Dear Everyone,

As I’m sure y’all can tell from the weather it’s just about time for the latest episode of the infamous Winter Gathering! We are so excited to see you, whoever you are, and we figured we ought to send out a little info about the event seeing as it’s supposedly coming up so soon.

July 1st – 3rd in the Irish Hills of South East Michigan. Gates open Friday at 2pm

Relax your breath
lean into yourself
here’s what I know is true
the sun hasn’t left
the sea still has depth
the rain is still wet
try not to forget we’re not so bereft
so here’s a bell that still rings true
there’s still something left, still something left for you
You’re not wrong things are a mess,
but there’s still something left –M.M.  

We usually gather in winter and brood over all the doom and gloom, but after 15 years of that kind of thing this year we are feeling like taking some time to celebrate the good things that are still left of life here in the later years of civilization. The living, growing, communicating earth. The song of the world. The bright summer sun of friendships old and new.  

This gathering has been built on the foundations of beautiful music, wild nature,  critique of civilization, and anarchistic spirituality, but the rest of the building is a nomad’s tent reconstructed anew each year by whoever happens to arrive and whatever they bring. Part cattail, part birch bark, part buffalo hide, part plastic bag. As we daily work to make a home in this place your presence completes something that can never be finished in time, but can be continued in the eternal present. When a bunch of us get together in person we are both the pretty flowers and the pollinators searching for the nectar of the gods, both the neon lights and the thirsty drunks, the songbirds singing, listening and migrating towards community. Point is we need each other, so don’t be a stranger, even if you are one. Hey, there’s always room for one more!

A summer storm absolves us all, and the tent of this gathering is torn, No longer a small shelter, now we are a complex ecosystem. This year you get to explore the landscape at the peak of growth, and green, and light. Renter the living complications of long term friendships. The thorns and the berries that we have been to each other over the years. Make new friends who show up like long lost local species emerging from the seed bank saying “Surprise!”

And what else are you going to do anyway? Go to Cornerstone Music Festival? Ships sailed. I mean the Winter Gathering aint’ no Audio Feed, but I think you’ll still have a good time, and besides it’s free.

What’s better than a summer night with music and friends to cure us of our pointless cynicism? Driving with the windows rolled down. Who cares how much gas costs? Just get here. All the winter gathering really tries to do is open a space, a road to community so we can exchange news face to face in a beautiful place to a good soundtrack with a few activities that serve as conversation pieces set at our communal table. We’ve never planned for the future, but every year someone says, “Hey, do that again!” So, here we go…

There will be an area to pitch a tent. Bring you’re own everything. There will be classes on everything from how to forage wild food to how to identify butterflies, a talk on ecological restoration, lots of music including theillalogicalspoon, and much more!

Contact Jeremy at 517-435-6079 with questions.

Dear friends and family, Happy Valentine’s Day! Here in Michigan the snow and cold remain for now and I am thankful for it. We all know the spring is so beautiful and everything, but it is also a time when life gets so busy again. I, for one, could use a little more time with the dark and stillness of the winter, dreaming by the woodstove. Actually, we have not been idle this season. As some of you know we’ve spent the time we’ve had working on a Little Spoon River album. We recently finished tracking and are now in the mixing phase and are excited to share with you a short clip from the rough mix in progress. Listen here at https://theillalogicalspoon.bandcamp.com/. We hope to be ready to release the CD this summer. This project is probably the closest we’ll ever get to writing an album of love songs, but be warned they are not all fun and games, yet I don’t think they are cynical either. We still believe in the power of love. And we love you, whoever you are, just the way you are. XOXO, Little Spoon River O, here it comes again! Love is a spring wind swirling around and in-between us and all our lovers and even our enemies. I know they say that love is our true home but underneath this Hunger Moon I’m all alone and eating bones I know that there is still nutrition in the marrow I’ve read Walden a couple of times so, “suck it” Henry David Thoreau Right now I can only hear the cracking of the ice the lake is freezing up again I drain another bottle of wine

“To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being…When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups…I want to speak to their souls.”
― John Coltrane

“Music at its best…is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us–beyond language–to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial
heights of our silence. ”

― Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader

A note from our friend Mark Van Steenwyk at the Mennonite Worker in Minneapolis: Here are 10 ways to support the struggle for justice in Minneapolis.

