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

Expired Hope by alexiuss

I had a short conversation the other day with an acquaintance who told me that he’d watched the first half of What a Way to Go and found it so overwhelming that he couldn’t finish. He asked me, “Is there hope in the second half?”

“What would hope be?” I replied.

“Something positive,” he said. ”Something we can do.”

I paused for a moment, as I always do in such situations, my wounded ego triggered with the need to not disappoint, a major liability for someone whose life’s work seems to include questioning the basic assumptions that form the foundations of our lives. ”I think we come at these things at more of a meta level,” I finally replied, searching for, and failing to find, short words to describe something that feels so big that I couldn’t describe it in a day’s worth of conversation.

He raised an eyebrow. ”What does that mean?” he asked.

I shrugged. ”We’re more interested in the question of who will we be? than what should we do?” I said. ”There’s tons of resources out there full of information about what people can do in the face of all of this. Sally and I are more interested in the deeper emotional, psychological, and spiritual aspects of our present predicament.”

“Hmmm…” he said, not appearing to buy my explanation. ”I guess I’ll have to finish it.”

“Many people have told us that they love how we end it,” I offered, hoping that he would watch the rest of the film. Hoping to be done with the conversation. Hoping to quickly escape into the dark, cold night air and walk back home, where it’s easier to pretend that I know the answers. Sally stood by the door, in conversation with someone else. I shook the man’s hand and started out, pulling at her shoulder as I passed, hoping she would follow. She did.

Sally and I went the first year of our life here in Eastport without mentioning to anyone that we’d made a documentary. Partly because we just wanted to fit in and be accepted, or not, based on who we are in the present moment. But partly because we both feel a bit of a need to distance ourselves from the documentary. Not because we consider the information in the documentary wrong in some way. The on-the-ground situation today, in fact, can feel far more “overwhelming,” to many, than even What a Way to Go presents. It’s more the tone of the movie from which we want to create some distance. We did not stop processing our emotional, psychological, and spiritual responses to the global situation back in August of 2007. We’ve kept at it. We are not now who we were then. And were we to make the movie today, it might feel quite different from What a Way to Go. The movie represents a step, and a necessary step, I believe, one can take in the journey to full, clear, adult human acceptance of, and response to, the situation. It’s just not the final step.

There probably is not a final step.

Eventually the bag unraveled and the cat escaped and we did a local screening. Eventually I published All of the Above, which continued the conversation What a Way to Go began. Eventually I started soapboxing on street corners in Facebook City. Eventually I jump-started my blog and began my sequel, Rumi’s Field. A great deal more processing ensued, pulling me along like an ocean current and depositing me on the shore of NOW. Eventually I found more peace and grace than I had before.

And still the same old question arises… “do you have some extra hope to share?”

Part of me, my wounded ego, my monkey mind, my reactionary self, felt rather irritated in the moment. Great. Another entitled White Guy™ demanding comfort and salvation from an outside source or “higher authority,” looking for a quick answer, an easy fix, a Happy Chapter™ that would allow him to return to his comfortable life. As if watching a documentary was the equivalent of “doing something.” As if hope were a product that could be transmitted cinematically. As if Hope™ would even help. ”I have no hope to give you!” I wanted to shout. ”I’m deep in contemplation of the “mid-century extinction meme”! How can you ask me for hope? Go find your own!”

But that, of course, would have been wildly unfair. I could have no real understanding of exactly what it was he was asking for, or what he was meaning by the words he used, without long hours of dialogue. I could not know who he was and what he knew and how he felt and where he was headed. I could not know what gifts he had to share with me, what wisdoms and insights, what challenges and proddings. That he had poked one of my buttons was not his fault. I’m the one who carries that button around, after all. And though I’m working to disconnect it, I have not yet succeeded. That’s on me.

And the button he mashed was this: I want to help, and I don’t know how. So I feel helpless, sometimes. And a little stupid. (Please refrain from leaving comments telling me that I should not feel this way, or offering advice about how to stop feeling this way. This is monkey mind. Part of disconnecting monkey mind is to simply speak it out loud and have it be heard. I already know the untruth of it.) What I really want is long hours and days of deep dialogue that would help us both get, not only to the bottom of this man’s question, but to a place to stand in the world that feels, if not steady and firm, at least stable enough, for long enough, for us to catch our breath.

