tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84162167878114338932024-03-14T01:34:48.268-05:00Swedish in Milwaukee: Musings in the Age Of CollapseMargaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.comBlogger214125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-52518919942721920802024-03-09T12:55:00.000-06:002024-03-09T12:55:38.233-06:00We're running out of electricity - among other things<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><b> by Margaret Swedish</b></i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What will it be like as things we rely on, that we don't even think about as we use them, begin to break down? Like flipping a light switch and the lights go on. Like writing an email and pressing "send." Or that GPS voice telling you where to go, when to turn, how to get there, suddenly goes silent. Think about the 12 hours that AT&T customers suddenly lost all access to their accounts a couple of weeks ago. No way to make a phone call, no way to connect with others - workplace, family, the internet. Couldn't call AT&T to find out what was going on or how long it would last. Couldn't let family members know why they couldn't reach you or where you are.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Yes, some people were quite unnerved. It could happen just like that someday soon, the entire internet going down. A solar storm making a dead-on hit, Putin playing with his new nuclear space weapon (in development right now), the Chinese government deciding to shut down our electric grid or interfere with weather satellites as the hurricane is headed straight for Florida.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Dystopian, I know. But believe me, a lot of folks out there are very worried about how completely reliant we are on virtual technology, on computer chips and the internet, on satellite connections and smart phones, for our daily existence.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">What really brought this to the forefront of my "musings in the Age of Collapse" was this article from just the other day in the Washington Post. Just to say, the headline really caught my attention.</span></p><p><b><a href="https://wapo.st/4a5Dw8d" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: medium;">Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power</span></a></b></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Yikes! Seriously?<br /><br />The tagline: <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: var(--wpds-colors-gray20); text-align: center;"><b>AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up.</b></span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Here's something we're having a little problem understanding. You can't just keep adding on more and more demand on an increasingly limited resource. And I am going to guess that millions of people had no idea that our wireless world in which we don't SEE or FEEL what these demands are doing to the planet is often as bad as, end even worse, than our use of paper, plastics, personal vehicles, and other materials we visibly use each day when considering our withering, destructive, ways of life on this abused, wounded, precious planet of ours.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">From this article:</span><br /><br /></p><div class="teaser-content" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="wpds-c-PJLV article-body grid-center grid-body" data-qa="article-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; grid-column: 2 / 3; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 640px; width: 640px;"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy" data-el="text" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: var(--wpds-lineHeights-160); margin: 0px; padding-bottom: var(--wpds-space-150);"><span style="color: #351c75; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><i><b>Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.</b></i></span></p><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy" data-el="text" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: var(--wpds-lineHeights-160); margin: 0px; padding-bottom: var(--wpds-space-150);"><span style="color: #351c75; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><i><b><br /></b></i></span></p></div><div class="wpds-c-PJLV article-body grid-center grid-body" data-qa="article-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; grid-column: 2 / 3; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 640px; width: 640px;"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy" data-el="text" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: var(--wpds-lineHeights-160); margin: 0px; padding-bottom: var(--wpds-space-150);"><span style="color: #351c75; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><i><b>In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.</b></i></span></p><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy" data-el="text" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: var(--wpds-lineHeights-160); margin: 0px; padding-bottom: var(--wpds-space-150);"><span style="color: #351c75; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><i><b><br /></b></i></span></p></div></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box;"></div><div class="wpds-c-PJLV article-body grid-center grid-body" data-qa="article-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; grid-column: 2 / 3; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 640px; width: 640px;"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy" data-el="text" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: var(--wpds-lineHeights-160); margin: 0px; padding-bottom: var(--wpds-space-150);"><span style="color: #351c75; font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><i><b>Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.</b></i></span></p></div><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Yeah, it's bad. It's seriously bad. Despite infrastructure bills and money pouring into states for all sorts of projects, demand is overwhelming supply. Once again, we are growing new technologies without slowing down to consider impacts, limits, <i><b>reality</b>. </i>Oh, so many millions of us just hate that word, and that, my friends, is one of the reasons we are in so much trouble.</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I have copied this pic into my post because I want to offer to us all some reality, a good look at what is necessary, what is <i style="font-weight: bold;">REAL</i>, about what is being done to the planet directly connected to our industrial/technological ways of life. Take a close look. And to get a sense of the magnitude of this environmental disaster zone, see the tiny trucks to get a sense of scale. They are not tiny. Their tires alone are taller than we are.</span><br /><br /></p><div class="teaser-content" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="wpds-c-PJLV article-body grid-center grid-body" data-qa="article-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; grid-column: 2 / 3; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 640px; width: 640px;"><p class="wpds-c-cYdRxM wpds-c-cYdRxM-iPJLV-css overrideStyles font-copy" data-el="text" data-testid="drop-cap-letter" dir="null" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: var(--wpds-colors-gray40); font-family: var(--wpds-fonts-body); font-size: 1.25rem; line-height: var(--wpds-lineHeights-160); margin: 0px; padding-bottom: var(--wpds-space-150);"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="font-family: Franklin, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhdPwgcqcc7OiZ9TyPVaep6VZCQ-_1zi5SMZnojWohlqwjp_9g0txbb08orE-BjGhoMyg4f8T55qLNmHLM1X_Rw6va4g6y2L5HTPoeRBlvm28B4DnUvRcIPuvCV0hEBxPUjnffCtSS9XlEuXQhJjg03LTnph-7QRnxXLyNF11hPVct2hZy3lq_iLA5c4g" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="792" data-original-width="1200" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhdPwgcqcc7OiZ9TyPVaep6VZCQ-_1zi5SMZnojWohlqwjp_9g0txbb08orE-BjGhoMyg4f8T55qLNmHLM1X_Rw6va4g6y2L5HTPoeRBlvm28B4DnUvRcIPuvCV0hEBxPUjnffCtSS9XlEuXQhJjg03LTnph-7QRnxXLyNF11hPVct2hZy3lq_iLA5c4g=w456-h301" width="456" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #45494c; font-family: SourceSans3; font-size: 15.008px;"><a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/3138/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-tar-sands-and-how-they-impact-you/" target="_blank">© Jiri Rezac / Greenpeace</a></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">I made a visit to the Alberta Tar sands site just over a decade ago with a few Canadian colleagues. It was bad then, but this... Sweet God, how is it possible humans keep doing this.<br /><br />Just to note: this was all boreal forest not that long ago, and the Athabasca River that runs through this geography once a source of fresh water for the indigenous communities that live in the region. Today, those same communities suffer extreme rates of cancer, renal disease, and more, their way of life utterly ruined. The forest is also our northern hemisphere's version of the Amazon Rainforest, lungs for this breathing planet, and a major regulator of climate.<br /><br />It's bad enough that humans created this industrial monster. It's something else altogether that we have done so much lethal harm and cannot stop ourselves. The drive for technology and profit, for ease of life and convenience, fancier consumer items and global travel, is an addiction we are unable to overcome, even if it does mean the death, the end, of so much. What our children will see in this century...</span><p style="font-family: Franklin, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></p></div><div class="wpds-c-PJLV article-body grid-center grid-body" data-qa="article-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; grid-column: 2 / 3; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 640px; width: 640px;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">I no longer expect us to learn. I don't even expect that those who have learned or are learning are willing to live an extreme of radical simplicity that would be required to move quickly into a new version of ourselves. Mystics and monks, maybe. Hard core followers of the actual texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or the actual real principles and ethics of Buddhism, perhaps. There will be some few who will try to shine a light on how we could do this, learn to live differently, not as separate individuals following our own self-interests (which is a violation of the Earth's natural laws), but in communities that rely on one another and the beings in our natural eco-communities for life and meaning. At the core of these communities would be an unshakable commitment to honor that Web of Life, to refuse to violate it anymore, and to become part of its regeneration and healing so that they may be preserved for the next generations.<br /><br />"Inflection point" is an overused, abused term these days. That said, we really are at one. Right now, the choices humans are making are not encouraging.<br /><br /><br /></span></div><div class="wpds-c-PJLV article-body grid-center grid-body" data-qa="article-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; grid-column: 2 / 3; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 640px; width: 640px;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div></div><div class="wpds-c-PJLV wpds-c-PJLV-fGHEql-layout-default grid-center" data-testid="topper-byline" style="box-sizing: border-box; grid-column: 2 / 3; text-align: center; width: 1200px;"><div class="wpds-c-ffLlrl wpds-c-ffLlrl-gvcFw-shouldJustifyCenterNS-true" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; justify-content: center;"><div class="wpds-c-hoWMuZ wpds-c-hoWMuZ-fQTJsw-shouldAlignCenterNS-true" style="align-items: center; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; flex-direction: column; max-width: 600px;"><div class="PJLV PJLV-ihSmMVC-css" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="PJLV PJLV-iPJLV-css mb-xxs overrideStyles" data-qa="author-byline" style="box-sizing: border-box; gap: 0.5rem; margin-bottom: 4px;"><span class="wpds-c-PJLV" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><div class="flex items-center" data-qa="author-byline" style="align-items: center; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex;"><div class="mr-sm flex lh-0" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; line-height: 0; margin-right: 16px;"></div></div></span></div></div></div></div></div>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-78105289275099210922024-03-05T23:23:00.000-06:002024-03-05T23:23:11.865-06:00The Math Does Not Lie<p></p><p><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
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Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
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Name="Smart Hyperlink"/>
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Name="Hashtag"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]--><i><b>by Margaret Swedish</b></i></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I spent some time this afternoon with a long essay by a physicist, Tom Murphy, who teaches at the University of California San Diego, entitled "<i><b><a href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-02-28/unsustainable-goose-chases/?mc_cid=0d741cf8ff&mc_eid=64a337ee7b">Unsustainable Goose Chase</a></b></i>." It's about one of my favorite themes, she says somewhat sarcastically, but also seriously. It focuses squarely on the "wicked problem" of our times - that we are living so far beyond the limits of sustainability on this planet that our doom is pretty much assured. It's in the math.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Math like this: "In this altered state, we find ourselves on a destructive rampage, as
evidenced by the severe toll on habitats and biodiversity: about <a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/">85% of primary forest is gone</a>; <a href="https://livingplanetindex.org/documents/LPR_2022_TechnicalSupplement_DeepDiveLPI.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">vertebrate populations have declined by about 70%</a> on average since 1970; and now <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115" rel="noopener" target="_blank">96% of mammal mass</a>
