A Prayer from Rob Brezny

[ken becker]

A prayer:

Oh Wise Trickster Goddess, You Compassionate Conjurer of Relentless Change, You Righteous Rascal in Charge of Keeping a Steady Flow of Sacred Uproar Pouring into Our Lives:

Please continue to influence the masters of plutocracy and war and their media minions to be ever-more obvious as they spin out their perversions of your glorious creation, so that more and more of our sleeping tribe will wake up to the Open Secret.

Inspire the enforcers of mass hallucination to display their hypocrisy in an ever-escalating melodrama of spittle flecks and sour faces, as in a slapstick morality play from the Middle Ages, so that we, their captive audience, may convulse with purgative guffaws that shatter the mass hallucination.

And if you don't mind, Sweet Divine Rebel Goddess, please allow us to nurture a spark of hope that the breakdown in the Way Things Have Always Been Done will lead to fresh, hot, tidal-wave breakthroughs of beauty, truth, justice, equality and love everywhere we turn.

And now, in my capacity as Sacred Janitor of the Invisible Government of Sweaty Meditation, I hereby declare the entire United States of America a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

As formulated by writer Hakim Bey, a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) is any festive event that liberates the imaginations of everyone present, thereby making it possible for life to be penetrated by the Marvelous. Authority and dignity and routine have no place at a TAZ; an uninhibited quest for rabble-rousing conviviality must be the only guideline. (See Bey's website.)

Here are a few suggestions, mostly from Bey, to get you started in creating your own local celebration of TAZ. Feel free to dream up your own, and make sure to tell me about them. (Send your emails to [e-mail].)

Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence and spiritual beauty. Burglarize houses, but instead of stealing, leave behind beautiful and confusing gifts. Spread gossip about the unsung genius of people who don't get nearly enough credit for their good work.

Take a few friends and a boom box to an all-night grocery store and engage in ecstatic, whirling dervish-style dancing in the aisles until you're thrown out. Scrawl the following graffiti in courthouse lavatories and on playground walls: "I dare you to scare yourself with how beautiful you are."

Pick people at random, says Bey, and convince them they're the heirs to an enormous, useless, and amazing fortune—say, 5,000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or a leper colony in India, or a collection of alchemical manuscripts. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, and will perhaps be driven to cultivate a more intense quest for exhilarating adventures.

Scrawl the following poem by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) in courthouse lavatories, on playground walls, and through e-mail lists:

AT THIS PARTY

I don't want to be the only one here
Telling all the secrets --

Filling up all the bowls at this party,
Taking all the laughs.

I would like you
To start putting things on the table
That can also feed the soul
The way I do.

That way
We can invite

A hell of a lot more
Friends.

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