Finding Ourselves Free

In the latest (May-June) edition of Orion, Chris Cokinos writes about the unbearable grief for Gaia that so many of us feel, relentlessly. In a similar vein to Richard Bruce Anderson’s article, its goal is to help us get past the first three stages of grief (denial, anger and despair) to the fourth and final stage (acceptance). “Sometimes I feel that I’m supposed to save the entire biosphere”, Cokinos writes. “Sometimes I just hang my head in exhaustion and doubt…[But] too much grief for the world means less energy to help it along…I do what I can without going crazy…Of course it is never enough…Here’s what I know: I know that when you find yourself free of the poisons that too much angst can cultivate, then something marvelous happens…you can keep going on, you can keep doing the work you do in this universe, feeling despair, feeling — amazing — joy when you feel joy.” He admits it’s “hard to say” how to “find yourself free” to do “this right work that is calm” and achieve “this letting-go and holding-on all at once”.

 

He tries to give us some perspective on how we might do this by invoking the stories of the previous five great extinction events, and reminding us that over 99% of the species that have existed on this planet are now extinct, and that within a billion years, as our sun begins to go nova, any life on this planet will be burned up anyway. Somehow this is small consolation, and sounds at times more an attempt to help us  inure ourselves (inure means “to habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection”) than to help us come to accept and understand what we’re doing and what we can, and must, do, to “find ourselves free”.

 

When I discovered Anderson’s article on Dave Smith’s site, I found it illuminating and, to some extent, consoling. I said then that I thought I was stuck at the third stage of grief (despair). Knowing your problem, they say, is half way to solving it. And since then I have become a happier person, more knowledgeable of what I can and cannot do to make the world better. But not, I believe, any less grief-stricken. I have not yet “found myself free”.

 

I suspect I am in good company in this. Someone asked me, in an interview a while ago, where I thought the world stood in understanding what we have done and are doing and what needs to be done. I replied that most are unaware, not out of ignorance but because they’re too busy dealing with the needs of the moment. Instinctively they know there is something wrong, but they haven’t the time or immediate inclination to figure out what it is. Perhaps there is a ‘pre-denial’ stage of grief where we’re only vaguely aware of impending tragedy, an ominous feeling of foreboding but nothing more. Perhaps six of the 6.5 billion people on the planet are at that stage.

 

Then there are those of us, the other half-billion, who have had either the good fortune of time, opportunity and resources to have come to grips with the utter tragedy and unsustainability of our civilization, or the good fortune to have lived largely outside of it and been able to see it for what it is all along, from the Edge. Our grief is more informed, and, like those drawn to a train-wreck, once we start to learn we strive to learn more, to understand why and what can be done, until we pass that threshhold that I call the point of unbearability and start to turn away, the point where more knowledge just deepens the grief and no longer informs or motivates us, no longer moves us to action.

 

That point varies, of course, with our circumstances. Mostly, it depends on how beholden we are to our civilization, how drawn by the great gravitational force always luring us away from the Edge to the seductive Centre, with its promise of wealth, fame, popularity, security (for us and our loved ones), creature comfort, excitement, distraction. The more attuned we are to our instincts, the more we will refuse to be seduced, and the closer we will come to the Edge. The motley crew closer to the Edge have the capacity to feel that grief more acutely, and it is this group that Anderson and Cokinos are addressing (and it is this group for whom I write, mainly, on this blog).

 

There have been moments when I have, briefly, “found myself free”, or at least relatively so. Moments of intoxicating love, of sudden understanding, of peace, of discovery, of awareness. The problem is that they are fleeting, and unsustainable, as the noise of the machine in our heads, and the realization of just how terrible this world is, rush back into our consciousness. We keep hoping for transcendence, and there are many self-proclaimed gurus and sellers of distracting and addictive products who will tell us how to achieve it, how to get past the grief forever and still be real rather than ‘comfortably disconnected’ as I described in yesterday’s poem.

 

Our austere, puritan, victorian, utilitarian culture teaches us that life is hard and we are sinful, and that moments of happiness are rare and incidental to our purpose. So perhaps we come too easily to accept that these brief respites from grief, these moments of freedom, are the best we can hope for.

 

I suppose it depends on how close to the Edge we can stay, and what we do with our lives, and the stuff we are made of. I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to be able to move, relatively easily, closer to the Edge as I’ve grown older. That’s just dumb luck, but it’s given me some financial independence and flexibility that few ever realize. I have also been blessed with few obligations or burdens. And I know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, I’ve figured out how to Let-Self-Change and what I’m meant to do. Those less fortunate or less self-assured than I am can be excused for turning away from their grief and its cause, and doing what they must to stay sane and to look after the people they love who need them.

I have no such excuse, and I cannot, will not turn away. Grief is in our nature, because it is our reaction to the loss of love, the love that bonds us and makes us one with all-life-on-Earth, a consequence of our propensity to remember what is important (read When Elephants Weep if you want to understand this better), and our natural reaction to great and enduring stress. I’ll carry that weight, not because I’m brave or courageous or exemplary, but because I can, and must. I’m sure I’ll be in good company, a small but insufficient army of people trying to make the world a better place, “letting-go and holding-on all at once”, only occasionally “finding ourselves free”, but honoured to be able to do what we can to help. Crazy, perhaps, crazy in love with this wondrous, scarred, sacred, ruined, magical world.

Onward.