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

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

For the longest time, I found it really difficult to imagine, create, or buy into a vision for the future. People would hand me thick folders full of their ideas and plans. Others would send me links and attachments. Some, often after screenings of our documentary, would tell me face to face what it was they were excited about. And many other visions and plans came across my radar just by virtue of my being connected into the Doomosphere™. But by and large, whether it was the relocalization movement, the biochar revolution, or the audacity of hope, whether any of these might be good ideas or not, I just couldn’t manage to really feel the excitement that so many around me appeared to be feeling.

For the longest time, I felt like a failure. I felt like I was doing something wrong. And a few people even told me that that was true, that if I wasn’t envisioning a positive future then, by default, I was envisioning a negative one, making me a part of the problem. They complained that What a Way to Go didn’t have anything at the end that they could latch onto, nothing in terms of a vision for what we could do. There was no happy chapter. There was no this and this and that which, if only everybody would do, would allow us to find the solution. Some people very much wanted such a vision. They wanted to have something they could get excited about doing. They wanted to find a way out of the mess I had outlined in the movie. And I just didn’t have that to give to them.

And then one cold, wintry day, while we were driving through the Vermont mountains, a piece of clarity alighted on Sally and me from above, and that clarity has served me since: This is not the time for visions. At least not for us.

The sense of failure I’d been laboring under has not returned to haunt me.

Here’s what came to us that day: it makes sense (and it resonates with us) to view our collective situation - our present predicament, our long emergency, our powerdown, our doomsday, our danger/opportunity, our end of suburbia, our life after the oil crash, our nuclear holocaust, our great turning, our die-off, our financial Armageddon, our eleventh hour, our petrocollapse, our overshoot, our endgame, our final crash, our mass extinction underway, our six degrees, our final empire, our ascent of humanity, our revenge of Gaia, our end of the world as we know it - as an initiation into cultural maturity at a grand and terrible scale, as some sort of a vision quest for the collective heart, mind, and soul. If that is so, it may help us to remember that the initiate does not go into the vision quest with a vision already in mind. That’s what makes it a quest. Initiates go first into the sweat house or death lodge, or embark on some similar process, or simply find themselves in a “dark night of the soul.” During this time the elders urge them to shed what needs to be shed, to symbolically “die.” Only then are they released into the wilderness to prove themselves ready and worthy, to be given a vision by the gods. And only then, upon their return, having faced their trials successfully, can they be reborn as fully adult members of the tribe, vision in hand to offer as service to the greater good of their community, and to give them meaning for their lives.

No wonder I couldn’t seem to hold onto a vision! Sally and I were sitting in the death lodge, doing everything we could do to help the remnants of our old, Imperialist egos die away, such that we could then open up to the Universe and let the gods lead for a while. It was not for us to concoct a plan or vision for saving the world. In fact, we were busily letting go of any inflated notions that “we” could do such a thing at this point.

We were working to get quiet and still, to sit for long days and nights, fasting from the ideas, assumptions, and energies of the dominant culture, and to learn, in the poet David Whyte’s words, to be in conversation with the Universe, rather than in control. The old visions? The visions given us by the culture in which we were raised? The visions of control and domination, of fixing and solving and making things happen, of even “benignly” ruling the world? Those we were shredding as quickly as we could. As I said in What a Way to Go, this culture’s arrogance, its adolescent sense of invincibility and entitlement, must be sloughed off to make room for a more mature sense of interdependence with, and responsibility to, the community of life. This is the work of initiation. This was the work we were doing, and still do to this day.

Over and over we confront, Sally and I, our egoic minds’ desire to know what to do, and then we face, again and again, the stunning realization that we cannot have what those minds want. Over and over, we take our current worldview gently in our arms and hold it while it breathes its last. Over and over, we go out into the wilderness and get still. The voices and visions do come: a whispering of wind, a rumbling of rock, a susurrus of stars, a trembling of trees. In bits and pieces, the next steps are given to us, a sense of the right actions, the best choices. Slowly, we make our way down this wilderness path.

There is little to figure out here. Little to reason through. Little to analyze, plan, and make happen. There is mostly the heart pounding with love, the blood rushing with excitement, the mind touched with snippets of poetry and image, the rough scratching of fingers in soil and the tickling of toes in the grass or the scuff of heel on concrete. It seems as though the whole of our reality, and of our collective predicament, surpasses our minds and egos. The vision can’t be known right now, it seems. But it can be felt. It can be sensed and intuited. It can be aligned to and resonated with. We are the children of this planet, after all, as surely as the deer and the dragonfly. We can belong here, if we choose. Like the birds and beasts, we can hear the tsunamis coming and make our way to whatever higher ground there is. We can sense the hunters coming and protect our cubs. We can find shelter in the storm, and joy in the dance.

