The View from the Soup
Six months. Six months since I jumped boldly into the Font of Helvetica and let the Roman Times roll. Six months since I last crept from my warm burrow to check for my blast shadow. Six months since I reported on the comings and goings of my own private Wobegon. Six months. Or maybe even seven. Where have I been? And where have you been? And how are you?
It was late in January, wasn’t it, when we went to Boulder and did a three-day circle with those kind souls there? Wasn’t that a couple of weeks after I wrote of my Uncle George? The winter was still with us, I think. I remember long mornings and longer afternoons, spent sitting by the wood stove. Sally made crusty bread, which we slathered with butter, and we played games with Andy and Stacy late into the night.
I was exhausted. The words don’t do that justice and my body cries foul at how shallow they sound, how poorly they express how it felt, and how it often still feels, even now. It wasn’t just the long years and days and hours of writing, shooting and editing. It wasn’t just the travel, the screenings, the tours, the plans, the particulars. It wasn’t just four years spent doing things I didn’t know how to do. The exhaustion went deeper still, wrapping itself around my core like a good ol’ boa, letting me know, kindly but firmly, that my life was no longer what I had thought it was, son, and that if I might could come to grips with that, maybe things’d go a bit easier for me. Having stared down our present predicament for as long as I had, having let grief and rage and disbelief and shame run their course through my body like a hit of bad acid, having actually died at every level save the physical, it was time to lay me down in the grave, oh sweet lord, sweet lord, and let the clouds roll over me, gray and damp and cold. Even as my body sat by the fire, my spirit crawled into bed in the fetal position, heaved a soft sigh of sad contentment, and let go, let go…let go.
Huge pieces of me have died away this past year. But the parts that remain, and the human body that contains them, are left with the work of grieving the loss.
Something happened, or, rather, failed to happen, upon the release of our movie and the screening tours that followed: the world did not suddenly, as my brother Derrick would put it, “undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living.” Had you asked me at any point over the past five years if I thought What a Way to Go would actually have that effect, I would have, of course, said no. My mind has long recognized the futility of that particular wish and has known, all along, that that was never my intent. It was just a movie. A log on the fire. A voice in the great council circle.
But my body, it turns out, failed to get that particular memo, and seems to have been holding out some hope that What a Way to Go would somehow - Somehow ™ - against all odds, explode into the Zeitgeist like the Furby ™ or the Pet Rock ™, hovering in the cultural firmament like the Virgin at Fatima (but with trendy archival footage), causing blind politicians to see, lame CEOs to throw down their corporations and walk away, and a sick and leprous culture to be healed, hallelujah. My body wanted desperately to find some way to stop what it saw coming, to spare us from the loss, the pain, the horror of what we have created, to take that cup from our lips and dash it to the ground. It wanted, just as Daniel Quinn wanted in The Story of B, to find some way to “make the Earth tremble and the stones weep and the skies open up.”
Didn’t happen. Leastwise so’s I’d notice. And my body, stun-blind and deeply fried, fell to its knees at the grave of that hidden hope and sobbed into the soil. “A loss of innocence,” my friend RC called it, nailing me to the cross I’d been hiding in my pocket with four steel-cut words. It was all Sally could do to keep my spirit connected to my flesh, so strongly was the urge to cut and run. Hot soup worked wonders. And candles. And the sight of empathetic tears and the soft sighs of understanding.
A loss of innocence. Grief. And a sobbing body helped back to its feet with loving hands, to stand again in anticipation of the sun peeking out once more from behind the clouds. This is the time in which we live.
But there was more to grieve. I found, as January slid into February and February melted into March, that I could no longer do what I’d been doing. I tried, but it was gone. I could hardly read my email, let alone respond to it. Couldn’t read blogs and articles and letters. Couldn’t read books. Couldn’t stay on top of the news. Couldn’t care. I couldn’t bear to open up Final Cut Pro and try to edit anything. And I couldn’t write.
I couldn’t write!
I tried. I did try. Ideas would hit me and burn inside with a bright enthusiasm and I would open up a new document. At last! But the excitement would burn away before I could reach the end of the second sentence and I would sit there, flummoxed, mugged, as blank and demanding as the page itself, until it hit me that there was nothing else. Nothing else. I was spent. Checking over my shoulder with embarrassment, as if to make sure I had not been espied in my failure to perform, I saved and closed and quit and stood and walked away.
I couldn’t do it any more.
I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t convince. I couldn’t cajole. I couldn’t push. For some reason never made clear, the great cosmic force who picked me up five years ago and sat me down and said Here! Make this movie! had seemingly left me without so much as a quick hug goodbye. At my keyboard, staring at those blank documents, I found, inexplicably, that I was alone. Alone. As if I’d come home from college to find that my mother had died a few weeks back and they’d forgotten to drop me a line. That thing, that being, that force, that goddess, that muse, that impulse, that goad, that love, that light, that fierce and gentle power who had sat by my side while I stewed in the anxiety of what was I doing, who held me in my fear and confusion and doubt, was gone. She was gone. And I was alone. And no literary device (Todd is going to kill me for saying this!) was ever going to take her place.
Exhausted, grieving, and bereft of that which had made me who I had been, and so, therefore, bereft of identity itself, I lapsed into radio silence, another station gone missing as the fall-out circled the planet. It must have been confusing, to those who had been listening to my transmissions. I know I’ve missed you.
One primary motivation that surfaced for Sally and me as we completed the documentary was that we wanted to find our people and connect with them, those awakened souls, those flipped-switches, those mutants, those sparsely scattered last-children-in-the-woods we knew were out there. Gol dang if it didn’t work. On our screening tours, in our travels, or just through the wires in response to our film, we met and connected and sat in circle or at table and fell in love with people more whole and real and beautiful than we had dared imagine. A few have since fallen fully into our lives but most, separated by distance and time and the demands of lives lived in the machine, had forged connections with us almost wholly through the wires and tubes.
When I lapsed into radio silence, I lost these people from my life. And I missed them.
I tried. I tried to keep email conversations going. But my response times dwindled to never. I tried to re-enter the lively dialogue on Derrick’s forum but found it almost impossible to engage. And even when a good man named Paul created a discussion forum just for What a Way to Go, I couldn’t seem to find myself there. I had nothing really to say. I couldn’t do what I’d been doing. I had died for real, it seemed, and everybody knew it but my still beating heart.
Robert was gone. And my brother Rafael. Ted was gone. And Janaia. Chris and James. John. Jan and Kevin and Carla and Adam and Terry and freeacre and Roxanne and Dave and Carolyn and Bernhard. More even than these. Gone not because they had dearly departed but because I had. Gone simply because that’s what searchers do when the search is finally called off, what mourners do when the funeral has ended. Lying there in my grave, listening to their car-wheels rumble as they drove away, I could only hope that these far-flung friends would understand, and know that I love them, and trust that they would go on without me, doing the good work they do in the world.
I speak of the grave but that doesn’t really catch it. It was not death per se that had gripped me, but metamorphosis. Beneath my skin I was melting away at every level, ego and assumption and story digesting themselves from the inside out, leaving a thick soup of random images and disjointed words, concepts and values and bits of information, the raw materials from which, possibly, something new could be created. While the process is far from complete, enough new fingers have formed to work the keyboard, and enough complete thoughts to make it, maybe, worth doing so. Rather than this being a voice from beyond the grave, it’s a voice from the thickest part of the soup.
Between caterpillar and moth there is something still, something wanting to be said.
Metamorphosis. The Holometabolic Contra Dance. The Great Constitutional Do-Over. My entire self began to break down, to slump like a stick of butter left out on an August afternoon. In the face of the mass extinction into which I was born, staring into the wild eyes of oil depletion and climate chaos, my ego could no longer maintain its form. Something had to give, and it would not be reality.
It would be me.
With fingers new and words drifting into novel (for me) combinations, I can tell you now what I see from the soup, and maybe give a hint as to where I might be headed. The thing you’ll have to remember is that I don’t yet really know. I’m pretty sure it can’t be known. So all I can do is my best.