on the planet is embodied in humans and our livestock. The dots are not
difficult to connect. The combination of methods and substances
available to us have allowed explosive exploitation of resources on a
global scale. A paltry and decreasing amount of habitat—increasingly
fragmented—remains. The healthy, biodiverse regions are disappearing
fast."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That paragraph is not from the goose chase but another article he linked inside that one, entitled, appropriately, "<i><b><a href="https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/12/the-simple-story/">The Simple Story of Civilization</a></b></i>." What he is pointing to, or explaining, really, is that the lives humans have been living in recent centuries, and in the decades of the 20th and 21st centuries especially, built upon the explosion of industrial and technological innovation since World War II, are completely impossible to sustain and have always been leading us toward this wall of biocapacity limits and our inevitable head-on crash into it. We are destroying the resilience of the natural world, the interlocking Web of Life, that keeps us alive. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span class="dt "></span></span></p><div class="sub-content-thread"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span class="ex-sent first-child has-aq sents"><span class="mw_t_sp"><span class="mw_t_wi">Entropy</span> is the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder. </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Humans don't want to believe it, but the Earth actually has limits for how much life it can support and no life can surpass those limits for long without getting into a boatload of trouble. All the innovation in the world cannot violate those basic laws of nature. Physics teaches us that the basic principle at work here is rooted in the second law of thermodynamics, which is particularly relevant to our crisis. It's called <b><i>entropy</i></b>, one of the more frightening terms relevant to our times. This is Miriam Webster's brief description of it: entropy is "<span class="dt "><span class="dtText">the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. (James R Newman) </span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span class="dt "><span class="dtText"><strong class="mw_t_bc">: </strong>a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder."</span></span></span></span></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Take a burning log, for example. When ignited, it gives off heat and lots of useful energy. But when burned up, it turns to ash. It cools. The same amount of energy is there, but it is no longer useful.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">When energy is burned, it is burned. When it is ash, it is ash. When it is ash, it can no longer provide useful energy. It becomes waste. When useful energy (like fossil fuels) becomes useless (like CO2 in the atmosphere), it can no longer provide energy to do anything. You have to find new sources to burn, whether in the ground, growing in the forests, or sucking in the sunlight with panels made from rare earth minerals, and then mining of metals - lots and lots and lots of mining.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">With humans now facing the depletion of the remaining oil and gas in the ground this century, new sources are being considered, tested, developed. Thus the search for renewable sources that can replace fossil fuels and keep the lights on - like the sun and wind and water, split atoms and hydrogen. But the energy they can produce ain't nearly enough to power this scale of human civilization. We know this, which is why those who promise renewable energy as a way to continue living as we do, but with different energy sources, are spreading false information, false promises, avoidance of what it would mean to really make this radical transition in the short time we have left to keep much of the Earth habitable.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Yes, we can keep some of the lights on, and some food in our markets, but the only way to meet the crisis at its essence is to begin the deliberate, planned, dismantling of the industrial civilization. Let's be real. What are the chances of that happening? That time will come, but it will come unplanned, in chaos and disasters, and with a stunning loss of human and other-than-human life.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We are using up the "resources" (hate that word) of the planet. We don't have enough energy sources left to provide 8.1 billion people with smart phones, much less food, and certainly not air conditioning on this heating planet, and what I have just been reading about the amount of water and energy that AI will drain from the planet [see from Forbes: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/25/ai-is-accelerating-the-loss-of-our-scarcest-natural-resource-water/?sh=3a283f1a7c06" target="_blank"><i><b>AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water</b></i></a>] - well, again, it is impossible, though pushing ahead full speed in this direction now seems irreversible. The crash will come even sooner, though, because of this new, untamed, technology, now appearing in all our computer programs whether we want it or not.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Let's repeat this over and over until we get it. The only
energy source that has made this era of industrialism and consumerism
possible is oil. Oil is the god, the sacred fluid, of the civilization
of economic growth, our church, our cathedral. It is fueling a global
ecological crisis. And it will run out within decades. Still want to
commit to it? Ain't it time to start thinking about another path to a
livable future beyond the death of this industrial era?</span></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Back in the 1990s, when I was becoming more deeply concerned about the looming ecological catastrophe, someone handed me this little booklet entitled, <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Friday-Morning-Reflections-World-Bank/dp/093202078X" target="_blank">Friday Morning Reflections at the World Bank: Essays on Values and Developement</a></b></i>. Not exactly a scintillating title, but it emerged from some early morning discussions among a few of the policy people who cared about the bank's ethical values and the global impacts of its programs. It was first published on 1991. Recommended to me was the essay by Sven Burmeister, one of the bank's deputy directors. What I read changed the direction of my life forever. I have shared this often since the 90s in talks and workshops I have led, in my book, <b><i><a href="https://orbisbooks.com/products/living-beyond-the-end-of-the-world" target="_blank">Living Beyond the 'End of the World,'</a></i></b> and in many blog posts and essays over the past decades. This is the excerpt that leapt off the page into my brain and never left it.<br /></span></p><blockquote><p style="margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 31.5pt; margin-top: 5.0pt; margin: 5pt 31.5pt 5pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i style="color: #20124d;"><b><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: medium; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“...our current handling of the environment and its resources
might lead to our ultimate destruction. In fact, if we continue on our present
course, the question is not whether destruction will happen, but when. Acid
rain, deforestation, ozone depletion, and global warming are clear signals that
we are misusing and exhausting the resources of the planet... all resources are
finite in the end... The important question is how we conceive of our
relationship with nature. Are we here to exploit the earth and use up its
capital? Or are we here to find an equilibrium with our fellow creatures, or to
live as stewards off the income that the earth can yield without destroying its
capital?...</span></b></i></p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 5.0pt; margin-left: .25in; margin-right: 31.5pt; margin-top: 5.0pt; margin: 5pt 31.5pt 5pt 0.25in; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="color: #20124d;"><i><b><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: medium; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“The ultimate constraint on resource use is the carrying capacity
of the globe: per capita resource use should not exceed the level the globe can
sustain for all the world’s people. Today’s per capita resource use in
industrial countries is not sustainable for all inhabitants of the earth... </span></b></i></span><span style="color: #cc0000;"><i><b><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: medium; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">the
planet is capable of carrying only 500 million people indefinitely at the level
of income and technology in the United States today. If resources were used
more prudently as in Europe and Japan, the planet might carry one billion
people </span><span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="font-size: medium; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">indefinitely. Demographers estimate that, if present trends
continue, the world’s population...will stabilize sometime in the twenty-first
century at nine to twelve billion human beings.”</span></b></i></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-size: medium;">You see the problem. <span face=""Calibri",sans-serif" style="mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It's in the math. It doesn't work out for our survival. More technological innovation? Means more destruction of habitat. Solar panels, EVs, wind turbines - all require a massive scale of mining. Mining and manufacturing require a massive scale of energy. AI requires billions and billions of gallons of water. And humans continue to burn fossil fuels at record rates, the peak not expected to be reached until somewhere in the 2030s to 2040s. That's a whole lot of CO2 yet to be poured into the atmosphere, a lot of forest to be destroyed, a lot of habitats unraveled for all the living beings that lie in them.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is okay to ask: What in the world are we thinking?!<br /><br />So, answers to all this? That's where the wicked problem comes in. While no one really has a solution that would create an easy path out of this mess, we still have choice. The choice is about how to live through what's coming, what has already started to unfold. I will be reflecting on that a lot in coming blog posts, and there are many good, good people who are doing some deep pondering about how we start to build the kinds of communities brave enough to look at the reality as it is and start living accordingly - with the best of the human spirit instead of so much of the worst that we see these days. <br /><br />And so I leave this for you - and me - to wrestle with in coming days. And while we're at it, let's add to our ponderings the notion of the Beloved Community and what that might mean for us now as we seek our paths through the mess we have made. <br /><br /></span></p>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-57062265219298955142024-03-01T15:12:00.001-06:002024-03-01T15:12:40.149-06:00The Meaning of a "Wicked Problem"<p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><i>by Margaret Swedish </i></b></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It would be good for us to understand well the meaning of this term. It is not a made-up description of a problem - that it is wicked, therefore negative, or bad, from our perspective. It is a technical term, used in science, research, engineering, and design. It is a term for a problem that is irresolvable, therefore wicked, objectively wicked. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">And we are facing thousands of them now. We live among them, and the paralysis many feel over trying to find or imagine a way out of our predicament (another word it would help us to better appreciate) is because there is no path that gets us out of it. We face collapses now we cannot halt, prevent, or fix. We can only figure out how to live through them, adjust our lives to reality, instead of the fiction of our economic, industrial culture, and create in the face of a generational crisis a way to survive with some semblance of our basic humanity still intact.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This world will be so in need of us - if we can hang on to our moral values, our integrity, compassion, equanimity, selflessness, deep respect for the Web of Life, our dedication to what promotes goodness, what helps to ease the inevitable suffering (material loss, grief, want, fear, anxiety, harsh scarcities...).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Am I exaggerating the scale? Think of this new Age of Fire as the Earth becomes more combustible with drought and aridification, record heat, and too much human development within high-risk fire zones. Think the Texas Panhandle, California, Alberta, British Columbia, Australia, Chile, Greece - just a few locations with recent historic level wildfires. Fires that cannot be fought for their power and strength, a raging force of nature that surpasses the capacity of the tools we have to "fight" them.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Am I exaggerating the scale? Summers now that regularly see heat domes and temperatures that reach into the 120s - in Iraq and other Gulf nations, India, Chile, B.C., Arizona, Texas, parts of Europe... Or winters. 74 degrees in February in Wisconsin and the first tornadoes ever recorded in that state.