Complicated Gifts: Remembering How to Live and Love Well Through Crisis
“What I’m witnessing is that this uncertainty is a great liberating gift to the psyche and the spirit,” says eco-philosopher and co-founding teacher of The Work that Reconnects, Joanna Macy when asked about how to stay sane in a suicidal culture. “It’s walking the razor’s edge of the sacred moment where you don’t know, you can’t count on, and comfort yourself with any sure hope. All you can know is your allegiance to life and your intention to serve it in this moment that we are given. In that sense, this radical uncertainty liberates your creativity and courage.”
With sincere compassion and deep empathy in the face of the pain and unbearable suffering people have already endured the world over and with the sobering knowledge that this disease will continue to bring profound losses, despair and death, this virus also has something to say if we listen. Our mostly patho-adolescent, never-enough appetite for more of everything, 24/7, bears its consequence by altering the functioning of the planet, and over time, has disrupted huge ecological cycles now careening toward tipping points of extinction and in some cases, no return.
Researchers attribute the crossing of natural system’s boundaries (in this case, species thresholds called zoonotics) to the inception of mutating viruses like CoVid 19. If we trace the etymology of the word dis-aster to its root meaning (dis = apart or against and aster = star) we find that it warns us of what happens if we continue to “go against our stars”, against the immutable laws of nature. A systems researcher colleague tentatively admits that this health crises has caused “a strange spark of relief” in the context of his “constant underlying anxiety about global climate change and biodiversity loss” with its potential for us to reorganize and adapt after the collapse phase. The graduate students I teach (who are also systems literate) write in to share their sense of calm (and daresay hope) fostered through a profound understanding of how feedback-loops of darkness act as precursors to necessary life serving transformation over time through reorganization to new levels of initiation and identity. They write to each other about catching a glimpse of the kinds of positive long-term climate changes they have so truly wished for but felt might never in a million years could happen, yet might now be possible. But strange relief is putting it mildly.
For too long, we have used nature as a backdrop rather than understood (or remembered) we too are nature, and can only thrive if every part of a living system is in relationship and doing its part. In 1993, Neil Evernden lamented, “We are not in an environmental crisis, but are the environmental crisis”.
Dr. Macy suggests, this is a crisis of perception because we have all but forgotten we are cells of an alive biosphere; are nature incarnate in human, conscious form and that it is only through our ability to co-exist and interconnect with all other life within an assemblage of entanglements (both visible and invisible) that we can all flourish as part of a healthy whole.
Make no mistake, stopping all commerce is not a lasting solution either. However, it seems that within bare truth there is always a dynamic tension of opposites present and daring to open to the paradox of silver linings in the face of this insidious disease, is also worthy of our consideration. Just a few weeks ago, Margaret Atwood remarked, “extinction is a choice” and while this might have mostly fallen on deaf ears, now, this sad virus provides a glimpse of a world slowed (and very soon, grinding to a halt); offers necessary breathing space for a distressed, disconnected and disrupted planetary system that has suffered deep loss of biodiversity and life. Reduced travel, reduced consumerism (barring a fear-based run on tp, hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol, rubber gloves and face masks), a ban on exotic, live animal trade, reduced pollution (as people stay home) and with that Co2 emissions, all offer a moment of restorative Gaian grace on this global runaway train. To say ‘no’, to refuse, to cancel, to stop, to resist, to slow, to step back, to stay home hasn’t killed us, while the alternative could. Can a more conscious reset mean a regenerative healing can take place on our beloved but ragged planet after all? Can the next extinction be averted? We see potent and positive effects our recent containment has had on not only potentially flattening the spread but on Nature’s ability to rewild in our absence. However, this is complicated because the drastic measures now in place are also not sustainable.
If we are to avoid even greater dis-aster, we must choose to resist any sort of business-as-usual return to ‘normal’ and instead awaken to the inter-relatedness that exists as a webbed network of relationships with its co-implications, patterns, and processes, as we redesign our lives with these principles in mind for real change to occur. This is our chance to remember that what we do to the one, we do to all others, that we all affect each other in the end. New disciplines in planetary health and ecopsychology have slowly emerged to make visible the connections between the interdependency of humans, animals, plants, insects and ecosystems and offer profound insights on how we might all live together, although mainstream education has been late to this conversation. If we remain faithful to the knowledge that all living beings are necessary to the health of the entire planet from the smallest bacterial flora within our own gut biome to the fantastic fungi that forms part of the mycorrhizal forest-underland to the vast deeps of the teeming oceans and above them, fathomless star-filled cosmos, it places a sacred obligation on us all to act with moral intelligence, in a move from dominator to protector, from consumer to community member and to behave as co-participants in the process of life.
It feels as if we have stepped into a surreal and mythic story, one of those cautionary Grimm tales that warn of dire consequences when leaders are no longer wise, when the people have squandered their truest gifts and of course, a great plague spreads across the land. However, if we are to break this bad spell and lift the veil of despair, the old stories tell us we need to call upon supernatural powers. Over the coming weeks, we can all activate our personal super powers. By staying away from other humans that you don’t live with (including family members who may live in another house and want to visit) and by caring for yourself right now, you are evoking your super power to choose. By stepping back, you are in fact caring for all others. Just imagine self-care as an act of communion — this is a super powerful antidote to the disease and how we can each can make a world of difference.