What do you expect from soup?
The first thing I see is that I could no longer do what I’d been doing for the simple reason that it was no longer accomplishing what I have come here to do. It had the look and smell of accomplishment, I’ll give it that. But that was mostly illusion. The problem is that my purpose has changed. The research, the list, the writing, the documentary, the blogs, they all worked to accomplish the goal of waking myself up, and then those others whom I could touch and impact. But “wake ‘em up” can only ever serve as the opening act of a story. OK. I’m awake. Now what happens in Act II?
If you’re playing the numbers game in an attempt to score that hundredth monkey and trigger a mass consciousness change, it makes sense, maybe, to just keep at it until, like the Lion’s Club, you reach your goal. But at some point on my long walk it finally hit me that I don’t really believe in Mass Consciousness Change ™ as a way out of our collective predicament, that “things” probably don’t really work that way, and that, in any event, it isn’t actually what I’m now called to work towards.
So while continuing to digest articles about oil or climate, or writing blogs that point out both the train and the wreck, or composing emails that attempt to explain, convince, cajole or push, while doing these things still looked and felt, for a long time, like accomplishments, at some point some part of me knew that they had ceased to serve as such. The documentary would keep on chooglin’, doing what work of awakening it would do. It’s good work. Noble work. And I love and honor those who do it still. But me, the real guy living in this moment rather than that short-haired bloke in blue jeans and a brown blazer you see in the movie who keeps going on about cheeseburgers, the me that met this particular morning with wild long hair and crusty eyes wanting a cup of coffee, that me now had something else to do.
And that spirit, that muse, who sat beside me for so long? She left the room for the simple reason that that work, and therefore her work, was done. May the gods bless her for her help. I know I do.
The second thing I see from my spot here in the soup is that I never really belonged in this realm. By “this realm” I mean this public realm, this electronic realm, this machine realm, this world of blogs and comments and listservs and forums and essays and documentaries and tours. I never belonged here. For more than one reason.
It’s funny. Having set the intention to reconnect with myself as a living creature walking the Earth … it happened. The process has been slow and clunky, to be sure, and it’s far from over, I think… I fear… I hope. But I have to report that, more and more, as days spiral around, I experience my connection to my animal, my emotional, and my spiritual self. And I find, as I shift, that my ability and willingness to interface with the rough surfaces and sharp edges of the machine declines.
I don’t belong online. I’ve become too organic, too visceral, too human to interface well in the machine realm. My body needs bodies nearby, it turns out, so close it can feel their hearts and bathe in the humidity of their tears and the glow of their smiles. Online, I start to become Machine myself: the Smartass Contraption… The Anger Apparatus… The Know-It-All Doomsday Device. My own automatics get automated, my triggers triggered, my habits inhabited and possessed and used for purposes not my own. The animal me - the sensitive, response-able, creative, living, spark-in-a-meatbag me – gets lost in that maze of gears and wires and blinking lights. Leggo my ego!
Does any of this resonate?
I find that the one thing I most crave – long and open dialogue with others willing to question their deepest assumptions and come together to find a wisdom more profound than any of us can find on our own – is the one thing I cannot seem to find online. I can find DVD rewinders. I can find a banana splitter. I can even find a fish massage. I can find argument and debate, flame-wars and trolls, opinions and experts and authorities and saviors, but I can’t find, online, the sort of dialogue I am looking for.
Of course I can’t. It ain’t the right tool for the job. Like trying to paint a kitten with a bowling ball…
As clear and conscious as I try to be, I can still quite easily get caught like a stupor-fly in the world-wide-spider-web. I get defensive. I get hurtful. I make pronouncements and pretend that I know when I do not. I toss predictions into a chaotic system and try to coax them to life by sheer force of White Guy Entitlement ™ and unacknowledged attachments. The online/public realm becomes my world-spanning strap-on ego extender, hi-jacking my ready and rigid personality structure and using it, like our misguided friends at Sherwin-Williams, to Cover the Earth ™. And my ego is still too wounded, too confused, too separate, too invested, to be given that much power.
When people first “wake up” to the present predicament they are frequently frightened and befuddled. They’re looking for things like Answers ™ and Solutions ™ and they are overly willing to listen uncritically to people who promise such things. But I’ve been at this long enough to know that I have neither answers nor solutions to give them. Ultimately, all of their answers will be personal, and can be found only in their own hearts. All of their solutions will be local, and can be found only in their own lives. The last thing they need is another White Guy ™ figuring things out and coming up with an answer and a plan and telling them what he thinks they should all do. That’s so last paradigm.
And it’s what got us here in the first place, innit?
And if I continue to put myself in the online and public realm, writing and blogging about the End of Empire ™, I run the risk of staying trapped myself in the belief that I can somehow solve it, save it, stop it or supervise it (and stay, therefore, trapped in the twisted mindset that has fueled our problem: the belief that we are in control). Groomed by parents and teachers to expect a life of “big things”, raised as yet another little prince by virtue not only of my talents and abilities but my White ™ skin and my socio-economic class, told repeatedly that I “can do whatever I want to do in this world”, I am particularly prone to falling into this cultural hole. Hey! I know! I’ll make a documentary! That’ll fix it!
Nope. Been there. Done, that. I will not run that risk. I don’t think that’s my Act II, to just repeat my first Act ad nauseum.
And it hurts me, to remain in that prison when the door is wide open and the sun is shining right outside. Just as it hurts to be laughed at, ignored, called names, misunderstood or dismissed. Just as it hurts to see years of hard labor stolen in bits and torrents at the click of a mouse. Just as it hurts to fall for the same old bait and switch over and over and over again. As slight as my foray into the public realm has been, as thankful and appreciative as the response has overwhelmingly come, as gratifying as it has felt to be of some service to those who have resonated with our movie, I’m not sure it has all been good for me. It has chafed “the soft animal” of my body, as Mary Oliver would put it. And chafed, that body has recoiled.
Having been advised more than once to “harden the fuck up”, I find that, in fact and in deed, I have. And knowing that fills me with sadness, because I don’t want to harden up. I want to be the sensitized, conscious, compassionate, open, feeling creature I’ve worked, and am working, so hard to become. I want to live fully and peacefully in the vibrant and connected animal body that I put on when I first got here. And I’m not talking wimpy here. Remember the butterflies that emerge from the soup. Have you seen those suckers fly in the wind? Tough little buggers.
As far as I’m concerned, my great strength lies precisely in my ability to stay open and feel my feelings fully and deeply. “Harden up” is from the dying paradigm. Control yourself. Put up with it. Stuff it down. Quit your whining. Keep it to yourself. Stiff upper lip and all that, old chap. Your reward will be in heaven. It’s a good way to sell stuff, maybe, but not a good way for an animal to live on a planet as alive and beautiful as this one is, if you ask me.
So it may be that it’s time for me to bid “this wider life” good-bye and find my place in this place. Maybe I need to simply stop. And sit down. And be still for a long, long time. Maybe I need to be still for so long that I will be able to actually listen. And maybe, listening, I will find my way. It’s so easy, for White Guys ™ like me, to be about the business of “saving the world”. But being still. Listening. Integrating myself into a place. Being of service to that place. Protecting it. Loving it. Becoming part of it. And finally, giving my body back to it with grace and gratitude. Now that would be something big and new, wouldn’t it?
And isn’t that what this is all about, this facing into the End of Empire: becoming something new?
I spent my years as a caterpillar, digesting whole trees worth of information. I grew as large as a caterpillar can grow, as full as a caterpillar can get. And then I began to fall apart. Because that was only Act I. There was soup to make. And then… after that… who knows? Something with wings…
Somewhere in the past six months we moved across the country, pulling ourselves up the globe from South to North. We spiraled in to a beautiful spot in a magical valley, with green mountains to the East and West and a river running through it, with water in the basement and winter just around the corner. It feels right: a suitable growing zone for a soul that first landed in northern soil. The land feels alive underfoot. My feet feel alive on the land.
And I no longer feel the need to make the Earth tremble. When I stand quietly with bare feet, I find that it already does.
