garyhorvitz

Love and Grief

Grief is a way of loving what has slipped from view. Love is a way of grieving what has not yet done so. They need each other in order to be themselves.

—Stephen Jenkinson

The appearance of COVID has changed everything. We’ve wandered from independence, personal protection and material support to broken food supply chains and communal support. Jobs disappeared while we were trying to integrate new rules and practices into thoroughly disrupted lives. Accurate information was and continues to be muddied by politics. There is a vast gulf between the promise of a vaccine (magical thinking?) and practical everyday precautions.

An unprecedented uprising for racial justice re-appeared nationally and globally. We continue to swim in deeply uncertain times in which political and social institutions are under attack, hopelessness courses like a deadly undercurrent with cynicism, opportunism and nihilism jumping on for the ride. The path that got us here is washed out and there’s no going back. Yet a powerful new solidarity has also appeared, providing compelling fuel for birthing a new national story. As Valarie Kaur likes to say, we are in transition: “Breath and push.” Yet, out of shock and loss and even out of revolutionary optimism, what opportunities are we missing, and what is suddenly available?

Realizing we are not going back to a familiar normal, we await the arrival of the new. There is deep deprogramming underway as the unconscious gives up its secrets, bringing hidden motivations and desires to the surface in a tumultuous display of community-building and compassion, yet also extremism, fear, tribalism and aggression. This is a moment of extreme neural reprogramming. We can decide what we want and create it as we awaken to the pervasive messaging of white plutocratic dominion, the transfiguration of culture and a global push toward humane alternatives. This self-awareness is emerging as critical moments of choice to relinquish assumptions and to transform worldviews as we kneel and bow in this bardo of becoming.

We’re not at all sure who we will become and many are determined to cloak the present in anything resembling the familiar. Yet some of the outlines of a different world are coming into view. How will we sustain ourselves spiritually, socially, materially and according to what values? Where or what is our refuge? Are we to resign to the political theater emanating from the centers of power? Are we to be ruled by fear and paranoia? Is there a pathway to confidence in a threatening world heading for collapse? Most of all, orienting to the grief of this time is a central challenge.

What of this grief—this persistent presence? It is not solely part of the apparition of ‘me.’ Whatever grief I feel is not strictly ‘mine’. It is a collective condition. It’s not a manifestation of the primacy or imagined indelibility of a solitary ‘me.’ It’s the elemental nature of being at this moment. I do not stand alone at the top of the pyramid of my life. I stand within. We are not the containers of our lives; we are the contained in the ongoing unstoppable process of living and dying that has always existed and never stopped.

Standing at the threshold of the Anthropocene, my outlook is not of fullness and promise. I am more aware of the losses, of being among those whose mistakes, hubris and arrogance, entitlement and recklessness have brought our progeny to the most dangerous moment of human history. The future is already lost.

The persistence of COVID is changing our outlook and personal practices; how we maintain a level of equanimity and easy connection with others. I am already rendered fragile by a personal health condition. Call it a pre-existing condition. Yet such fragility—and the shifting feeling that comes with it–is not weakness. It is the virtue of being affected, of still being able to feel at all. It is a form of strength in which mutability, resilience and adaptation form a capacity to bend without breaking. In the cracks of what decreases me lie what increases me.

Then there is the sense of a great unwinding—or, more accurately, unraveling–an exhaustion of neo-liberal economics and the accompanying desperation of its priesthood (and remarkably oblivious entitlement) who have brought us to the brink of extinction. How could anyone look upon this—even if it’s largely unconsciously—without noticing the suffering and dislocation nearly everywhere?

Parallel to the ongoing nature of COVID, the progression and demands of the personal condition are also very uncertain. There are no clear signs of resolution, no hints as to my personal longevity nor any probability of recovery. Restoring and sustaining meaning is my primary focus. Generally, in this atmosphere of official denial, the severity of the infection being downplayed, the most sensible path to recovery is rejected. Clinging more desperately to the past and continuing to isolate from the world in its response, the centers of power in America are shutting their eyes to the inevitable. We sit on an edge of anxiety and resolve. There is so much more at stake now than ever before.

Even so, in the enveloping pall of personal loneliness and perpetual fragility, how can self-sustaining practices adapt to these circumstances? I rarely acknowledge my own fragility. I cover it and compensate. But it’s always there. Where shall I go for equanimity? Shifting away from what has worked in the past is not an answer. Turning to heart-based practice, noticing the appearance of grasping, despair and isolation, not retreating or succumbing, choosing a path of passion, recovering spontaneity and taking refuge in unity and dignity is the path of the present just as it has been in the past. Only now, our resolve must be even greater.

My personal awareness of loss and the general compassion I feel for others are parallel processes. What I have personally lost–a measure of freedom, a measure of abandon, the luxury of mindlessness, living with only an abstract comprehension of mortality and an incomplete and muddled notion of agency leave no residue of regret. They give way to a renewed and acute sense of the massive inertia of culture, the durability of systems of power, of being only one outlaw among a massive cadre who see the task ahead.

Having the curtain removed between the abstraction of death and the reality of its approach is not a loss. It has been more of a gain. I have gained focus and resolve. I am creating time even as an expansive future is diminished. A bottomless reservoir of gratitude has been tapped. An appreciation for the smallest gifts prevails. I have re-localized, attending to the minutiae of thought and interaction. This is not loss.

The full meaning of reciprocity with the natural world appears as we realize our subordinate place in the biosphere. The presence of extinction and the prospect of personal death luck among us. I am connected more closely to the experience everyone, if they’re lucky, will have sooner or later, the past and future omnipresent on the bumpy ride of now. Yet the recurring awareness of endings is also a source of energy; an enveloping presence of finality reviving appreciation for this world, the impulse to discover what more can be done, to grieve what has been lost, to love life as it is, beyond approval, beyond promises or expectations.

