It’s Time to Let Go of the Shore
Tim and I tried with What a Way To Go to take as direct a look at as much of the global environmental and resource situation as one’s brain can hold at one time. As we’ve poured over the information in the last four years, I’ve been staggered by the implications of it all. I go in and out of my own denial. Though I try to maintain some sense of normalcy in my life, my brain dizzies with the understanding of how compromised our precious environment is, how flimsy the global economy is, how entrenched in denial and distraction the culture is. Restoration of the environment to pre-industrial conditions will take generations, tens, perhaps hundreds of generations. Humans as a species may not survive to see that healing. Certainly humans alive today will not be here to see it. There is huge sadness in that.
It is not the sadness for me that has been most crippling. It’s the times of huge anxiety. The soil, water, and climatic systems that the ecosystem depends upon continue to degrade at an ever faster rate with increased consumption and population growth. The picture is not pretty. Add to that the bankrupt and bogus credit economy and ever more unstable social systems and the picture grows ever bleaker.
It is hard to look at this. I’ve lost sleep. I’ve overworked. I’ve watched movies whiie eating huge bowls of popcorn dowsed in large quantities of butter and salt and parmesan cheese. I forget myself and lose my footing.
I falter when I have no felt sense that I am a part of something larger, something more vast even than the destruction. When I lose that felt connection to the mystery of the whole, I can feel terribly alone and helpless. My chest constricts. My heart pounds. I have never before in my life felt anything resembling ongoing panic. Having looked at the total situation, I identify with those who suffer bouts of anxiety and despair.
Part of my despair is highly personal. I have two adult children in their twenties. I am hard-wired, as I believe we all are, to care deeply about the fate of my offspring, my descendants. Despair hits home when I think about my kids and consider the future the culture is hurling us towards. Everything in me recoils at the thought of my children living in that world. But it’s not just the future that concerns me. It’s right now. I see young people struggle. In the midst of this insane and degrading culture, it is not easy or pleasant to be young and aware. It’s so very hard for them to find a place, to feel a purpose, to walk a life path that offers meaning. Many opt for high diversion. Of course they do. They sense what’s coming. Popular culture offers little vision about how to come together, how to find purpose and meaning in the face of that. Young people don’t much want to think about all of this.
Until the last several years my feelings for the non-human, natural world were not as readily accessible as my feelings for my children. Like most people encased in the culture, my day-to-day connection with the non-human natural world has been systematically severed. Wrapped up and insulated in climate-controlled environments much of my life, I too have been entertained and distracted. But I have gotten re-connected to those feelings of care and concern for the non-human natural world. My relationship to life as a whole has been to some extent repaired. Profound feelings of care and concern for the larger whole are beginning to feel every bit as hard-wired as are the feelings of concern for my children.
Most of my life I’ve not felt deep contentment. Certainly there were meaningful moments and experiences and relationships throughout. But there’s also been a gnawing emptiness. This restlessness is symptomatic of my lack of connection, feeling, and concern for all the other life on the planet. The two go together.
We live on a planet that is suffering and has been suffering. When the earth and her myriad species and life forms suffer, we suffer. Or, we wall that suffering off. We find a myriad of defenses and addictions. People who are addicted, driven by defense and compulsive activity, never find real peace or contentment. Addictions, compulsions, and distractions are hollow, a sham, the consolation prize when you’ve come in last.
In this culture we all know addiction is rampant. But not because it satisfies. Because it doesn’t satisfy. But it persists nonetheless. When a small dose doesn’t work, we try a larger dose. When one variation of the experience leaves us wanting, we just add more gadgets, more senses, more colors, more varieties. Each permutation of the addictive substance promises, but then fails, to satisfy. There is alcohol, drugs, furniture, work, food, romance novels, clothes, investment portfolios, academics, high action movies, chat rooms, music, any of an endless list of cultural offerings. There’s always another version or combination of any, or all of those, to try. The blue silk Birkenstock look-a-likes aren’t quite right? Try the chartreuse Crocs. The imported 70% organic dark chocolate isn’t quite right? Try it with freeze-dried raspberries and bits of old tire tread. Are the sour-cream-and-onion cardboard potato chips leaving you dissatisfied? Try the jalapeno-cheese-arsenic ones. They’re new! And they’re green. I guess that means they are organic.
