The Enormity of the Situation

Dear Readers, I have been struggling to find words to express my thoughts and feelings about the state of our collective world. Just when I think I can manage to write something, yet another jaw-dropping thing happens, and I am again left dumbfounded. Case in point: the volcanic explosion that took place near the island of Tonga in the South Pacific on January 15^th.

There I was, sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of fresh coffee, phone in hand, and as soon as I got onto social media, I see WARNING! Tsunami alert issued for the entire west coastline of the United States. From there, of course I had to do the dance of finding out what on Earth had just happened.

Facebook/Tonga Geological Service

This year of 2022 is certainly starting off with a boom. Already we are getting reports of massive heat domes over South America and Australia with record-breaking high temperatures. Occasionally I watch a Youtube channel known as World Of Signs. The guy who makes the videos put one up with footage of the Tonga volcano erupting, and a whole bunch of other extreme weather events. Check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABE84Phl2Ns

Some of you might follow the work of Charles Eisenstein. He is an author, philosopher, social critic and public intellectual. He recently collaborated with Ben Stewart on a mini-documentary, where he gives his impressions of our current collective situation. Charles is a thoughtful, brilliant, compassionate human. Here is a link. And the Music Played the Band (Charles Eisenstein mini-doc)  https://youtu.be/BDlreRnCYpg

Way back in the 80s, when people spoke to me of the End Times and the Apocalypse, I shrugged them off as religious fanatics and did not give it another thought. Even when the year 2000 was approaching and people were preparing for the worst, once the clocks turned and the world didn’t collapse, it seemed only that a bunch of people had overreacted. But the last decade in particular has really been extraordinary. Newscasters are running out of descriptive words for the events that keep happening. I heard one news anchor from Australia report that the Tonga volcano eruption was a “once in a millennium” event, with more force than several nuclear explosions. That strikes me as utter hyperbole, given our current state of the world. These kinds of events will clearly continue to occur with accelerated speed and frequency for the foreseeable future. We are on an unstoppable trajectory of Earth changes, and there no longer seems to be much that any of us can do about it.

My best advice would be to spend some time simplifying your life. Get rid of extra material things you no longer need or use. Lighten your load. Spend more time on Mama Gaia, feel the Earth under your feet. This world is changing, even the ground underneath us can shift and change in an instant. Make some new friends, get to know your neighbors. Reach past your comfort zone regularly and spend more time in quietness. Don’t be in such a hurry to do, spend more time simply Being. Find the still place within and get better acquainted.

Dear Readers, to those of you who continue to read my blog, I offer my thanks and gratitude. Together, we and many millions of others are raising the vibration of humanity to its next level of consciousness. This is why we are here now, incarnated into these human forms. It is extraordinary, courageous work we are doing, and exhausting. We truly are in the heart of the battle for the Light to overcome the forces of darkness. They are trying their hardest to prevent the Light from winning, just as the prophets of old prophesized. It actually is that time, right here and now. Everything you say, do, and the way you move through the world, if done in the spirit of love, truth, and compassion, adds to the Light quotient. Your presence here matters. Thank you for being here.

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System Breakdown

It has been a long time since I wrote on this blog. I’ve spent many hours dealing with my despair and conflicting emotions about the catastrophic state of our world. Back in May, when the weather where I live (Denver, Colorado) was sweet and fragrant with blossoms, I already felt trepidation about the coming summer. Every summer since I’ve lived here (from 2014 on), the summers have become increasingly more extreme. This is true for most places around the world—more heat, more extreme hurricanes, floods, drought, and wildfires.

What will our collective future be like?

The Earth/Gaia is clearly going through a cleansing and purging process. Humanity has for eons polluted, abused and taken from her in every way possible. And now she (for Earth/Gaia is indeed a living being, just as we are) is using all means at her disposal (all the elementals) to restore her body and become whole again. The outcomes of this process are all the extreme weather events humanity is experiencing, and will continue to endure into the foreseeable future.

For a moment, I still believed that the worst of climate changes could be avoided. Back when the Paris Climate treaty was signed, nearly six years ago, for a glimmering moment it looked like humanity was finally waking up. World leaders understood the real dangers we faced, and they made a big show to acknowledge them and committed money, time, and resources toward reversing the damage we’d caused over the past several decades of fossil fuel burning.

