Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
During the first half of the twentieth century, citrus fruits came to be grown a good distance from the (sub)tropical regions they usually thrive in. The Russians managed to grow citrus outdoors, where temperatures drop as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius, and without the use of glass or fossil fuels.
Natural disasters, economic crises and viral outbreaks have greatly impacted our cities in the past. Today, we witness this effect with the COVID-19 viral outbreak. It has heavily impacted food, accommodation, livelihoods, public transport, economy, and other public amenities available to cities globally.
According to Cantadora and Wise Woman, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Descansos are symbols that mark a death: as an example, a cross by the wayside with the name of the person who died spelled out in nails. Can we create Descansos for our dying civilization? For die it must if we are to live. Let these words be my Descansos offered in gratitude to She Who Loves Us All.
The documentary “Planet of the Humans” produced by Michael Moore is not the last word on our human predicament. Still, it starts a conversation we need to have, and it’s a film that deserves to be seen.
The novel Coronavirus disease Covid-19 is amplifying both the ways that our cultural and economic lives are durable and resilient, and the many, many ways in which we are utterly vulnerable and precarious.
It’s hard to take much comfort in our collective cultural and institutional experience with thinking through the kind of pandemic we now confront. Nor do we seem to have anything as valuable and practical as a paddle with which to leverage our movement out of the hole we’ve fallen into.
Whether the Sanders campaign seizes this opportunity, or an alternate framework for collective action arises, a mass movement response to the coronavirus pandemic cannot come too soon. For our own sake, and that of our society as a whole, let us help the drive toward solidarity emerge.
In fact there’s a wealth of evidence to support the idea that books can help to boost good mental health. ‘Bibliotherapy,’ a term first coined by American essayist Samuel Crothers in a 1916 issue of Atlantic Monthly, means the art of using literature and reading as a healing activity. It’s widely accepted as a way to enhance wellbeing.
I feel right now as though we are at, or very close to, the tipping point on these issues, nearing the moment where the gravity begins to change. I have felt, since Extinction Rebellion and the School Strikes began, since Greta began her strikes, as though deep beneath our feet the tectonic plates have finally begun to shift. Slowly and imperceptibly at first, but definitely shifting.
It is of the utmost importance to establish the right framework of values for the deep transformation of civilization that is needed. As I have laid out in The Patterning Instinct, different cultures have constructed vastly different systems of values, and those values have shaped history. Similarly, the values we choose today as a society will shape our future. The stakes for getting it right could hardly be higher.
If there is any hope worth having, in a time when we are rightly haunted by the thought of an ‘uninhabitable Earth’, then I don’t believe it lies in the triumph of reason, nor in the recovery of an imagined past. If I have any clue where it lies, I’d say it’s in the difficult work of learning to feel and think together again; to come down off the high and lonely horses that some of us were taught to ride, to recognise how much has been missing from our maps, how much has gone unseen in our worldviews.
There are no easy solutions to the problems we are facing. Addressing climate change will take a lot of work by a lot of people all over the planet. The fight against our climate crisis is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. We will need to learn how to build resilience of our interiority as much as we engineer resilient communities and infrastructures.
