In case you missed it…
intro
with my multi-part articles, I simply break up long pieces of writing into different parts for folks. so, this article starts where the last one left off! it may be helpful to go back to the first one and read the last few paragraphs if what i’m saying doesn’t quite make sense.
additionally, i know many of you appreciate audio recordings of the articles. i do plan on getting there! these recordings take a bit of time, and i didn’t want to delay article dissemination as i gain the energy and time management to make room for this addition.
in grief & praise,
M
multi-realm thinking, part 2:
walking the edge of the silhouette
Extending this further, I’ve been starting to experiment with positioning climate change and social collapse in similar spheres of multi-realm thinking. What if this process has everything to do with the universe experiencing itself through earthly lessons of duality?
First, based on anthropological research and mythology and biographical narratives I’ve come across, it seems clear to me that there have been groups of people throughout time who have created ways of being that flow with the current of life in heart-wrenchingly beautiful ways. They have created reciprocal, pleasurable, joyful cultures and systems that flow with the movement of life.
If time isn’t linear, which many wildly intelligent people (both spiritually and non-spiritually minded) seem to believe, then these experiences not only have already been collected by the universe, but are currently being collected and will continue to be.
The droplets of the river, all flowing through the same bed of time, are experiencing different phases of the eternally flowing current simultaneously.
Somewhere in this flowing cycle of time, we land here, in the present moment.
At this moment, in the tiny, obscure, sacred piece of time where you and I both sit, the universe seems to be interested in learning about forms of consciousness who reach the polarity of destruction.
We learn through duality; opposites; poles. We also learn through reconciling duality, and re-membering through non-duality. The pole we are experiencing now is one that, by way of lessons in opposites, teaches us about connection to the earth, the flow of life, collaboration, unconditional love, and relationship with spirit.
By severing our ties with all of these elements of life, [colonial patriarchal racial capitalist] empire has exposed us to the polar extremes of connection.
Even the “mild” forms of disconnecting violence we participate in is devastatingly extreme. We buy the food that is supposed to nourish our bodies & our planet from colorful plastic containers in grocery stores, grown by wage slaves in monocropped fields. We host extravagant pinterest weddings to celebrate love. We use our feet, bound tightly in rubber shoes, only to carry us from the car to the parking lot to the door. We give birth in hospitals on plastic tables with harried doctors speaking from behind masks under fluorescent light.
I think a big part of why we’re here is to feel into this.
I think we’re here to feel into the grief, despair, longing, and loneliness that arises from disconnection. I think we’re here to go mad with rage and heartbreak. I think we’re here to let that energy move through us and feel just how agonzing the duality can be. I think we’re here to scream and tear our hearts out and go numb and then thaw out again.
This moment in the nonlinear spiral of time screams out at me, over and over:
This is wrong.
Feel it.
the silhouette
I think we’re here to forget, and then remember, over and over, tracing the lines of the silhouette.
Lately, I’ve been seeing the image of a silhouette. The shape of the silhouette is bright and illuminated, and everything outside of it is dark. The contrast is stark. From afar, you can very clearly see what shape it is. It’s undeniable. In many (most?) other realms, our spirits exist inside the silhouette, inside the illumination. But from this place, we cannot know its shape, because we are inside the matrix of light.
When we come to earth, we trace the edge of the silhouette, teetering, walking, dancing, and stumbling from light to dark, light to dark. We discover the outline as we walk along this edge, learning the shape of life.
I have a suspicion that this is a unique ability we have here, on earth, as humans. We have this unique ability to feel the saturated depths of the darkness (duality) that outline the silhouette, as well as to feel the ecstatic lightness of being that lives inside (non-duality).
We are all tracing pieces of the silhouette; it’s too infinite and complex to engage in this task alone. We share our learnings with each other while we’re here, and we bring all the learnings back to a shared consciousness when we’re formless.
Climate change and general collapse changes the flavor and tones of this project to find our way back to the center, together.
