Lingering With Intent

There is something about lingering that is good for the soul. To linger has a time-honoured feel about it. Indeed, the word derives from the Old English word langan meaning ‘to prolong or lengthen.’

Nowadays, to linger has taken on some additional meanings: to delay going, to depart slowly (often reluctantly,) or even more disparagingly – to loiter with ill intent.¹

So, let me reclaim the word and its soulful sense.

When we linger, we have the opportunity to slow down, to remove ourselves for a short while from the hustle, bustle, and rush that pervades life today. When we linger, we have the chance to reflect and consider, without the distraction of our consumption-oriented culture.

Yet, we must be intentional about lingering. Our culture wants us to do all but slow down. Our culture entices and coerces us into going quickly from one thing to the next with little, or no, interlude or respite. To remove ourselves from this merry-go-round we must be intent on doing so. We have to make an active choice to disengage and to linger.

Slowing down and reflecting allows us much easier to make contact with our very core selves – our soul. In doing so we discover that our soul benefits, which in turn strengthens our intentional resolve to linger.

If we combine our lingering with doing so within nature (in a forest glade, beside a waterfall, on a mountain top for example) then our soul is even greater fulfilled.

Two and a half thousand years ago the esteemed Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu noticed this saying that ‘nature does not hurry but everything is accomplished.’ Very wise man that Chinese philosopher.²

Hence, if you find a stirring within your soul that encourages you to slow down, sit quietly, or simply stop, then listen to that inner voice. It is your inner tutor (in-tuition) speaking, and it knows what you need.

Notes.

1. An etymological note. Do not be tempted to think that there is a link between the word linger and the word malinger then be assured that they are not etymologically related. Malinger derives from Old French and means sick, haggard, or the pretence of sickness.

2. Lao Tzu (6^th century BC) is credited with writing the Tao Te Ching and the name Laozi is an honorific often translated as the Old Master.

From Revolution to Arms Exports

"Pots and Pans" Revolution, Iceland

When we think of “revolution” four are likely to come immediately to mind: French, American,
Russian, and Chinese. This is unsurprising, given that these four revolutions receive a lot of attention in our history books and our education system.

They were also violent revolutions.

In France, an estimated 20,000 men and women were killed during the Reign of Terror. In less than five days during the 1792 September massacres at least 1,500 people were killed at the hands of Parisian mobs.

In America it is estimated that 6,800 Americans were killed in the war itself, with a further 17,000 dying from disease because of the war (12,000 of these as Prisoners of War.) On the British side, there were some 24,000 casualties.

The Russian Revolution saw massive deaths, with up to 10 million lives being lost, the majority of these being civilians.

China’s revolution resulted in more than 700,000 combatants killed, and up to 3 million casualties. A further 3 million civilians also were either killed or maimed.

Now, I ask you: which are the four countries in the world who are the largest arms exporters?

If you answered, the U.S.A., Russia, France, and China you would be correct. Between them they account for almost three-quarters of the world’s arms exports. The U.S. leads with 40%, followed by Russia (16%), France (11%), and China (5%.) In 2022, this trade contributed to global military spending of $2.2 trillion.¹

Is it a coincidence that the four major violent revolutions took place in the same countries that now dominate the world trade in armaments?

This question may be unanswerable, although it would seem plausible that a nation founded upon violence would go on to be a large player in the global arms trade.

Furthermore, perhaps it is no coincidence that conflict (both inter-national and intra-national) continues to default to violent means, when most of our history lessons continue to give precedence to the four “big” (violent) revolutions.

Yet, there are dozens of examples, worldwide, of nonviolent revolutions. These get little attention in our history, and hence in our consciousness. Fascinatingly, many of these nonviolent revolutions are known by imaginative and colourful names – attesting to the creativity with which nonviolence lends itself to. To name but a few: the Velvet (Gentle) Revolution in Czechoslovakia (as it was then named,) the Rose Revolution in Georgia, or the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and Orange Revolution in Ukraine (inspired by the Rose Revolution.) The Baltic states ousted their Soviet Union authorities with a Singing Revolution. The most intriguingly named revolution is the Pots and Pans (or Kitchenware) Revolution in Iceland during 2009-11, named after demonstrators banged pots and pans outside the Althing (Icelandic parliament.)

Notes:

1. SIPRI Yearbook 2023, published 11 June 2023. SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) is the world’s leading peace disarmament, arms control, and conflict resolution research institute. It was founded in 1966.

