angst moving forward.  But a natural event? Maybe, just maybe there is something there from which we can glean some wisdom.

What is happening to our beloved Earth is not “natural” in the sense that it would have happened anyway, without human intervention.  Clearly, we are collectively responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Everything from the smallest piece of plastic litter to the largest planetary climate convulsions can clearly be blamed on humans. True.

One of my favorite quotes is from the famous biologist E.O. Wilson, ”…we live in Star Wars civilizations ruled by Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

I would change “Stone Age emotions” to “Stone Age minds.”  As a species, we evolved to deal with the conditions we encountered as Stone Age hunter-gatherers.  Our ability to learn collectively and transmit knowledge across generations gave us the astonishing capacities (for good and ill)  that we have today.  It also gave us a level of self-awareness and a capacity for self-reflection that is the source of our pain over what we now face.

Perhaps what we are witnessing now is the logical outcome of the evolutionary branch that led our species down the path of collective learning. Perhaps we are on the verge of burning out, going down in a blaze of glory like any other animal that found itself on an evolutionary dead end path. Do we honestly think humanity will still be around a million years from now?  A million years is a blink of an eye in geologic deep time.  The dinosaurs survived for tens of millions of years before being wiped out by forces beyond their control.  And humanity? Maybe the species with the big brain over-reached… and will quickly die off (in the deep time view).

So, maybe this is “natural” after all.  Earth will recover. Earth will heal. But it will be on a timescale far beyond a human lifespan, and we won’t be around to witness it.

Does any of this help us now?  Maybe a little.  Seeing myself for what I am (an evolved animal with the mental capacity for abstract thought) helps me be gentle with myself in my grief, and helps me work through it all and process what is happening.

Seeing where I fit in the big picture of the history of planet Earth (about 6 billion years) and the universe (about 13.7 billion years) helps me put it all in context. I am a tiny blip of consciousness in this vast expanse of All That Is.  Humanity is a slightly larger (although still pretty tiny) blip.

Of course, we live our lives on a much smaller scale than deep time, and I have barely scratched the surface in this post.  There is so much more physical, mental, and emotional work to do as we face our future.  But that is for another time.

Rebecca  is the author of  The Sustainable Soul:  Eco-Spiritual Reflections and Practices. 

But does that mean that the observation is a religious one? Well, it can be, but it doesn’t have to be.  It’s well known that the date for the celebration of Christmas was chosen  in the 4th century C.E. to coincide with solstice celebrations, in an attempt to sway converts to the new religion.  And that is all well and fine, since one of Jesus’ biblical titles is “light of the world,” symbolism which coincided nicely with festivals of the returning (unconquered) sun.  Around the world, many cultures acknowledge the solstice with festivals that have some religious connotation.

Today, neopagans of many stripes have reclaimed the celebration of the solstice, and sought to revive pre-Christian traditions or create new ones.  Every year, beautiful ceremonies are held at places such as Stonehenge in England, attended by various groups of Druids and other pagans.  Depending upon the group and its beliefs, any number of  diverse Gods and Goddesses may be invoked at these ceremonies. The pagan holiday associated with solstice is called “Yule” in English.  The connection of Yule to Christmas is as clear as a starry night, and there are many overlapping traditions (such as holly, evergreens, and the like).  And this is also well and fine. December is big enough for all manner of revelry.

I tend to separate the natural fact and observation of  Solstice from celebrations of Yule and Christmas.  Historically, religion has been incredibly divisive in the broad sweep of human history.  From ancient times, the “my god is bigger than your god” argument has been at the root of countless bloody conflicts. Another familiar argument is, “my God is the only god.” How many thousands have perished as a result of that particular train of thought?

In America where I live, the holiday season has devolved into petty so-called culture wars that pit the “Jesus is the reason for the season” crowd against the “Christmas isn’t the only holiday in December” bunch.  If a store has a Happy Holidays sign (instead of Merry Christmas), it is seen as an affront to some.  And vice versa.

The last thing I want to do is to stoke the fires of religious divisiveness.

I think that Solstice, as a simple, natural lived event can help us transcend religious arguments.  We all experience the deepening darkness, and the returning light, regardless of religious affiliation (or not!). Pausing to reconnect with the Earth in its moment of turning is an experience open to us all. It’s not a religious thing…it’s a living-on-Earth thing.  And it doesn’t have to detract from the other celebrations in our lives.  It only adds depth and meaning, and helps to balance the excessive commercialism of this time of year.

Religious or not, I invite you to acknowledge the solstice in your own way. I invite you to note this natural event, the source of celebration for many, and in so doing, reconnect not only with the natural world, but with our human ancestors stretching back into the deep past.  The solstice was probably acknowledged and celebrated even back in the Paleolithic by the earliest humans.  For them, the returning sun meant survival, joy and hope.  Is it so different for us?