Part of what Sally and I sense is that the vision will be found collectively, through a process of which most of us are unaware, and are reluctant to seek: the process of entering together this death lodge, where we confront as a group the inner and outer conflicts, sift through the machinations of ego, and find the precious grains of truth that all of our positions, assumptions, and desires, hold in their hearts. This is the work that most calls us. There’s room in the lodge, should you wish to join us.

Here, let me get that flap, then I’ll scootch around and make some more room. Sit with us for a while, with this group of open, often tattered souls crowded tightly together under these tarps, a pit of red-hot rocks in the circle’s center, and utter darkness all around. Sally throws water on the rocks, to sear our faces and fill our lungs with a burst of steam. Someone laughs. Another cries. A third rages and a fourth prays. One last cup of water on the rocks. One last cloud of steam. One last sloughing off. Then we push open the flap and crawl, together and one-by-one, out into the night, naked, shivering, our bodies steaming in the firelight and starshine. We don our clothes and make our way out into the wilderness, to find the spots we chose earlier in the day. We begin our fast, to show the gods our deep longing and sober intent. We sit and stare into the night, and soon we start to reflect.

We’re at a crossroads now. Who we’ve been, as a culture, is no longer working. The visions with which we used to operate can now be seen as unhinged and insane. The rules have changed, and we don’t know what to do. Every time we try to control the situation things just get worse. We’re tired. Scared. And so very, very sad. We’re close to bottom now. The ground is rising up rapidly beneath us. It looks as if we’ll smash onto the rocks at any moment.

And yet the galaxies spin overhead as they always have. The grasses still whisper in the breeze. The ground underneath holds us up just like it did the day before. The moon still lights our way. There is life, still, all around us, holding on in spite of this culture’s blind attempts to kill it all off. “We’re not dead yet,” the world of life calls out to us. “You’re not alone. We’ve missed you. We’re glad to have you back.” And beyond our tiny circles of struggling to know and do and think and work and own and have and understand lies a Universe so vast and so mysterious that we cannot hold it in our grasp. And in that moment, we can see, and even trust, that perhaps this is the only sort of vision we need right now: the vision that lets us see what is there all around us. Perhaps that is enough, for now. This is initiation, after all. The gods are leading this process. Maybe we can just concentrate on staying open, so that we can hear them when they speak to us.

Thomas Berry told us, back when we interviewed him in 2005, that “young people need to be educated in the context of the 21st century, and with the realization that they can’t depend on anything handed down to them from the 20th century.” That’s a stunning statement, I think. We can’t depend on anything handed down to us from the 20th century. Yet it resonates with my own sense of things. Linda Travis and Cole Thomas, in my new novel All of the Above, have to come to the same realization, as the reality they thought they were living in gets torn from underfoot. They, too, must allow their old worldview to die away, in order to see the world anew, arising all around them. And they, too, must meet the trials before them, before they will be allowed to find some new vision that aligns with the will of the gods.

Who will we be when the old visions die, and the old strategies no longer work? Whether fictional or flesh and blood, I believe we will all be given the opportunity to find our answers to that question.

The following is the first installment in a series of blog posts that will eventually be put together into a written interview. If you have interview questions of your own, please leave them in the comment section below. Thanks!

Q:

Tim, you are best known for your documentary, What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. You’ve switched mediums and are now writing fiction. The people who loved What A Way To Go were interested in resource depletion, overpopulation, environmental destruction and economic collapse. This seems like a departure. Who do you think is the audience for this book, and why should they read it?

A:

First and foremost, I worked to write a great story, with juicy mysteries, intriguing ideas, and interesting characters you can care about. All of the Above is for anybody looking for a page-turning sci-fi conspiracy thriller. It’s got psychopathic government agents, enigmatic aliens, indigenous and astral allies, and the first female President of the United States. It’s got love and death, hope and despair, grief and loss and joy and redemption. A perfect end-of-summer, or end-of-Empire, read.

And All of the Above is a book that goes further. I’ve long known, and have recently begun to put into words, that my work in this world is this: to question the assumptions, beliefs, and stories that surround me, whether those assumptions come from the schools and family in which I was raised, from the larger culture of Empire in which my family was embedded, or from the more fundamental paradigm of materialism out of which Empire rises. I didn’t stop questioning assumptions when I finished my documentary. I kept going, following the paths that opened before me, striding down avenues that might surprise those who’ve seen my film. So I would say that All of the Above is also for anyone wishing to go even further than my documentary went, and certainly further than the dominant global culture wants you to go.

