Struggling With, Preparing For, Change
Live at the Edge of the Woods7.26.26Dear EARTH MOTHERS,
The world is changing so quickly these days! I often get this nagging feeling that we’re all going through the motions of normal everyday life, while the bottom of the world falls out beneath us. It’s as if no actual normal life even exists any longer, we’re just play-acting. I think this is maybe what it feels like to live through the end of one historical epoch and the beginning of another.
The problem is, I have a lot of difficulty figuring out exactly what is ending and exactly what is starting. These changes are SO BIG - global world order, artificial intelligence, climate change, mass extinction - I can’t see them clearly. It’s like trying to see the curve of the earth while sitting in my house: it’s so impossible to see the whole that any ideas that I do get feel like they could just be a trick of my own imagination.
I do have touchstones for what a massive change might look like, but they’re mostly figments of other peoples’ imaginations. Apocalyptic scenarios abound, in movies and books, among the pundits, in these prepper movements, among billionaires stocking up their private islands - all over. But I don’t think that apocalypse is really that likely. It makes good theater, but probably what’s going to happen will be stranger and slower than that, right?
More importantly: I don’t WANT apocalypse. I want this massive epochal change to be towards something better, not something worse. Every once in a while I get the sense that a better thing might be possible - I see glimmers of it - but they’re fewer and fainter than the scary, violent ideas that show up all over the place.
How can I prepare for big world changes to come, when I can’t see them yet? How can I prepare in thought? How can I prepare in action? Is it possible to prepare in a way that helps build the world as I want it to be (even though I don’t know what that is quite yet)? And, how do I live in this “used to be normal” life while readying for a different one?
Signed,
Struggling With, Preparing For, Change
Dear Struggling,
This resonates deeply.
When the Covid-19 pandemic started, I felt inordinately attuned to the trickling but accelerating news stories from China about a virus, at first, far down on The Guardian’s front page, escalating toward the full blown red-highlighted Breaking News status by early March 2020. It felt like I could see the sequence in the apocalyptic movie where, in retrospect, the signs were clearly there all along. People didn’t seem that bothered, until we were. And then, almost overnight, it felt unsafe to breathe near other people indoors, things were shutting down, appointments postponed “for a few weeks,” schools closed, kids suddenly underfoot, the class tortoise, Paul, and his large aquarium retrieved and suddenly an additional organism to keep alive at our house - all while a gorgeous spring began to unfurl.
I remember distinctly feeling like: Wait. Hold on. It was supposed to happen like this: A few of my insightful, forward-looking, open to risk friends would very intentionally turn, and walk away from the city into the woods. I pictured my friends’ backs, maybe carrying light waist packs and whistling their radical, insightful tunes. I could see their tanned calves and sandaled feet increasingly surrounded by the forest ahead of me. The dark woods swallowing them up. Some of these folks were already well along this path, disrupting the holds of heteronormative, patriarchal, racialized, colonial capitalism through life decisions about divorce, open relationships, artistic commitments, rejecting institutions, activism - now, it felt like they were ahead of all of us. Maybe there was even a festive air to their motion - singing songs and carrying banjos, ukeleles? After a time, when it seemed doable, and I was fully prepared, and somehow there would be a way to hold all the conventional, loving relationships together despite my momentum towards this radical new existence that seemed to require letting go and reconfiguring all these same relationships, I would follow them. And I could feel my intention to do this soon after, I was ahead of many others. I had already learned a lot and made decisions cultivating a very palpable willingness to leave behind the sweltering, ridiculous expanses of parking lots and dead malls, the nuclear single family homes with all the societal breakdown bubbling up inside the individuated little boxes, the precarious jobs and health insurance and plastic, sterile medical supplies. But I just wasn’t quite ready yet. Soon, soon!
And then, very suddenly, it seemed that we were all experiencing being thrust into various degrees of depth into whatever those woods were for each of us. At first, it seemed that the parking lots were crumbling, breaking up. A new world of growth emerging amidst quieted engines, empty streets, paused landscaping. Routine repetitions were suspended and new rituals forged. And there was at least some deeply long overdue collective recognition of all the caring work that goes into keeping those routine repetitions going.
But then, weirdly, the parking lots, and relationships and everything else seemed to stay intact. And not only that. Now, five years after that first covid season, it seems the parking lots have only heated up, the norms are regressing into the worst caricatures. I won’t go on with this list. At times, it can seem (is?) worse than ever.
I guess, Struggling, I recount all of these details because it sort of felt like a sped up, simplified, accelerated version of what the world feels like right now. No escape. The bad news just keeps coming. Actually, it turns out there is very little safety net left, and some amongst us are all too eager to let go of what we do have. It all feels somewhat preventable - or at least, possible to respond differently. And yet, we can’t seem to organize a good response. We continue to drive in our cars and park and walk across the sweltering parking lots. We continue to play-act that this weather is maybe a blip? We continue to inhabit the routine repetitions - even as the dissonance booms loudly in our hearts.
The start of COVID was a time when it felt to me... not so much like possibilities… but a dawning realization: Oh. We don’t actually have a choice to make after all. We were all just thrust into doing it, in real time. My waist pack was not well packed, winnowed or honed - I only had what I had scrabbled to grab, and it felt like either too much or not enough. And there was death, all while so many, many things remained stunningly beautiful - and alive.
It is not lost on me, Struggling, that you have a historian’s sensibility in your outlook. You are deeply considering how to think about historical change, how we collectively do (or do not) make legible transitions in our societies and ecologies, whether (and to what purpose) history can be thought about in epochs. There is so much to explore here.
Struggling, I invite you (and all of us, together) to consider a cluster of interwoven questions: What is preparation? If we do not know what the change will be, or what the next “end state” might be - what does it mean to try to prepare? For a best case scenario? A worst case? Maybe one answer is to first live into undoing the play-acting we keep falling back to, and then later to chart a course. Like gardening a landscape, but tenfold. This all may be a much slower dance than we thought. No quick fixes, but perhaps slow ones?
My sense is there is not - at the moment - an organized or legible procession into the woods. You know as much as me there actually isn’t really the woods, either. But we have our packs, and making do, which we have always done. And my sense is that the answers - such as there might be any - to your queries may have to do mainly with making the smallest turns toward more connection and organization. Over and over. That the people have the power, truly, if we can find each other. What are the places each day, each week, where small steps are possible?
We are here, at the edge of something. Maybe together we can better share, prepare and winnow our packs. In the meantime, let’s look for each other and live at the edge of the woods.
EARTH MOTHERS