A great conversation -- reaching some simple but startling revelations. The importance of a practice and devotion to attentiveness in our daily activities -- at base attentiveness to the world, to Anima Mundi. The importance of knowing in our heart, our gut, that we have deep rivers of longing as Homo sapiens. And consequentially we are all searching for that house of belonging. John O’Donohue, David Whyte, and Francis Weller all speak to this in their writings.
This is where our culture has failed us miserably. An act of faith, of trust, of stepping off...into the unknown. In my lifetime their have been two seminal events where I had to dig down deep and let go (let go of my life as I knew it, let go of most of my beliefs and ways of thinking as I knew them, embrace the totality of the unknown that was presenting itself to me on a daily basis.)
The first time was in my late 20’s, when I got in my car, with a bottle of Wild Turkey between my legs, and drove to the Detox at my local hospital. Once I parked took the last swig or two from the bottle and went through the doors and admitted myself. I was scared to death, had no clue what life without substances would look like. Yet I never looked back. My life changed in ways I could never have imagined over the next 15 years.
The second time, was the sudden death of my wife in the Fall 2019. The night of the day she died I wandered the quiet country dirt road that I lived on shouting and crying into the brilliant glistening starlit sky. I knew in every fiber of my being that I had entered that terrain of the unknown once again. In that moment I vowed to embrace the mystery -- that this would become the most incredible journey of my life. That my grief would show me the way if only I gave it my absolute trust, my absolute attention.
Here I am. Thank you -- Charles, we are on the same path. In this journey I am finding others. This gives me comfort, this helps me to believe that the house of belonging is getting closer and closer. The foundation is being formed by our collective suffering, our collective grief and with a clear and present vision of the great mystery that settles on the horizon.
I feel there is wisdom to be found in the prophecy of Prophecy Of The Seventh Fire ( for a brief video description of the prophecy: https://vimeo.com/198949676 ) in how it invites us to trace the path back to the way of our ancestors and pick up the pieces they left for us that we intuitively feel will serve us as we strive to walk to soft and green path (rather than the jagged and burnt path).
For me, the burnt and jagged path (which is described by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her description of the prophecy above) is the path of addiction, commodification, reductionism, hyper-centralized control and statism (I feel you described many facets of it well in your articulation of the additions of our modern day industrial society and their potential trajectory in your Climate book).
Embarking on what you have described as a "new and ancient way" and walking in the footsteps of our ancestors means taking those leaps of faith (which can take the form of the courageous choices that Mark described in his comment above) and trusting the mystery and the proclivity for synchronistic guidance from Creator to align our path and our communities in a way that nourishes, heals and enriches.
Since many of our ancestors (well, all of them if you go back far enough) lived in stateless societies (many of which persisted and prospered with relative peace/equality for centuries) this is one of the perspectives of our ancestors that I feel called to pick up now as we embark upon what the Potawatomi describe as the soft and green path.
I elaborate on why I feel this is an essential pathway and leap of faith that all who claim to live by the permaculture ethical compass must take now if we truly want to make our actions aligned with our words and lend our energy towards healing and protecting her ecosystems in the essay linked below.
"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment" (Rumi's words) have always helped me turn down the light on my ego attachment to knowing or mastering. AND the remedy as "attention" is a great suggestion.
AND I also I experience a dose of honey-like softening to my nervous system in the rituals of my life; be they strictly ruled (Japanese Tea Ceremony or Zazen) or casually indulged (napkins on the table for diner, make my bed each morning). Trying not to fight the change, chaos, dis-integration while also reaching my hands out when hearts engage in good times (births, celebrations, rain showers) and arms around when the heart is engaged (death, loose, collapse) when I remember. And also clicking my seat belt for the ride.
Everything rises and falls. Certainly permanence is an illusion - but a useful illusion (one could say) for our fragile nervous systems. And perhaps our imperfect attempts at ritual are similarly useful, until they are not. Some of us consider ritual as a way to both align with and navigate the ever flowing of conditions and causes.
btw- The God I believe in works in and through the whole shebang: me, and you, and them, and everything else. I don't believe in some divine blueprint trying to climb to the surface from the morass.
You put into eloquent words the lessons of my 84 years of living. I am grateful. I feel less alone and more attuned to as I walk through my remaining days because of these words. Keep them coming.🦋🌀🌳♥️Diana
Wonderful, wonderful. Only one thing: "It may seem, from the infant's point of view, that he's achieving something. But in fact, the mother is doing almost all the work." Well - I had two children and never in my life have I had a stronger experience of NOT doing the work but it being done unto me, as when I was giving birth to those two. There was nothing I could do to stop the process, or to change it, or to speed it, or to slow it down, or whatever: there was only surrender to the amazingly vehement process itself. Which was life, I suppose, wanting to expand itself. So what does that mean about the birth of a new culture? Maybe it just happens? Let's relax into the happening?
But my daughter who has five children did not agree with me. She said: "We're all so far estranged from nature that it may seem that you as a mother are not actively involved in it. But if you connect more to the natural process you start to feel that you ARE the one who does it." Fair enough! So if we connect more to the big changes in our culture we can both feel that it is happening and feel that we are actively doing the change.
To answer your question: “ I wonder if this is all way too abstract for Substack? It's getting very mystical..”
I feel we need the mystical part more now, so go on please.
All is worth re-reading it a few times but I quote:
“.. Instead of striving, the yearning for a new culture has to source down to this level. As I said before, it's really a yearning for home… home is within… we actually are home. Physically, we're embodied here. We've just been distracted from it a lot… take ownership of your power of attention.”
The only controlling we can do is choosing where we put our attention. Yes! It took decades of spiritual seeking for me to admit/realize/see/resign myself to that there is no rudder on my boat. Well, more finely put, there appears to be a rudder, and I can grasp it and move it about in a manner of steering, but it doesn't actually reach into the water, and so it doesn't actually steer the boat. I will never forget the moment this realization landed fully within me, not as an idea, not as a system of belief, but as an embodied observation of how things really are, how things work around here, how things have worked my whole life, even as I was so busy seriously and studiously grasping onto the rudder and navigating with all my might, using a useless rudder. Wow! The world became soundless, meaningless, in that single flash of awakening.
Anyhoo... yes to all that you're saying here, Charles. The self-conscious silliness of groups of humans inventing new 'meaningful' rituals is so transparently trivializing to me. Life is living us. We are being breathed, we are not breathing. If we all could just STOP, let life seek us, find us, rather than us striving to find life, to make it meaningful, instantly so much of our foolishness would fall away as the useless stuff it is. This works both on an individual level and on a cultural one. We will invent and adapt new Earth-friendly, life-friendly rituals (and culture) once we return our attention to what is real. And, yes, I agree, in our returning to reality, there will most likely be first a period of mourning, of pain, and not-knowing (which can be terrifying to our minds). Which is ironic, of course, because, all along, all this time, our culture has not really known anything.