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Am I exaggerating the scale? Atmospheric rivers flowing across the Pacific Ocean and smashing into California now are becoming increasingly powerful as more and more moisture from the warming atmosphere fuels the storms. Rain falling in feet, not inches, hills and mountainsides collapsing, billions of dollars in damage. And then the rise in sea levels from warming oceans and melting ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic that are causing the disintegration of shorelines and threatening more populations because humans built ocean communities in defiance of nature and climate change. Meanwhile, the national hurricane center is considering a new Category 6 for those storms as they get larger, more powerful, and more destructive<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Am I exaggerating the scale? How badly have we also poisoned the planet and all living beings, including our own bodies? The National Cancer Institute, a government site, reported this from the year 2020, that 1,806,590 new cases of cancer would be diagnosed that year and 606,520 people would die from the disease. More than 40% of the U.S. population will get cancer in their lifetime. In the U.K., that percentage is over 50%.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I always thought that this would be the stat, the reality, that would change the culture, that would scare the hell out of us, that would make us say, "my God, we need to stop this." What we have done instead is create a sprawling largely for-profit cancer treatment and research industry. Rather than get the carcinogens out of the environment, we make cancer part of the industrial/economic growth culture. Clearly I underestimated the ability of investors and consumers to bear painful illness and death rather than give up their online shopping, their use of plastics (rising rapidly), and global travel.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Some people call this "adaptation." Some of us call it insanity, living outside reality.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Without intending it, we have created a culture of wicked problems now. Global baking and climate change? This crisis cannot be resolved by ending the production and burning of fossil fuels without massive economic collapses, raging poverty and want, wars and violent social conflict, and more. Nor can it be resolved by trying to replace the burning of these fuels with renewables that can never do the job that oil did, and that require mammoth extremes of environmental destruction in order to create the infrastructure for these fuels at the scale of what fossil fuels have enabled. <br /><br />Take the 100,000 plus untested synthetic chemicals that humans have introduced into our waters, soil, food, and air out of the environment - plastics among them - and the economy collapses. Pick your poison.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">I am not making this stuff up. This is all fact-based. This is studied, researched. I have been reading this stuff for decades. I have gone to the presentations, had intense conversations with some brilliant scientists, read the studies, in order to learn, to get this right, because I am annoyed by those who scare people with the unproven end-of-the-world stuff. What is proven and real is plenty terrifying enough.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">It is easy to face the reality of our "wicked problem" with despair. But we have to move through that, too. That won't help us learn how to live through this time in a manner that uplifts the best, instead of the worst, of the human spirit.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So, a couple of points to make at the end of this essay. One: don't try to waste time and energy trying to fix what cannot be fixed - like industrial, consumer civilization. It was always headed to this end. It is a hyper-expression of the wicked problem. It is wicked. Let it die. Second: in the face of that collapse, we can learn how to live differently, with different principles, ethics, ways of life, moral and spiritual values that not only serve to ease a lot of the inevitable suffering to come, but also to begin moving away from this destructive culture to a new one, ways of life that regenerate the human connection with the Earth, what gave us life, what can still hold us if we can keep from losing it all, and if we can learn how to live in the wild diversity of the planet without ripping up those connections that hold us all together.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><i>A culture of radical simplicity.</i></b></span><span style="font-size: medium;"> A culture of letting go destructive, selfish modes of life. A culture that breaks with the logic of this one, i.e.; the accumulation of stuff, wealth, status. A culture of solidarity, community, becoming repairers of the breaches we have created, allowing the Earth to heal itself and to show us how to do it.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">We must head in that direction if we really do want to survive. This is about learning how to live on this planet within the limits of her natural systems, with reverence and respect, without using her for our economic benefit but living within her in a way that is a benefit to all living beings.<br /><br />You can be sure we will be writing more about this in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned. Share this around. Let's get a community of truth and compassion going right here.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> -------------------------------------------</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="color: #20124d;"><u>Wicked problem</u></span></b>:</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;">In planning and policy, a <b>wicked problem</b>
is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of
incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often
difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be
fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked"
denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil. Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point." Moreover, because of complex interdependencies,
the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create
other problems. Due to their complexity, wicked problems are often
characterized by organized irresponsibility. [Grabbed this off wikipedia. Well-sourced.]</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="color: #20124d;"><u>Predicament</u></span></b></span><span style="font-size: medium;">: </span>an <span>unpleasant</span> <span>situation</span> that is difficult to get out of: </p><br /><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span> <br /></p>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-74981946795892581292024-02-26T12:39:00.001-06:002024-02-26T13:13:19.537-06:00Time to Face the Reality of Our Predicament<p></p><p><b><i>by Margaret Swedish </i></b><br /></p><p>Okay, this time I'm serious. I must start writing again. I have so much brewing inside, so much from my past, from my personal history, that shines some light on this moment in our western culture's history, so much I have let go from old belief systems that I have shed, that needed shedding, so I could see more clealy, and now from spiritual practices and insights emerging in this time of vast and often terrifying upheaval. So, too, of these recent years back in my hometown, what I am learning from returning to my roots after 25 years in the DC area, and my life with street folks and Chileans in Montreal in years before that, and before that, in the streets of Milwaukee and of Boulder CO during my university days, protesting the Vietnam War and marching for civil rights.<br /></p><p>And I just keep learning...<br /></p><p>Now, in the face of accelerating political and social crises, the dangers of world war, the cultural chaos that is leading to the collapse of our governing institutions, and all the ecological unravelings happening all at once, including my own unraveling as I age and struggle with lethal disease, this is the time for a real shout-out to the world. <i><b><span style="color: #990000;">People, wake up!</span></b></i><br /></p><p>As a nation, we are underestimating in the extreme how bad this is going to get. And, because of that, we are not preparing as we need to to take on the challenges. We do not yet have the psychological capacity, nor the spiritual stamina, to live through what's coming with our humanity intact. That will only come when we are truly prepared to surrender the very ways of life that are bringing about this great upheaval, when our values change from consumption, accumulation, and affluence to community and simplicity in all things, to living in deep relation with Nature in which we are fully embedded, when care for the Web of Life matters more than economic or financial "success," when that care becomes the reason we get out of bed in the morning, the core meaning of what it means now to work in the world, the core meaning of what it is to be a human being.<br /></p><p>What a time on this planet and in this dysfunctional culture to start writing again! But if we reach deep into that core to rediscover our humanity in the face of a culture that has been busy destroying it, perhaps we can find the path to how to live through this devastating transition with compassion, generosity, gentleness, integrity, and a deeper experience of the spirit and of community than we have ever known.</p><p>So, you can see where I left off in this last essay a couple of years ago. And you can see how the election of the wannabe dictator and the pandemic and then my own illness quieted my voice for a good long time. But a renewed surge of energy and inspiration is telling me it's time to get back to this, that the various lenses of my life's work and evolving faith have something to offer to this moment - about what went wrong and what we need to do to right this ailing species of ours. As a colleague said in a recent Zoom call, "We got it all wrong!" Indeed we did. We need to finally free our minds and hearts from the clutter of the values of this economic growth culture and start to see clearly what we need to do to live on this precious planet that is being rapidly diminished by the 6th Great Extinction, massive loss of biodiversity, our over-consuming at a massive scale the resources that this planet actually has to support us, climate change, the toxification of our environment, and a whole lot more.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVKN_t_wZRQYD27F94OQRIKwCxV1aXjUCCkvG1j-X6ZDLVUt2d1GtG0QBNhxMPbY1kFpvD6TyZA2kcCpTWuHQVTqDwsKPrHoGWnaSkXyC5JzC02fzuUGMEIelD6bZSGMMw1P44RQHeEAl836iAEfA09AXBVO4lA6CSRniscKJunNt2M2fTe0-qTZwjQg/s350/350%20pix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="237" data-original-width="350" height="158" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVKN_t_wZRQYD27F94OQRIKwCxV1aXjUCCkvG1j-X6ZDLVUt2d1GtG0QBNhxMPbY1kFpvD6TyZA2kcCpTWuHQVTqDwsKPrHoGWnaSkXyC5JzC02fzuUGMEIelD6bZSGMMw1P44RQHeEAl836iAEfA09AXBVO4lA6CSRniscKJunNt2M2fTe0-qTZwjQg/w233-h158/350%20pix.jpg" width="233" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Light at the end of the tunnel</b></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p></p><p>It's a grand scale for a writer, but I'm going to dig in. Whatever the limits of my physical life now, I can sit at a laptop and write my heart out for months or years or whatever I have left to make my offering.<br /><br />Hope you'll go on this journey with me. And I hope you might invite others to join you by letting them know about this blog and getting the link out into your communities and networks. We could actually have a conversation here. We could multiply the lenses through which more people are doing clear seeing. We could share best and deepest spiritual wisdom and practices. We could contribute to the urgent work of creating the Beloved Community wherever we are.</p><p style="text-align: center;">---------------------------------- </p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: small;"><i><span style="color: #cc0000;"></span></i></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: small;"><i><span style="color: #cc0000;">I intend to post twice weekly. You can receive the link via email by subscribing in the box on the upper right column. Ain't gonna charge for this. It will always be free. </span></i></span></blockquote><br /><p></p>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-51261085548973552982021-10-21T16:51:00.001-05:002024-02-25T16:33:44.003-06:00Two years later...a plunge into the present moment<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zFgha48DGak/YXHGF6ms5UI/AAAAAAAAFC8/-uefPPH57p4ExyZM4u1NS3eaMDNTNOPPQCLcBGAsYHQ/s500/pbs%2Bjan%2B6%2Binsurrection%2Bsm.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="500" height="265" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zFgha48DGak/YXHGF6ms5UI/AAAAAAAAFC8/-uefPPH57p4ExyZM4u1NS3eaMDNTNOPPQCLcBGAsYHQ/w412-h265/pbs%2Bjan%2B6%2Binsurrection%2Bsm.jpg" width="412" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Credit: <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol/2021/01/26/960775418/new-capitol-police-chief-offers-sincerest-apologies-to-congress">NPR.org</a></span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>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.<br /></p><p>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.</p><p>I never thought it meant I would never write again. It meant I would be a very different person when I began again.</p><p>The pause was not total. I blogged monthly for a while at the <a href="https://www.centerfornewcreation.org/" target="_blank">Center for New Creation</a> 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.<br /></p><p>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. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1zF8Fy-65xM/YXHPLlPv4sI/AAAAAAAAFDE/8in6VOqdDVAVE2ZaHNZq2xi8gB3NWkwigCLcBGAsYHQ/s314/muck%2Bon%2Bthe%2Bathabasca.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="235" data-original-width="314" height="235" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1zF8Fy-65xM/YXHPLlPv4sI/AAAAAAAAFDE/8in6VOqdDVAVE2ZaHNZq2xi8gB3NWkwigCLcBGAsYHQ/s0/muck%2Bon%2Bthe%2Bathabasca.jpg" width="314" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Credit: Margaret Swedish - Athabasca River, Alberta</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>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.