But my shouting would have also been unfair because, ultimately, his question may be a fair one (not to mention being, essentially, my own question), and he may have been right to ask it of me. The fact remains that, even in the face of the “mid-century extinction meme,” I am not feeling undone with anger, fear, or despair. I’ve got a strong gut sense that possibility remains. The doctor has delivered my fatal diagnosis and I’ve just picked up my guitar and played, as if I’ve been doing lines of magic happy fairy dust from a stash I keep in my desk drawer. Maybe I have been. I’ve been processing this meme my entire life. Who better to ask?

I’ve let hope become a bad word these past years, as though hope was simply a refuge for comfort-addled minds looking for an excuse not to do anything real. And perhaps hoping, as a verb, is and has been used in just this way by many people. And perhaps it is understandable that I have scorned it. But hope is also, simply, possibility and vision, longing and dreaming. It can represent an essential half of Robert Fritz’s dynamic tension, the thing-not-yet-realized which provides a motive force for movement, even in the face of impossible odds. Sure hope can be misused. But it can also be used correctly, I think. And maybe I now have something to say in that matter.

If I do, it’s not something I can easily give away, I think, certainly not in the few moments a chance encounter on the street affords. And perhaps it’s not something I can give to just anyone. It may be that the hope and possibility to be seen sitting in the midst of the “mid-century extinction” can only be seen by those who have journeyed far enough along the path that they’ve reached the hilltop from which it can first be glimpsed. It feels like that’s where I am right now, standing on that hilltop, a bit footsore and out of breath. I’m just beginning to see it: the possibility that remains, the possibility that has always been there, waiting for me to shed my false hopes, so that I could see the real ones.

Time will tell. I will trust things to emerge.

I hope my acquaintance finishes our film. I hope it moves him in some way, further along his path. I hope we find or make time to sit for as long as it takes to explore our mutual question. All or none of this may happen. But just saying this here, just finding my own clarity regarding what I want and what’s in my way, will allow me, the next time we meet, to more fully step into the clear, adult human response I want to give him. Already the dynamic tension pulls me towards. And ain’t that as cool as hell?

Time for music. Pax, all. T

Another bit of weaving, today in the lab. Another piece of bricolage. I awoke thinking about blog day, and about how Sally and Sarah and I have been busily working on Sally’s new website this past week, and how I’ve got band rehearsal this evening, with a couple of new songs to get ready to present, and so little time to write. I awoke thinking about how surreal that feels, to be at once processing the “mid-century extinction meme” and, at the same time, going about one’s day and one’s business as if nothing has changed. I awoke thinking about The X-Files, and how it used to drive me crazy, how they would uncover, in the “mythology” episodes, more and new and ever-more-important information about the global-elite-alien conspiracy and then, in the next episode or three, act as if none of that had even happened. I awoke thinking about how many times that very thing has played out in my life, how often I’ve uncovered new information, new ideas, and then worked doggedly to incorporate those new ideas into my life, and observe how so many around me could just say, “yeah, cool… new idea… ” and then, seemingly, go on with their lives as if nothing had changed.

Surreal, this life, these times. Surreal, I say.

Then I got up to find this article - Captain Kirk’s Predecessor: Star Trek Was RAND Corporation Predictive Programming - from my friend Kathie, which was fun, and that reminded me of my own Star Trek post, below, which I wrote for my previous blog. Reading my old things is always a bit surreal as well, to see what I was struggling with or thinking at the time, to note how I would say things differently now, if I would say them at all. I observe here my greater and growing facility to balance critique with wide-perspective acceptance of what’s so. I note here that I’m still processing with my children around matters of family, culture, and story, and that the processing feels both more fever-pitched and more peaceful right now. I note the judgmentalism in my language, and wonder how and if that serves the Cosmos. I note how the bit about boredom and connection continues to resonate. And I note how my own life so often feels like a matter of jettisoning my old engines in a desperate attempt to escape the gravity of my own acculturated ego.

I don’t know what this all means, or if I’m going somewhere, or if I’ve already arrived. I’m trying to follow my heart, here in the lab, rather than my head. I’m practicing letting my gut lead in this particular dance. And bricolage is poetry, I think, rather than science, and sometimes it takes a while for meaning and clarity to arise through the obscurity of metaphor and language.

