Let’s begin with the comment from the inaugural post in this new thread. If Teresita is right and most of us know deep inside that we are doomed in the near future, what do we get out of either facing this probability head on versus not thinking about it too much? As Teresita writes, “In a very human aspect we all want to live our lives … as if nothing was about to happen. Love needs to be circulating. The risk of depression and apathy is very high if we accept this truth just like that.”
So, let’s focus on attention and awareness. I want to face the truth of what is coming, so that i can live and die as consciously as possible. How to avoid sinking into depression, apathy, anxiety or fury, when we see that the human race is about to be culpable for the extermination of most life on earth, as the hothouse explodes into action over the next few years, if not decades? One way of thinking this through is to think in terms of investment and reward – a strikingly capitalist, or at least materialistic metaphor i know, considering we are talking here about values, psyche, heart and soul. But i’m going to try and stick to the here and now, the realities of our physical existence as much as possible, while we can. There will be time for the spiritual possibilities later.
Let’s roll the dice. Life’s a gamble, yes? We never quite know what the result of our actions will be. Let’s say we focus some attention on an imminent, planetary extinction event. What is the reward for this path? What is the reward, or possible set of outcomes, for avoiding this? Preparing the mind for chaos seems to me more valuable. What will we do when societal breakdown becomes one of the realities between now and then? When people are hungry, homeless, shocked, destitute, desperate? They will be looking for answers where there are none. The least we could do, as thoughtful people with the courage to look ahead, is to be ready with whatever little shreds of wisdom we can muster, like bits of flotsam on the flood.
I believe the horrors will be worse if we don’t prepare our minds, our hearts and souls for what seems inevitable. I want to live and die like a beautiful social primate, capable of self-awareness and generosity of spirit. We are all going to be challenged more than we can yet even possibly imagine. A bit of preparation can go a long way.
*NB: I’m going to try to keep these meditations short. Please Like, Share and Subscribe. Please leave comments, suggestions for the dilemmas we need to discuss, questions, debates, interventions etc.
Image: La Bête de la Mer (Tapisserie de l’Apocalypse) / The Beast of the Sea (Tapestry of the Apocalypse)
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.
*NB: Please consider Subscribing at the top right of this page, and follow Nature Calling – Deepening Connection to Nature on FB, as i’ll be posting updates on how to deal with the trauma, the depth psychology and ecomythic aspects of what is happening to Australia and the world right now; ie, how we recover, within and without.
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.
NB: Please Subscribe (enter email top right) to get updates on facing the end of the world as we know it with love and rage, acceptance and lyricism, and a scientifically literate and embodied spirituality.
The first bird turned out to be alive, still. Only just though. It was so weak i could approach, nudge, and note its feeble movement in protest as my dog backed away from the scene.
The next one was certainly dead, turned up so that you could see its guts had been eaten out. Then the next, and the next. These were Shearwaters, which had failed their migration and fallen upon the beach, only to have whatever small amount of nutrition that was left in their stomach eaten out by whatever sea creature or other bird could get at it.
I’ve only lived on this coast for 4 years, so saying i haven’t seen this before doesn’t amount to much. But something stopped me in my tracks; more than just the individual deaths, more than the mounting evidence of the current and ongoing extinction event that is seeing the end of so many species we can’t even keep count. My favourite animal of all, the Monarch Butterfly, have lost over 80% of their population over recent years (see here).
I later found this report, about the Shearwaters not arriving at their usual destination in Victoria. It was updated only days ago, here. What’s happening is part of a larger pattern. Climate science makes this clear and calling it a Mass Extinction Event seems accurate (although our political leader’s self-serving inaction makes the term ‘extermination‘ more accurate, as suggested by Jeff Sparrow recently). Professor John Arnould cautions us not to panic abut the failed migration this year. But it’s just another sign. They’re adding up.
We’re going to need to get better at dealing with death and destruction as the climate emergency rains its blows down upon us over the coming months, years and decades. In many places, for many creatures, the chaos has already taken its toll. Some people think the planet would be better off without us, but right now, we’re holding the keys to the nuclear reactors and so many other places that could make everything much worse for much longer if we can’t maintain the little control we have left over the damage we are doing every day.