</p><p>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). </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8z5gRDi-uGI/YXHQ5JLxoqI/AAAAAAAAFDM/L0rKltgM_Y8Z-ch8IH6O500IBB3gRKiWgCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/montreal%2B-%2Bfirst%2Bhome.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="222" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8z5gRDi-uGI/YXHQ5JLxoqI/AAAAAAAAFDM/L0rKltgM_Y8Z-ch8IH6O500IBB3gRKiWgCLcBGAsYHQ/w296-h222/montreal%2B-%2Bfirst%2Bhome.jpg" width="296" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The building here I first lived when I moved to Montreal</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>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. <p></p><p>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?<br /></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p8mz9DtM-8I/YXHS7BOw04I/AAAAAAAAFDU/loJ_-qaDL9EEMohT_aFESV60GtRtRqjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Honduras%2B-%2Bkids%2Bin%2Bfront%2Bof%2Bhouse%2B1992.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="313" height="317" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p8mz9DtM-8I/YXHS7BOw04I/AAAAAAAAFDU/loJ_-qaDL9EEMohT_aFESV60GtRtRqjuwCLcBGAsYHQ/w249-h317/Honduras%2B-%2Bkids%2Bin%2Bfront%2Bof%2Bhouse%2B1992.jpg" width="249" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Honduras: children displaced by palm oil plantation</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>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 Din<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">é</span> 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. <br /><p></p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-igEtMW_UlmI/YXHVElVK5kI/AAAAAAAAFDc/ICNEhhdmAhke8m3eD-8jJKvypRQLdWvwgCLcBGAsYHQ/s960/Pic%2Bby%2BCheri%2BJohnson%2BMay%2B31%2B2020.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="640" height="289" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-igEtMW_UlmI/YXHVElVK5kI/AAAAAAAAFDc/ICNEhhdmAhke8m3eD-8jJKvypRQLdWvwgCLcBGAsYHQ/w193-h289/Pic%2Bby%2BCheri%2BJohnson%2BMay%2B31%2B2020.jpg" width="193" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Credit: Cheri Johnson</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>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.<p></p><p>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.<br /><br /><b><i>~ Margaret Swedish</i></b><br /></p><p>swedishmargaret2@gmail.com</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-64048625233767239232019-09-17T16:25:00.002-05:002021-10-21T16:53:10.466-05:00Coming back to a writing life... Morder, "The Overstory," and why this feels urgentMy intentions to get back to my regular writing practice were derailed again over the last winter and through spring, this time by a wrenching personal experience - the dying and death of my oldest sister, one of the most profound relationships in my life. Thing about a loss like this is that there is upheaval on so many layers of one's life, and about all one can do is allow that to be what it is. What it is, is different for each of us. For me, it pretty much shut down my capacity for creative writing. I had to accept that. I had to let it be. Fighting it, pulling up a draft and staring at it helplessly, wasn't doing me any good.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2hz-his3lr8/XYFGMzvtskI/AAAAAAAACuc/5mBKeA7aXlwXAp6y8d_MDe1VgZKtlHv1wCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/8%2B-%2Btunnel%2B3%2Bat%2Bend%2Bof%2Bday%2B-%2B2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="262" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2hz-his3lr8/XYFGMzvtskI/AAAAAAAACuc/5mBKeA7aXlwXAp6y8d_MDe1VgZKtlHv1wCLcBGAsYHQ/s200/8%2B-%2Btunnel%2B3%2Bat%2Bend%2Bof%2Bday%2B-%2B2.jpg" width="149" /></a>It integrates. Takes time, but eventually it integrates. The context for the grief gets larger with time, the psychological room for it. The space gets bigger. This does not take anything away from the intensity, or those moments when it strikes again like a powerful ocean wave that washes over and for a moment takes everything with it. The grief can still be overwhelming, but it also begins to take on its own story, to reveal, to be comforting, to become a spiritual resource in which to rest, to find wisdom, to bond with the rest of the grieving world.<span><a name='more'></a></span><br />
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I have finally come back to the manuscript, the one that is a deeply personal account with another kind of grief that is becoming more common in our world - <span style="color: #444444;"><i><b>ecological grief</b></i></span>. I began this story after a 2013 two-week "pilgrimage" with five Canadian companions along the Athabasca River in Alberta, from its origins at the edge of a melting glacier in Jasper National Park to the tar sands industrial site centered around the booming town of Ft. McMurray. <a href="http://www.ecologicalhope.org/featured/changed-yes-by-raw-reality-so-heres-some-raw-footage-of-albertas-exceedingly-raw-oil-reality/" target="_blank">The steadily expanding industrial region is a true "Morder" on Earth, an industrial hell</a>, one of the largest such projects in all the world, and what is for western humans an acceptable way to support our consumer ways of life - a real-life version of Dante's <i>Inferno</i>.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Dc1Jmbc8O2c/XYFHWVr2HEI/AAAAAAAACuo/yIz-xU8O_GAvvbk2vAgeUGYLjYm47FBogCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/syncrude%2Bprocessing%2Bsite%2Bsm.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="448" height="125" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Dc1Jmbc8O2c/XYFHWVr2HEI/AAAAAAAACuo/yIz-xU8O_GAvvbk2vAgeUGYLjYm47FBogCLcBGAsYHQ/s200/syncrude%2Bprocessing%2Bsite%2Bsm.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Or, if you relate more to the <i>Lord of the Rings</i> reference than Dante, we have arrived at Morder (meaning, "Black Land," also "Land of Shadow), realm of the evil Sauron and his armies. Located in Morder is a volcano named Mt. Doom, where Frodo and his friends were headed to destroy the One Ring of the Dark Lord Sauron by throwing it into the crater where it had originally been forged by his Elvin-smiths (it takes 3 volumes to tell this story, so I won't even try). Arriving at Mt. Doom, Frodo was sorely tempted by the power of the ring and placed it on his finger. In that moment, he became captive to its seductive powers and unable to destroy it.<br />
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And just like Frodo, once placing the powerful ring of industrialism (an obvious Tolkien reference) and its seductive powers of addictive consumerism around our lives, we are no longer able to toss it into the fire, to destroy it, to get free of it. Despite best intentions, it has gotten hold of our very souls. We like its powers - a lot. Caught up in this seduction, we are unable to separate ourselves from what is bringing about our own doom - the power of industrialism<b>*</b> and what it offers to us, the seduction of ever-increasing comfort and convenience, the powerful, addictive, fossil-fueled basis for how we live, consume, work, and travel. We are hanging onto it for dear life even though <i>we know what will happen if we do</i>.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FgmUOdhNZUc/XYFHoBUgDOI/AAAAAAAACuw/nKmQpOEBLv4OUmn25EZg6KdOV-w9cK7RACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/SEH%2B-%2Btar%2Bsands%2Bwasteland%2Bsmlr.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="150" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FgmUOdhNZUc/XYFHoBUgDOI/AAAAAAAACuw/nKmQpOEBLv4OUmn25EZg6KdOV-w9cK7RACLcBGAsYHQ/s200/SEH%2B-%2Btar%2Bsands%2Bwasteland%2Bsmlr.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Once boreal forest - Alberta</td></tr>
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By the time I finished the first draft of the Alberta story and sent it to a couple of publishers, I realized it was losing its timeliness. I didn't need to toss it out, but I did need to rewrite it. And that's the project that was disrupted by this personal loss.<br /><br />Meanwhile, a lot of context had changed. That trip was before the shocking election of Donald Trump and his persistent unraveling of environmental protection laws and regulations. It was before the flood of evidence pouring in from science and research revealing how quickly our natural world was unraveling. I am a writer, speaker, workshop leader on the nexus among ecology, culture, and society. I am an organic gardener at an urban farm in the inner city of Milwaukee. As much as I have this strong background over many years regarding the impacts of the industrial growth economy on the living communities of the planet, the unraveling was happening faster and with more extreme impacts than science had predicted. It has been stunning to behold, and raised a lot of questions about what to write, why to write, with what intent or purpose.<br /><br />It added urgency.<br />
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So I went back to the manuscript, read it through, found much to build upon, and started building. It will be a while before a new draft is completed. I will be working on other things, essays especially, maybe some verse. But what I believe more than ever is that creative work - the arts, poetry, music, good stories - are crucial to how we attempt to communicate our human predicament. <br /><br />Poetry and other imaginative forms of story-telling feel especially important because I believe that so much of this crisis is beyond rational understanding or linear logic. What is needed from artists and writers is more creative work that breaks down the limits of our western rational minds, minds that still believe we can "understand" our way out of the crisis and come up with the technical "fix" that will save us. Metaphor, nonlinear breaks with the logical mind, stirring up our imaginations by shattering their containers, this kind of creative work can help break down the mental formations that prevent us from grasping the true nature of our predicament and how those formations cannot help us anymore. They are what caused our break with reality in the first place - the reality of living within limits in a nonlinear world that can only continue to generate and regenerate life within the reality of those limits.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--ldaBUnUahY/XYFJiQyDQQI/AAAAAAAACu8/2GcGM-8KBhshf9kvdYPVRoh_ZWu773YiwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/440px-Grizzly_Giant_Mariposa_Grove.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="189" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--ldaBUnUahY/XYFJiQyDQQI/AAAAAAAACu8/2GcGM-8KBhshf9kvdYPVRoh_ZWu773YiwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/440px-Grizzly_Giant_Mariposa_Grove.jpg" width="171" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Overstory's giant redwood</td></tr>
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Right now, I am reading Richard Powers' Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, <b><i>The Overstory</i></b>. Now here is an example of what I mean. It is fiction. It is truth. It reveals. It hurts. It forces us to <i>see. </i>Maybe its success means millions of readers will get a sense of what is being lost, and what it means to be in a deep relationship with the other beings around us with whom we share this ecological fate. Like trees. Like one another.<br />
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Does it get easier or harder to keep living off industrialism when we read these things - for example, a book like this accompanied by news of the unraveling of the Amazon forest, or the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of acres of boreal forest in Alberta to make way for the tar sands industry? When comes the point where we look around us and say, "I don't want to live like this anymore?"<br />
<br />I write non-fiction, but I hope I can make this work compelling (creative) enough to shatter some mental formations, to help readers see that industrial/consumer society is really not like the air we breathe, though we live as if that is the case, so much our atmosphere that we hardly notice it. It just is. We swim in it. It keeps us alive. But the opposite is the case. It is not even metaphorically or psychologically like the air we breathe. It is a human-made reality that must be unmade as rapidly as possible. We cannot live without air, but we lived hundreds of thousand of years without this industrial hell-on-earth. Living with it is bringing about our demise in a matter of generations. We not only CAN live without it, we must.<br /><br />Learning how to do that, learning how to live without killing life all around us, without destroying the living beings that keep this planet alive, that helps strip away the illusions (delusions) that we are a superior species that can consume life at will and survive alone on a hot dead planet - this I know is one of the reasons why I keep writing (and speaking), even though I have given up hope that it will change anything. But then, in surrendering that hope, maybe it will.<br /><br /><b><i>~ Margaret Swedish </i></b><br />
<b><i><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">*</span></i></b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="zci__def__word text--primary"><i><b> </b></i><b>industrialism (source: <a href="https://www.wordnik.com/words/industrialism">https://www.wordnik.com/words/industrialism</a>)</b></span>
<span class="zci__def__pronunciation"></span>
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span><ul>
<li>
<div class="zci__def__definition">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">An economic and social system
based on the development of large-scale industries and marked by the
production of large quantities of inexpensive manufactured goods and the
concentration of employment in urban factories.</span></div>
</li>
<li>
<div class="zci__def__definition">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Devotion to industrial