I’ve had a gnawing suspicion that, despite my attempts to be conscious and politically correct, I too was addicted to the culture. And for most of my adult life I had no real idea how profound that addiction to culture’s endless, but unsatisfying offerings, was. To access that understanding, I had to stop completely. I had to stop all distraction long enough to re-connect the hard wiring that now seems encoded genetically.
When I signed up five years ago for a 12-day wilderness encampment that included a three-day solo wilderness fast, I didn’t know that process of reconnection would begin. All I knew was that I was stuck in my life and needed stuff to shift. I didn’t know that the experience would re-solder that wiring in me that had been severed by the culture. But it did. And when that re-connection was made, I fell back in love with the world.
While I was “in the woods” the cultural addictions fell away rather rapidly and surprisingly easily. It mostly required only that I slow down, stop my habitual activities, including eating, and immerse myself in the non-human world for a time. And the effects have lasted. Now, even one day of fasting, dawn to dusk, immersed in the real world, can be profound. The love of the non-human world is hard-wired. It doesn’t take much to rekindle those feelings. Just time and willingness.
This journey that Tim and I have taken began largely grounded in research and science. As the information piled up around us, so did the feelings of despair. Despair continues to cycle when I do nothing but read the information. To move through the despair and not retreat into denial requires that I come back, again and again, to a number of spiritual practices that work for me.
Those practices seem to boil down to four: the practice of being fully present with journal writing; the practice of being fully present when I am engaged in my counseling work; the practice of being fully present when I sit in a circle with others; and the practice of fasting, silence and solitude in the non-human natural world.
I have respect for many spiritual paths, but for me, this last has been amazingly effective and deceptively simple. It is a cross-cultural practice and most spiritual traditions offer some form of it. It requires just three things: solitude, fasting, and immersion in, and exposure to, the natural elements.
My experiences during wilderness fasts have been, at times, phenomenal. And, as one might imagine, there are also long periods of utter boredom. Taken out of the culture, the ego becomes frustrated. Its ability to maintain the illusion of control, to stay attached to a hightly limited sense of reality becomes challenged. In that frustration and boredom questions arise frequently about why in the world I would subject myself to such an experience. With no concrete way of tracking time, theres no telling how long those periods of boredom and frustration last. But magically, and often without any apparent effort, a shift occurs. The ego surrenders and sometimes phenomenal, non-ordinary experiences occur spontaneously. I come back from such experiences with consistently changed attitudes. Something greater and more essential than my limited sense of self and personality takes root in me. I regain that felt sense of connection to that which is greater.
One thing that is significant to me is that these experiences are NOT addictive. While they are compelling and profound, they do not leave me always wanting more. There’s no craving sensation beforehand or in the aftermath. On the contrary, there is a fullness associated with the experience that is not like anything else I’ve experienced. There are no cravings or feeling the need to escape from something uncomfortable in my life. When I take a day, or a few days, to step away, to stop eating, and to become silent, it doesn’t come from the need to escape. On the contrary, I experience the need to actively move toward something rather than away.
That something I move toward is often quite challenging. Because what silence, fasting, and exposure to natural forces does is bring me face to face with Me. Me, and all that is in me that is not in harmony with the real world. There’s no escape. Whatever is out of harmony must be reckoned with.
In the end, that is what I want: to be in harmony. To feel at home here in the world. To be at peace. I want that felt sense, in spite of the insanely fragmented outer culture I currently live in, that there is an inner, unseen, and much larger wholeness that I am part of.
It is in that wholeness that I find I am ultimately safe. By ultimately safe I do not mean this ego and personality that I identify as myself is safe. The ego that is identified with the culture, with the need for comfort and control and security is not what feels safe. The ego continues to have times of anxiety, to be afraid of pain, discomfort, and ultimately of extinction, death, mortality.