But these same rituals as trivial as they may seem to you also can serve well as simple ways to call ourselves to attention. To be fully present. I know many that seemed silly when i started them 20 years ago. And now they are no longer silly at all.
Interesting point, and, yes, they can be helpful in the way you describe. To me, they can work (and have) on an individual basis. In groups, I've seen, say, short silent meditation or guided mediation work as a way to aid participants in arriving more bodily and becoming present. What I mean to say is that sometimes they work and sometimes they don't as individual aids. Do they work as 'community builders' though? Not to me, not as that.
I have seen them as powerful tools for community building in my work and neighborhood. But then again my context is likely radically different than yours.
What we pay attention to creates us and culture arises organically from what we pay attention to and how we interpret it. Also what we persistently deny eventually bites us on the butt. That is my take away Charles and I absolutely agree. As to the berry analogy, I have been one with alpine blueberry people for forty years and I can testify that what you say is true. If you are paying attention in nature or anywhere really, you are imprinted; sometimes willingly, sometimes not For me this is just as often curse as blessing since we now live in a world massively, toxically full of unhealthy things to imprint upon and boy do they stick with you . This is why my elders relied so heavily on prayer to protect them from being overloaded by the toxicity they were forced to absorb every day just to survive. And that really is the purpose of ritual, to put us back into right relationship with all that is and not be bogged down by that which we cannot control. Personally I would caution those who are ultra sensitive to be very very careful about when, where and how to step over that ledge into a brave new world. It takes alot of trust and faith in self and Spirit to do this healthfully.
While I think we collectively create culture some of what individuals, or a group of them, might do will have a greater impact on culture than others. I had too much to say here so published it here.
Your writing always makes me think. Thank you. And the comments always make me sad. Culture grows out of the abundance of whatever method each of us chooses to grow our individual heart's ability to connect to others. Hearts create culture whether they're empty, confused, distracted or loving. Our power lies in our hearts, not our brains. Beliefs, religions, religious sects, politics and rituals are what brains use to create communities around specific methods because that's what egos do. But our hearts need to direct our egos. When communities get lost in the fight about methods, it's because the purpose of hearts has been devalued. Whatever method each of us, personally, chooses to feel love, appreciation, compassion and kindness for others, we need to use. Each moment we spend trying to convince anyone to use our method is a moment wasted. Righteousness helps no one. Simply share the love your method grows in you. Show, don't tell. People will ask about your beliefs/method when they feel loved.
This post made me ask myself, “What is the central ritual of my life?” I realized it was the same one my grandmothers practiced. The one on one strengthening encounter with God in the lift of my attention to him with resultant rise of the Holy Spirit in my heart. As Jesus said “pray to your Father in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” and “how much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit”. Thank you. I was refreshed and renewed in simplicity.
“The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic ‘ideas’ and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth— that to live is to feel oneself lost— he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.” - Jose Ortega y Gasset
Reading this shortly after listening to Charles's dialogue with Iain McGilchrist, I hear the echoes of Iain's dictum that "attention is a moral act". And also what Thich Nhat Hanh says about dwelling truly in the present moment. But while we all have our favourites teachers and guides, it's good to be reminded that what comes in future won't be based on any blueprints they might give us but on the kind of letting go into the unknown that Charles is talking about.
This was an interesting conversation. However, I was very surprised that nothing was mentioned about conditioning, and especially pre-verbal trauma. Because of the consequences of trauma, especially pre-verbal trauma, we don't always have a connection to conscious choices which will affect our being at a deeper level. We need to be more connected to the deeper parts of bodily knowing, but trauma has disconnected us from that. Please consider what happens when an infant is repeatedly not given what it needs. Eventually the body shuts down, and when cognition comes into play it takes over. Now the child deals with issues cognitively, rather than thru bodily knowing. This will have an impact on intuition and various kinds of non-cognitive knowing. Even ritual will become a cognitive process, and therefore not have the same energy that a non-cognitive process would offer, and it would have a very different place in our lives.
I was born in 1940, the smaller of 2 identical twins. At that time, attachment was not considered important. I was put in an incubator for 3 weeks. As a teenager, I never felt what hunger was like, as well as many other situations that I was unable to respond to from my own knowing. When I began meditating, it took me a year to feel my belly breathing. Please learn about the importance of this through Gabor Mate's book 'The Myth of Normal'. It's all about our culture!
Some good stuff here. There's a powerful desire coursing through the human soul, one which transcends political and religious divides, to live in a more enchanted, more living reality. Our intuition tells us this is the world we're meant to live in, that this *is* the real reality. Our cultural priors all tell us this is so much nonsense, that ultimate reality is nothing but quarks and energy potentials. We grasp after control even as we yearn to slip free from the web of control ... our search for safety, for certainty (and these are the same thing) becomes a prison.
So how to escape? That's the question that preoccupies us. LARPing as Native Americans (the left-coded response) or Vikings or traditional Catholics (the right-coded response) is unsatisfying, it doesn't feel authentic, we're just play-acting, deep down we know it's just a game. We can't design our way out of it: a story that we know is just a story doesn't have the power of a Story. So, wat do? How to crack the eggshell? Hm. But then, if such games are merely play, is not play how children prepare for adulthood?
Yet, it is happening despite ourselves. And in a couple hundred years we will laugh at the things we are now discovering as real. Best keep that a secret though!
Fascinating walk through cultural deconstruction. I am more optimistic, if that is the correct word. My God of creation, the Jesus of the Bible has more evidence of him and his mastery over the act of creation than ever before. So that part of my culture is more secure than ever. As for the destruction of our biosphere, satellite images reveal the great gaseous fertilizer called carbon is making the biosphere literally greener than ever. As for the tiny increase in global temperatures, they are a welcome end to the global cooling that started a few hundred years after the vikings discovered and named a northern island for what it was then, Greenland. My family annals mention a summer 80 years ago that was a continuation of winter. Al Gore's hockey stick shaped warming chart was fraudulent then and not born out by time. I think the authors of substance are in fact writing about the ancient but true battle between the forces of Good and Evil described in the Garden of Eden. What's happened over the past few decades however is that the evil forces have gained the upper hand in our western due to the collapse of the ethics based on our judeo-christian values. The collapse of ethics that resisted sex outside marriage also resisted skewing and repressing truth in the sciences including medicine. When you review the global warming sciences through a filter of ethics the world is a much better place with lots of room for optimism not the despair our children are growing up with. Scientists are far from unanimous in climate extremism.
When I talk about the destruction of the biosphere, I'm not talking about global warming. I'm talking about the poisoning with pesticides and toxic waste, the draining of wetlands, the razing fo forests, the pumping dry of aquifers, the decimation of whales and fish, and all the other forms of ecocide. This earth is a gift from the Creator. We did not earn it; it is a gift. Therefore we do insult or honor to the Creator by the way we treat that gift.
