We the People...

Illuminated behind my closed eyelids, a flash of blinding light. In a semi-conscious state I count...one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand...disquieting the silence, a deeply-percussive, subwoofer rumble, the distance from the lightning’s epicenter marked by time, a second per mile. Lightning and its shadow, thunder, are the meteorological equivalent of a passionate tango – hot air aloft, cold air beneath, the dance ending in a fiery finish.

Then the other shoe, rain...drops. Two songs come to mind, one by The Temptations, the other, Cat Stevens...in a mash-up I sing, “cause raindrops will hide my teardrops and no one will ever know...I've been crying lately thinking about the world as it is..”

I awakened to a pristine, cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness morning at a Rockwood, PA, lakeside campground, having arrived after nightfall. I had quickly prepared a minestrone-themed soup which we enjoyed under a really cool pavilion. We were joined by our new friends from Eco Womb, a family with whom we had dined at Seven Springs this last weekend. They have joined the caravan for this leg of the journey. Dessert was comprised of a musical jam. With Jonathon laying down the rhythm and me on guitar, Sirraum found his voice and improvised lyrics to a wicked riff.

The pre-dawn storm having washed clean the chalk, a clean slate awaits. There's a new moon and Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, starts at sundown tomorrow, a good time to release the old and usher in the new.

An hour ago, the very wise Veronica Ramirez, whose living mandalas, co-created with festival-goers, always seems to become the spiritual hub of the spaces we come to occupy, mediated a different kind of circle, a shrine at which each of us cast little scraps of brown paper into a bowl, stating that which we wish to change and that to which we aspire. Elements reminiscent of Yom Kippur, which follows Rosh Hashanah, entered into the solemn, secular ceremony. In a collective act of purification, one by one, the little hand-written notes were set aflame.

The fields of apathy have lie fallow long enough. It's time to sow the seeds of change. All this week SLR will be tooling up for the centerpiece of our tour, the Right2Know March. Drawing attention to the potential dangers of GMOs, we will be joining several hundred protesters on a two-week trek from Brooklyn, NYC, to Washington, DC, demanding that Congress enact laws requiring manufacturers to label products which contain genetically-modified organisms.

And for the second time in as many months, this American citizen will be exercising his freedom of assembly. When I set foot in Layfayette Park, it will not be for me – it will be for we.

We the people...