Kali Takes America: Reconnecting With The Destroyer/Creator, By Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker

Kali Takes America: Reconnecting With The Destroyer/Creator, By Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker

In 2016, Andrew Harvey and I published Savage Grace: Living Resiliently In The Dark Night of The Globe. In Chapter 1 of the book, we forecasted essentially what is happening in this moment in terms of the demise of the last vestiges of democracy and human rights on this planet. We chose the image of Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction as the symbol of our current global predicament. Two years later, we are witnessing a virulent, worldwide embrace of white nationalist, authoritarian rule. Ultimately, Kali seeks to transform the human ego and rational mind and bring us into a more permanent residence in the heart, but the process is often excruciating. Might she also want to transform the image a country or a community has of itself? “This is not who we are.”—Or is it? How shall awake human beings respond? What is our work? What is our calling? How do we reconnect with the authentic sources of meaning in our lives and the web of life itself as totalitarian rule is poised to dominate our consciousness and our countries as we stand on the threshold of the potential extinction of all life on Earth as a result of catastrophic climate change? We will be posting portions of Savage Grace in the coming weeks because it is proving itself to be prescient and empowering in this very dark time.

Confounded On The Bridge Between Worlds, By Carolyn Baker

Confounded On The Bridge Between Worlds, By Carolyn Baker

I have been writing about collapse for more than a decade, and perhaps you have been reading about it for even longer. While I know that it is inevitable and that in tandem with climate catastrophe it will be even more horrific than seasoned students of collapse anticipated, it matters to me how it unfolds. Throughout history, the collapse of societies has played out in a manner unique to each one. How this collapse plays out matters to me. It is poised to be violent, and my intention has always been to minimize the brutality. The first step in that project is to name what is so at this moment in time and to stop minimizing it by pointing to the myriad evils the Unites States has perpetrated on other countries in the past. Indeed, the chickens have come home to roost, and now it is our turn to deal with them.

It’s Time For America To Face Its Racist Shadow: Making Intolerance And The Intolerant Intolerable, By Dr. Gary Stamper

It’s Time For America To Face Its Racist Shadow: Making Intolerance And The Intolerant Intolerable, By Dr. Gary Stamper

It’s easy to blame the racist rants of leaders who loudly denigrate the “others, but if leaders weren’t supported by a large number of people, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it. A leader and a large number of people and their shadow/hatred/fear of the “other”- spurred on by the silence of those may not agree but are afraid to speak up – encourage their hatred to feed upon one another.

Rebecca Solnit:  The Coup Has Already Happened

Rebecca Solnit: The Coup Has Already Happened

After the coup, everything seems crazy, the news is overwhelming, and some try to cope by withdrawing or pretending that things are normal. Others are overwhelmed and distraught. I’m afflicted by a kind of hypervigilance of the news, a daily obsession to watch what’s going on that is partly a quest for sense in what seems so senseless. At least I’ve been able to find the patterns and understand who the key players are, but to see the logic behind the chaos brings you face to face with how deep the trouble is.
We still have an enormous capacity to resist the administration, not least by mass civil disobedience and other forms of noncooperation. Sweeping the November elections wouldn’t hurt either, if that results in candidates we hold accountable afterward. Or both. I don’t know if there’s a point at which it will be too late, though every week more regulations, administrators, and norms crash and burn—but we are long past the point at which it is too soon.

Lessons From The Holocaust For Our Times, Part 3, By Dianne Monroe

Lessons From The Holocaust For Our Times, Part 3, By Dianne Monroe

Shortly after Trump’s election, Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder (whose focus of study is Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust) published a book titled On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The first lesson is Do Not Obey in Advance. Sometimes footprints from the past can point the way forward through a perilous and uncertain future.

Carolyn Baker and Andrew Harvey Receive Nautilus Award For “Savage Grace”

Carolyn Baker and Andrew Harvey Receive Nautilus Award For “Savage Grace”

You have written &/or published a book that carries a potent message – whether in text or photos – and we are grateful for the chance to help promote and celebrate your book by making it visible as a Nautilus Award Winner. We hold the intention with you that your book will find much recognition and success with this significant award

The Woman Who Silenced America For Six Minutes And Twenty Seconds, By Carolyn Baker

The Woman Who Silenced America For Six Minutes And Twenty Seconds, By Carolyn Baker

In reality, what Emma and her friends are experiencing is a profane, contemporary iteration of what youth in ancient, tribal times experienced in a sacred, contained, ritual setting. In those times, the community understood that rites of passage in youth were as necessary as learning to walk, cutting teeth, or entering puberty. Thus the community prepared its children for adolescent rites of passage because they understood that children come to this life with an inherent need for them. In fact, they understood that not providing rites of passage or what is sometimes called initiation, guarantees that the child will never grow up and in fact, will become toxic to the community

Reflecting On “Savage Grace” By Kathleen Byrne

Reflecting On “Savage Grace” By Kathleen Byrne

As Kali and Trump are disrupting the planet, you are offered the help of Andrew and Carolyn to ponder the 4 strategies and actions that awake humans must embrace going forward into the Dark Night of the Soul. The tools they provide to navigate the crisis are: Reconnection, Resistance, Resilience and Regeneration and each chapter has suggested practices to help the reader focus.

It’s Pretty Much Inevitable That Trump Will Try To Stage A Coup And Overthrow Democracy, An Interview With Timothy Snyder, Yale Historian

It’s Pretty Much Inevitable That Trump Will Try To Stage A Coup And Overthrow Democracy, An Interview With Timothy Snyder, Yale Historian

You have to accept there is a time frame. Nobody can be sure how long this particular regime change with Trump will take, but there is a clock, and the clock really is ticking. It’s three years on the outside, but in more likelihood something like a year. In January 2018 we will probably have a pretty good idea which way this thing is going. It’s going to depend more on us than on them in the meantime. Once you get past a certain threshold, it starts to depend more on them than on us, and then things are much, much worse. It makes me sad to think how Americans would behave at that point.