Sep 26, 2023·edited Sep 26, 2023Liked by Charles Eisenstein
I also have issues with the current politically motivated climate change agenda. However as both Carter and Theo. have said in their own replies, the progressive destruction of our local ecosystems is blatantly apparent to anyone willing to look. I live in what is supposed to be and has been for many thousands of years, the PNW coastal rainforest. It is quite literally no longer a rainforest. 10 years of drought stress, forest fires, disease, over logging and over development have dramatically changed the landscape here in a very short span of time. This area was known for generations as the asbestos forest, meaning you could not get it to burn it was so continually waterlogged. That is no longer true. The salmon could not get up the rivers and the creeks this summer because there was almost no water flow. The river was full of algae, the mountains that should be snow capped even in summer were bare rock and the glaciers are visibly shrinking. I am watching the red cedar trees die by inches all around me becuase they did not evolve for drought, they evolved for cool moist summers and we have not had that in almost a decade now. Many of my own native elders prophesied these tragedies for hundreds of years. They watched the destruction happening all around them and broadcast many warnings about this.
I agree that it is not useful to scare the children and I am quite upset that we seem to somehow be expecting the young to fix this without making the changes we ourselves need to make. However this is real and it is happening. Whether one believes as my elders did that Mother Earth herself will right the balance eventually; or one beleives that God will fix the problem, we need changes on multiple levels, culturally, scientifically, spiritually, emotionally, etc. The reason I follow Charles, even tho his approach is not really my style, is because I believe he is correct in that we ourselves have the ability to create the change we want by becoming more and more conscious of ourselves and our world. This is very difficult and painful and is not for the faint hearted. Eventually one hits the wall and then one must give it up to Spirit or whomever, but we must take self-reponsibility first. As my elders used to say, don't bother God with what you can manage yourself. Having been raised in the rural fundamental bible belt, I have seen that there can be a strong tendency to use the bible/religion to justify or explain away pretty much anything.
I'm intensely skeptical of the global warming narrative myself. Data just doesn't add up. However, I think the reason it has been so memetically successful is that it speaks to a deep intuition shared by almost everyone that the biosphere is being ruined by human activity. Not carbon emissions, but endocrine disruptors, hormone mimickers and blockers, micro plastics, PFAS, etc., to say nothing of the vast quantities of synthetic poison that have adulterated the food supply. This is affecting our health at a deep biological, even epigenetic level.
Then of course there is the deeply unnatural lifestyle - isolated in suburbs or apartment blocks, sedentary jobs sending emails, voyeuristic recreation staring at screens. It's no accident that the urban and suburban office worker is the most prone to falling for global warming. That narrative says that with just a few technological fixes, electric cars and such, we can continue our industrial lifestyle and not worry about the other things we're doing that are ruining our bodies and spirits. It's a cope for those most deeply embedded in the system.
Fully agree. And will add, framing ecological degradation as "global warming" feeds the idea that, well, we can solve it with better "air conditioning." I mean it literally and figuratively. Literally, people across vast swaths of this country barely venture outdoors for months at a time, trapped indoors with their AC. Figuratively: geoengineering schemes to cool the earth, and "climate-friendly" policies to cut carbon, most of which enable and even contribute to the continued toxic pollution and destruction of the environment. Example: razing forests to erect fields of solar panels. Expanding mining all over the earth to get lithium.
Yes it was overblown but sadly there is a core of truth to it all. For over three years folks up here have been fighting the national forest service so called 'thinning' project involving 70 million acres of our public forest. They will actually be logging living trees up to eighty years old in some insane attempt to artificially 'manage' what little mature forest we have left. They are going to be taking out much more than dead trees and I am very much afraid that in the end it is more than just dead trees Gates wants to bury. The forest service is actually framing this destruction in such wonderful green sustainability language, including Gates part in this, it actually makes me ill to open the emails from them. I won't even get into how much fossil fuels will be used and how much damage to the forest itself will be involved in transporting and burying massive amount of trees, either green or dry.
While global warming is obviously true, regardless of its cause, there is no doubt, as you say, "that the biosphere is being ruined by human activity." It is the corporate capture of industry, government and science to skew it all towards profits. The mechanism of power is their issuing of all the money as debt and due to compounding interest there is way more debt than money. World debt is 303 trillion while the world money supply is only 82 trillion. Money is a social power, it is the governing factor, as such it should be for public benefit as its first use, its first cause, not for private gain. As Frederick Soddy wrote, "To allow it to become a source of revenue to private issuers is to create, first, a secret and illicit arm of the government and, last, a rival power strong enough ultimately to overthrow all other forms of government." I think we need to change this to give us the space to create culture.
Does it not give you pause that the very financial interests that rule the world through debt are using their controlled media, universities, and governments to push the global warming narrative with a single voice?
I review the global warming sciences through the filter of going outside and seeing whether I like the changes 🤔
And it's gotten to the point where I've literally been dreaming of snow multiple times this year because the winters have been so non-wintry the past few years. Where I am in the mid-Atlantic there was effectively no snow at all last winter for the first time in my life. The old winter pattern has been replaced by mild weather most of the time interspersed with a few short periods of freezing wind so harsh that it has repeatedly torn up trees that stood undamaged for decades prior.
Meanwhile the summers have been too smokey to breathe comfortably in for the first time in my life while at the same time being so persistently humid that we've had to buy a dehumidifier to keep the mold at bay. The insect population has been very noticeably diminished, with even the mosquitoes making a delayed and underwhelming showing this year, not to speak of the missing fireflies or the caterpillars or the various beetles that I could expect to come in regular waves when I was younger.
Maybe all the evidence of my eyes is local, but I don't think you can get those kinds of persistent and obviously negative local changes without some questionable global changes going on around the same time.
And maaaybe you could argue that in principle the level of warming and the kinds of pollution the world is seeing aren't inherently detrimental to life, but in practice it does seem to be where I'm at, if only because it's happening too quickly at the moment for things to adjust.
Moreover, if you're coming at this from a Christian perspective, it seems very odd to me to pair that with an optimistic perspective on climate and the state of things. Haven't Christians been warning everyone that the world was going to heck in a handbasket because of humanity's sinfulness and that the end of the world was just around the corner for the past 2,000 years? I was raised Christian so I remember that, and even back then I was little I was a bit confused at how the adults could abruptly turn around and argue to death against what was just about the same notion they were espousing whenever non-Christians were the ones espousing it.
I think it is an apocalypse, the “lifting of the veil” on the crimes of the usurious power elite, the reality of the system under which we live, a reality we reject in favor of a more caring system. It is the end of their world order in order to establish a new one, one that gets us back to the Garden. I saw a TikTok video the other day of a young woman saying that the reason why change is afoot is because more and more people are able to see through the lies they are being told. That sounds like a paradigm shift. Yes, the truth will set us free to create a new culture.