Wild Yoga - Book Review

Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth ¹ is an unusual book. It is not just a manual of yoga practices. It is not simply a manifesto of environmental activism. It is not solely a poetic celebration of beauty and love. It is not even the author’s personal autobiography. It is all of these. And in the combination becomes more than the sum of all.

Rebecca Wildbear clearly states her aim in writing the book as being to ‘open you to unordinary ways of perceiving and awaken your inherent connection with the place we all most deeply belong to: the Earth.’

Does she succeed? That is for you, the reader, to decide. I would be surprised, however, if by the end of the book, your answer is ‘no.’

The background to this book is the environmental destruction and despoilation of our natural ecosystems. But this is not another recounting of the damage we (humans) are foisting upon the Earth - although Wildbear does not retreat from such descriptions where necessary.

This is a beautifully written book. It is highly personal – Wildbear writes openly of her experience with cancer for instance. She opens to her vulnerability, and to her dreams, visions, and soul-infused encounters with nature. She writes too, of the experiences of others whom she has guided or shared experiences with. She asks that we, the reader, open ourselves to similar encounters.

Rebecca Wildbear has been a teacher of Wild Yoga since 2007, she is a river guide, and has worked with Animas Valley Institute² since 2006 where she has guided dozens of people on vision quests and other ecological and soulful programs. Her life story and her work provide her with an abundance of personal experiences, stories, understandings, and connections with which to write this book.

Each chapter has three sections. The first section is an exploration of some aspect of our environmental/social reality. Wildbear takes us into dark caves, has us negotiating river rapids, or climbing to the tops of trees. Her writing is visceral and somatic.

The second section offers a number of self-directed experiences that the reader can undertake to enable us to more fully experience the wonders and mysteries outlined in the first section.

In section 3 Wildbear guides us through a yoga pose that connects us somatically with the themes of the chapter.

This book could be read as a personal manual or workbook. Wildbear, however, is keen to ensure that we do not become stuck in personal growth; she exhorts us to a collective experience of our reality and responsibility.

Drawing on the power of prayer (without ascribing that notion with a religious fervour,) Wildbear tells us that ‘our prayers need to stretch beyond the individual. Soul making is a collaboration tied to the fate of the Earth, asking us to descend into the collective dark night of our planet.’

That we are in the twilight of a dark night of the planet is now a given. That we must descend into the darkness is unavoidable. That we must do so collectively is crucial.

If there is to be a way in which the human race descends into the darkness and emerges into some unknown, and unpredictable, future, then it will be the writings of people such as Rebecca Wildbear who will help guide that descent and emergence.

Notes

1. Rebecca Wildbear, Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth, New World Library, Novato, California, 2023. Rebecca Wildbear provides links to where her book may be purchased on her website (https://www.rebeccawildbear.com/wild-yoga-book)

2. Animas Valley Institute is a Colorado institute founded by eco-psychologist Bill Plotkin in 1980. The Institute provides nature-based programs that ‘evoke the life-shifting experience of soul encounter – the revelation of a larger personal story that whispers to us in moments of extraordinary aliveness.’

Oroboros Bites

The subject of this blog forms the premise of a book currently in the planning and research stage. Globally, we are in a mess. We are in a mess environmentally, socially, politically, economically, and any other “…ally” you can think of. To not see this, or acknowledge it, is to deny our current reality.

The mess we now find ourselves in has not arisen in recent times, as some would suggest. Our predicament predates the Industrial Revolution, and was in place long before we began emitting tons and tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Our predicament is not simply one of climate change, although some would suggest this. Climate change is a symptom of our predicament, not a cause of it.

Our predicament arose long before the socio-economic ideologies of capitalism and socialism were formed. We had started on the road towards this mess well before the Enlightenment, well before the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Indeed, our predicament was in place even before most of the modern religions of the world existed. Jesus, Buddha, Muhammed, Confucius, and other such great religious teachers were born long after the first steps were made leading towards this mess.

Many argue that the Industrial Revolution, and the start of our reliance on fossil fuels, is the origin of our predicament. Certainly, that revolution did not help, yet we can trace the roots back even further. The genesis for our predicament even predates the Agricultural Revolution, notwithstanding Jared Diamond’s assertion that the ‘advent of agriculture…(was) the worst mistake in the history of the human race.’¹

All the reasons noted above for how we got into this mess are about what we (humans) have done throughout our history. Whether it be the political systems we have setup, or the technological inventions, or the fossil fuel industry, or even our religious systems; all these are about how we act in the world. Our predicament is more closely related to who we are and how we view the world, each other, and ourselves. Our cultural psychology and spiritual core have a lot more to do with the mess we are in than do the ways in which we manifest our psycho-spiritual being.