For now, WordPress and my mandolin call, and life goes on, and on, and will until it does no longer, and then maybe even then… and I need another cup of coffee. Mulder and Scully never did really get to the bottom of that global-elite-alien conspiracy, and I’ve yet to get to the bottom of that meme, and the dominant mainstream culture has not yet reached the end of “giving it all you’ve got.” We go on, all of us, and what happens unfolds, a great Cosmic dance of creation in which we are all dancers and singers and mandolin players and website designers.

Pax, all,
T

We’re Givin’ It All We’ve Got, Captain!

Originally published 5/23/09

If I needed confirmation of the claim I’d made in an email to my daughter just yesterday morning that “I’m no longer a member of the culture in which you live,” I could not have asked for a better one than the new Star Trek movie, which Sally and I saw last night. I’m so many standard deviations from the mean these days that I’m now on the next normal curve over. That’s how it feels.

“You’ll want to see it again, right away,” I was told. “It’s hilarious,” I was told. “It’s the best Star Trek ever,” I was told. And yet, as I sat there watching, what I noticed inside was this: I was bored. I’ll have to remember that. Because this has happened before. The next time a movie gets such universal acclaim, the next time a good number of my friends and family tell me how great a movie is, I’m heading the other way. I am not a member of the dominant culture. In fact, I regard the dominant culture as twisted, insane and bankrupt. So I cannot expect to like what that culture likes.

Charles Eisenstein, author of The Ascent of Humanity, speaks of boredom as that feeling of discomfort one feels when the distractions and busy-ness end and you slow down enough to feel the wounds of separation that dog our every moment as creatures of this culture. That resonates. Sitting in a theater surrounded by people surrounded by Middlebury surrounded by Vermont surrounded by the US surrounded by North America surrounded by a planet of 6.8 billion and counting, surrounded by lilacs and red maples and turkey vultures and moose, surrounded by air and water and soil, surrounded by muons and photons and particles and waves, I felt disconnected from it all, as the splash of color and movement and sound and fury thrashed and weaved before me, desperate to draw me into itself, frantic with the need to re-capture me into its story. And I wasn’t having it. My immunity has built up to the point where I can no longer succumb to that particular disease. I could only sit there, bored and more than a bit sad, watching the story dance and chatter, and wondering what it was that could have possibly so enchanted my friends and relations.

What I saw on the screen was pure Imperial swagger - that macho, never-say-die, bad-boy, break-the-rules, teen-aged invulnerability and exceptionalism that pulses through American veins at warp speed, taking command, getting the girl, making its own rules and nailing the enemy, in the end, with a hot spurt of phaser blasts and photon torpedoes. An adolescent Jim Kirk steals an uncle’s car, speeds down the highway, resists arrest, destroys the car, and stands to face the police officer chasing him… and the audience is ecstatic. An older Kirk picks a bar fight with half a dozen Starfleet cadets, gets the crap beat out of him, and wins the attention and approval of Captain Pike… and the audience laughs and smiles and nods its head. Why do they love him so? Because he’s had a hard life (his father died the day he was born). Because he’s strong and daring despite that. Because he’s so self-assured. And because he is totally unapologetic. Does this sound like any of our recent political leaders? Does this sound like an entire civilization? Just a thought…

This is what the culture has right now, I guess. Ten months (or many years, depending on which starting point you choose) into our current economic shitstorm, with banks failing and jobs disappearing and shelves dwindling and bailouts piling up, the affront to our collective ego has elicited this first big summer smash, this joint-statement issued to the world. To wit: nuh uh! It’s as though Uncle Sam is 15 again and you just told him he has to clean his room. Oh yeah? Well… you can’t make me! Cuz I’m… uh… cuz I don’t want to!

Our response to the crumbling world is to simply tell our stories louder, to do more of the same, to stand taller, stomp harder, swing faster and shout louder. We must maintain our heroic self-image at all costs. It’s all we’ve got to give, right? I mean… it’s worked up til now, hasn’t it?