Thank you again for your post and taking the time to engage my thoughts. I remember more fireflies too. Some insects, maybe some you mention, are unfortunately moving north, with our warmth, things like Lyme disease that was not in Ontario prior, and some invasive species eating certain trees here and in the Western Canada forests. One can see vast patches of dead coniferous attacked by a beetle that used to be held at bay during more bitter winters. My son in law in snow removal says winter is milder, over his 20 years experience, meaning more ice and less snow. My POV is that malevolent people and forces have fanned this flame of concern into full blown irrational fear by intentionally withholding data that would present a more optimistic picture. (diminishing their power) Your ocean coast, perhaps where you live, was underwater your government says in the geologically speaking time period, recent past. (see eastern seaboard coastline map at my substack "Unmasking 4 ways politics masquerading as science..") When living in that fear the public caves into otherwise poor government planning and onerous taxation. eg, Stopping the use of plentiful, clean and cheap natural gas to heat homes even while there is insufficient electricity to replace it. Mandating electric cars even when 70 +/_ percent of the nightly charge comes from Natural gas created electricity and 90% of the battery materials come from unethical sources, ie children in flip flops mining poisonous materials (see same substack) Its always the "little guy" that suffers as governments mandate, to reduce carbon, a 30% reduction in fertilizer meaning higher prices at the store. ..... As for the Christian aspect, I know what you mean about being taught that the world is going to heck in a handbasket so just focus on Jesus. I don't believe Jesus wants that attitude or the actions it fosters. In Jesus' day, shortly after he had risen, one group gave up working and sat down waiting for his return. (as you note-awaiting his return for 2000) The book of James calls them out on that saying get back to work, "If you don't work you don't deserve to eat" and "If a man doesn't look after providing for his family he is worse than a non-believer". I recently took a year of study to become a Colson Christian World view fellow which is all about working hard to make the world a better place now. (Redeeming our culture) I agree with your comment that Christian youth weren't taught to do that. Youth in my day- 50 years ago- were encouraged to become pastors- good- but not Hollywood writers and content creators. Bad. Now we are working on redeeming culture with aspirational productions like "Sound of Freedom". Additionally, what I learned in my Colson fellows study is that no culture outside of a Bible based culture, historically speaking, actually provides for the freedom and economic growth at the personal level we all desire. Colson's "How Now Shall we Live" maps that out better than I can. Yes the Colson of the Nixon/ Watergate infamy. While a culture may survive fa few decades as it slides off its biblical foundations, it ultimately sinks into tyranny as the western world is doing now. Why? Without the self restraint fostered by one's own belief in the "do not steal" (your neighbor's corvette or his wife, or his real estate thereby enshrining property rights) or tell lies, plus the golden rule, (which Jesus used to summarize Moses' prior 10,) "love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself" we need more government/control with more power and more police. We all can likely agree that to the degree we obey those commandments we need less policing, fewer lawyers and judges, and less government meaning we are left with more freedom and more money in our pocket. And so the mess we are in now from my POV comes out of the collapse of ethics leading to broken science and diminished health, ultimately fueled I think by the elite who genuinely believe we must de-populate to save the planet. Again, that notion is "supported" by skewed and incomplete science. I don't recall the source of the stat but something like all the worlds population -cities- can exist in a place the size of Florida. There is lots and lots of land left and science is growing ever more in less geography- e.g. tunnel green houses in northern England and my own province of Ontario. But to de-populate we create a safe and effective "vaccine" that reduces women's fertility and maims babies. See recent substack "naomi wolf, the-covenant-of-death". There is no doubt in my mind that all this is simply a continuation of what started in the Garden of Eden with Satan, in disguise, asking- not telling- asking if Adam and Eve could be sure they could trust God's simple one and only rule. That doubt led to their failure. They failed and so do we. But we still get to walk with God in his albeit diminished garden as they did, we are still to look after it (the biosphere) but yes with more thistles and rocks to pick through. I look forward to reading more of your posts
You write "...authors of substance are in fact writing about the ancient but true battle between the forces of Good and Evil described in the Garden of Eden. What's happened over the past few decades however is that the evil forces have gained the upper hand in our western due to the collapse of the ethics based on our judeo-christian values."
I'm grateful that ethics based on values that entitle humans to dominion over the rest of Nature, are collapsing. Perhaps authors of substance could attempt a re-write.
A new coyote warning sign appeared a few days ago in a nearby ravine along a waterway that is no more than 100 yards/meters from children playing, library, homes and stores. A walkway runs through the middle. A coyote and her baby offspring were photographed earlier residing in it. A mother coyote will happily snatch a baby person or dog to help her feed her pups. In the past animal control would have been instructed by our town to trap the coyote and pups and move them further from humans for their safety and ours. Not so today. Humans are considered the invasive species to "mother earth". Overall, humans are not given permission by the writers of the Bible to ravage and destroy planet earth- God's gift to us. We are to be "stewards" not owners of it.
Meaning-making and ritual are rooted in our actual relationship with our living environment — where the food, water, medicine, shelter, beauty, actually come from, and what we create and give in return.
When food is shipped in boxes across the world, grown and processed in ways that very few people can bear to behold, as are building materials, medicines, etc, the culture must necessarily be a facade, with no true roots and no true nourishment. In a city, one can choose between "Mexican food" or "Italian food" or "Indian food"; originally, people ate what grew or lived near them or was brought over through relationships with others. This was the basis of their culture; the songs and rituals grew like branches and leaves. They were not trying to be authentic; if the roots are no longer intact, any attempt to be authentic can only ever be a re-enactment. A re-enactment may be better than nothing, but it only kicks the can further down the road towards collapse.
Culture is, fundamentally, the cyclical reciprocal cultivation of the earth, which cultivates us in turn. It is a mirror facing a mirror, and both aspects always change simultaneously. The despair of ecological degradation on one hand and spiritual degradation on the other hand are actually the keys to one another, and the answer to our longing is found where they meet.
I've come back to this comment Like 3 times now. It rings so true. "If the roots are no longer intact, any attempt to be authentic can only ever be a re-enactment". Thank you :)
A great conversation -- reaching some simple but startling revelations. The importance of a practice and devotion to attentiveness in our daily activities -- at base attentiveness to the world, to Anima Mundi. The importance of knowing in our heart, our gut, that we have deep rivers of longing as Homo sapiens. And consequentially we are all searching for that house of belonging. John O’Donohue, David Whyte, and Francis Weller all speak to this in their writings.
