I have long felt that the way things are cannot be sustained. I have felt that we cannot disconnect the suffering we see in a far away land from the comfort I feel here in my home. When I sit by and allow things I cannot condone to happen, then I am as bad as if I’d done it myself. So, it is clear to me that the ways things are surely must come to an end. By shaking the foundations of the very establishments that hold us so secure, we are actually forwarding the painful process of change. In the long view, what is unleashed in the process cannot last and will not last. Fear, prejudice, selfishness, these are the now overt elements of what was already here. The trick of the Establishment has ever been to keep us from looking them directly in the eye yet using them to justify immoral means. But now these are open, above ground, visible. And now we cannot hide from what has been festering within our comfortable world.
Yet these too will diminish in time as what they fought for turns out to be a horrendous mutant of what went before. They perhaps don’t realise that they are only taking the underbelly of emotions of what has always been and making them new. What will really be new is when the Earth Herself heaves up in cataclysmic protest against all who have undone Her delicate balance, when capitals are flooded and humans drown in their own confusion. When the paper that fiscal policy is written upon disintegrates in the water and the air poisons swathes of this green and pleasant land. And if it’s not our own British green and pleasant land being poisoned, it will be that of lands once flourishing in the cradle of farming, or the dawning of new religions. The people fleeing to us. To us! As if we have different answers to the ones they once dared to dream were right. People, like me and my husband, my daughters and their unborn sibling. Bodies with dreams and wishes, memories and desires, with thoughts and learning, joys and tears. People. Who drowned off our shores because of the death rattle of the establishments, like the one we’ve just taken away.
This is a globe and these are global times. What happens to you happens to me. It’s always been thus, but now it is so very obvious. I am retreating, slowly from the world. I retreat from the cyber world for my personal mental health, I have retreated from fashions and consumerism. I have retreated into good friends and good food, soul-nourishing experiences and deeply meaningful moments. I have retreated into work that reconnects. Yet I need to forever renew my retreating. For this is a damaged world and a damaged mess to which I cannot see an end.
Yet, nothing is ever the same, from moment to moment. What we feel today will be a fuzzy memory in time. Things may not even have been important enough to worry about, but perhaps only time really shows us that. Time long after my time. For now, I will meditate under the apple tree and feel the cells of who went before all around me. For now.
Nwyfre 