I could fall in love here…
Michael Moore said of What a Way to Go that he had the sense that we knew we would only have one chance to say what we had to say, so we took the time to say it fully, an observation with which I would agree. I’ve had the same sense with this blog, and have let it run as long as I needed it to for that reason. I don’t know if I’ll be back. The kick-ass blog I’ve been working on about Al Gore may never be finished. Those novels lurking in the back of my mind may never see the light of page. I may never be much good at answering email again, or editing video. I just don’t know. I don’t know what kind of creature I am becoming. I don’t know what sort of wings I’ll be wearing.
Do caterpillars, when they spot a beautiful moth overhead, think to themselves: “one day…”?
End of Act I.
Act II. The curtain rises. Onto the stage walks a tall, stooped, middle-aged man with longish, tangled hair and a beard. Dressed in baggy shorts and a ratty t-shirt from the thrift store, he takes a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, smoothes it, clears his throat and begins to read, his voice soft but sure:
Man:
I am the thistle in the field,
I am the bend in the stream,
I am the gaze of the clouds,
I am the fox on the flat,
I am the kingfisher in the sun,
I am the blush of the moon,
I am the fold in the hills,
I am the birch in the dawn,
I am the bear on the road,
I am the snow on the branch,
I am the boulder in the falls,
I am the butterfly in the gale.
Sparks in a pulsing illusion
I am part and whole and neither
And all.
Who but I will walk my path into the next paradigm?
Who else will bear my witness to the destruction of the life of an entire planet?
Who but I will grieve my grief?
Who else will protect my love?
Who will align my heart with the Great Mother and offer her my service if not I?
Who will shed my tears?
No one else.
No one.
The man stuffs the paper back into his pocket and looks out over the audience. He smiles. He waves a wave of love and gratitude and farewell. He bows a deep bow. Then he turns and walks off the stage as the curtain closes and the lights go dim.
The house lights come up and the audience stirs, mumbling about the strong smell of soup that lingers in the theater. Overhead, the soft slurry of wings can be heard and they look up to see a moth sputtering about in the lights.
Eventually it makes its way to a high window and is gone into the night.
Exeunt.
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August 11th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Dear Tim,
our dear Shaman who has been masquerading as a middle class white guy. We love you. Thank you for spilling your heart once more, as you do so beautifully. Especially as it required of you to interface with a machine and to step away from Mother Earth for a moment or two. I am looking forward to standing with you on your land in a few short days and giving you a big hug for which I will also have to step on my tippy toes.
love & light Vivienne
Heart Alchemist
Fraser River Tsawassen First Nations Land B.C. Canada
August 11th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Tim,
You have no idea how strongly your feelings resonate out here. So many of us have come to this transition point, each from our own direction.
On the one hand my heart aches for your pain, your loss of innocence, your sense of ending with no new beginning in sight. On the other hand, a subversive voice in me whispers happily, “Ah. Now he’s ready.”
Do you understand that you are experiencing a spiritual crisis? If so, it’s obvious that the next step on your journey requires a step off the path of the material, the Path of Answers and Solutions, and onto an inner path. No one but you can know what form this next part of your journey will take, but it is inevitable, ineluctable. Those who have taken it will reassure you: read the work of Carolyn Baker, Sharon Astyk and Joanna Macy.
For that matter, read one of my articles (you knew my ego would get around to that, didn’t you?) It’s entitled “The Spiritual Effects of Comprehending the Crisis”, and it’s posted at http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sprituality.html
You’ve done something admirable, something monumental. You have begun. Keep going.
With love,
Paul Chefurka
August 11th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Tim after reading your blog this morning I went back to finishing the last few pages of Eliot Cowan’s amazing book. I’m meant to be packing!
I want to share this Shaman story with you from the last few pages of the book:
A Shaman’s Story
(excerpted from “Plant Spirit Medicine” by Eliot Cowan
“Don Lupe tells the story that the wind tree was originally a little baby boy. He was a real nuisance because he cried all the time. His parents couldn’t get any sleep, they couldn’t get their work done because he just cried and cried. One night they got so fed up they took him out on the patio and threw a blanket over his head and left him there. During the night Trickster came and led him off into the mountains. Eventually, the boy turned himself into a tree that grows on a high cliff, the wind tree.
The next day the father came back from working in the fields and checked on his son, but, of course, he was gone. The mother and father looked everywhere for their boy, but all they found was a miniature set of deer antlers next to a shrub on a high cliff. Some wise Shamans were called in. They spent the night chanting by the shrub. Around one or two in the morning, the child appeared to them. His parents didn’t care for him, he said, so he had gone off to the mountains with his friend Trickster and become a tree. But he said that the Shamans should tells his parents that in five days he would return to visit them. Five days later, there was an incredible storm with powerful winds and rays of lightning streaking across the sky. The parents were disappointed not to see their son. Once more the shamans were summoned and spoke to the boy. He explained that he had visited his parents in the form of lightning and wind. They would never again see him in human form. Later in the story, the boy becomes an old man who appears on the mountain top and declares that he will grant the gift of healing or any other knowledge. He takes the form of a lightning bolt and rises into the sky. They he becomes an eagle and flies away.”
“What a bizarre story!” said my friend Roxanne. “What do you make of it, Eliot?”
…” think it’s an allegory of the shaman’s apprenticeship
….all the different characters are parts of the apprentice, parts of me. Mother and Father trying to do their chores represent the normal work a day me. The baby represents the undeveloped potential of my soul that cries for attention. But the square part of me can’t understand the crying of my soul, doesn’t like it, throws a blanket over it. Might as well be a wet blanket. My neglected soul gets disenchanted, turns away from normal human life, and gets led into the wilderness by Trickster. In the wilderness my soul begins to rediscover its power-symbolized by lightning and wind. I try to show this to Mum and Dad, but they don’t get it, so eventually my soul realizes it’s not about getting approval, it’s about becoming a fountain of blessing for the community. This is gaining maturity, thus the baby boy becomes a wise old man.”
love & light Vivienne
August 11th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
one more thing…
Paul, I’m confused by your words directed at Tim?
I know you mean love and encouragement but.!!!
….”the next step on your journey requires a step off the material, the path of answers and solutions and onto an inner path”!!!!
Isn’t that what “What a Way to Go” and more to the point Tim is all about. Tim is embodying the inner path to his limits and beyond.
love & light to all
Vivienne
August 11th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Dear Tim,
I love you. I want to hug the “soft animal” that is you. And I guess I can, in a few days! If you’ll let me.
Does it resonate? Yes, it does, like a deep, wide singing bowl at all hours, repeating its vibration over and over. I hear you very clearly, and I feel profound gratitude for your voice.
I know the Soup and the Ego and the grief and dying, too. And the limitations of this machine which I am using right now. It is seductive and useful and even life-saving sometimes but also limiting and tyrannical in its way.
May the beautiful land you have landed on offer comfort and companionship, along with your beloved human companions.
Jen
August 11th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Can understand your change. I have too. Time wasted on computers is time away from the earth, time away from things that you can touch, see, smell and hear. find myself enjoying watching a bee at work more than reading blogs. Bees are so much more precious. Love life amongst the vegetables, feeling their thrust for growth. Love picking, preserving and using the wonders of the earth. What a world we live in right under our feet, rather than the other side of a computer screen.
Loved your ‘What a Way to Go’ and the many other films I have watched about the amazing future we face. Feel good about this future, feel hopeful and still feel one day everyone will wake up to it. Maybe too late but sure they will enjoy what’s left.
Thank you for you wonderful film. Life is a mystery that is forever changing.
Mary
August 11th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Good luck, Tim. I wish I could step off the internet and let it float away. Too many hooks in it yet, so I can’t.
I have a friend who has cerebral palsy and it is painful for him to do anything intentionally (intentional tremors). He has to sidle up to the things that need doing and let them happen. He has learned to understand and live in the here and now. The future and the past are myths, and what needs to be done will get done. I am the opposite. I cannot deal with the here and now very well. I have a blind spot where Now is. My mythical life is in the past and the future.