Every summer into late autumn has proved more devastating than the last. The past several years have been the hottest ever recorded on Earth. The poles are melting at rates much faster than climate scientists believed possible. Siberian forests in the coldest regions of Earth have become infernos each summer. Records continue to be broken for all the extremes, all around the planet. As it turns out, the world leaders who signed the Paris Climate agreement didn’t really mean what they said, what they wrote, nor what they agreed to do. The machine of fossil fuel use continues on and we continue to abuse our planet’s air, water, land, oceans, and resources.

Two years ago on this blog, I posted some articles written by Jem Bendell. He wrote a research paper about the impending collapse of systems due to all the factors I’ve named here. At the time, I was horrified and appalled, and yet I also could understand why he made the assertion that our world would soon experience breakdown. Two years later, Bendell’s predictions are beginning to become our reality. Everywhere one looks, there is system breakdown.

We gather and rebel not with a vision of a fairy-tale future where we have fixed the climate, but because it is right to do what we can. To slow the change. To reduce the harm. To save what we can. To invite us back to sanity and love. The truth is we are scared and we are brave enough to say so. The truth is we are grieving and we are proud enough to say so. The truth is we are traumatised and we are open enough to say so. We are angry and we are calm enough to say so and invite others to join us.” (Jem Bendell’s Opening speech of the international rebellion of Extinction Rebellion in Oxford Circus on April 15th 2019).

It is excruciating to look at the world now. I think that’s why so many people refuse to see what is obviously before them. Denial of our common situation is sadly ubiquitous among many millions of souls.  Brave scientists, authors, thinkers, journalists, and even some awake politicians have been sounding the clarion call for changing human behavior for years, and some for decades. Now we have reached the point of no return. Someone wrote recently, “this may be the coolest summer for the rest of my life.” 

Dear Readers, I am very sad to write that I’ve reached the point where I no longer feel hopeful about our common future on Earth, at least not into the foreseeable future. I refuse to join the crowd who foretells the extinction of the human race. Yet, it seems very clear to me now that the years ahead for all of us will be increasingly difficult to navigate. The extremes in temperature and global heating of the atmosphere will force us to make radical decisions about where and how we live upon Earth going forward. The Elon Musks of the world will likely find extravagant ways to live well, no matter what. But for the rest of the billions of humans, life is about to become much more difficult.

There is a loose community of people alive today who firmly believe that we have now entered into a new, Golden Age of Gaia. They advise against watching the old paradigm of life as we’ve known it for millennia crumble. Some of these folks are serious about aiding this new Earth, and spend their time giving courses, being out in nature with crystals, performing all sorts of healing rituals for Mama Gaia, and envisioning the new, healed and whole Earth and her people. In their scenario, the people have reconciled their dualistic, separate self with the One/All That Is. There is no more war, hunger, greed or bad actors. It’s basically a New Age version of the proverbial Garden of Eden story restored. This group of folks are very serious about their visioning and have been working and waiting for it to manifest for many years. They are still waiting.

As much as I want to also say yes, this New Earth has been birthed and will continue to grow in the decades and centuries ahead, I currently see only evidence of the crumbling and breakdown that apparently “needs to happen” before the new age can begin. For a lot of reasons, I sincerely hope the New Agers are right, and it will only be a matter of time before the world transforms into a beautiful, peaceful, healthy, ideal place filled with happy, secure and peaceful humans who understand that All Is One. However, I personally don’t have much energy left to keep fighting for this someday future world. I am exhausted.

These are tremendously hard words to have to write, and the main reason I seldom post on this blog any longer. No one wants to read such depressing thoughts. I wish so much to report better news. To be fair, there are small pockets of humans around the globe who are raising organic food, saving animals, helping other humans and modeling better and more sustainable ways to live upon Earth. This is wonderful and I applaud them all. But in the face of the vast tsunami of disasters facing large populations of people, these efforts are like trying to put out a hundred thousand acre forest fire with a garden hose.