1. Add your voice to this list of demands from Reclaim the Block and Black Visions. 2. Support the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a widely respected bail fund for those arrested in protests against oppression. 3. Support George Floyd’s family on GoFundMe.  4. Support the Black Visions Collective, a grassroots organizing group intent on improving the Cities for black communities. 5. Donate funds to Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. They are directing funds as need. When asked to choose a fund, select “Other” and simply type “Justice.” 6. Support the North Star Health Collective, who is providing street medics during this uprising.  7. Support Reclaim the Block, a group focusing on shifting municipal budgets away from the carceral state and towards needed social services. 8. Support MPD 150 a police abolition group working to support the ongoing institutional struggle to defund/abolish the police in Minneapolis and beyond. 10. Give food, supplies, and funding to CTUL, which is collecting (and giving out) food, formula, masks, household/cleaning supplies, and more. For a no-contact dropoff, leave resources at the door. 3715 Chicago Ave Minneapolis.  Besides these things, join your local protests to add your voice to the cries for justice. And pray, sharpen your compassion, and remain vigilant.   Peace and Resistance, Mark Van Steenwyk Director, the Center for Prophetic Imagination

tired of the news? listen to a fresh perspective on the John Zerzan raido show: https://www.johnzerzan.net/radio/

On Willem Van Spronsen & His Final Statement

By CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective -July 14, 201920637

Statement from CrimethInc. on the recent death of Willem Van Spronsen, who was killed by Tacoma police after attempting to set fire to buses at the Northwest Detention Facility in Tacoma, Washington. Includes a written statement from Spronsen.

On July 13, Willem Van Spronsen was killed by police while apparently taking action to disable the fleet of buses that serve the Northwest Detention Center, a private immigration detainment facility. His final statement, reproduced below, conveys that he was acting in response to the continuous raids and deportations carried out by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE). His action occurred on the one-year anniversary of a hunger strike inside the Northwest Detention Center and an encampment outside. You can read a list of other acts of resistance that have occurred inside the Northwest Detention Center here.

We understand why Willem Van Spronsen decided to give his life to interrupt the violence that is perpetrated against undocumented people in the United States every day.

It is not hyperbole to say that the ICE raids are targeting our friends and neighbors, people who have lived and worked alongside us for years or even decades. The vulnerability of long-term undocumented people as a hyper-exploitable class has helped billionaires like Donald Trump to profit even more than they could have by legal means. To put the icing on the cake, capitalists then turn to the other workers they are exploiting and tell them that the poverty and misfortunes they experience are the fault of those who are poorer and more oppressed than them. It’s hard to imagine a more cynical strategy.

The disparity in rights between the documented and undocumented is a construct—just as the disparity in value that the Nazis constructed between Jewish people and gentiles was a construct. Both are mere inventions; they have no intrinsic existence except as a means for a powerful group to justify violence against a less powerful group. Those who justify obedience to the law as a good in itself stand alongside the Nazis whose laws condemned millions to the death camps, not to mention the racists who passed the Fugitive Slave Act and the Jim Crow laws in the American South.

Laws are just constructs. They have no value in and of themselves. They often serve to legitimize injustice that people would otherwise take action to oppose.

The further that the proponents of racist violence are permitted to legitimize invented concepts like slavery and citizenship, the more violence they will perpetrate—up to and including roundups, concentration camps, and mass extermination. We have seen this before, in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, and we are seeing it again today in the United States. The thousands of deaths that take place in the borderlands and the thousands murdered by police are just a foretaste of what is possible.

In this regard, the Jewish people who are carrying out blockades against ICE are engaging in rational efforts to prevent the recurrence of the same unthinkable injustices that were perpetrated against their ancestors—just as Willem Van Spronsen, who grew up in the wake of World War II, made the rational decision that the time had come to fight the rise of fascism just as people did in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

If more people had chosen to take action to fight the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the Second World War might have been averted, and with it millions upon millions of lives would have been saved. Let no one say it is “violent” to attack the infrastructure of ICE and the mercenaries who maintain it. The real violence is the complicity of the Good Americans who do nothing as their neighbors are disappeared, just like those Good Germans who choose to ignore what was being done to their neighbors in the 1930s.

Every day, mercenaries around the world risk their lives in service to the agenda of the rich and powerful, obeying orders thoughtlessly, squandering their capacity to think rationally, to feel compassion, to take responsibility for their actions. Millions of people kill and die every year simply to increase the wealth and power of the tyrants who manipulate them. Willem Van Spronsen chose to think for himself. He took personal responsibility and did what he could to put an end to what he recognized as injustice. He did not use the Nuremburg defense to excuse his actions the way that every police officer and prison guard does.

In those regards, what he did was heroic.

We recommend the statement about Willem Van Spronsen’s action posted by La Resistencia, a grassroots collective led by undocumented immigrants and US citizens based in Tacoma, Washington.

“ANYONE WHO IS DETERMINED TO CARRY OUT HIS OR HER DEED IS NOT A COURAGEOUS PERSON. THEY ARE SIMPLY A PERSON WHO HAS CLARIFIED THEIR IDEAS, WHO HAS REALIZED THAT IT IS POINTLESS TO MAKE SUCH AN EFFORT TO PLAY THE PART ASSIGNED TO THEM BY CAPITAL IN THE PERFORMANCE…

IN DOING SO THEY REALIZE THEMSELVES AS HUMAN BEINGS. THEY REALIZE THEMSELVES IN JOY. THE REIGN OF DEATH DISAPPEARS BEFORE THEIR EYES.”

