One of the two very vivid dreams I recall from my early childhood in the 70s was a warning about the current times. I think of it sometimes, as it informs me about how to steady myself for the extinction event that is currently escalating on our planetary home.
Although very young when I dreamt this, I am a bearded man in the dream, standing on a granite pavement, with my two children standing innocently next to me. It feels very Atlantean; we are part of an advanced civilization, proud of our place in the world. I had been in some kind of committee meeting, inside a marble hall, and had come out for some fresh air and to see my children. Suddenly, without warning, the ground began to rumble beneath our feet. In no time at all, the pavement was crumbling away, and I begin to lose my footing, which seemed so secure just moments before. I instinctively reached down, grabbed both of my children in my arms, and pulled them up to my chest. It felt good to have them so close, even as the world collapsed into an abyss beneath our feet.
And that’s it. Like so many dreams, it simply ends, having appeared to my young mind from … from where? Nothing in my early childhood offers a reliable compass for this vision. It is a spontaneous irruption from the collective unconscious, a pattern of longing, shock and adaptation, an archetype of life and death arising out of the storehouse of human myth and symbol.
But the imagery says so much – and its visionary power goes a long way to explaining why I have always known that the world as we know it would end in my lifetime. Now that we are seeing evidence of this everywhere, it is time to draw upon the endlessly fascinating world of myth to try and navigate the tumultuous seas that are crashing down upon us, as runaway climate disaster is matched by unstoppable ecosystem breakdown, all in feedback loops of their own.
So, what can the great stories from the collective annals of culture tell us about where we’re at now and what we can do about it? What wisdom can be imparted by studying the ancient ways, as well as waking up to the limitless miracle of the moment (which is really where myth points, endlessly).
The end of this world has been a consistent image in world mythologies, from Biblical revelations to Mayan calendars, from nuclear threats to Kali Yuga. There is little point in running over the false starts and fake prophets that have predicted that The End is Nigh! So, just as my MA tracked the way that our dreams link us to the mysterious worlds of myth, let’s return to its life changing power and see what can be further divined from it.
I mention that my dream felt Atlantean, knowing that the original inspiration behind the myth of a lost but highly advanced civilisation can be found in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias. In the latter, Plato tells of the fast and furious fall of the legendary Atlantis, when “there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune … the island disappeared in the depths of the sea.”
An entire civilisation disappearing in 24 hours is a classic ‘warp’ of mythic time, which is often elastic enough to stretch out towards the infinite (which we can experience when we practice timelessness) and back in towards the intimate (which is how we experience time in an embodied sense). Plato’s 24 hours can remind us of the riddle Oedipus answers to destroy the Sphinx at the gates of Thebes, unwittingly ensuring his own downfall: what creature has four legs in the morning, two during the day, and three at night? A human, whose life passes so quickly from the face of the earth that it may as well be one day – from crawling infant, to free standing adult, to the elder holding themselves up with a crutch – our entire lives pass as quickly as a mote in time.
This also makes sense in another way: the entirety of large-scale human civilisation – urban settlements built on the profits of agriculture and colonisation, magnified a hundred-fold with the industrial revolution – has risen and will fall in the blink of a geological eye. Our moment in the sun has been brilliant and short-lived. Like Atlantis – both the one Plato claimed was already an ancient myth in his day and the imaginative one that has been dreamt up many times since – we are now crumbling into the sea. And as in my dream, it is now happening very, very quickly. Technological development and ecosystem destruction have been increasingly rapid in postmodern industrial culture. But as I never tire of pointing out, the exponential pace of this machine was set in motion during the agricultural revolution, thousands of years ago, when we changed from treating the life around us as kin and instead started to think about it as a set of resources for our use.
And now, we are visiting panic time. Mental health issues are skyrocketing – a pandemic is highlighting and magnifying this, because we mammals don’t flourish when we are socially isolated – but we can expect this to continuously escalate, as the true horror of what faces us next becomes increasingly apparent. We don’t need old time prophetic predictions anymore – a hot house earth is now a matter of scientific certainty and will spell the end of the world as we know it (certainly for the beer and skittles reality we in the affluent west have enjoyed over recent decades).
The only thing left to do is to prepare for the best possible end we can, to draw near those or that which we love, resist the urge to become frantic, let go of our sense of entitlement, practice meditation and breath work and become proficient in dealing with grief. (I’ll keep practising environmental activism, btw, but the days are gone when we might have dreamt we were going to make any real difference to the near future of the planet.)
It’s time to spend the rest of our lives building relationship with the sliver of our consciousness that remains connected to the eternal spark of life. Paradoxically, the practice of seeking to awaken to the timeless can deepen our awareness of the moment, as we experience life in the body, in the here and now, this unrepeatable but soon to pass opportunity to be exactly who we are. Breathing in connection with all that is connects us to the spirit of life that emerges out of the universe and falls back into the ultimate matrix upon its death. Like everything else, we are the flourish of a brush stroke, the coming into being of a certain kind of energy, the passing of a firefly in the night.
