Take Me to the Pilot
I Have Some Important News About our Trip
Once, in a fever dream, I saw the future through my jaded lens of the past. When I came back into myself I was in the present, and I was filled with gratitude for right now. The guts. The glory. The absurdity. The banality. There was no legacy to chase and no resume to escape - only a calming acceptance that the measured world our ego invents is just a false cage we pace anxiously in. I accept the gift of all of it, still.
Later, in another fever dream, I spied a hole in the sky that I felt I could slip through and escape to the quantum mixer. If only I could fly, I thought. When the dream passed I was again thankful to be awake, in the present, and not bound to a story of fantasy and absurdism. The moist ground held me firmly rooted to a real thing: this earth.
What good is the hope for tomorrow when we have the gift of today to explore? And does the fiendish mining of a future that doesn't exist, lit by the burning of a past we should let go of, inevitably tarnish the focus on right now? Ah, never mind. Dreams, fever or not, are for dreamers. Anyway, my dream is to be a realist, dreaming about reality. Here, now, without the foolhardy overlays of hopium dosed delusion so common in dominant culture.
So what is reality, to me? Global Industrial Civilization is. While nature is, always has been, and always will be primary, and will eventually win out over our death machine, it's wise to call our overlaid reality cloak what it is and not mislabel it as malleable or fixable. Once the cancer lives in all the cells throughout the body, the body and cancer, once orbiting each other, become one - a titanic collision and fusing, separable only by total destruction. I call Global Industrial Civilization a death machine. I don’t want to “other” this machine by naming it such, so make sure to note that we’re all bound together, blameworthy and blameless. At some point, there was some steering involved but that moment doesn’t matter and has long since drifted from mattering. Many still chase that rabbit into that hole, hoping to undo thousands of years of iterations by finding the one typo that launched our lifeway of illiteracy. Be gone, seekers of causality. It is what it is, and that’s good news.
Homo Colossus is certainly attached to Global Industrial Civilization. Debating the order of which came first is a rather chicken and egg infinity loop. Homo Colossus is most obviously also dependent on civilization. It can't be controversial to see that 9 out of 10 living humans, and 10 out of 10 domesticate pets and livestock, are alive only because of civilization. Therefore, we've coevolved into and through that relationship. One cannot live without the other in both directions. We are civilization and civilization is us, bound together in a gordian knot of inevitable overshoot and extinction. Taken further, civilization is a function of power, and power is an expression of the stored sunlight we exploit to obtain the energy slaves that allow us to overshoot our planetary boundaries. But, we're not just simply dependent on this, we're also, in my view, addicted to it. So when I say Homo Colossus is addicted to Global Industrial Civilization, this is what I mean. Quibble over terminology all you want, I’m sticking to my right to define my view of reality in my way, using my terms, without allegiance to the very machine of definition I’m taking aim at.
How did I respond to getting into collapse awareness through the wormhole of climate activism and the associated commitment to personal and lifestyle change? Well, I "bugged out" more than a decade ago. Prepped, hard. Learned, a lot. How to see in the dark, walk without shoes, eat homegrown food that didn't look like the grocery store food I was used to and often had a bite taken out of it already. Lived without on demand hot water (I know, first world problems). Harvested (killed and processed) animals I had raised and fed and named. Armed myself, learned how to use the weapons, and worked through the process of actually using them - which is really the important part since having a gun is rather silly if you aren’t fully ready to use it when the criteria for doing so is met. I thought about injured or sick community members, up to and including their death and burial. I thought about my own death, be it by injury, sickness, or choice. So many things to think about, all in the future. All the while, I also imagined what my idealism sought - a return to the garden (or whatever cutesy metaphor one prefers). I intended to be fuckin' ready and if you know me you know that ain't some conceptual statement.
But along the way I also learned that all of my plans relied on a healthy biosphere and habitat for me and my community of life partners. I learned that, despite the river flowing close by and the hand pump on my well, we could never have enough water for all the needs we'd have and that it would be a full time occupation just managing water. Never mind the full time jobs of planting, harvesting, storing, seed collecting, defending, administering to sick community members, burying the dead. And firewood. All day, everyday. Firewood! Add to that the reality that everyone we had tried grouping up with while building our community were sick domesticates generally unable or unwilling to commit to what we generically call "suffering" as it relates to any sort of degrowth or loss of comfort and convenience. Oh, and did I mention that all of this has to happen without livable habitat and multiple, overlapping, overwhelming natural disasters unfolding alongside random violent civilization addicts in addiction freefall wandering around showing interest in my “situation”? Again, so much to think about, and again, while a little more present, all in the future.