If there is a core of any sustained grief, it would be a sense of my own limitations. It is the younger generations who’ve been robbed of their future, not me. My grief and love is for them and for the impossibly complex, incomparable beauty and perpetual emergence of life of which I am only a tiny nested part. Grief has not diminished me. I expand into it as a part of the perpetual astonishment of existence. What emerges is productive action. I am enveloped in life, reaching my arms around its every dimension.

Zombie America

America is under racist assault. It has been this way for centuries—as though a cult of the undead, the empty dispossessed can only see the world in one way—Us vs Them. Purposeful demolition is the foremost objective of the undead—led by the First Family of Destruction. The zombie ideologues now get their news from the Family, its enablers, sycophants and its media amplifiers. There’s no more capacity for the undead to change than there is for a jellyfish to float against the currents. Yes, the undead are the jellyfish of the logo-sphere and they carrying a nasty sting.

There’s no aspiration, no value, no commitment or connection to the collective, only to a their narrow view of entitlement. There’s been no event, no sacred passage, no period of trial or transition, no foundation for their actions other than domination, jealousy, greed, anger and vengeance. There’s been no transition, no developmental progress, no entrée into a wiser way of seeing based in reality instead of wish-fulfillment.

Traditional initiation crosses a threshold to join the continuous stream of birthing and dying, with all the triumph and adversity, love and suffering in between. Emerging successfully from an initiation would mean walking with our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds (not the reverse), holding a natural connection with our selves, others and with the land.

Traditional cultures whose initiations were integral to the continuity of their communities prescribed these rites on the cusp of adulthood. They require a separation, a death, an awakening to essence (or soul), a time of rebirth and a return. An initiation is a second birth, having grown up dependent on family and community, the initiate is prepared to establish a separate life, to be guided by a core vision and to live out a full investment in the community according to that vision.

Initiation is also a rooting experience, a gesture of coming home in the body-mind of the initiate. The body of the initiate is infused with the land and the spirits of the land. They become One. This is the indigenous experience of initiation. Imagining a shred of anything similar in the American racist zombie cult is a laughable fantasy. We are diminished by all of it—for 400 years. We, as a nation, have been the undead, lost. Sadly, on the issue of race, we are as homeless as the ones sleeping in doorways.

I am of a people who, historically, had no land. The cultural lore is of temporary residence and history has tragically proven the validity of that outlook. We were not nomads, unless you count wandering in the desert for 40 years after escaping slavery in Egypt. That was the original initiation of the Jewish people. As the story goes, we received not only land after the struggle, but a rebirth in that land blessed by the God of that land. True or not, the history of the Jewish people has been one of being landless—until the establishment of the State of Israel. Overlooking the injustice of that creation for the moment (and all the suffering it has unleashed), that land remains the State of Israel in the hearts of many Jews whether they live there or not.

Even so, tracing my own roots in the Jewish diaspora over the last 150 years, I can say I’m a citizen of America. I could even say I own land or I might trace my life in America for four generations, but I do not have a place in the same sense in which I describe it above. Rural Americans do; urban/suburban Americans don’t. As Stephen Jenkinson has said, we have learned to make do with portable gods. I personally have by conventional definition been a nomad. The deeper yearning to be of a place remains.

My advantage, my privilege, is that I was not ripped from my ancestral home and transported against my will to this land. And beyond the mass kidnapping and enslavement, the American tradition of making others landless in the course of claiming this land continues to this day. This ideology is, under Trump particularly, delivered every day by the occupying force of police and ICE whose job it has become to enforce the message: you do not belong here. You have no claim to this place. It is ours and will never be yours.

My personal bond connecting my history and cultural memory to Israel has been severed by the racist apartheid policies of that government. But in my adopted home, zombie white supremacy, an increasingly visible, dangerous and aggressive segment of this nation of white European immigrants, staking a claim to this land above anyone else, is now with rising brutality resuscitating and delivering a murderous message of ownership with a knee to the neck, further severing my bond to this land in the process.

Looking at the American republic, dangling as it is now between the life and death, the racist undead, led by the foremost zombie of our time, Donald Trump, remind us of an incomplete national initiation. There is nothing about Trump to suggest any history of formative, let alone transformative development, no true home, allegiance to anything or any distraction from singleminded and empty devotion to personal gain. And likewise, his most ardent followers feel entitled to demand and accept nothing less than unobstructed freedom of their personal choices without much suggestion of a commitment to anything other than that freedom–such as the common interest.

America’s initiation on the issue of race is entering the encounter-with-death phase. Trump’s zombie cult, the uninitiated, reflect to the rest of us how severed we are from our ancestor’s bones. America is still way behind the curve of truly becoming Emma Lazarus’s home to the many. It’s primarily a home to the few whose dominance depends on successfully claiming—and selling—the idea of America as their exclusive home. The message delivered to communities of color are that they are temporary residents with shallow roots at best, at constant risk of being attacked, marginalized, incarcerated, exploited, oppressed, exported, discarded and finally, if necessary, killed. America is now being dragged into the mud of history by the undead. The world looks on in horror.

The racist undead have never been alive in the sense of recognizing interdependence as a primal reality of existence. Nor do they recognize or consider themselves beholden to any resident spirits. Even their god is homeless. Grounding to a place and to all people is not embedded in modern American culture; thus, no common vision exists of what it means to live in the full flower of diversity we represent. Our roots are too shallow; our gods are foreign. We are driven by the ideology of self-interest. And if Trump’s ascendance is any indication, the zombies are winning.