So, Merry Christmas and Blessed Yule to those who celebrate them.  And a Happy Solstice to all my brothers and sisters in the family of humanity.

Rebecca is the author of The Sustainable Soul:  Eco-Spiritual Reflections and Practices

Photo Credit: flickr user kevin dooley at creativecommons.org

The experience of change that sort of sneaks up on us is a
common one in our busy world. Looking in the mirror, I realize that (oh my!) I am middle-aged. When did that happen? And children! If there is a child in your life who you don’t see very often, you know the feeling of looking into a much-more-grown-up face than you remembered from the last visit. Change happens. Subtle. Steady.  Constant.

Often, we experience change in sudden bursts of awareness because most we are so busy with all the stuff of our lives that we lose conscious awareness of the passage of time. When that happens, it feels like the days drag on, but the years fly by. Know what I mean?

Our ancestors who lived in close awareness of the seasons probably didn’t experience time this way.  The experience of time rushing by is a product of our modern culture.  We live our lives by the clock, with the incessant pressure to move and change ever faster.  In the industrialized world, we are slaves to the pace of our times.

The ancestors  experienced time as both cyclic and linear:  cyclic in the sense of the seasons that repeated every year, and linear in the experience of their own aging and the aging of those around them. Today, by contrast, we are immersed in the linear and pay scant attention to the cyclic.  This is a great loss.

Even if you are not a regular solstice observer, this year I invite you to try a simple ritual. Find a quiet moment, and light a candle. Sit for a while, pondering the light, and consider change and the passage of time in a conscious way. Imagine the Earth tilting as far away from the sun as it  will go, then slowly beginning to tilt back. Feel that shift deep in your bones. Acknowledge the changes in your own life. Sense the changing seasons.  When you cultivate an awareness of change and cyclic time, you will find that the “oh my where did the time go?” sensation will lessen, and you will live deeply and fully. This is the gift of the solstice for you.

Rebecca is the author of The Sustainable Soul:  Eco-Spiritual Reflections and Practices 

Photo Credit:  “Time Spiral” by flickr user gadi at www.creativecommons.org

Yes, yes… I know.  But the fact is that I still have to pay my bills (I am the 99%), and writing provides a portion of my income.

This year, I will purchase some holiday gifts, and chances are you will too.  I will also try to make my purchases do some good beyond just enriching the stockholders of big box stores.  So, I shop at small businesses as much as possible, I shop fair trade, and I give some homemade gifts.  Maybe you do too.

If there’s someone on your gift list who is ecologically minded, spiritually minded (or both), consider The Sustainable Soul: Eco-Spiritual Reflections and Practices  as a holiday gift.  You can order it through your local bookstore  (print ISBN : 978-1-55896-605-5), or as an e-book download from Amazon if you prefer your reading material tree-free.  If you purchase it from a small independent bookstore, you will not only support that bookstore, but also a small publisher (not a big publishing conglomerate), and of course myself as the author.  I donate 5% of my net royalties from my writing directly to organizations that are committed to preserving and restoring the Earth.  Check out the “Environmental Committment” tab on my website for a list of organizations I support.

To sweeten the pot, I will gladly write an inscription for your gift. Just email me (rebeccahecking@earthlink.net) with your address, who the gift is for, and I will write a special note on a suitably decorative sticker to be placed inside your gift book, and zip it off to you by old fashioned snail mail.  If you would prefer an actual signed book over the sticker option, email me and we can work something out.

Consider also purchasing a copy for your community or church library, or your book discussion group.  It can help facilitate deep conversations about the environment, and how to create a mindful, eco-friendly, spiritual life. Here’s what people are saying:

“A valuable reminder that this environmental crisis-and our response to it-must exist in many dimensions. Here’s a deep take on how to make that happen.”  Bill McKibbon: author, activist and  founder of 350.org

“With empathy and pentetrating insight, Rebecca James Hecking helps all of us, whatever our background or beliefs, become more intimate with the natural world-and with ourselves. She knows that soul-nourishing communion with the divine is about right relationship to the larger body of life. May this book inspire a generation of heart-led, visionary activists.”  Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution

“This book beautifully participates ini what Thomas Berry has named the Great Work of our time, providing an excellent ‘how-to’ for groups and individuals seeking to meet the ecological urgency in renewed relationship with Earth and Cosmos and self.” Australian activist and author of PaGaian Cosmology, Glenys Livingstone

Thank you for your support, and happy holidays.

Topping my personal gratitude list is the Earth itself, its life-giving processes, its rich evolutionary history, its place in the cosmos… Our relationship to the Earth in a way mirrors Americans’ relationship to our history. There is plenty of unpleasantness to acknowledge, and plenty for which to atone.  Ecological destruction, global warming, mass extinctions: the list could go on and on.  It feels hypocritical to celebrate the Earth while the destruction hasn’t even slowed down, much less ceased.

