I’ve grappled with writing this blog post for the last sixteen days, since You Know What befell us here in the land of the now increasingly overtly Disunited States.
During this time I’ve read seemingly innumerable editorial responses to You Know What, and You Know Who. I can hardly stand any more prophecies and predictions of dire doom, as they appear to be to someone like myself, a middle-class woman with undeniable white privilege, exacerbated by a doctorate in how we tend to think about, how recognize, that we do, actually, create our realities.
But I can’t help but throw my own typing hands into the written ring. What I’ve been grappling to articulate is not so in fashion right now. I offer it aware that I may be proven just plain wrong, with time, though I sure hope not.
The only vision that I truly want, in my heart of hearts, to contribute to our current collective dialogue is this: that we will come through this almost inevitably catastrophic time into another that we can as yet barely imagine. As Jose Stevens said:
“…according to the Mayan elders, the sixty years after 2012 hold the key to this planet’s future; the world will go through such a dramatic transformation that it will be hardly recognizable by 2072. This will be for the great good of humankind.
Much of the time in between will be something like a construction zone, with chaos as old systems collapse and are replaced by better ones.”
As I look at the swirling mass of probabilities – almost but not entirely unknowns – that we’re facing together right now, whether we are looking forward to them in hope or facing them in shock – it seems that what came into more crystallized form sixteen days ago is an intrinsic, necessary part of the dying away of the historic realities that led us directly towards this mess in the first place.
If only we could, collectively, be less frantically bound and determined to try our darndest to hang on to our past! Imagine how we could then, together, build a very different kind of world. Many of us, myself included, are so pulled between the old and the new, to holding onto at least the best of what has been, even as we hope and dream of an ahistoric new world. Because our infinite possibilities do include actual democracy, and nurturing and cherishing this our only home, planet Earth! But we’re now way into the chaos of the construction zone that the Mayans foresaw.
The scholar and environmental activist Joanna Macy wrote of our choice between the Great Turning and the Great Unravelling. Right now we’re zooming at high speed towards considerable unraveling. I pray with heart, soul and intentional far-vision, that this will turn out to have been a necessary phase before we move beyond collective screaming toddlerhood and choose the Great Turning. That this is how our world, our reality, our choices, have to get worse before they can get better.
I pray this. I dunno what else to do, since social and planetary suicide are such irreversibly terminal acts.
I am, and will be, taking this long view, because I simply cannot bear to do otherwise, and because I decided long ago that investing in worst possible outcomes only makes them more likely to come true, and investing in our highest and wisest possibilities may hopefully help them come true. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to embody Democracy, in all the ways that I can, to organize, per Gloria Steinem’s “This is not a time to mourn, it is a time to organize”, and to contribute to the ACLU. To cherish the Earth, the sunlight coming through this window, the ultimate, undeniable privilege of having life.
Ruby Seaton, PhD, artist, writer, visionary of an actual New World Order.
see www.artlifecreation.com
photo credit: davidyuweb Rain storm via photopin (license)