I dearly love them, my world change friends. Brilliant, active, moved by concern for planet, society, living beings suffering everywhere – many singing their final farewell songs as they go extinct. We all know this for quite some time now. We know it in our marrow, our soul wailing. We’re earthlings on our way to oblivion, and to waste go all the flowers of civilization on this planet. We all know this, and some of us act in one way or another, and some cry their heart out, and some prepare for civilization’s collapse.
We’re in the loop, getting tons of messages via email, facebook, twitter, gplus, and the media on a daily basis diagnosing the disaster, offering ways to deal with it; some are bleak, others urgent calls, again others slightly more positive. And we could read all day and night about it and still the sounds of alarm and requiems of loss would not end. We could work all day and all of the night and never even come close to responding to the tiniest fractions of the calls to action…
There are a thousand great plans that promise to help. There are a million fantastic, creative voices. Leaders, activists, spiritual and post-metaphysical, atheists and the Pope, women and men all over the planet. We’re all shouting and pointing in a thousand different directions. “Let’s go!” we say, “We need to be on our way! It’s urgent.” And it’s true, isn’t it?! So, “Let’s unite!” — And hundreds of banners are raised in the field and shouts go out to “Rally here! Unite! We’re in this together!”
But what is this that we’re together in?
Study more, agree, disagree, doubt the data, trust the largest majority a science has ever mustered, hear the Scream of Nature as Edvard Munch heard it in the beginning of the 1890ies, 125 years ago. All hell has broken loose, between the climate change deniers and accepters, between the activists and not-so-activists, everyone talking and shouting and screaming and crying and wailing, drowning out nature’s scream, fading out the panic rising in the soul with plans and projects and all the well meaning attempts to stop the race towards an unknown abyss. Authentic chaos feeding back to itself ever faster devastating loops just as the climate seems to do.
I know, I know, this is what I need to face – way too long have I avoided seeing the obvious, hearing the sound of this profound chaos, mashing up truths, half-truths, lies and propaganda into a carnage of arguments and feelings. Too long have I thought that if we all would just use this tool or that, align ourselves along these lines or those, all would be well. Too long have I hope for a technological miracle, CO2 and plastic eating bacteria, an Artificial Intelligence whose benign intelligence would solve all this human madness for us, expecting the Singularity when machine’s intelligence surpasses that of humans would fix it all. So now I face it, let’s face it, that even though we do our very, very best that hasn’t stopped the increasing speed of civilisation’s mad dash but rather fueled it. No, it is chaos growing more authentic by the minute, confusion squared, desperation gripping a million throats, constricting my throat, your throat, choking us. Tears well up. We cry oceans.
There’s nothing I can do, nothing we can do that doesn’t first and foremost feed the chaos, energizing the scream. Hope dies last, they say, but it does die. It dies now. It is perishing right here. Finally I descend into this chaotic hell, where everybody does their best and nothing is accomplished but swelling this madness. It all comes crashing in now that I’ve opened the gates. I washes over me. I break into a million pieces, we break into a trillion pieces, those of us that open their eyes and see, those of us that open their ears and listen — I hear us being broken. We mourn for ourselves. And then the mourning expands to those we don’t care about, those we dislike, the whole mad circus called humanity, and we mourn for our animal friends, the living beings we routinely destroy, all living creatures and what will now never even come alive. We are broken. We break, and mourn… our heart becoming a requiem for all possibilities, creativities, brilliances, for what each and everyone of us could think of and do. I accept.
And then the mourning fades. The sorrow goes and with it the social self, the distortion that has grown on us the last 10.000 years. The distortion we call civilization, seeking power, seeking approval, growing emotional, growing intellectual, acting for our individual good, acting for the good of all; it all fades into the historical background. We’re through.
[To be continued]