I'm spending the month of June co-teaching a seminar at Esalen on the history of the Human Potential Movement and what lessons and tools might be useful for a modern day radical mental health movement. That's not actually the full description of what the course is about, but that's the focus I'm bringing to the table from my years working with the Icarus Project and being involved in radical anti-capitalist organizing...

just a scratch of a journal entry, a reminder of a glimpse into the other realm.

Here, I have something for you: it’s an old box of stories I’ve been carrying around for way too long. I want you to have them, it’s time for me to let go. It’s time for me to move on. If you see glimmers of yourself in them it’s because you actually wrote them years ago and told me to hang onto them for you and wait till the right time. Well the time is now. Can you feel the hairs on the back of your neck standing up like that cat that just walked by? Are you ready to take this to the next level? Step into the Present and lets see what we can do…

and it's rough. it's all posts on the icarus discussion forums from the winter and the spring. i'll come back and format it better, maybe edit some.

it's like some kind of spiral dance,  a manic-depressive schitzo-coaster spiral dance of fate. it's familiar, like i've been here before in a different life and i already know the path. there are a lot of us dancing to our mad music, and we're figuring out how to be together and work together and live together in ways that have never been tried. this place really is like a bridge between worlds where our stories connect to one another. i feel you all out there from this little kitchen in brooklyn, at least i imagine i do. whenever i'm about to finish a little piece of writing like this it always somehow feels like i'm connected into the collective consciousness and i'm moving upwards. like i'm spiral bound, connected to people i've known in the past and places that we've been too before.

As a mad activist with an analysis of collective trauma, it seems painfully clear to me that my people, who have been so oppressed throughout history and most recently under Nazi Germany, are acting out the role of oppressor in the same way a traumatized individual will lash out and perpetuate the cycle of violence with the people in their life. In the same way that I’ve come to believe that the hardest and scariest parts of ourselves hold the secret keys to our problems, I think that politically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the equivalent of our darkest fears and secrets. It’s as ugly as it gets and we have to stare it in the face and take action or else in the long run it will destroy anything good and just we are working towards.

For years the tension of being a bunch of radical anarchists trying to influence the dominant culture while staying out of it ourselves has been one of the most interesting aspects of working on the Icarus Project. Early on we developed a metaphor to talk about our role in the movement, that of the dandelion pulling the good stuff up from the underground with its deep taproots, influencing the mainstream culture to evolve the way soil structure builds and changes, slowly over time.