pursuits and interests; predominance of industrial interests or
activity; also, the characteristics of industrial life, especially of
the manufacturing industry.</span></div>
</li>
<li><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Devotion to industrial pursuits; labor; industry.</span>
</li>
</ul>
Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-47113770347495061352018-12-20T12:44:00.000-06:002019-09-17T16:26:33.318-05:00Writing and the need to imagine a different world - urgentlyWell, 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.<br />
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<b><i>Storming</i></b> - 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?<br />
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I wrote this sentence in my October post: <br />
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<span style="color: #660000;"><i><b>To everything we do, the Earth has a response. That understanding ought to sober us.</b></i></span></blockquote>
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Does it?<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i><b>see, feel, experience</b></i> 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 <b><i>in our bodies</i></b>. 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k9E1283oI84/XBvg_Sa-92I/AAAAAAAACb4/99uAVIv-SScYOeMfvZHYmZS0qqnnG-nvQCLcBGAs/s1600/dscovr-epic-21-aug-2017-solar-eclipse-shadow.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="150" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k9E1283oI84/XBvg_Sa-92I/AAAAAAAACb4/99uAVIv-SScYOeMfvZHYmZS0qqnnG-nvQCLcBGAs/s200/dscovr-epic-21-aug-2017-solar-eclipse-shadow.gif" width="200" /></a>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.<br />
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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 <b><i>see</i></b>, rather than understand. And this is crucial.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i><b>see</b></i> the world as it really is.<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uZuz7U4bd6E/XBvifCqgV-I/AAAAAAAACcM/J8Xjx8YSn34pYUk-FFMICNDav2fS0cVDACLcBGAs/s1600/8%2B-%2Btunnel%2B3%2Bat%2Bend%2Bof%2Bday%2B-%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="262" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uZuz7U4bd6E/XBvifCqgV-I/AAAAAAAACcM/J8Xjx8YSn34pYUk-FFMICNDav2fS0cVDACLcBGAs/s200/8%2B-%2Btunnel%2B3%2Bat%2Bend%2Bof%2Bday%2B-%2B2.jpg" width="149" /></a>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.<br />
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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).<br />
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In her wonderful poem, "The Othello Sarabande, or: the Occupation," Alicia Ostriker (one of my favorite poets) writes:<br />
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<span style="color: #660000;"><b><i>Is it not the task of poets to raise the mirror to the world's face, to say lo and behold, </i></b></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><b><i>See here, will you just look at yourself, the occupation is love, the rest is silence?</i></b></span></blockquote>
Could we ever learn to live like that?<br />
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<span style="color: #660000;"><b><i>Gaia is a prisoner, all poems ask who will free her.</i></b></span></blockquote>
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 <b><i>good</i></b> 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.<i> </i>What it is creating now is ecocide, mass extinction of the living communities from which we evolved and which we need to stay alive.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.upress.pitt.edu/books/9780822958758/" target="_blank">To order</a></td></tr>
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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?<br />
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<i><b>~ Margaret Swedish </b></i><br />
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<i><b> </b></i><span style="color: #134f5c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Center for New Creation</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #134f5c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">PO Box 070495</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #134f5c;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Milwaukee WI 53207 </span></span></span><br />
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<i></i>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-15133968364326699592018-10-12T16:05:00.000-05:002018-12-20T12:44:54.439-06:00Do our words protect us from what we need to see?Some of our spiritual sages, philosophers, psychologists, poets, and artists will tell us that the minute we use words here in the West, we go right into our heads. We start "thinking," we start analyzing, we start breaking experience down into pieces of what we can handle, what we can get our heads around.<br />
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What that can also do is protect us, a way to step back from what we need to hear in other ways - with our bodies, our spirits, the living communities of beings around us who do not speak our language, who do not speak "words," but communicate in sounds and resonances and energies that humans were once more capable of "hearing," or better, "sensing." Part of that was survival instinct, knowing which sounds - rustling noises in the tall grasses and woods, for example - might indicate an approaching predator, or the first low sounds of a coming storm, a shift in the wind or the air pressure that says, seek cover.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Credit: M. Swedish</td></tr>
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We have long separated ourselves from those kinds of communication links. And if ever there was proof that words protect us, keep us a bit removed from the full-on experience of what living reality is trying to tell us, it would be our human responses to decades worth of words about the imminent unraveling of the ecosystems of our biosphere and atmosphere leading all living beings to catastrophe.<br />
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And here we are, at the beginning point of the unraveling just as it catches steam, hurtling the unraveling forward, accelerating from one positive feedback loop to the next, and we argue and fret over the words that emerge from the research. We have 50 years, no, 30, now maybe a dozen, to avoid 1.5C of warming, and we go right into our heads, because the words take us there, and, as <a href="https://margaretwheatley.com/" target="_blank"><b>Margaret Wheatley</b></a> and other wise ones report - people do not change because they are given information.<br />
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Give us words and watch us rationalize and discuss and argue ourselves into a safe place where we determine that we don't have to do anything today, and probably not tomorrow.<br />
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But if we turned off that noise inside our heads and listened with our bodies, with every pore of our skins, with the sharpness of ears not dulled by the noise of traffic and appliances and cable boxes and DVRs and earphones piping music right into our brains - would we be able to hear the ominous rustling in the woods and fields growing...ever...nearer?<br />
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<b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh-MPQvM5bI" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />Drone footage of Mexico Beach FL - PBS video</span></a></b><br />
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The people in Mexico Beach, Florida, did not know what was about to hit them. An "ordinary" Category 1 hurricane approached and they started boarding up windows. Two days later they were told to run for their lives as it became nearly a Category 5. While some meteorologists hoped for the usual wind shears and land contact that would reduce the intensity, there were other signs of the approaching monster - like <b><a href="https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/dsdt/cwtg/egof.html" target="_blank">water temperatures way above normal in the Gulf of Mexico</a></b>, mid-to-upper 80s, in a couple of spots approaching 90!! Hot water adds fuel to hurricanes because they feed off this energy, and in the case of H. Michael, it was like pouring lighter fluid on a burning fire.<br />
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Oh wait, that's what happened in the West this year, massive fire storms that burned through whole communities, destroying that U.S. fantasy of the mountain home surrounded by pine forests with <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CA fires from space. Credit: Ricky Arnold/NASA</td></tr>
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pretty views.<br />
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I can't find words. I mean, I can find plenty, but not the ones that <i><b>stop</b></i> the thinking, that draw us <i><b>into</b></i> reality, rather than pushing us away from it. I want to stop all this thinking about the catastrophe into which we are free-falling; I want to find words, stories, metaphors that make us <i><b>FEEL</b></i> it in our bodies and souls, in the deepest parts of ourselves, so that we can finally get to the magnitude of what is occurring on this planet. Because in the deepest part of ourselves, where we are still animals with instincts, still capable of dreaming, of myth-making, of intense listening to our surroundings - <i><b>we know!</b></i><br />
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And that is the place we seem desperate to avoid. Westerners who came across the pond fleeing the horrors and brutalities of Europe through the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch-burnings and the plague - brought with them trauma and a deep loathing of nature and the body.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Credit: M. Swedish</td></tr>
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I had a next-door neighbor who used to go out repeatedly through the warm months with a broom and power hose to get rid of all the spiders and their webs on the outside walls of her house and her garage. "I just hate all those spiders," she said to me more than once.<br />
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Eighty percent of flying insects have disappeared from Germany, and researchers are doing with intention what I have done frequently in recent years by taking a drive through farm states like Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana - driving through these states in the middle of summer to record how many insects get splattered on the windshield. I didn't do this for research. I just drove across Iowa a couple of summers ago and there were almost none - as in, ZERO. When I was a kid, we would have to stop now and then to wash the smear of dead insects off the window.<br />
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I was awake enough to notice this, because in my work life for the past 13 years or so I have been concentrating on trying to do that thing that doesn't change anyone - in talks and workshops, <b><a href="https://www.centerfornewcreation.org/new-creation-news" target="_blank">blog posts</a></b> and a <b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/ctr4newcreation/" target="_blank">Facebook page</a></b>, offer up the information that indicates that it is already pretty much too late to save ourselves from a truly dreadful future on this planet - with no clue of how we survive that, and, if we do, what new kind of life will emerge from the devastation.<br />
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If we were able to turn off all the noise and listen with our bodies to what is going on around us in the natural world, we would realize the danger we're in and our responses would be meaningful instead of empty, or reassuring, or calming, or resigned.<br />
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Writers use words. What words break through the thinking? Metaphors and myths? Images? Words that come from dreaming, irrational, capable of breaking down the analytical function of the brain? Can words draw the kinds of emotions and sensations that bring us back to our primitive instincts, the ones that know the danger is - right there, almost within reach?<br />
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It came within reach of Mexico Beach, Florida, and in the outbreaks of famine in many parts of the world, and in the Mendacino fire (more than 300,000 acres scorched), and in the endless floodwaters in the mid-Atlantic, southeast, and my state of Wisconsin. Can we feel it in our bodies, this threat, the danger, the way it is peering out at us, watching what we're doing - responding?<br />
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<i><b>To everything we do, the Earth has a response. That understanding ought to sober us.</b></i><br />
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I have been counseled over and over again in both my writing and speaking to be careful not to frighten people too much or tell them they must change their lives because their defenses will keep them from hearing the message. What!? Well, I've been bad at keeping that counsel. And now what I want to do is find the words, the images, the ways to present that get people back into their bodies and out of their rational brains. I want to break down the thinking, silence the spaces inside of us from all our artificial noise, and get people into their skin, their hearing, their seeing, their sensations, where they can learn everything they need to learn to see clearly what is now unfolding on this sacred, sacred planet.<br />
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<b><i>~ Margaret Swedish </i></b>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-12357306718104314572018-09-15T09:08:00.000-05:002018-12-20T12:45:18.137-06:00Reinventing myself as a writer - it's time<i><b>A new look. A new lens. Looking out on a collapsing, tumultuous world. This writer needed to make some changes.</b></i><br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Yes, I am trying to locate myself in this time of tumult and collapse.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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.<br />
