What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Tim and I tried with What a Way To Go to take as direct a look at as much of the global environmental and resource situation as one’s brain can hold at one time. As we’ve poured over the information in the last four years, I’ve been staggered by the implications of it all. I go in and out of my own denial. Though I try to maintain some sense of normalcy in my life, my brain dizzies with the understanding of how compromised our precious environment is, how flimsy the global economy is, how entrenched in denial and distraction the culture is. Restoration of the environment to pre-industrial conditions will take generations, tens, perhaps hundreds of generations. Humans as a species may not survive to see that healing. Certainly humans alive today will not be here to see it. There is huge sadness in that.

It is not the sadness for me that has been most crippling. It’s the times of huge anxiety. The soil, water, and climatic systems that the ecosystem depends upon continue to degrade at an ever faster rate with increased consumption and population growth. The picture is not pretty. Add to that the bankrupt and bogus credit economy and ever more unstable social systems and the picture grows ever bleaker.

It is hard to look at this. I’ve lost sleep. I’ve overworked. I’ve watched movies whiie eating huge bowls of popcorn dowsed in large quantities of butter and salt and parmesan cheese. I forget myself and lose my footing.

I falter when I have no felt sense that I am a part of something larger, something more vast even than the destruction. When I lose that felt connection to the mystery of the whole, I can feel terribly alone and helpless. My chest constricts. My heart pounds. I have never before in my life felt anything resembling ongoing panic. Having looked at the total situation, I identify with those who suffer bouts of anxiety and despair.

Part of my despair is highly personal. I have two adult children in their twenties. I am hard-wired, as I believe we all are, to care deeply about the fate of my offspring, my descendants. Despair hits home when I think about my kids and consider the future the culture is hurling us towards. Everything in me recoils at the thought of my children living in that world. But it’s not just the future that concerns me. It’s right now. I see young people struggle. In the midst of this insane and degrading culture, it is not easy or pleasant to be young and aware. It’s so very hard for them to find a place, to feel a purpose, to walk a life path that offers meaning. Many opt for high diversion. Of course they do. They sense what’s coming. Popular culture offers little vision about how to come together, how to find purpose and meaning in the face of that. Young people don’t much want to think about all of this.

Until the last several years my feelings for the non-human, natural world were not as readily accessible as my feelings for my children. Like most people encased in the culture, my day-to-day connection with the non-human natural world has been systematically severed. Wrapped up and insulated in climate-controlled environments much of my life, I too have been entertained and distracted. But I have gotten re-connected to those feelings of care and concern for the non-human natural world. My relationship to life as a whole has been to some extent repaired. Profound feelings of care and concern for the larger whole are beginning to feel every bit as hard-wired as are the feelings of concern for my children.

Most of my life I’ve not felt deep contentment. Certainly there were meaningful moments and experiences and relationships throughout. But there’s also been a gnawing emptiness. This restlessness is symptomatic of my lack of connection, feeling, and concern for all the other life on the planet. The two go together.

We live on a planet that is suffering and has been suffering. When the earth and her myriad species and life forms suffer, we suffer. Or, we wall that suffering off. We find a myriad of defenses and addictions. People who are addicted, driven by defense and compulsive activity, never find real peace or contentment. Addictions, compulsions, and distractions are hollow, a sham, the consolation prize when you’ve come in last.

In this culture we all know addiction is rampant. But not because it satisfies. Because it doesn’t satisfy. But it persists nonetheless. When a small dose doesn’t work, we try a larger dose. When one variation of the experience leaves us wanting, we just add more gadgets, more senses, more colors, more varieties. Each permutation of the addictive substance promises, but then fails, to satisfy. There is alcohol, drugs, furniture, work, food, romance novels, clothes, investment portfolios, academics, high action movies, chat rooms, music, any of an endless list of cultural offerings. There’s always another version or combination of any, or all of those, to try. The blue silk Birkenstock look-a-likes aren’t quite right? Try the chartreuse Crocs. The imported 70% organic dark chocolate isn’t quite right? Try it with freeze-dried raspberries and bits of old tire tread. Are the sour-cream-and-onion cardboard potato chips leaving you dissatisfied? Try the jalapeno-cheese-arsenic ones. They’re new! And they’re green. I guess that means they are organic.

I’ve had a gnawing suspicion that, despite my attempts to be conscious and politically correct, I too was addicted to the culture. And for most of my adult life I had no real idea how profound that addiction to culture’s endless, but unsatisfying offerings, was. To access that understanding, I had to stop completely. I had to stop all distraction long enough to re-connect the hard wiring that now seems encoded genetically.