What is so disturbing and ironic in these times is that those who claim to be Most American, the ones claiming ownership and to being the ‘true’ keepers of the only legitimate version of America, the ones lugging automatic weapons into statehouses, to polling places and into the street proclaiming their ‘freedom,’ the ones acting least like they believe in the promise of this nation, have the least invested in making sure all people share and contribute to the struggle of thriving together, most likely because it is they themselves who have been hollowed out and discarded by the America they claim to love. They are our zombie chickens coming home to roost, leaning into the nihilism of the chief zombie, Donald Trump.

Solidarity, Somatics and Psychosis

The classic design of the vessels transporting the kidnapped, the brutalized and dispossessed, the colonized masses brought from Africa to the New World, endures to this day in the forms and structures of patriarchal capitalism: social stratification, marginalization, income inequality, racism, limited or blocked access to the means of acquiring wealth, property, equal justice or the general benefits of living your own dreams. White people may still enjoy the freshening breezes of the upper deck, but the metaphor still applies to nearly all of us today. It is only a matter of degree.

Yet even in the darkness, the impossibly close quarters and squalor of the lower decks, the light of freedom and joy never died. Dislocation does not extinguish the longing for home, burning to this day in the literature, art, music and poetry of the oppressed. It is in these ceremonial forms of breathing together that solidarity is affirmed. That yearning comes to life in the reverence for the journey, the longing to recover the sacred, to resolve the diaspora with the free and full habitation of a transformed body in a new land, even if that land only exists as an aspiration in the hearts of the wanderers.

Four hundred years later, it is not only the ones who bore the lash who still cry out for home. Neoliberal economics, by commodification, relentless extraction and by the absence of any loyalty to genuine community and because it refuses to regard the earth as anything other than untapped economic potential, renders all of us landless on the new plantation just as it does in the foreign territories, occupied, re-colonized and subjugated by the weapons of finance and law. If those fail, force is applied.

These conditions, specifically the hierarchies of privilege, the tightening grip on the lash, the systemic racism and the use of money as a bludgeon, the predatory financial order and all the other inequities accompanying its regime, remind us that we can lose anything at any time. And indeed, since our relation to earth is much more than merely to a potential source of revenue, everything is being taken from us, incrementally, every day. Manifest destiny operates upon the collective body now just as it did in centuries past upon the territories of the indigenous.

Modernity is a rationalization of the wild. It is a leveling. Anyone noncompliant; anyone who dances, breaks the rules, bends time, looks beyond the borders, meets with other bodies, dwells outside the boundaries of sanctioned connection, imbibes the nectars of the sacred, seeks wisdom from forbidden sources, cries out for justice or draws outside the lines may be indulged with limited tolerance. Some will be infiltrated, criminalized, surveilled, tracked, deported, bludgeoned, jailed or killed. The rest, at least figuratively, become fugitives.

These and others like them, the restless, underserved, disenfranchised and denied, the ones living outside today’s inverted definitions of “freedom,” and “opportunity,” the ones discarded by the “free market” are the ones deserving of our solidarity. But they’re not the only ones being damaged by the paradigm of dominance and exclusion. However the systems of power continue the privatization and destruction of the commons is our disenfranchisement in real time.

The Freudian definition of psychotherapy is that in exploring and expanding the psyche we reclaim territory. Our wounds back us into corners and make us small. Our addictions limit our capacity for outreach and connection. All the consciousness work we do is to reclaim territory, to halt the narrowing and to expand our view. Modernity rounds the edges and flattens consciousness, narrowing focus to channel and facilitate the pursuit of illusory solitary happiness. Bayo Akomolafe calls it gentrification. When we open psychic territory, we push past the limits of convention. We enter the wilds, tearing through the fences of what we know. We recover expansion and breath.

As David Abram reminds us, the original meaning of psyche was about breath, the wind or spirit of life. When we (re) occupy the wilds, we are learning to breath again, to fully inhale the spirit of life and the common territory of choice and possibility we all inhabit. Sitting and breathing is the most elementary practice of contemplative traditions. In doing so, we typically only think of ourselves, our solitary and separate bodies and the spirit, or psyche, of our existence. We inhale, filling the self, partaking of the esprit, the ruach, the motivating energy of being, momentarily narrowing our focus to this body, this consciousness, this moment, cyclically relinquishing the territory of awareness we just claimed, releasing into the non-dual self, into the unity of all consciousness, eliminating all boundaries and expanding to occupy all the territory we abandon in our pursuit of Self. We infuse ourselves with psyche.

Psychosis names an abnormal state of the psyche, a condition of separation from the essence of being. We become lost to the potential of cyclical expansion and contraction of spirit embedded not only in the simple movement of air, interacting with the flow of breath essential to language. The expression of sound, the original musical intonation of nature, the stops and starts, the shapes of the throat, lips and tongue are rooted in the original sounds and symbols of our relational self. They were orienting, defined community, interspecies dynamics and expressed the ebb and flow of interdependencies upon which group survival depends. To become, over millennia, progressively separated from and to lose all sense of relationship between language and natural world, to permit indigenous languages and their ways of knowing the world to be lost is a mark of the deepening journey into mass psychosis.

We lose our breath until we can’t breathe at all.

Breaking free of the mass psychosis is not simply a matter of breathing or language. It’s a much deeper process of conspiring to access and know our bodies in relation to earth in a different way. The energetics of reductionism, scientific materialism and neoclassical economics drive a widening gulf between humans and nature, from the full-bodied, erotic conversations between humans and the seasonal textures and interactive exchange of wisdom held in sacred sounds and labels of obscure and unique mind-states for which there may be no equivalent in any other language.

Recovering indigenous history is more than recovering stories. Embodiment includes discovering the architecture of authentic freedom, sharing the history of our bodies, exploring the interpenetration of culture and somatics, coming to our full stature, bringing the diaspora home to place and community, recovering belonging, power and perspective, connecting with ancestral voices bending time and preserving the libraries of wisdom contained in disappearing languages.

