I have been silent for a long time on here. At first it was because of the disastrous falling apart of our initial community and some feelings of disillusionment. Lately it has been anything but, as our now smaller community is blossoming in unexpected and wonderful ways. Instead my silence has been the result of trying to solve certain philosophical conundrums.
In our previous community model we were getting back closer and closer to traditional lifestyles, growing a lot of our own food, planning to try and go off-grid with our wood oven heating our water and an eventual solar-powered electrical system. Our community was meant to be held together by Indo-European polytheistic adherence, with a few different cultures represented and my sorcery and craft workings for healing or otherwise were sort of a private thing. In fact it seemed to be a source of problems.
When everything fell apart we started from the ground up, and increasingly I noticed that the things uniting us were the spiritual currents in the land here and the mystically transformative aspects of traditional witchcraft. There was something more organic going on and it led me to think about a lot of things. I’ve always been a bit more political than a lot of people in my religious and spiritual circles and I am constantly trying to find how what I do and believe is to be integrated into the way that I live. To my mind this is necessary. As long as you are not on the very edge of being unable to eat and live, it seems to me the next thing is you have a responsibility to consider, how shall we live? How should we live so as to embody what we believe?
My answer last year was a return to a simpler more organic way of living. I still think this, I still think that there is much beauty and poetry there, but I don’t think it contains the seeds of us finding the way forward as a civilization anymore. As much as it seemed to me a sane thing, given the way our current life-style is poisoning and destroying the land all around us that us people from earth-based spiritualities claim to venerate, it seems to me as I look deeper that it cannot be. The way forward will have to involve us finding a way to be technologically advanced in harmony with the rest of the supra-system.
Previously it seemed madness to me that people would rather face ecological collapse than change their life-styles. Now I realize that there are greater Fateful factors playing out here that require consideration. The internet, for instance, is, as a dear friend of mine says ‘the synaptic system of a new world.’ Something is happening to humanity, some kind of change or realization of ourselves. Globalization is something we all must intellectually and spiritually grapple with and the possibility of instant communication around the world makes it impossible for us to ignore. I
deeply and personally care about what happens in New Orleans for instance even though I've never been there. Tribalism is going to have to be redefined, we all belong to tribes of the mind and spirit that span countries and continents. But I don’t believe we can just simply rely on technology and science to save us, nor can we try to go backward. It is a balancing act we are asked to walk, and a living through the emergence of something new. Being aware of what is happening is the best way to become what we have the potential of being, the super-conscious aspects of the great being that is made up of all Life.
I am someone who lives out in the bush and drinks sky water and takes away my own garbage composting the rest, who spends a lot of time out of doors. I am not unfit nor unhealthy and ‘Nature’ is a very direct reality for me, not something I talk about only from my seat in front of the computer as it is for so many. However, I do also spend a fair amount of time at screen, both as a writer and someone who connects with their broader spiritual community online. It is undeniable and no where as tawdry as so many paint it. I still support the importance of flesh and blood community and yet at the same time I know that amid all the trashy internet speak and people writing 'r u?' and numerous vacuous ‘twitters’ there are people like myself and my few precious comrades using this wonderful technology for all it is worth. It is after all like a reclaimed library of Alexandria, back and forth flicker instant access to the classics, to political activism, to high-end correspondence between thinkers of all different types, contemporary poetry, love-letters and the society of other polytheists, mystics and witches. Part of what we are, our generation, some of the one above it, and all of the one below it, is this shared mental life of various qualities for different people. It’s making our world smaller and manifesting the web of interactions in this world in a new way.
As a female I owe my ability to participate in this world of thought and mysticism to things like birth-control, labor saving devices and most particularly the way the capitalist system provides my family with most of the food we drink and clothes we wear. Previously I have raged against this, trying to only buy hand-made goods, move toward growing all my own food. For a while I managed a large amount of this, but had little time to participate in the above mentioned community or to write the books that burn inside me to be written. I still believe that my mystical experiences were aided by this style of living and I continue to seek a lot of solitude in the wilderness and to live on local produce and favor either the second hand or hand-made purchase. However, it is not simply a question of whether I wish or whether I would be willing to give up a lot of if not all of these comforts to bring our collective lifestyle back into harmony with the greater system. Personally if this was what it clearly took then I certainly would. But the question is more complicated.
As someone who believes in Fate, I have to ask myself questions about the meaning of the way we have developed. Even agriculture has some times seemed to me a controlling of the land and nature that caused us to fall further away from our original state of integration with nature, a state we find other hunter gatherer people in. But the fact is, our civilization moved in this direction and has continued to refine the process for a long time now. Most parts of the world no longer have the kind of eco system where hunter gathering is a viable option. We are forced to practice agriculture, but we have options about how we practice it. And now we have technology it appears that we cannot live without it. There must be some reason for all of this. Some aspect of the collective consciousness that seeks to know itself in some new way through this great ‘experiment’ like behavior humans are exhibiting. I cannot seem to believe that what we are witnessing is merely our own self destruction playing out. Perhaps it is, but it seems that there is more to it than that.
