A Deeper Way is Calling
I haven’t written very much the last few years, not for someone who would call themselves a writer. I haven’t written because the words that would come out felt forced and contrite. They felt like words that I was supposed to say, stories and advice that belonged to someone else, not what was actually true. And so, with some exception, I held my voice back.
Crisis may be too strong a word, but I have been on a reckoning of sorts. A questioning of where my life has been, where it stands and where I want it to go. Questioning my career, my values, my sexuality, my truth; trying to answer the question that has been a predominant theme in my experiences: what if life doesn’t turn out like I thought it would?
While I’ve been on this reckoning of sorts, stepping back from areas I thought I was meant to serve, I’ve been discovering new paths and trails ahead of me. The ecological crisis, with its companion fear and grief, has fuelled my activism, allowing me to step forward in a way that perhaps I would not have without. There’s this voice that beckons to me, the time is now; there is nothing more to wait for. The world is unravelling like that thread you pulled on your sweater, and it’s too far gone to remain the same. So, what do you want to make of it?
On culture
Our culture has this wonderful myth of the linear life. That you finish school, start a career, get married, have children etc, and eventually you reach the place you’re meant to be. And even when you know this not to be true, or maybe not true for you, this myth pervades our consciousness with its idea of the upward trajectory. Life is always in the next place, and the next place is always better than here. The goal is always to be reaching somewhere else, because that is where your happiness will lie. It’s mimicked in the cultural beliefs we hold of eternal growth, of cities and economies that never come down, and in our ideas of “I’ll be happy when…”. It’s an alluring story, if only it were true; that life is this simple line, and if we follow the steps we’ll eventually arrive.
I remember a video with Stephen Jenkinson; he spoke about how in the western world growth is a precondition of happiness, but that growth in and of itself is not a good thing. A tumour grows itself to death, he said. It proceeds absolutely undisturbed by the consequences of the actions it takes. The myth of eternal growth, our continual seeking of the next place: this is our tumour. The symptoms are screaming at us through soaring rates of depression, inequality on unfathomable scales, and now mass extinction. The systems that run our world are, without a doubt, dying.