While I don’t agree that we can predict in any certain manner, what’s going to happen re: climate change, or when, I do feel that grappling with the largest idea of all, that we may be headed for extinction, can immeasurably deepen our experience of aliveness. Just as, when someone finds out that their body has engaged with a terminal disease suddenly wakes up to the beauty of life, to the exquisite poignancy of the open-petaled flower, the hummingbird hovering over it, the waving forest of grasses hiding scurrying insects below, the mushrooms sprouting up from tree roots that tap Nature’s healing nourishing minerals and fluids and shoot their branches to the life-giving Sun — we witness and bow to the glory of endless phenomena as it perishes before our eyes, dissolving into the moment. We can do that. We must do that, if we are to re-enter our original communion with the natural world.
The kind of writing that this author gifts to us bespeaks a heart that is open, wounded, and willing to surrender. Grateful.
Radical Embrace: Breaking the Cycle of an Unfertile Demise
September 27, 2013
by Jack Adam Weber
Excerpts:
The repressed dark night — which when embraced on a regular basis profoundly heals — and all her power and rage are upon us now. This is not negativity; this is the divine power of the Great Mother here to shut down the light-loving, sun-only worshippers of all kinds — the Industrial Revolution optimists, the neurotic meaningless-manufacturing entrepreneurs, the fundamentalists, the GMO liars, the clueless capitalists, the fracking-fools, pharma-fanatics, the worshippers of chemistry and “convenience,” the happy-obsessed, and the new-agers — who have all reigned for too long.
. . .
Unless we can miraculously reverse the trend of climate change, something has to give. We need a cure, if only to embrace of our own dignified surrender, which is not to give up, per se, but to concede what we can no longer change. What we deny and repress cannot be transformed; whatever we consciously embrace is yet potentially fertile, especially that which is dark.
. . .
None of this is easy. But it can get easier. We all still have to make a living, and we need things, but it seems the only way to make headway is to give up living luxuriously and to live with scarcely a surfeit of anything, except courage and care and some other c-words. Taking a vow of material poverty is a rich thing—not to pursue poverty as a goal, but to accept it as a consequence of breaking the hamster cycle of (arrows mean “engenders/creates”): denial of pain/fertile darkness > irrational fear/insecurity > imagined need > unfulfilling work > dirty money > more denied pain (suffering), guilt, and remorse > consuming to numb, maintain excesses, and avoid our pain and fertile darkness underneath our habits and unsustainable culture.
. . .
We need a new cycle, something to the tune of: caring enough to challenge ourselves into extreme simplicity > frees up our need to make so much money > creating more room for meaningful work that might pay little or nothing and with time to heal our inner-life complexities > time to create and live more earnestly, creatively, and essentially > time and space to sink into and be passionately reborn from the passion of heartbreak and fertile darkness > money enough to survive and to fund direct, potently sustainable endeavors > consuming to survive and thrive in outward simplicity, and to celebrate nature and one another with the deep-down good feeling that we are acting with wisdom for now and a hundred years from now. This is not hippie talk; it is cutting edge survival strategy.
