When I watch a movie, my thinking always wanders to the same few questions.

How is this a story for our time?

What does this film tell us about ourselves, our deepest feelings, our secret thoughts, our invisible yearnings?

And how conscious are the filmmakers themselves about these processes?

Because we seem to be living in a time of converging crises, and because I am sensitive to that, I view most films through that lens. Being both a filmmaker and a cultural critic, it is an occupational hazard that I quite enjoy.

As Copenhagen unfolds, I notice some patterns in the media conversation: new examinations of confusion and denial; repeated attempts to explain and convince; more proposals of crucial solutions and necessary policies; timely reports on the severity of the situation. One question that seems to wander through these articles and essays and reports is this: why can’t we seem to get our shit together when it comes to climate change? The failure of Copenhagen feels, to many, like a foregone conclusion. So, like, What the What?

Good question. One that seems to apply to much of the present predicament in which we find ourselves. And one, I think, that will benefit from a viewing of Ridley Scott’s 1991 “Zeitgeist-catching” road movie, Thelma & Louise.

Go watch it. I’ll wait.

OK. You back? Good. Let’s move on.

So, if the question is why can’t we seem to get our shit together when it comes to climate change? then most of the answers I hear seem to fall into one of three categories. It’s because we (or our leaders) are:

stuck in distraction and/or denial,
greedy, unprincipled and maybe even psychotic or evil or
just too stupid to go on living.

To me these are all reasonable explanations. Distraction and denial are surely in force, as are those other human possibilities: greed, psychosis, evil, and stupidity. If you view our movies, as I do, as the stories of Imperialism, which reveal how we view both the world and ourselves, then you’ll find overwhelming evidence to support these assessments. But I think I see something more at work here. Something more fundamental, perhaps, or more invisible. And invisible, maybe, because it just breaks too many rules, to speak about it.

Here’s what I see: our collective death wish at work.

Hang with me for a moment. I have no doubt that our egos have been left battered, bruised, and pretty much insane by the experience of being born into captivity in what Derrick Jensen calls “the culture of make-believe“. I’ve experienced that insanity intimately in my own life. And once I identified it, I could see it all around me, at work in the world. But I also have a sense that my true self, my essence, that good and beautiful being I came here as, has not been destroyed. My animal body senses, perceives, and moves through the world at levels above, below and beyond the warped and word-bound ego that thinks it is in charge. My essential self remains in close and constant connection with a reality that far exceeds any mental constructs my thinking might wish to lay on it.

What if, apart from the denial, stupidity, or greed to which our ego-bound thoughts and words are too often constrained, our bodies know exactly what’s coming down? What if the reason we’re not getting our shit together when it comes to climate change is because our essential selves are not buying a bit of what our egos are being told about how to address this “problem”? What if, in fact, at some deep level from which we cannot even speak, those parts of our being that have not been distorted, distracted or destroyed by the absurdities of Empire regard climate change, in some crucial way, not as a “problem” at all, but as a “solution”?

Hard to imagine? Let’s go back to Thelma & Louise.

This movie was a “huge critical success”, clocking in as the 88th best-reviewed movie of all time at metacritic.com. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, and won for Best Original Screenplay. If it’s correct to call this film “Zeitgeist-catching”, then what part of “the defining spirit or mood of our times” does it catch? Pull over there. Let’s check the map.

Thelma and Louise leave their loveless, abused, and unsatisfying lives behind for a weekend fling together. A bit of fun leads to the attempted rape of Thelma, in response to which Louise kills the offender. They run, sure that they’ll never get a fair hearing in a court of law, and their attempts to flee to Mexico spiral out of control. As the charges against them pile up, they find a surprising exhilaration in their unanticipated life of crime. It all comes to a standoff at the edge of a cliff. Trapped in a situation with no acceptable solutions, poised between a line of state troopers and the sympathetic detective who has been trying to bring them in on the one hand, and the vast unknown of that cliff on the other, Thelma and Louise choose the cliff. The film ends with that iconic freeze frame, as they launch themselves in their ’66 Thunderbird into the only freedom they can imagine.

If that’s the map, then the territory is our own world, our own culture, our own lives. If Thelma & Louise shows us the Geist, it’s the Geist of our own Zeit. And if we allow that as our starting point, then the connections come easily enough. Did not the culture of civilization, at some point, take off on a weekend fling of unexpected exhilaration that spiraled out of control, bringing the entire planet face to face with our present predicament? And have not many people’s lives, at least those lived here in the heart of Empire, become so loveless, abused and unsatisfying that we’re poised now to do almost anything to get out of them? Have we not truly managed to do something no other living creature has managed to do, which is to make ourselves, individually and collectively, miserable?

Aye, now I’ve done it. I’ve violated a deep taboo, spoken the unspeakable. Because, well, we’re so happy, we Americans. Aren’t we?

I mean, sure, we’ve got corrupt leadership, economic insanity, and the end of cheap energy to contend with. We’ve got climate change and population overshoot and mass extinction to think about. We’ve got dying oceans, dying forests, dying aquifers, dying krill, dying caribou, dying everything. We’ve got nuclear power and nuclear waste and nuclear weapons and depleted uranium. We’ve got fucked up political systems, health care systems, educational systems, economic systems, agricultural systems, and septic systems. We’ve got racism, sexism, narcissism, workaholism and fascism. We’ve got child abuse and elder abuse and spouse abuse and animal abuse. We’ve got rapes and murders and suicides. We’ve got unwed mothers and single parents and children having children. We’ve got addictions, distractions, obsessions and compulsions. We’ve got unemployment and underemployment and homelessness and debt. We’ve got boring, meaningless work, longer hours, longer drive times and falling real wages. We’ve got unsatisfying relationships, loneliness, divorce and broken homes. We’ve got mental illness, stress, busy-ness, depression, despair, medication and “the deliberate dumbing down of America“. We’ve got obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer and heart disease and all those other “diseases of civilization“. And sure, all of these things seem to be spiraling out of control, as if Conquest, War, Famine and Pestilence just stormed onto our polo field and started to beat the ever-loving crap out of our players.

But, c’mon! We’ve also got 24,909 tunes on our iPods! We’ve got Trundled Duck Confit with a Gorgonzola Reduction! We’ve got shamanic excursions into the heart of the Andes! We’ve got that new James Cameron movie coming out! In 3-fucking-D! Surely it all balances out? Surely, surely, this all counts for something? I mean, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right? And the upholstery in this ’66 Thunderbird is just luscious, isn’t it?

I’ve got to stop and wonder whether comfort and distraction have been confused with joy, fulfillment and meaning. I acknowledge that it’s possible to find moments of comfort and happiness even in prison. That doesn’t mean we’re not in prison. I view this as our deepest denial, the denial of the truth of our own life experience, the denial kept in rigid place by our desperate story of The American Way. As David Edwards says in his interview with Derrick Jensen,

What prison could be more secure than one we’re convinced is “the world,” where the boundaries of action and thought are assumed to be, not the limits of the permissible, but the limits of the possible? Democratic society, as we know it, is the ultimate prison, because who’s going to try to escape from a situation of apparent freedom? It follows, then, that we must be happy, because we can do whatever we want.

Copenhagen unfolds. The cliff approaches…

Go back to those last minutes in the movie. We learn, finally, how deep Louise’s wounds go, how vast is her pain. We see the chase. The attempted escape. The final capture. We see the line of police cruisers. The helicopter hovers menacingly overhead. The sniper rifles aim their way. The “good cop” has failed to bring them in but argues angrily for one last attempt. The “bad cop” uses his PA system to order them to give up. Thelma and Louise are not buying any of it. They’re fed up with living lives in prison.

Thelma looks at Louise. “Let’s keep going,” she says
“What do you mean?”
Thelma looks out over the cliff, nods her head almost imperceptibly.
“Go,” she says.
Smiles and tears flit across their faces.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
They kiss, their faces a study in love and grief and terror and power.
Louise hits the gas.
They hold hands.
They speed toward the cliff.
And they’re gone…

Can we just hold silence here for a few seconds?

Thank you.

I think Ridley Scott failed in this moment, as Roger Ebert so gratifyingly pointed out. Having spent two hours building up to this point, Scott could not hold it. Rather then just sit with the tension, the grief, the surprise, the pain, or the exhilaration, his freeze frame dissolved way too quickly into white. And the white dissolved right into rolling end credits, that haunting score, and a snapshot review of their happier times. As Ebert said, “Can one shot make that big of a difference? This one does.”

But now, here in our Zeit, we are given an opportunity to correct that failure. In this time of seeming collapse, as we sit staring over our own collective cliff, perhaps because, 18 years since the movie’s release, we are more desperate now, or perhaps because we have each other, we can hold the shot that Ridley Scott could not. We can sit with that tension, that grief, that surprise, that pain, and that exhilaration. We can hold that freeze frame and feel it to the very depths of the canyon underneath. We can look at this hidden piece of Geist and see what it is that the public, as a whole, seemed to resonate with so deeply. And we can learn, perhaps, in doing that, what there is to be learned in this moment.

I wonder if we’re not getting our shit together when it comes to climate change because, at some level, we’re not buying it, just as Thelma and Louise didn’t buy it, no matter the assurances of the nice white guy in the suit, or the threats of the stern authority figure in the uniform. We’re not buying the notion that this predicament will somehow get “fixed” by any combination of carbon caps, emissions agreements, green shopping, alternative energies and new technologies under the sun.

Some months ago, the specter of 4 degree C temperature rise started bouncing around in the news. Just a few weeks back, there were new reports that we’re on our way to 6 degrees C if we keep going as we are. And another new study reports that global CO2 emissions have risen 29% in the past nine years, indicating our commitment to doing just that. Six degrees moves us into the realm of the End-Permian extinction event, during which roughly nine-tenths of the lifeforms on the planet said their last farewells.

It seems… well… unlikely… that corrupt and insane leaders will have much say in such matters, as energy, environment and economy slip rapidly from our hands, as if they ever really were in our hands to begin with. Conquest, War, Famine and Pestilence seem now to have made their way up to the clubhouse. Hard to believe that that padlocked gate is going to hold.

And I wonder if we’re not buying any attempt to fix this problem that has as its goal the preservation of the culture of Empire. I think, collectively, our bodies are not buying that. Our sane essential selves are not buying that. iPods and duck confit DO NOT outweigh the costs to our souls of lives lived in prison and the destruction of the community of life. And sadly, we do not see that anything less than global catastrophe will free us from our collective insanity.

