– Kit

I find that I want to eat all the time, all the things I love, because I know mostly they will no longer be attainable. Better than going on a diet…that will come soon enough!

I have thought about who I will be during this transition to who knows what. I know I cant be the rock of gibralter that therapists are supposed to be. But I can cry with people, I can help mobilize people. And I can use my faith..nothing fancy just spiritual…to know that miiracles can happen, and when its my time, then I go on another leg of the journey.

My fear is for my children. Their dad died about 15 months ago…and in the grander scheme of things, I wonder why I am left to take care of them (though they are young adults). Perhaps because I am the perrenial student of everything I come across, and am always learning about things that somehow will apply to the challenges ahead. I am 60 and will not be here forever…I don’t see that life expectancy will be better in the coming years.

I also believe strongly in synchronicity. that is, no accidents in life. I did not force my children into college (though I am well educated), because they need a different type of education. My son can fix almost anything, and is very adept at solving problems with creativity. My daughter writes, like I do, is very loving, and talented with people. They both are entertainers, and lord knows we will need some of that.

Strangely, one of my favorite movies is Kevin Costners “The Postman”. I try to stay focused on what may be gained by the collapse, we have so lost our values in life, and many are so lonely.

Another in-law was visiting from out of town, down to clean the fridge for her lawyer daughter who was moving into an upscale apartment in a notable area of the city. I was in one of my disconnected places but from that place I observed how comfortable this relative was in her life, she had enough wealth to afford her a high level of comfort and had a running dialogue to prove it.
I was shaken out of my disconnection with an overwhelming urge to strangle her, just so she would stop. I found her sense of entitlement so sickening. Then I stopped in my judgement and looked at myself and wondered where am I invested in my own comfort level. I decided to test it. I’d been invited to an Eco-Activist workshop in an old growth forest in B.C. I’d said no because I was feeling down and disconnected and just couldn’t imagine summoning up the energy required to get there. Then I was faced with this Empress of the Empire and her blatant comfort and I just knew I had to test mine. I was kickstarted out of my disconnection, I hopped a ferry and hopped a bus, travelled across island with a friend and we drove three hours down a logging road into the wilderness. When I got there it looked like I’d arrived in a refugee camp. There were tarps strung between trees and a makeshift kitchen set up which was in complete disarray. There was a fire burning with people curled up around it wrapped in blankets with the odd black lab lying at their feet.
Everything was dirty everything was strewn about.
I threw myself into the experience of living in community with people I didn’t know at a level of comfort that mimicked a refugee camp. A few of the kitchen volunteers were homeless and experiencing sores and colds and common complaints of the homeless. Which I now took personally because I was eating out of that kitchen.
People were sleeping wherever and whenever the level of cleanliness was pretty sketchy and we haven’t even talked about the latrines. I got a really good felt sense of how living rough would feel.
At the same time I found myself surrounded by 60 or so people who all saw the future the way i do …. one of collapse. I’m so used to being the only radical in the group here I was one of about 60. It was such a strange feeling. I got to hear my own conversations of the last few years being played back to me from many different angles. I also got to spend some time living in a nylon orange bag on the floor of an old growth forest it was completely magical and that beauty was puntuated by the sound of chainsaws from the logging area next door and the sound of majestic old growth trees falling in the forest. I was outside my comfort zone and in it all at the same time. I have just arrived back home and it was all I could do to not get down and hug my magic chair. I’m still processing my experience it’s really given me a lot to think about the strongest feeling the one I left with is I just want to go home and get on with preparing for the inevitable.
Vivienne

That’s my greatest fear - not so much for myself and my husband and close friends, but for the rest of the populace-in-denial, those who don’t know how to process their emotions at all. When the shit hits the fan, I think it’s going to be the emotional shit of the unprepared that’s going to be the hardest to deal with.

After I’ve plunged my ecopsychology students into the unpleasant realities of peak oil, climate change, the global economy, species extinctions, etc., I tell them: “Deal with your emotions now, so that you can help others when the shit hits the fan. There’s going to be a ‘market’ for ecopsychologists, though you may not make a ‘professional’s’ salary when the economy collapses. But there will be a high demand for gentle, patient teachers and healers to help people understand what’s happening, why, and how to adjust to it.”

The other side of that coin is that we’ll need to protect ourselves from the insanity that will erupt. Not that it isn’t already erupting, but it will get worse. Keeping our own sanity will depend on having people around us who are committed to keeping their own sanity and helping each other with compassion. And any kind of sustainable human community that survives this century is going to have to know how to protect itself from the demons and predators that will be unleashed during the Long Emergency. That is one of the main reasons that it’s necessary to find our community and begin to prepare Now. We need to know how to protect ourselves physically as well as psychologically.

Thanks for a great post and a great metaphor. Are we done with Tod now?

Best,

Suzane

Thanks for the comment. I think you’re exactly right. Glad you’re doing the work of training people for this. That’s a big aspect of what we’re trying to accomplish as well.

Looks like Todd took offense at your comment. I’ll talk to him about it. He may not have considered the possibility that you were asking because you are hoping to see more of him. It’ll be fine. He’s been hanging out in those huge climate change modeling programs all week and he’s a bit frazzled.

Take care

As to ‘the collapse’. I think it’ll come on like turbulence, a breakdown in a flow of communication caused by little delays and misdirections that multiply, where just-in-time becomes just-too-late and backfires all the way up the line. There’s a good and bad kind, though, which would take some explaining. The bad kind would have an effect like the great depression, a dieback, and might be considerably worse. It might be triggered by discovering our errors in the plan to avert global warming and attempting to ‘turn the big ship’ even more sharply than the very rapid changes in direction that have been projected as necessary already.

I’m sorry, Todd. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, and I’m sorry I misspelled your name. I see that you are a big help to Tim and thus to all of us. Thank you for your support work.

Tim, yes, I recognize the you’re also trying to prepare and train people. That’s why I appreciate you and Sally and Todd so much. There aren’t enough of us yet! (There never have been!) So I do hope your film and dialogue work gives people the ‘permission’ and courage to begin shifting their consciousnes, speaking from their hearts and their guts, and standing up for what they know to be true.

Thanks for intervening with Todd. I can understand why he frazzled.

Best, Suzanne