No, what feels safe is other than that limited, separate, disconnected ego. What brings the sense of safety is that I have come into contact with something of my essence. I have touched that essential self that is connected, at-one, with the whole of timeless reality.
This real sense of the Other, of that which is not my ego identity, has made a huge difference to me. I find it easier to gently accept that this ego and personality are ephemeral and will naturally wither and die like the blossoms of bee balm that bloom wildly, as I write, in the untended garden spot in front of the deck this year.
The idea of losing this ego, this identity, with all that being human, being me, here, now, has meant, brings natural sadness. But that sadness is not the same as despair. The fact of mortality softens. I can feel deeply sad without losing all sense of safety or peace. Much of this acceptance is a result of the times of fasting in the wilderness where I experienced that what is essential about life is not based in my ego and personality.
Writing this now helps me remember and reconnect with that essence. There is ground where I stand that allows the waves of anxiety to rise and crash against my ego’s fragile shore, a ground that allows anxiety to be there without the need to resist or defend or control. Anxiety, especially at this time in human history, seems an understandable part of the journey of being human, of having an ego, a separate, unique sense of self that has been fairly well beaten up in this culture. Finding ways to experience something beyond ego, beyond that separate sense of self, something more essential, is key for me.
The times require this.
As the Hopi Elder counsels:
“…There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.”
“Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate…….”
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
All of us who are looking squarely at the global situation face this challenge: How do we find our essence, individual and collective, in the face of collapse? The collapse of life as we know it. The collapse of our ego identities that have been tied to our stuff, our jobs, our comforts, our diversions, our privileged lifestyles.
It’s time we let go of the shore of our well-groomed ego identities, of what Derrick Jensen calls this Culture of Make Believe, to move into the middle of this fast flowing and amazing time. It’s time to let go and celebrate those we find in there with us.
What a way to go.
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July 1st, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Beautiful Sally……………..
I am so honoured and affirmed by the offering you and Tim are giving, both in the movie and in these blogs. Yes, you slogged through all the research and science, and morphed it into two hours of creative laser surgery on our apparent reality. What I love, is that you didn’t leave it there you followed your feelings and hearts and spirit and continued the journey as your last post so beautifully illustrates.
I am working with the Hopi prophecy in my classes.
It really resonates with me. I want desperately to wake people up, to scare them if I have to and then I want to lead them away from the edge of the cliff where they might feel frozen like lemmings in the shock and horror of it all and invite them into relationship, deep relationship with the natural world which they are encoded to love and to sit down in sacred circle and honestly feel our way into our new creation.
Vivienne
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:08 am
Sally getting free of the shore is but a first step. Getting your barings in rushing water is the second. But then you have to pick behaviors that make the world what you want it to be. As you have worked so hard to show, I have not yet seen your film, going with the flow is not an option. You need a plan if you don’t want your two children or maybe your grand children to be dumpster divers — floatsome and jetsom of the turbulent years infront of us.
I have picked the path, rapidly population decline (RPD). I have outlined the behavior one child per family. I have outlined implementation the contagian model.
http://www.skil.org/position_papers_folder/HumanviabilityRPD.html
And each day I produce elements to recruit people to a belief in RPD.
http://www.skil.org/position_papers_folder/consensusbeforeBehChg.html
I have even created a book proposal to bring these elements to life.
http://www.skil.org/position_papers_folder/SKILNOTEbookprop.html
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:26 am
Sally,
Thank you, as always for your words. Every time I read one of your blogs, I want to thank you for being able to so elequently articulate your feelings, so many of which I have felt myself. I live with my husband and 2-year-old son on a small piece of property along a beautiful river. In order to keep the despair and anxiety away, I study the river, even talk to it. I talk to the honey bees as we pick raspberries in the garden. I get healed by feeling the earth under my feet and the damp of the sprinklers on my skin. It reminds me that in so many ways, there is nothing but that moment and that in that moment, there is profound joy and beauty, and even peace. It is so easy to get tied up in knots over what the future will bring and what should be done, especially for my son, but remembering to experience the present moment, to be in that moment for all it is worth, brings peace.