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What we are lacking now is any real evidence of that old saying. And that is a hard thing to admit at age 69.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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<i><b>~ Margaret Swedish </b></i><br />
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<b><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Photos taken from the Sparta-Elroy WI bike trail. Credit: Me </span></i></b>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-26014050051749068672018-02-04T21:39:00.000-06:002018-12-20T12:45:47.801-06:00Girl's gotta writeSo, it's the first Sunday of February 2018 and the beginning of the second year of the administration of the Orange Man - and despite all my assurances to myself last year about getting back to more creative writing, it just didn't happen. Like a lot of people, I have struggled with where my writing goes next, what projects to complete, or to alter before submitting, how to really <b><span style="color: #20124d;"><i>hear</i></span></b> this moment in the culture, to penetrate it with all I know from <a href="http://www.ecologicalhope.org/about/margaret-swedish/" target="_blank">my own life story</a> and the wisdom simmering inside it all.<br />
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What is it I want or need to write now? Poetry abandoned me. While that is not my primary mode of writing, I found joy in it. The more I wrote poems, and then the more the poems started showing up, the more I felt poetry-writing to get a hold of me. Whether or not I am a decent poet, writing poems have made me a better writer.<br />
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Last year was hard. I have been a committed "social change agent" (not a perfect descriptor but better and more accurate than "activist") since the Vietnam War days. The other work I do - on the nexus among ecology, culture, and spirituality, the talks I give, the workshops I offer, the blog posts I write, <a href="https://www.centerfornewcreation.org/" target="_blank">the website</a> I maintain, my engagement in an urban farm in Milwaukee and core participant in a new emergent community called "The Table" - all of that work and effort intensified at a deep emotional level; it felt more meaningful, necessary, even urgent, a way to stay engaged in a time when everything seems to be falling apart.<br />
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Given that history, and despite not being surprised at the collapse scenario that seems well underway now, I was shaken as much as anyone by the 2016 election result, aware of what it would mean for this society. It accelerates every aspect of the collapse, particularly the ecological, political, and cultural aspects of it - pours grease on the slide, as the nation fragments, comes apart as a coherent polity, and as this constitutional order that once held those fragments together also comes apart.<br />
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How does one address this people, this culture, at this moment? After all, the point is to communicate, isn't it? How do writers of all kinds help illuminate this moment - in stories and metaphors, in verse and creative narratives? I look for direction, but have yet found my own.<br />
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I know this time in our political culture is effect, not cause. It is emergent from decades of a slow, but now rapidly accelerating decline of this empire called the United States of America. I have been reading a lot these days about the collapse of complex societies, empires, civilizations. We have all the hallmarks of the last stages. Empires come and go. What makes this time especially scary, compared to previous collapses down through history (Rome, the ancient Chinese empires, the Mayas and Incas, the Spanish, the British) is the power of our weapons of mass destruction, their potential to destroy life as we know it forever in an instant, and the planetary crisis that threatens living ecosystems all around the planet because of the global industrial growth economy.<br />
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We have gotten ourselves into a helluva predicament, yes?<br />
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Look, this a hard time to live, to get one's bearings, to stay calm (<i>stable mind</i>, in Buddhist terms), to tamp down the fear and acknowledge the inevitability of this time. It's what we humans have to live through. We have no choice about that. The only choice we <i>do</i> have is the one I offered as title to the last chapter in my 2008 book, <a href="http://www.orbisbooks.com/living-beyond-the-end-of-the-world.html" target="_blank"><i>Living Beyond the 'End of the World:' A Spirituality of Hope</i></a>:<b><i> </i></b><br />
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<b><i>what kind of human beings will we be as we go through the crisis?</i></b></blockquote>
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In her latest book, <a href="http://margaretwheatley.com/books-products/books/who-do-we-choose-to-be/" target="_blank"><i>Who Do We Choose To Be</i></a>, echoing my chapter title, <a href="http://margaretwheatley.com/bio/" target="_blank">Margaret Wheatle</a>y, systems thinker, leadership trainer, speaker, and more, writes: "We enter the path by bravely facing reality, willing to see with clarity and discernment where we are and how we got here. We seek to understand the forces at work that created this present world..."<br />
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We enter that path not to throw ourselves into heaps of depression and despair, but to empower ourselves to live creatively in this failing world, to live creatively even as things seem to be falling apart all around us. If anything I write can help us do that, well, that sounds like a mission to me.<br />
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I will be engaging an 8-month training with Wheatley this year, training to become a <a href="http://margaretwheatley.com/warriors-for-the-human-spirit-training-to-be-the-presence-of-insight-and-compassion/" target="_blank"><i>Warrior for the Human Spirit</i>.</a> I'm pretty sure that's going to stimulate some new writing and I look forward to that with keen anticipation, a way to free up what's been simmering inside for much of 2017. I don't know where you will find it yet, but I will get it out there one way or another.<br />
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So, stay tuned. This time I mean it. I will be writing. And I will be posting about writing here on this blog.<br />
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<i><b>~ Margaret Swedish</b></i><br />
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<br />Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-77753643543744383882017-11-13T10:02:00.001-06:002018-02-04T22:36:31.704-06:00Meanwhile, during the unraveling...What did we do? What are we doing? What are we creating?<br />
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Because create we must.<br />
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Yesterday I saw an intimate version of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" at an invitation-only performance at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. The great Estelle Parsons directed, welcomed us, spoke after and invited her actors' input in a post-performance talk-back. I mean, if you love theater...<br />
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I had read the play during a semester course on 19th century Russian literature back in my university days in Boulder CO, but had never seen it performed. I have long been attracted to the darkness and despair in a lot of Russian lit, though I cannot tell you why. I'm neither dark nor despairing. But I think I always picked up something that feels a deeply rooted part of the human angst - the struggle with meaninglessness, the psycho-spiritual version of entropy, the darkness that lies at the heart of Christianity with its body-loathing, belief in the power of some outside Devil always ready to draw us into the filth of the world, judgment and a wrathful God.<br />
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And in the vast Russian steppes, the bitter cold of the Urals and Siberia, the tragic history of that part of the world, the Czars, the Russian orthodox leaders in league with the Czars, the anti-Semitism that expressed itself in outbreaks of brutality, forced displacement and exclusion, and a vast diaspora of Jews who fled the pogroms - in all of that is some dark part of us, a darkness that lies deep within the human that we do our best to avoid at all costs, but repressed, not addressed as it needs to be.<br />
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Okay, all that. But what really impressed me in seeing the play, and in this particular version of it, was how contemporary it all feels - that malaise of despair, the inter-family betrayals (I mean, talk about dysfunctional nuclear family!), the internal oppression so fierce and painful that it made me want to scream, "for God's sake, break free!!", and Chekhovs remarkably relevant reflections on environmental degradation by way of the character of the doctor.<br />
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But also this - how even in the face of the desperate need to break out of these claustrophobic social relations, obligations, and repressive religiosity, the play ends in resignation and despair, in the inability of the characters to break from the repressive dynamics, to make those other choices that would set them free to have the lives they really wanted. And so we go through this whole exercise only to find in the end a resignation to this horrible psycho-spiritual status quo that makes you want to blow your brains out.<br />
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And I wanted this play not to feel so relevant to a culture that is stifling itself with the inability to break out of an oppressive economic culture that is killing the human spirit, disempowering us, and creating what some Buddhist writers (like Tara Brach) call "the trance," the trance of a world view that has tricked most of us in one way or another. We are headed toward 3-4C degrees of global warming this century, and the resulting climate disasters which will be at scales we can hardly imagine except in fantasy dystopic movies. We are slaves of the consumer "tools" of this economy, harnessed to ways of life and consumerism that are destroying the very interlocking systems and webs of life that made our evolution possible.<br />
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There is a malaise and despair in our times that are having real repercussions for us in terms of our ability to rise to the challenges before us.<br />
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I believe the role of the arts is crucial here, because we need to find ways to break through that malaise, to kick the chairs out from under us, to throw some of these screens in the trash - especially the ones we take with us everywhere, play with constantly, stare into mesmerized while all around us our world is actually falling apart.<br />
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I don't know if Chekhov had all this in mind, but I think he would be pleased to find this play still so relevant in a time and place and culture so far from his own. And it reminds me why we need theater and stories and poems and songs and essays and film and all the rest as a mission to help us perceive ourselves with some searing truth - searing enough to break the malaise, allow ourselves to be astonished by what we have missed occurring in our world and within us and, for god's sake, after the awakening, to get out into this world and do some serious shaking up, to add our part to crashing the illusions and delusions in which most of this world lives.<br />
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<br />Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-41093504784917560112017-08-09T13:32:00.000-05:002017-11-13T08:44:04.352-06:00Writing in the 'End Times' - a comprehensive mission statement for this writerNo, not <i>those</i> end times, not the biblical apocalypse, not the extinction of humans that so many environmentalists predict is imminent, not the death of the planet (it will live on long after we're gone). No, the end of <i>these</i> times, the end of the US American era, the end of U.S. dominance in the world, the end, more than likely, of our political and governing institutions as we have known them.<br />
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Only for most U.S. Americans do we not notice that this is happening, so comfortable are we in perceiving ourselves within a certain way of being that we cannot imagine it could ever end.<br />
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But it's ending. As I have written elsewhere and repeatedly, Trumpism is not cause but effect. The collapses underway opened a huge vacuum in the culture into which these people could storm in. The destructive force of this rightist movement, ideologically rigid, uncompromising, and fully bent on destroying government as a service to its people (who merely pay for it after all), has been paving the way for this takeover for a long time. The vacuum was created when the 2-party system ended up fully bought by different factions of global corporate power, when more and more people realized that their lives had become irrelevant to the powers-that-be.<br />
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Okay, this is not a political blog. It's a blog about writing and why I write. But why I write, and what I write about, the things that most concern me and make it worth my time to sit with my journal or laptop, has a lot to do with how I perceive the times in which we live.<br />