Collapse asks us to feel into complete and total grief. To feel into the wonder and majesty of all the things we are losing. Grief is the other pole of praise -- one cannot exist without the other.
I think that to engage in the project of collective action, individual healing, and spiritual & embodied re-membering, we must also interweave a practice of individually and collectively holding the weight of despair, and letting it move through us. This is grieving.
What if suffering is not a punishment, but the teacher of dualism manifesting emotionally to teach us about the shape of life?
What if non-duality is not the ultimate goal of how we engage in our experience 100% of the time, but a fluctuating, oscillating practice of being as we trace the dark and illuminated sides of the silhouette?
What if we forget because remembering itself is part of the knowing?
What if we incorporated grieving into our practice just as much as praising?
When we pathologize depression, anxiety, suicidality, bipolarity, and other forms of consistent suffering, do we erase the undeniable tendrils of collapse that creep into every single material experience of existence? I wonder if these ways of moving through the world are more spiritual than a “chemical imbalance” in the brain (which was a marketing technique of the pharmaceutical industry, to simplify the symptom as the root cause). I wonder if these wildly prevalent manifestations of “mental illness” are actually healthy grief energy that gets stuck in our bodies and has no way of moving through us, precisely because we don’t know how to grieve.
reimagining
I imagine us weeping and singing together, feeling into the reality of collapse and isolation. I imagine us wailing deep into the night, synchronizing with the darkness of the earth to move through the darkness of the silhouette. I imagine drums and fire and physical touch, holding one another while staying strong and soft.
I imagine this practice making space for us to engage in ecstatic joy together, showing up in solidarity after floods and fires and death, feeling into the power of connectedness and community. Showing up together for the apple harvest, pressing cider and letting our minds go as the autumn transition sets leaves ablaze and infuses the air with the crisp scent of nostalgia.
I feel the praise that comes with imagining new ways to build infrastructure and houses, to restructure ourselves back into villages, to return land to its rightful indigenous caregivers, to repair the violence committed against colonized BIPOC, to reconnect with growing and harvesting food in ways that regenerate the earth and flow with life, to learn from one another, crossing all contrived boundaries of ancestry, to re find spirit, to re acquaint with minimalism and nomadism as we move to the spaces that can hold us at a given time, the spaces that aren’t raging with fire and water and air.
I imagine us rising up against wage slavery, and feeling the praise in liberation. I imagine us once again planning seven generations ahead, feeling the praise of care and generosity for others.
I imagine us stumbling over and over again, because we forget, because we don’t yet remember how. Because this project is hard and was always meant to be challenging as hell.
__
hot sun &
tender bodies &
rains that come too quickly, or not at all.
—
how deep can your longing be
for clean air and fresh water and
relationships as whole & full
as the out breath of
a forest?
—
how deep can your longing be
for healed wounds & timeless wisdom
& villages that bound with multigenerational joy
as each individual nestles, sighing
into their place as a piece
of the puzzle?
—
can the longing be so deep &
so wide that it tears you, completely
in half? that it pummels you down
into the soil, the clay that birthed you,
hands and knees rubbing heavy
against the crust?
—
& can you rise up again
so full of relief
—
that you know what you long for is real
& so full
—
that the joy you feel whenever
you bear witness to the memories you’ve longed for
floods you with waves of praise so
brilliant & overflowing with delight
that you’ll forget
the the grief
once again
—
being human is not
a punishment.
—
being human is not
a punishment.
—
being human is an
opportunity to feel
it all.
a note
Welcome, new and old friends.
I post 1-4 times a month here, always aiming to share the most pressing, urgent topics on my mind about other ways of being. I am so grateful you are here, joining me on this journey of re-connection.
If you benefit from this labor in any way, the greatest acts of reciprocity you could offer include:
leaving a comment or reaching out to me individually to tell me your thoughts
I love this
sharing the substack with friends and family
including a note about why you think they might enjoy it
contributing to the project financially
each article takes ~4-12 hours to compose
Sending heaps of love to you as we navigate the earth realm together.