It is forbidden to say this out loud, of course, even to ourselves. It’s just too painful, to face into just how miserable we have become as a people, how lost, how wounded, how stuck. And how pointless life seems. As we asked in What a Way to Go:

“Are we destroying the planet, as Dmitry Orlov asks, just ‘to be somewhat more comfortable for a little while’?”

It’s too much to bear. And truly, why should we? Maybe Warren Zevon was right. If the planet’s now headed toward six degrees, “as the mystics and statistics say it will,” why not go out like desperadoes, our foot on the pedal, our hair just flying in the wind, taking out Empire as we go?

And “heaven help the one who leaves.”

Ultimately, what I think we are not buying, body and soul, is the notion that this is all there is, this “physical reality” of corrupt leaders, insane systems, working, shopping and fucking and dying. We’re not buying this whole “materialism” thang, this deadened world, this end of magic, this loss of meaning. We’re not buying it. The costs are too high. The benefits too shallow. And the growing edges of our own science seem no longer to support such notions. The anomalies have been piling up in the corner for so long now that we can hardly get through the door. We can still sense, despite the bullshit that has been heaped upon our minds, a Cosmos far more wondrous than either the suit or the uniform can even begin to imagine.

Indeed. Go back to that last scene. Watch closely. Look at Thelma’s face. Watch Louise’s reaction. The excitement mixed with terror. The wonder fused with grief. The pain of wounds so deep they drive us over the cliff. If Thelma and Louise are running away in their final act, they are also running toward. It’s in their eyes. They can see it. Beyond that cliff lies not only the end of this madness, but the beginning of something new. A step into that unknown Cosmos that has never abandoned us, even as we abandoned it. Plunging over a cliff is not an act of control. It’s an act of intention. And surrender. And trust.

Climate change may be a fuck-all mess, but at least it’ll get us out of this nightmare, and take us to some place new.

Hit the gas.

“Go!”

I do not wish to be mistaken here, though I’m fairly certain that I shall be. I merely wish to point out that, from where I sit, these forces are alive in our collective heart. I know they are alive in mine. I have no idea whether Thelma and Louise made the right choice. I do not know that we “should” hit the gas, whatever that means. The full manifestation of current trends is poised to take out a great deal more than human beings. It already has. It would certainly be my wish to kill off just the culture, rather than the vast majority of the community of life. As Derrick Jensen said in What a Way to Go:

So many people are so very, very unhappy. And they want this nightmare to end. And they don’t recognize that the death that they want is a cultural death, and is a spiritual and metaphorical death.

This death wish is here, part of the spirit of the times, and I say that it’s exactly what Thelma & Louise tapped into, exactly what caught its viewers in the throat, exactly what caused the members of the Academy to honor that Best Original Screenplay. Our collective misery, and our wish for the death of the culture that underlies that misery, hover still in that great freeze-frame of our present predicament. If we fade-to-white too quickly, if we insist on our snapshots of happier times, then we will miss a deep truth of this moment, and the opportunity to learn from this moment what there may be to learn.

Our failure to respond may, indeed, spring from denial, greed, and stupidity. Those are all likely suspects. But it may also be grounded in the deep longing of our bodies and the wisdom of our souls. Whatever the reasons, when it comes to our collective reaction so far, we’re not buying what’s being sold. We do not seem eager to “save civilization.” It may behoove us to wonder why that is.

If we face into this death wish, if we stare into our collective misery, both as the conquered and as the conquerors, and allow the truth of our culture, a culture that would drive us to this cliff, to rise into conscious acknowledgment, we may find, in doing so, a choice that now eludes us. It’s a possibility. One that I don’t think we have much explored.

We’re sitting on a cliff in a ’66 Thunderbird, staring into the abyss of the insoluble predicament. None of the choices we can imagine are acceptable.

Now what?

Sunday, December 4, 2011

We lost Rocco yesterday.  Those who knew him well know what a loss that really is.  Those who didn’t will likely never understand who it was they missed.

Robert “Rocco” Anderson died sometime Friday night, after another hard seizure, it seems.  I don’t have all the details yet.  Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy is common enough, apparently, to have its own acronym, a fact I can imagine Rocco riffing on in his own inimitable style.  He’d have worked “SUDEP” into a poem, a rant, a status update, or one of his many and often eye-opening comments, and then followed it with a big ol’ “LOL.”  One thing I can say about Rocco… when he wrote LOL, you could be absolutely certain that, wherever he was, he had, in fact, laughed out loud.

I knew Rocco for seven years.  I knew him as my daughter’s partner.  I knew him as a drummer.  I knew him as a writer, as a keen observer of the human condition.  I knew him as one of the primary editors of my novel.  But mostly, I knew him as a friend.  Somehow he managed to weedle his way deep into my heart, and there was no getting rid of him then.  I don’t make friends easily.  There are few to whom I’ve found I can give away all that I have, with whom I can be exactly who I am, no hiding necessary, no holding back ever required.  Rocco was one of the few with whom I could show up just as myself.  He actually WANTED who I was, and never ceased to love me, to hold me up, to call me forth.  He NEEDED me to be who I was.  He NEEDED what I had to give him.  And that’s about the greatest gift anybody has ever given me.

We tried to make a documentary of Rocco, Sally and I.  Shut Up and Drum, we tentatively called it.  We sat with him for long hours and days during the hot North Carolina summer of 2009, listening to his story, coaxing him through it, loving him when he did not love himself, holding him up as he spoke out loud the aching, painful past he still carried inside of him.  Rocco lived a hard life.  Harder than any other person I’ve ever personally known, I think.  That hard life had left him with doubts and confusions, habits and beliefs and patterns that held him back and got in his way as much as the physical manifestations of his epilepsy did.  It was our hope that we could help Rocco still those voices in his head, those doubts, those confusions, so that he could get about the business of living his life, and of doing full-out what he had come here to do.

And while it eventually became apparent that Rocco’s story was not for us to tell, while we gave up on the documentary, we never gave up on Rocco.  And because he had so many who loved him, even as lost and confused and self-defeating as he could appear to be from the outside, Rocco learned not to give up on himself.  He stayed in one place for a good long while, putting an end to the long years of homelessness and wandering, the astounding succession of jobs and cities and rooms and shelters.  He connected with a host of helpful people, groups, and services.  He came to see and know that he was as deserving of help and assistance and support as the dozens of people HE had helped and supported over the years.  He began to DEMAND that he receive some help.  He saw that he was WORTHY of support and nurturing.  And eventually, because he asked for it, because he demanded it, because he allowed it, the help began to fall into place.

In what is either a gross injustice, a tremendous display of Cosmic Irony, or an example of things working out exactly as they must, Rocco’s death came just as he’d managed to begin what he would have considered his “adult life.”  After decades of uncertainty and struggle, Rocco had achieved for himself a measure of stability and security he’d never before been able to find.  With a stable home, a loving roommate, and the Social Security support finally coming through, Rocco was poised to step into a whole new phase of his life.  In our last phone conversation, maybe a month ago, he dreamt of a new drum kit and the opportunity to play it, and spoke with joy and excitement of his plans to visit his daughter at Christmas.  He was finally in a position to offer her the support he’d long wished he could give her.  His long, lost adolescence was coming to an end.  He was stepping into his adulthood.  And then he died.  It all feels so unfair.  But death has rarely felt particularly fair, now, has it?

If it’s true to say that Rocco was beaten up by his epilepsy and his hard life, it also feels true to say that Rocco was never really beaten.  No matter how often he smacked his head on the pavement, no matter how many times he dislocated a shoulder or broke a bone, no matter how his seizures battered his body like a decades-long torture of stunning, bone-cracking electric shocks, no matter how the old memories haunted him, Rocco’s good heart was never stopped from loving, and his great spirit was never dimmed.  That’s the thing about Rocco: underneath the anxiety, the outward appearances, the quirky banter that could put some people off, the man could SHINE, just as Geoffrey Rush did in the movie Shine, one of Rocco’s favorites.  No matter how hard his life was, no matter the pain and confusion he carried inside, the man never stopped loving, never stopped caring, never stopped teaching, never stopped encouraging, never stopped hoping.  And he never stopped laughing.  He said what he thought.  He followed his own advice.  He stood up for excellence, for learning, for the betterment of the human being.  “Love, truth, strength, hope,” he wrote, “Push ‘em. They’re important.”  Informed by thinkers like Frank Herbert and Ayn Rand, Rocco could see that his fellow humans, as lost and damaged and confused as they could often be, could also find and step into their own greatness.  He could see this because he could see himself, I think.  He knew that, even as lost, damaged, and confused as HE was, his heart was good, and his intellect was clear, and his intentions served the greatest good for all. Because HIS spirit had never been beaten, Rocco knew that we could ALL grow and learn and heal and evolve.  That was the vision he served.  And he served it right to his end.

He served that vision with me.  He guided me through the editing of All of the Above, seeing things my other editors missed, demanding that I stick with the process even when it seemed to go on forever, even when I just wanted to scream.  He would not let me stop with “good enough.”  He could see where we were headed even when I could not.  He pushed me, challenged me, goaded me, praised me, and loved me, always he loved me, as we took that lump of unformed clay that was my first draft and carefully molded it into its final form.  He did it all with incredible wit and a piercing humor that left me, at times, literally doubled over with laughter.  And now, on the verge of writing the sequel, I’m left staring off into the distance, or glancing up to the heavens in consternation, and wondering just how the hell I’m ever going to write another book without Rocco here to help me.  Rocco was the inspiration for the character I named Obie, a character who died at the end of All of the Above.  In the world of the book, the possibility exists that Obie will somehow return in the sequels.  In the world of “real life,” I’m going to hold that same possibility for Rocco.  I know he’ll be busy, wherever he is now, drumming and laughing and teaching people to think, people, think!  But maybe he’ll find some time to watch over my shoulder as I write.  It shouldn’t be that hard for him, even now, to reach into my computer, grab the electrons as they race through the wires, and make a few edits here and there.  I surely hope so.  I can always use another muse.  In any event, I expect that there will be some strong sense of aching loss in my next book, with Obie and Rocco both gone.  Rocco was so excited by the idea of editing the sequel, and was full of ideas about how he could help.  It gave him so much joy, to help.  And Rocco deserved every bit of joy he could get his hands on.