My childhood dream is like a lifetime’s memento mori, a reminder that death awaits us all. My guiding metaphor for the awakening I seek out of it is the life cycle of the butterfly. We have been crawling along as caterpillars, but now it is time to create a cocoon, withdraw into it, and dissolve into goop. These old selves must die. This applies on multiple layers and across differing contexts of our lives; I recently emerged from a 5-year apprenticeship to nature spirit, guided again by my dreams, this time to leave the city and live a coastal life far away from my academic and other urban pursuits. This whole period of life, including work and parenting and being in the world in my way, was like a cocoon compared to my previous existence. But I also feel like every night is another cocoon, out of which we emerge renewed; as is every meditation sit, every relationship breakdown, every opportunity for change.
No matter what the context, we can see in nature that there is a basis for trusting that the goop of our dissolved self will re-crystallise, that a new being will grow and build strength, that eventually, after a long, dark night of the soul, we will break out of one cocoon and fly free to another dimension of ourselves. This is the cycle of energy that gives rise to religions: all that lives must die and out of death comes new life. Quantum physics tells us the same thing – life is energy and it is never completely snuffed out, just transformed. To believe that this is what happens to us, to our bodies and consciousness, when we die makes just as much sense as any other faith, like the one that states that consciousness arises out of physical matter and life is ultimately meaningless. As the world crumbles away around us, which myth will you choose? To hold onto the last vestiges of your sense of entitlement; to party as much as possible; to forgive and expand; to prepare for another dimension?
Every traditional culture teaches that part of us passes over to another realm. With an ear out for that wisdom, we can live for the moment and experience the vibration of a living, intelligent cosmos. If we do so while practicing compassion for the suffering of all beings, we may even realise some small measure of liberation from the confines of the self along the way. The possibility of spiritual liberation in itself should be enough to inspire us to reconnect with the ocean of eternity, beyond the iron cage of reason and the isolation of the individual.
I’ll still reach for my kids as the world crumbles beneath our feet. And I’ll still be thankful to feel their breath on my chest as we fall into the abyss below. That’s because the shadow of death does not seem a threat to me, but a promise. This is the ecomythic in action – inspiring compassion for all creatures, celebrating a living cosmos and an animate earth, within which we all dance, for that limited time we have allotted.
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A new type of seaweed, I thought. Black – I haven’t seen this here before. But it isn’t seaweed, washed up on the beach this morning. It’s ash. We’re 25km south of the fire that has just ravaged over 70,000 hectares of forest between Batemans Bay and Bawley Point, where I first lived when I moved to the coast. I drove 35km through that forest every weekday for 6 months. But the numbers don’t add up. The forest is dead. The buildings are protected, the human homes saved. But the trees are gone and with them the nests, the birds and the insects, the lizards and wombats, the life. And its dust is washed up on the tides, carried away by the ocean, deposited here to let us all be reminded – a great fire is coming and we are all in line.
At first it looked just like seaweed …
I’ve gotten used to the Shearwater carcasses lining the shoreline by now. But this is new – a colourful parrot, strewn across the beach, and then a magpie. Charred by the fires and thrown into the waters, to be spewed up here by the ocean. We can only imagine the horror of its last moments, its world incinerated by a monstrous explosion of fire, its feathers burning crisp as it crashed into a death spiral and the waves below.
There have always been fires, like floods and droughts, in Australia. But the ferocity, the intensity, the extent of their devastation is new. This is what scientists warned us about 20 years ago and this is what fire chiefs reiterate now. Now we reap what we sow. Centuries of farming for what we could get, on this land, and millennia of profiteering across the globe, behind it. The relentless logic of capitalism, built out of the greed that drove colonisation since the age of agriculture began, turbo boosted by the machine age of industrialisation and now the exponential skywards march of the digital age. Straight up, go the growth figures; and straight back down, they will come. This is timeless wisdom, dressed up as prediction, made easy by the stupidity of our ‘leaders’.
I still swim in the salty sea waters I love. The ash isn’t too bad once you’re in. The scent is off-putting, though; not as bad as burnt hair, but a whiff of death is in the air for sure. The sun glows an eery red but the surfers are still out too, looking for a wave. I still go to work. Life goes on. But it’s changing, this year, and it’s going to keep on getting worse while we fail to face, let alone act on, the realities of anthropogenic climate change. The crisis is washing up on our shores, just as it is lapping at the feet of the Pacific Islanders, melting glaciers, extending deserts and torching even rainforests. While our ignorant PM waffles on about the cricket and anything but the emergency, the only ashes that matter this summer are already here.
