It has been some time since I last wrote. I have been taking my time over the months since I last wrote trying to work out what is next. Where to turn. What to become in this age of forces arraigned against those who would live contrary to the dominant narrative.
I still don’t know. Trying to pursue my gifts is becoming increasingly important to me, but I don’t know where to find them. I turn 48 in a couple of weeks, and I feel that every year I become less clear on my gifts. Less clear on how I can bring my full self to the world.
If I’m to be honest, I don’t much want the current industrial civilisation that dominates the world to continue. It seems increasingly obvious that the only way civilisation can continue is to exert complete control over the world, and the humans within it. And so it will be, instinctively executed by everyone who has a stake in the continuation of civilisation. Which is most, all willing executioners prepared to put humanity to the sword so that they avert their eyes from the sight of a world uncivilised.
This is difficult to exist within. What is my gift within a world that I believe does not deserve to continue? Is my gift abiding within, waiting to emerge upon the end of the world as we know it? What do I now? This is a dilemma, and one that I’m breaking my silence to explore.
Perhaps there is a need to usher in the new. To nurture the seeds planted in the world by those who also see this. To envision, and so create, a new world. I do see this new world. I do see a world where humanity transcends itself to remember its sacred purpose of stewarding the Earth into planetary transcendence. To live in small community across the Earth, each dedicated to Earth nurture in its place, to ensuring that every plant, animal, stone and drop of water is enlivened.
And so, each in our own way, each in accord with our own unique gifts, we enhance the divinity of the world. The world is born divine, and humanity is here to bring the world’s divinity to ever higher note. To do this, of course, we need to move beyond this world that seems born of millennia of trauma that is handed down and amplified through the generations. I don’t know how to do this.
In fact, I don’t know how to do much at all other than see that something is deeply wrong in the world and yearn for a way to help remedy it. At the moment I’m left with writing. Is that useful? Knowing how much nurture I receive from Charles Eisenstein, Paul Kingsnorth, Johan Eddebo and others, then this might suffice. It will have to, for now, because I have nothing more to give.
That’s not quite true. I can grieve, I can mourn, I can revel in the mystery that abides even as it comes under the full force of the machine world. I can be as true to myself as is possible in a world that would seek to bring us all to heel. I can search the world for a place to call home, both physically and figuratively.
I can do all of these things, and I can do them through my writing. I have been doing it for some time now through my poetry, roughshod and slab hewn as it is, though I have never shared the poems with the world at large. They hide within plain site on a public blog, concealed by the vast wash of words that swill around the internet, and they are a small source of pleasure for me, their author.
I’ll close now. It seems the height of futility to conclude, when confronted by a world fast going mad, that the best I can do is write. To bear witness, and not even that. To record the passing of a world and birthing a new, perhaps, and so contribute to the creation of that new.
It seems the height of futility, however it is what I can do. It is all I have to offer.