Star Trek has been with me my whole life. I remember watching original episodes as a kid in the mid-60s. I’ve seen the original series many times. The Next Generation. The movies. It’s part of who I have been. Part of my story. And all of that just made it harder to watch this new iteration. It’s like… c’mon! More than forty years have gone by since that first episode. Have we learned nothing in that time? In it’s early manifestations, Star Trek actually had some facility for questioning the dominant culture, as much good science fiction does. It held up a mirror to our society, using strange planets and alien beings to make plain our own assumptions and beliefs, our weak points as well as our strong ones. But this new movie showed no such inclination, substituting a silly time-travel plot, lots of noise and flash, and a cutesy alien sidekick for anything more substantial. With the climate heating up, the oceans and forests dying, the oil slowing and the economy unraveling, Star Trek doesn’t once get close to the existential questions the new Battlestar Galactica started with in its first episode. Should we humans survive? Damn straight, we should, bro. Now get outta the way while I pop me some o’ them-there Romulans. And grab me a beer, bitch!

No doubt some will chide me for this. It’s just a movie, they might say. It’s summer fun. It’s entertainment. It’s popcorn and laughs and thrills and spills. Why do I have to take everything so seriously? While I might answer with any number of explanations, I think they all boil down to this: I know the power of story to shape the world. I consider story the most powerful force in the universe. And so I want to be very careful about the stories that play through my life. It’s story that has brought us to where we are. It’s story that will take us to where we are going. I, for one, would like to be conscious about those stories.

Ultimately, I regain my self, and sigh, and nod my head, and laugh a bit at my own wounded ego, at that part of me that could always see things that others didn’t, that couldn’t figure out how to be heard, that keeps fighting that same old fight. Star Trek serves simply as a reality check. The dominant culture really is “giving it all we’ve got.” Thousands of light-years away from home, this is what the culture has. And it has to play that out, fully and completely, until it hits bottom. Until it runs smack into the bankruptcy of the stories that power it. As an e-friend said years ago, “only when all hope is lost will the necessary actions be taken.” The necessary action, to my mind, including, at the level of culture itself, a change of story.

And there was a bright spot. At the movie’s end (spoiler alert!), as the Enterprise is about to be sucked into a black hole, as their engines fail to pull them out of it, as all the power they can apply is not enough to free them from total destruction, the Captain (I’m pretty sure this is what happened… it was difficult for me to make out all the dialogue) ordered Scotty to jettison the cores of their engines into said black hole, in the hopes that the resulting explosion would knock them free.

And it worked. Their desperate act of giving up that which had up to that point powered their ship… worked. They tried something truly different. And that is what saved them from annihilation. We may wish to remember that one.

Live Well and Discover, yo…

TTG

Come on Pino, We’re going Home.. by Mattjin Franssen

Last week’s laboratory musings seems to have touched something wider than myself, as more than one fellow Doomer™, or Recovering Doomer™, or Post Doomer™, or Ex-Doomer™, or Non-Doomer™ (and maybe this is the week to retire that label entirely?) reported a resonance with my words. My friend and colleague John Ludi got right to the heart of it when he said “I think it is tied into the recent environmental/climate news building up.” Yep. Last week’s post was my first attempt to process and incorporate what I’ve been calling, in FaceBook City, the “extinction by mid-century meme.” That’s what I was chewing on last week. That’s what I’m still chewing on. I’ll get as far as I get today, and save myself the pressure of having to have it “all chewed up” by the end. We’ll see…

A meme (pron.: /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

I’m not really interested today in analyzing or assessing the Truth™ of that meme. I may not ever be. I don’t know that that’s my work anymore. And I sense that our Universe is too chaotic, and that there are too many unrecognized variables, for me, or us, to ever really Know™ how it’ll all turn out in the end. I just want to observe that this meme is out there, that, in the past year or three, the climate news has brought more and more people to the point where they are considering, and speaking about, the possibility of human extinction, and that this meme has seeped into my consciousness and is changing me. Part of me wishes to assert that this meme is nothing new to me at all, that I have long, and perhaps always, been open to this possibility. And there is truth in that. But of course another part of me knows that it’s one thing to consider the metaphor of the “fatal diagnosis” as a useful lens through which to view our present predicament, and another thing entirely to actually sit in the doctor’s office and hear the news. And it can take quite some time to let that news really sink in. Part of me wants to say that the news that “we’re all gonna die,” is hardly news, though it may feel like such to card-carrying members of an adolescent society convinced of their invincibility. But of course extinction is not the same thing as an individual death, and seems to require an entirely new conversation.