I cannot say how many hours I have spent gazing at our little river, but I have realized that living along this river can teach my son all he needs to know. It can bring him a profound philosophy, a deep sense of rootedness, not to mention sustenance and an education in physics, mathematics, literature, ecology, and history. The list could go on.
I am losing track of my thoughts here. I just wanted to thank you and to throw in my 2 cents. Living away from the city brings back a part of the child spirit that we leave behind when we enter our school system and our course to adulthood. It brings back our imagination, our child knowledge that everything is so alive and so full of wonder, just as it is. It brings back the magic that we think no longer exists as we grow up. It brings back the wonder. It is the greatest gift I can imagine.
Thank you for all you are doing. Celia
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Dear Sally,
Thank you for sharing your personal feelings and the ways you keep yourself sane as you look squarely at the global situation, and especially the ecological crisis. I’ve started to feel comfort in knowing that other “crashwatch bloggers” (besides you and Tim) are also sharing their personal feelings about the impending collapse, and not just reporting the likelihood/inevitabiity of it. Discovering ways to keep ourselves sane, including self-reflection, seems like essential psychological preparation/self-defense for what is to come. And perhaps acknowledging how difficult it is to unplug from the system and let go of our “well-groomed ego identities” is an important step towards doing so. Maybe we have to know how hard it is, and how risky, before we actually do it resolutely and with finality, knowing that, this time, there’s no going back.
I came across the term ‘crashwatch bloggers’ on Carolyn Baker’s blog in this article by the fellow who runs the Survival Acres site under the name “admin.” In another article, “The Message is Insufficient,” admin bemoans the general public’s inability to respond adequately to the message of collapse, the loneliness of being aware, and his own inability, so far, to completely unplug, or to find anyone who has truly become self-sufficient. The self-disclosure of the difficulty of living in the culture of make-believe - and especially the difficulty of going through the roller coaster of emotions in relative isolation when so few people around us know what we’re talking about - seems an important, deepening aspect of this time, part of the preparation.
For me, six years of living in the wilderness (the Colorado Rockies) helped me to realize that my “essence,” as Sally calls it, is not different from that of the nonhumans that surrounded me. I learned to have intimate relationships with the wildlife, to regard them as my kin, no less than my family and friends. Communicating with nonhumans - actually receiving feedback that they recognized and trusted me - enabled me to hold the conviction that I belong to and within the Earth. I became a passionate animal lover, with only enough discrimination between domestic and wild animals to allow the wild ones to remain wild. But I discovered that they all can be fully present when I was fully present to them. (This is not true when any of us is caged.)
The cosmologist Brian Swimme, one of my teachers, says that one of the best ways to shift the paradigm, evolve and survive the end of the Cenozoic (the age of mammals since the dinosaurs) is to hang out with nonhumans. I think that’s true. When you develop a passionate love for the Earth and her OTHER creatures, it somehow ameliorates the difficulty of facing collapse, of not having many friends on the journey, and of letting go of one’s socially constructed identity, because you KNOW where and with whom you belong. Your identity expands beyond human society. The society of the wild brings us home to our true selves and gives us heart - courage - to remain true to ourselves and what we know to be true. Yes, we live in a culture of make believe, and the nonhuman world helps us to see through it and let go of it. That’s why, I imagine, Sally’s annual wilderness solo is the most important means she has to stay sane.
Self-disclosure: I am caged at the moment. I live in a city. But I hope to end that condition very soon.
Thanks, Sally!