When I signed up five years ago for a 12-day wilderness encampment that included a three-day solo wilderness fast, I didn’t know that process of reconnection would begin. All I knew was that I was stuck in my life and needed stuff to shift. I didn’t know that the experience would re-solder that wiring in me that had been severed by the culture. But it did. And when that re-connection was made, I fell back in love with the world.

While I was “in the woods” the cultural addictions fell away rather rapidly and surprisingly easily. It mostly required only that I slow down, stop my habitual activities, including eating, and immerse myself in the non-human world for a time. And the effects have lasted. Now, even one day of fasting, dawn to dusk, immersed in the real world, can be profound. The love of the non-human world is hard-wired. It doesn’t take much to rekindle those feelings. Just time and willingness.

This journey that Tim and I have taken began largely grounded in research and science. As the information piled up around us, so did the feelings of despair. Despair continues to cycle when I do nothing but read the information. To move through the despair and not retreat into denial requires that I come back, again and again, to a number of spiritual practices that work for me.

Those practices seem to boil down to four: the practice of being fully present with journal writing; the practice of being fully present when I am engaged in my counseling work; the practice of being fully present when I sit in a circle with others; and the practice of fasting, silence and solitude in the non-human natural world.

I have respect for many spiritual paths, but for me, this last has been amazingly effective and deceptively simple. It is a cross-cultural practice and most spiritual traditions offer some form of it. It requires just three things: solitude, fasting, and immersion in, and exposure to, the natural elements.

My experiences during wilderness fasts have been, at times, phenomenal. And, as one might imagine, there are also long periods of utter boredom. Taken out of the culture, the ego becomes frustrated. Its ability to maintain the illusion of control, to stay attached to a hightly limited sense of reality becomes challenged. In that frustration and boredom questions arise frequently about why in the world I would subject myself to such an experience. With no concrete way of tracking time, theres no telling how long those periods of boredom and frustration last. But magically, and often without any apparent effort, a shift occurs. The ego surrenders and sometimes phenomenal, non-ordinary experiences occur spontaneously. I come back from such experiences with consistently changed attitudes. Something greater and more essential than my limited sense of self and personality takes root in me. I regain that felt sense of connection to that which is greater.

One thing that is significant to me is that these experiences are NOT addictive. While they are compelling and profound, they do not leave me always wanting more. There’s no craving sensation beforehand or in the aftermath. On the contrary, there is a fullness associated with the experience that is not like anything else I’ve experienced. There are no cravings or feeling the need to escape from something uncomfortable in my life. When I take a day, or a few days, to step away, to stop eating, and to become silent, it doesn’t come from the need to escape. On the contrary, I experience the need to actively move toward something rather than away.

That something I move toward is often quite challenging. Because what silence, fasting, and exposure to natural forces does is bring me face to face with Me. Me, and all that is in me that is not in harmony with the real world. There’s no escape. Whatever is out of harmony must be reckoned with.

In the end, that is what I want: to be in harmony. To feel at home here in the world. To be at peace. I want that felt sense, in spite of the insanely fragmented outer culture I currently live in, that there is an inner, unseen, and much larger wholeness that I am part of.

It is in that wholeness that I find I am ultimately safe. By ultimately safe I do not mean this ego and personality that I identify as myself is safe. The ego that is identified with the culture, with the need for comfort and control and security is not what feels safe. The ego continues to have times of anxiety, to be afraid of pain, discomfort, and ultimately of extinction, death, mortality.

No, what feels safe is other than that limited, separate, disconnected ego. What brings the sense of safety is that I have come into contact with something of my essence. I have touched that essential self that is connected, at-one, with the whole of timeless reality.

This real sense of the Other, of that which is not my ego identity, has made a huge difference to me. I find it easier to gently accept that this ego and personality are ephemeral and will naturally wither and die like the blossoms of bee balm that bloom wildly, as I write, in the untended garden spot in front of the deck this year.

The idea of losing this ego, this identity, with all that being human, being me, here, now, has meant, brings natural sadness. But that sadness is not the same as despair. The fact of mortality softens. I can feel deeply sad without losing all sense of safety or peace. Much of this acceptance is a result of the times of fasting in the wilderness where I experienced that what is essential about life is not based in my ego and personality.

Writing this now helps me remember and reconnect with that essence. There is ground where I stand that allows the waves of anxiety to rise and crash against my ego’s fragile shore, a ground that allows anxiety to be there without the need to resist or defend or control. Anxiety, especially at this time in human history, seems an understandable part of the journey of being human, of having an ego, a separate, unique sense of self that has been fairly well beaten up in this culture. Finding ways to experience something beyond ego, beyond that separate sense of self, something more essential, is key for me.

The times require this.

As the Hopi Elder counsels:

“…There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.”

“Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate…….”

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

All of us who are looking squarely at the global situation face this challe