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By Root 1281 0

take long for me to realize what I'd done wrong. Wu Wei. I had attempted to force it. I was no longer working with the bees, helping them into a new home, but instead, I was determined to capture these bees no matter their desires. And I was willing to saw a perfectly good limb from the tree for no unselfish reason. No wonder the bees got mad. The tree was probably cheering them on. The whole incident seemed to me a tangible manifestation of the consequences of an unwillingness to listen, of disobeying fundamental rules of neighborly compliance, and on the bees' part, of reasonable resistance to insanity. I apologized to the swarm, and to the tree, and let the swarm go wherever it wanted.

There is another kind of revolution, one that does not emerge from the culture, from philosophy, from theory, from thought abstracted from sense, but instead from our bodies, and from the land. It, too, is a part of this language older than words. It is the honeybee who stings in defense of the larger being that is her hive; it is the mother grizzly who charges again and again the train that took from her the two sons she carried inside, and that mangled their bodies beyond all but motherly recognition; it is the woman who submits to her rapist, knowing it's better to be violated than murdered, but who begins to fight when he reaches for the knife, or the hammer; it is Zapatista spokesperson Cecelia Rodriguez, who says, "I have a question of those men who raped me. Why did you not kill me? It was a mistake to spare my life. I will not shut up . . . this has not traumatized me to the point of paralysis." It is the indigenous Zapatistas, who declare, "There are those who resign themselves to being slaves. .. . But there are those who do not resign themselves, there are those who decide to be uncomfortable, there are those who do not sell themselves, there are those who do not surrender themselves.. . . There are those who decide to fight. In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and that cynicism has dyed grey. Any man, any woman, of whatever color in whatever tongue, says to himself, to herself, 'Enough already!"' It is Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Nigerian government at the urging of Shell Oil, whose last words were, "Lord, take my soul but the struggle continues!" It is the U'wa people of South America, a part of whose community committed mass suicide 400 years ago by walking off a fourteen-hundred-foot cliff rather than submit to Spanish rule, and whose living members today vow to follow their ancestors if Occidental Petroleum and Shell move in to destroy their land. It is the U'wa woman who says, "I sing the traditional songs to my children. I teach them that everything is sacred and linked. How can I tell Shell and Oxy that to take the petrol is for us worse than killing your own mother? If you kill the Earth, then no one will live. I do not want to die. Nobody does." It is anyone who dares to think and speak for him- or herself. It is Nestor Makhno fighting for his Ukrainian homeland and for the autonomy of those who work the land, against the Germans, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Bolsheviks again, the Whites again, and again the Bolsheviks. It is the men and women who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it is those who rebelled at Treblinka. It is Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple. It is the women and men who lock themselves down in front of bulldozers. It is the Chipko movement in India, begun by women who clung tight to trees so the woodmen's axes would bite into their own, and not the trees', flesh. It is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo. It is the salmon battering themselves against the concrete, using the only thing they have, their flesh, to try to break down that which keeps them from their homes.

It is not the attempt to seize power or the industrial "means of production," but it is actions based upon the instinctual drive to survive, and to live with dignity.

This is not