understanding patterns; connecting dots

A couple of mornings ago I was sitting at coffee and a friend looked me in the eye and says, “I sense there is a bit going on.” I subsequently did a rubbish job at trying to explain some things. It prompted me to sit down and think more clearly about what  is  going on for us. So here goes. There are transitions in 3 dimensions. 1. I’m navigating a seasonal career change. 2. We are making some ‘step changes’ to better align our living with our espoused values. 3. We are wrestling with what it means to live wisely as the world as we have known it unravels. The easiest one of these to explain is 1. Then 2 and 3 get deeper and ultimately more substantial. There is stuff going on in the outer world. But the inner world journey is for us the main game, and our wrestling with 2 and mainly 3 is where that comes to the fore. I’ve stumbled, and been confusing in my conversations with people about what we’re processing because I’ve cherry picked bits and pieces from each of 1, 2 & 3...

It’s a melancholy Sunday afternoon. It’s a bit weird actually, middle of summer (yesterday was the classic beach day) but now it’s raining and dark and I’ve got a slow brewing broth on the stove for some lamb and barley soup - so it smells like winter inside despite the fact I’m in shorts and T-shirt and shoeless. I had a celebratory morning with some swimming friends for a birthday, then did an open water swim in the river in glassy clear conditions before the dark clouds, thunder and rain defined the day. Slow brewed stuff tastes better right? The flavours are deeper and richer and more complex. And even better when you’re doing it yourself because, like right now for me, you get to savour the process by being immersed in the aromas. So why is it harder for me to savour slowly brewing stuff in the rest of life? Stay with me on this for a few paragraphs … Yesterday we had an open for inspection for our house. The rationale was that there would be lots of visitors around and we’d get s...

Reality as we perceive it comes from the story we (mostly unconsciously) tell ourselves. And we rarely make the story up ourselves, it is typically the story that the media (news, marketing, pop culture and TV drama, etc) tell us. One of the stories that I have, perhaps cognitively rejected, but for all intents and purposes have bought into, is the story that security and certainty offer peace. Further, that security and certainty is a product of outer world things such as income, housing, and other material ‘things’. While I may have agreed intellectually that this is not the case, I struggle to practice an alternative in my living, in part because I haven’t known what the alternative is. Paradoxically, it seems the path to true peace is to let go of the things I think offer me security and certainty. When I tell myself that I am ‘self-made’, that my lifestyle and it’s privileges are of my own making, the story I am believing is that I am entitled to what I have, and that anything tha...

I suspect the titanic, which Jem Bendall calls Imperial Modernity, has already hit the iceberg. Owning that suspicion means I feel increasingly alienated. My growing awareness is of the likelihood of societal collapse. Or to use the titanic metaphor, the knowledge that the ship that carries the institutions of democratic capitalism (including economic and financial institutions, food systems, education systems, government institutions and systems, biosphere 'management' etc) has already hit the iceberg, and that the damage is already fatal. The bedrock pillars of modernity are unrecoverable.  I say 'alienated' because so few of my friends have been digesting the material feeding that knowledge and awareness. If I weren't me, I'd think I'd lost the plot, or at least had gone a bit too far down the lefty rabbit hole. I don't blame them. If we have not been exposed to the idea of collapse, less dramatically called the great disruption, then all we have is t...