Richard Bach, in his book Illusions:  The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, wrote “Here is a test to find whether your mission here on Earth is finished:  If you’re alive, it isn’t.”  If that’s true, then the reverse would be this:  when someone dies, their mission here on Earth may be finished.  As much as it hurts to have lost him, I find some comfort in the notion that Rocco has completed his mission here.  He took the awful hand that had been dealt him and finally… finally… finally… found the trump card hidden amongst the deuces and treys.  With a glint in his eye he pulled that trump card out and played it on the table of his own life with an enthusiastic “Blam!” and a hearty laugh.  He’d done it.  He’d won.  He’d shown that healing is possible.  He’d found his own sense of worthiness.  And having found it, he could go.  Mission accomplished.  What’s next?  If that’s so, then I feel it my obligation to honor Rocco’s life by taking his accomplishment and paying it forward in my own life.  Rocco showed me how, even in the face of such challenges as he faced, a human being can hold onto their true selves, and demand their right to be who they are.  I shall not forget that.

Sally, upon hearing the news of Rocco’s passing, was struck by a vision of him crossing to the other side, of his coming up for air after flailing about for so long under the cold and choppy waters of physical existence, of shedding both his epilepsy-ravaged body and a mind that blinked on and off, betraying and obscuring the great heart and huge intellect contained within.  What relief it must be for him now, to be rid of such limitiations, to be free at last of the pain, even as sad as he must be, to have left us all so suddenly.  “Yay! Yay! Yay!” I can hear him say.  Wherever he is now, I am certain that Rocco is, indeed, laughing out loud.

The writer and teacher Malidoma Somé, speaking of the Dagura tribe, explained how it was the duty of the living, when someone died, to adequately grieve the loss, such that the departed would not get stuck in this earthly plane, but would move on into the world of the ancestors.  I, for one, intend to grieve my friend Rocco as completely as I can, to let the tears flow and the sobs burst forth, to feel the aching loss as deeply as I can.  It’s what I can do to honor him.  It’s what I have to give him now.  And I could sure use another ancestor, especially one as bright and loving as Rocco.  The world could use such ancestors.  I invite you to join me in that process of grieving.

So good-bye, Rocco…

Poet

Teacher

Genius

Wild man

Friend

Comedian

Drummer

Lover

Giver

Dreamer

Cheerleader

Good-bye, you good, good man.  You did it.  You made it.  Go find your peace.  Go do your work.  Go make your magic.  And go knowing that I love you.  To use TS Eliot’s words, you were “worth the trouble of understanding.”  You were a gift to me.  I will never forget you.

As you always said to me, take most precious care,

Tim

I can say this with a fair degree of confidence: save for the few who are already fully awake, most people who are now looking at the world are just waking up to the four horsemen that we address in What A Way To Go: Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Species Extinction and Population Overshoot. They are just waking up and they have no accurate idea how late in the game it is.

What’s the game I’m talking about? The game of “civilized, industrial, technological life as we know it.” We are at the end of that game. And people are just beginning to wake up to the fact that it’s a game.

I’m talking about The Apocalypse, which, I’ve come to learn, literally means The Unveiling. We are on the verge of The Unveiling. We are beginning to pull back the curtain and see clearly what our civilization has actually been up to over the past two centuries and eight or ten milenia.

The Unveiling is upon us and only a small percentage of the people are waking up. Those that are, are waking up at the last minute. And they are waking up rather slowly and reluctantly. Most still imagine the full unveiling and revelation of consequences must be decades away. They believe it’s at least a generation or two off. Most, even after they see our movie, continue to think there’s time to create a mass awakening, a popular uprising, a reformation. They want to believe that there’s a revolution afoot, that “green building” and “hydrogen cars,” will save us, if only “we the people” will demand those things. They continue to think there’s decades yet ahead in order to turn away from catastrophe, that it’s possible to solve our energy and climate and ecological holocaust. But you don’t solve a holocaust. At best, maybe you survive it.

Hello. It’s not generations away. It’s not decades away. As Tim says in voice-over early on in the movie,  “Turns out it may be just around the corner.”  In fact, for most of the community of life, apocalypse is right now. Today, for two-hundred species, life ends at midnight, or noon, or even as I write this.

Two hundred species a day we are losing. Two hundred. As Daniel Quinn says in the movie, “This is calamitous.”

Many who have been studying peak oil for years now suggest that the “peak” may have happened a year ago. You can tell yourself that hundred dollar a barrel oil is just corporate gouging. That we can somehow make them stop the rising prices. But that’s delusion. No doubt the oil companies are going to make as much as they can manipulating the prices. But the prices are going up. And up. And up. There may be a few manipulated blips on the upward curve. But demand will outstrip supply, if it hasn’t already, and the price will continue to climb, blip, climb, blip, climb.

Likewise, the evidence that climate change tipping points have already started to tip is also mounting. Summer sea ice levels on the northern ice cap hit record new lows this summer, new lows that far exceeded past predictions. Extinction continues unabated, as does rising human population. Richard Heinberg, who published The Party is Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies in 2005, has just published Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. The party is indeed over, and not just for oil, but for all the things we’ve become accustomed to, for all the stuff the culture has eaten up and spit out and landfilled and is now trying desperately to recycle.

People have no idea how late in the game it is. And, sadly, many don’t seem to want to know. If people wanted to know they would walk from a screening of What A Way To Go to their local library or independent bookstore and start ordering and reading books from the authors we interviewed. They would find our website and click links to the many sources of energy, climate, extinction and population information. They’d find and read  The Oil Drum and Energy Bulletin. They would immerse themselves in the information because they’d want to know. But the truth is, most don’t want to know.

Having toured 36 communities with our movie in the last three months and having sat with over a thousand people in post-screening dialogue circles, I find myself sad and sobered. And I thought I already was sober. I thought I had a clue about how little consciousness exists with regard to the extent and consequences of our human impacts on the world. I thought that was the whole point of making a no-punches-pulled, hard-hitting, wide-lens documentary in the first place. We knew people were sorely uninformed and misinformed about how dire the situation is. But we were naive.

We were not naive about the lack of awareness. We were naive about the lack of desire for that awareness. People don’t really want to know. And a surprising number of people acknowledge that. They don’t want to know because they realize they are already depressed. They are depressed and discouraged. And they believe they would rather be numb and distracted. They don’t see a way through the depression and discouragement so they turn their backs and resolve not to look.

I’ve come to see that there’s a major paradox we now face, having made a documentary that is as comprehensive and thoughtful and hard-hitting as ours is, in the context of a populace that is as dumbed-down and disheartened and disempowered as America’s. I thought it would be an unequivocally good and empowering act to make a movie that is smart and compelling and that moves people emotionally. But in fact, for many, the movie actually becomes part of their sophisticated denial system. Having seen it they believe what is not true, and what is true seems to go right over their heads. Maybe it’s too smart. And paradoxically, maybe it’s too compelling. Most people don’t seem to want to think that hard. And they don’t seem to want to feel that much, either. So they don’t watch it again and again, as we have, to make sure they won’t go back to sleep.

As we listened to people, all too often we had the scary sense that they liked our movie because they wanted to get other people to watch it. They wanted other people to wake up. They wanted to believe that because the movie had been made it was an indication that things are getting better. They wanted to don a blank, hopeful, smile and declare weakly “People are waking up!”

Other people. Because it’s always other people that need to wake up. Not us. We already know. We are the choir. We don’t need preaching to. We get it. If we can just get this movie seen by other people, the people who really need to wake up, the masses, the leaders, the rest of the population, then everything will be okay. If only we can get this movie seen by everybody, then everything will be okay.

It’s not going to be okay. It’s too late for everything to be okay.

Soon after we had finished the movie, Marc Maximov wrote that What A Way To Go is an “ecological horror film”. When we read that comment in his article we laughed. We thought it interesting and startling that he would describe the movie that way, given that we had interviewed such luminary scientists as William Schlesinger and Stuart Pimm, and such amazing thinkers as Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn and Chellis Glendinning. I mean, who would have thought that Thomas Berry would appear in a horror movie?

But now I think Marc was on to something important. I think he astutely observed that in spite of the scholarship and intelligence and poetry in What A Way To Go, many people will respond to it as if it were a horror movie rather than as a documentary. When people don’t want to wake up to the nightmare, but are faced with an accurate and compelling assessment of their condition, they can, and will, relegate that experience to the file they’ve created in their heads labeled “Horror Movies and Other Things I Don’t Want to Believe Are True.”

Human beings are extremely creative when they want to be. That includes being psychologically creative. That includes being creative about constructing defense and denial mechanisms that serve to keep them numb and asleep. They seal off accurate knowledge about the world just as they’ve sealed off a thousand other real and unreal images that they’ve been exposed to via the media. They relegate the feelings that arise when confronted by the four horsemen of This Apocalypse to the same realms they relegate feelings elicited by Stephen King’s fiction, by terrifying dreams, and by the boogey man under the bed. They unwittingly label this documentary the way they labeled The Shining: Just Another Horror Movie. And, having filed the experience away, they then go back to sleep. They step into the fantasy that “green business” is selling: the solution to our environmental and social and resource problems is to be good consumers and to buy more stuff, green stuff. After all, people vote with their dollars don’t they? Wow, lacking real elections this is the deal: You can vote by spending! So the more you spend the more powerful you are. Wow. This is great! We can step into our powerful identities as consumers and accept our full responsibility as citizens. We get to vote every day we buy something. What a great fantasy: the destruction of the world will be stopped by spending more money.

The answer to these problems is simple, and everyone can be involved: one can shop. Because shopping is fun. And shopping can happen even at home or on the airplane. One can look adoringly at advertisements for hybrid SUVs. One can admire how Chevron is going green! One can fantasize about someday living in that wonderful solar heated, natural green home of 3-5 thousand square feet, with imported rugs on comfy, cozy, water-heated slab floors. And that next bedspread? Well, do consider hemp! That will make a real difference. Best of all, considering the time of year, it’s time to vow to make it a Green Christmas: buy beeswax candles and exotic fruit baskets and yoga mats. Buy imported things and support indigenous cultures. Buy big things and small things, green things and live things. And in so buying, we can all pretend that things will get better. That things are getting better. All one need to do is shop correctly. After all, shopping is fun. And stopping the destruction of the world should be fun.

I realize I’m on a bit of a tear here. I can’t help it. I sat with over a thousand people and I’m more discouraged about the awakening in the world than ever. And mostly I’m sad. I’m sad that as a group we are not getting it.