This is where our culture has failed us miserably. An act of faith, of trust, of stepping off...into the unknown. In my lifetime their have been two seminal events where I had to dig down deep and let go (let go of my life as I knew it, let go of most of my beliefs and ways of thinking as I knew them, embrace the totality of the unknown that was presenting itself to me on a daily basis.)
The first time was in my late 20’s, when I got in my car, with a bottle of Wild Turkey between my legs, and drove to the Detox at my local hospital. Once I parked took the last swig or two from the bottle and went through the doors and admitted myself. I was scared to death, had no clue what life without substances would look like. Yet I never looked back. My life changed in ways I could never have imagined over the next 15 years.
The second time, was the sudden death of my wife in the Fall 2019. The night of the day she died I wandered the quiet country dirt road that I lived on shouting and crying into the brilliant glistening starlit sky. I knew in every fiber of my being that I had entered that terrain of the unknown once again. In that moment I vowed to embrace the mystery -- that this would become the most incredible journey of my life. That my grief would show me the way if only I gave it my absolute trust, my absolute attention.
Here I am. Thank you -- Charles, we are on the same path. In this journey I am finding others. This gives me comfort, this helps me to believe that the house of belonging is getting closer and closer. The foundation is being formed by our collective suffering, our collective grief and with a clear and present vision of the great mystery that settles on the horizon.
So beautiful. Thank you for sharing your story. The house of belonging, yes.
I feel there is wisdom to be found in the prophecy of Prophecy Of The Seventh Fire ( for a brief video description of the prophecy: https://vimeo.com/198949676 ) in how it invites us to trace the path back to the way of our ancestors and pick up the pieces they left for us that we intuitively feel will serve us as we strive to walk to soft and green path (rather than the jagged and burnt path).
For me, the burnt and jagged path (which is described by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her description of the prophecy above) is the path of addiction, commodification, reductionism, hyper-centralized control and statism (I feel you described many facets of it well in your articulation of the additions of our modern day industrial society and their potential trajectory in your Climate book).
Embarking on what you have described as a "new and ancient way" and walking in the footsteps of our ancestors means taking those leaps of faith (which can take the form of the courageous choices that Mark described in his comment above) and trusting the mystery and the proclivity for synchronistic guidance from Creator to align our path and our communities in a way that nourishes, heals and enriches.
Since many of our ancestors (well, all of them if you go back far enough) lived in stateless societies (many of which persisted and prospered with relative peace/equality for centuries) this is one of the perspectives of our ancestors that I feel called to pick up now as we embark upon what the Potawatomi describe as the soft and green path.
I elaborate on why I feel this is an essential pathway and leap of faith that all who claim to live by the permaculture ethical compass must take now if we truly want to make our actions aligned with our words and lend our energy towards healing and protecting her ecosystems in the essay linked below.
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/why-involuntary-governance-structures?
Thank you for your candor & heart- keys to the abyss of the entry hall to the house of belonging
"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment" (Rumi's words) have always helped me turn down the light on my ego attachment to knowing or mastering. AND the remedy as "attention" is a great suggestion.
AND I also I experience a dose of honey-like softening to my nervous system in the rituals of my life; be they strictly ruled (Japanese Tea Ceremony or Zazen) or casually indulged (napkins on the table for diner, make my bed each morning). Trying not to fight the change, chaos, dis-integration while also reaching my hands out when hearts engage in good times (births, celebrations, rain showers) and arms around when the heart is engaged (death, loose, collapse) when I remember. And also clicking my seat belt for the ride.
Folding the napkin and those other little ceremonies scaffold a container whose "temporary permanency" gives us room to grow.
Well said!
Everything rises and falls. Certainly permanence is an illusion - but a useful illusion (one could say) for our fragile nervous systems. And perhaps our imperfect attempts at ritual are similarly useful, until they are not. Some of us consider ritual as a way to both align with and navigate the ever flowing of conditions and causes.
btw- The God I believe in works in and through the whole shebang: me, and you, and them, and everything else. I don't believe in some divine blueprint trying to climb to the surface from the morass.
You put into eloquent words the lessons of my 84 years of living. I am grateful. I feel less alone and more attuned to as I walk through my remaining days because of these words. Keep them coming.🦋🌀🌳♥️Diana
Wonderful, wonderful. Only one thing: "It may seem, from the infant's point of view, that he's achieving something. But in fact, the mother is doing almost all the work." Well - I had two children and never in my life have I had a stronger experience of NOT doing the work but it being done unto me, as when I was giving birth to those two. There was nothing I could do to stop the process, or to change it, or to speed it, or to slow it down, or whatever: there was only surrender to the amazingly vehement process itself. Which was life, I suppose, wanting to expand itself. So what does that mean about the birth of a new culture? Maybe it just happens? Let's relax into the happening?
But my daughter who has five children did not agree with me. She said: "We're all so far estranged from nature that it may seem that you as a mother are not actively involved in it. But if you connect more to the natural process you start to feel that you ARE the one who does it." Fair enough! So if we connect more to the big changes in our culture we can both feel that it is happening and feel that we are actively doing the change.
Thank you Charles and Benjamin
To answer your question: “ I wonder if this is all way too abstract for Substack? It's getting very mystical..”
I feel we need the mystical part more now, so go on please.
All is worth re-reading it a few times but I quote:
“.. Instead of striving, the yearning for a new culture has to source down to this level. As I said before, it's really a yearning for home… home is within… we actually are home. Physically, we're embodied here. We've just been distracted from it a lot… take ownership of your power of attention.”
The only controlling we can do is choosing where we put our attention. Yes! It took decades of spiritual seeking for me to admit/realize/see/resign myself to that there is no rudder on my boat. Well, more finely put, there appears to be a rudder, and I can grasp it and move it about in a manner of steering, but it doesn't actually reach into the water, and so it doesn't actually steer the boat. I will never forget the moment this realization landed fully within me, not as an idea, not as a system of belief, but as an embodied observation of how things really are, how things work around here, how things have worked my whole life, even as I was so busy seriously and studiously grasping onto the rudder and navigating with all my might, using a useless rudder. Wow! The world became soundless, meaningless, in that single flash of awakening.
Anyhoo... yes to all that you're saying here, Charles. The self-conscious silliness of groups of humans inventing new 'meaningful' rituals is so transparently trivializing to me. Life is living us. We are being breathed, we are not breathing. If we all could just STOP, let life seek us, find us, rather than us striving to find life, to make it meaningful, instantly so much of our foolishness would fall away as the useless stuff it is. This works both on an individual level and on a cultural one. We will invent and adapt new Earth-friendly, life-friendly rituals (and culture) once we return our attention to what is real. And, yes, I agree, in our returning to reality, there will most likely be first a period of mourning, of pain, and not-knowing (which can be terrifying to our minds). Which is ironic, of course, because, all along, all this time, our culture has not really known anything.
kind of like the fake steering while Maggie Simpson uses to drive Marge's car.
