Our situation is urgent but it will not be solved by fear. It will not be solved by the most vigorous intersectional analysis, nor by the most poetic articulation of who and what there is to blame. It will not be solved by revolution, as that by definition implies a swift return to more of the same.
If we define ourselves by that which we seek to oppose, we bind ourselves to it, and wind up mirroring the very same confusion that made our opposition so insane. Bad news for the anxious and the traumatized: we become what we attend. And we are dying from an epidemic of confusion, a confusion that has its roots in mostly unexamined shame.
It’s like this: the infant disconnected from its mother develops a confusion called self. A people disconnected from the Earth develops a confusion called civilization born out of a hunger that knows not what it seeks.
We do not have time for fault finding, as those most besotted with the hunger we call greed are, at bottom, the most loveless. Which is another way of saying confused. Which is another way of pointing out shame.
Nor do we have time to pour judgement on the blamers who, having been ripped from their mothers, their lands, and their poetry, they have become afflicted with the very same disease.
We don’t really have time for this essay either, which articulates the crisis rather than the vision of resolve. And because of that I run the risk of falling into the same trap as the one that has claimed the efforts of much of my generation who have dedicated their energies to an increasingly cannibalistic machine of righteous critique. Who have become so devoted to attending to problems, it seems they have forgotten how to dream.
But I am running the risk that comes with holding up a mirror to a problem because I have learned that from the vantage point of this level of confusion, an articulation of solution will read invariably as effete. Naive. Too simplistic. Incomplete. So I am trying to speak to you in a language you understand, the language of problems. If this has given you a moment of pause, it will succeed.
Any mystic knows there is more power in a sacred pause than in the most invective critique. Because silence leads to stillness. And in time, stillness leads to grief. And if you allow it, the grief will make you tender. And at a certain point, you will no longer be able to stomach the blame. It is then that you begin to remember your nature, and knowing this, you begin to recognize the way it lives in all that you encounter, and in your recognition, you will not want to continue causing pain.
By now you will have stopped feeling so hungry, because you will have realized that the substance you were lacking cannot be given, earned, or taken, only remembered. Only reclaimed. And from where you are sitting now it will become clear to you that those bulldozing sacred forests to extract whatever oil remains to add to a fortune already so massive that there is nothing left on Earth for it to purchase — it will become clear to you that they are lost in the very same spell of confusion as the addict who beats up his grandmother as a means of replenishing his supply.
And you will wonder how to go about getting the guns out of both of their hands, how to inspire sacred pause in them, that they might remember how to grieve.