I’ve actually come full circle, back to the information and analyses that first pushed me down my own path toward What a Way to Go so many years ago. Anomalous experiences and evidences, new science and old wisdom - these are the things on which I first cut my critical-thinking teeth. These are the realms that opened me up and helped me to develop the analytical and emotional tools I needed in order to explore, head on and without blinking, the current global environmental, economic, and energy situations we now face.

I’m in a somewhat unique position, I think; I can view our collective present predicament from an extreme outlier’s perspective. Sure, we’re facing an unprecedented set of conditions, with oil declining and ecosystems failing and the economy ready to unravel, but we’re facing all of this in a world, and a Universe, that feels, to me, determined to undermine our every assumption about matter, spirit, time, space, and the nature of reality itself. What happens when you view the unraveling of Empire through the larger disintegration of the paradigm of materialism? That’s what I explore in this story. If you’re up for that, come along for the ride. I’ll be glad to have you along.

Of course, why one might wish to go further is another question entirely…

In the summer of 2005 a frightening piece of information came to me: Stephen Donaldson would soon publish Book One of a new series of fantasy novels, The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Good news, you might have thought. I mean, if you like dense, challenging prose, vibrant characters and a richly imagined alternate world, then Donaldson’s books are just the ticket, as far as I’m concerned. And it had been more than twenty years since he’d finished the First and Second Chronicles. I’d read all six books in the series. More than once. How nice it would be, to go back to that world and walk again with those characters.

But I remember, oddly enough, being rather upset at the news. Why? Well, at the time, I was knee deep in the writing and editing of our documentary - What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire. We’d just completed our interview tour. I was wading through hard-drives full of footage, piles of books, inboxes stuffed with articles and essays, and stacks of documentaries. I was analyzing, beholding, correlating, deliberating, evaluating, figuring, gauging, and holding every last piece of information, opinion, and conjecture I could get my hands on regarding our collective and precarious situation here on Planet Earth. I was staring at the end of cheap and easy oil, the extinctions of species, the quickly shifting planetary climate and the growing human footprint that fueled these things. I was feeling my way through the despotic, dominating, disconnected, and delusional global culture that has not only, as Sherwin-Williams says, “covered the planet,” but has seeped into every cell of my body and every facet of my ego. I was facing head-on, and with every morsel of my soul, what felt like the final result of all our collective choices. The end of empire was breathing down my neck. The runaway train felt ready to jump the tracks. It was a very intense time.

A new Covenant novel? You’ve got to be kidding, Mr. Donaldson! There’s no time for that. The economy cannot possibly last long enough for you to finish. You’ll just get me hooked again and then leave me hanging. You’ll leave Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery trapped in some terrible situation in the Land with no hope of resolution. Ever. And I’ll … what? I’ll have to drag my half-starved, irradiated carcass across the bleak, post-apocalyptic American landscape of my nightmares and force you to finish the story for me face-to-face, sitting around a campfire in your New Mexico back yard. At a time when I was staring daily, hourly, minutely, into the collapse of Empire and the possible extinction of the human race - the extinction of my family and friends, my children, myself – the notion that you would start a new series that I would not be able to finish filled me with dread. I think, in the end, that situation was simply something I could wrap my heart and brain around. The rest of it, the unraveling world I could see ahead, was too big to hold.

But I bought Donaldson’s book. Read it. Moved on. Eighteen-months-worth of twelve-hour days finished the documentary and we did our screening tours. Book Two came out in October of 2007 and I read that. We recuperated, moved to Vermont, convened a few dialogue circles, started another documentary, stopped that project, and then moved to Maine. And in October of 2010, Stephen Donaldson published Book Three. At last! He’d done it! Just under the wire!

I finished Book Three a month or so ago. Get this: the further I read, the more it became obvious that, unlike any of Donaldson’s previous series, this one would require a Book Four. Due out, no doubt, in 2013. <Insert Big Dramatic Sigh Here.>

It gets even funnier. I’ve now published All of the Above, Book One of my own three- or four-book series of novels that will follow President Linda Travis and Cole Thomas as they make their way into a new view of reality.

Waiting for the collapse of the global industrial economy has been a tricky business for me. On the one hand, I know it has to happen sometime. From what I can see, unending growth and a net-destructive impact on the planet simply cannot be sustained forever in the physical levels of reality. On the other hand, predicting the how and why and when and where and who feels pretty much like a losing game. Hovering in the unknown, with one foot in “what’s here now” and the other in “what will come,” it had been extremely difficult, at times, to know what makes sense to do. I mean… does it make ANY sense at all to spend almost two years writing, editing, and publishing a novel when it looks as though the economy could go belly-up at any moment? And does it make ANY SENSE AT ALL to write a novel in any case, given what’s going on in the world?