And the rest of the community of life is at risk. No. Wait. See how easily denial slips in? The rest of the community of life is not at risk. The rest of the community of life is being wiped out while human population numbers continue to increase, and shop.

On our tour, after the screenings, we avoided the typical Q & A. After all, while we admit to some extent of knowledge as a result of the last four years spent deep in research and analysis, we really aren’t experts, or authorities. We’re pretty smart and we’ve peeled off many layers of denial. And because of that we’ve let the magnitude of the global predicament hit us in the gut, over and over. But we don’t pretend to have answers or authoritative prescriptions. Not that anyone does. In fact we hold that anyone who says they have the prescription to stop the destruction and reform this system in order to make it work is either extremely ill-informed, lying, and or flat out delusional. There just aren’t any easy answers other than shutting down the industrial infrastructure yesterday. And that would not be easy.

So we didn’t do Q& A after screenings. We refused to be set up to be hit with people’s understandable projections and anger at all the authorities and experts who continue to confuse, disappoint, and exploit them.

Instead, on these tours, we invited people to pull chairs into a circle and talk with us and each other as concerned peers, to respond to the movie by expressing their feelings, by talking about what moved them, what emotions were touched. We knew this might be a stretch for many people. Most of us have been emotionally dumbed down as well as intellectually hobbled by this numbing and stupid culture. So we offered a menu of sorts to help people identify their feelings. We gave them a short list of the basic five: Glad, Sad, Mad, Scared or Ashamed. Turns out, this was a good thing to do. People actually reported on their feelings. They took the risk to do what is anathema for most Americans: they expressed their feelings, and they often did so in clear and heartfelt ways. I was touched and impressed. Circle after circle, people did this. They talked about their feelings with one another. Often it was quite moving. And on occasion I think the experience was not only cathartic but transforming for certain individuals. And probably it planted a fair number of seeds. I wonder, though, how many of those seeds will ever germinate into any kind of action. Despite the genuine expression of feeling in the rooms on those evenings, I don’t get the sense that the majority of these people went home to start radically changing their lives.

I say this because by the time the tour came to an end I began to see something that was fairly disturbing. The most frequently reported feelings were sad and glad, followed by ashamed and mad, with only the rare expression of people being scared. I think that’s backwards to what would best be experienced. I think if people were really letting the information sink in, if they were letting it past their denial and defense mechanisms, that they would, first and foremost, be scared.

Let me explain. If a person is not scared when confronted with the immanent demise of their lifestyle, then clearly they aren’t looking at it. They are relegating the information to the “horror movie” file and continuing to pretend. They are telling themselves that all this is going to happen in someone else’s lifetime. But, in fact, all this is happening RIGHT NOW. Preparations for dealing with this, for responding, for surviving it, for helping to heal it, needed to begin 300 years ago or 30 years ago. Or at least yesterday.

But my sense is that people aren’t preparing. They aren’t even considering what making preparation might mean. Way too often what I witness is that people see the movie and then continue to talk about careers and retirements and the future. Like the future will in any way resemble the past or even the present

I genuinely liked most of the people we sat in post-screening dialogue circles with. Their expression of concern and caring for each other and the rest of the community of life evoked fondness. I often said that the circles convinced me that the human species, at least some percentage of it, is worth saving. But I have to say that I don’t really think that one viewing of the movie or one sharing of heartfelt concerns actually changed very many people in any significant way. I still feel fondness for these members of my species. But I don’t hold any illusions that this movie is changing people, or moving them into action with any kind of appropriate speed or conviction.

So I feel compelled to say something. I hope many people who have seen What a Way To Go, or who will see What A Way To Go, will take this to heart:

Our movie is not evidence that things are changing. Once you’ve seen our movie, that does not mean you don’t need to radically and rapidly change your life in preparation for utter upheaval of how you’ve been living and what you’ve been planning and working for.

Please don’t watch our movie and then be glad that change is happening. Because the most prevalent change that is happening is that things in the real world of plants and animals and water and soil and climate are continuing to get worse. Rapidly worse. They’ve gotten worse since An Inconvenient Truth. And they’ve gotten worse since Al Gore got the Nobel prize. They’ve gotten worse since our movie was released on DVD and since we’ve traveled the country touring with it and sitting with people in circles to process it.

Things are getting worse and they are going to keep getting worse until industrial civilization either grinds to a halt or is stopped. Only when that happens will the great bulk of humanity that is enmeshed with industrial civilization stop destroying the community of life through the inexorable consumption of everything.

All evidence I see is that there isn’t going to be a popular mass uprising. So don’t be waiting around for THAT to happen. There isn’t going to be a technofix. And the aliens, if there are any, are not going to intervene and clean this up for us. It’s time to pay the piper, or the rats are going to continue to overrun our village.

So please, don’t wait for someone else to “get it.” Don’t wait for the leaders of your country, or company, or community to get on aboard. Don’t wait for someone else to wake up and make the changes happen. Because they aren’t going to get it.

I think what Upton Sinclair said is more true than we want to believe: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” How many people’s jobs depend on them NOT understanding that capitalism is a dead end, that consuming is folly, and that technology is a hoax? Don’t depend on politicians or business people or even academics to understand what’s going on when their jobs, and their mortgages and their plasma television sets and probably their marriages depend on them NOT understanding it.

And don’t depend on yourself understanding it if your job and your current lifestyle depends on NOT understanding it. Denial is real and alive and most of us continue in it’s stranglehold.

Only when we wake up to that understanding will we begin to have some choices. Work your way to that place. Watch What A Way To Go thirty times or more, like we have. Read a bunch of books and websites. Choose to step out of delusion. It will probably mean you have to plan to quit your job. And maybe move. It will probably mean you have to consider a very different kind of life.

The good new is that, probably, a very different kind of life will be a life which has meaning and purpose and is grounded in the reality of soil and water and other living, breathing, feeling creatures. In some ways it will be a harder life that you’ll have to choose. But it will be better.

Feel your way into where you want to be and get there. Focus on the basics: water, food, non-fossil energy. Focus on how you can help to stop the destruction and start the healing. Listen to the voice-over at the end of What A Way To Go:

“The waters are rising. We’re going to have to let go of the shore.”

Listen to it again and again, and again. Until YOU get it. The waters are rising. It’s time to build an ark.

It’s time. Don’t wait. Build it now.

These are my comments presented at the The 2011 International Conference on Sustainability, Transition & Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership at Shanty Creek Resort in Bellaire, MI, 11/11/11, delivered in three parts.

Part 1: The River of Vision

“Teacher seeks pupil.  Must have an earnest desire to save the world.  Apply in person.”  So begins the novel Ishmael, published in 1992 by Daniel Quinn, now residing in Houston.  Through the course of more than a dozen books and countless speeches and essays, Daniel Quinn has served as a strong and poetic guide for the human journey.  Whether speaking in the voice of a talking gorilla, an itinerant teacher, or one of our animist forebears, Quinn’s love for the Earth, and his concern for the future of life on this planet, are palpable and clear.

I must admit, the task of figuring out what to say about Daniel Quinn and his work kicked my butt.  My attempts to summarize his ideas, and I made more than one attempt, ended up dense and lifeless.  And rendering Quinn’s work lifeless is the last thing I would want to do.  When I read his Ishmael stories, my heart pounds, and my eyes mist with tears.  It’s as if I’m sitting in the presence of the whole of life on this planet condensed into a single gorilla.  He speaks to me firmly, yet lovingly, of my long and destructive journey into disconnection and domination, of my bad behavior and mistaken ideas, and invites me to come back home.  And I follow him where he leads me.  When I read the words of the teacher in The Story of B, I’m listening to a missionary from the living world, a speaker of such clarity, such wisdom, and such commitment, that my heart and mind break wide open.  The normally unseen stories and assumptions of our culture, and our history, come to life before my eyes like an epic poem, or a grand piece of theater, and I can see what is all around me with new eyes.   Daniel Quinn’s greatest genius, I think, was to put his insights into the mouths of characters that I could love.  Because I loved them, I could open up to what they were saying, even when what they were saying was new and strange and unbelievable.  I have no wish to take such magic and render it dense and lifeless.

And yet Daniel Quinn’s ideas could inform us here this weekend.  And as I cannot read to you out loud a half dozen of his novels in 18 minutes, I shall simply have to do my best to see to the heart of his insights without killing them.  Aaron wished to speak of vision this weekend, and Daniel Quinn certainly has something to offer us in that regard.  Ultimately, I think, all of his work boils down to matters of vision and culture and paradigm, words which I will use rather interchangeably here to speak of the web of assumptions, beliefs, values, expectations, and stories upon which our society is founded.

Quinn speaks explicitly of vision in The Story of B and Beyond Civilization where he writes:  “If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs, but by new minds with no programs at all.”  Let me repeat that:  “If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs, but by new minds with no programs at all.”  In order to tease this apart, I shall have to grab and briefly sum up a select few of Quinn’s many ideas and observations, in order to set the foundation.  I will simply have to trust that this will be enough

In Quinn’s view, to “save the world” does not mean to save our current cultural system, a goal that he regards as both impossible and undesirable.  Instead, to “save the world” means “to save the world as a human habitat,” which means “saving the world as a habitat for as many other species as possible.”

To that end, Quinn works to uncover the deep roots of the confluence of crises we now face.  He focuses on matters of vision, and outlines how our present world-spanning cultural system has been enacting a story that tells us that the world was made for us human beings, to conquer and rule as we see fit, using our power to control the world around us to take both our survival and our destiny into our own hands.  He explores the origins of this urge to rule the world, how it rose out of our culture’s invention of a new style of food production that claims the Earth’s productive capacity for human consumption, at the expense of all other species.  He traces how the food surpluses of this style of agriculture led to our increasing power to shape the world around us, and to the exponential rise of human population levels.  These, in turn, fueled the steady rise of a myriad of environmental and social problems, bringing us to the point where many now claim that we are living inside of the planet’s Sixth Great Mass Extinction Event, and foresee the possibility that this event may include the extinction of humanity itself.

As this impulse to conquer and rule spread around the planet, we began to think that our culture was the whole of humanity, rather than just one culture amongst many.  We took our power to control as sure evidence that the world had been given to us to dominate and tame, and that our way of life was the one right way.  Even as the side effects of trying to rule the world became clear, as war, disease, pollution, and a host of social ills, appeared on the stages of history, even as we began to imagine that there was something fundamentally wrong with us, we saw little else to do but continue on this path.  If taking control of the world was not working, it was because we hadn’t yet taken control of EVERYTHING.  The only way forward was to do even more of what we’d been doing.

