Reinventing myself as a writer - it's time

A new look. A new lens. Looking out on a collapsing, tumultuous world. This writer needed to make some changes.

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Reinventing myself as a writer after nearly two years of a kind of despair. Well, that may not be exactly right. More like a period of getting lost - lost in the magnitude of the tumultuous changes underway in our world, and picking up speed. These are changes I knew were coming - in my head, I knew. It has been my work for about 12 years now - following the ecological tragedy swiftly unfolding, the unravelings, the collapses of most of the pillars on which our culture and history have been constructed.

But knowing that in the head is different from knowing it in the heart, or in the gut, which changes everything. Makes for clear seeing, which in these days is a harsh view of things.

11/9, that fateful day in 2016, made things glaringly clear. This wasn't a one-off aberrant occurrence of the political moment, this was a direct outcome of those collapses - and of a population living with more and more confusion and fear. What is happening now and for the last two years is a narrative of planetary abuse, human hubris and arrogance, the egregious error of individualism, the cultural denigration of Nature, other-worldly religions with promises of personal salvation and eternal realms outside reality, and the priestly class - whether religious, political, or celebrity priesthoods - in which we have put our trust and hope for security and identity - because we no longer find these things in ourselves and our communities.

The culture created identities out of the myths of nationalism, American "exceptionalism," white supremacy, male domination, western intellectual arrogance, and a whole lot of imperial grandiosity, and all those myths are in a state of collapse. The collapse of these things feels for many like a tearing away of anchors, security, sense of self, walking confidently in a world they once knew, because our "selves" or sense of self have become disconnected from the world in which we are embedded, and because that in which, or those in whom, we have put our trust have turned out to be false gods. They have nothing to offer to our confusion and fear - and so most cling to them more fiercely than ever, with a growing rage.

So my struggle with despair, with getting lost in the unraveling of the world, with seeking my place in it now, with what I have to say or create, with my own identity, and where exactly I am standing, on what ground, and then what I am seeing from that location - this has been my work as a writer for a good long while now, and I finally see that the not-writing times are essential to the work of a writer. Sometimes you really do have to go inward for a while, deeply inward, to pay attention, to listen intently.

Yes, I am trying to locate myself in this time of tumult and collapse.

Every day, the news of a world in upheaval, a transition from which there is no turning back. As a writer, a contemplative, and in my work all my life, a social change agent of sorts (in the world of human rights, international solidarity, economic and environmental injustice, etc.), I follow the news. Reading the news is part of my daily work, my commitment to knowing what's going on. The internet changed the nature of that work making access to news overwhelming. And now each day it's a cascade of shock and awe at how quickly things are unraveling.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the internet and then its evolving world of social media. It's not that social media has captured me, it's not like being addicted to it, though it is hard sometimes to turn away, as when an enormous storm approaches the eastern coast and is about to change lives, geology, ways of life, forever. Because of my network of friends and colleagues, what is posted is significant, and there is so much of significance now. No, it's not that I am addicted to social media, it's that I am mesmerized by the rapid pace of world-changing events, disasters, unraveling, unprecedented occurrences, moving from shock to shock, gut punch to gut punch.

All of this evidence that the world we knew - and that not very long ago - is over: forever. The tipping points we have passed are not only about climate change and extinction, but about the collapse of western ideas, civilizations built from them, including the seemingly all-encompassing capitalist marketplace, now in its last frenzy before its inevitable - and likely final - collapse.

Why likely? Because we have eaten up or poisoned more of the planet than the planet could or can sustain. Our lives exist on a foundation of the Earth's living ecosystems, and every one of them is on the verge of collapse.

I can tell you now, finally, why it has been so hard to write. I mean, I write for a blog and two Facebook pages, but I mean serious writing, I mean creative non-fiction writing (which is my genre), and poetry (where I was headed more seriously before this block presented itself to me). It has been so hard because the pace of these changes, and my need to be an observer of them, has brought about an inner whirlwind of tumult that I have had to learn, to understand better, to see more clearly because I had not a clue how to proceed.

Now, these 22 months since the inauguration of the truest sign of our demise, I sit here with old files of poems finished, unfinished, in need of editing, or barely begun, a few verses begging to be opened - and feel urgency about looking at them again. I have computer files of essays begun and wanting exploration, and some of them are really good. And I have two book manuscripts that need to be rewritten, reconstructed because time has passed and what they are or could be is clearer to me now.

How much time is left for me to make a meaningful commitment to all that work? Is there time? Will I be alive long enough? Will the world be functioning long enough for a writer to write?

Not questions I thought I would be asking when I graduated from Holy Angels Academy: A School for Girls back in 1967. We were descending into tumult then, but it was a tumult in which so many thought we were creating a new and better world, that long arc of the universe that we really believed bent toward justice. We were working on bending it. Many of us spent our lives putting all our effort into bending it.

What we are lacking now is any real evidence of that old saying. And that is a hard thing to admit at age 69.

This is not despair. Really, it is not. It is a recognition that we maybe got this wrong and that living in the truth of what is may be the most important work we can do right now. I mean, was there ever a time better than this, really? Human life has always been about struggle, dreams and the collapse of dreams, suffering and joy, rising and falling - not a direct line toward the end of history or an eternal salvation of unending bliss. Rather, it has always been a cycle of life, death, and rebirth - not reincarnation but a process of how life unfolds - chaos to order, chaos to stability, and always back again. Seems to be how creation keeps working. We're in it, inside the process, not outside where we can manage it or wrap our minds around it, or answer the question ultimately of why it is at all.

Maybe if we could humbly accept our predicament, we could also find within us a little compassion for one another as we all search for who we are in the mystery of all this.

Anyway, I am going back to the poems, the essays, the manuscripts to see what's there, to reignite the creative process and then see what emerges.

We are entering some incredibly challenging times. There have always been challenging times. We are not immune from that truth of human history. Maybe there are some words I can offer that can help us.

~ Margaret Swedish 

Photos taken from the Sparta-Elroy WI bike trail. Credit: Me