It’s 2020 and Covid-19 has sucked the life out of so much.
We can’t go out and play together.
Everything has become a challenge worthy of a strategic planning meeting: work, school, shopping, home.
But let’s not forget that this is just the start, as far as climate science has been telling us for decades.
This is the carbon we released in the 90s. Spiking towards the sky, swirling up the stormclouds, breeding new diseases, creating the conditions for the worst bushfires in Australian history. Even the original peoples, here for tens of thousands of years, don’t have a story for that kind of damage. And if they don’t have a story for it – the people that were here when you could walk across Bass Strait from the mainland to what we now call Tasmania, who hunted across the plains of what is now Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne before the last great deluge – then it is truly unprecedented.
Now that we’re beginning to see what anthropogenic climate change looks like, we might as well get used to it, as we have to prepare to be lashed by the 30 years’ worth of carbon that has been discharged since this greenhouse began getting pumped full of hot gas.
The storms that lashed the Buddha, as he faced his final spiritual battle before the complete and irreversible awakening that would be the apotheosis of a lifetime of meditative practice, can be seen as metaphorical. Whether they were psychic entities tormenting him towards his great overcoming, or real elements of malevolence, the earth continued to live and breathe beyond the scene. Our reality is the ecological version – real storms and the breakdown of the physical world – but maybe it’s time to treat them as a spiritual challenge too.
To prepare best for the worst, stop thinking things are going to get better. That optimism will leave you victim to reality, shocked with every new assault upon your vision of the good life, unprepared for the horrors to come. 2019 was the best year you are ever going to remember – at least on a planetary scale. You may have better ones personally, but we’re on the downward slide now kids. Get used to it. Breathe deeply and find calm in the midst of the storm. Lean into it. Awaken the Warrior of Peace and Spirit.
While it’s also not enough to find solace in being protected by a great serpent, like the Buddha was, when the storms become truly threatening, it’s certainly one of the things we could be doing with our time, while we still have it. Keep agitating for change but balance that out with some concentration on spiritual liberation. This is your one wild life.
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We packed the kids into the car at 4am, terribly nervous at driving into the face of unknown fire fronts, blocked roads, possibly a tortuous death, but prepared to risk it to make it to somewhere on the other side of this inferno. On New Year’s Eve we prepared to defend our home from ember attacks, with garden hoses and buckets of water. We had no power, no phone or internet service, and no idea of what was coming our way … we were in between Moruya and Batemans Bay:
This is what was coming towards Broulee, where i live. We were already in that thick smoke, so we couldn’t know there was much worse coming. Looking towards my home from the other direction.
We’ve been living with very heavy smoke for weeks, so low visibility had become the norm. I had digested the previous loss of some favoured forests and places, although i hadn’t properly grieved them yet. I still haven’t. When i return from my evacuation, i’m going to have to.
But in the meantime, i need to hear the voice of the muses, as they sing the song of the earth, as it cries. Hear something ecomythic, which matches the fear our kids are going to experience, as they awaken to the Australia – and the world – we have made for them. Something that gets beyond the sexiness of the flames:
… and integrates the death they leave behind them:
How my beloved local beach looks now: ashen.
But really, nothing can prepare them. I try to weave a fine line between informing my kids about the world they will inherit and making sure i don’t scare the living daylights out of them. I turned my ‘prepper/survivalist’ tendencies towards helping to build community resilience rather than retreating to a bush bunker/treehouse combo. In the same way, i turned my Zen monkishness away from dreams of a mountain hideaway to an active life in my community, leading meditation circles and integrating evolutionary adaptations into everyday life. I sing about the apocalyptic times we are hurtling towards as well as about the joy of being in the body, as a self-aware primate on a beautiful planet. I try to integrate what i know from my specific area of expertise – the symbolic life of human consciousness in the context of our relationship with nature – into modern life for anyone who will listen. It’s not very lucrative, but … here we go again.
The Apocalypse, in mythic terms, is both an end time and an experience of revelation; an awakening. For Christians, it involved a rapture in their God’s company. I’ve written before that the term apocalypse now should be seen as something more rational, an actual degradation of our earth in physical terms, an unfolding of the logic of capitalism; while the truly ‘mythic’ leap of faith today is taken by those who still believe in the profiteering dream of unending growth. For the ecological apocalypse we are now witnessing to carry its truest meaning, it must lead to an awakening of the human spirit to the true meaning and value of our beautiful, rare planetary jewel of a home.
And for this to occur, it’s the song of the Muses that has to come through now: those transcendent ladies of the night, whose voices embody earth spirit, whose intelligence is celestial in nature, who flow with the fractal dance of the cosmos even while they stand with those who fight injustice. What do they sing now?
I’ve been praying to hear their words ever since i moved to the coast. I felt their influence directly in every song i’ve composed since, starting with my ode to the salty spirits of the ocean. The Muses love with abandon, they embrace everything, and in their embrace the petty greeds, hatreds and ignorance of the human ego are melted away. The way of the future, they sing, is falling back in love with the earth.
Seek your way through the clutter of human confusion, they advise, to that place where the spirit of life courses through your veins, rises up your spine, emanates from your DNA and passes along the sacred path from generation to generation, from the ancestors to the children: be a part of the transmission as it is embodied in human consciousness.
The Muses sing: fight for the earth, nourish your home, tackle injustice, be the warrior who stands for what is right on the playing field of life. Demand better of those who are responsible for making decisions about how the purse of your nation is spent; make sure they care for the frail, the elderly, the children and our home. Hold them accountable if they don’t. And they don’t.
Calm the mind and focus your anger.
