Writing and the need to imagine a different world - urgently

Well, so much for my once a month promise to this blog. Missed November - a dreary, dreary month 'round these parts. Too reflective of my mood, especially as a writer. I don't know how to write of and to these times. The pace of tumultuous change is picking up speed. I take in a day's worth of shocking news and events, and then, just as I try to absorb them, reflect on them, process my own thoughts and feelings, open to whatever emerges - more shocking news and events come storming in.

Storming - too often quite literally these days. Unprecedented weather events are almost daily fare now, disrupting lives, bringing personal tragedies to thousands of families, and billions of dollars worth of destruction - and that's just in this country. But, have you noticed the culture changing its priorities at all because of these things? Do those not affected "feel" these events as part of their lives?


I wrote this sentence in my October post:

To everything we do, the Earth has a response. That understanding ought to sober us.

Does it?

If not, then I can assure you that we have lost a conscious sense of our complete interconnectedness with Nature, with natural systems, with our biosphere and atmosphere, our utter dependence upon the living eco-communities of our planet. If not, then we are in more danger than perhaps most of us have realized. The loss of that knowledge, that living awareness of this dependence, means we are not capable of experiencing the existential threat this species faces.

Okay, this is a writers blog and my work life encroaches. I can't really separate them well. The craft of writing, and its meaning and purpose for me, are wrapped up in my deep desire to use words - spoken or written - to help us reconnect, to help us see, feel, experience our place in the natural order of things. Western economic thinking, and the glorification of the individual and "individual freedom," fed by mass industrialization and technology that has severed our senses from direct experience with Nature, have dulled our senses, our ability to live in our bodies. We are mesmerized by our minds, forgetting that they are so easily manipulated. We believe way too much in our abilities for rational thought, while life is not rational, living systems are not rational, and that beyond our rational western minds is, well, everything else, every other way that our bodies and spirits, if you will, experience life.

When words become detached from what they are supposed to indicate, then words can no longer help us. It has been said by many wise ones lately that one thing we have learned in this moment of ecological, cultural, and spiritual crisis is that information doesn't change people. Give them all the info about the world that comes closest to matching or describing reality - if that info challenges their world views, religious beliefs, their calcified sets of expectations and aspirations for their lives, it is the info that will be set aside.

The planet is changing all around us - the weather, the seasons, the scale of disasters, the epidemics of cancer, neurological disease, addiction, and suicide - all of these are indications of the failure of our ways of life, our sets of values, and we get up most days and live as if none of this is true, as if the reality we created from our minds is more real than the physical, biological, ecological facts of our planet.

One of the reasons poetry is so vital now is that, by way of metaphor, dissonance, broken lines, and other tools, it can break through the rational mind, stump its way of thinking, confuse, break down the logic, shatter the old lenses, help us to see, rather than understand. And this is crucial.

I write poems sometimes - or used to. I've been bringing back some of the old ones to work with them, take more rational brain out of them, and hone them in the hopes of getting some of them out into the world. Since doing that, new poems have arrived. They show me where I am in my own journey with the increasingly dire nature of our human predicament. I don't always like what appears, but am often moved by the lines themselves. I need to do them more justice, give them the time they deserve.

I started writing poems to help me be a better creative writer. But poetry gets a hold of you, yes? Once it does, it's hard to turn away from it. On the other hand, writing poems has changed the nature of my non-fiction writing. We need to find ways to share the narratives of our lives, reveal what we see through our own personal lenses, and to do that with great vulnerability because it is story and metaphor and insights and wisdom that can help us see the world as it really is.

Which is a scary thing at this point in human evolution. But if we don't find ways to face that fear, to walk right through it so that we can appreciate at a very deep level what the true nature of our predicament is, most everything we do to address it will fall short.

Like believing that carbon taxes and renewable energy can save us, and we don't have to do anything else. Too late, my friends. We either do this now, or we face global ecological collapses without any preparation, without developing the skills of deep adaptation, resilient community building, drastically reduced "standards of living," and new fiercely local economies based on talents and skills nearly lost at this point (think things like repairing appliances, sewing clothes, growing and preserving food, reading a map).

In her wonderful poem, "The Othello Sarabande, or: the Occupation," Alicia Ostriker (one of my favorite poets) writes:

Is it not the task of poets to raise the mirror to the world's face, to say lo and behold, 
See here, will you just look at yourself, the occupation is love, the rest is silence?

Could we ever learn to live like that?

Gaia is a prisoner, all poems ask who will free her.

We have imprisoned Gaia, beaten her into submission, extracted from her what we require to sustain this grossly unsustainable, ecologically impossible techno-industrial way of life. Has it created a good life for most of humanity? Never has. Always needed slave labor and poverty, concentrated power and wealth, endless war, fierce oppression, racism and injustice, to keep it going. Its occupation is not love. What it is creating now is ecocide, mass extinction of the living communities from which we evolved and which we need to stay alive.

To order

So why can't we just let it go? Are we really lacking the imagination to figure out another way of living? The poems are asking. Can we come up with responses worthy of the poetry?

~ Margaret Swedish 

Center for New Creation
PO Box 070495
Milwaukee WI 53207