But it will be the grief that undoes us. The countless moments of loss and trauma as we watch our loved ones fall upon the earth, their stomachs empty as the crops fail; or the shock as our communities burn to ashes on the wind in the next horrific fire; or the anguish as we are swept away on hitherto unimaginably fierce storms … the actual details of our undoing will be sickening, so that we cannot celebrate the end of the anthropocene with a clear conscience. We’re going to have to get better at grieving loss, because just as it came for these few birds on my local shore, it is coming for all of us, whether we act now to make our fates less harrowing or not.
In Anima, Thom Yorke follows a trail that was set out for his soul when his European ancestors crossed paths in the great forest.
For this new audiovisual feast from Paul Thomas Anderson is fairy tale, folks, mark my words. And as a writer who has long explored the deep trails made across our psyches by the play of light and darkness since time immemorial, the idea of ancient tales with modern significance is something dear to my heart. This isn’t myth as falsehood, but myth as powerful storytelling, opening doors to our secret longings, our hidden hopes, our romantic selves.
So how does this modern mythmaking work? Well, where once wise old crones shared secrets beneath the wild spreading branches of an oak or elm, or curious children allowed themselves to become enchanted by the thrilling call of a songbird until they were lost in the forest, Yorke is drawn along this heartfelt tale by similar instincts. His character in this romance is on the scent of the chase, following a girl of his dreams, yearning to return her lunch case, which is as precious to him as any other form of lost treasure could be. By the time he has woken up on his crowded train, dodged countless commuters on crammed escalators, and faced other barriers to his distant love interest, Yorke is following the golden imperative of the mythic journey: the hero is inspired to set things right, by returning the case and maybe meeting someone to care about in the deal. The foes and barriers, the challenges to his path, the obstacles that threaten to derail the fruition of his dream … these are all inevitable in the hunt, or life is not being lived. The thorns cross the path, the villain stands in the way, the mountain must be climbed. Our goal may seem just out of reach, but it is in such a quest that we are reminded of our power, as Joseph Campbell so often reminded us.
But while the chase is timeless, the imagery of Anima reflects our new ‘natural environment’: the city. The opening, submerged in the subway, enfolds us within a train shooting along a tunnel, like a probe into our everyday underworld. We don’t want to over-analyze the film – as Martin Shaw wrote, the best stories remain dark around the edges, they leave us in mystery, grappling with our own inner truths and conflicts, unsure rather than overly confident in our self-knowledge. But the nodding of the commuters, Yorke included, seems to stand as the inevitable process of socialization, a dance we all join in order to get by, a way of being that lets us be in the world. Turning it into dance is the magic that art, in this case film, allows us – to settle into the truths of our lives while also making them part of a greater whole. We play the game, we know we play the game, but we know we are also more than this, that we come from a place of unlimited potential and ultimately we belong in that place, as much as we do here, in our world of limit and dissolution.
In this world, Yorke and Anderson play with the familiar while feeling out its edges. As soon as Yorke glimpses his Anima – a Jungian term for the feminine within – his otherwise tired character is opened out into new worlds of excitement, with the possibility that everyday life might not leave us flattened but invigorated; that something might change for the better, after all. The chase includes a classic flying dream sequence, as well as epic scenery, and Yorke’s character responds with passing episodes of passive acceptance, fleeting anger, playful exploration and hopeless resignation in turns. All of these human responses are bound within another mythic signalling: towards the wonder of awe. Can it be true? Is it real? The dream of Anima speaks of these gentle inner experiences, which we all know and hold dear but too often let slide along the rigmarole of modern life.
The eventual meeting, the reuniting of two lost souls who complement each other in the endless dance of being around being, rolling along a laneway wall, is a testament to the hope of our unquenchable longing. Anima draws us down and reminds us where we come from and where we belong. This is Home, a place we have sometimes forgotten is also a planet with limits, forests and lakes, seas and other creatures that need protecting.
Whatever parts of us face the world – our Persona to society, family and each other – find relief in the depths of Anima. Psyche, or mind; self, the individual, you person, the mind/body, your vehicle for getting by … that person seeks their dance partner beneath the surface, where she lives and breathes and waits for us to remember. Take the trip, again …
Geoff Berry wrote his PhD on the symbol of light, his MA on dreams and myths, and sings along similar themes with Melbourne post-punk band SEVERINS.