:D
But these same rituals as trivial as they may seem to you also can serve well as simple ways to call ourselves to attention. To be fully present. I know many that seemed silly when i started them 20 years ago. And now they are no longer silly at all.
Interesting point, and, yes, they can be helpful in the way you describe. To me, they can work (and have) on an individual basis. In groups, I've seen, say, short silent meditation or guided mediation work as a way to aid participants in arriving more bodily and becoming present. What I mean to say is that sometimes they work and sometimes they don't as individual aids. Do they work as 'community builders' though? Not to me, not as that.
Thanks.
I have seen them as powerful tools for community building in my work and neighborhood. But then again my context is likely radically different than yours.
What we pay attention to creates us and culture arises organically from what we pay attention to and how we interpret it. Also what we persistently deny eventually bites us on the butt. That is my take away Charles and I absolutely agree. As to the berry analogy, I have been one with alpine blueberry people for forty years and I can testify that what you say is true. If you are paying attention in nature or anywhere really, you are imprinted; sometimes willingly, sometimes not For me this is just as often curse as blessing since we now live in a world massively, toxically full of unhealthy things to imprint upon and boy do they stick with you . This is why my elders relied so heavily on prayer to protect them from being overloaded by the toxicity they were forced to absorb every day just to survive. And that really is the purpose of ritual, to put us back into right relationship with all that is and not be bogged down by that which we cannot control. Personally I would caution those who are ultra sensitive to be very very careful about when, where and how to step over that ledge into a brave new world. It takes alot of trust and faith in self and Spirit to do this healthfully.
While I think we collectively create culture some of what individuals, or a group of them, might do will have a greater impact on culture than others. I had too much to say here so published it here.
https://howardswitzer.substack.com/p/how-to-create-a-caring-culture
Your writing always makes me think. Thank you. And the comments always make me sad. Culture grows out of the abundance of whatever method each of us chooses to grow our individual heart's ability to connect to others. Hearts create culture whether they're empty, confused, distracted or loving. Our power lies in our hearts, not our brains. Beliefs, religions, religious sects, politics and rituals are what brains use to create communities around specific methods because that's what egos do. But our hearts need to direct our egos. When communities get lost in the fight about methods, it's because the purpose of hearts has been devalued. Whatever method each of us, personally, chooses to feel love, appreciation, compassion and kindness for others, we need to use. Each moment we spend trying to convince anyone to use our method is a moment wasted. Righteousness helps no one. Simply share the love your method grows in you. Show, don't tell. People will ask about your beliefs/method when they feel loved.
This post made me ask myself, “What is the central ritual of my life?” I realized it was the same one my grandmothers practiced. The one on one strengthening encounter with God in the lift of my attention to him with resultant rise of the Holy Spirit in my heart. As Jesus said “pray to your Father in secret and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” and “how much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit”. Thank you. I was refreshed and renewed in simplicity.
“The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic ‘ideas’ and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. And this is the simple truth— that to live is to feel oneself lost— he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.” - Jose Ortega y Gasset
Reading this shortly after listening to Charles's dialogue with Iain McGilchrist, I hear the echoes of Iain's dictum that "attention is a moral act". And also what Thich Nhat Hanh says about dwelling truly in the present moment. But while we all have our favourites teachers and guides, it's good to be reminded that what comes in future won't be based on any blueprints they might give us but on the kind of letting go into the unknown that Charles is talking about.
This was an interesting conversation. However, I was very surprised that nothing was mentioned about conditioning, and especially pre-verbal trauma. Because of the consequences of trauma, especially pre-verbal trauma, we don't always have a connection to conscious choices which will affect our being at a deeper level. We need to be more connected to the deeper parts of bodily knowing, but trauma has disconnected us from that. Please consider what happens when an infant is repeatedly not given what it needs. Eventually the body shuts down, and when cognition comes into play it takes over. Now the child deals with issues cognitively, rather than thru bodily knowing. This will have an impact on intuition and various kinds of non-cognitive knowing. Even ritual will become a cognitive process, and therefore not have the same energy that a non-cognitive process would offer, and it would have a very different place in our lives.
I was born in 1940, the smaller of 2 identical twins. At that time, attachment was not considered important. I was put in an incubator for 3 weeks. As a teenager, I never felt what hunger was like, as well as many other situations that I was unable to respond to from my own knowing. When I began meditating, it took me a year to feel my belly breathing. Please learn about the importance of this through Gabor Mate's book 'The Myth of Normal'. It's all about our culture!
Some good stuff here. There's a powerful desire coursing through the human soul, one which transcends political and religious divides, to live in a more enchanted, more living reality. Our intuition tells us this is the world we're meant to live in, that this *is* the real reality. Our cultural priors all tell us this is so much nonsense, that ultimate reality is nothing but quarks and energy potentials. We grasp after control even as we yearn to slip free from the web of control ... our search for safety, for certainty (and these are the same thing) becomes a prison.
So how to escape? That's the question that preoccupies us. LARPing as Native Americans (the left-coded response) or Vikings or traditional Catholics (the right-coded response) is unsatisfying, it doesn't feel authentic, we're just play-acting, deep down we know it's just a game. We can't design our way out of it: a story that we know is just a story doesn't have the power of a Story. So, wat do? How to crack the eggshell? Hm. But then, if such games are merely play, is not play how children prepare for adulthood?
Yet, it is happening despite ourselves. And in a couple hundred years we will laugh at the things we are now discovering as real. Best keep that a secret though!
Fascinating walk through cultural deconstruction. I am more optimistic, if that is the correct word. My God of creation, the Jesus of the Bible has more evidence of him and his mastery over the act of creation than ever before. So that part of my culture is more secure than ever. As for the destruction of our biosphere, satellite images reveal the great gaseous fertilizer called carbon is making the biosphere literally greener than ever. As for the tiny increase in global temperatures, they are a welcome end to the global cooling that started a few hundred years after the vikings discovered and named a northern island for what it was then, Greenland. My family annals mention a summer 80 years ago that was a continuation of winter. Al Gore's hockey stick shaped warming chart was fraudulent then and not born out by time. I think the authors of substance are in fact writing about the ancient but true battle between the forces of Good and Evil described in the Garden of Eden. What's happened over the past few decades however is that the evil forces have gained the upper hand in our western due to the collapse of the ethics based on our judeo-christian values. The collapse of ethics that resisted sex outside marriage also resisted skewing and repressing truth in the sciences including medicine. When you review the global warming sciences through a filter of ethics the world is a much better place with lots of room for optimism not the despair our children are growing up with. Scientists are far from unanimous in climate extremism.
When I talk about the destruction of the biosphere, I'm not talking about global warming. I'm talking about the poisoning with pesticides and toxic waste, the draining of wetlands, the razing fo forests, the pumping dry of aquifers, the decimation of whales and fish, and all the other forms of ecocide. This earth is a gift from the Creator. We did not earn it; it is a gift. Therefore we do insult or honor to the Creator by the way we treat that gift.
