Make Your Peace
If we have finally hit the point where we have to admit that our esteemed leaders are not listening – to us, to climate science, to the voice of hope for a peaceful, healthy earth – then it is probably also a good time to let ourselves synch in to a new way of evolving. I’m going to try to outline this in under 300 words, by using dot points, to illustrate that we are still capable of profound possibilities in a digital age hurtling towards some very uncivilised outcomes.
- We are here.
- This means our ancestors survived and evolved successfully, across a myriad of different environments, and we can do the same. But to do this, we need to …
- Adapt to reality.
- Our planetary climate is heating up, drying out in many places and flooding more in others, making every micro-climate more challenging. But …
- It’s business as usual at the top.
- Business and politics are following the military/industrial complex model of colonisation, appealing to the lowest common denominator of our worst tendencies like greed and fear, and consolidating their power over divided peoples at the same time. So …
- We have to do two things at once:
- We have to get organised, hold the powers that be to account, demand action that combats climate change by taking care of our environment and treating all people (as well as animals, plants and places) with dignity and respect – all of which sounds very boring but necessary; and
- We can get back in touch with our ‘deep time’ selves, as well as our fleeting sense of being alive in this very moment, right where we are, in this mind and body. This could be the fun thing that balances out the serious stuff with a blend of timelessness and existential awareness: that realisation that we are consciousness embodied, a deep time experiment in primate bodies, with the capacity for self-awareness, able to perceive complex problems and solve them with win/win solutions, social animals with personal identities and mystic abilities and the ABILITY TO SEE THE ENORMITY OF THE UNIVERSE THROUGH INSANELY POWERFUL TELESCOPES AND IMAGINE OUR PLACE IN ETERNITY ALL AT ONCE!
OK, i got a bit excited there, but watch this video and be reminded of how incredibly, unimaginably vast the universe is. And that’s just the physical one we can sense with our limited beings. Life is beyond words. Let’s party like there’s nowhere else to go*
*The universe may be very large but we can’t get anywhere else in it. The scales are too big. This is home.
NB: sorry i went over 300 words. But hey, get off the internet and read some Virgil or Shakespeare. That’ll test your attention span 🙂
PS i tried to talk about this video once during a public presentation in Hong Kong and CHOKED ON MY TEARS! Egad. I’ve performed better, but at least i found out how i really felt about the universe – cosmic!