<a name='more'></a> My vantage point is pretty broad. I turn 68 this month. Fifty years ago, the events that shaped my life journey - from growing up in a very conservative Roman Catholic family harboring racist fears in a whites-only suburb of Milwaukee, to the progressive firebrand and spiritual seeker that I turned out to be - those events began with the outbreak of riots in Milwaukee 50 years ago on the last days of July 1967, fomented in large part by the fierce response of our local police force and the city's mayor to the local civil rights movement led by young black men and women with inspiration from the great civil rights leader, Fr. Jim Groppi.<br />
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My family feared him. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., too. Mayor Henry Maier called in the National Guard and shut down the entire metro area for several days, enforcing a dawn-to-dusk curfew, no matter how far you were from the actual location of the rioting. What that did was create an intense climate of fear, as if hordes of young black men would show up several miles from the inner city to our precious lily white 'burb and start raping the white girls and burning down our houses.<br />
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I know, I know, it's hard to believe. But it really was that bad.<br />
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This shaped my young life. I graduated from high school that summer. I didn't have a lot of life experience yet, so the impact was huge.<br />
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After the riots came the <a href="http://200nightsoffreedom.org/" target="_blank">200 straight days of fair housing marches</a> in our city until the laws were finally changed. Then came the assassination of Dr. King, then Bobby Kennedy, then many more riots and more police brutality all over the country, then the police riot targeting anti-war protestors in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, watched live on TV by millions of people. I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV in the family room all by myself watching this and I can tell you that the shock and trauma is as raw today as it was 49 years ago this month.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_9OJnRnZjU" target="_blank">Video - one of those moments that changed my life forever</a></span><br />
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Should I be grateful for these events? I am. I don't know who I would have been without them. Between 1967 and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68g76j9VBvM" target="_blank">the murder of 4 students by National Guardsmen at Kent State</a> in Ohio in 1970, followed by the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u7UUIHj0r8" target="_blank">two students shot and killed at Jackson State</a> 11 days later, my world view, shall we say, had taken a fierce 180 degree turn.<br />
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I wanted to be a writer then but I was not a very good one. It took a long while to find the confidence in my vantage point, or my POV, as writers call it. I needed to live into this person who had no real foundation for the turn I had taken. So from UW in Milwaukee I went off to CU in Boulder and lived there for 4 years. Via a very progressive campus ministry staff, I became involved in peace studies, solidarity with the United Farmworkers, visiting young first offenders at a federal prison (where I also encountered several draft resisters), marched against the Vietnam War and got tear-gassed, some sort of rite of passage, I guess.<br />
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From there I returned to Milwaukee and spent a couple of years kind of lost, searching, trying to find my path, until circumstances put me in Montreal for another couple of years, living and working around a soup kitchen in an old beat-up neighborhood called Griffintown. It was there that I first came to know political refugees from Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, including a guy named Ra<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">ú</span>l, a teenage labor organizer and member of an armed left group there, before being captured, detained, horribly tortured, and eventually released to Canada thanks to the work of Amnesty International. With all that history, he was only 24 when I met him. His stories of the overthrow of the Allende government, his testimony of repression and torture, his analysis from the perspective of a Marxist revolutionary group - well, it was all an education for this still rather naive young Catholic girl from Milwaukee. Gave me a lot to think about - especially when it came to the role of the United States in installing military dictatorships throughout most of Latin America.<br />
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The journey continued, one encounter leading to other encounters until I ended up in Washington DC working with the Religious Task Force on Central America for 24 years. It was there that I finally became grounded, found work to do, a contribution I could make. I wrote my brains out - our bimonthly journal, our organizing packets for local communities, our homemade books and calendars with stories of the martyrs of the region. I found my voice there, and even I could see it become clearer and more confident over time.<br />
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By the time I came back to my hometown, I was a very different person. I have been disoriented here ever since, caught up once again in the <i>slow-to-change-like-walking-through-molasses</i> Milwaukee culture, still as segregated as when I left, maybe not quite as racist, except for most suburbs and exurbs, and more affluent parts of the city that are as racist as ever. When I left, African-Americans were about 23% of the population, now it's over 40%. White flight continues, and those white people take a whole lot of money and resources with them. Much of the city is very poor, and unemployment among African-American men is in the 20% range. We have the highest incarceration rate of black men in the entire country. <br />
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This is not an accident. This is structured into the culture itself. The laws encoding discrimination may have ended, but not the cultural structures that gave them force to begin with. And I have finally had to come to terms with this reality: most white people around here simply do not want to live anywhere near black people. It always feels shocking to say it out loud, and to write it here, but that's indicative of the problem - we never like to say outright what's really going on.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.orbisbooks.com/living-beyond-the-end-of-the-world.html" target="_blank">my 2nd book</a></td></tr>
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By the time I returned, 10 years ago now, I had two books under my belt and some published essays, started writing poems, a few of which got published. I have a new manuscript I'm trying to shop, and another well on its way, except that it's really two books, not one, and I have to do the work of separating them out. (Look for that after another year or two - sigh). I have to find a new publisher, too, because I have outgrown the target audience of the first one. <br />
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The focus of my work has evolved, or expanded as the world shifted toward a global crisis - planetary in scale. From peace and justice work, embedded in a radical Christian liberationist perspective, that focus began to embrace ecology and a grounded Earth-based spirituality as a response to the crisis in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. I was (and still am) also inspired by the grand vision of what's often called the "new cosmology," a new understanding of the vastness in space and time of our universe, and how scientific discovery over the past century or so has toppled many old gods, though most people still cling to them.<br />
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But the social justice orientation remains and my POV now brings all of that together with the realities of economic inequality, racism, and environmental injustice. It became clear to me that one of the reasons all that other work doesn't really change much in the cultural story here is because those latter realities, so resistant to change, mostly get left out.<br />
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What I keep seeing in this whole journey as it has evolved and opened me more and more to the reality of the big world, not the small one in which I was raised, are the same underlying causes of most of the crises of our time: capitalist/consumer economics and values; fierce individualism based in the small unit of the nuclear family and property rights; religious orthodoxies that enforce, rather than challenge, those economic and cultural values even when they contradict the tenets of their religions; separation of the economic human from the natural world in which we are fully embedded but which most people no longer experience as such; instilled aggressiveness and competitiveness that we are told are natural traits of the human but are really products of culture and economics. I could go on. I'm sure many of you could add to the list.<br />
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As a writer, I feel compelled to resist that culture of separation, to speak truth about our humble place in the scheme of things, that our grandiosity and propensity to commit vast destruction for its sake is leading us directly into an apocalyptic "end time" - for <b><i>us</i></b>, for <b><i>this</i></b> culture, <b><i>this</i></b> nation - that we could very well be at the beginning of the end of the American Revolution and the unraveling of the nation that grew from it - until we ran full on into our own deep contradictions that have plagued us from the first days.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jk-kJR6J5As/WYtPMaYH-jI/AAAAAAAAB0A/Sgnkf96RAqwidZ3C1Rh7hgejaO7mTp83wCLcBGAs/s1600/my%2Bhome%2Bsm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="186" data-original-width="280" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jk-kJR6J5As/WYtPMaYH-jI/AAAAAAAAB0A/Sgnkf96RAqwidZ3C1Rh7hgejaO7mTp83wCLcBGAs/s1600/my%2Bhome%2Bsm.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lk Mich shore - trying to live outside the contradictions</td></tr>
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I need to write outside those cultural boundaries. I need to stand outside the contradictions and name them clearly. Milwaukee, for example, can't get away with mere endless dialogue about racism, of being nicer to one another (we can be so, so nice here), of allowing a few more "people of color" to enter into the silos of staidness (or what <a href="https://news.fordham.edu/tag/bryan-massingale/" target="_blank">Fr. Bryan Massingale, STD</a>, recently referred to as Milwaukee's "numbing sameness"), without addressing the cultural and economic structures of separation, without addressing how much was stolen from these communities by white privilege and transferring some of those stolen resources back into the city's neighborhoods.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #0c343d;"><b><i>I need to stand outside the contradictions so that I can see better, articulate better, what this reality is that we fortify every single day without seeing it, or wanting to see it. I have heard some amazing local poets do this. I have seen artists do it with an image. I want to do more of it with words. I want to use metaphors to get us out of our rational brains (the ones that keep talking us out of radical change) and break open some deeper truth about who we are, </i>even perhaps who we are meant to be<i>. I want to share the stories that - reveal. And if that revelation is not searing and a call to conversion, then it is not the full truth.</i></b></span></blockquote>
<br />
Last Sunday evening (Aug 6) on the <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ohio-foster-care-system-flooded-with-children-opioid-epidemic/" target="_blank">CBS Evening News I saw this story</a> and was ove<span style="background-color: white;"></span>rwhelmed with horror and grief. There are <i><b>more than</b><b> 2.5 million children in this country who are living with relatives or in foster homes because both of their parents are opioid or heroin addicts</b></i>. Read that sentence again, then read it again. Watch the news story and take this in. This is a sign of a failing nation at every level. And the truth is that, as a nation, we have no answer to this. Even the treatment approach (forget about any meaningful conversation about the causes) is endangered by future cuts to Medicaid. Ohio alone is anticipating <i><b>10,000 overdose deaths this year</b></i>. <br />
<br />
If we were a sane nation, if our culture cohered at all right now, this would be declared a nearly unprecedented national emergency and it would be all hands on deck in dealing with it.<br />
<br />
But we haven't dealt with any recent national emergency like that, as Hurricane Katrina announced to us so well back in 2005.<br />
<br />
How do those of us writers who care about these things use our words, our stories, poems, essays, to break down the walls of our crafted misperceptions, our cultural blindness and shallowness, so that we can begin to see ourselves more clearly and exactly what is happening now? Cultural, political collapse seems inevitable to me - not because of Trump but because of larger forces at work that opened the space for him to be there. He and Bannon & Co. may be bent on chaos, but the chaos was already here. They're just pushing it along, kicking more pillars out from under the culture we once knew.<br />
<br />