But Daniel Quinn has good news.  Modern scholarship, he says, allows us to see that WE OF THIS CULTURE ARE NOT HUMANITY, but just one culture out of many on this Earth.  We now know that humans lived on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years without bringing the world to the point of mass extinction, which means that humans are fully capable of living in balance with the rest of the community of life.  We can see that our ancestors, and the few remnants of these ancient cultures still alive today, enacted a very different vision from our own.  If the story of our culture is that the world was made for and belongs to human beings, the other story is this:  human beings were made for and belong to the world.  If the intent of our vision is to rule the world, the intent of the other vision is this:  to live in a dynamic, creative conversation with the rest of reality, trusting that the world has no need for humans to either conquer or rule it.   We can see, then, that it is primarily a culture, a vision, a set of stories and beliefs and assumptions, that is taking us toward catastrophe.  If we are the inherently greedy, destructive, or violent creatures many think we are, there is no hope for us.  If we are, instead, wonderful creatures who are simply trapped inside a greedy, destructive, and violent culture, and if such a story can be changed, then we have a chance.  This is the good news.

With this foundation in place, let me return to Daniel Quinn’s thoughts on vision:  “If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs, but by new minds with no programs at all.”

Quinn likens a culture’s defining vision or story to a river, and observes that our culture’s river of vision, our dream of ruling the world, is carrying us toward catastrophe, and always has been, as our lifestyle has us grow and consume at the expense of all other species, and makes of us the enemies of Life.  Programs, Quinn says, are like sticks planted in the river of vision in an attempt to stop it, as we can now see clearly the catastrophe toward which this river is taking us.  But the sticks succeed only in slowing the flow a little.  Programs are essentially reactive, and focus on making bad things less bad, rather than on creating new things.

Programs, these ineffective sticks, are invented by what Quinn calls “old minds,” minds that are bound by the limits of the current dominant vision.   When you find programs, you find old minds, thinking inside of the current river of vision and trying to impede its flow.  But programs never stop what they are intended to stop.  “Programs,” says Quinn, “make it possible to look busy and purposeful while failing.” We’ve now had centuries of programs.  Millennia of programs.  If programs did what we say we expect them to do, human society would already be a heaven on Earth.  Government, education, economy, law … these systems would already work for the greatest good of all.  If the world is saved, then, it will not be saved by people who remain stuck in the vision of ruling the world, and who, in an attempt to stop the effects of that vision, simply invent new ways to exert even more power and control.  A river taking us a bit more slowly toward catastrophe is still taking us to catastrophe.  We now have centuries of data to show us the truth of this.

If the current river of vision is taking us to catastrophe, and if old minds and their programs will never suffice to stop this river, then what will suffice?  The answer, says Quinn, is this: a new vision, held by new minds.  Rather than try to stop the current river, what we must do is divert the river to a new vision, a new way of being on this planet, a new story of who we are and why we are here.  A new river of vision will need no programs to carry it along.  Programs are about stopping a vision.  A new vision will be self-spreading and self-sustaining.  “Vision is to culture what gravity is to matter,” says Quinn.  It is the force that pulls us now toward catastrophe.  It is the force that can pull us back to a sane and sustainable human life on planet Earth.  If we wish to be free of the river that is dragging us toward catastrophe we will have to find a new vision.

Notice that Quinn’s words echo those of Albert Einstein, when he said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  Einstein was also speaking of new minds and new visions, though even he himself was trapped in the cultural programming, since, in some very real ways, the paradigm of “problem solving” IS the level of thinking that has created our present predicament.  Approaching every situation as a problem to be solved is what conquerors and rulers of the world DO, after all, and many now see that most of the “problems” we now face stem from previous “solutions” to earlier “problems.”  It may be fair to say that “problem solving,” as it is understood in our culture, is largely a matter of placing sticks in the river.

Notice also that the defining cultural visions Quinn outlines – of ruling the world or of belonging to the world – are deeply foundational in nature.  These are not visions about how we might reorganize our urban areas, or how else we might grow our food, or what sort of decision-making process we will use in our meetings, though those may all be worthwhile discussions in which to engage.  The stories Quinn reveals are stories about who we are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are headed.  These are visions about what it all means, our place in the Universe, and how we relate to the rest of creation, what Thomas Berry would call cosmologies.  These stories are primary and fundamental, and they determine the basic direction of the river of vision which carries us along.  Such defining visions shape all of our other visions.  We can grow food as a ruler of the world, or as a member of the community of life.  We can organize politically to conquer the world, or to live in harmony with the rest of creation.  In the end, it boils down to why we are here, and if we have no clarity on that point, nothing else will be clear.

Know that Quinn made clear that both of these visions arose out of long periods of experience.  The first members of our dominant global culture did not one day decide to conquer and rule the world and then invent a new style of agriculture to achieve that end.  At some point, the practitioners of this new style of agriculture noticed the great power to control that this lifestyle gave them, and began to fancy themselves the rulers of the world.  In a like manner, the vision of being made for the world grew out of long millennia of a lifestyle that kept people in intimate balance with the community of life around them, and which gave those who enacted that vision largely happy and fulfilling lives.  In both cases, the thing to notice is that these visions arose out of long periods of experience.

Contrast that with our situation now, a time of such urgency that it seems we must invent and word-craft a new vision, type it up, post it, forward it, link it, frame it, brand it, explain it and get it out there, with bulleted talking points and a neat, three-color logo, ASAP or WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!   And we have to do this all knowing, in the back of our minds, that it may be too late in any event, that it may never work, and that we may have no future in which that new vision can manifest.  We who live today have a unique and seemingly impossible task, like none who preceded us.  These are truly unprecedented times.

Know, also, that, in Quinn’s view, “no paradigm is ever able to imagine the next one.”  In fact, “it’s almost impossible for one paradigm to imagine that there will even be a next one.”  He says that “for all our blather of new paradigms and emerging paradigms, it’s an unassailable assumption among us that our distant descendants will be just exactly like us.  Their gadgets, fashions, music, and so on, will surely be different, but we’re confident that their mindset will be identical – because we can imagine no other mindset for people to have.”  Using Richard Dawkins’ concept of the meme, which he calls “the conceptual building plans for our culture” and of which he says “memes are to cultures what genes are to bodies,” Quinn answers the question “How can we achieve a vision we can’t imagine?” this way:  “one meme at a time.”

And know, finally, that, in Quinn’s view, this matter of finding a new vision is not a matter of ease or difficulty.  As Quinn said in The Story of B, “The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty.  The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness.  If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on Earth can make it catch on.  But if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire.”

For myself, the experience of reading Quinn’s work is summed up by one of his own characters, who said of the teacher Charles Atterly in The Story of B, “Everything Atterly was saying was obvious, and all of it was new.”  Quinn made conscious for me the cultural stories that surround us, the stories in which I was raised, the stories that masqueraded as “just the way things are.”  Cultural stories are to humans like water is to fish.  We swim in these stories without even knowing that we’re swimming in anything.  But once somebody points out the water, we realize that we know it intimately, as we’ve been swimming in it our whole lives.  Daniel Quinn points out the water.  And once we see the water, it becomes difficult to not-see it.  And once we see the water – the stories, the culture – we may be gifted instantly with the ability to swim consciously.  And swimming consciously, we can begin to swim away from the default stories that are taking us toward catastrophe, and to imagine new stories, a new vision, that might take us toward life.

Daniel Quinn gives us new tools with which to respond to our collective predicament.  His simple, moving prose touches me deeply each time I read it, and I have read it again and again.  I see the water quite clearly now.  I can’t not see it.  And I shall be forever indebted to Daniel Quinn for that.  The notion that a culture is a set of stories we tell ourselves, that these stories shape our lives in the physical realm, and that we can question and change these stories, has impacted every layer of my life, from my relationship to Sally to my work in the world.  I question everything I can now, every aspect of the culture in which I was born and raised.  And questioning it, I have found a measure of freedom apart from it.  When I speak to you again, I will tell you more of that freedom.  Until then, I will leave you with this question to ponder, if you will, a question that might open up new avenues of thinking for you:

How are you still trying to rule the world?

Thank you.

Part 2: The Vision Quest

I spoke last time of Daniel Quinn, of the old vision of ruling a world that was made for us, of programs that fail and the need for new visions.  What if he is exactly right?  What if it’s our defining stories of meaning, purpose, and destiny that most determine our course from here on out?  What if we humans are not deranged, flawed creatures at all, but instead belong here as much as butterflies and bison and birch trees?  What if it’s mostly just a matter of deleting a suite of stories that has occupied our heads?

I remember how Quinn’s good news filled my heart and mind and soul with some new possibility.  I know I don’t feel flawed and deranged.  And most of the people I encounter feel like good souls doing their best in a mad situation.  We were all just born into a culture that is clearly harmful to the community of life, and to ourselves.  I know in my own life that I’ve slowly learned to enact a very different story from the one in which I was raised.  I know that it’s possible.

But whether possible or not, I’m not sure how this generalizes out to whole populations.  And I’m not sure how it can turn into actual, on the ground change in the physical world.  A few weeks back, in preparation for this conference, I did an informal survey, asking friends and readers what they thought about whatever “movement” they saw happening in the world, and how that movement was succeeding, or failing, or both.  While the responses I received were all over the map in terms of whether there even IS a movement, whether there should be a movement, or what the movement was up to, there was a fair amount of agreement that, while this “movement” has succeeded in raising some awareness, we have yet to see that translate into large-scale preparation for what’s coming, let alone a large-scale effort to stop the destruction of the living planet and “save the world as a habitat for as many other species as possible.”  As Michael Brownlee wrote, “I don’t know if there will ever emerge a coherent and robust and truly viral Transition movement in this nation…  For many, it just seems too difficult, too big a challenge.”

We in this room feel the catastrophe looming and have self-selected as some of those who will attempt to meet it consciously.  We see the limitations and consequences of our old cultural vision of ruling the world.  But it seems we’ve yet to find and speak the new vision that will catch on like wildfire.  And time, it seems, is running short.  Methane is now boiling up from lake bottoms in the far north.  The Great Barrier Reef is dying.  Radiation continues to spew from Fukushima, and oil from the Macondo Reservoir.  Global CO2 emissions increased by 6% in 2010.  And our leaders appear to be largely insane.

