Do Not Lose Heart. We Were Made for These Times.

I have felt incredibly inspired to write lately, which is always very enlivening for me as it is something that I know I was born to share.  I love telling stories, expressing my experiences, and connecting with the larger world in this way.  Yet I have felt a little lost as to how to insert my writing back into the human sphere because my current theme is a topic that I'm not sure many people want to hear about or perhaps it can just feel so completely overwhelming that most people have chosen to shut down and shut off.  Yet here I am, writing about the ongoing ecological collapse of Earth.  

I can’t help it!  This matters to me and I need to speak to it.  I feel such a pull to express these thoughts that I could practically throw up if I don’t, or perhaps I will throw up if I do, I’m uncertain which one it is.  Either way, it feels like an edge for me, one that may not be well received. Yet I remind myself, that that is not why I write.  That is not why I create. It is not meant for something as small as ridicule or even acceptance.  It is for a much larger offering to the world. One of the core purposes of my life. The Great Work of Your (my) Life! (Stephen Cope.)

Lately, I have felt burnt out from trying to sell myself, from trying to market my creations, from trying to advertise in a way that will get people to care about what we are creating here and why.  Perhaps it is because I am not meant to be a salesperson or a marketing sleuth.  Perhaps it’s because the majority of people just don’t really seem to care about what’s in the items they buy, where those ingredients/materials come from, who made them, what the ecological impacts are in the countries they originate, or any of that.  Perhaps it’s also because I don’t want to scale up because that will mean selling out and compromising my values in order to meet demand.  Perhaps it’s due to my strong desire to have everyone create things for themselves, using locally-sourced ingredients and materials, in order to cultivate healthy, resilient communities built on systems of interdependence between community members and place.    

I want to share how I make things and inspire everyone to create from this place of love and intense respect for life.  Yet I can’t do that if I’m having to compete in the dominant culture’s capitalist system of dog-eat-dog.  In that context, I need to be the only one making what I’m making, how I’m making it, and if I was to share that with others, well then they’d be making it like that too and then I wouldn’t get it all for me!  Maybe though, if I had some instagram reel or tiktok video go viral, then I would be able to afford to share how I create what I do for free because I would be so popular and rich from my viral explosion of fame that I could afford to just give shit away :)  But really, I'd rather just give shit away and share anyways, irregardless (that was for you Momma Bear) of my financial situation and lack of virtual popularity. 

At the end of the day, I really just want out of the capitalist system…as much as I can of course as I still live here, in this time, right now.  I want out of trying to get you to like what I make or to support me enough to survive and thrive.  I don’t want to engage in the business slogan that "the customer is always right" or try to please certain people who just really seem to want to complain and suck my energy completely dry.  And just to be clear, this has only happened with literally like a couple of people with whom I have dealt with over the past few years, the majority of you are just incredibly kick-ass and so supportive!  You see what we are working to create here and you are appreciative.  Thank you.  Yet I still don’t want to deal with those few.  I would rather inspire you to make your own soap, grow your own food, create your own incredible life that you just never want to escape from!  Then you can complain to yourself if you don’t like what you made or grew instead of taking it out on someone else ;)

Okay, I feel like this writing has gone off on a slight tangent, yet it’s all totally relevant. 

I live immersed within 74 acres of diverse forest along a magical brook.  The skills and knowledge that I have acquired over the past eight years here have been completely life-changing, yet also feel so completely normal that I'm uncertain how I have lived without them for so long. I have been blessed with such incredible gifts.  A deeply rooted ancestral re-membering.  I have truly come home to myself. The ways, with a current twist of the times, that my ancestors, that all of our ancestors, connected so intimately with place and life and death feels so natural to me.  And not natural like how the word “natural” is marketed nowadays, because everything that comes from the Earth, which is literally EVERYTHING, is natural, really.  Don't be too quick to jump on that marketing bandwagon where companies want to make you believe that the word "natural" must be good for you and Earth...that is often not the truth. So I don’t mean that kind of natural.  The kind of natural that I am referring to is the deep-seeded intrinsic kind, where I was actually born and created to live this way, which means I am simply returning to that symbiotic way of being in relationship with the animate world of which I belong. 

I want to share this way of innate living with everyone.  I want to share the traditional skills that I am reconnecting with and inspire everyone to reconnect with their ancestry and ways of simple living.  We are meant to be a collective species, living in commons, in deep relationship with Earth, with other humans, and the more-than-human beings as well.  I find immense inspiration from the ways that humans have lived solely interdependent with the world directly at our feet for a much much longer time than our current global system of disconnect and separation.  We lived within the means of the human and the more-than-human community around us.  Sure, there would have been the odd barter and exchange from the random weary traveller, yet that would have still been within the means of a fairly localized area.  

However, more recently in human history, we have blown all of that right out of the water and are living way beyond our means, bringing the whole Earth to a crisis point of ecological collapse.  We have passed the point of overshoot and are continuing to behave as though we can have infinite growth on a finite planet.  I am not a lover of math, yet even I know that that math just don't add up!  You can't keep taking from something/someone without replenishing it/them. So I don’t care about advertising anymore - I never liked it anyways.  I don’t want to try and figure out how to market my creations so that people will want to buy them.  I don’t want to focus on scaling-up so that we can get people to support local by buying our toxic-free veggies and eggs.  I am tired of trying to share what I deeply care about only to have it fall on mostly deaf ears. The sense of urgency that I feel right now is a very powerful force, encouraging me to be fiercely heart-centred and continue directing my energy fully towards my purpose.