Hugs, Suzanne
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
All this wilderness experience, communing with the animals and tree hugging will look different if starvation comes to the US. I spent two years in Africa in the Sahel with starving populations of Turuegs, Zarma, Fulani and Hosei peoples in the late 1980’s. It was Peace Corps duty. When you starve you don’t think about anything but where your next meal will come from. Connectedness is psychological fantasy for those who live in a resource rich envirnonment. You haven’t got a clue about what it takes to be part of the environment until you see people dying in droves while the local government officials drive around in USA aide Toyota pickups collecting rent food from starving people. Chain your self to a shady tree with a 20 foot long chain and stay there a week eating only what you can find in the circumference. That is limited resources. We had to leave guards on our vehicles to keep the children from crawling underneath to scrape the grease off the transmission and engine for something to eat.
You had better think reality…then security if you want to be part of the alive environment in the future. If you cannot secure your own food then someone else with more securith will take it from you.. legally or illegally.
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:08 am
Dear Sally,
I quite agree with you; the society here in Port Angeles has been on the skids for decades and grows ever worse; bigotry, power-grabbing, denial, and banality. More or less the case for Bellingham and Skagit County. Everett and Snohomish are a cold blooded hell.
Seattle is ok, but too expensive to live there.
Tacoma is a horrific basket case in deep denial.
Kitsap County is a religious thing.
The old order is shot, I see it by the deadness and reruns on the tv. I see it in the candidates and their same old bullshit. I see it in the disgusting case of G. W. Bush and Cheney.
A political plan for uniting our world is crucial, it must have 1st priority or we will not survive, (nuclear armageddon). I’ve created the plan, HOW do I get it published?
Love has to be resurrected from its Feminist graveyard.
Universal faiths, (Buddhism, Sufism, and Vedanta), must replace the bigotted sectarian faiths.
We Americans MUST let go of Calvinist sadism, self-centeredness, crass materialism, and bigotry. -Our track record is covered with blood, violence, and exploitation.
We’ve a very long way to go. -Time is short, and the water rises.
-Bill Bokamper
BA/History
Vietnam Vet.
Buddhist
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:09 am
Dear Joe,
I can see where you’re coming from, sort of, but I don’t agree that communing with the Earth and the nonhumans is just a fantasy indulgence of those in resource-rich environments. I think it is the way most humans lived for 99% of our history as a species and the capacity for it is just beneath the veneer of “civilization.” The trouble is that human overpopulation and industrial civilization have turned the heaven-on-Earth of balanced ecosystems into the hell-on-Earth of a depleted, sick planet.
I have no illusions about the chaos, violence, insanity, etc. that we can expect when the shit hits the fan. I’ll do what I can to survive, but I won’t become a survivalist. I’m ready to join the die-off if Mother Earth needs me to go, because she certainly needs for about 2/3 of us to go. Otherwise, there ain’t gonna be no living environment for future generations of any species. The whole planet may become like the Sahel, or Cambodia, or Chernobel.
So, what do you think, Joe? Are you ready?
Suzanne
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Sally,
You say it so well. You express what thousands of us are going through. I go around much of the time, physiclly ill. When when i look out into the world, the horror of it makes me sick. It makes me week. Here i am shaking im my boots, sucking my thumb and looking for some kind of comfort. A hellish place for sure. How do we get out of this hellish place? I think you give use some help when you say it is time to let go of the shore. I put down some words the other day that i would like to share with you. “Dappled sunlight dancing with the green grass. White clouds, comming and going in a blue sky. One chime tone then another, turning the breeze into music. Am i separate from theses things? Where do i end and they begin? I call this becomming non local. Its what you do in the woods when you fast. We are not contained by are bodies. And we are not stuck in this place. We have a choice. And that choice makes all the difference. There is an avenue availible for us to disolve into what is. This is the letting go of the shore. Here is where i find the peace and the joy. Here is where i an strong and healthy. Here is where i get a sence of purpose. The purpose i sence is what You and the Hopi sugest. Look around and see who your’e with and celebrate. We need to reach out and hold hands. Look in each others eyes and know that we are together. Hallelujah ………….rcd
July 3rd, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Sally and Tim — I am lucky to live where I do, surrounded by wildlife every day. The downside of that is the envy they generate in me, realizing that every one of them has a better gig than I do. What greater freedom is there than being able to take to the wing in an instant and be miles away, very fast, on no more than your body? What kind of security could be greater than knowing you will survive this night comfortably, with no more than the feathers or fur you grew for insulation, no mortgage or rent due? Where food is everywhere you look, for the taking? The ravens in my neighborhood “work” for perhaps two hours a day — the rest of the time they are relaxing, preening their feathers, grab-assing with each other, or playing on the air currents like surfers or white water rafters.