Oh my…

What Quinn said about vision and timing and readiness for change resonates inside me.  We need a new defining vision of who we are and why we are here.  And we need it by yesterday at the latest.  But defining visions, Quinn said, grow out of long periods of experience, and shift “one meme at a time.”  If we’re staring at a 9% oil depletion rate and 6% CO2 increases, it doesn’t look to me like we HAVE long periods of time.  When I look at the world through Quinn’s eyes, I see lots of programs, lots of sticks in the river, but very few new minds.  I see bootstrapping and problem solving and yes-we-can-ing and get-‘er-done-ing. But it feels to me that if the world is telling us anything right now, it’s telling us that THAT STRATEGY IS NOT WORKING.  If “no paradigm is ever able to imagine the next one,” and “if the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on Earth can make it catch on,” then what are we supposed to do?

A new vision?  How ARE we going to get from here to there?  Or are we?  Even though ruling the world appears to have come at the cost of catastrophe, I don’t know how we STOP ruling the world.  How do we free ourselves from ten thousand years of cultural conditioning?  How do we let go of the idea that the world was made for us?  The dominant culture, an operating system that has been installed in our hearts and minds does not wish to be uninstalled.  That urge to control will fight us and fool us at every turn.  Even were we to manage to break free of that programming, what else IS there besides ruling the world?

At this point, it feels like the truest thing I can say to you is this:  I don’t have the answers to these questions.  I don’t know where we’re headed, or how we’ll get there.  I don’t know how to create a new vision that will spread like wildfire, and some days I’m pretty despairing that such a thing is even possible.

I know that my personal attempts to uninstall the dominant culture from my own being are not yet finished.  I still get caught in my own identity as a tall, White, American male who knows the one right way.  It happened yesterday.  It will happen today.  Just because this thing called “saving the world” may require both new minds and a new vision, it does not necessarily follow that my work is to go around trying to change minds and invent a new vision.  I question my own work of “waking people up,” – the blogs I’ve written, the articles and essays I’ve posted, the documentary we made, all the convincing and explaining and persuading and even frightening people into consciousness and action.  While it was all done with the heartfelt intention and desire to contribute something good to the world, it has also carried a strong whiff of covert domination and control and one right way.  My right way.  Despite my good intentions, I wonder if trying to solve the problem of creating a new vision has actually kept me trapped in the old one.  Clearly, confronting one’s own cultural programming is not for the faint of heart.  This can be challenging and subtle work.  But it’s my experience that the work is worth doing.

In the time that Sally and I have worked together to face into our collective predicament, the process or journey known as the Vision Quest has resonated with us both as a helpful lens through which to view our situation.  There’s nothing really mysterious about the basic process, I think.  We use it in our daily lives, every time we meet a challenge that causes us to shed an old story or idea or behavior and open up to something new, some new guidance or information from the world around us.  The vision quest, as practiced around the planet and across the ages, simply adds ritual, intention, and tradition to that process, and focuses on the matter of our core sense of identity, the questions of who we are and why we are here.  There might be a death lodge ritual, for instance, in which we let go of our old sense of self and identity and empty out the feelings, beliefs, and stories that no longer work in our lives.  And there might be a three-day fast in the wilderness, during which we open up to and listen to that which is outside of us, the elemental forces of the “natural world,” perhaps, or the voices of what some call “spirit.”  In all cases, the vision quest is exactly what it says it is, a quest for a vision to guide us.  We push ourselves beyond the limits of who we have been thus far in order to connect with our true selves and to hear the truth of the Universe in which we live.  If we are lucky, we will receive a new vision, a new story, a new direction, something we can bring back into our own lives, and to our communities, to bring healing and connection for all.

I said earlier that I can feel lost and despairing, if our task is to invent or concoct a new vision for ourselves.  But when I step into the notion of the vision quest, I remember that the initiate does not go into the quest with a vision already in hand.  That would just be more control.  I begin to see that I am doing the work exactly as I need to, sitting for long days and months, and sometimes even years, in the death lodge, passing slowly through the messy and sometimes excruciating process of letting go, burning through my impulses to control and dominate, my attachments to knowing the one right way, my fear of feeling helpless and out of control, and my stories of who I am and why I am here.

Then I go out into wilderness of our current culture with no vision at all.  It is humbling, to open up, to listen, to connect with the world around me.  But it is my experience, and the experience of many others, that it is only with empty hands that I can receive the vision that is given to me.  So I slow my breath.  I get still and silent, and simply watch and listen.

All of a sudden, my burdens melt away.  I don’t have to struggle to wake people up.  I can sense that new minds are already forming, walking the streets beside me, ready to shine out once the time is right.  I don’t have to invent some new vision out of whole cloth.  I can trust that new visions are already coming to us as we walk this wilderness, rising right inside and underneath and beside the old vision, hidden in plain sight in the landscapes of our lives, ready to spread like wildfire when the time is right.  Perhaps, the first signposts, the first new memes, are already visible.  Where might we look for such signposts?  What visions are now arising from our long experience of trying to be the rulers of the world, and of failing so gloriously?  How is the next paradigm already peeking around the corners of the present one?

I can tell you where I’m looking.  I’m looking at the wild and woolly Occupy movement, at what Paul Hawken calls our “blessed unrest,” at the Deep Green Resistance movement, the Zeitgeist movement, the Wayseers movement, at the various risings up around the world, at the crowds in the streets, and the more quiet, less noticeable work being done behind the scenes.  I’m looking at people’s attempts to form new cultures, from the co-housing movement to permaculturists to biker clubs and street gangs and religious groups, from the hippies and slackers to the anarchists and anti-civvers.  I’m looking at our use of various mind-altering substances, at the rise of extreme sports, extreme makeovers and extreme self-expression.  I’m looking at the movies people watch, the books they read, the music they listen to, the wild and intriguing dreams and visions that come to them through the media, from Middle Earth to Pandora and beyond.  I’m looking at how these media have put us in touch with cultures, lifestyles, and worldviews from around the world and across time.  I’m looking especially at how these media view our collective future, the dystopian visions, the imagined futures, the approaching singularity.  I’m looking at people’s fascination with the so-called “fringes” of science, spirituality, and consensus reality, from UFOs, crop circles, and the near-death experience to lost civilizations and the quantum/ holographic/chaotic universe, the alternate worlds, the alternate explanations, the anomalous data.  I’m looking at our fascination with conspiracies, with a hidden ruling elite, hidden technologies, hidden plans, hidden agendas.  I’m looking at our television series, these windows into the intimate lives of people real and imagined living lives fully felt and fully expressed, where people try and fail and grow and try again.  I’m looking at the internet, the cell phones, the webs, the connections, the interactions, the constant contacting, messaging, texting, poking, the direct line to information and analysis, the endless hits of love and like, the constant calling out of “here I am.”  I’m looking at our multitude of human addictions, the unceasing attempt not to get what the addictive behavior or substance provides, but SOMETHING MORE than the substance provides.

I’m looking at all of these things and seeing, not the deluded, dumbed-down, comfort-addled sheeple that my own angry, judging ego would want me to see, but good, essential souls trapped in thick crusts of culture and ego, doing their best in a mad situation, and acting out their deep animal longings and knowings in the only ways they know how, trying to challenge the limits of the current dominant global vision at every turn and, in the words of Jim Morrison, “break on through to the other side.”

How might these things I’m looking at, and many others, be signposts to a next paradigm?  I’m not sure what to say here.  I know for myself that, sitting quietly in the wilderness of no-vision with the cultural blinders largely removed, just observing the Universe as it presents itself to me, I’ve grown skeptical of the strict materialism of our culture, and am stepping into a view of reality more in accord with my felt experience of living in a chaotic, quantum world unfolding beyond the limits of my ability to predict and control.  I’ve grown suspicious of the strictly rational, and am adding the non-rational and intuitive to my bag of tools.  I feel sick unto death of ruling the world, of struggling to be in control of life, of having to know the answer and be in charge and pretend that I know what the hell I’m doing. Slowly I am learning to trust the callings and longings and excitements that arise in my own heart, rather than the voices of the culture that speak inside my head.  I’ve lost my trust in Yankee ingenuity and problem solving.  I hunger for intimate connection, shared feelings, and the honest expression of our true selves, for stories of meaning and purpose and belonging in a vast and mysterious Universe that’s as alive as I am.  But I am hesitant to analyze and name what is arising, as to name it may be to limit it, and what I feel in my very flesh is that the new defining river of vision arising amongst us is way more powerful, way more uncontrollable, and will be way more surprising than anything I can wrap my words around.

What I can see is, if this is a vision quest, then we are in the midst of it, passing through the death lodge of this culture and just beginning to open up to what the living world is telling us.  I can sense a new vision coming, and see some signposts, but I cannot speak that vision clearly, in tidy words that will, as Daniel Quinn wrote, “make the earth tremble and the stones weep and the skies open up.”  That’s as far as I can go. What I feel in my heart is that, if we are to avoid complete catastrophe, it will be because the new rivers of vision that will take us somewhere else are already flowing around us. My job is not to invent or concoct, but to simply feel, and begin to see, what is already here.

Part 3: The Vision of River

Let me begin my last piece with something usually attributed to an unnamed Hopi Elder, and called, simply, A Hope Elder Speaks:

“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour.  And there are things to be considered.

Where are you living?

What are you doing?

What are your relationships?

Are you in right relation?

Where is your water?

Know your garden.

It is time to speak your Truth.

Create your community.

Be good to each other.

And do not look outside yourself for the leader.”

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time!”

“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.  At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, Least of all ourselves.  For the moment that we do,  our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

“The time for the lone wolf is over.  Gather yourselves!  Banish the word struggle from you attitude and your vocabulary.  All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

If, as I suggested last time, the new rivers of vision are already arising amongst us, rising from the nightmare of our long experience of ruling the world, rising to take us, perhaps, away from complete catastrophe, then what I have left is an invitation:  jump into the river that is already flowing, and let this river carry you.  Never mind that you cannot know with your rational mind exactly where this river might take you.  That, indeed, is the whole point.  And this river may be taking us to a million different destinations.  This is something very different from being in control.  “Let go of the shore,” the Hopi Elder counsels.  “Push off into the middle of the river, keep your eyes open, and your heads above water. And … see who is in there with you and celebrate.”