We need to be ready to explore what the future holds, without being futurist enthusiasts who claim that all problems will be solved by science without the requirement of any action on our behalf, or on the other hand, deciding that the future is evil and a return to the past is needed. We will need a fusion of ancient wisdom with modern technology if we are to survive and prosper as a global community. And in many ways we are yet to imaginatively catch up, let alone mythically and spiritually, with the way that life has changed just over the time we’ve been alive. Out of the five people most important to me on the planet one of them lives in another country from where we speak instantly every day. We have to ability to see images of each other, to hear each other’s voices and to share a large number of words and yet nothing of our daily physical life. This sort of thing has the ability to radically change the way we view the world. Globalization and the concept of the global village is going to have to become a reality. Copenhagen, where the world demonstrated it’s as yet significant inability to work together to decrease it’s CO2 showed us a world imaginatively a long way behind where it needs to be to catch up with the reality of it’s situation. We simply cannot deny the same life-style that we enjoy to the developing world unless we intend to give it up also. And I don’t think we do. We no longer live in a world where we can afford to live off 'raiding' other people, our destinies are too bound up in each other's.
Daily I find myself pondering these things, while I stand in the aisles of supermarkets making my consumer choices. Do I spend two dollars on the Fair Trade chocolate or choose to ignore what I know about the human implications of the free-trade chocolate? Do I buy those extra things that I really enjoy but don’t really need or do I spend that money on the more expensive milk where the cows are treated humanely? These questions to most people who as part of our largely unconscious civilization make a habit of never considering the reality of how anything came to be where it is being bought by them, will make me sound like an extremist. But I have my own questions. I still believe all these things are important, we are conscious beings capable of making conscious decisions if people did in front of most people the inhumanity that brings to them many of the products they enjoy they would throw up!
However, if I go too far down this path I find myself forced to condemn people I love dearly as unfeeling, selfish and blind. I don’t want to see things like that, I don’t want to see myself like that on the day that I can’t afford to buy the Fair Trade chocolate but buy some anyway or feel like a different type. Sometimes it seems like so much avoiding the truth of the fact that we are all guilty, all complicit. Perhaps there is no other way to be. Perfectly good people in the past lived on the proceeds of slavery or moved into land where the previous occupants were pushed out. Some of those people, the dependents of those people, weren’t bad people they just needed something that someone else had and benefited from someone else’s misfortune without even thinking about it. But today do we have the luxury of saying we didn’t know? When all this information is at our finger tips? What explanation will our age tender for itself? Basically, that we preferred not to look because we liked to have certain things and it might make them taste bad?
Today we are not talking about need in many cases we are talking about want. We are talking about chocolate and coffee and cheap shoes. And yet chocolate and coffee are simply pleasures people enjoy, things that the less well off members of our society couldn’t afford to use if only Fair Trade chocolate and coffee were available and I struggle to see guilt in the innocent enjoyment of these kind of pleasures. What difference would it make to not have it amid the plethora of other exploitations and cruelties I see reflected back from the shelves of the supermarket every day? Can we be free of it even if we become vegan and never touch a free-trade item that exploits workers in third world countries? Even then our governments pollute on our behalf, make war on our behalf and obtain access to oils in ways that might make us feel queasy at the gas-pump, no matter what choices you the consumer make you can never not participate. We have not been given any other choice but to partake in this society we were born into. Unlike Brave New World who offered the protagonist a choice between insanity and lunacy, we have only been offered a choice between insanity and insanity.
So how does a highly conscious compassionate being live in such a world? Despair and pessimism seem worse than useless. Perhaps one must simply hold out some hope that there is something going to develop out of these birth-pains. That we will find a way gradually towards a system not so based on exploitation of poor nations, animals and the environment. Find it before we destroy our own future, and worse yet, before we
deserve to have our future destroyed. But we in the West are Fate’s instruments as much as anything else and I like to think that this transformation of ‘development’ that we have started and is spreading across the world is not a cancer but hopefully a bumpy stage in the evolution of a new way of being for mankind.
There are a few things that give me hope. The place of women in the West, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Whether we want to pretend it’s not true or not the fact is that outside the modern world there has never been a world where a female enjoyed the independence and options that we enjoy today. The pagan world may have offered many great examples, but nothing like today. In those days our role was still tied to reproduction, and as we could not altogether control it it was not a choice but something that made us less free than males, less our own person. We needed to be controlled in certain ways so that society could control reproduction. This is not an 'evil' in those societies, just a fact of what happens when society and nature meet up and have to form compromises. This is found the whole world over to some extent, no matter how ‘equal’ the sexes may appear in a traditional society.
It may seem like only one example, but this is the self-realization and potential of over fifty percent of the species we are talking about and that is quite something. I know I have great potential to contribute to society, to have my voice heard, to have things worth saying, to love whom I love, to go where I wish to go, to help people, to travel, to influence things, so much of it would have been impossible for me in another time. I can’t imagine that only on the eve of our self destruction would Fate make such opportunities available to Her daughters. This gives me hope that something else, a different way of life which might eventually alchemically wed the best of sustainability with the best of technological progress could be about to be born. Mainly because that’s the only way I can see us going forward and I just can’t imagine that all of this, this gradual emancipation of women, other minority groups, this increasing consciousness of the needs of others in remote places, the internet and all the potential for knowledge on a world scale that it offers, is all for nothing but our destruction.
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