Are You Having a Lovely Occupation? Three Months of Resilience at Occupy Wall Street

What if all your heart ever did was break? What if it broke open so wide the whole world fell in?

When I studied Art History as an undergrad, I took a class on aesthetic theory and contemporary art criticism called “Looking Between the Lines.” On the first day of class, we made a list of words that we'd frequently heard in reviews of art shows. Our professor wrote them on the chalk board, and then instructed us that we were never to use any of these words in anything we wrote or said in that class. How could I write an essay about a painting I'd seen without using the word “juxtapose?” This project forced me to actually investigate my relationship to the painting instead of relying on words that had essentially lost their meaning and become crutches through too frequent use.

I was thinking about attempting to write about my experience with the Occupy Wall Street movement, but wanted to make sure I didn't fall into this same trap. Could I write about these past few months without relying on soundbites I'd picked up along the way? Could I express my thoughts on the entire thing without having to rely on the oft-used terms “process,” “inequality,” “nonviolence” or “justice?” To do so I might explore my personal relationship to the occupation.

Taking My Seat

Walking Meditation from Foley Square to Liberty Plaza GA Dec 3, 2011 (photo by Michael Coniaris)

When Occupy Wall Street started back in September, I was employed at an e-Book publisher doing design work. My co-workers snickered at the futility of protesting and openly mocked what was starting to take place at Liberty Plaza. As someone who'd been politically active at a young age but had eventually burned out on the previous model of protesting, I also wondered about the futility of a protest. But I also wondered something else. “I hope this movement becomes like something of a radical zombie movie,” I said to my best friend. “I hope slowly, more and more people descend on that park. I hope it grows slowly and eventually reaches a critical mass.”

And isn't that what happened? I was let go from my e-Book job, as I'd been let go from so many jobs since the economic collapse. But within a few weeks I began working at IDP, which had at that point been where I practiced meditation and took Buddhist studies classes for almost two years. I was brought on board for full time work at IDP right around the same time as the one-month anniversary of the occupation of Liberty Plaza. It was exciting to me to be able to work for an organization that I felt had given me so much already. When I found IDP two years prior, it had felt like a homecoming. And now, being able to sustain myself financially by helping our group thrive felt like refuge from an increasingly hostile economic situation. As Occupy Wall Street gained footing, I found myself thinking that absolutely everyone should be able to experience what I was experiencing. Everyone should be able to sustain themselves and their families financially doing something they love. People should not be punished for seeking to thrive, punished through predatory lending practices, through having their homes forcefully taken from them, punished by the ever-encroaching fantasy of infinite growth at the expense of the lower and now the middle classes.

Sleeping in the Concrete Forest Under the Vast Expanse of the Sky

My co-worker and friend Lani Rowe put out a message on Facebook asking if anyone wanted to sleep down at the park with her that week. I still wasn't really sure what, exactly, Occupy Wall Street was about. Buddhism had taught me the value of direct experience, so I was eager to get down there and see for myself. I'd been an active feminist for years, and had more recently taken an interest in environmental issues. Through IDP's Prison Project I'd become interested in issues of mass incarceration, and through friends who'd become interested in farming I'd done some advocacy on behalf of small agriculture. But where and how could all these things meet? As someone who had studied public art and space, I knew I instinctually agreed with any group that demanded to reclaim public space. And I knew that the disparity between the upper classes who were parasitically extracting funds from the rest of us while we couldn't even find jobs was certainly something to address. But I needed to go down to Liberty Plaza to find out for myself what it meant to occupy space.

In Buddhism we are told to take our seat. That night, the one-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street's taking of Liberty Plaza, Lani and I took our seats for the night. Actually, we slept in sleepingbags on the concrete, under the stars. We crossed paths with a Pro-Choice Catholic Anarchist named Joey, who welcomed us into his little portion of the camp. They only had two rules, which were written in Sharpie on a piece of cardboard: No assholes, and keep it down after 10 pm. I slept next to a man who, after introducing himself, said “The cops here know who I am. I've been occupying this park and others like it since 1983. Welcome.”

We woke up to rain. At one point in the night, the police had been ordered to seize the occupation's medical tent. People formed a human chain around it and at the last minute Jesse Jackson appeared to tell the police to step down or arrest him with the occupiers. It was really revelatory to see the NYPD back off of a situation due to the convergence of a number of people using the tactic of linking arms. The morning felt different, like this temporary autonomous zone was truly a space out of what we'd come, through corporate indoctrination, to think of as the natural order of things.

