PREPENT5772 DAY THIRTY IS IT WORTH IT?

I didn't get arrested, but it was close. Truth is, I didn't want to. This fight is right - but not all fights are worth the price of freedom - not for everyone, not always.

what would you go to jail for, today? what fight? if any?

Down at the Wall St. protests today,  there to show support and solidarity with the anti corporate greed movement, he winds turned cold quickly and the march on the Brooklyn bridge  gets wild and before we know it there is confusion and commotion and people get pushed and there's yelling and shoving and I find myself out of there before I know it.  The friends I came with are split up. Some stay. we all txt to confirm ok. none that we knew then get arrested - and I decide to leave right away. Can't handle the heat and tension and the noise. Sorry. Been there, done that, not today. I hail my friends who are out there, fighting, reporting, passionate, tireless.

I ended up walking alone for several hours, thinking about what it means to be part of a movement, or a march or a nascent budding moment, like drops of water in a wave, and then what does it mean to separate from 'it' as the wave crashes and become - wanting to or not -  what we are  - I am - ultimately about at the end of the day - alone.  

It doesn't help that the rain came and the first real chill of winter in the air.

The moody lighting of a fading Sabbath sun, sometimes romantic, sometimes mysterious, today was a picture of Gothic gloom.  

It did help that in the context of these days of prepenting I had a framework with which to process this emotional street scene, so different than the summer protests I was part of in Israel this past summer - such a different sense of 'we'. 

Embrace the aimless walking, the slow pace, the temporarily-no-obligation-to-anybody-else situation that you are now in, I say to myself, somewhere between Chinatown and Nolita and I start walking even slower, umbrella in hand, and think about what's worth it in my life - what would do I go to jail for? what would be worth it that much? What change would I fight for with as much energy and determination as to risk my freedom? - this which I have right now as  I walk here, totally free to be whatever I want and make every decision?

Being part of a 'we' - from a couple to a nation, will always restructure the sense of the 'me', of what it means to be an individual - of how it feels to sometimes feel alone. So much of our social structures are built around this notion of support systems so that we are not alone. 

but at the end of the day, aren't we always? 

A question with which to go to sleep, on a rainy night, privileged, dry, home, and safe, and alone, and free. 

is THIS worth it?

ten days to go, finding focus, clarity, within.