What age were you when you realised the planet was fucked? About 11. What age were you when you realised the planet was fucked and your parents weren’t going to do anything about it? About 12. What age were you when you realised that the government didn’t care about the environment? About 13. What age were you when you realised that all of the adults round you were complicit in holding up the system of environmental destruction? About 14. All of this was my first experience of societal gaslighting. The T.V. said one thing about the ozone layer, wildlife conservation and your immediate connections said another. it was then I felt the weight of environmental activism. The crippling weight of both action and inaction and the risk of being completely ostracised from my community. Didn’t seem very fair or sustainable to a teenager. As well as having to bear the crippling anxiety of indecision that would hound me for large swathes of my adult life. luckily that time is over now.
So you see that was my first introduction to Systemic trauma and it has plagued me my whole life. That I could have saved something and my fear stopped me. The societal gaslighting stopped me. Now we have a name for it Eco-Anxiety. Knowing that the largest challenge we face as a species is deeply interconnected with our natural environment and the relationship we have with it. That our relationship with planetary healing is all bound up in the community, the collective, the ancestral, the generational and our innerscape. It’s a fucking mess. A big bad beautiful mess.
Today I was meditating on the idea of resolution. About all the things that are missing from our community spaces. When the hierarchical structures makes decision without the due care of the emotional trauma of the community or individual that that decision impacts.
Due Process and what might be the way forward to integrate this kind of practice into everyday processes. What would happen if we took due emotional care of the people and the places at the centre of our processes? Things would move a lot slower.
It makes me wonder if The Great Pause has ignited this understanding in us. As I stated in my last post The Personal Is The Planetary
I was invited into a political fray within a spiritual group that I was invited into. Where the need to get spiritual work done overlooked the emotional needs and indeed the healing needs of the members of the group. Thinking that the autocratic decision-making process was appropriate as way to seed sovereignty within the group. Needless to say there has been a schism. That has involved all sorts of rhetoric, including referencing dark forces and the silencing and externalising of core healing issues. Why is it more important to follow a pre-determined singular agenda than exploring and healing what has emerged in the energetic field? You see The System is everywhere and we embody it. Our need to go plant 1 million trees, or indeed go vegan and even anchor the light is driven by a fear of what was, what is to come, rather than facing what is. What if greenwashing isn’t ok? What if nature destruction of any kind isn’t ok? What if the idea of planetary crisis isn’t so much about the planet as it is about us?
You see the planet is going to be ok. Maybe it will evolve change, evict and even extinguish us. Isn’t it great that it has the power to do so? Our Mother Gaia as it screams shut up and listen to me. Shut up and listen to us. Listen to us Earthlings. It’s not ok. What you do as part of your day to day practices are affecting me, it’s killing Earthly life, it’s killing you. I don’t need your grand gestures. I don’t need your narcissistically driven environmental militancy. I need you to resolve to change. In order to do that you need to listen. You need to see me. You need to hear me. You need to witness my distress. I can look at this writing now and see clearly that is could be construed as projection. It’s once again where the personal meet the systemic and thus the planetary.
it occurs to me that maybe as a result of our trauma we are using nature and the consumption of it, either through ‘wild experiences’ and or our extraction economies as an endless source of narcissistic supply. Make me feel better. What are you giving in return? How are you truly honouring the Earth in these times of extreme social deprivation?