Perhaps you will learn to live Now and well, and say goodbye to the future possibility that you gave the world. Humans are not as smart as we hope they will be. We live by emotion, but our lives have been saturated with the emotions of Marketing, so that we cannot feel our real lives through the babble and demands. We should all walk away from that world. It isn’t necessary to our good living. If you want Change, keep it in your pocket. It’s the only way to vote.
August 11th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Tim,
It was a brave act of hopefulness to make the movie. You have spoken for so many of us and I thank you for the 5 years you devoted to it. You are a better man than I Gunga Din.
Karen
August 11th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Hey Tim!
Good to hear from you bro! Thank you for sharing your journey, it’s very norishing to know we have similar issues…
No matter what, there’s a community of support out here across this jewel of a planet we call home.
I too, desire more analog than digital groups, and that’s more than likely the future anyway.
I’m now in apprenticeship as a part-time Permaculture teacher, and see this is a relevant future anyway, regardless of how things unfold. Sitting in knowledge/wisdom circles, passing on and learning from students, creating a community of grounded ecological wisdom, I’ve found very healing of my “civilised” neurotic past…still a long way to go, but I guess I’m a student of this for the rest of my life!
Warmest regards to you and Sally!
Ted
August 11th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Hi Tim,
Nice to see you evolving. Glad you are getting past the desire to “save the world” — especially potent nectar when combined with the “White Guy Saves the Day” upbringing we have both had.
Your Act II says it all. Be like Candid - Tend your own garden and you will be rewarded far beyond the Act I person you used to be just a short while ago.
Lua and I send our love to you and Sally.
Bob
August 11th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
I thought I would share two journeys I had not so long
In the first I traveled to a far of land where I saw a very large tree in the Savannah half of it in complete darkness. There was a man dancing a traditional dance by the tree. Slowly I became the man and then I melted deep into the Earth traveling in complete darkness, I could feel emotions of fear and anger. The in front of me I saw the top of what appeared to me to the the heart of the Earth. It recoiled from me in fear, not from who I was but what I was. I tickled it with a large feather and it laughed. I sat close beside it and we chatted for awhile.
The second journey was part of a Spirits and Nature workshop I attend a few weeks ago. In the journey we were told to go to the sea and ask a sea mammal what would could do t help the ecology of the world. So I traveled to the East coast and after being visited by a few animals a sperm whale took me out to the what seemed the middle of the ocean and left me there. I was visited by what I will call animal metaphors wolves with whale fins and loins with mermaids’ tales but none would answer my question. Then out of the deep came a huge blue whale. It gave me a big kiss on the cheek. I asked the question, what could I do to help the ecology of the world or my space. The whale gave me a one word answer. Die.
Thank you and Sally for your movie
Be well.
August 11th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Tim, you have spoken my heart.
Lua
August 11th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
PS. (By the way - Bob meant “Candide.”)
August 12th, 2008 at 12:01 am
Dear Tim,
Reading what you have written here leaves me with tears welling… sadness for the loss of you in this cyber community even though I have not had the opportunity to visit it often. But also with a sense of the joy that can and will be found in the physical, proximal home you are making for yourself that is so much more real in this moment than anything I could write to you via these circuits.
That’s where our place is… where our next efforts will make the most difference. These places we each call home are where we can learn, each together with those close around us, how to take care of each other in the kinds of ways that our society so often neglects. The work of nurturing the small community I make my home in… trying to help shape it into a place where people will come together for each other when there is need… parallels the nurturing of myself through spiritual and emotional changes which I think so many of us are experiencing here. I find daily moments of delight and joy in small things… connections with others and pleasures shared… the first tomatoe picked and eaten off the vine today (we had a cold spring and a late start).
So I think your choice is a good one. I will think of you there taking pleasure in similar small things. things that exist in the moment… where that moment is the only one that matters.
And Vivienne, I found it so wonderful to read your reply since I am just at the end of Eliot Cowan’s book myself. With roots in Western medicine (which continues to be the way I make my living), but understanding of its significant limitations and draw-backs, I am exploring traditional herbalism as well as other alternative approaches. I find his work compelling and invigorating while at the same time I struggle with the possibilities for integration of it all. Its a joyful struggle though!
In community,
Jill
August 12th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Tim (you’ll always be Wabbit to me :-), As I read your blog, my heart and mind and soul shifted from excitement to resonance to sadness to happiness to silence to … I could go on for a long time. It’s hard to find all the right words but easy to feel the emotions…
I too find myself going through a smaller version (or maybe just the early phases) of what you’ve been through. I crave more connection with beings and things real - and I find myself not so satisfied anymore with the various media and electronic interactions that offer to take over our lives. As do you, I look forward someday to “long and open dialogue with others willing to question their deepest assumptions and come together to find a wisdom more profound than any of us can find on our own”. Perhaps someday our paths will cross in person - not just electronically. That would be good indeed. Then again, maybe I’ll become a butterfly in my neck of the woods and we’ll share butterfly stories in Act III.
I’ll just say, the world (and certainly me) is a better place for you (and Sally) being here.
Thank you - deeply,
-Bob
August 12th, 2008 at 2:11 am
“Does any of this resonate? I find that the one thing I most crave – long and open dialogue with others willing to question their deepest assumptions and come together to find a wisdom more profound than any of us can find on our own – is the one thing I cannot seem to find online.”
Tim, I offer you, and also leave you with the same thoughts which I shared with you personally after your first blog when you began this on-line voyage of self-exploration and planetary discovery. I am sorry for your loss and it is not what you where wanting to hear, but your children, as most of us, will not likely make it through this planetary cleansing. The great purification is at hand, as it should be. Nothing to get excited about and every reason to refrain from reproduction for those with a conscious.. (feel free to edit this intro as to make it politically correct (but please preserve the quotes). I appreciate all you are and all you try to do. Love on ya, tu amigo zimba
“We shall never cease from exploration and at the end of all our exploring we will arrive where we started and know this place for the first time.” - T.S. Eliot
“Civilization may be part of the problem with respect to nature, but there will be no solution without it. It is culture, and certainly not nature, that teaches us to observe and remember, to learn from our mistakes, to share our experiences, and perhaps most important of all, to restrain ourselves. Nature does not teach its creatures to control their appetites except by the harshest of lessons - epidemics, mass death, extinctions. Nothing would be more natural than for humankind to burden the environment to the extent that it was rendered unfit for human life. Nature in that event would not be the loser, nor would it disturb her laws in the least - operating as she has always done, natural selection would unceremoniously do us in. Should this fate be averted, it will only be because our culture - our laws and metaphors, our science and technology, our ongoing conversation about nature and man’s place in it - pointed us in the direction of a different future. Nature will not do this for us. The gardener in nature is that most artificial of creatures, a civilized human being: in control of his appetites, solicitous of nature, self-conscious and responsible, mindful of the past and the future, and at ease with the fundamental ambiguity of his predicament - which is that though he lives in nature, he is no longer strictly of nature. Further, he knows that neither his success nor his failure in this place is ordained. Nature is apparently indifferent to his fate, and this leaves him free - indeed obliges him - to make his own way here as best he can.” - Wendell Berry
“Having weaved and dodged our way around the main issues by expending critical time and effort on spinning out non-renewable energy, we will eventually have to confront our essential challenges as a species and decide whether we can respond logically to our intellectual understanding of the world’s limitations and thus overcome flaws in our ancient DNA or whether the primitive urges towards procreation, tribalism and power will prevail and we will behave like other plague species and suffer a truly catastrophic situation because we have no control over our exponential population growth or urge to consume.
World population more than trebled last century from 1.8 billion to 6 billion in 2000 and has added a population of consumers the equivalent to that of North America since 1998; we are currently adding 3 humans per second. It is ironical that we should be agonizing over this issue in Australia, the continent where wildlife species had adapted their breeding cycles to respond to resource availability long ago and where the indigenous human population had more or less reached a steady state with the environment over a period of some 60000 years.
