It is good to let it sweep over you- to cry- sob-scream - its real, its agonizing but sooooooo liberating. Regardless of what we “know” and don’t know, we will continue to BE, until we are done.

Thank you for sharing - the honesty of even your darkest thoughts- is the sound of freedom to my heart.

Hugs- Alice in Wonerland

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

— Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

Second: Thank you for trying.

You’re trying to do too much, Tim. Unlike me, you can’t save the world. I can, but it doesn’t want to be saved. We can’t save our children because our children have to save themselves. They won’t inherit our world, so the things we have to teach them will be mostly useless in their world. We can only try not to screw them up and try to preserve useful knowledge and resources as we get the opportunities to do so. I cannot stop the idiots who want to burn up iron and chrome and copper and silver to make weapons to fight wars for oil that we shouldn’t need. I can only fix what I am given and asked to fix. I can only make a list and work through it as best I can.
Your list is different from mine.
The things that everyone will be affected by will be in the minds of the PTB. If everyone is about to lose their homes, it’s a pretty good bet that profit motive will put the brakes on it. If everyone is going to be hungry, then profit motive will find food for the System to buy.
If my neighbor is the only one hungry, I can do something about that. If my kids want to buy a book instead of a video game, I can do something about that, too.
If the world collapses around us, we deal with the cards we are dealt, and in between now and then, we work on our lists.
If you specifically don’t know something, or wonder what it’s all for, I can help you with those questions. If you seek a group for companionship or a majority decision, I can’t help you with that. As the anarchist web site said: “If you have to ask how to join up, we don’t want you.”

P.S. Nobody really wants to know the truth. Truth is thrust upon them like a maggoty chicken leg. No matter how hungry you are, or how dangerous it is, you must deliberately take a bite along with the maggots or you won’t get any at all. The Chicken just waits for the maggots to get done and eats them. That way, it isn’t like cannibalism so much, but the Truth is no longer intact.
PPS: sorry about that, but some thoughts flow directly from the barnyard to the page.

The only thing I can seem to do these days is to follow my instinct which seems very reliable at the moment. Maybe because of the increasingly serious situation instincts are being heightened and are becoming more important. Good luck with whatever you decide to do next but keeping doing. Its not a time to stand still is it? Have solar panels, wood burning house heating stove and grow our own vegetables. Must keep going this year to do more toward self sufficiency and lighter footprint. Even if there are not many people with us everything we can do helps.

Thank you. It DOES help…immensely I think. It does help to “normalize” the confusion and fear and grief and anger that many of us feel. And it is encouraging more people to speak their truth.

See “No Happy Chapter Here” by Rick Dubrow:
http://www.a1builders.ws/rss/cascadia_weekly_034.pdf

David in Bellingham

Gar

I live in a cohousing community and a house here is just about to go on the market on Saturday. I know you are torn about whether to move, but figured I’d mention it in case you might be interested.

Your tale of not knowing and getting lost rings so true to my own experience. The phrase I have repeated to myself, to remind myself of what to do, is “follow your nose.” As in, we can’t see much further than the tips of our noses sometimes, so let’s just focus on that. As in, the nose knows. As in, sometimes it’s better to trust our feelings than our minds.

The rawest, truest part for me of what you said above was the part about not being able to save anybody, and the grief for your children and family and friends and all the people, all of us. I am sitting here with my 8-month-old daughter asleep on my lap, with the most angelic little face, the tiny expressive hands, and my love and terror and grief is overwhelming.

Alice, thanks for your kind words and resonance. Wonderland may be a great place to navigate collapse!

Rod, the Gary Snyder poem is so moving. I haven’t read much Snyder, but he has recently shown up a number of times, so I guess I’m ready.

Auntigrav, your words are helpful, and reflect some things Thomas Berry said in his interview, about how almost nothing from our current life will be of much use to our children. The same holds for me, I think. Learning to not know is my spiritual path. I love it.

Mary, thanks for checking in. Sounds like following your instincts is working well. Glad to hear you are in action.

David, good to hear from you! So glad to hear that it helps. That’s always good to know. And I’m also glad to hear of so much truth-telling in Bellingham. RIck Dubrow’s piece was really cool. Yeah… give me reality, straight up!