Feel the river as it pulls you along.  Notice the map in your pocket, now soaked and falling to pieces.  Let the river take it away.  Your destination is not on that map.  Feel the cell phone in your pocket, the watch on your wrist, now both dead and useless to you.  Let them go, and find new ways to connect to the world.  Feel your clothing of old assumptions and stories, soaked and cold, dragging you down.  Shed them, and notice your natural buoyancy as a creature who belongs on this planet.  It’s just you now, naked and wet, with others splashing nearby, the cold water rushing, the sky overhead, the calls of birds in the trees and the tickle of fish underfoot.  You feel awake and alive now, in that cold rushing water.  No more distractions.  Nothing left to lose.  Who will you be?

You can feel the river’s great force, the tug, the longing, the great re-balancing of forces.  Your good, true, essential self, as covered with wounds and scars as it might be, knows what to do in this river.  The river may pull us relentlessly, but we are not helpless here.  So long as we don’t fight this river, we can swim.

And I have another invitation: If we’re truly going to step away from domination and control, if we’re truly wanting to find some new, more co-creative relationship with the planet, if we truly desire, in the poet David Whyte’s words, to enter into conversation with the whole of creation, both speaking our truth AND listening to the truth of the rest of reality, then perhaps the perfect crucible for that work is in learning to speak with, and listen to, our fellow human beings, without trying to dominate and control each other.  We can do that work here, now, in this room.

Listen to the Hopi Elder:  Jump into the river.  See who is there with you.  And celebrate.  This person is investing everything she has in growing food for her community.  That one thinks all such attempts at local sustainability are pointless without a more global restructuring.  How will these two souls learn to celebrate each other?  This is the work the Hopi Elder encourages.  This one wants to blow up cell phone towers.  That one meditates on an image of golden light encircling the globe.  How will these two learn to celebrate each other?  One thinks we must power down to the Stone Age.  Another believes that wind power and solar will play a big role in our future. One sees the challenges ahead in largely spiritual terms.  Another operates from a much more on-the-ground materialist perspective.  This one is filled with anger and despair, but does not find the safety she needs to express her feelings when that one insists on keeping things positive.  That one fears that if he lets himself feel how all of this is impacting him he will sink into depression, or unravel in our midst, and cause harm to those around him.  How will we all learn to celebrate each other?

The Hopi Elder does not say to see who is in the river and try to persuade them to your version of the truth, or argue with their vision, or ridicule the path they are on.  As the Dalai Lama says, “just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.”  We can spend from here to extinction arguing over the one right way or how it all will play out, but that’s the same story that got us into this mess.  It’s unlikely to get us back out.

A huge opportunity awaits us in this river, I think.  We can learn to set aside our assumptions long enough to truly hear what the other is saying.  That gift of deep listening will give others the room they need in order that they may hear us.  We can learn to hold paradox, holding more than one truth at a time, sitting with the tension without having to resolve it.  We can learn to examine every last thing our culture has told us, and to ask whether it serves who we are and what we want and the highest good for all of life.  We can learn to embrace the outliers, those who seem to live at the far ends of the normal curve, those who see things very differently than us, and who may have pieces of the puzzle we don’t have.  We can learn to overcome our tendency to get stuck in our own orthodoxies, seeing only the information that confirms what we already think we know.  If our acculturated minds are inadequate to the task of facing insoluble problems and unanswerable questions, we can turn to our hearts, our bodies, our animal selves, and also to our best future selves, to lead us forward, following our loves and longings, our excitements, our callings, our wantings.  We can learn to operate above and beyond the programs of culture and ego, not just new minds with a new vision, but new minds with a new vision of operating without story altogether.  We can lay down our armor, and our weapons.  We can become, finally, free of the cultural programs that separate us.

Jump into the river with me.  See who is here.  And celebrate.  Let the vision we can currently only sense and intuit carry us along.  Let it wash away the old, so that we can follow the signposts to the new.  Jump into the river of new vision that is already here.  See the new minds that are already awakening.  And celebrate.

“Everything is waiting for you,” David Whyte says.  The community of life is waiting for us, I think.  We may not find our way in time.  We may not, in the end, realize our worth, our potential, our belonging.  We may not be able to slough off our impulse to dominate and rule.  We may continue to take down huge swaths of the life of this planet in a futile attempt to sit on a throne that is not ours.  We may take ourselves down.   And if so, I believe there will be a great cry of grief in the Cosmos, at the loss of such beauty and potential.

But we MAY find our way.  We may, against all odds, respond in a way that “saves the world as a habitat for as many other species as possible,” as Daniel Quinn wrote.  We may survive this frightening time of initiation.  We may find a new vision of who we are and why we are here and where we are headed, and bring this new vision back to the community of living souls. We may take our right and proper place as mature members of that community, and find the healing, intimacy, and connection we crave.  We may find our cultural maturity and still not survive the catastrophe.  But we might.  And if we do, then I think the stars themselves will shout out in celebration, and the galaxies will dance with joy.  It’s likely to be a near miss, but it’s a possibility worth surrendering to.  As an uncle of mine used to say, “what else ya gonna do?”

I will leave you with the words of Elizabeth Kubler Ross:  “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.  These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.  Beautiful people do not just happen.”

It we get through this, if somehow we manage to survive this catastrophe, I think we will find that we have become beautiful people indeed.

Hey All,

As I continue to find clarity about how best to bring my gifts to the 2011 International Conference on Sustainability, Transition & Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership (link below) in Michigan in November (see link below), I find that it would be useful for me to do an informal survey. Any responses you feel called to give me in the comments below will be greatly appreciated.

To the extent that we can speak of a “movement” of people who are looking at the current “global situation” in terms of a confluence of environmental, energy, political, economic, cultural, and/or spiritual issues, I have three questions.

1) In broad strokes, what do you see are the goals, or specific measurable results, that this movement is attempting to reach? What is the movement for? What is the movement moving toward?

2) In what ways, if any, do you see that this movement has succeeded? Where has it made headway? How has it reached its goals or created the results it set out to create?

3) In what ways, if any, do you see that this movement has failed? Where has it lost ground? How has it failed to reach its goals?

I’m not looking for quotes to attribute (though I may find some, in which case I will ask your permission before sharing your words). I’m looking to get a general sense of how this “movement” views itself right now. If you have something to say to that end that feels to fall beyond the outlines of my questions, by all means share that as well. These may not be the best questions to ask. And feel free to pass this along to anyone whom you feel would be interested in responding.

Thanks!
Tim Bennett
Writer/Director – What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire
Author – All of the Above

http://www.sustainabilityconference.org/

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

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

For the longest time, I felt like a failure.  I felt like I was doing something wrong.  And a few people even told me that that was true, that if I wasn’t envisioning a positive future then, by default, I was envisioning a negative one, making me a part of the problem.  They complained that What a Way to Go didn’t have anything at the end that they could latch onto, nothing in terms of a vision for what we could do.  There was no happy chapter.  There was no this and this and that which, if only everybody would do, would allow us to find the solution.  Some people very much wanted such a vision.  They wanted to have something they could get excited about doing.  They wanted to find a way out of the mess I had outlined in the movie.  And I just didn’t have that to give to them.

And then one cold, wintry day, while we were driving through the Vermont mountains, a piece of clarity alighted on Sally and me from above, and that clarity has served me since:  This is not the time for visions. At least not for us.

The sense of failure I’d been laboring under has not returned to haunt me.

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

No wonder I couldn’t seem to hold onto a vision!  Sally and I were sitting in the death lodge, doing everything we could do to help the remnants of our old, Imperialist egos die away, such that we could then open up to the Universe and let the gods lead for a while.  It was not for us to concoct a plan or vision for saving the world.  In fact, we were busily letting go of any inflated notions that “we” could do such a thing at this point.

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

Over and over we confront, Sally and I, our egoic minds’ desire to know what to do, and then we face, again and again, the stunning realization that we cannot have what those minds want.  Over and over, we take our current worldview gently in our arms and hold it while it breathes its last.  Over and over, we go out into the wilderness and get still.  The voices and visions do come: a whispering of wind, a rumbling of rock, a susurrus of stars, a trembling of trees.  In bits and pieces, the next steps are given to us, a sense of the right actions, the best choices.  Slowly, we make our way down this wilderness path.

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

Part of what Sally and I sense is that the vision will be found collectively, through a process of which most of us are unaware, and are reluctant to seek:  the process of entering together this death lodge, where we confront as a group the inner and outer conflicts, sift through the machinations of ego, and find the precious grains of truth that all of our positions, assumptions, and desires, hold in their hearts.  This is the work that most calls us.  There’s room in the lodge, should you wish to join us.

Here, let me get that flap, then I’ll scootch around and make some more room.  Sit with us for a while, with this group of open, often tattered souls crowded tightly together under these tarps, a pit of red-hot rocks in the circle’s center, and utter darkness all around.  Sally throws water on the rocks, to sear our faces and fill our lungs with a burst of steam.  Someone laughs.  Another cries.  A third rages and a fourth prays.  One last cup of water on the rocks.  One last cloud of steam.  One last sloughing off.  Then we push open the flap and crawl, together and one-by-one, out into the night, naked, shivering, our bodies steaming in the firelight and starshine.  We don our clothes and make our way out into the wilderness, to find the spots we chose earlier in the day.  We begin our fast, to show the gods our deep longing and sober intent.  We sit and stare into the night, and soon we start to reflect.

We’re at a crossroads now.  Who we’ve been, as a culture, is no longer working.  The visions with which we used to operate can now be seen as unhinged and insane.  The rules have changed, and we don’t know what to do.  Every time we try to control the situation things just get worse.  We’re tired.  Scared.  And so very, very sad.  We’re close to bottom now.  The ground is rising up rapidly beneath us.  It looks as if we’ll smash onto the rocks at any moment.

And yet the galaxies spin overhead as they always have.  The grasses still whisper in the breeze.  The ground underneath holds us up just like it did the day before.  The moon still lights our way.  There is life, still, all around us, holding on in spite of this culture’s blind attempts to kill it all off.  “We’re not dead yet,” the world of life calls out to us.  “You’re not alone.  We’ve missed you.  We’re glad to have you back.”  And beyond our tiny circles of struggling to know and do and think and work and own and have and understand lies a Universe so vast and so mysterious that we cannot hold it in our grasp.  And in that moment, we can see, and even trust, that perhaps this is the only sort of vision we need right now: the vision that lets us see what is there all around us.  Perhaps that is enough, for now.  This is initiation, after all.  The gods are leading this process.  Maybe we can just concentrate on staying open, so that we can hear them when they speak to us.

