Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Collapse as a Renaissance

I just finished a course through the University of Victoria called Leading in the Metacrisis, which is part of the Facing Human Wrongs curricula. It dug deeply into modernity, colonialism, extractive capitalism, hierarchy and supremacy of humans, complexity, and our complicity in the systems that are killing the earth and all living things. It’s been intense. A couple weeks ago, I shared with the class a nightmare I had (I’ll spare you, it was awful), and a visceral fear I’ve been working with around the intense pain and/or death of my daughter and husband that may come with further collapse. One of the other students reflected back to me by saying, “I hear you on feeling fear about letting ourselves truly grieve at the required depth for the moment, Kyra”. Her insight in reframing my fear created a crevice in my spirit that has continued to open the more I’ve sat with it.

The grief of this moment, of the multiple collapses we’re navigating, is completely overwhelming when we actually do the work of feeling it, especially when we’re doing it alone. And we, understandably, don’t want to. We want to distract, numb, shop, ignore, “self-care”, or blame our way out of reality. Or maybe most dangerous, believe in the false hope that others will just save us from this – the hope that the Cory Booker’s of the world (who are frankly doing the absolute minimum requirement of their job in the midst of the complete destruction of the Republic) will solve even one aspect of the metacrisis (this video is worth the 50 minutes), or the Ezra Klein’s telling us that Democrats just have to reframe and use an “abundance” frame and all will be well. This, while the environment is accelerating toward an inability to sustain human (and most other forms of) life due to the choices we make in our lives every day. This while we have funded the ongoing genocide of more than 50,000 Palestinians (more than 15,000 of those are babies and children). This while our government is disappearing people because they’ve disagreed with the regime. This while our taxes have funded (at the cost of $40 million in one month) an offshore concentration camp for brown people, many of whom came to this country fleeing violence. All while simultaneously defunding lifesaving social programs and research.

Of course we don’t want to feel this. It’s a nightmare.

My own desire not to feel this has me thinking about all the Nazis that didn’t call or think of themselves as Nazis. The nice people who were just doing their best to work and parent and live amid the Holocaust. Who chose to just keep living like they always had because they felt too powerless (or busy, or tired, or comfortable) to do anything else. For many of us, that choice may feel familiar.

And yet, unlike for them, it’s not too late for us.

Today is as good as any for a revolution (rapid fundamental transformation).

For a renaissance (rebirth).

We can’t afford to indulge in despair, busyness, and inaction. Unfortunately, it looks like the daily barrage of bad news is our new normal, and we’re going to need each other in order to be resilient enough to both cope with our world and find the grit to keep moving forward. We need to do the brutal grieving work in community with one another, and get ourselves organized to build a new world.

This is the moment to grab a hold of each other, both figuratively and literally. We can dream together about what kind of world we want to create, learn from the current deaths within and of our systems while in community, grieve and be in presence together, and hold one another on the days when despair or numbing takes our focus. Collective action doesn’t work without a collective — we have to birth, form, and build it.

We can choose to let our fears reinforce our worldview (extractive capitalism, colonialism, violence, hoarding, protection of comforts), but we can also let them create an awareness of our mortality — of the beauty and fragility that is this one precious life. There is potential in the metamorphosis of this pain to facilitate our emergence into curious, present and courageous beings.

I only have my own experience, and yours may be different, but I see the work in front of us as a balancing act between the internal and the external. I’ve written about some of the internal work I’ve been playing with already, see: Exploring New Ways of Being. For me, a total worldview shift was necessary in order to adjust my lens from the brainwashing of privilege in the global north to seeing our current reality clearly. As I’ve previously mentioned, the beginning of that journey was supported by the magic in the books Breaking Together and Hospicing Modernity, and digging into the Internal Family Systems (IFS) framework (the book No Bad Parts was a great intro for self-practice).

The simultaneous external work has been mostly led by what is breaking my heart and the opportunities that align with that. For instance, I’m gutted by the living nightmare being experienced by immigrants in America so I’m leading Jefferson County’s Immigrant Protection Teams (if you’re in Jeffco and want to get involved, please reply to this email or if you’re on substack, dm me - we need you!!). And I’m deeply worried about food scarcity in the coming years, so we’ve used our privilege of “owning property” to convert our lawn into a regenerative farm for our community. As I get quiet, I’m feeling the call to write and teach, so I’m also listening to that. My artist friends are creating beauty or using art to speak truth to power. My friends in healthcare are fighting for systems change. My friends in policy are fighting for soft and hard reforms. The point is, there’s enough suffering to go around so we can find the places that align with our abilities. And we can start today — without shame or blame.

For me, service and community have always been the light out of the tunnel of self-centeredness and despair.

I’ll leave you with a new single from Arcade Fire.

“It’s the year of the snake so let your heart break.

It’s a season of change, and if you feel strange.. it’s probably good.”