Our predicament is rooted in three interlocking disconnections: disconnection from nature, disconnection from each other, and disconnection from our own selves. Which came first, although an interesting enquiry, is ultimately of little import, as the three are so interconnected that the starting point is now irrelevant.

The image of an ouroboros is one way to indicate these intertwining feed-back loops.

The ouroboros (snake eating its own tail) is an ancient symbol found in ancient Egypt² where it represents the disorder within which the orderly world sits and signifies the world’s periodic renewal. The ouroboros is portrayed encircling Ra and Osiris and together the entire motif depicts the beginning and end of time.

The ouroboros then, as a motif for our predicament, is a fitting one, as it is difficult to see any outcome for our predicament that does not entail some sort of global renewal.³ It is also fitting to note that the snake is biting its own tail. It can be said that our journeys of disconnection from nature, each other, and ourselves, have now ‘come back to bite us on the bum.’⁴

These three disconnections should not be read in literal terms, rather they refer more to our ways of thinking, our worldview. They are paradigms rather than specific events or even sequences of events.

Mention should also be made of the use of the word predicament (a more sophisticated word than mess.) Predicaments are not like problems, not even like complex problems. Problems tend to have solutions, whereas predicaments do not. Predicaments have outcomes.⁵ Predicaments are inherently chaotic and, as Chaos Theory tells us, the outcome is unpredictable, uncontrollable, non-linear, and is turbulent. Exactly what is happening!

Furthermore, often solutions offered in a predicament tend to contribute to deepening the predicament. There are many examples of this approach today. From techno-optimism to geo-engineering, from so-called green renewable energy to the prepping bunkers of the billionaires, all these rely on greater use of technology. Such belief in technology is a sign of techno-addiction. As we know, addictions are very hard to give up.

If we are to withdraw from our techno-addiction then recognising our core disconnects (from nature, from each other, and from our own selves) is the first step upon our way to recovery.

Notes:

1. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

2. First found in a funerary book from the tomb of Tutankhamun in the 14^th century BCE

3. Renewal often has a positive sense about it. Here, I am attributing neither a positive nor a negative attribute to the world. We simply do not, and cannot, know the sense of any future renewal.

4. The term ‘come back to bite you on the bum’ appears to have originated in Australia and refers to an action performed in the past now having dire consequences for the person who performed the original action. Collectively, we could think of this as our collective karma.

5. See Erik Michael’s excellent blog (https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/) for an explanation of the difference between problems and predicaments.

Living In The Time Of Dying (Film Review)

‘Our world is trembling.’ These are the first words spoken in Michael Shaw’s film-doco Living in the Time of Dying.

With a title like that and with this as an opening line you might expect this film to be full of despair, doom, and hopelessness. But, it isn’t. It might be a stretch to say it is a joyful or happy film, yet there are glimpses of such feelings throughout the film.

One overriding emotion that does frequently arise is that of love.

Michael Shaw is an Australian filmmaker who, in order to make this film, sold his house and spent most of 2019 researching and interviewing four remarkable people for this film.

Catherine Ingram is a teacher of meditation and Buddhism. It is her words and voice that begin the film. She is well known as the author of Facing Extinction,¹ originally written in 2019 and updated in 2021 during coronavirus.

Dahr Jamail is an American journalist who has received awards for his writing about Iraq. However, it his book The End of Ice that is the reason for Shaw’s interest in interviewing him.

Jem Bendell, best known for his 2018 paper Deep Adaptation,² is Professor of Sustainability at Cumbria University. His paper has been downloaded more than one million times.

Stan Rushworth is a Cherokee elder and citizen of Chiricahua Apache Nation – an honour Stan says that cannot be refused, nor can it be requested – ‘it is a gift’ he says. He is the author of four books.

All four of these people bring a different, yet complementary, perspective to the topics of, social/environmental collapse, climate chaos, the 6^th mass extinction, overshoot, and the time of dying.

Shaw’s primary purpose in interviewing these four people, and in producing the film, is to attempt to answer the question; How do we live in the knowledge that the planet (including humans) is dying?

Shaw asks this question in various ways. When asking Stan Rushworth what traditional owners of the land could offer at this time, Stan is quick to remind Shaw, and the films viewers, that the message indigenous people have to offer is one they have ‘been saying…since Day One.’

Yet, westerners (colonisers of indigenous cultures) have not listened. Dahr Jamail reiterates this when he says ‘it is all about listening.’