Sarah, yeah! It’s like, we don’t become teachable until we can admit we don’t know! Once we admit it, we open ourselves to teachers showing up and helping us, by pointing us in certain directions and sending us messages. Until we admit we don’t know, they’re just gonna hang out in the teacher’s lounge, drinking bad coffee and complaining about those damned kids. Thanks for that. I’ll be on the lookout for more teachers showing up. Like, for instance, YOU!

Gar, thanks for the link. I’m in a place right now where the connection is too slow to watch, and for some reason it won’t keep downloading. Will watch ASAP.

Jen, thank you… for connecting, for letting me know that it helps, and for loving that sleeping child as deeply as you do. I’m so glad to know that you are in a community in western Mass, which some folks I’ve met think will be a very good place to be as things play out. My best to you and your people there. I’ll keep your tip in mind. Thanks!

Tim

So I’ve wandered, in every sense of that word. Early in my days of being down here (it was a long, drawn out migration for me, as unlike most, I actually miss long snowy winters) I took a walk similar to yours. I found fields and ponds I hadn’t known were there, and then, ‘on the other side’, the encroaching machine – a subdivision going in where it seemed to make no sense – does it ever? That was ten years ago. A heckuvalota similar ‘development’ has gone on in the interim, h’ain’t it?

My post is disjointed, this I know. That’s why you’re the blogger and director of a doc, and I’m just a supporter and hanger on. I can’t hold it all together like you can. What I mean by that is your writing, not your being. Here’s what I think about you and Sally holding it all together after staring collapse in the face for years – if you can then it isn’t real. ‘It’ being either collapse, or you, or the act of holding it together. Well, I’ve been looking at it for a bit, now, too, so I know that collapse is real. And I’ve sat in circle with you and heard you speak for the seagulls, so I know you’re for real. So that just leaves the holding it together not to be real. So don’t, Tim. Let it go. If I don’t see you breaking down in the face of this, then how the heck am I ever going to get past the data and back to my heart? How am I, or are any of us, to hear the lessons of the seagulls and the vultures and the crows and the hawks and the eagles and the owls? I’ve told you of my shared experience regarding snowy owls, and that helped me move one step toward my own letting go. They are wise, these birds, as are the rivers and creeks, the oaks and the pines. But we need those who can show us how to listen.

I will tell you, as I am fortuned with the opportunity, in future conversations, of my encounters with crows, the times I’ve gotten lost, and my thoughts on international distribution of WAWTG. So I’ll spare your readers those burdens. But what I will share is this – yesterday would’ve been my mother’s 84th birthday, had she not died in Nov. 2000, while this country was in limbo wondering whether Bush or Gore would be president. Now as icecaps melt and patriots act, and those of us who can see through the veneer look for paradigm shifts, I, too, being a not as tall, not as smart but very white American male wished her a happy birthday, and asked her if she could in any way help me find clarity to end my funk and find my way through the fog. And she did. So you keep on cryin’ in the pines my friend. We all need you to. And we all need you, too.

Nobody that we know of knows.

I like to think of myself as an amateur handyman on the cusp of collapse. I’m building my tool kit, piece by piece. All I can hope is that the kit will be sufficient for the various jobs that will come my way.

Let’s keep building! Best of instincts and “wu wei” to us as we surf the waves of the great unveiling.

Peaces,
MP

-Joel

Dan, thanks for your love and encouragement. You’ve got one of the biggest hearts I know, and I understand, I think, why you plucked it from your sleeve and hid it away, to keep it whole until such time as it’s safe to bring it out again. In many ways, I followed a similar path, until I found my safety. Having found it, I can risk bringing it back out and letting it live again. It’s wonderful, to feel…

MP, not having much familiarity with the Tao, I read the wu wei article on wikipedia. Sounds like something I want to explore further. It mirrors much of what Sally and I have been talking about lately. Thanks! Good luck with your toolkit.

Hey Vivienne! Thanks for your kind words. Middle-aged white guys saying “I don’t know”… therein may lie an answer that “works”. There’s a wonderful, moving moment of just that in the great movie “Half Nelson”. Yeah, back to relationship, back to love, but now, looking for love in all the RIGHT places!