As Alnoor Lada declared in a recent issue of Kosmos Journal, solidarity is a direct erosion of the structures of oppression, the powers anchoring domination. Reclaiming the past informs the possibility of changing the present. Acting from a different set of values, breathing together, healing from the mass psychosis by breathing with our ancestors, redefining our identities, reconnecting to deities rendered remote and quiescent is a direct affront to the forces of economic dislocation that would erase the past and reframe history as the solitary pursuit of self-interest.

Things I Can No Longer Do #1

There is nothing further left for me in data-heavy climate tracts. I have to turn away now. I don’t want to know—at least not in the cognitive sense of knowing–because I already know.

I’ve reached the end of the line. There is nothing left for me in the latest morning-after mainstream media. I have to turn away. Yes, I’m fascinated, but I don’t really want to know—at least not in the cognitive sense of knowing–because I already know. I can’t even activate the part of my brain necessary to process an argument or anything purporting to be reasonable or logical or scientific, trying to convince…anyone… that this or that event is “directly related to climate change.” Nothing but futility and dissonance arise in the very first paragraph of such material. Where does anyone still get the idea that this does any good? Who still clings to the notion that deniers or ‘low information voters’ can be convinced otherwise? Who still imagines this particular event will constitute the critical nugget for some fence-sitter out there? Do such persons even exist?

Popular treatment of climate issues has become performative journalism, going through the motions in service to a dying ritual of “providing a public service.” Who can stand this anymore? Numbness invariably accompanies reading such stories. They are space-fillers. As long as their vocabularies include the specialized terminologies of science, divorced from every somatic signal, gesture or sense-making faculty connecting us to the natural world, they no longer serve a purpose. There is no longer any refuge in being right. I have become a fugitive from this form of engagement. That fugitivity, as Bayo Akomolafe would say, is the definition of post-activism.

What is the root of a belief in continuing the activist debate? It’s the same dualistic ethic with centuries of baggage accompanying our estrangement from the natural world. The paradox of language is that resorting to reason as a way of propagating the conclusion that we humans have lost our way is part of the disease itself. As has become so clear in recent years, the way we react to the problem is often part of the problem. Reinforcing binaries is itself a form of distancing from our direct experience of the more-than-human world, reinforcing the dissociation at the heart of our headlong advance toward extinction.

What is more disturbing is remembering when I myself might have used words in that way, using (limited) tools of persuasion at my disposal, imperfectly, earnestly and mindlessly. But the very act of switching into that mode of communication is a betrayal. Sure, we all communicate in this way. Yes, we regularly appeal to reason and rationality, brandishing logic, evidence and data in our communications. Yet, at the end of this long trail of tears and deepening anguish, with humanity coming face to face with the self-destructive nature of our values and behavior, and mostly not comprehending, even with yet another book by the most erudite and passionate spokesperson appearing on behalf of coming to our senses, these efforts are now ringing dreadfully false and futile because, as someone living closer to my gut, the tears are already just below the surface anyway. And that feeling never goes away.

I can view photos, arresting, disruptive, body-shaking invasions, images without any words at all, the ones that break through the most recent fragile emotional repair, images like the surgically tortured, dissected and harvested tar sands landscapes of Alberta, Chris Jordan’s photos of plastic-filled corpses of sea birds on Midway Island or the solitary orangutan fighting a bulldozer in a Sumatran rainforest or the Amazonian fires or rivers of ice-melt surging to the sea in Greenland, grayed and lifeless coral reefs or the abandoned tarpits of Ecuador. These images belong to me….and I belong to them.

Who would dare publish nothing but photos of the most recent evidence of distorted human values and behavior? Where will we find pictures of the California firestorms with no story? The pictures of the orange sky above the Golden Gate Bridge spoke louder than any words ever could, as would typhoon devastation, denuded glacial moraines, bulldozed rainforest, dry riverbeds, open-pit lithium mines or the translucent shells of deep-sea mollusks that can no longer find sufficient accessible calcium.

Yes, I can still look at (some) graphs. But I already know what they say. Just save me from the words. That part of my brain is already exhausted. I can speak to you from my body. There I can wander with the desperate migrations of species, dream with the giants of the seas. I can listen to the land, soar with the last endangered condor searching for home. Just don’t ask me to process the words any more. It’s like eating cardboard and expecting to be nourished.

Collapse Redux

The basis of Jem Bendell’s original and revised paper on climate-induced societal collapse and Deep Adaptation was his review of current climate and public opinion research. In addressing the probability of societal collapse, his paper was and remains a contribution to popular understanding of the social implications of climate change, mainstream environmental advocacy and our current predicament. The definition of collapse he chose was an uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity and meaning. Any distinction between collapse and catastrophe was not addressed. And, by the way, what is “societal” anyway? Whose society? Perhaps this omission was intentional, but clearly, he regarded any more specific definition of collapse as a separate pursuit.

Bendell was obviously content with allowing collapse to remain mostly a subjective frame, which would account for wide differences in definition depending on whom is talking—and where. What, after all, is the normal mode of sustenance or shelter, or even pleasure? And what is normal? If sustenance was overtaken by a revolution in food production that fed more people for less money and didn’t even require soil, would that be an ending of normal? Security is also an awfully big tent if it contains governance, rule of law, energy, health care and public health. Burning the last drop of oil would certainly be an ending, but would it be collapse? The fact that there was no serious effort to be more specific, even if it might have proven as difficult as picking up mercury with your hands, guarantees that readers remain within their subjectivity without much questioning and that the resulting variability of responses don’t represent a very reliable measure of anything. Perhaps it’s only what people believe that’s important.