Which is the conversation I’ve been in most of my life, I think. And which feels risky to enter into now. Sally has long confronted me on my tendency to explore the “what’s so” at the expense of “what’s possible,” and she is right to do so, I think. Following Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of Least Resistance, it’s the “dynamic tension” that gets created when we hold a clear understanding of our present situation AND a clear vision of where we wish to go that provides the motive force for movement. Too much focus on the “present predicament” can keep one stuck or despairing. Too much focus on the “possible vision” can make one ungrounded. It’s the both, the paradox, the holding, the balance, that keeps us in tension. And, in tension, we have motivation to move toward resolution.

But, wow, it’s been so hard for me to find and hold onto vision and possibility in the face of peak oil, climate change, mass extinction, and population overshoot. Hard. Wow. I found the “what’s so” of our situation so overwhelming that I had to find a vision not outside or beyond or apart from my understanding of the reality of our collective situation on the material plane, but inside of that understanding.

Curiously, in this time of the ”extinction by mid-century meme,” I’m feeling more hopeful, more vision-filled, more engaged, more joyful, more powerful, than ever. I’ve long held that my habit of staring unblinkingly at the worst possible news of the world is a spiritual practice, as it strips away the bullshit and casts me into the NOW more than anything I know. If that’s the mechanism at work, then my practice has surely worked. But if I’ve got some new handle on vision and possibility, I’m only now beginning to figure out how to speak about it. And to tell the truth, speaking vision in the face of extinction feels pretty scary to me.

What is worth doing now? That’s the question that has bounced around in my head these past few months. I mean, really. If there’s truth to this meme, this analysis of climate change, if Charlie has stolen the handle, leaving no way to slow down, then what the fuck? As John Ludi said, “It’s understandable to be OK with the idea of the end of a largely rapacious global civilization…but the notion that we may be on the verge of creating conditions that could extinguish vast swathes of life on this planet itself is where you just can’t do much more than throw your hands up and make the best of whatever time you have left.” Right. And so what does it mean, to “make the best”? What is possible, even then? What matters now?

Must human extinction be considered a complete fail? Or is there another possibility?

Like I said, risky…

And I wonder this because, as an individual human sitting in that storied and metaphoried doctor’s office and hearing the fatal diagnosis, I know, or think I know, that it’s possible, even in that situation, to find a “win” before I die. It’s possible to decide, even then, to live the best life I can live. It’s possible to complete my mission here, to gain in maturity and wisdom, to love and be loved, to grow and evolve. It’s possible, as Khaled Hosseini wrote in The Kite Runner, that “there is a way to be good again.” It’s possible, I think, somehow, in a way that matters, to come home again. And if it’s possible for an individual, then I wonder what’s possible for a culture, a people, or a species.

I can’t go any further than this today, except to offer a number of things that have moved me over the years, as places where I intend to look for clarity and understanding and vision in the coming weeks and months.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth contains, if memory serves, a wonderful exploration of the meaning of human extinction in our time. He was exploring nuclear weapons and war, rather than climate change, but I think there’s something in there I need to read again, as I am not who I was when I first read it.

The next thing that comes to mind is Edward Abbey’s novel, The Fool’s Progress. This is the only Abbey I have ever read, and I remember it moved me deeply as a younger man. It’s about coming home before one dies. It’s about finding oneself in the face of the fatal diagnosis. And I remember it moved me to tears.

The movie Seeking a Friend For the End of the World comes to mind. It masquerades as a Steve Carell comedy, but I think it’s much more than that. I watched it twice in as many days, and it brought me to tears each time. There’s something there, the search for love and meaning even as the comet approaches, that speaks directly to our present time. Marvelous.

And then there’s this video about coming home, which some find brutal, and others find inspiring, and which brings me to tears of grief…

And there’s this video, also about finding one’s way home, which makes me weep not only with grief, but with some strange hope…

Sigur Rós - Ekki múkk from Sigur Rós Valtari Mystery Films on Vimeo.