This is a film about our values, about how we live with each other and the more-than-human beings on this planet. It is not a film about how much carbon is in the atmosphere or even about mitigation attempts. There are only two graphs in the film and no numbers. As such, this is a film that speaks more directly to our hearts than to our minds.

This film is less than an hour long. Spending an hour watching and listening to this film will reward you in many ways. It is available for free at https://www.livinginthetimeofdying.com/

Notes:

1. This essay is no longer available. As Catherine says about it: “I wrote the long-form essay “Facing Extinction” in early 2019.  Over these past years I have occasionally been able to update the information and perspectives contained therein. However, I am finding that the speed with which the data is changing and the pressing issues that we are immediately facing, such as the exponential rise of artificial intelligence and transhumanism, have made some of this essay obsolete.  I have thus decided to remove it.” There is, however, a Youtube video of the author reading the original essay still available.

2. Deep Adaptation is available on Jem Bendell’s website - https://jembendell.com/ - either by using the ‘Search” button or by scrolling to the bottom of his home page.

All I Am

When I consider how long I’ve lived, and then ponder the age of the Earth, I am humbled. Let me put this into a scale that may be easier to comprehend.

Suppose the age of the Earth was compacted into a single year. Then my life would blink into existence for just half of one second.

That is infinitesimal. That is insignificant.

That’s time. What about my mass?

The Earth’s mass is approximately 6 x 10²⁴ kg. That is a 6 followed by 24 zeroes. That’s a lot. I won’t even consider the mass of the whole Solar System (the Sun is 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System,) or the mass of our entire galaxy. As to the mass of the Universe – mindboggling!¹

So, just in terms of the mass of the Earth, my mass (as well as my lifetime) is also infinitesimal and insignificant.

Thus, when I consider my mass and the length of time I have been here, I am a flicker of time, a speck of dust, insignificant in the vast space and time of the cosmos.

This is all I am.

Such a perspective may seem desolate and worthless.

Yet, it is only a perspective. It is a viewpoint that considers myself as an individual, separate from others, from nature and the Earth. It is a place disconnected from the cosmos.

There is another way to look at things. This is the view espoused so poetically by William Blake in the first four lines of his oft-quoted poem:²

‘To see the world in a grain of sand

And heaven in a wild flower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.’

When I look at things through similar eyes to those of Blake things change – dramatically. I become inseparable from nature, indivisible from the Earth and all that is.

I am the cosmos, wrapped up in a tiny, temporal human form.

Instead of saying to myself ‘this is all I am,’ I can tell myself that ‘this is ALL I am.’

I am now the world in the grain of sand and eternity in an hour. That is significant.

I am part of this vast cosmos; indeed, it is possible to think of myself as being the cosmos, albeit embodied in this tiny insignificant body that lasts but a flicker of time. I do not pretend that such thinking is easy; indeed, most of the time it is nigh on impossible. Yet, it is worth pondering, and doing so often.

The seemingly contradictory perspectives of all and ALL brings with them a responsibility to act and live from the perspective of ALL whilst inhabiting and accepting a body that is all I am.

Moreso, this responsibility becomes innate, instinctive, intuitive. Again, not easy. There are practices we can nurture and cultivate that allow us to get closer to these concepts however.

Spending mindful time in nature, meditating, chanting, trance dance, and other rituals and states can assist. The reader is encouraged to discover their own practices for doing so.

Notes:

1. For those who are interested: the Solar System is 333,000 times the mass of the Earth, the galaxy is 3,000,000,000,000 times that of the Solar System. And the Universe? It is 166 million times the mass of our galaxy. I’ll leave you to compute how much more the mass of the Universe is comparted with the mass of the Earth. Here’s a hint: It’s huge!

2. William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, written 1803, published 1863.

Why Do Men Like War Stories?

Two recent scenarios had me pondering this question.

Scenario 1: Recently I attended a Readers and Writers Festival and bumped into a man I know. I asked him what talk he was going to attend next. He told me he was going to a talk given by a prominent Australian male author who had just published his most recent book, about a Vietnam War battle in which Australian forces had participated. This author has found a niche in which he has now published a number of books about battles involving Australian forces in many parts of the world. My colleague said he was going to go because he “was conscripted” during the Vietnam War, although he had not been sent to Vietnam. Beside him, his partner gave me a look that seemed to suggest, “Men!?” I watched the queue for the talk to form outside the venue and noted that around 80% or more were men.

Scenario 2: A couple of months earlier I was at a regular men’s group meeting at which the visiting speakers were a man and a woman from a reducing men’s violence programme. After their presentation and as soon as they had left the room, one of the men in our group bemoaned what he perceived as the programme being one that blamed men for domestic and family violence, whereas, he asserted, women were also capable of violence in domestic situations. Although the man in Scenario 1 is also a member of this men’s group, it was another man complaining here.