As an educator I believe that humans can be trained to step back from the abyss, but it will require a level of self discipline and regulation that takes people to the edge of their genetic capabilities.
Dominant religious, economic and political frameworks today fail to take account of man’s capacity to destroy the earth’s life support systems and the concept of divine power excuses believers from taking absolute responsibility for management of themselves and their earth, leaving an urgent need for an overarching set of global ethics and principles through which wise decisions can be made.
Now that some leaders have accepted concepts of climate change and that oil is a finite resource it is time for the ‘population reduction issue’ to be addressed in public. Limiting the right of humans to reproduce has been a ‘no-go’ area even for most permaculturists but it is clearly the core issue. Our education, legal and medical systems must seriously address the matters of bioregional and national ‘carrying capacities’, school and tertiary curricula, family planning, euthanasia, sterilization and abortion in a philosophical, humane and scientific manner; every hour that we delay in developing a workable approach to population 11000 extra people arrive on this overstretched planet.” – from the Running On Empty Oz’s (ROEOZ) Website
“The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.
The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity” — and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.” -Garrett Hardin (1968)
“There is a secret in the world and nobody wants to talk about the secret. The secret is that we will continue on doing what we are doing until we can’t anymore”. - Danial Quinn
“It’s never seemed relevant to study people whose only accomplishment was to live on a planet for three million years without devouring it. But as you approach a point of no return in your plunge toward extinction, this study will soon seem very relevant indeed”. - “My Ishmael” By Daniel Quinn
Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. – “The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race” by Jared Diamond, Prof. UCLA School of Medicine (Discover-May 1987)
“Man, You must convince yourselves that the optimal solution is the voluntary extinction of your genus. Extinguish yourself and return dignity to Earth and all of her other creatures.” – zimba
“Creating babies today is like renting rooms in a burning building, to our children no less.” – Les U. Knight (founder - www.vhemt.org)
The Last Messiah by Zapffe
And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and a new Messiah. Yet when many saviors have been nailed to trees and stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.
Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom, a man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousand fold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:
“The life of the world is a roaring river, but Earth is a pond and a backwater.
The sign of doom is written on your brows - how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the
pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails…
August 13th, 2008 at 2:51 am
My dear dear friend.
My chest is tight with your pain but I have to say [and make you look at] your opening line - there is life there yet, lots of it. It is a life that will always see more in a given
thing than the simple reflection of light focused through the retina upside down onto the photo-sensitive nerves, sent to the brain, re-shuffled the right way up and presented
as reality. And things in this context are not only tactile ones, but all the other ones like thoughts and concepts and dreams and those faint and distant lights that draw us
on.
Among my gleanings is that the word Shaman originates from the Tungis [?] people [Mongolia way] and that it means “one who sees”. So I go with Vivienne, wholeheartedly
[and thanks Vivienne].
I remember only too well my experience of clear purpose and inspiration after my first Community Building Experience [CBE]. I came back to Africa with “Benign Being -
please use” written on my forehead. Then I started figuring ways to arrange a CBE locally and very quickly came up against some very tough questions - like - how do I sell
love? or How do I persuade people that we need honesty, deep, raw and naked honesty. There were more, many more, and to each I found no answer, and that not for want
of quest. That was nearly ten years ago and I still do not have answers to those questions. But asking them of myself changed me.
I no longer subscribe to platitudes, in fact, they are red flags to me, and the stars on the red flag spell out the word “unconscious!” I do not believe that the choice to be
unconscious is subconscious. But it is deeply buried and best forgotten otherwise we would not have today as it is - Empire - where some are simply the best, dictating the
lives of all the rest. Empire, where there is not a single problem that we have created that we cannot fix with another problem in the making.
There are those who stand up and say “Mea culpa”, those who couldn’t and those who wouldn’t.
There is that saying about forbearance, courage and wisdom. The scraps of wisdom I have accumulated have all come at great cost. They came with pain, the wrenching
and tearing of taking a long-held belief and removing it from the depths of my soul, and the pain of clearer sight. The pain of seeing sisters and brothers stand before the
mirror, pupils dilated by what they see, only to hesitatantly, almost longingly, turn away and carry on business as usual. The pain of seeing the many many more too busy
to even stop and look in the mirror.
But the clarity that comes with wisdom puts the senses in touch with the soul. The effect is some magnification and a fair amount of X-ray capacity. It has given me the
cause for wonder at little things - like the amazingly neat and clean way that the humble chicken’s plumage lies over its body and flexes to every move it makes - and I think
“What care and attention to the most minute detail of that little creature. What Love!”
And then there is that other thing that has graced me. It is the grace of resonant thought. You may remember my phone call just after you had read my “so what do I do
now?” e-mail and you shared with me how it had ‘crystalised’ a thing that had been troubling you at the time. Other times I will pick up the ringing phone and say “Hi Jane”
who will respond with great surprise “How did you know it was me?” The little things go a long way for me.
When I find myself caught in my own whirlpool of burden I ask myself why it is ‘happening’ to me. [Of course that is an inane question because ‘it’ is inamate and
non-sentient.] And the answer is simply - “You asked.”
With love
Bernhard
PS - “what do I do now?” is, of course, the universal question [well maybe lifelong but who knows what happens in the herebefore nd the herafter]. It is the root of every
action in every moment. Most-times when I have got there after having done that, I find that I am not where I thought I would be, things are not what I expected. So I get
stuck in trying to fix either that or how I ’see’ it and “Whatcha gonna do now?” becomes more insistent [to the point of maddening dis-ease] as I waste my energy on what
can no longer be changed until eventually I break loose and move on. Fly brother!
August 13th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Vivienne, Paul, Jen, Mary, Auntiegrav, Karen, Ted, Bob, Ivor, Lua, Jill, Bob, Zimba, Bernhard… Thank you all. I’ll take your love now, your hugs later, your best wishes and fellowship and resonance and alignment… and I’ll use it all to make it through this day, and then the next, and the one after that.
The sun is out, the air cool and dry and breezy, and I’ve a post office to walk to, and butter to procure, and chickens to follow around. The great purification… yes… I can feel my old self continuing to burn away. There is pain, of course, but my heart is light and full and my eyes are filled with stars.
Peace, all.
Touching the ground,
Tim
August 13th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Tim,
First I want to say, great movie. I bought it and recommend it to others. I’m thinking about public showings, but after your experiences I’m not sure.
In your focusing on the present, you may have overlooked that the “good fight” that you are presently engaged in has a long history. Some of us thought the “evil empire” needed to be brought down in the late 60s and early 70s; whether by trying to form communes, establish rural homesteads and farms, or do one’s own “thing” in the city. Back then it wasn’t so much about creating a “local economy”, or survivalist as it was about doing what one loves, practicing “right livelihood”, not contributing to the evil empire and being free. And, in a sense, this struggle is the struggle for stability, justice, freedom, peace, health, joy, sustainability, and preserving the natural world around us; and is as long as civilization itself.
Your frustration and quandary may be the same as many others who have attempted to “buck the system”…… all through history. Perhaps the million-dollar question is “buck the system”… to what? I guess you have also said this in so many words.
Having worked “outside the system” and having been an organic farmer from many years I watch with some amusement how it seems people who have been working “in the system” for many years are suddenly questioning that system, afraid for its stability and talking about creating “local economy”.
Let me first say, I’m prejudiced. I spent my 20s trying to create or find the perfect commune, it didn’t happen. I also always wanted to be an organic farmer, an opportunity presented itself in my 30s and that’s what I did for 20 years. So, when I say I still think we need to live communally in some fashion or another, you understand my prejudice. Nevertheless, I still stand by what I’m about to say which is the idea of an “local economy” and for that matter the idea of “eco-village” are fatally flawed in my opinion and will never happen. By “never happen”, what I mean is these two ideas will never change anything fundamentally, even though they obviously can be manifested in one form or another.
