Living in a Time of Dying

How do we live in a time of dying – when everything that sprouts around us withers, surviving in the world as we must while our souls drift in a sea of extinction? Perhaps the greatest gift we can give this earth is our surrender.

(Enjoy this 10-mintue read or have me read it to you via the audio file at the top of the webpage.)

The veil is growing thin. I can feel a presence growing stronger, just behind my shoulder when I walk at dusk. Words that rise within me take on a more definite shape, a taste reminiscent of something ancient, something that lies in the corner of a dream that slips away at the first hint of dawn. Something precious, but forgotten, unnerving, quietly lurking.

It wasn’t until I resolved the bulk of my own pain that I began to recognize Melancholy itself for perhaps a sliver of what it is. Unloading my grief and rage, there’s a period of relief, of joy, of effervescent life. My vitality gushes back into the caverns of my being and sloshes over into the world as a heady spring of wonder. Then I am emptied out, a vessel, a still lake to reflect what is there. It is days like this – when there is absolutely nothing in or around my visible world to disturb me – that Melancholy still comes so thick and deep that I begin to wonder how much of it was ever really mine at all.

Our planet is suspended in a melancholy fall. It moans on its axis and the sun slips away. Trees withdraw their sugars, animals burrow deep, rivers and winds tumble for a few final moments before they are frozen still. But this seasonal cycle mirrors a more profound, much longer and far more ancient rhythm; one not of death and rebirth, but of extinction. One that blankets and chokes every surface, that burns and chills beyond the limits of resilience, that sets in motion some element in the most sensitive of us that seeks not a journey of renewal, but the recognition of a moment of finality. That perhaps even corroborates with destruction.

Some say nature connection is about beauty and joy, wonder and connection. I find that as well when I first begin to listen. I am stunned awake by the intricacies of each leaf, the way the light bends throughout the day, the gentle tugging of birdsong hinting at a world of color and light I can only fleetingly access. If I’m lucky, I take those nuggets of wonder back into my modern-day sleep walk and feel at peace. If I try to stay awake, Melancholy always comes.

I sat within a circle of oaks once, years ago, as the night rose around us, and I felt such a palpable anguish among them as they showed me how the ships came and the trees fell and their networks were severed by steel rumblings. A humpback whale once tailed my evening walks for weeks, swimming leisurely above me practically filling the street. Then she came to me in meditation, with her great eye before me, and revealed the pain of her starving kin choking the oceans. It’s hard for me to walk the hills these days and really listen, because most of what I hear behind the small islands of jubilance is a great ache, a chorus of longing for all the networks lost above and below the ground, the disorientation over all the expanses of concrete and sterile cropland, over the blinding light in the night sky, over the constant thuds and whirs of our machinery.

These beings that share our planet appear to me increasingly as we humans do. We stand alone or in small pockets of conscious gratitude and generosity, but we drift in a sea of waste, of noise, of oblivion where we were once held in vast networks of life from shore to shore and beyond. Fish slipping out of the rivers, flocks of birds blackening the sky, herds of hooved beasts stretching across the horizon. The presence of those who remain alongside us today both inspire me beyond belief and break my heart beyond all reckoning.

I am far, far beyond feeling angry. Anger is the life force in us that rises to take action. But what is there left to do but stand and watch? I can no more restore the razed redwood forest than I can knit the fractured rhizomal networks together with my fingers. I can no more convince someone who doubts the consciousness and sacredness of all life than I can manifest neighborhoods and governments that ensure everyone is warm, fed, and loved enough to begin to think about art and beauty and truth.

Things that are simply trying to survive don’t care. They don’t dance and they don’t share. They dash panicked in all directions. They rip trees out of the earth, smash stumps and throw rocks. They abandon or eat their young. They howl all night to be saved even when their voices draw the wolves. No, there is no anger in me. There are simply tears when I gaze up at the softly feathered chest of the young redtail perched on a wire above me and sense its isolation, its rugged determination to track the gophers despite my presence, the airplanes, the roads, the streetlights. It isn’t the disappearance of it all that pains me as much as hearing the melancholy call of the last one standing alone after a lineage once innumerably deep and wide has trickled away. Then the last remaining sound is the fullness of absence.

How do we live in a time of dying – when everything that sprouts around us withers? When mental illness and chronic health issues proliferate around us?  When we feel how much more exhausted we are after being in the world, how much more effort it takes for tasks we once handled with ease, and how much more anxious we feel about our income and connections? It takes far more work to get anything done, and what we build takes far more effort to maintain. It feels as though there is an undercurrent tearing down whatever we create. Each day we experience building and dying like twin tides rushing past one another, surviving in the world as we must while our souls drift in a sea of extinction.

I do not begrudge any of us our sleep, even if we choose to sleep while waking, even while the remnants of the world are still very much alive around us and clamoring for aid. I have no remedy for the ache of awareness, for the outcry in a million tiny throats that slowly becomes audible. Our apathy and powerlessness are a symptom of our world dying away. We do what every creature has done as the comet ash drifts across the earth, as the glacier inches nearer, as the toxic gases fill the air and seas. We take another mouthful of what we can. We find a bit of shelter and curl up together. We continue simply being what we are until the very end. For us humans, that means telling whatever stories we must to endure.

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give this earth is our surrender. When night finally falls, when the pain of loss has fully landed, there comes a stillness. Gone are the torrent of birds chorusing to their roosts. Gone are the robust gusts that blow over the hills from the sea. Gone are all the lines and faded colors of withering foliage. Even the ache within us can settle to rest in the soft, moist earth. Melancholy rises when all things are falling. Once they land, there is nothing left. Even the grief has ended. We are no longer the only one remaining, but Everything. There is no longer anything to pay attention to for we are Attention itself. Our story has ended so Life itself can begin again.

I share these words with you in case you find yourself listening and feel the anguish rise. You aren’t doing anything wrong. I would argue you’re actually doing it right. You are listening, watching, feeling, and struggling to make sense of it all as we humans are made to do.

I share these words so you do not feel alone in your shame of wanting to hide, of despairing at whether anything really, truly can be done. That unbearable powerlessness is the greed and arrogance of our species rotting away. The idea that we are in charge of the earth is a poisonous lie that must be cleansed for our planet to heal itself.

I invite you to not be afraid – to stand with me at the brink of the abyss, marveling at all the wonderous, vibrant, colorful life behind us and leaning into the cold, gray expanse before us. All living things shudder in the shadows, but we are far more than living things. There is a mysteriously luminous beauty that pulses behind every form of this earth, and when all else falls away, we experience ourselves and Life itself for what it truly is. And that never dies.

Nancy

Thank you to ekostoriesdotcom for this post’s featured image: Studio Ghibli still from “Princess Mononoke” of the Forest Spirit’s feet, who brings both life and death.