We Don’t Know How

Grab a cool drink and comfy chair, and enjoy this 12-minute read!

We don’t know how to do this, but we were born for this time. We who hold the window of the cosmos in our eyes. It peers out at all we face, at all we have created, and is filled with wonder. It is we who weep, we who condemn, we who are driven as we have always been to fashion the world in our image, into what we believe it should be. The time for that has ended. Our time has ended. And yet we were born for exactly this, as each thing is born to witness its passing and to perhaps surrender with dignity.

How do we go into that good night? Do we rage against the dying of the light? Do we dip into the cosmos behind our eyes and marvel at being alive at such a time? They say that of all the planets in the universe, ours is the most fierce, populated by wild, untamable things. It takes tremendous courage to choose to be here, to inhabit one of these animal bodies and try as we might to remember our dual identity. Simply undertaking this quest – regardless of outcome – is a heroic act worthy of praise. To embody a sliver of divine love, wisdom, compassion along the way? More honorable still.

It is we – we alone – who dream of pushing out past the cradle that holds us to craft the world to our liking. Everything else appears content to exist within the vast network of reciprocity. Perhaps they are incapable of anything different, lacking the self-reflective consciousness that gives us the grandiosity of assuming ourselves to stand apart from everything else – instilling a special pride and fear in our bellies. Perhaps they see it all as clearly as we and are simply wiser and more loving than. I suspect it is simply the cosmos giddy to push out through our limbs and minds, pulsing forever with that playful mantra: “I wonder what is possible!”

We seem to find ourselves in a place very different from the one we imagined. We envisioned an Eden for ourselves of flourishing beauty and abundance. Now we teeter on the edge of mass extinction, of human depravity on a vast scale that we shudder to admit we are each capable of bringing about. When we envisioned that Garden, it only contained what we value. The animal we inhabit wants what it wants and cannot see the greater Truth, cannot see beyond our desires to what is needed of us and for the whole. We seldom recognize and so quickly forget that benefitting all things is what most benefits us.

Now we know in the way only a human can what the cosmos has always known in the belly of its birth – how all things are connected, mutually reliant and co-emerging. This is no magical moment of awakening and remorse rewarded by absolution. The cosmos craves experience, desires more than anything to see potentials played out in flesh and stone. We must live through this. For the millenia we cast aside our religions to follow our desires, we must live through the consequences, whether we numb out and drift into a coma, whether we are violently shattered, whether we stand eyes wide in the flames and whisper “blessed Earth”. It is all a reparation, a surrender of our will to being here now in this human experience not as we would have it be, but as it actually is.

Whatever you do, do not get drawn back into the dream that we can shape this world in our image. Diagnosing what is wrong and charting our way through it is precisely what needs to be shed. We lost our way the moment we stopped praying to what is beyond us for truth and guidance, which is always ultimately shrouded in mystery. The clearer and more specific the message, the more obviously it comes from us and is to be mistrusted.

Divine guidance reminds us to simply be loving, asks us to approach a person or eat a particular thing or lay our hands on a tree or just be still and let go. Sometimes it places us within an inner landscape that fills us with beauty, electricity, and homecoming, and we become obsessed with actualizing that place not realizing it’s simply a transient gift a grace, a reminder of the worlds we came from and where we rest between lives, a cool breeze and splash of water on the hot dusty road of embodiment. It is not a commandment to build. We do not have the power for such things, for reshaping our own psyches and those of our fellow humans. As with all things, we are grateful for the humbling, moving revelation and return to the work that is ours to do.

Divine guidance is as practical as it is profound, and always either tremendously immediate or mythically grand, indecipherable until the journey is complete, which it never fully is. To be open to it is to live in a way that is disorientingly paradoxical: I establish routines of self-care I must break at a moment’s notice – even for suffering so that insight and cleansing may occur. I bring awareness and care to my established responsibilities – serving exactly where I am – while holding the knowing that I am so much more vast than any of these vehicles and meant for so much more. I am desperate longing and deep contentment. I am utter outrage and profound compassion. I am surrounded by both sacrilege and the sacredness of Life itself unfolding in myriad shapes and colors, no matter how dark and barbed.

To be human – to be alive on this planet – is to be strung between tenderness and torment, never knowing what is coming next. Our bodies are mauled and slowly digested in the belly of another. We are graced by rivers, sunlight, fruits offered willingly from the bodies of others. We are clawed and rammed and crushed in a bid for space and creation. We are nursed, groomed, defended, cradled in dens and eggs and within each other’s bodies. We freeze and roast and starve. We sprint. We rest. In each moment, we must be prepared for battle and for giving birth, donning and shedding our armor at a moment’s notice. And always, always we die. We sink back into the earth or the belly of another or are dismantled by winds and mycelium.

Ecosystems change. Epochs dawn and die. The fact that this one is of our own making is no different than holding the continents responsible for diverging to trigger an ice age, or blaming primordial bacteria for generating too much oxygen and failing to figure out what to do with it in time to avoid mass extinction. Life expands indefinitely based on its capabilities until it reaches its limitations.

We hold ourselves responsible for foresight and self-control because we think we’re in charge, we think we’re capable of taming these animal bodies we’ve been born into. But that capacity is a tremendously rare exception to be lauded in legend and certainly aspired to, but never expected. Certainly not as quickly or completely as would be needed to die with dignity in the almost certainly unavoidable ecological collapse we now face. But Life has done this before, many, many times. Can we trust it?

We like all things must weather this time with whatever humble presence and ingenuity we can – ingenuity not to flaunt our superiority over earth’s healing intelligence or to deny the truth of forces within and around us – but to embody what we are, to work with and honor what’s unfolding. We are storytellers, artists, inventors, worshippers. We marvel at the world, we sing and dance, we craft things with our hands and minds and sometimes those things imprison us and gut the world.

Can we have compassion for ourselves as simply one more form that Life has taken? Can we hold ourselves gently as we become aware of the myriad self-destructive, divisive things we do each day despite our awareness, remorse, and deep care? Can we let go of our pompous, archaic concepts of purity and simplicity and celebrate the fleshy electrical mess we inhabit that has created so much beauty and wreacked so much cruel and selfish destruction? Can we let ourselves go – first by releasing our claim as masters over matter; then by releasing our claim on this planet? Can we let ourselves go back into the belly of life to do with us as it must?

That is the heroic act now requested of us: to either become obsolete or to become vehicles of nourishment for the web. Do not think you know how to serve. In order to be guided, we must enter a Great Forgetting, a profound surrender of body, heart, and mind so we may be transformed and infused. Whether or not this is possible is the next great evolution of Life. It isn’t about trying. It’s about letting go – facing all of our fears and foibles and vulnerabilities without running back into the cave for comfort, or hunting down the wolves for protection. This isn’t about creating a virtual world with engineered food and modified sunlight. Its about being digested, infusing our consciousness with the experience of what it means to be totally at the mercy of Life – which we ultimately are – and letting that knowing transform us, as the cosmos itself allowed us to transform it.

Nancy