the quandary we face now is that the climate and ecological crisis wasn’t caused by one thing and cannot be mended by one thing. it was made by a billion small and repeated actions and will be repaired in the same way.
yet perhaps what we can say about converging crises is that they all emerge from the same pattern of thinking, of being. they share a root pattern, and when we alter that pattern, we alter everything.
so while we cannot take one sweeping act to restore flourishing life, we can align every small act we take with another pattern. to understand that we have even been repeating a pattern and that there are other patterns that we could choose, this is transformative. this makes massive, distributed change actually within our reach.
what’s more, we comprehend viral cultural-economic-ecological shifts in a profoundly vivid way. our sense of how news spreads is palpable, a common experience. we know intimately, with our very beings, how a small action can erupt, and impact every life in every direction. we know that it can happen overnight, and that political will can flip like a switch. we know, in other words, our power.
a meme, in one of those digestible pop-culture nuggets of wisdom which emerge often sourceless and shared widely, pointed out that our stories of traveling to the past observe that any tiny change to that moment might have profound impact to the present moment, and yet we act as if we have little impact in this present moment upon our collective future. we have imagined this relationship to possibility, to impact, looking back, in our stories. we can feel it. the smallest act is bound to have tremendous consequence. now we must imagine this so vividly in looking forward.
to see clearly where we are and why, we must look at our patterns, unflinchingly. if the pain of the stories of the state we are all in does not obliterate our capacity to continue to feel, if we can touch that searing grief for a moment* and remain present to it even as we draw back in self-preservation, if we do not fashion our escape from it but rather, imagine another way of being with it, and transforming within it, then, then. then we can feel how powerful we are, all together. what we could do.
it may be that a great reluctance is intrinsically a great resistance, and the margins that have always resisted dominant culture are strengthened by its slow, stepping collapse. it may be that the conqueror-patterns that have proved again and again inherently to fail to thrive, they are loosening. the charm is wearing off. we can see it in a great turning away.
so, this is our moment. now, and now, and now. to know deeply that what we do matters, that we affect each other profoundly, that everything depends on us and what kind of life we culture today in every decision, every interaction. that every instance of cultivating another pattern, one based on meeting the needs of all that life, in reciprocity and mutual thriving, it spreads, it gives life to another way of being. so our thinking becomes matter, so our living becomes life. so, how we live matters.
this is the small work.
the criticism of small changes is the idea that they are not fast nor large enough to alter our course toward certain collapse. that we are recycling our bread bags while the oceans fill inexorably with plastics that rain down upon us.
or that we each of us are not responsible, culpable, that some corporate-governmental body profited and should be held accountable, a separate force from the rest of us, as if we are not all of us repeating the pattern of competition and extraction in all our everyday exchanges. because what else is there? the ceo who started that company was someone’s child, who was wholly cultured in this way of being. they embody our idea of success, conquering all. we make this story again and again.
now we can revive another, based on collaboration and collective thriving. on the idea that no one of us is successful if any one of us is going without our needs met. who are the children of that pattern? what does the earth look like when all the tiny exchanges are made in that image, of life flourishing in mutual support?
in this new story** there is no one to fight, no one to overthrow, no one to resist, because we all reenact the patterns of our culture and the pattern of fighting is itself the old story that only makes more of itself. we must learn the new pattern intimately and we can only do that by experimenting with it, playing with it, living with it. collaborating with it.
this is the small work. it is grassroots. it will root deeply, and rhizomatic it will reach widely, if we take the time to sow and tend it in all our everyday ways. its seeds will blow in the wind with weedy resilience and pollinate another way of being, carried on a billion wings, buzzing on the air.
what does your small work look like?
*see joanna macey, the work that reconnects, particularly activehope.training
**see charles eisenstein, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible
***
this piece is for you, dear patrons of the letters, with gratitude. thank you for supporting these works and drawing them out of me, through me.
what questions wake you in the night, about how we live, about the crises we face? i’d love to write in response to them.