This was first posted in the Summer of 2008…

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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.