Two years later...a plunge into the present moment

So, where are we now? Nearer collapse. That's the first point. We were there 2 years ago when I pretty much stopped writing. The death of my oldest sister in 2019 morphed into the pandemic that began at the end of that year, and here we are almost 2 years later. I couldn't write during the pandemic. A lot of writers had that reaction.

Staring into a darkness, a big ending right out there in front of us, growing closer and closer, inexorably - that's what it felt like at times. It was the "45" years, the years of the Orange Man. We were headed for political collapse, watching incompetent power-mongers, racists and misogynists, making a mess of things, unraveling the political system and Constitutional order for the helluva it, for revenge against the progress of BIPOC people and women who threatened their power (which was built in part upon racism and misogyny) after all the years of struggle for rights expansion. Corruption, substanceless braggadocio stomping around the White House (or the golf course), a frail, extremely narcissistic, volatile ego, attracting others of the same ilk - it was sad and dangerous. And we are reaping the whirlwind now and will for years to come.

Credit: NPR.org

All happening in a world falling apart from ecological unraveling and cultural failures all around the world, a time when what we need is the best of humans, not the worst.

It was hard to sit here and write any damn thing. And then I received a cancer diagnosis. It all fit together in ways hard to describe. My body, my spirit, following the path of diminishment and decline in a diminishing, declining world.

I never thought it meant I would never write again. It meant I would be a very different person when I began again.

The pause was not total. I blogged monthly for a while at the Center for New Creation website, but that ended as I moved on from it after 15 years. I have poems started or nearly finished as they roll themselves out of whatever that space is where they originate. They need attention, but they are there, waiting for me. My discipline when it comes to editing a poem is just terrible. They are born, I file them away as drafts, and there they linger as I return to the prose. They may never see the light of day, but the practice of writing poems has made me a better writer.

Meanwhile, in this atmosphere of a world falling apart (and nothing we can do to stop it), the acceptance of that entails a lot of letting go, and that letting go is quite freeing, if also painful. The desire to "fix" the world is still there in this aging social justice advocate, but this one can't be fixed. It can only collapse, and the real question before us now is how we will live through it and what kind of world will emerge from that. 

Credit: Margaret Swedish - Athabasca River, Alberta

If nothing else, this precipice moment tells the writer that there is no use holding back anymore. Nothing to lose, right? Write it all, fully, honestly - what you see, what you know after decades on this planet, what the precipice looks like as we all draw nearer. None of us can "save" the world anymore, so we may as well tell the truth about it from the various vantage points of our lives. And we need to tell that truth as vulnerable, scared, gentle humans so that the words can be of service to others, rather than judgment that just pushes people away, or the resentment and rage that become violence and hate. There is a bad time coming and we need to learn how to live through it and keep a modicum of decency, generosity, and compassion as values we treasure.

We look back on our lives, those of us who have been around a while, and perhaps ask what it is we can gather up to mine for wisdom. There is a lot of material for me. I grew up with extreme racism here in Milwaukee, and later the Vietnam War and the great cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s. At CU in Boulder, I was involved in campus ministry, which in those days involved solidarity with farmworkers struggling to form a union, and visiting young men, boys really (average age 15-24), in a federal prison for first offenders near Denver, including several conscientious objectors avoiding the draft out of conscience, and peace marches and teargas, and later living among street people at a soup kitchen in Montreal, and after that, 25 years in Washington DC, most of that in a national office animating and resourcing a faith-based solidarity movement with liberation struggles in Central America. Back in my hometown of Milwaukee, I am engaged with an urban farm, which raises community as well as food, a practical hands-on path of community survival and enrichment, and have turned to a sangha and Buddhist practice as an anchor for my spiritual journey (though I am still very fond of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, despite what religion has done to them).  

The building here I first lived when I moved to Montreal

That sounds like an interesting life and it has been, and it is chock full of things I never thought I would do, but did, and some of it was painful and traumatic, and some of it was rich beyond measure. In other words, I have some material to work with, yes? I'm 72 now (hard to believe, it's not what I thought 72 would be when I was a kid, when all those aging aunts and uncles came by for a visit) and, as I mentioned, I have a very unusual cancer that is being checked with a monthly injection that keeps it where it is for hopefully a good long while. I have no doubt that the increase in this cancer in the population, and so many others, is because my body is contaminated with beaucoup carcinogens no matter how healthy I have tried to live. 

We all have microplastics in us now, and PFAS "forever" chemicals (a family of toxic chemicals pervasive now everywhere and in everything), and more than half of people alive in this country will get cancer, and that is a pandemic quite unique to us. You'd think that would change things, but instead of deciding to get the toxins out of the environment, it just started a cancer industry where more billions are being made by investors in the private health market. Clever, capitalism, don't you think?

Well, the reckoning is here and more people know that than are willing to admit it or say it out loud. We just cannot imagine a life without the capitalist industrial growth economy. We can't, even though we've had it for so brief a time in human history. One thing capitalism has understood perfectly is precisely how addictive our brains are, the evolution of intelligence, wisdom, and ethics being far behind that of the technology where it can offer stuff online and have it delivered to our porches.

That's the world that's ending, collapsing now, having made us sick, having poisoned our world, having made us quite incapable of stopping that which is bringing us so much harm.

Honduras: children displaced by palm oil plantation

I've seen too much of what it has cost us, this economic growth culture - in the streets of Montreal, in the federal prison in Colorado where we celebrated the 15th birthday of a Mexican boy who crossed the border carrying weed (and could not speak a word of English), in the bombed villages and encampments of displaced populations during El Salvador's civil war, in the simple houses of workers in the sweatshops of Mexico and Honduras, in neighborhoods back home here in Milwaukee with conditions as bad as some of the poorest countries I visited, or in the Diné and Cree communities along the Athabasca River in Alberta where the tar sands industry has bulldozed their forests, contaminated their waters, and ruined a whole culture's way of life. I learned that the U.S. teaches people in other countries how to torture and how to destroy villages to save them. I learned that all this affluence and consumerism the culture so enjoys requires this brutality in order for us to have them. No way around that bit of moral truth either.

And since I started focusing on the ecological crises we are falling into now without hope of avoiding them any longer, I also learned that we will fell entire forests, dig up, mine, and destroy millions of square miles of precious lands and water all over the world for the same reason - to have the benefits and the comforts and conveniences that industrialism has brought us.

There, you see? I start writing and it comes like waves washing over the present moment, drowning us in our history of colonialism, empire, and rapacious industrialism. This is what I was afraid of, that if I started I couldn't stop. I would have to look at it all again. All of it. Hold nothing back. Trust me, that is a frightful space in which to live. Fortunately, while I don't have a lot of company in that space, especially here in my hometown, I do have company. There are others I know bravely walking into that space to ask - what do we have to offer now from our passion and skills, our compassion and sorrowful solidarity, that can be of service in such a world?

Credit: Cheri Johnson

I have my garden plot in our urban farm with 90 or so others, gardeners as diverse as what we grow, and before the pandemic I took my trusty laptop and PowerPoint to all sorts of communities to talk about the conditions of life on the planet and what needs to end - as well as what needs to be begun - and I have my words. And now I want to offer them again. We'll see what emerges. I hope you will be with me on this journey. It needs company. In order to build the Beloved Community amid the chaos, fear, and violence of our time, we need to start actually living it.

Finally, words are not meant to be cast off into a vacuum. Every writer wants a conversation, feedback, solidarity. As I move along this path now, thoughtful responses are welcome. With the world as it is right now, sharing wisdom is more necessary than ever.

~ Margaret Swedish

swedishmargaret2@gmail.com