–ALFREDO BONANNO

Willem Van Spronsen’s Final Statement

Audio manifesto: thesuper8.bandcamp.com

There’s wrong and there’s right.
It’s time to take action against the forces of evil.

Evil says one life is worth less than another.
Evil says the flow of commerce is our purpose here.
Evil says concentration camps for folks deemed lesser are necessary.
The handmaid of evil says the concentration camps should be more humane.
Beware the centrist.

I have a father’s broken heart
I have a broken down body
And I have an unshakable abhorrence for injustice
That is what brings me here.
This is my clear opportunity to try to make a difference, I’d be an ingrate to be waiting for a more obvious invitation.

I follow three teachers:
Don Pritts, my spiritual guide. “Love without action is just a word.”
John Brown, my moral guide. “What is needed is action!”
Emma Goldman, my political guide. “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.”

I’m a head in the clouds dreamer, I believe in love and redemption.
I believe we’re going to win.
I’m joyfully revolutionary. (We all should have been reading Emma Goldman in school instead of the jingo drivel we were fed, but I digress.) (We should all be looking at the photos of the YPG heroes should we falter and think our dreams are impossible, but I double digress. Fight me.)

In these days of fascist hooligans preying on vulnerable people in our streets, in the name of the state or supported and defended by the state,

In these days of highly profitable detention/concentration camps and a battle over the semantics,

In these days of hopelessness, empty pursuit and empty yearning,

We are living in visible fascism ascendant. (I say visible, because those paying attention watched it survive and thrive under the protection of the state for decades. [See Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.] Now it unabashedly follows its agenda with open and full cooperation from the government. From governments around the world.

Fascism serves the needs of the state serves the needs of business and at your expense. Who benefits? Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Betsy de Vos, George Soros, Donald Trump, and need I go on? Let me say it again: rich guys (who think you’re not really all that good), really dig government (every government everywhere, including “communist” governments), because they make the rules that make rich guys richer.
Simple.
Don’t overthink it.

(Are you patriots in the back paying attention?)

When I was a boy, in post-war Holland, later France, my head was filled with stories of the rise of fascism in the ’30s. I promised myself that I would not be one of those who stands by as neighbors are torn from their homes and imprisoned for somehow being perceived as lesser.
You don’t have to burn the motherfucker down, but are you going to just stand by?

This is the test of our fundamental belief in real freedom and our responsibility to each other.
This is a call to patriots, too, to stand against this travesty against everything that you hold sacred. I know you. I know that in your hearts, you see the dishonor in these camps. It’s time for you, too, to stand up to the money pulling the strings of every goddamn puppet pretending to represent us.

I’m a man who loves you all and this spinning ball so much that I’m going to fulfill my childhood promise to myself to be noble.

Here it is, in these corporate for profit concentration camps.
Here it is, in Brown and non-conforming folks afraid to show their faces for fear of the police/migra/Proud Boys/the boss/beckies…
Here it is, a planet almost used up by the market’s greed.

I’m a black and white thinker.
Detention camps are an abomination.
I’m not standing by.
I really shouldn’t have to say any more than this.

I set aside my broken heart and I heal the only way I know how—by being useful.
I efficiently compartmentalize my pain…
And I joyfully go about this work.
(To those burdened with the wreckage from my actions, I hope that you will make the best use of that burden.)

To my comrades:
I regret that I will miss the rest of the revolution.
Thank you for the honor of having me in your midst.

Giving me space to be useful, to feel that I was fulfilling my ideals, has been the spiritual pinnacle of my life.

Doing what I can to help defend my precious and wondrous people is an experience too rich to describe.

My trans comrades have transformed me, solidifying my conviction that we will be guided to a dreamed-of future by those most marginalized among us today. I have dreamed it so clearly that I have no regret for not seeing how it turns out. Thank you for bringing me so far along.

I am antifa. I stand with comrades around the world who act from the love of life in every permutation. Comrades who understand that freedom means real freedom for all and a life worth living.

Keep the faith!
All power to the people!
Bella ciao.

Don’t let your silly government agencies spend money “investigating” this one. I was radicalized in civics class at 13 when we were taught about the electoral college. It was at that point that I decided that the status quo might be a house of cards. Further reading confirmed in the positive. I highly recommend reading!

I am not affiliated with any organization, I have disaffiliated from any organizations who disagree with my choice of tactics.

The semi-automatic weapon I used was a cheap, home-built unregistered “ghost” AR-15, it had six magazines. I strongly encourage comrades and incoming comrades to arm themselves. We are now responsible for defending people from the predatory state. Ignore the law in arming yourself if you have the luxury, I did.