Bendell also goes to great lengths to describe different psychological strategies, including denial within the environmental movement itself, for mitigating direct confrontation with advancing collapse and especially how we, particularly scientists, steer away from alarmism. Bendell has been criticized for making declarations potentially triggering despair. Different cohorts, whether scientists, laypersons, academics, different age generations or even samples from widely different cultures may have very different ideas about what collapse would look like. But in the absence of (even flawed) parameters, we are left to imagine the worst possible scenarios and a very hazy timeline in which they might unfold. Bendell may have had good reasons to avoid defining collapse any more specifically than he did, but his orientation, given the evidence he was citing, was solely to advancing climate impacts without much attention to political or economic dynamics.

In that avoidance we lose (or overlook) a capacity to evaluate whether collapse is already progressing according to dynamics not directly linked to climate impacts per se, or whether in grappling with a definition we might inevitably expand our understanding to include dynamics that only become more visible and valid according to a systemic perspective that doesn’t arbitrarily exclude those social, political and economic dynamics.

Collapse also deserves a closer (and wider) review because it carries implications for determining whether climate signs already exist, whether there are additional signs of collapse which may not be specifically climate-related but will augment climate impacts, and because the use of this term in this context appears to exist within a limited ethnocentric (global North) perspective. Whether collapse is already here for parts of the global south or whether it remains at a comfortable distance for the industrialized north is not even an open question. It’s difficult to tell whether Bendell was writing for a limited audience. But for the north, at least, we are already fascinated and appalled at the same time, hovering between hope and despair as events increasingly break through our dissociation. But for areas of the South, the signs are more advanced and already clear.

If we considered a single individual as a metaphor of global human systems, we could easily diagnose the patient in the grips of a profound ecological disease, even a pathology, gradually taking over. The fever is rising and the patient is in increasing distress. We see organ systems on the way to failure. From Bendell’s view, collapse represents a transition of the patient into an unmanageable condition, human systems failing to remain in any semblance of harmony with the biosphere. In other words, how can we speculate about when collapse may occur without naming the signs of illness, the social and environmental symptoms along with those strictly related to carbon emissions?

Just to be slightly more precise, although collapse may be perceived as a response to catastrophic events such as the permanent loss of polar ice, the jet stream or the Gulf Stream, it’s more likely to be a slowly unfolding emergency (uneven, as Bendell said) whose impacts aggregate over time. How long that time may be could vary from 10-50 years, or even longer. The question is, where is the inflection point between a normally functioning society and one that is coming apart—or will we only know in retrospect? There will be many signs, increasingly varied and disruptive. There will be mitigation, from mostly effective to increasingly futile. There may be rampant denial and spreading panic. How much deforestation does it take to upend normality? How much pollution? How much ocean acidification before the food chain collapses? Is fascism a sign of greater or lesser security? Is mass surveillance a sign? Is the pandemic a sign?

We are challenged to investigate relationships among an increasing variety of events and systemic adjustments to come to conclusions about what is climate related and what may not be, realizing that as time passes, the increasing number of events portending collapse will most likely be directly attributable to climate. And even if those relationships appear to be tenuous, the reality is that all events are data points illustrating the operation of a social, political and economic regime driving violent global change.

Bendell’s references to climate research include numerous big picture metrics such as sea ice, ocean acidification, the atmospheric carbon budget and changing weather patterns. He bases his theory of inevitable collapse on these advancing measures across numerous defined ‘tipping points’ and makes a case for near-term collapse based on these and additional effects of existing carbon emissions already baked into the atmosphere. The aggregate of emissions playing out over the next 1-3 decades will, he asserts, guarantee disastrous impacts. Likewise, despite the potential for sequestration practices at significantly greater scale or for radical reduction in emissions, the fact is we are adopting neither of these measures to the degree necessary, increasing the probability of collapse.

In addition to calculations of carbon emissions and sequestration, Bendell includes further and more recent data on the measurement of methane emissions and the likely scenario for their acceleration and resulting amplified climate effects as well. This is high-level analysis permitting the most general speculation about the sustainability of human and ecological systems and the likelihood of unpredictable effects on civilization, both agrarian and ocean-based food systems, human migration, disease and the loss of biodiversity.

The greatest proportion of global carbon emissions comes from a limited number of affluent nations. There is no dispute about this. We know the effects of those emissions will fall first upon less developed economies and peoples, but their impacts will also fall on local communities. In fact, while much of the affluence of industrialized nations derives directly from resources extracted from less-industrialized nations and guarantees the true costs of fossil fuel exploration and consumption to fall on those nations, the costs of other resource extraction practices also fall upon those less-developed economies.

In case one needs examples of these practices to fully grasp the nature of globalized exploitation and the externalization of ecological effects, we need only look at the tar-sands operations of Canada and Colombia, the destruction of the Niger Delta, toxic residues in Ecuador, the deforestation of Indonesia, the burning of the Amazon, mountaintop coal mining and the destruction of water resources in the US. In other words, the wealth and hence the carbon footprint of industrialized (white) nations derives primarily from the appetites and extractive practices of those nations in the global south.

In the most general terms, what collapse looks like is the transition of a society from greater to lesser complexity. Outside westernized urban centers, much of the global south is already less complex than the industrialized north, with agrarian culture’s economies more localized and resilient. But since Bendell shies away from defining collapse (or catastrophe) in anything other than the most general terms, one gets the impression the destruction he speaks of will only become real when it effects industrialized societies who have benefited the most from emitting carbon—at the expense of everyone else–and that their very development and stability insulates them from initial and less dire effects of climate disruption.

