TRICKSTER

TRICKSTER

The gift of Trickster is to remake the world in new terms. With the multiple gifts of uproar over a virus and upheaval over police brutality, new truths are surfacing. Our racist President now lives at 1600 Black Lives Matter Plaza. The fence he had erected to secure the perimeter of the White House - the People's house - started as a high, barren hurricane fence. Today it is a vivid collage of ever-changing art: layer after layer of public emotion, displayed loudly and in defiance of our cold clod of a leader.

Tricksters love to lie. It is part of how they remake reality. Trump excels at this, but, as happen in most Trickster stories, he has met his comeuppance in a twist only the most brazen writer would suggest: he is becoming irrelevant. At the Woman's March the day after his inauguration his name was everywhere; this time I haven't seen a single sign with his name on it. He is a pathological narcissist, and his greatest fear is that he will be eclipsed for even a nano-second. Attention is his oxygen and he is being deprived of it - ironic, since George Floyd died literally from lack of breath. Trump's meaning in history is being re-written by a global outpouring of love and passion for the kind of person Trump has spent his life ignoring or incarcerating: a black man with little money or power. George Floyd is the very antithesis of what Trump uses to make his claim to power - that he, and those he installs in positions in his cabinet, are rich and white.

Here is Trickster in his finest hour, tripping the powerful on the entrails of their own vanity and recklessness.

Chance and accident are key elements of Trickster power, plus the descent into chaos that comes with them. During these past months, we who could nestled in our shelters. Those people who we have kept from warm fires found their lives spiraling out of control - the homeless, the poor, those who lost their jobs and, with that loss, their healthcare. I stayed in my house but many had no house, or houses they weren't safe in. I tried to minimize the tumultuous gift of trickster and the pandora box loosened on the world through pandemic. I've been successful but there are more than 2 million cases of Covid-19 today in America and over 113,000 people have died. Poverty is what connects the majority of casualties.

After almost three months in quarantine, we thought we were going to find out what “new normal” looks like. Suddenly, a video of a man being choked to death went out on a second viral path. Like a tsunami that doesn't care if you are emperor, the Great Disruptor in the White House was disrupted by both viruses.

The Trickster in me is delighted. It is the power of privilege that I can stay inside and cheer on the new disruptors, the kids exploding out of sheltering-in-place and filling the streets with what I thought was a casualty of this time: moral courage. En masse they fill the vacuum left by our spineless leaders. They chant, sing, pray, dance, walk, cry, yell. They lean on each other. They fuse as a mass. Their heat comes through my TV and computer screens and I can feel their pulse. They are the living, breathing reminder of why Trickster is the compost maker.  

This is what they are saying to me, one of the old guard: "George Floyd, and men and women like him, died so we may live." This is not a religious statement though it is the basis of all spirituality. It is not a trick, though you can see the hand of the Trickster. It is spring after winter - the eternal cycle of life brilliantly urging forward after death.