Love your kindred spirits, your families, your home, your breath. Hold onto whatever you hold sacred and dear but be prepared to let it all go. Face death with poise. Prepare your soul to transform into another dimension of loving embrace for life as you enter another plane. Appreciate the little drops of water as dew bedecks the grasses and rain runs along the leaves. Be in awe of the power of nature, the fury of fire, the stellar force of our sun behind and within it, the explosions of volcanoes, the surge of the tides, the subtle draw of lunar magnetism, your sense of your body rising and falling with every breath, the twitching of nerves, the relaxation following a good stretch, the way mist rises from tea in the morning.
Love aimlessly but fight with determination. Meditate upon what gifts have been bestowed upon you, take nothing for granted, but don’t let your thankfulness make you complacent with what can be transformed into something better. Glow from within. Remember your dreams. Stay in touch with friends and remain generous with colleagues. Inspire those around you. Connect with the spirit of life within and without. Walk in peace while you can. Be prepared for anything. Love.
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Being trained to read mythic symbols, i have sometimes erred on the side of caution when it comes to the classic “End is Nigh” predictions. I’ve often felt i was in a similar boat to the IPCC: if we warn people that it’s the end of the world as we know it, we get ignored, for doing crazy talk. Knowing how many times eccentric fundamentalist crackpots have predicted the end of the world makes it hard to join the ranks. But, in an attempt to be true to the times and to assert the sanity of mythic end times warnings in an era when they have finally become realistic, i present to you … How Come Dire Warnings that the End of the World is Nigh are finally to be filed under Current Affairs instead of under the Rantings of Religious Lunatics. Please read on if you think this might be of interest to you, fellow sane person …
The idea that this world is doomed is as old as fundamentalist cults themselves. Basically, a very confused God/dess sets up the world then decides it is just not worth the trouble. Humans turn out to be too evil, usually, as in the Noah’s Ark story, or simply too numerous and noisy, as in the Mesopotamian myth of Babel and its tower. Anyway, send in the Flood, or the Plague, and wipe them out! You can see how an outraged mystic with a vindictive and misanthropic streak could run with such a fantasy – wipe the slate clean, scream the freaks! How satisfying.
But carrying that sign is no longer the job of those disappointed in humanity en masse; it has now become the job of the sane, those who recognise that it is science that offers the signs today, not the entrails of a sacrificed bird or the vagaries of ancient scripture (endlessly open to new misinterpretations, which is why they persist as creeds). Ironically, it is now reason that alerts us to our existential, planetary danger, not mysticism. The true ‘myth’ of our times – the powerful story that carries us along in its wake, even though we know it isn’t rationally true – is unrestrained capitalism, which convinces us it’s OK to keep consuming as if life will continue like this forever.
This is the great reversal of our times: now, the raving lunatics own mass media/propaganda platforms and are accepted as model corporate citizens, as they tout the mantra of the fossil fuel fat cats (keep burning!), big pharma (stay stupidly unhealthy, we’ll cure you!), big tobacco and other drug lords, dealers and purveyors of beer and skittles (or bread and circuses). Meanwhile, those listening to well reasoned arguments, massive amounts of data and incredibly convincing climate modelling, are labelled as freaks, and scapegoated by the powers that be for threatening their profit margins.
That this reversal is itself a tactic of the capitalist lords should be obvious by now. I just wanted to point it out, in case it helps others bothered by the fact they seem to be on the side of lunacy when they are, in fact, on the side of well reasoned argument. We need every ally we can get, and explaining how we are on the right side of history and should not be befuddled by ecocidal disinformation designed to weaken our righteous anger, indignation and activism at the state of the world is just another string needed for the bow and arrows of truth today. Go forth, be alarmed at the direction of the world, and know that you are not a fanatic but a sane citizen of an insane world; because you are also an intelligent being capable of discerning truth and calling bullshit.
All indications, at least from reliable climate science, are that we are hurtling towards eco-apocalypse. Yet, every day, we hear government and industry leaders plan for a future that completely ignores the most vital message of our times. I listen to the news on the radio; we need more infrastructure, we are planning for more business, we are spending more on weapons, we continue to be motivated by growth.
My fleeting experiences of mass media give me an outsiders view; the kind you see when you look at a place with fresh eyes, trying to discern its over-riding themes and messages. There is a lot of beer and skittles, bread and circus action, of course, which does its job of keeping most people from thinking about important things like societal direction and cohesion in a time of increasing chaos … but more importantly, there is this ongoing fantasy that the way we live is going to continue.
[Warning: don’t watch this video with the kids around, or if you’re feeling squeamish about curent trends in facisct violence. It’s genuinely disturbing in the second half. But, hey, how are we going to acknowledge that the party is over if we don’t face its depravity every now and then?]
It is as if the melting of the poles, the increasingly terrifying storms, the disappearing island atolls, bushfires in winter, earth-cracking droughts becoming worse, the insect apocalypse are all just more items on the 24/7 entertainment landscape. What is still touted as ‘real life,’ the everyday norm we still enjoy (for now), is a dangerous fantasy, because it ensures that most of our attention is devoted to keeping this disastrously eco-cidal downward spiral of destruction continuing.
In times like this, imagination is the most important faculty we have. Also very high on the list are trusting actual scientists, being suspicious of what political leaders are motivated by, ignoring media hype about celebrity and sharing fine sentiments with friends and loved ones … but using our imagination to find new ways of being, which are less carbon dependent and more community minded, is absolutely vital. Remember your roots in deep culture folks! Trust in self, join with others, find your soul in nature, indulge in music and dance and poetry and live as if there is no tomorrow. Otherwise, we may need to 🙂
