Rise & Root

This image, Rise & Root, is from The Hermitage blog, which I know nothing about, via my blog friend Annie of This & That with Artichoke Annie. Something about it really speaks to me even though as vaguely political images go it's earthier and less specific than my usual idea of good propaganda. But who hasn't pondered the magic of majestic trees rising above, their equally majestic root systems remaining secret and unseen below? As Annie says, "perhaps [it's] a symbol that this new year 2012 will be one of change, perhaps a year where fights will be won, a year where growth in the humaneness of humankind will be seen."

There's bound to be lots of ugliness this year, but this mandala-like artwork speaks to the possibilities that have been revealed for changing that ugliness. I've been continuing to work with my local Brooklyn "Occupy" chapter — a longer report here soon, I promise — and the one thing that keeps sticking with me is how what can easily be dismissed as the same old community activism is actually something profoundly deeper, like the roots on these trees, something much more sophisticated than the political activism I have witnessed before. In rejecting easy ideology in favor of a profoundly revolutionary sense of autonomous optimism and determination, the movement being created is something more organic and more radical than anything that has taken root in years. I'm meeting young people with a sophisticated grasp of, well, class warfare in a way that disarms many of the ideological arguments I've seen the left waste its time on for decades.

So yes, against blandness and conformity...otherness, black earth and imagination.