Thanks for reading, if you made it this far. I send each of you love and light, and the courage and strength to keep going in your life. May all the small gestures of loving kindness we give to others and to ourselves add up to something amazing and miraculous that we cannot know right now.

Radical Amazement

Mary Oliver once wrote that when death comes, she wants to be able to say that all her life she was a bride married to amazement. I think she always knew that she had it in her to do amazing, incredible things with her life, and so she went ahead and did them, through poetry and teaching and observing life and nature. For me, she embodies a life well lived, a beautiful marriage of giving oneself to the world and at the same time, making sure she always had enough time for herself, for solitude and contemplation. She has had the great fortune of a grace-filled life. She can rest in the knowledge that through her efforts, she has touched and inspired millions of people across the world. In my own humble way, I would love to be able to say, at the end of my life, that I too have been a bride married to amazement. That I too did something artistic and wonderful and giving which made a difference to others’ lives. That people grew for having known me, that they found a creative part of themselves which they hadn’t quite been able to access before. That knowing me inspired them in some way, and made their lives richer than it would have otherwise been. I don’t think this is purely an ego-desire on my part, but rather a sincere desire to share my gifts, to fulfill the purpose I was born to fulfill. I am beginning to see, starting to know why I am here, and what it is that I wish to do with my remaining time.

We are more magnificent than we can imagine.

It is not difficult to waste one’s life on trivialities and petty dramas. People do it all the time. We humans are masters of making mountains out of molehills, and conversely, denying and covering up our actual pain and suffering so that we don’t have to deal with them. We are all grappling with being in these human forms, and the difficulties of embodiment on earth at this time. We are all aware of the consequences of this life: addictions, violence, separation, depression, suicide, dissolution, despair, desperation. What can we do, how can we deal with our anxieties and fears?

Everybody has a story to tell here. The biggest favor we can do for each other is to listen to another tell their story. Not with judgment or condemnation, but simply for the fact that they will heal by telling it, eventually. Many of us love to read stories, whether fiction or factual matters not. We love certain characters in a novel, play or movie because he seems all too familiar, because we see ourselves in her. My story is a little bit yours too. Okay, now I don’t feel quite so alone out here on the high seas of life. Your story has given me a lifeline, something I can hold onto, a way to help me get back to shore. When I am feeling low and alone, and like no one else in the universe cares or remembers that I exist, when eating alone the tenth night in a row is making me feel completely miserable, or when the demons come in the middle of night and attack me with their punishing thoughts, what can I do? Give in, lay down in a puddle on the floor and want to end it all? No. I will not give into fear and thoughts of hopelessness. Somehow I must find strength within myself to climb out of the hole, to hold on until the morning, to find hope that I will again one day be cooking for two or twenty. Because I am not only doing this work for myself, but for every other lonely and afraid human out there also. My struggle, my battle with the darkness of my soul is everyone’s battle. The single most important work that any of us can do now, is to embrace the love and light within ourselves, while acknowledging the darkness and pain there too, and work to find all the ways, big and small, to shine it upon the world. Every single day.

By now, I am way beyond self-help books and pep talks (even though I sometimes still read and listen to them.) Life is about more than that, and is much, much more complex. Good advice is all well and good, but the times are calling for something far deeper and greater. Our world needs compassion like never before. It can be the smallest gesture, a smile or a friendly greeting to another human as we walk down the street. It can also be simply noticing others, from people to the birds in the tree above your head. Every gesture counts. Every thought also.

When I learn how to truly love what is in my own heart, it will automatically free me to love everyone and everything else which appears to be outside of me. The illusion is that there is any separation. I love you.

<p style="font-size:15px" value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">[Note: This post comes from an older blog I had on WordPress, called <em>Clearskies, Bluewater. </em> I wrote the original post in January of 2014. In upcoming posts, I will be sharing some of the best writing from that blog with readers of <strong><em>interrelatedplanet.org.</em></strong> Thanks for reading and sharing.][Note: This post comes from an older blog I had on WordPress, called Clearskies, Bluewater. I wrote the original post in January of 2014. In upcoming posts, I will be sharing some of the best writing from that blog with readers of interrelatedplanet.org. Thanks for reading and sharing.]