I want to focus on how I show up for the world (which of course, making lard soap from the fat from our pigs infused with our farm grown and wild foraged botanicals as well as growing real, wholesome, non-poisoned foods is totally a huge part of how I show up!)  Yet I want to share how I make and grow these creations to encourage others to do the same so that they may feel empowered to reclaim their own health and wellbeing, as well as their relationship with Earth.

I strive to be the voice for those beings whose voices we no longer remember how to hear.  I care about continuing to manifest this place as a refuge for other weary souls who also long to show up and are choosing to be the change they long to see.  “My life is my message” Mahatma Ghandi.  I want to share what I have endeavoured to re-member about being an intact, mature, human being.  One willing to sacrifice many things in order to enact her unique gifts for the world. Yet when we live from this place of purpose, sacrifices don’t really feel like sacrifices.  They are just all a part of being wholly alive.  We are each born at just the perfect time and in just the perfect place.  We each bear unique gifts that we were born to share with the world, a world and community that is meant to cherish and support those gifts so that they may be fully manifested and enacted for the whole.

Yet we live in a broken culture. The dominant culture.  We no longer have an intact village of Elders who are able to guide us through these initiatory processes.  There are still Elders, most certainly, yet they are few and far between because we, as a larger whole, have come to value narcissistic, adolescent behaviour, putting self and the acquisition of wealth for personal gain at the forefront.  We have forgotten what it means to live for the whole, to be willing to set aside our own egotistical desires in order to manifest the dreams and vision of the entire Earth community.   

So here we find ourselves, as a global community of people, being forcefully thrown into the depths of our own initiation.  Most people will go fighting the entire way.  Many people will not survive the descent.  There is no other way to put it.  I am tired of attempting to sugar coat it or not speak to that which breaks my heart and rests very heavily within my body.  These are the times of complete collapse.  Ecological collapse.  Dominant culture collapse (thank goodness!)  Species collapse.  Watershed collapse.  Economic collapse.  Full system collapse.  It is the "Long Dark" (Duane Elgin) that we must go through in order to find ourselves on the other side of what is possible.  We have thus far not been willing participants and time has run out.  

I have always wanted to believe differently.  I have wanted to believe that people would willingly make different choices when faced with these dire consequences and that so many beings, SO MANY BEINGS, would not have to perish in order for us to choose wisely.  Beings that encompass far beyond mere human beings.  Yet this is not the story.  We, as a whole, do not want to wake up, we do not want to choose life.  

What now?  

Well, as the heartbreaking poem “Hieroglyphic Stairway” by Drew Dellinger asks: 

“it’s 3:23 in the morning

and i’m awake 

because my great great grandchildren 

won’t let me sleep 

my great great grandchildren 

ask me in dreams 

what did you do while the planet was 

plundered?  

what did you do when the earth was 

unravelling?...”

So what will you do?  What will you choose?  Will you stand up and be a formidable adversary in the face of these treacherous violations against life?  Will you willingly and courageously face the decent and step through the fiery gates of your own necessary and much needed initiation so that a new story of co-creation may emerge?  Will you fall deeply in love with life, laying your own life on the line in order to plant the seeds of a future you will likely never live to see manifest? Or will you hold out until the last moment when life chooses for you?  Sinking deeper into despair and pulling up a chair beside denial, ignorance, and overwhelm?

I choose to show up, to follow that which calls me each day, to rise out of bed, to tend to life and death, to create beauty as an offering, and to open my heart to the grief and possibilities of "The Great Turning" (David C. Korten.)  This is the place that I want to show up from, that I need to show up from.  This is why I was made for these times. And this, my friends, is why you were made for these times as well. There is such immense opportunity right now, if only we may have the courage to dream it into being.

I will leave you with some incredibly inspiring words from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a poet, Jungian psychoanalyst, and author.  This letter she wrote to a young activist was shared with me many years ago by a dear Elder and tender of the Hearth of the world, and has just as much resonance for me now as it did then. 

“Mis estimados queridos, My Esteemed Ones:

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for “good” in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, “the new normal,” the grotesquerie of the week.

It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

…You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking.

Yet … I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is – we were made for these times.

Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised, since childhood, for this time precisely.

…I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frustrations in arighting all that needs change right now, or even feeling you have lost the map entirely, you are not without resource, you are not alone.

Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. In your deepest bones, you have always known this is so.

Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a forest greater. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

… We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over — brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by suddenly realizing one deadly thing or another, by not realizing something else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme.

We all have a heritage and history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially … we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection.

Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered – can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves.

…Though we are not invulnerable, our risibility supports us to laugh in the face of cynics who say “fat chance,” and “management before mercy,” and other evidences of complete absence of soul sense. This, and our having been ‘to Hell and back’ on at least one momentous occasion, makes us seasoned vessels for certain. Even if you do not feel that you are, you are.

Even if your puny little ego wants to contest the enormity of your soul, the smaller self can never for long subordinate the larger Self. In matters of death and rebirth, you have surpassed the benchmarks many times. Believe the evidence of any one of your past testings and trials. Here it is: Are you still standing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like “barely” are allowed here). If you are still standing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are seaworthy.

…In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the Voice greater? You have all the resource you need to ride any wave, to surface from any trough.

…In the language of aviators and sailors, ours is to sail forward now, all balls out. Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more rapidly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by whatever countervailing means, to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner, far less volatile core – till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again.

One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair – thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.

It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts – adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

…One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires … causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

…There will always be times in the midst of “success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen” when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But … that is not what great ships are built for.

…This comes with much love and prayer that you remember Who you came from, and why you came to this beautiful, needful Earth.”