The first of these two scenarios raised the question for me: why do men like war stories?

The second scenario may help to provide an answer.

Let me explain.

There is a mystique around war, an almost romanticised narrative of heroism, glory, and bravery attached to war. Men seem more attracted to this potpourri of ideals than do women.

How can we account for this fascination with war stories? There are at least four possibilities. 1. Is it genetic (or epigenetic)? 2. Does evolution play a role? 3. Is it cultural? 4. What about our psycho-social development?

Is there a gene for violence that is more likely to attach to the Y chromosome? The research and evidence for this appears imprecise and ambiguous. Could it be epigenetic rather than genetic? Again, the evidence is mixed, although there are indications that our environment and our behaviour are closely correlated with “turning on” certain genes – like a switch.

Perhaps there is an evolutionary factor at play? Our closest cousins in the Hominidae family – chimpanzees and bonobos – provide us with an answer both for and against. Both these apes continue to live in Central Africa, with chimpanzees habiting a bigger range than their evolutionary cousins. Chimpanzees can be quite aggressive and violent, whereas bonobos show a definite pacifist disposition. Interestingly, chimpanzee bands are ruled by males, and bonobos by the females.

Did we (especially men,) then, follow an evolutionary path that closely resembled that of chimpanzees and shunned that of the more egalitarian and nonviolent bonobos? If evolution is a determining factor, is the path the bonobos took still open to us?

What about culture? Skirmishes between small groups or tribes seem to have taken place within many cultures of the world. However, large-scale warfare appears to have arisen only once societies began to grow in size and become more complex. Indeed, the title of ‘most aggressive warring culture’ can arguably be placed upon the collective heads of the Yamnaya people who strode out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (in eastern Europe) and rampaged throughout Europe, reaching as far as the Iberian peninsular and the British Isles around 5,000 to 4,000 years ago.¹ Historically we might conclude that European culture has indeed promulgated warfare more often than other cultures, via the colonisation process that began in the 15^th century.

Another possibility is one raised only recently within the eco-psychology movement. It has to do with our human development journey from birth to death. Many psychologists, sociologists, educators, and others have attempted to map out this developmental journey. One of the maps that makes the most intuitive sense is that suggested by Bill Plotkin.² Plotkin draws on the natural world for inspiration and posits an 8-stage journey. Sadly, westernised cultures, collectively as well as individually, according to Plotkin, are mostly stuck in a patho-adolescent version of Stage 3. This unhealthy version of late adolescence is characterised by egocentrism, narcissism, greed, insecurity, continuing violence, materialism, addictiveness, and little capacity for empathy.

I have posed these four possibilities as questions, with little attempt to provide answers. I will attempt to do that now, in considering Scenario 2.

The perpetration of violence in westernised societies is highly gendered. Men are far more likely to be the offenders in violent crimes. In the Australian State (New South Wales - NSW) in which I live 91% of those committing murder were men, 93% of crimes intended to cause injury were committed by men. In a staggering 98% of sexual assault cases the offender was a man.³

When we consider these statistics, it is hard to maintain a fiction that women perpetrate violence as well. Yes, they do, but look at the figures. Suppose you had been stabbed and losing blood from two stab wounds, 95% of your blood being lost from one stab wound, 5% from the other. Which stab wound would you prefer the paramedics to attend to first?

It is no different with the gendered question of violence. Men are the primary perpetrators. Programmes to address men’s violence must come first, especially in a society that pays little attention to funding preventative programmes.

When I hear a man claiming that men are continually being blamed for violence (and women presumably are equally culpable) then, it seems to me, there are two possibilities. Either, the man does not know the bigger picture and the data involved, or they are hiding and attempting to point the finger elsewhere.

Shifting blame and accusing others is an age-old tactic. It is a convenient veil to hide behind. Alas, when we hide away (either ourselves or, in this case, a matter of concern) it becomes difficult to ask questions, and even more difficult to find answers, and nigh on impossible to institute solutions.

So, my plea to men who like war stories is this. Ask yourself why you do so? Then, ask even more probing questions, such as: where in our culture has this fascination come from? What purpose, if any, does it serve?

Notes:

1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132230-200-story-of-most-murderous-people-of-all-time-revealed-in-ancient-dna/  accessed 14 June 2023

2. Plotkin, Bill, Nature and the Human Soul, New World Library, Novato, California, 2008

3. NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR), accessed 14 June 2023