Indeed, Bendell rattles off the list of recent international institutional efforts created to mitigate the effects of climate by building resilience into developing economies. Unfortunately, these efforts aren’t much more than institutional green-washing, too little and too late. While the North refused in Paris (2015) to adequately compensate the South for climate impacts, giving themselves the freedom to define their own mitigation efforts in the absence of any enforcement mechanisms, they sloughed off their responsibilities to underfunded excuses, continuing Business As Usual and guaranteeing catastrophe far away from their own shores.

Meanwhile, contemplate just a few drivers of uneven endings:

The massive and unprecedented shift of wealth upward for the past four decades
Unregulated capital markets and the creation of phantom economies using unregulated speculative financial instruments, shifting risk to the collective.
Increasing extraction from labor and destruction of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
Intrusive and controlling policy serving narrow economic interests at the expense of health, education and the welfare of the commons.
Mismanagement of land and degradation of food safety: food and soil quality declining with monoculture, pesticides, additives, GMOs & preservatives.

What collapse feels like is also not a matter to ignore. What may not be at the forefront of awareness is rising anxiety and apprehension about the security of current lifestyles, a viable future and the ability (not to mention willingness) of governments to respond. Do the incremental changes in perspective, the rising apprehension and pessimism about the future (solastalgia) count as a signal of collapse? The reality of these proliferating signs of economic and psychological stress are likely more widespread than we realize. And we’re not likely to be able to calculate their true effect until it’s too late.

Meanwhile, the North continues to generate climate impacts in the South, knowing the effects and continuing practices foretelling social disruption and eventual collapse elsewhere. Climate-related signs are already present, but again, it’s only from the perspective of highly developed western economies that Bendell presents the probability of collapse, failing to account for existing signs in less developed economies.

A few examples:

Much of Bangladesh is under water. Between this year’s monsoon and a climate-amped cyclone, millions are affected by the pre-existing COVID lockdown, the closure of businesses, the loss of rural income usually provided by urban workers and the loss of arable land by erosion.
Indigenous societies in Brazil are undergoing attack and destruction (ethnic cleansing?) by Bolsonaro’s aggressive agricultural development practices, directly driving climate change in the Amazon and the planet.
Parts of the Pacific island nations of Fiji, Kiribati, Solomon Islands, Marshall Islands, Vanuatu and Micronesia are already disappearing. Human settlements, sanitation, agriculture and fresh water supplies are threatened due to rising sea levels.
Disastrous multi-year drought and total crop failure in the north of Syria caused mass migration to the cities and, along with resource mis-management, foretold the destruction of that nation.
Sudan is experiencing climate driven variability and timing of extreme temperatures and rainfall, disrupting food supplies, triggering civil war, the displacement of millions and a succession of either military dictatorships or civilian incompetence. Suffering is pandemic.

We could go on. It will likely be only when there are unavoidable signs occurring at home that developed nations will take notice:

The rich central valley of California supplies a vast majority of all the fruits and vegetables for the entire US. Yet extended drought conditions have forced growers to tap groundwater supplies for years. Wells are now dropping 150 ft. or more into the falling aquifer. Water war is a long-standing condition between densely populated northern California urban centers and the agriculture industry. Factor in the declining snowmelt of the western Sierra and we have conditions eventually forcing choices between food and water.
The Southwestern US relies on water supplies from the Colorado River and Lake Mead. Water levels of both have been in steady decline for decades. It’s only as matter of time before the viability of the metropolises of Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles are threatened.
The UK wheat crop is the lowest in 40 years, foretelling a sharp effect on food prices.

Climate related migration has been already underway in many locations, causing economic and political destabilization. Coastal property insurance costs are rising and coastal land values are falling. Migration from the Florida Keys, Houston, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta is rising. Whether it’s flooding or water scarcity in India, climate migration will result in unchecked urban growth just as it did in Syria, taxing inadequate infrastructure and further causing political and social stress.

What global events have been telling us for quite awhile and which have become especially clear very recently is that virtually no aspect of human presence, other than by reductionist efforts defining linear causation, can be culled from the whole and paraded before us as irrelevant to a calculation of impending collapse. Does collapse mean preventive measures have already failed? Would the implementation of security measures or the initiation of resource conflicts themselves represent collapse? Would mass food insecurity alone or rising crime in response to food insecurity constitute collapse? Does collapse imply a breakdown of governance, lawlessness or border disputes?

One of the most practical aphorisms of this age is to “think globally, act locally.” From this view the Deep Adaptation agenda makes sense, although it could stand some scrutiny and even radical expansion of what Reconciliation means from a global view. Personally, I see few signs of human resolve to revert to true reciprocity with the natural world in time to forestall broad collapse. Given the pace of events, the high degree of integration of global systems and realizing the entirely ethnocentric orientation of this agenda in the face of a huge disparity between the outlook and fortunes of the North and South, we might consider reversing the aphorism to “think locally, act globally,” asking what we need to do on an international scale to restore reciprocity and reverse the drastic inequities already playing out as consequences of our privileged over-consumption of carbon-based products. In doing so, we might even be saving ourselves.

Stray Thoughts

Here by the water the only constant
is the wind, the waves behave as if they
couldn’t be bothered to make themselves known

against the rock. A fellow nearby looks intently
at The Gate while his beloved sits in silence,
chin in hand, waiting for the answer that should come

to her at any moment. This bench is dedicated to the
public service of a city councilman, who from this spot
shall look upon the Bay forever, contemplating the

shifting nature of the world he left behind.
This is the day I will record the argot of the shaman
preparing his evening magic by a low fire,

a squirrel rising up from a rocky windbreak,
the clatter of small drums,
the snap of kite tails and unintelligible

harmonies celebrating sunshine. Ballooned yachts
criss-cross the horizon, white sails whipping halyards
taut — a flock of gulls straddling the updrafts–

white wings, distant whitecaps, a white cotton
candy sky, a white dog passing,
the white socks of the walkers,

the white lace gown you wore last night,
the bed a Rohrschach in white.
The Buddha never shifts his gaze.