You have to understand, I’ve been living it so to speak. I’ve been living the solution people are now talking about and I’m saying in all my years of rural living and self-employment all I saw from my vantage point was alternative people steadily progressing back into “the system”. Rural living and in my opinion, even the venerated “family homestead” is an extremely inefficient, often socially isolating, and one might even say extravagant and expensive (time demands as well as money) form of living. Doing what one loves and right livelihood can never adequately meet those needs, or at least in most cases.
Human beings have a record of being dishonest with one another and for that matter even dishonest with oneself. The kind of dishonesty I mean here is best characterized as “the little white lie”. It’s like that author Paul Hawken said in one of his books, and I paraphrase, “people are quite happy to tell you their sexual proclivities, but are quite secretive about their incomes or bank accounts”.
But that “little white lie” is significant when it involves just how one got the money to live in that “eco-village”, or how one is able to keep doing ones “right livelihood” when in fact all the money one is getting that one needs to survive is not actually coming from that “right livelihood”. Or, the very thing that made it possible was an inheritance.
To me, the big shebang may be about shared ethics and goals, articulating them and taking a stand on them and then finding others to achieve and live them with. I think they have to be very simple if we are actually going to be able to share them with others. I think we all have to first decide for ourselves what they are and then seek others who feel similarly. Mine are stated at www.cooperative-community.info
Finally, I have suspected for quite some time that there is a power play going on between men and women on this planet. In some societies the males dominate and in some societies the females dominate. And when I say this I don’t necessarily mean men and women as people, it can also be about female values and male values dominating.
In my opinion the feminine values dominates the “West” (watch the Bill Maher you tube clip below) and the masculine values dominates the “East”. Of course, there is overlap, I’m just generalizing. My view is, and I think all would probably agree, it is a balance between the two that work best. The trouble is it seems we humans are used to an hierarchal sort of power structure, not a cooperative one, and so even on the most intimate of levels, that being between men and women, there is still (often, sometimes?) a power struggle going on (probably deeply hidden, subtle and cultural involving long held (or perhaps shortsighted and immediate) expectations and agreements. If one thinks women do not dominate the West, just try suggesting to your wife, girlfriend, partner or date that(you don’t think life needs to be nearly as much work, or cost as much money as what everybody else thinks it does and that you the male feel you should have a lot more freedom ) or you want to live in a commune, (or even just in the country for that matter, that you just don’t want to live the “9-to-5″) that you no longer want to worry about large expensive possessions and money; that you want to eat communally, share large resources and do some cooperative work together. You can’t even say what I just said in our society and not get into trouble. Without being called sexist. Maybe it is sexist, but what if one sex is trying to dominate in one way or the other, whether it be it through capital resources, sexual resources or some sort of favored position? What if one sex or the other is trying to dominate through the support of cultural tradition?
Go to and watch the BBC documentary called “The Trap” and I think it’s in the first episode that the psychiatrist RD Lang’s research is talked about. Pretty fascinating stuff I think . Or watch the YouTube clip of Bill Maher
Ultimately “Empire” in my opinion, equals exploitative economics or exploitative capitalism and of course this is been going on for a very long time, way before oil and mining technology. Modern technology and oil or nonrenewable energy sources have just exasperated this exploitative capitalism, economics problem. Once, I believe, we see it for what it is, it’s not that hard to understand why nobody really has anything significant to say to each other. Because if we were to say anything significant to each other we would have to acknowledge that the whole basis of our culture, a socioeconomic culture is based on a profound lie and even it might be set a profound evil. This, I suppose it could be said, is related to what the fellow Jack Reed calls “the everybody for themselves” mentality. There simply isn’t any way that we can do “anything we want” (as in having as many children as we want and exploiting others economically) and everyone be “free” or have a high quality life.
Chris Greene, www.cooperative-community.info
August 13th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
VLADIMIR:
We can still part, if you think it would be better.
ESTRAGON:
It’s not worthwhile now.
Silence.
VLADIMIR:
No, it’s not worthwhile now.
Silence.
ESTRAGON:
Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR:
Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
Curtain.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I would like to add a couple wrapup thoughts which I think I missed from my previous comment.
While on one level, to response to the question “what to do now?” or “where to from here?” and so on and so forth……with the humble answer of “I don’t know” is okay at certain level, however, at another level I feel it may be dodging, or avoiding required work; no matter how experimental, risky and uncertain of a successful outcome it may be.
If one thinks the general response to telling or sharing with the “masses” ones view of “the end times they are coming” was rather lackluster, try sharing one’s “plan of action” to create a better life and to avoid disaster. I have been at that for several years now (maybe my whole life) and I can tell you….. (while at least you might get a little money, maybe, for a movie) for thoughts on what to do, one is lucky to even get a response, or maybe I mean lucky not to get a negative response.
Now, maybe you’re saying well of course, who wants to conform to “your” plan? And that’s a legitimate point, up to a point. However, to the degree that solutions involve some sort of consensus among people (and I would argue that the alternatives and necessary courses of action to avoid catastrophe do involve consensus among people) that it is indeed a “social” problem or “socio-economic” problem. If it is a “social” problem then how do we face it together?
I often tell people that if you’ve ever been in a room full of people and discussed what “community” means you never really want to do it again trying to make a point through humor. But the point is this: I suspect we must decide for ourselves, by ourselves what “community” means before we ever come together to discuss it together. We must read books, meditate, reflects, watch documentary movies and talk amongst ourselves (just a few or with a close friend) and then decide for ourselves and by ourselves just what the “answer” is.
Now when I say “answer” I am referring to something in an extremely broad sense, a foundational sense. As in: what are the underlying principles, ethics and goals that create sustainable and peaceful societies? I am not referring to the plethora of “details” such as where, how, how many and so on. My feeling is without consensus on the underlying principles, ethics and goals any kind of attempt to move on to the “details” will only be an exercise in frustration.
Again, I’m getting wordy. The main point I’m trying to make is: no suggestion as to what “the answer” is, is to say what is, is okay. And what is, might be called anarchistic, individualistic, opportunistic, exploitive capitalism. And it seems to me there is no possible way that this could ever be changed from the top-down. It must start from the bottom up. And I can only see this happening: first with 10 or so people agreeing what to do and then a few hundred or so. It only seems utopian and impossible if one doesn’t think very hard about what would make it work; both practically and in the human sense.
But again, suggest almost anything and one will be shot down. But I say again to suggest nothing, is to give in, it is to dodge the questions and problems. The rugged individualist, survivalist, homestead in the country solution, with all due respect, is a continuation of what is, in my opinion. People are just not being honest with themselves or each other about what’s really sustaining these survivalist homesteads in the country. Take away those (invisible?) economic inputs such as the spouses job in town, the annuities, the pension, the food stamps, the trust fund, the rental income, a car, and so on, and one, I believe, will discover just how unattractive that answer will be.
I’m talking, to some degree of course, about the extremely unpopular “intentional community” ideas or paradigms. And I agree, what they represent has been and is, largely a failure. I think of the IC.org website and list, not as the hope of the future, but rather the nightmare to come. Why would I say such a thing? Those “communities” largely represent a few people with “capital” saying they want to share it, but it seems a lot more like they want to use that capital to control and exploit others. And the eco-village concept sounds nice, but unless everyone tore up their deeds all at once, the so-called “eco-village” concept will remain, as the cohousing movement is also, extravagant, expensive, inefficient, largely uncooperative and a continuation of classism.
Chris Greene, www.cooperative-community.info
August 15th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Tim, I would be deeply, deeply suscpicious if you were not doing what you are doing. Thanks for the articulate light that shined on some of the existing pathways forward. I resonated. That’s what I’m ‘trying to do’ now. The search for my people, locale, way of working and the act of listening is still going on. I think from now I’ll still be interested in hearing what you have to say about whatever….
August 20th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
To Tim and Chris Greene,
First to Chris,
All you seem to be saying is that the human ego has a hard time cooperating with others in community. This is especially true for all of us who are being forced into the position of having to create tribal society from scratch, and indeed it is almost impossible.
Yes, my experience of intentional community (and all of my life, really) taught me that money and the issue of how to designate spiritual authority are very difficult issues.