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Here is a letter that is less than 1 page long and is designed to gather support for the Global Climate Strike on Friday 20th of September. Please feel free to adapt, sign as your own, share widely and use to initiate a conversation in your workplace or with anyone.
On Friday the 20th of September, we have an opportunity to show our support for a movement that is focussed on building a new way of life for humanity: one that does not take our planetary home for granted and works to protect it for future generations and for other species. Without this transformation, we will continue to do irreparable damage to the environment, to our soils and rivers, seas and fellow creatures.
This is just one day of the year, dedicated to the biggest issue facing the entire human race. No matter how important our work is, we can find a way to strike in support. If we work in a caring field, or anywhere that safety is an issue, we can suggest that those who don’t want to strike are rostered on to work. Management may be open to this, if they recognise the unparalleled danger that we face. If not, we can apply for leave. But however we do it, we have to strike. We have to show that business as usual is a death sentence for life as we know it.
The devastating impacts of human-induced climate chaos are increasing daily. Animals and plants are becoming extinct in frightening numbers. We are involved today in a struggle that is no longer ideological (about beliefs or ideas), or historical, but scientifically validated as an existential threat to living species on this planet right now. This is the most important moment to be alive in the history of humanity. No longer do our actions only matter to our local communities – although they still do. We must now give in to the call to “Think Globally and Act Locally”, for this emerging crisis affects us all.
On Friday the 20th of September, we are being asked – by leaders in the environmental movement, by school students who can see their very future crumbling before them, by climate scientists and communicators the world over – to strike for climate action. I call upon you now to
commit to this action and to make your commitment public;
talk with your colleagues about how to keep everybody safe (rostering staff who are prepared to stay on at work to ensure public safety while others strike);
make a statement of support for the general strike’s aims, which are to call upon world leaders in politics and industry to support serious and immediate climate action such as complete transformation of energy to a carbon neutral world; and to
enable your organisation, department or corporation to professionally and compassionately manage this day in support of climate action, as meaningful participants in the most important movement of our times, in ways that promote the transformation of our own work practices in alignment with a carbon neutral global society.
Yours in civil disobedience, Geoff Berry [*NB: adapt and sign your own name here freely!]
The School Strike for Climate started by climate action heroine Greta Thunberg has spread to the adult world (as predicted here in March). So now we can throw ourselves into support of the movement without worrying about whether or not we’re supposed to wait for our children to lead. Salutary times!
In an attempt to get as many people across the world to join the strike, to normalise civil disobedience and turn the insane tide of self-destruction to a global mobilisation of climate action, i have drafted a letter. It’s designed to get our colleagues, bosses, clients, customers and everyone involved in our workplaces and households to join with us in support of planetary care, without risking harm to the vulnerable in our communities.
Please feel free to adapt to your workplace and share widely! Start with the CEO or top management, see if you can get organizational support, then share with everyone else. If we follow the protocols of our workplaces we might just help to transform ‘business as usual’ forever!
*NB: this letter is written for the allied health and caring professions. Contact me for help with adapting it to your industry or field! naturecallinggeoff@gmail.com
General Strike for Climate – Friday 20th of September – a call for support
We in the allied health, mental health, social work and community development spheres do important work. We help people: to heal and find wellness, to grow as individuals and together, to make a better world. Through our work we show we care and because of this simple fact, our work is important, to us and to those we help. In our fields, we also have to take time to take care of ourselves, to avoid burnout or compassion fatigue. How we find that balance between self-care and helping work is a matter of personal import, which can be helped or hindered depending on our workplace and its culture.
Beyond this personal level of helping and healing work, staff and carers in these fields may also find alignment with a position that critiques the structural inequalities that make magnify the damage we encounter daily. The ‘facts of life’ that create inequality in the first place; the systems that marginalise those who don’t fit mainstream ideals, or leave behind those who aren’t on the side of the ‘winners’ in a competitive society, that let them slip through the cracks when someone else can’t be there to hold them together. There are historically traceable reasons why so many members of modern society are simply left behind by impersonal forces of ‘progress’ and development. We can choose whether or not we want to be more informed about these factors, just as we can choose to side with inner faith and our resolute determination to help regardless of the history that out us here.
But there is one situation growing more deadly by the day that none of us can afford to ignore anymore. This is anthropogenic climate change – the way the planet is heating up, due to the enormous amount of greenhouse gases being burnt by modern society, and the devastating impacts this is already having on people, on the environment and on the animals and plants that are becoming extinct in frightening numbers and with increasing rapidity. We are involved today in a struggle that is no longer ideological (about beliefs or ideas), or historical, but scientifically validated as an existential threat to living species on this planet right now. This is the most important moment to be alive in the history of humanity. No longer do our actions only matter to our local communities – although they still do. We must now give in to the call to “Think Globally and Act Locally”, for this emerging crisis affects us all, including our environment, our atmosphere, and the living world of plants, animals and other lifeforms that make up our beautiful jewel of a planet.