An Activist Rhizome

As IDP became involved in doing sits down at Liberty Plaza, I started to see how this horizontal structure of mutual support created by Occupy Wall Street, which leveraged social media not merely to draw attention but also to manifest action, incorporated all of the issues I'd always been trying to reconcile. It was as if everyone with activist inclinations were finally stepping back and looking at the way their personal story or involvement related to the big picture of the failure of infinite financial growth and its impact on everyone.

On the night of the the raid at Liberty Plaza, I stayed up and watched the online livestream footage until 4 am of the NYPD destroying property and abusing the media to prevent them from bringing attention to Mayor Bloomberg's siege of the camp. I was stuck to my computer screen, and headed down early the next day to spend time at Liberty Plaza. The crowd grew as we waited to hear if the occupiers would be allowed back into the tent. The energy built. People pushed at the barriers. Cops punched one woman in the face for showing them a copy of the restraining order which stated that people should be allowed back in the park. Eventually, news came through the National Lawyers Guild that people could re-enter the park, but without tents or bags, and they would not be permitted to lay down.

At one point I looked up and saw author Rebecca Solnit, a writer whose work concerns the interstices where anarchist politics, landscape and environment, and art history meet. I stopped her to say hello, wanting to gush about her books and her recent essay on the Occupy movement had informed my decision to be down there that day. “Are you having a lovely occupation?” she asked. I said yes. “Good, I am too!” she responded and walked off into the crowd of occupiers.

I knew then that I had to be present for the two-month anniversary of the occupation. An entire day of action had been planned for November 17th, starting with an attempt to shut down the New York Stock Exchange and ending with a march over the Brooklyn Bridge. I woke up early and walked quickly down Kent Avenue toward the subway to Manhattan. The view of the Manhattan skyline immediately pre-sunrise was dotted with stationery helicopters. I felt impelled almost by an invisible hand toward Liberty Plaza.

#N17: A Day of Action

That day changed me. Moreso than the changes that came with sleeping at Liberty Plaza. I had planned to meet with a friend and we picked up a few more people I knew on the way to shut down the New York Stock Exchange. I'm not sure I can explain to you if you haven't experienced it the feeling of moving through the narrow streets of downtown New York with an enormous crowd of people. We'd get blocked off at one street by police and surge as a group into another. Once we'd reached the checkpoints that were set up to allow those with work identification to pass through, the cops rushed in and began brutalizing the crowd. It's odd maybe to say this but I felt so grateful to be experiencing this situation with a group of women. It'd just worked out that way, that the group that had assembled almost randomly, out of old friends & more recent ones, was completely composed of women. It felt almost like it grated us a forcefield of nearly aggressive feminine beauty. We were fearless, and as a group we put ourselves into a chaotic situation together.

The moment before the police arrived in droves was one of absolute street theater in its purest and most genuine sense. A brass marching band had joined us in the street. They played a waltz, and everyone began dancing. “Come join us! Dance with us!” a girl who was waltzing called to the police. A woman in a red ballgown stood inches from a police officer and sang opera at him in a classically trained voice. It was a feeling like when you're jumping on a trampoline and you reach the height of your jump and feel completely weightless for a second. But in the end, gravity enters into the scenario, and that's when hundreds of cops came in with their riot gear and clubs. The only reason I wasn't hit or arrested in that moment is pure chance. I backed up between the legs of taller protestors and was helped by a few of them up onto the 4 ft ledge of a building, where I stood for the next few hours, watching as police often pulled people off the sidewalk and then charged them for not leaving the street.

Across downtown people were being arrested for taking the streets. We eventually marched back to Liberty Plaza where the group decided on whether to stay at the park or head up to Union Square. At this point I headed back to IDP because, hey, non-profits don't organize themselves. I wrote our newsletter and wrote e-mails all while tethered, again, to the livestream footage of the continued day of action.

At 6, I left IDP and headed down to Foley Square to meet my best friend. “All of the things we used to talk about,” I said. “They're happening.” Jim and I had met ten years earlier and bonded over a love of performance art, the Situationists, anarchy, film, all the places where life, art, & activism overlap. And now we were going to march over the Brooklyn Bridge. We joined what I am told was around 35,000 people at the base of the bridge. I received text messages that some people were being arrested. And here's the part that had the greatest impact on my psyche: we really didn't think we were going to make it over the bridge. We couldn't see anything except thousands of people hemmed in by police on horses. And what are police horses really for aside from trampling protestors? We joined the crowd, not knowing what would happen.

View from the Brooklyn Bridge during the #N17 March

When we got onto the bridge, there was a moment of silence out of the disbelief that it was actually happening. We were actually on the bridge, and we were moving forward. As we moved forward on the bridge, toward Brooklyn, it sank in. Something I couldn't even wrap my head around due to years worth of watching protests get dismantled by the police, due to whatever mental constraints I had placed on my own mind, I just didn't think it was possible. But it was happening. Cars on the bridge honked in solidarity. In that moment, a huge shift happened inside of me. I realized on an emotional level that just because I can't imagine something, doesn't mean it isn't possible. There are so many unknowns, the places where our mental map turns into an expanse of infinite sea. But in that hazy distance of the unknown is space, and space is dense with potential.