Like Shirin in Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B, and like Sally, I’m a bricoleur. I weave things together from the pieces I find available around me, whether they be shards of tile, film clips, or ideas. These are the things I’ve found that move me, that speak to what remains possible even in the face of human extinction, that tell me, in some way only my tears seem to understand, that there is something that still matters. I don’t know how to put these pieces into some coherent whole. Or, if I do, I don’t yet know how to speak of it in a way that satisfies. For now, here are some pieces, sitting on my lab table, waiting to be contemplated and explored.

The day is sunny. Enough of this. I wish you all peace.

T

It seems I’ve tapped into something big, here in the dark of the year. Something that’s tied together with grief and shame and stories of imprisonment and fate and despair. But also bound with love and hope and joy and new possibility. It may take me weeks or months to see my way into this, and possibly through it, and all I can do today is “take the first step, the step close in,” as the poet David Whyte would say.

I was reading from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower this morning, the last book in a long, weird series of sci-fi/fantasy novels. I’m at the point where the heroes, those who remain, those who have not fallen along the way, are beginning their final journey to the Tower. As they make their way, they find, written on a wall, a message from some others they met along the journey, others with whom they shared both adventures and loss.

“Roland, Susannah,” the message said, “We are on our way! Wish us good luck! Good luck to you! May God bless you! We will never forget you!” And then, under their signatures, was an added note: “We go to seek a better world. May you find one, as well.”

“God love em,” Susannah said hoarsely. “May God love and keep ‘em all.”

“Keep-um,” said a small and rather timid voice from Roland’s heel. They looked down.

“Decided to talk again, sugarpie?” Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was weeks before he spoke again.

As I read this now, to write it out here, the same tears that clogged my throat earlier rise to clog it again. And it’s tears I need to talk about, I think, because tears are water, and water is life, and I can know, I can feel, with tears, that I am alive, and that I will make it through, whatever “make it through” ends up meaning.

I find today that I’m exhausted with thinking. Tired of acquiring information and analysis, uninterested in argument, fed up with anger and judgment and blame. Sally has helped me, these past two weeks, to get in touch with something important: the Doom business largely bores me these days, and I can barely pay attention. I’ve got tabs open with purportedly important, wonderful essays by Paul Kingsnorth and Charles Eisenstein and Guy McPherson. I’ve got tabs open to Facebook threads I want to follow. I’ve got stacks of books to read and comment on and review. Yet I can hardly bring myself to turn the pages. I’ve got voices inside that tell me I should and I must, but the honest truth is that I’ve lost some big portion of my fascination with Doom, and the only thing that keeps me going, I think, is the fear that I’ll be left behind if I don’t keep tagging along.

The thing is, as a Doomer, I’m not sure what else to say anymore, beyond echoing the simple words of a grieving billy bumbler named Oy. And so maybe that work is done, and it’s time to scrape the sign off my door and paint a new one. We do seem to be on that final approach, though whether our Dark Tower will be extinction, transformation, evolution, or salvation I do not know. I’ve had my share of loss along the way, enough to break my heart, enough to get my attention, enough to bring me to humble knees. And really, now, all I want is to wish others good luck and tell them I’ll never forget them, to wish them godspeed and send them my love and my warm well wishes as I continue my journey. And if people call me sugarpie now and then, that would be okay too, and God keep-um.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what else to do to help. There are meals to cook and fires to build and sidewalks to shovel, and I am glad to do these things. I can see how those actions help. There are birds to converse with, and the sun and the wind to feel on my face. There are people, flesh-and-blood human beings, a few, with whom I am beginning to share the deep, life-affirming salvation of music. There are songs to sing and music to listen to and drums upon which I can pound out my heart. There’s a story half-finished, with characters hovering in extremis, waiting patiently for me to move them forward. And there are holes in my heart that need gentle tending if they’re to ever fully heal. But beyond those things, I’m not really sure how else to be of service. Perhaps it’s the trying to tag along that prevents me from simply knowing, and accepting, where I am.

There are deep questions for me to face here. Questions about work and impact and reach and audience and fame. Questions about “helping people” and “making a difference” and “serving the planet” and “following the muse,” about “marching orders” and “our work in the world” and “what are you called to do?” And I have deep, defining stories to unravel and rewrite, it seems. So I’m going to proceed slowly.

For now, enough. I’ll be back when I figure out what to say next.

I’m on my way! Wish me luck! And good luck to you!