Joel, thanks for checking in. I have little doubt that music will continue to be very important to us as the future unfolds. In fact, real people making real music in our local communities will likely become MORE important. The question is, do you need the degree, or do you need to follow another path with your music? Since there seems to be no way to rationally “know” whether you are doing the right thing by studying music in college, you are left with the non-rational. What does your heart say? What does the wind say? And how about that bird that sits and watches you as you walk to class? When you quiet your mind, your words, your rational, and let the universe speak to you with images and feelings and music, what bubbles up? We have found the words of the Hopi Elder to be right on and have referred to them many times in the past years. Do these words help to bring some clarity?

It’s hard to be alone with this, isn’t it? So many of us who are looking are feeling alone, as if we’ve been spread out across the planet, perhaps to have the greatest effect? But my guess is that there are more of us than we think, and that we are kept artificially alone by the culture that would keep us from speaking of what we see. Keep opening your mouth. Keep seeking those souls that will meet you where you are. It feels risky, but it may be worth the risk. When you find those souls, your life changes. Mine did.

Take care, all,

Tim

That bit (as well as a fair amount of the rest of it, actually), really hits home. Every time I am about to put a new project out I go through the same thing. In my case, I always ask myself if I’m really going to raise awareness with my lyrical observations, or am I just bitching? And there is always the “preaching to the choir” issue: are the people who are going to get something out of what I do only going to be the people who have figured things out pretty well already? In which case, what the hell is the point of it all? I suppose though, to be totally fatalistic about it, if everyone else falls off the cliff and the only people left are the “choir”, then the world may be a much quieter and peaceful place after the smoke clears…and we’ll be in good company.

I met you and Sally with my friend Cameron at a screening discussion group in Lawrence Kansas and ever since it has lit a fire under us and caused us to make some serious decisions.

I thought I had it all planned out so perfectly but now I’m also a bit more lost and fumbling around. Which, when you start talking like its the “end times”- straight out of the back of the biology book- around your friends and family, they always ask, “Well then what.” And they look at me like I have some answer because I’ve discovered we are so past the “tipping point” and that our population Will be decreased- I must have a solution right?

But in reading this blog today, I kept comming back to the phrase “Don’t Know” - and how that is the main meditation that I was taught when practicing zen buddhism. Asking to your self, “Who am I?” and answering “Don’t Know.” And achieving “Don’t Know Mind.” is really the goal. The excercize that one teacher taught me was to imagine that moment just before you embark on something- like going on stage to perform or that white piece of paper before painting. That is what Don’t Know feels like.

So falling into and being absorbed by “Don’t Know” is where you find clarity and peace. Maybe we all have to join you or already have and we are about to embark on a wonderful answer and journey to create beauty instead of destroying it. I hope so. Cuz ya man, we are F’n scared and confused sometimes.

With regard to your moving delima (I’ve been there several times myself), have you considered renting out your property while you travel up there and decide? It might be easier to rent it, get the money to pay the bills while its on the market (if you decide to put it on the market) , and free yourself up to move? Renting might also be better with regard to the intentional community because then the prospective buyers possibly or a temporary resident might be able to mesh better with all the other people. Just a thought. Either way I’m sure you will find your space to dwell.

As for being separated and split apart, it may not be as bad as it seems. People in Africa are doing it and have been making it work for a long time, even with threat of death from visiting the “wrong” people or at the “wrong” time. And I have plans for a sweet donkey cart if I need it.

Thank you for sharing even your confusion. Voicing this as someone who has read so much just makes me want to be that much more creative on solutions.

Good luck! (and I appologize for the spelling, I’m having to sneak this in during work.)
Trish

That’s not to say we can’t all continue to conserve and preprare and subsist but it’s the struggle that makes us miserable!!! Stop Struggling!

Auntigrav, I love your image of a hole the size of a human being, just big enough to take a hoe through with us. That one really speaks to me. Great!

Thanks, Trish. Yep, I’m still “Don’t knowing” as much as possible. It’s the only way I can stay sane. We are thinking of renting, considering other options. Thanks!

Lee, I think you are right. The acceptance of possibility does not cancel the inevitability of inevitability.

ZenThing, that’s exactly right. Nothing would be a much superior option to much of what we are actually now doing in reaction to the situation, much of which comes straight out of struggle. That paradigm is bankrupt. Time for something really new!

Thanks, all…

Tim

danny: email me your peax pro or con

http://prpc101.blogspot.com/