Every time anthropologists have done serious economic studies of extant hunter-gatherer groups, they find that they work an average of four hours per day. And these are the last of their kind who have been pushed off into the most marginal lands; we’ll never know how easy hunter-gatherers may have had it when even the rich ecosystems belonged to them before they were overrun and seized for agriculture. We are lucky now in this brief era of fossil fuel luxury to be down to an eight-hour workday, only twice as much as hunter-gatherers. But for our time on the job, paying 50% of our income in all kinds of taxes is a good rule of thumb, leaving us with four hours per day for ourselves — same as the hunter-gatherers. Is there a connection there?
Civilization, for all of its wonders, is the biggest lie in the history of the planet. It is solely so a few parasites at the top can suck off the labor of everyone below.
I might have guessed that film makers would be film lovers, so may I recommend my lifetime favorite film to curl up with a bowl of popcorn to: “Zardoz”. It was written, produced, and directed by John Boorman in 1975. It was the strangest role Sean Connery ever acted. And it was a box office bomb because NO ONE wanted to hear its message. I consider it the most accurately prophetic film ever made. It foretells all of these: ecological collapse; overpopulation; murderous population reduction campaigns; in a sci-fi form, gated communities occupied by the clueless wealthy who consider themselves elites with a right to exploit the masses; the cynical use of religion to control the masses; voice activated computers, and an erily accurate equivalent of Total Information Awareness. If you’ve never seen this film, it will blow your mind. If you are old enough to have seen it when it came out 32 years ago, consider revisiting it to see how much of it is coming true.
Tom Ness
July 18th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Hi
of all the books on the library’s fiction shelf, this one jumped off yesterday. I curled up with it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it.
“Into the Forest” by Jean Hegland.
I’ve read so much factual stuff over the last 3 or 4 years on the perfect storm scenario, peak oil, over population and climate change, this was one was a nice change. It’s a very touching story of how two sisters deal with the eventual powerdown. I didn’t expect it to be hopeful and yet for me it was. It validated the true wealth in connecting with each other and mother earth, the very relationships that are compromised by our present consumer on demand culture. Read it I think you will enjoy it.
Vivienne
July 21st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Sally,
What you say in this blog reminds me very much of the work of Eckhart Tolle. If you don’t already know his book *The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment* I think you will find great insight there regarding this part of your essay in particular: “what feels safe is other than that limited, separate, disconnected ego. What brings the sense of safety is that I have come into contact with something of my essence. I have touched that essential self that is connected, at-one, with the whole of timeless reality.”
I too have experienced what you experienced, Sally, and I have studied a lot of works in my attempt to understand that experience better. As I see it one can learn more about it from Eckhart Tolle than from any other author, East or West, living or dead.
Bill
August 17th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Sally,
Thank you for your eloquent dispair. I have long found The Darkness Around Us IS Deep a source of communion with a kindred spirit on this suffering planet. The accidentalist theory of history has not answered my questions, I begin to consider the possibility that human hierarchies of politics, economics, academia, religion, etc. are designed for the benifit of a few who enslave mankind, as Don Juan said, by giving us the predators’s mind. Perhaps these predators are essential psychopaths. These psychopathic humanoids are without conscience and without empathy. This genetic trait allows guick and mericiless decision making, the criterion for success in this pathocracy. These humanoids prey upon mankind in secret as we are unaware of their existence until the current administration and its court advisors have become bold enought to emerge from the shadows. I am including a link to a network which is studying this subject in dept as time is short to expose the deviant nature of the rulers and leader of this country. Thank you for your generous work and I hope this link will be of some use to you and your readers:http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/official_culture.htm