Black Soil is the Other Oil

Ukraine is known as the “breadbasket of Europe.” According to a recent report from the Oakland Institute, it has one-third of all the arable land in the EU (32 million hectares). For 19 years the nation had resisted the arm-twisting, coercions and seductions of global finance to protect its rich agricultural base and keep it in the hands of millions of peasant owner-farmers, sparing them the invasion of industrial scale use of pesticides and fertilizers. Ukraine is the 7th largest wheat producer in the world. This is some of the best land on the planet. Guess who wants it.

Since COVID effected the Ukraine economy in the same ways it has everywhere else, the nation was cash-strapped. The IMF, the Snidely Whiplash of global predators, offered Ukraine a desperately needed bridge loan. In return, the IMF wanted to open a land market, gaining access to that black soil, over the objections of 80% of the population (who were locked down and could not publicly demonstrate), President Zelensky eventually agreed. And since then (March, 2020), those cash-poor, land-rich peasant farmers have been gradually separated from their most valuable asset because they couldn’t come up with the cash necessary to obtain a license to keep their own land.

In fact, with the IMF fully engaged, private financial backing for the world’s 35 largest meat and dairy companies totaled an estimated $478bn (£380bn) between January 2015 and 30 April this year. The financing came in the form of loans, bonds and share ownership from the likes of BNP Paribas, Barclays, HSBC, Prudential UK, Standard Life Aberdeen, Legal & General. Pension funds were also singled out for criticism in the report, with Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund listed as one of the largest shareholders in meat and dairy corporations. US participation in the agribusiness sector also comes from some of the largest pension funds such as TIAA, CalPERS, the NY State Teacher’s Fund and other state retirement funds.

Who benefits? Cargill, DuPont, Bayer (which recently bought Monsanto). The land will be used for cultivation (corn and soybeans), grazing (meat and dairy) and mining. In fact, this trend of multinational agribusiness buying up rich farmland across the world has been going on for 15 years for more. Large tracts in Brazil, East Africa, Eastern Europe, Zambia, Myanmar, Poland, Chile, Australia and elsewhere have been snatched up because the return is reliable. If you’re wondering who is buying the land being cleared by fire in the Amazon, look to these companies and their partners in ‘market efficiency’, i.e. crime: private equity funds, retirement funds, endowments and most likely hedge funds. And then look at the fertilizer giants following right along such as Syngenta with its bee-killing neonicotinoids.

The ostensible reason agribusiness has been descending on vulnerable nations to sweep up large tracts for cultivation is to “feed the world” or to “reduce poverty.” But in reality, the former occupants of the land, living there for generations, often cannot produce clear title. The approach to gaining access to the land is to institute ‘reforms’ that create an ‘efficient’ market where there previously was none. So while the new ‘owners’ use deep financial resources to gain control, the previous owners are dispossessed because they can’t ‘buy’ their own property and are left with meager compensation and no transitional training. Another side of the story is that unlocking ‘dead capital’ can help the poor improve their land, gain access to credit and realize greater returns from it. However, this is World Bank, IMF and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation neo-colonial theory based on limited evidence . And while having little or no effect on local poverty, new owners of unused or state-owned land tracts institute cultivation practices known to be damaging to soil, water resources and finite mineral resources.

Scientists have repeatedly expressed alarm over the environmental impact of large-scale food and dairy production and are calling for a transformation of the global food system. They say the current model is responsible for up to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and 70% of freshwater use, with huge reductions in meat-eating essential to forestall climate crisis.

Public employees and other American investors checking out the returns from their pension and retirement accounts are, to a degree, looking at the success of these rapacious intrusions into legacy land ownership systems and flawed title systems based on community ownership. These intrusions are designed to take advantage of historically informal systems by pushing formal registries with the intent of separating peasant farmers from their land in the name of ‘productivity.’

Brazil is a slightly different story. The Amazon fires have spread to the largest and most bio-diverse savannah in the world, the Cerrado. Fires have cleared 40,000 sq miles of land for international agribusiness investors including two of the largest private pension funds in the US: the Harvard Endowment (owner of over 1 million acres) and the New York-based TIAA-CREF (owner of over 830,000 acres). These practices are directly fueling land grabs, assassinations of environmental activists, displacement of indigenous populations, environmental destruction and the well-documented destructive practices of monoculture with chemical inputs.

Arable land is a limited resource. Black soil is a limited resource. Keeping that soil from becoming a source of GHGs instead of remaining a carbon sink and keeping it out of the hands of “drill and kill” developers is just as necessary as preventing the fossil fuel industry from exhausting earth’s ‘carbon budget.’

The Eye of the Storm

The state of gnosis is defined as an arrival of total awareness, a direct and often sudden experience of reality, wholeness, some spiritual truth beyond typical conceptual understanding. Gnosis is an intense and total immersion in the unity of divine nature. Few could say they’ve ever had such an experience nor anything close to such complete knowing, a burst of non-dual presence, whether lasting one hour, one minute or even one second.

What if we’re all having that experience right now? What if this mystifying unveiling, the cataracts of modernity being stripped from our eyes, the complex system of global culture stopped in its tracks, the open wounds of racism, white supremacy, inequality and of highly discriminatory structures of social control exposed before us, not to mention the exhaustion of the idea of human supremacy over the natural world, reductive medicine, the agonies of earth, the collapse of the legacy energy system and even the specter of extinction appearing on the horizon are together generating a mass experience of wholeness?

What if we’re all standing on the threshold of our own personal breakthrough moment, wrestling with the sensations, feelings and barely comprehensible observations, realizing the full nature and impact of interdependence beyond any theories, contrived models or imagination? What if we’re taking our first steps into a deeply uncertain future already knowing far more than we realize?

