Like weeds after a hard rain

https://backroad-life.tumblr.com/post/49138435651/rustic-country-blog

As some of you know, being a blogger is a mixed deal. Sometimes you’re super inspired and feel like what you have to say is important, fascinating even, and clearly people will want to read what you wrote. Other days, not so much. There are probably millions of blog posts devoted to this topic, with all sorts of cures for the blogger blues, ways to increase readership, drive people to your site, make them want to read YOUR post over the other fifty million out there in blogland. For whatever reasons, none of that really works for me. Maybe I just really don’t care that much about how much traffic I have, or how many readers are reading. It’s a paradox, alright.

During the past month, I became fascinated with the work of Jem Bendell, who wrote a paper titled Deep Adaptation, on how, after looking at a bunch of scholarly and scientifically sound research, he came to the conclusion that societal collapse is basically inevitable. What does this mean? To put it in a nutshell, he concludes that the kind of world we are all accustomed to living in, with all the benefits of modern society that we (mostly) take for granted every day of our lives, will become impossible to maintain and will collapse on itself. When will this breakdown occur? No one knows for sure. Some people think it could happen within decades, or even sooner. There is a Facebook page for people who are on board with Bendell’s analysis, that is a closed group you have to join. Naturally I joined it, so I could connect and see what others have to say about all of this. As you might expect, people are in various stages of agreement with the premise of societal collapse and the details.

This topic, and some of the comments people make on the Facebook group, seem a bit familiar to me. I am reminded of the period of time leading up to the year 2000, when many people were concerned about Y2K, another moment of societal doom. Back then, the theory went, the changeover from the 20^th century (1900s) to the new millennium (2000) was simply too much for all the world’s computers to handle, and so they would stop functioning. This would lead to world-wide disaster on a massive scale, so people had better prepare for the worst. Some folks stockpiled emergency food and water, fuel for generators (since the electric grid would surely be undone by the glitch), and all manner of survival gear. Then the moment arrived: the clocks turned from 11:59 on December 31, 1999, to 12:00 am, January 1, 2000. Fireworks exploded around the world, but the world’s electric grid and computer systems did not fail en masse. Miraculously, we all survived and continued. Thank goodness, and we still got to party.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that there is nothing to worry about, everything is fine, let’s continue to exploit, extract and plunder Earth like there is no tomorrow for our planet and ourselves. But, after reading some of the posts on Deep Adaptation, I have decided that I just cannot live life like an emergency is around every corner. I have also decided that my addiction to the daily news cycle is not only unhealthy, but in fact is poisonous.

Wise people throughout time have always known that there are really two main choices for how to live one’s life: through fear, or through love. Doomsaying and preparing for the end of life as we know it, at this stage, feels a lot like living through the fear lens. Living through the lens of love doesn’t mean one isn’t being smart, getting and giving support to others, finding creative ways to live with much less materiality, growing your own food if possible, stopping bad consumer habits, and protesting injustice. It means all those things, with the important addition of not focusing on the fear-induced What-if scenarios that seem to keep cropping up like weeds after a hard rain. We all know what a hard rain brings.

These are my rambling thoughts for tonight, dear Readers. This weekend was the celebration of Wesak, in which people around the world honor the Buddha’s birth, as well as all the venerated, ascended masters who have helped humanity over the eons of time. Humanity has been through so much in our long, extraordinary history. I may be an unrealistic idealist, but I am holding to the idea that we will make it through the coming decades, and society will change for the better. Change is inevitable, as is death. It is the nature of life on this planet. Let’s do what we can to stop fearing the future, and instead to imagine a more beautiful future world for our children, while doing the hard work of creating it.

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Stretching through Grief

image via Public Domain.net/ George Hodan

Here in the mid-March energies, few are not feeling the effects of the changes happening across our planet. In a profound sense, humanity is experiencing a tsunami of change. Yet, as humans being, well, human, we tend to dismiss, deny, disregard or discount what is actually happening here on Earth. The good news is, more and more are waking up and discovering that the Earth changes are real, not imagined. They are recognizing the need for massive changes to how we treat our world, each other, and ourselves. And while it’s hopeful to know all of this, knowledge alone doesn’t help with the intense emotions that accompany all this change.