But perhaps the celebration holds the key to healing.  Within gratitude, we find love that moves us to change. Cultivating gratitude for the Earth and celebrating its beauty is worth doing, despite our part in its destruction, and so we do, and in the doing, we turn towards healing and renewal.

As I pause at my table tomorrow, I will cast a blessing back through time, honoring the spirit of those who walked this land centuries before me.  I will do what I can to make amends, to heal the Earth. And all the while I will be thankful.

Green blessings of this moment to you.

As I wrote in my last post, The Blog is Occupied, we are deeply enmeshed in systems beyond our control that limit our ability to make meaningful change on a large scale.   Like I said, I see little reason for hope.

In their darkest dreams, I would bet that Al Gore and Bill McKibbon feel the same way, although they dare not say it out loud.

So now what?

For better or worse, we are here, still living our lives in the shadow of all this impending doom.  We still have to look our children in the eye and encourage them when they are sad. We still have to attend to the daily business of putting food on the table and a roof over our heads. We still have to care for our elders,  tend to the sick,  help those who need it, feed the dog, brush our teeth…  We still have a life. Impending doom or no, we are still here.

Even without impending climate doom, we all really live in a shadow all the time, but we tend not to talk about it and we try not to think about it either.  That shadow is our own mortality.  Someday, I will die. You will die. Our children will die. Their children will die. The only question is when and how, not if.  Death and life go hand in hand, but in our modern industrialized culture, we worship youth and pretend death doesn’t exist.

I think that pondering our own mortality can actually help us deal with whatever ecological future awaits us.  Ask a terminally ill person about their condition, and the response is likely to be that the illness caused them to sort out what is really important in life from what is not.  Relationships with loved ones become central. Simple pleasures become profound. Fluff and false values  fall away. Only the real remains.

Facing our own mortality, even if it is not as imminent as for a terminally ill person, can help us sort out of our values too. What is truly meaningful for us? What is most important? How do we wish to spend our limited time?  To quote Mary Oliver, “What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

By facing climate reality, we can expand these questions to include our relationship with the Earth.  How do we wish to live? Are our ecological values a part of the core of who we are? What does that mean for our lives? I don’t think the Earth itself is in a terminal state (at least on the timescale of the next few million years). Earth will adapt, and go on. New species will evolve to live in a changed climate. Change is the fuel of evolution.  Earth will heal, mostly after humanity has met its collective mortality as an extinct species.

Does that mean that all our eco-efforts are in vain? Does that mean that we should give up and not work to limit the damage of climate change in our own lives and the lives of our children?  Or cease our activism entirely? Absolutely not.

By doing what we can, both as individuals and groups, we can live with integrity toward the Earth itself. We can let go of the individual guilt that ecologically aware people tend to feel. We can live day to day, counting our conscious relationship to the Earth among the most meaningful in our lives.

The serenity prayer may be a cliche, but its wise advice to do what we can and not confuse it with what is beyond our control is very applicable to our lives on a changing Earth.

This is life beyond rosy-glasses hope. This is real life. Lived with integrity. Lived with honesty and guts. No matter what happens.  Do what you can. Lose the guilt over things beyond your control.  Each of us is here, awake and alive in this tiny splash of time in the ocean of Earth’s history. We are part of a grander story that stretches beyond us into the deep past and far-distant future. So we treasure our days. We treasure our relationships. We treasure the simple pleasures of gazing at the moon or watching a bird at the feeder. We walk the sacred green Earth with integrity.

No matter what.

The key stumbling block to long term environmental  and economic solutions is the fact that we (the people of the industrialized world) are entangled in incredibly complex systems that are mostly beyond our control. I’ve had some extra thinking time lately.  Last Thursday, I had a second knee surgery and in my medication-induced fog,  I found myself mentally wandering through the convoluted systems that are the default settings for our society.

In our economic system, most of us need a job to provide ourselves with the basics of life. (yes, yes… I know about zero-impact freecyclers who thrive at the edges of the culture…but without the excess of the culture, how would they live?)  Even if  I decide to go totally off-grid, I need the basics of food, clothing and shelter. I need land on which to build my sustainable, eco-friendly straw-bale house, not to mention materials. For that, I need money. And for that, I need a source of money. Lacking a wealthy (and generous) great-aunt, I am left to my own devices, looking for a job.

For my job search, I need a phone, transportation,  decent clothes to wear to my interviews,  and the same old baseline needs for food and shelter while I search.  Back to square one.