And we can also refuse to isolate from the marvellous! One Rx is go outside (in measured distance from other humans) to the wet, grassy meadows or to the woods where here on the west coast of Canada, the Indian plum is unfurling her leaves and where the more-than-humans there — the Doug Fir, pine, fern, lichen and mosses, owls, rabbits, robins and wrens, streams and dark lakes do not carry this virus and have no need of disinfectant wipes. Or go out into your own backyard (if you can) where Spring is revealing herself in tender and blossoming ways, showing us all that renewal after difficulty is not only possible but perennial. If we sit still and listen, we are sure to find a fount of reciprocity in wild companionship with wise and resilient, non-human teachers that offer guidance through difficult times.
In my experience, when true heartbreak is shared, there is always also unimaginable beauty. I read a FB post that reframed isolation and loneliness as solidarity and solitude and a shelter-in-place order became an invitation to one’s own artist-in-residence. And, we can all see how economic collapse is intimately tied with ecological renewal. If can embrace the truth of dynamic tensions, if we can return from this brink as the larger, more generous and creative versions of ourselves — the versions we have witnessed showing up all over the world as people reach out to each other with hearts rather than hands, I trust we can redesign our ways and practices to choose life over stuff and instead cherish simpler, more wholesome habits that refuse to be overscheduled.
Remembering how to live well is undoubtedly rooted in love. Magically, love has shown up on deserted Italian streets ringing out with song as people in isolation sing to one another from their windows and balconies, as tiny book libraries turn into neighbourhood free food shares and priorities shift world-wide to caring and sharing. Ingenious examples of this pour in with free broadcasts and livestreams, images, plays, poetry-readings, concerts and movies all free and streaming, libraries and collections without paywalls, artists and musicians giving virtual workshops and mini-concerts, teachers and therapists moving online. It is as if we’ve all been infected with viral kindness through adaptation.
In the midst of it all too is an emotional crisis. Self-love and the acceptance of things as they are in this moment can act as an antibody to the plague of stress that no one has immunity to. Surrendering to what we cannot change can alleviate suffering, denial, and resistance. Surrendering to face our own deaths (which is of course possible at any moment in time) means knowing we simply cannot control, fix or hold on to things. However, our bodies will try to hold on in response to this threat. Deep, slow breaths that first soften the brow and the throat, then expand down into the chest to alleviate tightness around the heart so it may carry out its life-giving work, let us let go. Deep belly breathing softens gut-wrenching fear and fills us with a sense of calm and feeling of being ‘enough’. Breathe and acknowledge just how terrible and tragic this is, so you can feel your way through, can move through grief and keep tension fluid so it resists solidifying into petrification and paralysis. Acknowledging our vulnerability does not take away our worthiness or our true power. Let your body become your own first responder with safe-at-a-distance exercising, quiet meditation, reflective journaling, art-making, cooking and baking, dancing alone or digging in soil and planting a garden. If we reframe from social to physical distancing, myriad amazing technologies allow us access to each other socially still. By sharing rather than suppressing difficult thoughts and feelings, we just always feel better in the end and transmute suffering into ‘good grief’. At a time when we have been brought to our collective knees, I pray we won’t waste this crisis and instead let it summon our deepest creativity and intelligence and the moral will to act, so that out of this fruitful darkness, a radical, more possible, sane and just way of being can be born.
I wonder, is our collective, response-ableness in this emergency also our opportunity to finally really grow up? I believe that alchemically, the poison holds the cure. Perhaps we are being catalyzed in this moment to become our own cure and make radical and deep shifts of perception as we remember we are part of an interdependent and interconnected Earth if we refuse to let anything stand in the way of what truly matters. Can we remember we must guard well our truer inheritance and through wise-relating and life-furthering action become good ancestors? In the months to come, as we are doing the hard work of reshaping our lives, I want to remember how so many fought for each other and cared for one another while on high alert. Care showed up anonymously through loving acts for neighbours, friends, family and for our companion animals, and we all made daily sacrifices, mainly witnessed an outpour and abundance of love and generosity. Like Macy, I place my faith in our allegiance to the sacredness of all life and our intention to serve it because we have been given the rare (and complicated) gift of seeing what happens if we don’t.
REFERENCES
Atwood, M. (Feb, 2020) On Tasmania’s Forests and Saving the Swift Parrot. In The Guardian. Retrieved https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/29/extinction-is-a-choice-margaret-atwood-on-tasmanias-forests-and-saving-the-swift-parrot
Evernden, N. (1993). The natural alien: Humankind and environment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Jamail, D ( June, 2014). On Staying Sane in a Suicidal Culture. An Interview with Joanna Macy. In Truthout.org. Retrieved from https://truthout.org/articles/on-staying-sane-in-a-suicidal-culture/