May 1, 2019 | Articles, civil liberties, Culture, Emotional/Spiritual, Resilience, Resistance, Society In Decline, Tyranny
Do you see a little bit by what I mean when I say democracy needs to be nourished by sanity? If Americans had cared about each others’ psychological wounds — if they’d turned to one another and said: “we’re all being hurt by predatory systems and institutions, and yet we’re all asked to be part of them too — this has to change!” — then maybe enough people wouldn’t have been so psychically fragile as to be such easy prey for the world’s dumbest demagogue. But they were — and that Americans fell for Donald Trump, of all people, tells us just how badly psychologically shattered they must have been. You must be genuinely and totally broken inside by your insecurities if you believe what a Donald Trump is selling you.
Apr 26, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Resilience, Trauma
The optimistic position is simply naïve. The pessimistic predicts the precise design of the future and doesn’t acknowledge that we can do a lot in the name of compassion to make life easier on ourselves, one another, and other species—our triangle of resilience relationships. Many don’t seem to be able to hang out in the 8–9.5 range, and I am certainly practicing this myself. If our fear is great and especially if we have little tolerance for fear, we might even try to deny climate change altogether.
Apr 17, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Culture, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, New Paradigm, Resilience, Society In Decline
This week I have been disheartened by climate activists who have minimized, trivialized and literally mocked humanity’s mourning of the losses at Notre Dame Cathedral on April 15. Yes, Notre Dame is a building made by human beings, and the loss of its...
Apr 6, 2019 | Articles, Carolyn's Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, community, Culture, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Resilience, Society In Decline
We easily associate empathy, compassion, an open heart, support, cooperation, honesty, integrity, and gratitude with love, but how about boundaries, limits, grief, anger, discernment, comfort with not knowing, and a commitment to working on our personal and cultural shadow?
Apr 2, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, community, Emotional/Spiritual, Grief, Resilience, Sacred Activism, Society In Decline
There is another reason for fending off sorrow about the loss of the wild natural places we love to visit and the communities where we live, and this is perhaps the hardest one of all to accept and overcome. Many of us are simply afraid that if we allow ourselves to wade, even for a moment, into the feelings of sadness for the living world that lap at the edge of our consciousness, we will find ourselves pulled so ruthlessly into grief and despair that we will never emerge.
Mar 29, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Economic Meltdown, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Options/ New Paradigm, Society In Decline
I was recently asked to respond to a short email interview. My response seems like a nice summary of how I’ve spent the last decade and a half of my life, so I thought I would share it here.
Mar 15, 2019 | Articles, Emotional/Spiritual, Grief, Sacred Activism, Trauma
There we all share the communal cup of loss and in that place find our deep kinship with one another. That is the alchemy of grief, the great and abiding ecology of the sacred once again showing us what the indigenous soul has always known; we are of the earth.
Mar 4, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Grief, Resilience, Trauma
Despite our having caused so much destruction, it is important to also consider the wide spectrum of possibilities that make up a human life. Yes, on one end of that spectrum is greed, cruelty, and ignorance; on the other end is kindness, compassion, and wisdom. We are imbued with great creativity, brilliant communication, and extraordinary appreciation of and talent for music and other forms of art. We cry in tenderness when we are touched by love, beauty, or loss. We cry in empathy for others’ pain. Some of us even sacrifice our lives for strangers. There is no other known creature whose spectrum of consciousness is as wide and varied as our own. You likely know well the spectrum of human consciousness within yourself. Perhaps you have had many moments when greed or hatred overtook your mind. But it is likely you have also had many moments when you knew that love was all that ever really mattered. And in your final breaths it is likely to be all that is left of you and all that you will leave behind, a cosmic story whispered only once.As Leonard said, “It is in love that we are made; in love we disappear.”
Feb 25, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Empire, Extinction, Grief, Society In Decline, Trauma
The 21st century is going to be the first time — ever — that the human species stops increasing, expanding, and growing. The human population is — for the first time in history — projected to finally peak around 2050, for the first time ever, in a hundred thousand years. Let me put all that in perspective, if your response is — “so what?” — I think it is one of the most significant events of all time, and I don’t say that for hyperbole’s sake. So powerful and meaningful that we haven’t even begun to think about it. I think it explains everything from today’s wave of fascism, to climate change — to tomorrow’s urgent, desperate need for better paradigms of everything, from economics to politics to society
Feb 18, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Culture, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Resilience, Resistance, Trauma
For it is only unacknowledged trauma that prompts us to act out in ways that make the problem worse. If what we have been calling “climate change” is, in fact, an unprecedented form of trauma that is prompting us to act out in such perplexing ways as questioning the validity of facts themselves, then there is tremendous potential for societal and global healing in simply bringing awareness to the nature of our collective wounding. As anyone who has walked a 12-step path will tell us, awareness is a powerful elixir.