Already,  just in my hopes to raise some money to buy my land on which I will build my wonderful eco-off-the-grid house, I find myself entangled in the system.  I buy a cell phone… now I’m enmeshed in everything from rare-earth minerals mining in Africa to plastics manufacturing in Asia. I’m indirectly involved in petroleum drilling (to make that plastic) in the Gulf of Mexico,  coal mining in Appalachia (powers the electrical utility so I can charge my phone), and the financial sector since I need a credit card to purchase a usage plan.

Oy vey!!

And that’s just the stupid little phone.  I haven’t even considered having  a meal or dressing myself or any of a million other entanglements that are part and parcel of our everyday lives. We live with a level of complexity that most of us barely glimpse, like fish unware of the ocean in which we swim. And those systems? My little cell-phone thought experiment already put me in touch with Big Oil, finance, mining, and chemicals manufacturing.  These are not exactly eco-friendly industries.  And yet, here I am.  Here we all are.

The “Occupy” movement is on the right track, seeking economic justice by exposing the systems that perpetuate the status quo.  They are absolutely correct when they assert that for a just and sustainable culture to emerge, everything must change.  And I do mean everything.

The trajectory of the status quo, where ever more complex, entangled systems predicated on perpetually increasing consumption enrich the very few at the expense of the biosphere itself… well, it’s only a matter of time before the whole edifice collapses under the weight of its own complexity and ecocidal tendencies.

In my last entry, I made the point that ”the needs of the Earth are primary.”   I didn’t mean  “the needs of the Earth must be primary in our political agenda,” or “the needs of the Earth must be taken into consideration.”  The needs of the Earth are primary.  If Earth’s life support systems collapse, all our complicated economic systems are immediately rendered irrelevant, along with our species.

Because you see, we are entangled in other systems as well. Not just complicated economic supply chains. We are deeply, permanently and inextricably enmeshed in fantastic, delicate, resilient, interdependent systems like the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the carbon cycle. We live in symbiosis with billions of microscopic life forms that colonize our very bodies, and without which we could not survive. We depend on photosynthesis, cellular respiration, and DNA transcription.  We depend far more than we realize on ocean tides, fungal decomposition, and the albedo effect.

So we are faced with the tasks of dismantling our destructive economic system, re-imagining a more sustainable and life giving one while at the same time doing all we can to nurture the natural biospheric systems upon which all life depends.  What a task. No wonder we have moments where we’d just rather hide under the covers rather than face it all.

In the end, this is a challenge that is beyond our leaders. It is beyond our political systems. It is beyond any corporation. It is beyond any person.  But it cannot, it must not be beyond all of us together.  Each of us must, in our own way and in our own sphere of influence, act immediately and decisively to challenge and dismantle destructive, life-destroying economic and social systems while supporting and nurturing life-sustaining Earth systems.

How, exactly, can we supply our basic needs while nourishing our souls and healing our planet?  What is your part in this grand venture, the Great Work of our time?

Occupy the possibilities.  Make them reality.

Photo Credit: “Signs of Life” by flickr user sinisterbluebox at www.creativecommons.org

Sending love and light, kudos and applause, good energy and huzzahs!  God bless!  All the best! Don’t stop!  As a humble admirer, I offer a few brief sound bite ideas for your consideration.  I applaud your attempts to move the public discourse beyond the usual snippets of drivel and into serious discussion, but sadly we are a sound bite society, and it seems that the message gets lost in the media.

So, in the spirit of clear communication, I suggest that we all coalesce around the following three simple points:

1) Revoke corporate personhood.

2) Stop the massive flow of cash and power to the 1%.

3) The needs of the Earth are primary.

Okay. There are your bumperstickers.  To elaborate a bit on points 1 and 2:  since the 80s, the powers that be in the US have systematically dismantled the legal structures that reined in the worst of capitalism’s excesses.  Without checks and balances (such as a robust estate tax and financial regulation), the system has run amok, and the politicians of both parties have become corporate shills.  We must revoke corporate personhood, restore checks and balances, and never again fall for the lie of “trickle down” prosperity.

Now, to number 3. And this is the global one. We are fast bumping into the absolute ecological limits of the planet that sustains us in the most literal way.   This is science, folks, not politics. Even if you don’t “believe” in it, it is reality. A few hundred years ago, many people didn’t “believe” that the Earth circled the sun, either…but that didn’t change the reality. But, I digress.  We must place the restoration of the Earth and its systems at the absolute center of all that we do, at all levels (personal, local, national, global…).  All the protesting and legal restructuring in the world won’t be worth a penny in the end if we utterly destroy our home.

There. That’s brief enough for our collective short attention span…I hope.

Again, kudos, applause and best wishes!  Go for it! We are with you.

Love,

Rebecca

p.s.  And one more thing… pass this one around! I usually don’t ask readers to do this, but maybe if you do, it will reach someone in the protests.  Thank you!!