Right now I am in a cycle of viscerally experiencing the tensions running extraordinarily high all around me. We all experience it in our own way, and for me it manifests as grief. There’s a lot to grieve in our present state—go to any reputable online news site and there is no lack of sad stories across the world. On Monday, for example, an airliner carrying 157 people from Ethiopia to Nairobi crashed, killing everyone on board. The daily news tells similar stories of unexpected death, destruction, injustice, corruption, abuse, inhumanity, and damage to Gaia in a nonstop stream. Even if a person has no interest in reading these reports, it’s basically impossible to avoid the knowledge of these chaotic times. It’s literally in the air we all share, the water we all use, and the common ground beneath our feet.

It can be difficult to know what to do with all the heavy energies around us. I read many blogs and watch select YouTube channels for encouragement and inspiration. Some days this helps, but other days nothing I read or listen to seems to touch the level of sorrow I feel regarding our world. Many times I read advice to the effect of, “Be joyful! The changes happening on Earth are necessary for the purging and cleansing of long-held negative and toxic energies that humans have held onto for eons of time. You cannot take the old energies with you into the new Earth, so it’s imperative to forgive others, forgive yourself, and release them.” I understand this logic with my mind, but right now I cannot feel joyful as I look at all the difficult life experiences we are enduring. There are times to grieve for what is being lost, and that’s how I’m personally experiencing what’s happening right now.

On this blog, I’ve posted recently about Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist who has made headlines around the world for her courageous school strikes in protest of the lack of action by world leaders. At the end of this week, on March 15^th, many thousands of school-aged children and youth are planning to strike for climate action all across the globe. Greta, in an interview with The Guardian this week, said she was excited about the strike, and that it will be fun. But she made no hopeful speech about the future of Earth for her generation. She clearly recognizes that by the time she reaches mid-life, the world is likely to be a very difficult place to live upon for nearly everyone. For those of us who also see that future as very likely, it’s a heartbreaking acknowledgment of how we’ve mistreated our home, and through our complacency and lack of care, have allowed the climate crisis to continue.

I am by nature an optimist and want, more than anything, to believe that solutions will come in time for the next generations of humanity to have a chance at a healthy world to live in and raise their children and grandchildren. But to be completely honest, it is becoming harder and harder to believe in a healthy future world in thirty, fifty, or a hundred years, without some seriously major changes on a global scale happening NOW. That is Greta’s message, and she speaks for many millions of people. As long as the majority of people in power do little to change policies, laws and regulations regarding fossil fuel use, the future scenarios we’ve all heard and seen of a dystopian world are likely to become reality.

When I look around at our planet, say on the internet, and see places that still hold such absolute beauty and majesty, are still relatively unspoiled by humanity’s activity and where wilderness is still alive, it makes me wonder how much longer will these places survive intact? Increasingly there is a split between the human-made world and the world of nature, to the point where now there are many humans who never experience wild places, or even touch the bare earth with their bodies. Through technology, people feel that they no longer need direct, sensory experience of nature because they can play virtual reality games which simulate those type of experiences. A whole generation of humans are now being raised in a virtual reality environment without direct knowledge of how it feels to simply be outside in a wild place, with all the sensory stimulus it provides. It’s the equivalent of eating fast food your whole life, never realizing that there is food available that’s natural, unadulterated, and nutritious. Having never experienced it, they don’t even know it exists or what they’ve missed out on all those years.

The premise of this blog is that all life on Earth is connected, that we are all joined in the great web of everything-that-is. When one is hurt, all feel it on some level, no matter to what degree. The thought of a future earth that is uninhabitable because it has become so damaged by thoughtless, careless human beings full of hubris who only focused on extracting the planet’s treasures without giving life back, is utterly unbearable. No one wants to live in such a world, so why are we living in such a way?

The fine line between self-deprecation and inflated egoism

I have a friend who is a blogger. Since 2017 I’ve been reading her posts, and have witnessed her progressive changes on both inner and outer levels. When we met, she was a die-hard meditator working at a meditation retreat center on the west coast, trying hard to love it and fit in with the culture. But once we had a few deeper conversations, I understood on a gut level that she wasn’t happy there and didn’t truly fit the peculiar mold of human that could stay at a place like that for any length of time. Sure enough, only a couple months after I left, my friend quit her position, packed up her stuff, and headed southwards to the Bay area. There she hooked up with some people who offer year-long, esoteric apprenticeships for those who desire to meet and work with their wild shadow self through lots of time spent in nature, rituals and circle work. Throughout the year she blogged about her journey, experiences and the emotional rollercoaster she rode throughout.