Ya got me.

Maybe the trouble is in that phrase “make sense.” The dominant culture has taught me that things that “make sense” are rational and logical. But what if I take this phrase out of the realm of the head, where the dominant culture put it, and place it lovingly back into my heart and body, where my senses actually reside? What then?

What I notice is that, while I’ve never been able to come to some rational, logical answer to the question “Does this make sense?,” my body and heart have sensed all along what to do. My body has willingly sat long hours at the keyboard, even as it complains about how hard that has been. My heart has drawn me back to this story, over and over. (I wrote the first five chapters over twelve years ago, after all. I couldn’t let it go until it was finished.) And when I’ve been able to get very quiet, I’ve been able to touch – briefly, as if touching a fawn – that larger something, that Muse, that Source, from which this story seems to have come, as if the Great Hologram Itself simply gave it to me to put to the page. While my rational mind was trapped in uncertainty, my heart and body kept following their excitements and promptings and senses, and brought me here, to the end, with the book now out in the world, and just under the wire, perhaps?

Who knows what it’s for, this book? I don’t. Not the rational, thinking, brain “me,” at any rate. I know it changed me, just to write it. I know it goes out wrapped in the intention to be of service, with a wish to further the conversation about what it means to be alive in this time, and with a hope of aiding in the evolution of our collective hearts, minds and spirits. And I sense that this is a time that calls for new stories. But beyond that, like all of our children, this book shall have to go out into the world on its own, to do whatever work it came here to do. I will nurture it, guide it, and help it along the way, sure. But it’s mostly out of my hands now. And I guess that’s a good thing, because Book Two has been slowly downloading into the hopper for some time. I have a sense that, after a good rest, and some much-needed attention paid to the other domains of my life, the Great Hologram will once again grab me by the scruff of my neck and sit me down at the keyboard, for reasons I may never really understand. And that, perhaps, is how my life will look from here on out: doing things that never really “make sense” to my rational mind.

So I find myself facing again what I’ve faced before: I am not in control, but I am in conversation. As a recovering White Guy™ I am learning to refrain from saying “how it is,” but as a living facet of the Great Hologram, I do get to say what I see and feel and experience, as long as I then stop, and listen to the Multiverse around me, and enter into real dialogue with Reality. I get to be a part of the dialogue without having to know the answer. In fact, the Great Hologram needs that from me. And what a relief. Knowing how “it is” has been such a burden.

Right now, what I see to do is to begin my own Book Two. So I will. The Multiverse will have its own ideas about how things must unfold. So it will. We’ll dance together as the Earth spins and the Universe expands and the hurricanes blow and the markets leap and tumble. We’ll shout and sing and argue and make up. I’ll hold up my part in the conversation. Then I’ll listen. And when it’s my turn, I’ll speak again. It feels like that’s what I came here for, so I may as well stop resisting it.

And who knows? Perhaps the global economy will soon falter, as so many anticipate. Perhaps life will get really local before I finish my story. And perhaps, one day, Mr. Donaldson will make his way to me, traveling slowly and sanely across the quieter, more sober, more conscious and compassionate American landscape of my better dreams. Crazier things have happened. Maybe we’ll sit around that campfire and swap stories. “You left Linda Travis and Cole Thomas trapped in a terrible situation with no hope of resolution,” he’ll say. “Tell me how it ends.” I’ll pour us another cup of tea, and then I’ll tell him.

Just discovered Jarett Sanchez podcast. This one is a reading from John Taylor Gatto. Sally has listened to a couple of others and they were wonderful, thoughtful pieces. Anymore it is hard for Sally to do “hand work” without listening to a podcast because there’s just so much out there that is incredible. This particular one addresses our dismal lack of educational choice and how the larger system of schooling make it difficult for the wonderful, caring and creative people who are drawn to teaching to truly educate, to bring forth the unique individuality of their students. This is well worth the listen. And the other programs on Sanchez’ playlist look as good and even better. Bring on the ‘hand work.” There’s nothing like listening to wonderful ideas while shelling peas, or folding towels, or painting the trim in the bathroom!

This interview is part of a great podcast series. Well worth the listen. KMO also has many other programs that viewers of What A Way To Go and readers of All of the Above will be interested in. Sally and Tim talk with KMO about “stories” and how those stories have kept us stuck. In addition viewer will hear about the journey they’ve been on and some of the insights they’ve had since the movie was released.