As for the source of the money though, I do not agree. I see no reason why one cannot and should not use money from “the system” and do good with it and I intend to do just that.
But as to the human ego, here is the only solution I have seen:
The person or people who are most advanced in Self-Realization, the most advanced in healing themselves from the damage done to them in social indoctrination in a spiritually degenerate culture/world should be acknowledged as the natural leaders and teachers.
The point is, no matter how much anyone disagrees with this, there is really no other choice.
THE PROBLEM is that almost all human egos balk at the idea of treating a contemporary as a spiritual mentor/teacher even if the person has demonstrated that they have earned the right to be trusted.
But life does not come with an insurance policy. Just because there is the possibility that a leader(s) can degenerate into an authoritarian does not mean we must therefore discard the idea of leadership such as radical egalitarians/feminists want to do, because then the group degenerates into ineffective incoherence.
In other words, the kicker is, people will only be capapble of spontaneous community self-organization AFTER they have been healed of the damage done to them by this culture, and for that, they will need to accept the leadership of those who are more advance than they are in this endeavor and can lead/teach them and help them.
However, it looks like we are headed for global disaster, so all of this healing stuff and egalitarianism will probably fall by the wayside as people struggle and band together just to survive.
Tim,
Yeah, I went through much the same thing. And I think I will be walking away from the Internet soon and moving to small-town life, work on organic farms and possibly intentional community.
I think the reality is that there really isnt much left to say, so what can one do except live?
Garden. Raise goats. Become as self-sufficient as possible. Create community. Meditate. Live a renunciate, contemplative life. Prepare for death. That is where I am going. Warm regards, Joseph
August 21st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
There is a new game in town being played by some collapse writers.
It has now become fashionable to claim that those predicting a serious catastrophic collapse of industrial civilization in the near future, i.e. in 10-15 years, are suffering from an “apocalyptic mind-set.”
For the most part, these writers are only dealing with Peak Oil, and, they are using historical examples of cultures that have collapsed in the past.
The point missed by these writers is that there is no precedent for what is happening on this planet: at least 7 billion people facing: Peak Oil, Peak Fresh Water, rapid depletion of topsoil/arable land, dying oceans, catastrophic climate change and etc..
It has become fashionable to claim that those like James Lovelock, who think it very possible that we have already passed the point of no return in terms of preventing catastrophic climate change, are simply “all wrong.”
Well I, and the people I know, are not suffering from an apocalyptic mind-set. I have no need to believe in catastrophe and derive no *pleasure* from doing so.
I come to this conclusion by examining the empirical evidence and then rationally considering the situation.
All of these writers deal with “best-case” scenarios”, and the evidence right now points to the FACT that all best-case scenarios have been almost invariably proven wrong.
Take the presidential elections. There is absolutely NO sign that this country will deal with the Peak Everything world we are entering in a mature fashion. Instead, we see a childish bulls**t.
Look at the world. Where do we see any sign of a serious, radical global dialogue about the absolute need to reduce human breeding?
And when I say serious, I mean a discussion that dominates the entire global media with an in-depth look at and analysis of the situation, a discussion that at least gets as much air time and ink as, say, the Olympic Games.
It is also becoming fashionable with these writers to be derogatory toward those who want to build lifeboat communities or ecovillages of intentional communities or whatever. They claim that such people are childish dreamers.
Well, perhaps there are some people who are caught up in romantic ideas about what the future holds, but I think the majority want to engage in such endeavors because circumstances are forcing us all to at least try.
I just have to wonder about these scoffers. They have egos the size of ocean liners, they *know* how it’s all going to turn out and they denigrate those who disagree with them.
I wonder if they see that there big egos are an example of why humanity is headed for catastrophe.
And yes, I know from personal experience how ego destroys community.
August 21st, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Tim, Chris, Joseph-
Tim- Good to hear from you. Della and I are back in Spokane after spending 3+ months traveling in the Southwest and Midwest. Getting out was an eye-opening experience and Della predicts — and did so before McCain surged in the polls — a win for McCain based on our conversations with those we came across.
Chris- I think you have it mostly right and I’ll contact you in the near future.
Joseph- The problem with not using money from the system is that quality — a goal for Chris — will be hard to achieve in whatever one does outside the system.
Matt
August 22nd, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Matt,
Perhaps I have a blind spot, but I just dont see a problem here. Why not use whatever money one has and do some good with it?
Sure there are problems. I lived in an intentional community/aspiring ecovillage. I and most of the other left because the woman who had bought the land was a tyrant. She had serious problems getting along with other people, and would not accept valid criticism.
As such, I and most of the people there at the time left (and we were a very good group of people)
. I am not going to name names, so let me just say that the community had a fairly viable business that was paying the mortgage and property taxes.
However, I am not going to let this one experience cause me to completely write-off such endeavors, or write-off the use of money from the system to fund the building of communities outside the system, or as *outside* as one can get.
In other words, there will come a time when money as we know it will be worth perhaps 10% of its present value if it is not completely worthless. So why not use it now to prepare for this time?
Indeed, how can one do otherwise? I know that one could discard everything one owns and possesses, including ones cloths, and go live in a national forest and start from scratch as a naked hunter-gatherer, but I do not think this is a viable option for very many people.
Most people are going to want to have some cloths, a knife, perhaps a hatchet and etc.. and therefore - before you know it - we are back to using money to fund the new life. Regards, Joseph
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Joseph- I was agreeing with you. My apologies for not making that clear. My point was supposed to be that it is difficult to operate in isolation from the dominant economy/system. It *is* necessary to interface and this includes attracting capital. The trick is getting those with the capital to accept that usury is not compatible with sustainability. Interestingly enough, the wealthy do not expect a monetary return — at least short term — on things like exclusive residence club and golf course memberships. Best regards, Matt
August 27th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Tim, anyone.
Here is a good short article
http://sorrynogas.blogspot.com/2008/08/sorry-no-gas.html
Anyway Tim, you did good, you have a good heart and you are one of the best in the Peak Everything Awareness Movement - PEAM hehehe - how’s that for a label? L8r, Joseph
August 27th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Also, the following link is not easy reading but…it has one of the most extensive, up-to-date environmental links list I have seen.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46378
September 4th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Wow. Tim, thanks. This is something I’ve encountered. For a while now, I’ve felt that by using electronic mediums and media I am giving a thumbs up for Business As Usual and not being the earthly me I want to be. I’ve wanted to cut the cables!
We didn’t have internet all summer in order to save cash. Now, wifey is back at work and the web extends to our home again. I’m already having a hard time living in my actual environment and keeping away from the raging rapids of information. Blogs and news and email and interests and articles and… ARGH!!!
I need to keep this computer off until I have a good idea of what I want to do in my actual environment and then use it to help with the task(s) IF NECESSARY.
I Love all you guys. Bring love to the places you live in. They need it.
Peace,
J
September 4th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Dear Tim,
Thank you for your work.
If we are ever in the same place, we should talk again. I’ve been through this and have emerged on the other side. With all the world at stake, we should talk again. There is much work still to be done, and we have a profound responsibility to the land that gives us life to do whatever it takes to stop this culture before it kills all there is. As you know, lifestyle changes are not sufficient to stop this culture. We need to fight back. With all the world at stake, we need to fight back. We should talk.
your friend,
Derrick
September 5th, 2008 at 3:04 am
Derrick,
Love your work, bro!!! BUT. Humor me… Fighting doesn’t always look like fighting. Many ways to fight. Right? I mean, Aikido, Capoeira, Drunken Bitchslapping… Anyway, people need to LIVE LIVES. Not everybody has the warrior constitution. Not everybody can go fuck shit up and leave their family to pick up the pieces when they get hauled off to a KBR facility. Fighting can look like someone manifesting as much as possible the lifestyle you and I wish was normal. Enough people doing this and being satisfied, even happy, can have amazing impact, especially in an age when it is more and more obvious to anyone who is halfway honest with themselves that our culture is dysfunctional, absurd and suicidal.
What the fuck do I know? I know that people are tired and are beginning to live in strangely beautiful ways. This can’t be bad. Some fight, and others fight. Same fight. Need it all, right?
