Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In his anthology An Archdruid’s Tales, Greer seeks to use fiction, together with a few nonfiction forays into future scenarios, as a means of painting a more accurate picture of what lies ahead for industrial civilization.
So, it comes down to this. The answer to these crazy times, is to evacuate & de-spend the enclosures and to inhabit and re-spend the skill, ingenuity, sensuality (intelligence gathering) and moral probity of the common.
For years, Myra Greene had explored blackness through her photography, often in self-portraits. She wondered, what would it mean to take pictures of whiteness? For her friends, what was it like to be photographed because you’re white?
The relief we feel when we no longer have to pretend to be other than we really are will be echoed across the natural world, as we relax and put our energies into showering the love for ourselves, one another and the wider world that we are made for.
The need for imagination right now is more urgent than ever. We stand to either create a new daring world or stay in old paradigms with some minor fixes that give us the illusion of change.
Our biology equips us to understand not only what is, but also what could and what should be. We are ethical creatures; we are nature debating, rationalizing, and thinking with itself.
This emerging mosaic of alternatives for social-ecological transformation provides fertile ground for the development of ideas, practices and actions leading to a good life for all.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this anthology of stories and verse about romance in the deindustrial future is its rich assortment of tones and styles. Some stories are charming, others throb with as much trauma as passion and still others feel as timeless as myths.
Animism, the enactment and culture of interspecies reciprocity, cannot teach us how to better manage “natural objects”, but shows how to sustain a cosmos giving life to all its members. This will require us to rethink traditional sustainable practices.
How will future generations fare in the world of scarcity and instability to which our present-day actions are consigning them? Catherine McGuire’s short story collection The Dream Hunt and Other Tales suggests a multitude of possible answers to this.
Now, here in a changed world with a broken-open heart, I look into the eyes of beauty and invite in the fullness of it all, the grief and the love, the fear and the hope, the pain and the joy.
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