Absolutely agree
I also have issues with the current politically motivated climate change agenda. However as both Carter and Theo. have said in their own replies, the progressive destruction of our local ecosystems is blatantly apparent to anyone willing to look. I live in what is supposed to be and has been for many thousands of years, the PNW coastal rainforest. It is quite literally no longer a rainforest. 10 years of drought stress, forest fires, disease, over logging and over development have dramatically changed the landscape here in a very short span of time. This area was known for generations as the asbestos forest, meaning you could not get it to burn it was so continually waterlogged. That is no longer true. The salmon could not get up the rivers and the creeks this summer because there was almost no water flow. The river was full of algae, the mountains that should be snow capped even in summer were bare rock and the glaciers are visibly shrinking. I am watching the red cedar trees die by inches all around me becuase they did not evolve for drought, they evolved for cool moist summers and we have not had that in almost a decade now. Many of my own native elders prophesied these tragedies for hundreds of years. They watched the destruction happening all around them and broadcast many warnings about this.
I agree that it is not useful to scare the children and I am quite upset that we seem to somehow be expecting the young to fix this without making the changes we ourselves need to make. However this is real and it is happening. Whether one believes as my elders did that Mother Earth herself will right the balance eventually; or one beleives that God will fix the problem, we need changes on multiple levels, culturally, scientifically, spiritually, emotionally, etc. The reason I follow Charles, even tho his approach is not really my style, is because I believe he is correct in that we ourselves have the ability to create the change we want by becoming more and more conscious of ourselves and our world. This is very difficult and painful and is not for the faint hearted. Eventually one hits the wall and then one must give it up to Spirit or whomever, but we must take self-reponsibility first. As my elders used to say, don't bother God with what you can manage yourself. Having been raised in the rural fundamental bible belt, I have seen that there can be a strong tendency to use the bible/religion to justify or explain away pretty much anything.
I'm intensely skeptical of the global warming narrative myself. Data just doesn't add up. However, I think the reason it has been so memetically successful is that it speaks to a deep intuition shared by almost everyone that the biosphere is being ruined by human activity. Not carbon emissions, but endocrine disruptors, hormone mimickers and blockers, micro plastics, PFAS, etc., to say nothing of the vast quantities of synthetic poison that have adulterated the food supply. This is affecting our health at a deep biological, even epigenetic level.
Then of course there is the deeply unnatural lifestyle - isolated in suburbs or apartment blocks, sedentary jobs sending emails, voyeuristic recreation staring at screens. It's no accident that the urban and suburban office worker is the most prone to falling for global warming. That narrative says that with just a few technological fixes, electric cars and such, we can continue our industrial lifestyle and not worry about the other things we're doing that are ruining our bodies and spirits. It's a cope for those most deeply embedded in the system.
Fully agree. And will add, framing ecological degradation as "global warming" feeds the idea that, well, we can solve it with better "air conditioning." I mean it literally and figuratively. Literally, people across vast swaths of this country barely venture outdoors for months at a time, trapped indoors with their AC. Figuratively: geoengineering schemes to cool the earth, and "climate-friendly" policies to cut carbon, most of which enable and even contribute to the continued toxic pollution and destruction of the environment. Example: razing forests to erect fields of solar panels. Expanding mining all over the earth to get lithium.
I recently saw a story (true? Dunno) that Bull Gates is planning to clearcut forests and bury the wood in order to permanently sequester carbon.
Destroying the environment in order to save it.
That was overblown. Really it was about taking removing ultra-dry dead wood and burying it to make the forests less of a tinderbox.
Yes it was overblown but sadly there is a core of truth to it all. For over three years folks up here have been fighting the national forest service so called 'thinning' project involving 70 million acres of our public forest. They will actually be logging living trees up to eighty years old in some insane attempt to artificially 'manage' what little mature forest we have left. They are going to be taking out much more than dead trees and I am very much afraid that in the end it is more than just dead trees Gates wants to bury. The forest service is actually framing this destruction in such wonderful green sustainability language, including Gates part in this, it actually makes me ill to open the emails from them. I won't even get into how much fossil fuels will be used and how much damage to the forest itself will be involved in transporting and burying massive amount of trees, either green or dry.
I knew it looked too bad to be true.
Yeah, we hear so much about carbon because it’s the oneEarth/atmosphere cycle they are marketing while ignoring all the rest.
While global warming is obviously true, regardless of its cause, there is no doubt, as you say, "that the biosphere is being ruined by human activity." It is the corporate capture of industry, government and science to skew it all towards profits. The mechanism of power is their issuing of all the money as debt and due to compounding interest there is way more debt than money. World debt is 303 trillion while the world money supply is only 82 trillion. Money is a social power, it is the governing factor, as such it should be for public benefit as its first use, its first cause, not for private gain. As Frederick Soddy wrote, "To allow it to become a source of revenue to private issuers is to create, first, a secret and illicit arm of the government and, last, a rival power strong enough ultimately to overthrow all other forms of government." I think we need to change this to give us the space to create culture.
Does it not give you pause that the very financial interests that rule the world through debt are using their controlled media, universities, and governments to push the global warming narrative with a single voice?
I review the global warming sciences through the filter of going outside and seeing whether I like the changes 🤔
And it's gotten to the point where I've literally been dreaming of snow multiple times this year because the winters have been so non-wintry the past few years. Where I am in the mid-Atlantic there was effectively no snow at all last winter for the first time in my life. The old winter pattern has been replaced by mild weather most of the time interspersed with a few short periods of freezing wind so harsh that it has repeatedly torn up trees that stood undamaged for decades prior.
Meanwhile the summers have been too smokey to breathe comfortably in for the first time in my life while at the same time being so persistently humid that we've had to buy a dehumidifier to keep the mold at bay. The insect population has been very noticeably diminished, with even the mosquitoes making a delayed and underwhelming showing this year, not to speak of the missing fireflies or the caterpillars or the various beetles that I could expect to come in regular waves when I was younger.
Maybe all the evidence of my eyes is local, but I don't think you can get those kinds of persistent and obviously negative local changes without some questionable global changes going on around the same time.
And maaaybe you could argue that in principle the level of warming and the kinds of pollution the world is seeing aren't inherently detrimental to life, but in practice it does seem to be where I'm at, if only because it's happening too quickly at the moment for things to adjust.
Moreover, if you're coming at this from a Christian perspective, it seems very odd to me to pair that with an optimistic perspective on climate and the state of things. Haven't Christians been warning everyone that the world was going to heck in a handbasket because of humanity's sinfulness and that the end of the world was just around the corner for the past 2,000 years? I was raised Christian so I remember that, and even back then I was little I was a bit confused at how the adults could abruptly turn around and argue to death against what was just about the same notion they were espousing whenever non-Christians were the ones espousing it.