Resilience

I'd started meditating because I wanted to know that if there were another 9/11 in New York, that I could be someone who at the very least wouldn't be a drain on the resources of others by breaking down and freaking out. At best I hoped I could be someone who would reduce the suffering of others. So I prepared myself mentally and attempted to ease my heightened anxiety with the acceptance of self and world that a regular meditation practice provided for me.

But New York didn't have another 9/11. We had the financial collapse, as has the rest of the world. It has been a slower and more insidious disaster, and watching Occupy Wall Street's slow and building response take form over the past few months has healed the personal scars I bore from witnessing 9/11 in Lower Manhattan. That, also, is not something I really ever expected to happen. The scar tissue formed over my heart after watching the World Trade Center fall from 12th street was dismantled by that march over the Brooklyn Bridge. It felt like a spontaneous growth of rapidly growing vines tearing apart an old abandoned house. My heart broke open so wide that the whole world fell in.

Instead of talking about the way that Occupy Wall Street is more of an emergent process than a movement, and that I cringe every time I hear someone say “Occupy Wall Street should...” I want to take a second to talk about resilience and inclusivity. I am astonished, regularly, by Occupy Wall Street's resilience. I saw a sign online that said “Occupy will never die. When you evict, we multiply.” I experienced this directly when the livestream footage of Liberty Plaza being evicted fortified me in my decision to remain as involved as possible with OWS's unfolding. It clarified things for me. Instead of choosing this or that issue that I am concerned about, say the Keystone Pipeline or Big Agriculture, the picture opened up. I stepped back and saw that OWS was addressing the gestalt, the systemic abuse of humans. Not just women, not just the poor, not just people of color, not just gays, but people, and MOST of us, could see our connection in being abused. OWS began providing a networked, horizontal method of addressing this.

Resilience is something I knew I had to develop personally and Buddhism seemed to me to be the best way to do so when I first began practicing a few years ago. I merely wanted to know how better to cope with the seemingly torrential influx of pain and chaos involved in being a person. I got to the point where my habitual way of dealing with these stresses just wasn't working anymore. So I had to try something new. I had to try sitting on my ass for an apportioned amount of time per day. And for the time I wasn't just sitting, I had to exert the effort to cultivate positive feedback loops: of laughter, of being a better friend, of being gentle with myself and with strangers. Doing this work has indeed made me more resilient in the face of problems that might arise. And it has made me more open to new opportunities.

IDP's idea of integral activism, that to change ourselves we can change the world, has certainly been key in my involvement with OWS. I've been working on my own mind and now can't help but see the ways that I not just can but must involve myself. By learning to think of myself as someone who is worthy of respect and kindness even merely from myself, it follows that I then know that all other sentient beings are people who deserve the same, and that this ideal is something to stand-up for. This is why the world needs you to be brave enough to like yourself.

Three Months, Three Jewels

This Saturday, December 17th, is the three-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. I have spent, along with my sangha, my friends, co-workers, teachers, and twitter followers, three whole months bringing mindfulness to activists, acting in accordance with my personal values of compassion and transformative action. I have participated in sits and walking meditations at Occupy Wall Street, I have met and befriended amazing and creative people like Anne Waldman, I have run into old friends I never thought I'd see again. I have made new friends and had ephemeral chance encounters with strangers that were charged with meaning and propelled me forward with their strangeness and beauty. We have sat in on General Assemblies, and we have begun to occupy our own bodies because being yourself as genuinely and fearlessly as possible is something that will lay waste to oppressive systems of social control.

For this three-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, people are meeting at Duarte Sq at Noon in order to make known that this is a resilient movement and that we are not going anywhere. I invite you to join me on Saturday. As I learned on the Brooklyn Bridge, the world is just full of so many unknowns and is thus crackling with potential. When we combine our intention and will, there is no limit to what we can do. Another world is possible whether you believe it or not. Belief is almost beside the point. Action, however, is the key. We are on the cusp of something big, and this is just the beginning. So get active with me. Let's link arms.

I'll see you at the square.

Saturday, Dec 17th at 12pm
Duarte Sq. Park, 6th Ave & Canal
PROTECT & CELEBRATE THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

(Intense amounts of Metta to my entire IDP sangha, everyone I've met or re-connected with through Occupy Wall Street, everyone who has read this, everyone who gives a shit. It is hard sometimes to be a person, so I thank you for doing so.)