having awoken to the collapsing ecological state of this moment, beginning to touch our grief, beginning, finally, to thaw out of paralysis as we recognise all the forces of denial that prevented action, we come to the edge of despair at the sheer enormity, the vast and multiple confluent crises. bleakness and doom. we see the weight of it on each other, and most especially in the eyes of our youth.
there’s fury, there is despondency.
but there’s also an ability to respond.
there’s bargaining.
but there’s also tremendous creativity and resourcefulness. there is what is called active hope*.
we must tread carefully now. pause— just a moment. it is not just our solutions that must follow a different pattern than the one that generated such distress. it is firstly our fundamental understanding of who we are, and through it, another comprehension of what healing looks like. if we have witnessed what appears to be spontaneous healing, we may already have an inkling of this.
when we say, this is collapsing, this is failing, when we hear that our economy uses this much energy and material, and the toxins, the pollution, the emissions, the human pressure is just too much, that we are a pox on the planet wherever we go and to sustain our lives we’d need multiple planets, that the answer is to discover, to innovate, or to suffer, to be deprived — wait.
wait. there are assumptions beneath those narratives and now, we must look squarely at them, and see a bigger picture and a smaller one at once. here is what i mean.
though science has come to see and to name and to prove so much, still much of what is, is unknown, even magical, outside of that way of knowing. even as science spirals around of late to recognise and ratify the inherent wisdom of ancient indigenous traditional knowledge and to affirm ideas that came from the margins of dominant culture, we see that the possibilities will surprise us. there really is life in the soil that holds the carbon cycle, water cycle, life cycle. the trees really do talk to each other. animals, plants, the microbes that sustain us, that make up half of our bodies, they really are kin. we have proof of ways of being and knowing that other cultures with other patterns took for truth and lived by, with better outcomes.
if we have witnessed chronic dis-ease that healed in what appears, staggeringly, as spontaneous, we know that creating the conditions for healing can catalyse something far bigger than the sum of its parts. what this language can only awkwardly call the mind-body, has emergent properties.
life’s desire to heal, its skill in doing so…stories of spontaneous healing that
can make no sense in a linear way. some people say that what we think of as ‘diseases’ are actually psychosocial in nature. the resolution is not at all what you would expect and can be astonishingly rapid to heal once the root is addressed.
if healing is becoming whole, then wholeness is certainly also what we are talking about here, in deep interconnection with all being. with great respect to bleaker perspectives, i also see that sometimes one’s hammer makes everything look like a nail- we must be careful–of unintended consequences which track patterns stuck in the conqueror model, the discoverer mode…and then to watch out to see who profits by it. who benefits on the other end from our fear?
we must act, urgently so, but in reinventing the fundamental pattern we also must address how we see our bodies and the earth. knowing that we have the capacity to restore a lush landscape that brings back rivers…to me that is regeneration that probably is not being accounted for.
so- yes. to touch our sorrow.
to face what is.
to move into action-
but also to recognise that we are part of something bigger with a tremendous and unknowable capacity for healing, for life. creating the conditions – i feel like a real examination of what conditions we have been creating, and why- is rich territory for healing.
so. are we sure this is terminal? are we sure even the accounting of what we currently use, and what we currently need, is based in any sort of model that would exist if we were collaborative, abundance-focused, purposed to meet the needs of all and affirm life with every decision? no, we are not.
perhaps, then, if we do this differently, premised on what is life-affirming, embracing of unknowable diversity and capacity for healing, if we dwell in wonder and possibility— as yet we have hardly tried!—if we recognise that between plunder and deprivation there are other stories, of collaboration and abundance and regeneration…i think we may have faith in ourselves to live in a way that heals, that becomes whole, that makes more life.
***
this letter is community-supported by patrons like you, who make possible new writing on the detailed theory and practice, in a word, praxis, of moving into regenerative futures. i would love to hear your thoughts on this new, patron-only piece. this piece is a potential page of a future book in the making and your feedback really matters.
look out for shareable, free letters ahead as well as these longer experiments, and if at any point you feel overwhelmed, do set your notifications to stop receiving emails and just choose to come log-in and read here or at patreon when you have the capacity. i will be here writing to you, whatever way you choose to engage. thank you for your faith in my small work*.
*the annotated appleturnover: i cannot recommend enough the free training on active hope, from joanna macy and chris johnstone. it has helped me enormously to process the darkest grief about our predicament and keep turning again toward possible futures.