Posts Tagged ‘Israeli apartheid’

My fingers are pierced and sore, typing is a chore.  And more yard-garden work out of the question.  So, I am taking advantage of the ‘wasted’ time to make candles.

Not just any candles.  Candles with nubs of already burnt candles included: candles that were embellished with wax paint and metallic dust and magical sweet scented healing oils.  They were the first batch of candles made to burn to send healing energy to Tristan Anderson, a peace activist from California who was shot in the head with a tear gas cannister as he protested in Israel.

His family and woman at his side, he lies in a hospital in Israel unconscious after three surgeries to address the damage to his brain’s frontal lobe.  He is a member of the Reclaiming pagan group led by Starhawk.  He was not throwing rocks at Israeli troops, he was standing in protest of a wall that America would have disavowed at once had someone in South Africa erected it to keep blacks apart from whites.  Or as America did disavow a wall around West Berlin, designed to constrain Germans from seeking freedom there.  But this wall is to keep Palestinians apart—often from ancestral lands and olive trees that are their livelihood.  And America is silent.  The news media doesn’t talk about this young American who may never be the same if he awakens at all.

So, I pour hot wax into pyramidal molds.  I watch the bits of color and metallic shimmer swirl and tell myself and the universe that what I am seeing is not mere motes of material—but of magic, of force, of Will to endure and prevail against terrible odds.  I will paint more beautiful and potent symbols when the wax hardens. I will chant and dance and put scented oils on anew and hold my breath to see if the flame endures.  The first candles guttered, shuddering with an unseen wind.  I sat up nights to keep them alight.  Now, the flames are steady.

But every flame is vulnerable.  The flame of life, the flames of freedom, the flames of peace.

And also vulnerable are the flames of hate, power, oppression and control.  My flame to counter those….my wind against the dark storms that threaten Tristan and the cause he stood for—the cause he fell for, a cause of life and justice. So I cast—wax into candles, and magic into the world.  For Tristan.

(The center candle is what Tristan’s look like, btw)