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

Todd has been gone since I last wrote. Off doing research, as I suggested, perhaps. I know that time flows very differently for Todd, so it may seem to him as if he’s only been gone a moment. I guess I’ll know when he returns.

It’s strangely appropriate, Todd’s absence. This has been a week for loneliness.

Something happened to me, at some point during the making of What a Way to Go. A switch got flipped. A river crossed. A tipping point tipped. Somewhere in there I became somebody new. A different sort of person.

And now I no longer seem to belong anywhere.

What was that switch? There are a million ways to say it. What comes to me in this moment is this: I now know, deep in my bones, that the collapse of the dominant global culture is unstoppable, that the crash of the human population is inevitable, that both of these changes have already begun and are quickly gaining momentum, and that both of these processes are the best possible news for the community of life as a whole. People speak of hope for the living world. To my mind, collapse and crash are that hope.

It’s one thing to know this. Knowing it changes everything. But it’s another thing altogether to speak it. To share it. To put it out into the world. Knowing it forces me to confront meaning and purpose and change and loss and death at every point in my life. Speaking it forces me to confront my own power, my own identity, my own limitations. I must face my own deepest fear: will I be enough to speak my truth?

Every day, I wonder.

And yet I am called to go far beyond knowing, to speaking as clearly and as powerfully as I can. In a very real sense, what I have to say is not mine. It has been given to me to say. By the Earth. By the gods. By the ancestors. By life itself. I do not feel I have much choice in the matter. I am being used by something much larger than myself. I am compelled. And so, despite my fears, I open my mouth, and speak.

Here I am.

When I am with those precious few who have grokked deeply the world situation - who have felt their way through the enormity, the complexity, the fear and the anger, the grief, the despair - when I am with those people, we find that “it” – call it the end of the world, the apocalypse, the collapse, the great turning, call it whatever you like – “it” is pretty much all we talk about. Of course it is. Once your switch gets flipped, once you know, then every single aspect of your life has to be readjusted to this new reality. Every nook and cranny of your psyche must be realigned. Every mundane detail. Every plan. Every expectation. Every assumption. Every hope. Every dream. On this side of that looking glass, the rules have all changed. And nothing remains the same.

Nothing.

I would not switch back, if such a thing were possible. The sense of sanity on this side of the mirror is worth every bit of the pain and upheaval it takes to get here. But because my whole world has tilted, I cannot walk easily in the world I once inhabited – what some have called “the consensus trance”. I try. But more and more often, I fail. It’s as if there was a trick I once knew, but can no longer quite remember. As if there was some password that would get me into that club, some key I could use to unscramble that cipher. I go to conferences, to lunches, to meetings, to parties, to dances, I go to the various gatherings I have always attended, but now I can barely open my mouth. My heart clunks. My breathing quickens. And as soon as I can, I slip away, out the door, back into the open air of solitude.

I don’t belong anywhere anymore. I’m not who I used to be. I’m losing my ability to pretend. And much of the time, it feels like that’s what I’m expected to do.

Todd was right. The vast majority of people in this country, in this world, are not looking at what we’re looking at, or thinking about what we’re thinking about, or feeling through what we’re feeling through. Though there are many of us, in absolute terms, who can see both collapse and crash in all of their obvious reality, we are, in relative terms, so few, and so spread out, that we’re often effectively on our own in our own lives. There’s a bone-chilling loneliness that sets in that can deaden the soul and dim the mind. New mutations splashing about in the meme pool, we signal in the night for others of our own species, glowing and blinking and calling out our existence, hoping against hope that another mutant has arisen nearby who can receive our message, and see us, and hear us, and really, really get us.

That’s one of the reasons Sally and I made the documentary. It’s a beacon, a flare, a message to other mutants.

Here we are.

And Sally and I are some of the lucky ones. At least we have each other. And we have a few close friends who walk beside us on our journey. That’s more than many have.

But out “in the culture”, surrounded by the oppressive delusions of progress and growth and innovation and comfort, face to face with people who really don’t want to hear what we have to say, the loneliness rises still. Uninvited, unwelcome, it attempts to freeze us solid. And we have to be clear, and aware, so that we can warm ourselves on the fires of our own powerful knowing. So that we can speak once again.

And we need to speak out.

How many are we, we few thousands in a world of billions? How many haunt the peak oil websites, the climate change listservs? How many are peering right now into the void, trying to decipher how the mass extinction of species and the towering human population intersect with economic meltdown and political insanity and religious fundamentalism and corporate conspiracy? How many are we, we who can no longer walk easily in the consensus trance? How many?

Mutants! Open your mouths and make yourselves known! Flit through the forest, slip through the seas, skim the skies, cross the high passes. Glow and blink and call out your names in the night.

Perhaps we are more common than we realize. Perhaps, right next to you, there sits another mutant, feeling as alone as you. Perhaps.

Remember the words of the Hopi elder: The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Tim's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.