Gnosis transports us into the heart of emergence, interdependence and universal relationship. All phenomena, including thoughts, feelings and sensations are all one and all now. We are standing against a tsunami of perpetual stillness, a continuous tidal wave of creative interdependent unfolding that has no beginning, no end, no center and no limits. Boundaries dissolve. There is no distinction between the inner and the outer universe. Ego is lost, subsumed in radical entanglement with everything. Is that not the experience of this moment? Despite our struggles to make sense, our separate identities become gauzy and indefinite. Even more importantly, much as we might wish to cling to hope as a lifeline to the future, what confidence can we muster in the face of such a muddled vision?

Spaciousness, however, abounds. Time slows down, awareness of all ‘events’ is acutely and vividly focused. We might well imagine such experiences are extremely rare. And they are. They can be unsettling. But this moment is unprecedented. Beyond the safe confines of our carefully constructed identities, unexplored capacities are emancipated. The familiar is upended. We are instantly seduced to tease, to assimilate, interpret and to act.

Gnosis is commonly a religious or mystical experience. It’s a spontaneous encounter with truth beyond comprehension. In modern culture, it’s not acknowledged nor is gnosis well understood or even regarded as a worthy pursuit except in mystical circles, as though the rituals of inquiry, the visionary pathways have been lost in antiquity. But that’s just the way we like it, isn’t it? We don’t have to think for ourselves. In fact, instead of piercing our accumulated filters of bias, bewilderment and fear, plenty of people seek refuge in nationalism and religious dogma, believing them to be bedrock values. But we are far beyond these now. We are wandering in primal terrain where such accessible anchors can only take us deeper into delusion. We are being challenged to rewrite the source code for human presence on the planet.

We are arrested, with no sign of easy or proximal solutions as we share this sensation of falling together. Loss and instability reign, the personal and collective parameters of normal are eroding without any replacement reality in sight. Even though corporate and political forces seek to take control in this vacuum, we have not yet stepped into the new. The point of gnosis, however, is to realize we already know. We must become our own sense makers. We cannot wait for someone else to decide for us.

In the midst of this transition, instead of confusion, fear and reactivity, we are on a mass unwitting collective and individual journey. There are few authentic leaders here, only pretenders. Our antipathy toward any kind of limit is on full display: a pandemic freely driven by its own intrinsic directives, climate change, economic disparity, the sophisticated wealth extraction of late-stage capitalism, a persistent and dispiriting assault on truth, the rise of theocratic fascism and environmental destruction are all stripping us to our raw essence. We can see the macro. Now it’s time to attend to the micro. It is our responsibility to seek guidance from within, to track the subtle and nuanced flows of feeling with focus and rigor and to respond in real time to the truth of our relationships and to the destructive nature of so many granular decisions of everyday life.

Who are we to become? We may have only a vague notion of how to process what is emerging, let alone what is beyond this moment. We do sense there’s no way to dissociate or avoid what is happening all around us and within us. All we truly know is the intensity. We have no choice but to be here and totally in it. Instead of resisting, going through familiar motions and attempting to reconstruct systemic collapse, suppose we were to let go and stand in the eye of the storm, watching all resistance dissolve as we sink deeper into the shifting currents of change?

Gnosis is an entirely different take on agency. The rules don’t conform to conventional physics. We are becoming the world as the world is becoming us—which has always been true, but only now becoming more visible. Complete interpenetration with no static outcomes is the new rule; we are enmeshed in an unpredictable eternally transformative process of inter and intra-active engagement with no logic to contemplate, no rules to apply; nowhere to go for advice.

Gnosis sees all events from a vastly greater perspective. Linear causation is not recognized as a prime directive except from the narrow view of a very limited array of events. From the perspective of gnosis, making significant decisions on such analysis is foolish and self-destructive. To sit still with all the feeling, confusion and not knowing of this unfolding drama is the current challenge. Now everything matters; the smallest stimuli, the smallest adjustments, how we make sense of our world, all matter more than ever. This will determine who we become.

We’re waking up from a narcissistic, self-destructive dream. Waking into gnosis cuts through the illusions, the complexity, the inertia, the havoc and tenacity of modern culture. We’re in the wilderness now. We’re being given a chance, perhaps a last chance, to find our way.

Gratitude

Gratitude, I am your listening post,
perched on the shoulders of mountains,
in the grasses, in your granite faces,
reclining in the long valleys of your body.
.
Send me your chariots, your champion angels,
warriors of the spirit, whose love rises in speech,
in gesture, in wordless looks,
bathed in sublime rose waters;
even in anguish for the suffering of others.

Send me your thoroughbreds, heavy with bridle;
I will race alongside you, breathing my thanksgiving
for the idealism of youth, for the wild and holy power
of the earnest novitiate;

for conversations between fathers, mothers,
sons and daughters, blooming in the
rising cumulus of purity and courage, in
the altitudes of high regard, the vitality of innocence,
the awakening of inquiry.

Let me travel beside you,
raining down with the pounding hooves
of your galloping love.

No Time To Lose

Reading Andrew Harvey’s 1994 book, The Way of Passion, about Rumi’s relationship with his teacher Shams i-Tabriz is a riveting and enlightening dive into the poetry Rumi produced from that time.

Reading Andrew Harvey’s 1994 book, The Way of Passion, about Rumi’s relationship with his teacher Shams i-Tabriz, is a riveting and enlightening dive into the poetry Rumi produced from that time. Why would I read this? Because devoted to my Buddhist niche as I may be, it’s dry in comparison to the ecstatic and explosively awakened passion of Sufism. Continue reading “No Time To Lose”

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