In the areas of allied health and social work, we already focus on the immediate needs of those around us. We work with love, compassion and kindness to alleviate suffering and promote healing and growth. On Friday the 20th of September, we are being asked – by leaders in the environmental movement, by school students who can see their very future crumbling before them, by climate scientists and communicators the world over – to strike for climate action. I call upon you now to
• commit to this action and to make your commitment public;
• talk with your colleagues about how to keep everybody safe (rostering skeleton staff who are prepared to stay on at work to ensure public safety while others strike);
• make a statement of support for the general strike’s aims, which are to call upon world leaders in politics and industry to support serious and immediate climate action such as complete transformation of energy to a carbon neutral world; and to
• enable your organisation, department or corporation to professionally and compassionately manage this day in support of climate action, as meaningful participants in the most important movement of our times, in ways that promote the transformation of our own work practices in alignment with a carbon neutral global society.
Yours in civil disobedience, Geoff Berry
*NB: Please feel free to use this form and sign off with your own name, to adapt in any way you see fit as long as you don’t edit out the environmentally activist intent, and share as widely and freely as you can.
We are born out of the eggs of our mother, inseminated by our father, awakened to our immediate environment. As Caterpillar, the next stage includes wandering about in small circles, munching on the leaves we were born on, following the wisdom of our immediate and distant ancestors. In the same pattern utilised since time immemorial, our mother instinctively chose the right plant to lay her eggs on. Likewise, we’ve followed our own internal compass, to feed and grow, extending the range of our explorations until we find their natural limit. Next, it’s time to pull back. Think of it as a mid-life crisis, where we realise that the strategies we’ve utilised so far don’t work anymore; or an initiation, like into adulthood, where we know we have to step up to a new level, to leave behind the indulgences of childhood and accept the pleasures and responsibilities of being a fully fledged member of adult society.
Either way, we are in need of transformation. In terms of the climate crisis, we all face this now, which was the point of the original post that inspired this series: as a race of technologically driven modern humans, we are acting like children, despoiling our nest and hoping someone else will clean it up for us, But as George Monbiot recently warned, no one is coming to save us. Which makes it ironic that one of the most influential environmental activists of the time, Greta Thunburg, is a schoolchild. It’s also of note that the oldest cultures still alive lead the way when it comes to ecological wisdom; if only we could listen better. So what to do? In worldly matters, protest, join the movement that places ecological health above profit and endless growth, agitate and never give in. In terms of the inner life … well, that’s another thing.
Because there is no division between mind and body, or humanity and the rest of nature, our social lives completely infiltrate our psyche. The reverse also pertains; as below, so above, or as we think, so we feel and act. We need to take care of ourselves, our souls and our breath, if we are to live fully and not become victims of the stress, anxiety an depression that increasingly afflicts modern society. If we care about the damage humanity is doing to this beautiful, precious and now fragile planet, we need to take good care of ourselves even more so. Sometimes, we need to withdraw from the world and find solace within. Each night, as an allegory, we curl up into our restful world of sleep, allowing the relief of night time to wind us down and prepare us for another fresh day tomorrow. We choose a soft cocoon, just as the caterpillar does, and retire into it. And that’s where the magic happens. (Again, the feature image is the actual cocoon created on my little lime tree by the swallowtail butterfly.)
Inside our cocoon, we dissemble. Sleep turns our mind to goop. The butterfly appears as a transformation beyond the complete dissolution of the caterpillar; it no longer exists, except as a memory of this incredible new creature. This doesn’t happen for us, however. If anything, most of us probably find the loop of thoughts and habits that limited us yesterday kick straight back in almost as soon as we’re awake. BUT we can make the process of transformation more conscious, thus more effective. We might not wake up completely transformed into a beautiful new being, but each night something changes and over time we do transform. Why not make this more conscious with a simple ritual designed to support this process?
Sage Counsel offered online
Every morning i make a little space for myself and intone my thanks to the spirit of the butterfly. I ask that my night’s rest bring me new insights and allow the parts of myself that are still broken, or crawling inside their own cocoon, or dissolving into goop, or recrystallising and getting ready to break free, to find their way towards transformation into the more evolved being they are destined to become. Find your own way to this and allow the magic to work.
“Choose Transformation, Create Cocoon, Allow Yourself to Dissolve into Deep Feelings, Wait, Crystallise, Reform, Grow Strength, Break Out of Former Limits, Fly Free. Repeat Daily.”
Geoff Berry, outlining the rites of the Butterfly: Adapt and Practice, Practice and Adapt.