Besides, if anyone DOES survive crash, they must know how to live well and avoid repeating the same shitty cycle(s).
Live well. I may regret this post when I am sober. Screw regret!
Love,
J
September 7th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
We are all going through various stages of a common process of awakening. At different stages, different responses are appropriate and possible. At some point I believe all of us will fight… when our backs are against the wall and that which we love most is being ripped apart before our eyes. As Derrick notes, even a mouse will fight when its young are threatened.
The sad fact is, that at that point it may be too late. Too late in every sense except symbolically. Too late to save what we love.
Wherever we are in the process, our responsibility is to not turn away, to not halt the process, to have the courage to stay awake and go where it leads. It may not be healthy to force ourselves to go at a faster pace, or to take on more than we can handle. Hopefully enough of us will have gotten to the point where action can be something other and more effective than a last-ditch futile gesture or symbolic protest.
When they came for the wild salmon, I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a salmon, and store-bought canned tuna was fine anyway. When they came for the gray wolf I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a gray wolf, and it was far away, and the ranchers had a point, I had chickens to tend to myself. When they came for the blue whale I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a blue whale, and anyway it couldn’t be as bad as they said, and I had to keep my job. When they came for the polar bear I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a polar bear… I mean sure I was sad but the whole problem of climate change was too big, what could one person do, and I mean, I still had to drive to work, you know? Finally, when the fish were all poisoned, and the gray wolf was silent, and the blue whale was no more, and the oceans were dying, and the coral reefs and the plankton were gone and… and… I finally did speak up because I decided enough was enough… but it was brief, because there was very little oxygen left, so I kind of… you know… drifted off…gently.
Love,
Kevin
September 11th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Well Derrick, Tim,
As one who has read both volumes of Endgame, I certainly thank you Derrick for an in-depth investigation of the human situation from a perspective that I suppose would be called “deep ecology”.
I also like the “earth-as-spiritual-school” narrative, so below is a sample of that narrative (that I posted on another website also).
Ultimately though, I would have to say that one is under NO obligation to have an opinion about existence. Think about it. An opinion about existence is once removed from existence. So why is it that we feel the need to think some Absolute, Final, Great Thought About It All That Sums It All Up?
I know that the deep ecology people do not care much for the esoteric spiritual pov.
However, I think that we are at a time of spiritual initiation and climate chaos, and I see the two as somehow connected .
In fact Tim, had we had the time at the screening, I might have mentioned this then. Not sure if it helps or not.
Warm regards, Joseph:
Now, here is the thesis. If, maybe, humanity hadn’t lost touch so completely with the sacred, with higher esoteric spirituality, and had humanity been able to make the higher, esoteric spiritual the foundation of civilization, we would then have been able to see that the right way to use industrial technology and our fossil fuel inheritance would have been for the purpose of creating the leisure time for all so that people would have the spare time to deeply engage in esoteric spiritual evolution.
Fostering the unfolding of the innate spiritual Genius in the individual, aligning culture to that purpose, would result in an explosion of Consciousness-Intelligence and a quantum jump in the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health, balance and integrity of human beings.
And again, since the relationship is dynamic, humans would create a planetary civilization that had the wisdom and maturity to regulate itself sustainably, especially when you consider that the esoteric spiritual process gives access to a multi-dimensional spectrum of Consciousness-Intelligence that contains knowledge about the creation, maintenance and renewal of the cosmic process. Sacred Science
I mention this because many writers in the Peak Everything Awareness Movement (PEAM) point to the need for a “new narrative” about the purpose of human existence, so I just offered one, the “Earth-as-Spiritual-School” narrative. I offered it because I do not often see this one mentioned in the PEAM.
I suspect that beings such as humans have arisen in billions of Gaian systems in billions of galaxies and that the experimental outcome is as varied as the idea that whatever can happen actually does happen somewhere, at some *time.* There is also, then, the possibility of either directed or random Panspermia, and/or the possibility that Gaian-DNA systems are generated by the higher planes of the consciousness-spectrum.
There is then the possibility that legends of Atlantis are deep archetypal memories about possible outcomes on Gaian systems. We are now entering a time of spiritual initiation along with climatic instability. Maybe the two are connected. warm regards, Joseph
September 12th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Here is the rest of the material regarding the ideas above. I do not know if all of this has merit or not.
As for the rest of it, it is now an established fact based on the experimental and experiential evidence from comparative esoteric spirituality, transpersonal psychology and psychedelic research that human potential is light-years beyond what both conventional science and religion postulate as possible.
Compared to what we can become, I would characterize the human race as literally fetal or larval.
The general idea is that, with the possibility of billions, trillions of Gaian systems throughout the cosmos, that many evolutionary possibilities are…well…possible. If we bring in the idea of Nonlocal Mind (faster-than-light communication) and morphogenetic fields, there is the possibility of an intra-galactic Network of Gaian-DNA Consciousness-Intelligence.
We all could actually be living many different lives in many different systems Now, or accessing “memories” about these lives and systems.
Or, DNA could act as a transceiver through which we could tap into such memories, memories of DNAs aeonic migration across the Cosmos.
Graham Hancock has a book out on such called Supernatural if I remember correctly.
Again, I mention all of this because perhaps, some will be able to use such information as a disinhibiting instruction to help jolt them out of spiritual amnesia, or in other words, remembering who they really are. If you do not resonate to this particular transmission, you are free to experiment with others, of course.
Also, I mentioned the “earth-as-spiritual-school” narrative as a way of looking at our situation from a different pov than the one we normally “look through” in the Peak Everything Awareness Movement (P.E.A.M.).
In other words, what if we are not humans having spiritual experiences but spiritual beings having human experiences? In other words, what if the ecological crisis we are experiencing on the physical plane is itself a reflection/result of our karma and our actions on some of the higher planes of existence?
Part of the reason I am writing about such things is for the purpose of finding a “middle way” between the PEAM and the 2012 movement. In other words, even if we are not going to achieve a planetary spiritual renaissance as the 2012 movement hopes, I still cannot disregard that there is a spiritual aspect to what we are going through.
In “dark night, early dawn: steps to a deep ecology of mind”, Christopher Bache suggests that we are heading into what we might call a Dark Night of the Collective Species Soul.
The memories and visions reported in NDE research and psychic and psychedelic research concerning planetary upheavals and earth changes may be some kind of archetypal memories of such occurrences here (see the book Forbidden Archaeology) or elsewhere on Gaian systems throughout the Cosmos.
If DNA can travel on asteroids in space, the possibility is that some of the DNA on this planet could have developed on other planets. We could have all lived through things like this crisis many times before, here and elsewhere.
And, there could be a collective DNA-Archetypal-Gaian memory-bank of both past and maybe future scenarios in Gaian systems.
Couple this with the research of people like Hancock (Supernatural) that shaman seem to be tapping into a DNA hypermedia database of esoteric knowledge and that civilization may have been “downloaded” from higher planes of existence, or a DNA database, and the point is that there might just be much more going on here that we realize.
September 15th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
In summation,
Some scientists want to name the present era the Anthropocene because humans have become a major bio-geological force in the biosphere that is driving the planetary support system into instability bordering on a chaotic condition.
Talk about creating your own reality……..
The problem, however, is by what criteria can we judge one of Nature’s Gaian-DNA experiments a “failure?”
I think one of the heaviest aspects of all of this is the moral dimension. But if humans are…well… designed by DNA then who is to blame for the seeming self-destructive trajectory of the human race?
The other aspect of the moral dimension is the fact that it is the poor around the globe who are the least to blame for the Peak Everything situation who are going to suffer the most and who already, in fact, are.
My personal choice is to have a spiritual path that is not dependent upon what does or does not happen on this planet.
Beyond that, I do not what more can be said, other than the fact that it is going to be one rough ride. Blessed be, Joseph
September 16th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
For those interested, this:
http://deoxy.org/meme/CosmicSerpent
is an example of some of the cutting edge Consciousness research.
Despite everything, I find this stuff very inspiring