The “way forward” started to gel around being more like feral wanderers, reading and reacting, foraging relentlessly and that the reality of that wasn't a readily "preppable" scenario. So I wandered the hills around me, saw places to hide, noted the locations of wild foods, tried to imagine learning to see the signs of other animals around me - to respond to signaling they were offering or just kill them and eat them. I again learned, and again, learned a lot. About me, about “nature”, about the truth of existence. And, most importantly, I accepted that none of these actions mattered much beyond taking up time and giving me an outlet for my wandering mind. Without habitat there is no survival. Collapse Acceptance came, slowly, and our action camp turned into a hospice village. And this focus was much more in the present. And that’s good news.
Through it all I learned to reject not just the confining comfort and convenience of dominant culture, but the very foundation upon which it is built - what we call language, art, education, health, food. Is this all too much to take? For some, sure. For me, not so much. However, in the slowly growing collapse support communities, the conversations tend to avoid these challenging parts and instead delve into abstractions and notions of philosophy, and that just doesn’t feel like forward motion. So I often push into these less comfortable areas. I’ve been accused of being hard to handle, intimidating, myopic, not open to the views of others. And, you know what? That’s a fair assessment. I also have my reasons for that. I don’t trust Homo Colossus and our addicted spirit to consistently rise above the entanglements of domestication.
This may upset some, but we have to work harder, do more, dig deeper, and hold the line as we advance so slowly. The masses will never accept our doomed reality and I understand why. For those who do find acceptance, however, we gotta stay strong for each other and hold our communal line while pressing forward carefully into our uncertain certainty. And I will always remain empathetic but wary of the other sick zoo animals as I wander the fenced containment yards where we all roam - especially those convinced they’re free and it’s fine.
I have allegiance to the river I live near, the trees I rely on for shade and downed firewood, the animals that keep things fertile and provide food to support this web that I am part of and ensnared in. I don’t have allegiance to people or things far, far away. This doesn’t mean I don’t generically wish every living thing well, but I don’t have any capacity to do anything meaningful for anything outside of my arms reach. And while we do have global networks that can affect outcomes far, far away, they’re just coping mechanisms, awkwardly dealing with flare ups but never putting out the fire.
I have what I crave and that is what I’ll call clarity. And I share that clarity when asked to. It can be off putting. It is purposefully interventionist. It is most of the things people accuse me of. And I’m both 100% OK with that and sorry to all who find it unpleasant. This isn’t a weekend retreat or a gameshow. It’s also not gardening or a silent meditation camp. It’s about reclaiming our place in the community of life even though it’s too late. Reclaiming that place includes rejecting Global Industrial Civilization, a tall order for anyone fairly assessing that their survival depends on it continuing. And that’s gonna take time, sacrifice, clarity and intention. The clock is mercilessly ticking. How will we choose to live out our one wild and free life? I’m gonna go down swinging for and at the fences that contain us.
My Collapse Acceptance comes from making an honest assessment of my current situation. And here’s that assessment: Global Industrial Civilization is in Collapse from Overshoot and Homo Colossus is functionally extinct.
Finding a way to make that part of this fever dream of civilization might just be the best path forward possible. This acceptance isn’t giving up, giving in, quitting on hope and dreams, the youth, or the community of life in the present. It is letting go of that nonexistent future and accepting consequences for our and our ancestors actions. But that’s a healthy, reasonable response we can build on. Right here, right now. And that’s good news.
Welcome to Hospice. Enjoy the rest of the flight.
Oh and by the way, there’s also a monkey on the fuselage.
This may sound like me telling the reader how things are, definitely. But it’s not. It is me affirmatively describing how things are to me. I support all thinking: radical, collaborative, inclusive, exclusive, and none at all. But my one rule is to speak our truths with passion and intention. My words are intended to keep my energy flowing. Let your energy flow as well! If you read mine, are entertained or inspired at all, lovely. I appreciate that. Thanks.
There is not now and never will be a request or option to pay for this content. There is also no space for comments. That’s not because I don’t care what you think. It’s because if you have something to say, I encourage you to write your own commentary somewhere. And leave the comments off. I’m not a pinata, and you shouldn’t be, either. If you wish to communicate, I’m generally responsive to direct messages.