Thomas Berry told us, back when we interviewed him in 2005, that “young people need to be educated in the context of the 21st century, and with the realization that they can’t depend on anything handed down to them from the 20th century.”  That’s a stunning statement, I think.  We can’t depend on anything handed down to us from the 20th century.  Yet it resonates with my own sense of things.  Linda Travis and Cole Thomas, in my new novel All of the Above, have to come to the same realization, as the reality they thought they were living in gets torn from underfoot.  They, too, must allow their old worldview to die away, in order to see the world anew, arising all around them.  And they, too, must meet the trials before them, before they will be allowed to find some new vision that aligns with the will of the gods.

Who will we be when the old visions die, and the old strategies no longer work?  Whether fictional or flesh and blood, I believe we will all be given the opportunity to find our answers to that question.

The following is the first installment in a series of blog posts that will eventually be put together into a written interview.   If you have interview questions of your own, please leave them in the comment section below.  Thanks!

Q:

Tim, you are best known for your documentary, What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. You’ve switched mediums and are now writing fiction.  The people who loved What A Way To Go were interested in resource depletion, overpopulation, environmental destruction and economic collapse.  This seems like a departure.   Who do you think is the audience for this book, and why should they read it?

A:

First and foremost, I worked to write a great story, with juicy mysteries, intriguing ideas, and interesting characters you can care about.  All of the Above is for anybody looking for a page-turning sci-fi conspiracy thriller.   It’s got psychopathic government agents, enigmatic aliens, indigenous and astral allies, and the first female President of the United States.   It’s got love and death, hope and despair, grief and loss and joy and redemption.  A perfect end-of-summer, or end-of-Empire, read.

And All of the Above is a book that goes further.   I’ve long known, and have recently begun to put into words, that my work in this world is this: to question the assumptions, beliefs, and stories that surround me, whether those assumptions come from the schools and family in which I was raised, from the larger culture of Empire in which my family was embedded, or from the more fundamental paradigm of materialism out of which Empire rises.   I didn’t stop questioning assumptions when I finished my documentary.   I kept going, following the paths that opened before me, striding down avenues that might surprise those who’ve seen my film.   So I would say that All of the Above is also for anyone wishing to go even further than my documentary went, and certainly further than the dominant global culture wants you to go.

I’ve actually come full circle, back to the information and analyses that first pushed me down my own path toward What a Way to Go so many years ago.   Anomalous experiences and evidences, new science and old wisdom – these are the things on which I first cut my critical-thinking teeth.   These are the realms that opened me up and helped me to develop the analytical and emotional tools I needed in order to explore, head on and without blinking, the current global environmental, economic, and energy situations we now face.

I’m in a somewhat unique position, I think; I can view our collective present predicament from an extreme outlier’s perspective.   Sure, we’re facing an unprecedented set of conditions, with oil declining and ecosystems failing and the economy ready to unravel, but we’re facing all of this in a world, and a Universe, that feels, to me, determined to undermine our every assumption about matter, spirit, time, space, and the nature of reality itself.   What happens when you view the unraveling of Empire through the larger disintegration of the paradigm of materialism?  That’s what I explore in this story.   If you’re up for that, come along for the ride.  I’ll be glad to have you along.

Of course, why one might wish to go further is another question entirely…

In the summer of 2005 a frightening piece of information came to me:  Stephen Donaldson would soon publish Book One of a new series of fantasy novels, The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.  Good news, you might have thought.  I mean, if you like dense, challenging prose, vibrant characters and a richly imagined alternate world, then Donaldson’s books are just the ticket, as far as I’m concerned.  And it had been more than twenty years since he’d finished the First and Second Chronicles.  I’d read all six books in the series.  More than once.  How nice it would be, to go back to that world and walk again with those characters.

But I remember, oddly enough, being rather upset at the news.  Why?  Well, at the time, I was knee deep in the writing and editing of our documentary – What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire.  We’d just completed our interview tour.  I was wading through hard-drives full of footage, piles of books, inboxes stuffed with articles and essays, and stacks of documentaries.  I was analyzing, beholding, correlating, deliberating, evaluating, figuring, gauging, and holding every last piece of information, opinion, and conjecture I could get my hands on regarding our collective and precarious situation here on Planet Earth.  I was staring at the end of cheap and easy oil, the extinctions of species, the quickly shifting planetary climate and the growing human footprint that fueled these things.  I was feeling my way through the despotic, dominating, disconnected, and delusional global culture that has not only, as Sherwin-Williams says, “covered the planet,” but has seeped into every cell of my body and every facet of my ego.  I was facing head-on, and with every morsel of my soul, what felt like the final result of all our collective choices.  The end of empire was breathing down my neck.  The runaway train felt ready to jump the tracks.  It was a very intense time.

A new Covenant novel?  You’ve got to be kidding, Mr. Donaldson!  There’s no time for that.  The economy cannot possibly last long enough for you to finish.  You’ll just get me hooked again and then leave me hanging.  You’ll leave Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery trapped in some terrible situation in the Land with no hope of resolution.  Ever.  And I’ll … what?  I’ll have to drag my half-starved, irradiated carcass across the bleak, post-apocalyptic American landscape of my nightmares and force you to finish the story for me face-to-face, sitting around a campfire in your New Mexico back yard.  At a time when I was staring daily, hourly, minutely, into the collapse of Empire and the possible extinction of the human race – the extinction of my family and friends, my children, myself – the notion that you would start a new series that I would not be able to finish filled me with dread.  I think, in the end, that situation was simply something I could wrap my heart and brain around.  The rest of it, the unraveling world I could see ahead, was too big to hold.

But I bought Donaldson’s book.  Read it.  Moved on.  Eighteen-months-worth of twelve-hour days finished the documentary and we did our screening tours.  Book Two came out in October of 2007 and I read that.  We recuperated, moved to Vermont, convened a few dialogue circles, started another documentary, stopped that project, and then moved to Maine.  And in October of 2010, Stephen Donaldson published Book Three.  At last!  He’d done it!  Just under the wire!

I finished Book Three a month or so ago.  Get this:  the further I read, the more it became obvious that, unlike any of Donaldson’s previous series, this one would require a Book Four.  Due out, no doubt, in 2013.  <Insert Big Dramatic Sigh Here.>

It gets even funnier.  I’ve now published All of the Above, Book One of my own three- or four-book series of novels that will follow President Linda Travis and Cole Thomas as they make their way into a new view of reality.

Waiting for the collapse of the global industrial economy has been a tricky business for me.  On the one hand, I know it has to happen sometime.  From what I can see, unending growth and a net-destructive impact on the planet simply cannot be sustained forever in the physical levels of reality.  On the other hand, predicting the how and why and when and where and who feels pretty much like a losing game.  Hovering in the unknown, with one foot in “what’s here now” and the other in “what will come,” it had been extremely difficult, at times, to know what makes sense to do.  I mean… does it make ANY sense at all to spend almost two years writing, editing, and publishing a novel when it looks as though the economy could go belly-up at any moment?  And does it make ANY SENSE AT ALL to write a novel in any case, given what’s going on in the world?

Ya got me.

Maybe the trouble is in that phrase “make sense.”  The dominant culture has taught me that things that “make sense” are rational and logical.  But what if I take this phrase out of the realm of the head, where the dominant culture put it, and place it lovingly back into my heart and body, where my senses actually reside?  What then?

What I notice is that, while I’ve never been able to come to some rational, logical answer to the question “Does this make sense?,” my body and heart have sensed all along what to do.  My body has willingly sat long hours at the keyboard, even as it complains about how hard that has been.  My heart has drawn me back to this story, over and over.  (I wrote the first five chapters over twelve years ago, after all.  I couldn’t let it go until it was finished.)  And when I’ve been able to get very quiet, I’ve been able to touch – briefly, as if touching a fawn – that larger something, that Muse, that Source, from which this story seems to have come, as if the Great Hologram Itself simply gave it to me to put to the page.  While my rational mind was trapped in uncertainty, my heart and body kept following their excitements and promptings and senses, and brought me here, to the end, with the book now out in the world, and just under the wire, perhaps?

Who knows what it’s for, this book?  I don’t.  Not the rational, thinking, brain “me,” at any rate.  I know it changed me, just to write it.  I know it goes out wrapped in the intention to be of service, with a wish to further the conversation about what it means to be alive in this time, and with a hope of aiding in the evolution of our collective hearts, minds and spirits.  And I sense that this is a time that calls for new stories.   But beyond that, like all of our children, this book shall have to go out into the world on its own, to do whatever work it came here to do.  I will nurture it, guide it, and help it along the way, sure.  But it’s mostly out of my hands now.  And I guess that’s a good thing, because Book Two has been slowly downloading into the hopper for some time.  I have a sense that, after a good rest, and some much-needed attention paid to the other domains of my life, the Great Hologram will once again grab me by the scruff of my neck and sit me down at the keyboard, for reasons I may never really understand.  And that, perhaps, is how my life will look from here on out:  doing things that never really “make sense” to my rational mind.

So I find myself facing again what I’ve faced before:  I am not in control, but I am in conversation.  As a recovering White Guy™ I am learning to refrain from saying “how it is,” but as a living facet of the Great Hologram, I do get to say what I see and feel and experience, as long as I then stop, and listen to the Multiverse around me, and enter into real dialogue with Reality.  I get to be a part of the dialogue without having to know the answer.  In fact, the Great Hologram needs that from me.  And what a relief.  Knowing how “it is” has been such a burden.

Right now, what I see to do is to begin my own Book Two.  So I will.  The Multiverse will have its own ideas about how things must unfold.  So it will.  We’ll dance together as the Earth spins and the Universe expands and the hurricanes blow and the markets leap and tumble.  We’ll shout and sing and argue and make up.  I’ll hold up my part in the conversation.  Then I’ll listen.  And when it’s my turn, I’ll speak again.  It feels like that’s what I came here for, so I may as well stop resisting it.

And who knows?  Perhaps the global economy will soon falter, as so many anticipate.  Perhaps life will get really local before I finish my story.  And perhaps, one day, Mr. Donaldson will make his way to me, traveling slowly and sanely across the quieter, more sober, more conscious and compassionate American landscape of my better dreams.  Crazier things have happened.  Maybe we’ll sit around that campfire and swap stories.  “You left Linda Travis and Cole Thomas trapped in a terrible situation with no hope of resolution,” he’ll say.  “Tell me how it ends.”  I’ll pour us another cup of tea, and then I’ll tell him.