My friend is a prolific and eloquent writer. She writes from the depths of her passionate soul, and isn’t afraid to be painfully honest in her posts. She’s great at self-deprecation and describing the hard edges of her lived experience, in an effort to give the reader the full expression of her deep and often sorrowful soul life. She’s also quite funny, often irreverent, and sometimes names the tender wounding within our common experience in a remarkable way. Now that she’s gone through her initiation year, she’s changing the focus of her blog to be a guide for those who also wish to venture out into the wild nature alone and unaided. This is admirable and useful information to offer readers. However, she also continues to write her honest-to-a-fault blog posts for her faithful followers. She asked me for feedback about her new direction recently, which got me pondering.

The crux of the dilemma my friend had, and which I think many bloggers also have, is finding the balance between not coming off sounding like an egotistical, arrogant know-it-all, and writing in a way that is so honest and authentic that one ends up disparaging oneself, sounding either depressed, confused, or simply the polar opposite of an expert on the subject. This is an issue in the field of blogging and of writing nonfiction generally. What can be done?

This question begs us to go back to the roots and ask, Why am I writing what I am writing? What is the purpose of this blog at its core? Am I in a position to be an “expert” on this topic? And if so, then just how honest about the whole process should I be? Where is the line between authenticity and loss of respect? Between expertise and arrogance? Between not enough information and too much? The other important thing to consider in all this is, Who is my audience? What are they interested in? Am I writing to please them and keep them coming back for more of my blog posts, or am I writing what I please and if they like it fine, and if they don’t, that’s fine too?

These are real questions that all writers who are serious about their craft (in this case, blog) need to be asking themselves. And it’s good to recognize that the answers are dynamic and will change as you change and evolve yourself as a writer over time. There are several factors to consider around having a blog, such as, is my ultimate goal to have a solid and high number of followers? Do I want to make money off the blog (monetize it), and if so, how and for what purpose? Am I mostly interested in the literary value of the work and wish to offer readers something of value and quality when they take the time to read a post? Or, is my blog mostly for entertainment, news, or a how-to type blog? Then, there’s the question of mission and vision: is my blog a way to promote my business venture, used as a marketing tool? Is my blog centered around a noble aim, like social, racial, or environmental justice? Is my blog a platform for my deeply and passionately held political views? Or do I have a particular cause I am promoting or wanting supported, such as animal rescue, human trafficking, criminal justice or educational reform?

I think it’s safe to assume that most people who take the time to build a blog, write posts, and work to get a following, do it because they feel what they have to say is important to some people. It’s far too easy to compare my blog to another’s and feel that mine is sorely lacking. If I write posts that I consider to be high-quality content, yet only twenty or fifty people read them, compared to thousands who may read a travel, food or sports blog, chances are good I will get discouraged. perhaps even giving up on writing eventually. Blogging is a numbers game, among its other dimensions.

We are living in a world that values material success above all. Our heroes are the people who have made it—they’re rich (obscenely so, usually), physically perfect, usually under 35, and mostly famous. Look online for bestselling nonfiction books, and nearly all of them will be stories of the people who made it in the world, in one form or another. Which is fine, I suppose, except that for me there’s something simply not REAL about all of that. Is the purpose of life, of living, really to get rich, stay thin, ripped, and sexy, and be able to buy your happiness and anything else you want on a whim? Or could it be that there is much more to being a human incarnated on the planet now, a larger story unfolding that we have yet to truly understand?

Back to my friend’s blogging story. She asked for my opinion, so I told her that it seems at odds to have a blog that simultaneously offers expert advice and techniques for wild nature solo adventures, and also tells her personal story of loneliness, anger, fear and sorrow, interspersed with humor and moments of joy and bliss. But I could be totally wrong about that. Readers, what do you think? When you follow someone’s blog, what are you hoping to get out of it? Do you want their expertise? Or their brutal honesty? Or something in-between? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section, if you are willing to share with us here.