I think it is an apocalypse, the “lifting of the veil” on the crimes of the usurious power elite, the reality of the system under which we live, a reality we reject in favor of a more caring system. It is the end of their world order in order to establish a new one, one that gets us back to the Garden. I saw a TikTok video the other day of a young woman saying that the reason why change is afoot is because more and more people are able to see through the lies they are being told. That sounds like a paradigm shift. Yes, the truth will set us free to create a new culture.
Thank you again for your post and taking the time to engage my thoughts. I remember more fireflies too. Some insects, maybe some you mention, are unfortunately moving north, with our warmth, things like Lyme disease that was not in Ontario prior, and some invasive species eating certain trees here and in the Western Canada forests. One can see vast patches of dead coniferous attacked by a beetle that used to be held at bay during more bitter winters. My son in law in snow removal says winter is milder, over his 20 years experience, meaning more ice and less snow. My POV is that malevolent people and forces have fanned this flame of concern into full blown irrational fear by intentionally withholding data that would present a more optimistic picture. (diminishing their power) Your ocean coast, perhaps where you live, was underwater your government says in the geologically speaking time period, recent past. (see eastern seaboard coastline map at my substack "Unmasking 4 ways politics masquerading as science..") When living in that fear the public caves into otherwise poor government planning and onerous taxation. eg, Stopping the use of plentiful, clean and cheap natural gas to heat homes even while there is insufficient electricity to replace it. Mandating electric cars even when 70 +/_ percent of the nightly charge comes from Natural gas created electricity and 90% of the battery materials come from unethical sources, ie children in flip flops mining poisonous materials (see same substack) Its always the "little guy" that suffers as governments mandate, to reduce carbon, a 30% reduction in fertilizer meaning higher prices at the store. ..... As for the Christian aspect, I know what you mean about being taught that the world is going to heck in a handbasket so just focus on Jesus. I don't believe Jesus wants that attitude or the actions it fosters. In Jesus' day, shortly after he had risen, one group gave up working and sat down waiting for his return. (as you note-awaiting his return for 2000) The book of James calls them out on that saying get back to work, "If you don't work you don't deserve to eat" and "If a man doesn't look after providing for his family he is worse than a non-believer". I recently took a year of study to become a Colson Christian World view fellow which is all about working hard to make the world a better place now. (Redeeming our culture) I agree with your comment that Christian youth weren't taught to do that. Youth in my day- 50 years ago- were encouraged to become pastors- good- but not Hollywood writers and content creators. Bad. Now we are working on redeeming culture with aspirational productions like "Sound of Freedom". Additionally, what I learned in my Colson fellows study is that no culture outside of a Bible based culture, historically speaking, actually provides for the freedom and economic growth at the personal level we all desire. Colson's "How Now Shall we Live" maps that out better than I can. Yes the Colson of the Nixon/ Watergate infamy. While a culture may survive fa few decades as it slides off its biblical foundations, it ultimately sinks into tyranny as the western world is doing now. Why? Without the self restraint fostered by one's own belief in the "do not steal" (your neighbor's corvette or his wife, or his real estate thereby enshrining property rights) or tell lies, plus the golden rule, (which Jesus used to summarize Moses' prior 10,) "love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself" we need more government/control with more power and more police. We all can likely agree that to the degree we obey those commandments we need less policing, fewer lawyers and judges, and less government meaning we are left with more freedom and more money in our pocket. And so the mess we are in now from my POV comes out of the collapse of ethics leading to broken science and diminished health, ultimately fueled I think by the elite who genuinely believe we must de-populate to save the planet. Again, that notion is "supported" by skewed and incomplete science. I don't recall the source of the stat but something like all the worlds population -cities- can exist in a place the size of Florida. There is lots and lots of land left and science is growing ever more in less geography- e.g. tunnel green houses in northern England and my own province of Ontario. But to de-populate we create a safe and effective "vaccine" that reduces women's fertility and maims babies. See recent substack "naomi wolf, the-covenant-of-death". There is no doubt in my mind that all this is simply a continuation of what started in the Garden of Eden with Satan, in disguise, asking- not telling- asking if Adam and Eve could be sure they could trust God's simple one and only rule. That doubt led to their failure. They failed and so do we. But we still get to walk with God in his albeit diminished garden as they did, we are still to look after it (the biosphere) but yes with more thistles and rocks to pick through. I look forward to reading more of your posts
You write "...authors of substance are in fact writing about the ancient but true battle between the forces of Good and Evil described in the Garden of Eden. What's happened over the past few decades however is that the evil forces have gained the upper hand in our western due to the collapse of the ethics based on our judeo-christian values."
I'm grateful that ethics based on values that entitle humans to dominion over the rest of Nature, are collapsing. Perhaps authors of substance could attempt a re-write.
A new coyote warning sign appeared a few days ago in a nearby ravine along a waterway that is no more than 100 yards/meters from children playing, library, homes and stores. A walkway runs through the middle. A coyote and her baby offspring were photographed earlier residing in it. A mother coyote will happily snatch a baby person or dog to help her feed her pups. In the past animal control would have been instructed by our town to trap the coyote and pups and move them further from humans for their safety and ours. Not so today. Humans are considered the invasive species to "mother earth". Overall, humans are not given permission by the writers of the Bible to ravage and destroy planet earth- God's gift to us. We are to be "stewards" not owners of it.
Stewards would be nice. The words in the verses I had to memorize were subdue and dominion. I like your re-write!
I wonder if something was "lost in translation" from the original . Thanks for engaging me
Meaning-making and ritual are rooted in our actual relationship with our living environment — where the food, water, medicine, shelter, beauty, actually come from, and what we create and give in return.
When food is shipped in boxes across the world, grown and processed in ways that very few people can bear to behold, as are building materials, medicines, etc, the culture must necessarily be a facade, with no true roots and no true nourishment. In a city, one can choose between "Mexican food" or "Italian food" or "Indian food"; originally, people ate what grew or lived near them or was brought over through relationships with others. This was the basis of their culture; the songs and rituals grew like branches and leaves. They were not trying to be authentic; if the roots are no longer intact, any attempt to be authentic can only ever be a re-enactment. A re-enactment may be better than nothing, but it only kicks the can further down the road towards collapse.
Culture is, fundamentally, the cyclical reciprocal cultivation of the earth, which cultivates us in turn. It is a mirror facing a mirror, and both aspects always change simultaneously. The despair of ecological degradation on one hand and spiritual degradation on the other hand are actually the keys to one another, and the answer to our longing is found where they meet.
I've come back to this comment Like 3 times now. It rings so true. "If the roots are no longer intact, any attempt to be authentic can only ever be a re-enactment". Thank you :)