Another way to look at the coming changes

[GliderGuider]

The following excerpts are from the blog of a friend of mine, Tim Bennett. He's a communicator. He made a documentary movie four years ago called What a Way to Go: Life at the end of Empire that I reviewed here on E/E. He just wrote a wonderfully strange SF novel called All of the Above. And he just put up this blog post yesterday. It's a rare and precious thing to meet someone else who can speak your thoughts. Tim speaks mine very eloquently.

The Quest for Vision

For the longest time, I found it really difficult to imagine, create, or buy into a vision for the future. People would hand me thick folders full of their ideas and plans. Others would send me links and attachments. Some, often after screenings of our documentary, would tell me face to face what it was they were excited about. And many other visions and plans came across my radar just by virtue of my being connected into the Doomosphere™. But by and large, whether it was the relocalization movement, the biochar revolution, or the audacity of hope, whether any of these might be good ideas or not, I just couldn’t manage to really feel the excitement that so many around me appeared to be feeling.

Here’s what came to us that day: it makes sense (and it resonates with us) to view our collective situation – our present predicament, our long emergency, our powerdown, our doomsday, our danger/opportunity, our end of suburbia, our life after the oil crash, our nuclear holocaust, our great turning, our die-off, our financial Armageddon, our eleventh hour, our petrocollapse, our overshoot, our endgame, our final crash, our mass extinction underway, our six degrees, our final empire, our ascent of humanity, our revenge of Gaia, our end of the world as we know it – as an initiation into cultural maturity at a grand and terrible scale, as some sort of a vision quest for the collective heart, mind, and soul. If that is so, it may help us to remember that the initiate does not go into the vision quest with a vision already in mind. That’s what makes it a quest. Initiates go first into the sweat house or death lodge, or embark on some similar process, or simply find themselves in a “dark night of the soul.” During this time the elders urge them to shed what needs to be shed, to symbolically “die.” Only then are they released into the wilderness to prove themselves ready and worthy, to be given a vision by the gods. And only then, upon their return, having faced their trials successfully, can they be reborn as fully adult members of the tribe, vision in hand to offer as service to the greater good of their community, and to give them meaning for their lives.

We were working to get quiet and still, to sit for long days and nights, fasting from the ideas, assumptions, and energies of the dominant culture, and to learn, in the poet David Whyte’s words, to be in conversation with the Universe, rather than in control. The old visions? The visions given us by the culture in which we were raised? The visions of control and domination, of fixing and solving and making things happen, of even “benignly” ruling the world? Those we were shredding as quickly as we could. As I said in What a Way to Go, this culture’s arrogance, its adolescent sense of invincibility and entitlement, must be sloughed off to make room for a more mature sense of interdependence with, and responsibility to, the community of life. This is the work of initiation. This was the work we were doing, and still do to this day.

There is little to figure out here. Little to reason through. Little to analyze, plan, and make happen. There is mostly the heart pounding with love, the blood rushing with excitement, the mind touched with snippets of poetry and image, the rough scratching of fingers in soil and the tickling of toes in the grass or the scuff of heel on concrete. It feels as though the whole of our reality, and of our collective predicament, surpasses our minds and egos. The vision can’t be known right now, it seems. But it can be felt. It can be sensed and intuited. It can be aligned to and resonated with. We are the children of this planet, after all, as surely as the deer and the dragonfly. We can belong here, if we choose. Like the birds and beasts, we can hear the tsunamis coming and make our way to whatever higher ground there is. We can sense the hunters coming and protect our cubs. We can find shelter in the storm, and joy in the dance.

I highly recommend reading the whole post if you have a few moments. This perspective is orthogonal to all solar panels...

[phantom power]

1. He had me at "Doomosphere"

:patriot:

[GliderGuider]

2. That tickled me too.

The bit about not having the vision when you begin the quest really hit home. And traveling through a Dark Night of the Soul is exactly how I got here. I wonder how many others are viewing this shift from the left hemisphere? It feels to me like there are more and more every day - the path feels quite crowded now.