The contradictions of a nation bent on taming the frontier and occupying it, no matter who was already living here, no matter how many bodies had to be stolen from other lands for the labor needed for conquest and settlement, that wrote its very first democratic principles for white landowning men only, and only grudgingly over time (and after long and usually violent struggle) allowed more people entry into that system - those contradictions are now crashing into each other with tremendous force. And along with them are the contradictions of an economic system based on endless
economic growth and endless exploitation of the Earth's waters, land,
and living beings. This is no longer sustainable. This can't go on. It's breaking the world apart.<br />
<br />
The unsettling thing about the political anti-culture right now is that we have no idea how this is going to play out. Even a year from now, six months from now, we can't tell how this story is going to go. Unnerved by that? I am, even though I know this time is inevitable and necessary. <br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qHK-hyZsb94/WYtNhOZJkOI/AAAAAAAABzs/mtKsU5Rs-mogLAdr7kjDjZQjuBphyD-owCLcBGAs/s1600/gardeners%2Bpot%2Bluck2%2Bsm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="233" data-original-width="350" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qHK-hyZsb94/WYtNhOZJkOI/AAAAAAAABzs/mtKsU5Rs-mogLAdr7kjDjZQjuBphyD-owCLcBGAs/s320/gardeners%2Bpot%2Bluck2%2Bsm.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.alicesgardenmke.com/" target="_blank">Alice's Garden</a> - sacred space in the heart of Milwaukee </td></tr>
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Now how am I going to write <i><b>from all of that?!</b></i> Well, I can't write from ALL of that. It's a worldview, and the focus is on "story," and the story is full of individual words and images, and they become lenses, binoculars, through which to view the greater whole and bring into focus. It's like the CBS news story. The shocking nature of the opioid addiction crisis is overwhelming, but seeing it from the vantage point of one foster mother and her witness to the crisis through her specific lens brings it into focus where we can get a handle on it, see the tragedy in its most intimate human terms.<br />
<br />
That's a tall order for any writer - to approach creative writing in that way, to bring the reader closer to the heart of the real human condition. But we have to do all we can to help one another <b><i>SEE</i></b> the dynamics that are shaping our world right now, how that is shaping our culture, our emotions, our psychological state, our health, our values, and sense of deeper meaning (so many people here are losing that, hence the growing despair). We have to rediscover connection - with one another and the living beings all around us, including the non-sentient beings that hold us here - water, soil, forests, the air we breathe. Stories told well help us reconnect, find our common ground, open wells of compassion.<br />
<br />
So, this ended up being something like a long mission statement about writing. So be it. I think I will just let it be long. I hope you find something useful here, something that helps, that supports. I know I need that, and I'm pretty certain we all do.<br />
<br />
<b><i>~ Margaret Swedish</i></b><br />
<br />Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-90508518603223571922017-06-20T15:09:00.000-05:002017-11-13T08:42:37.894-06:00Losing focus - then trying to get it backI imagine this is the plague of many a writer whose work addresses the times in which we live. I imagine it is also impact of the rapidity of change in our world right now, the intensity of events, and the intense connectivity and exchange of information with which most of us engage on a daily basis now as we try to understand our human predicament.<br />
<br />
I've struggled as a writer this year - not because of who is in the White House (though that adds a measure to it) - but because of how clear it has become that we are facing a mixture of crises that are unfolding rapidly and which we humans do not seem to have the capacity to address, at least not in a way commensurate with the scale of the crises.<br />
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I've been working around themes of ecology, spirituality, and culture for some years now. But clearly they are not differentiated "themes" anymore. They are a nexus, a point of connection at which the true nature of the crisis is revealed - <br />
<a name='more'></a>or so it seems to me. We humans are managing to destroy the web of life that is our home, from which we evolved and which has made possible these hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. We U.S. Americans are in the process of cultural decline, becoming fragmented, incoherent as a polity, all the worst of our historical sins coming home to roost, as they say. The global economy is consolidating into the control of small but powerful elites of corporations and investors whose wealth has become disconnected, or abstracted, from the planet and the living reality of most human beings (pure delusion as this is impossible).<br />
<br />
<br />
The crises we face are real, they are existential, and they have come upon us so quickly over the past few decades of industrial-technological growth, the explosion of population, the shredding of habitats, and a long, long list of demographic, climate, cultural, and other changes, that we barely have had time to breathe, to take them in, to reflect on what they mean, what they tell us about the times in which we live. <br />
<br />
All of this is interrelated, of course. The crises feed upon one another. And I, for one, have been left feeling a bit overwhelmed, and often discouraged, when it comes to sitting with my pen and journal, or at a keyboard, to attempt to write. Often, I am left with the blank page unable to focus. Where to start? Does it matter? Is there any point to it? Does what I write make any difference at all?<br />
<br />
I have a feeling I am not alone in any of this. I can't blame the November election because it was and is all symptom, not cause, and the point is to try to get the diagnosis right so that the crisis can be treated correctly and effectively.<br />
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Except that we don't want to go there as a culture. Because the diagnosis is that the culture itself has been the disease and, like incurable cancer, you can keep trying to treat the symptoms but eventually the disease will overshoot the treatments and you will die. The cancer cells: individualism, self-interest as a value, capitalism which always concentrates wealth and demeans labor, capitalism and western economic thought which sees nature as one big resource to be tapped for economic exploitation, cancer cells that spread into and destroy things like a shared sense of the common good and the good of the commons.<br />
<br />
As I write this, I feel a renewed sense of mission as a writer rising with passion, restlessness, some hidden rage, a fierce sense that truth above all is what writers need to write. This cancer is out of control and it is eating us from within, destroying vital organs, metastasizing to our brains so that our thinking is muddled and confused.<br />
<br />
To mark his passing, I have been reading Brian Doyle's "Mink River," and find myself gasping out loud at times by his lyrical brilliance, weeping at times at his tender compassion for his characters, for this community of absolutely no importance to the world of this nation and its economic and political culture, but how the humanity of the people in it, however broken - at times literally - puts pols and pundits and many religious and cultural "leaders" to shame.<br />
<br />
This is us - all tender and broken, struggling with, or avoiding as much as we can, this question of whether there is any meaning at all - except in the place of tender connection, or at the spot amidst the tall grasses on the hill where one can see the waves of the ocean breaking over the rocky shore of the Oregon Coast, the sound of the Mink River as it meets the sea, the sound of the bicycle wheels as Daniel and the bike go over the cliff, the view of the ocean from the doctor's porch.<br />
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The humans, the salt wind, the wet earth, the cedar trees and hemlocks, the feel of bodies wrapped around each other in passion or sleep, the hangovers, the fear, the comfort, the despair, the simplicity, the violence - the all-too-human things that make up our real lives (including our mortality), but that this culture hates seeing within itself, covering over weakness and vulnerability in all ways possible, and these days with noise, frantic activity, "success," distractions on little screens and big screens, and constant texting and connectivity via satellite (rather than directly), storing up in barns, and our constant restless mobility - anything that helps prevent us from having to face the vulnerability of who we are in the way the people in the fictional village of Neawanaka see themselves - because they do not have the economic means to hide from who they, we, really are. They are raw, exposed, and they are the neglected parts of ourselves, shunted to the margins, even in a place of stunning beauty.<br />
<br />
Doyle gives us this mirror - as any true writer should do.<br />
<br />
I don't write fiction, but I have grown increasingly attached to the "creative" part of creative non-fiction. I do write essays on the blog for the website that sponsors that "nexus" work I do, the <a href="http://www.centerfornewcreation.org/new-creation-news" target="_blank"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><b>Center for New Creation</b></span></a>. Maybe you would have a look.<br />
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But the other writing stalled in recent months, and now it is urging me back to it, as if some transition had to be gone through, some transformation from one way of seeing the world to another (and it is quite profound, also freeing), before I could sit again in front of the screen (first, of course, I had to sit with the journal and scribble things by hand so the muse had a path from heart to paper). It needed time, including time to get over the panic of not writing and not submitting, time to let go some expectations, time to discover that I am not the only one who thinks it too late to save us from real catastrophe, and that the chaos time is upon us and it is necessary to go through it. One of the essential missions of culture workers now is to tell the truth about that - what it is and why it is necessary - and to point out how stripping this era away, letting it go, and returning to the truth about ourselves can be our salvation on this planet - while it is still able to hold us and ultimately to heal, and we along with it. Stories, poetry, creative writing, many forms of art and music - this will all help us now. We need all of it to help us see the collective path opening for us, not despite the tumult and chaos, but because of it.<br />
<br />
So this is what it feels like to get my focus back - a sharper view, and therefore a clearer rendering of the true state of things. The stripping away of both hope and despair leaves a space for more creative expression without trying to promote or cling to either one. I have a much better sense not only of what is being stripped away, but also what is emerging.<br />
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<i>As we descend into the fog, we feel our way, step by step. I don't know any other way to move through darkness, but to put one foot ahead of the other and listen for the exact sound of our footsteps. If we have to drop to our knees sometimes and press our hands against the duff and damp of the earth, then that is what we will do.</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">~ Kathleen Dean Moore, from the essay, "Overnight Fog in the Valley," in <i>Wild Comfort - the Solace of Nature</i></span></span></blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Photos & essay: Margaret Swedish </i></span></b>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-81321134373778048892017-04-07T16:25:00.002-05:002017-11-13T08:41:39.605-06:00Threshold or PrecipiceA bit of a thrill ride, isn't it - the circumstances that lead to that headline?<br />
<br />
Because we don't know which one it is. We don't know if we are on the verge of a major breakthrough or a complete collapse. I don't know if we have lived in such an unpredictable time, at least not since World War II.<br />
<br />
I feel the uncertainty. Many, many do. Many feel it without knowing what it is they feel, and that, too is scary, makes the times even more unpredictable, because people don't always act rationally when they are both afraid and not clear about what it is they fear exactly. Easy to project onto "the other," then. Easy for the moment to sink into chaos and more violence.<br />
<br />
Also to seek simple solutions and a savior, a strongman, to make their world coherent again.<br />
<br />
We are sinking into a period of incoherence.<br />
<a name='more'></a> The chaos cannot be resolved by anything we have known in the past. What we have known and done in the past, our way of understanding the world, the planet, our cultural and economic frameworks - there is nothing there we can reach into to find a way through this chaos time, to put pieces of old familiar worlds together again.<br />
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We are entering a period of <b><i>extreme unknowingness</i></b>. People don't tend to act rationally in a time of extreme unknowingness. They are looking for something familiar to hold onto, and it's the familiar that is becoming incoherent, that is in a state of collapse.<br />
<br />
Threshold or precipice. You can walk over a threshold. You can walk over a precipice, but the result is different.<br />
<br />
Are there words for this? Are there words that can help us see clearly what it is we face, what our choices are? Are there words, stories, essays, poems, that can help people realize, without completely falling apart, that an old world construct based on economic growth and white privilege (along with a lot of philosophical and religious belief systems made to uphold that dying order) is over forever, that it is destroying us - our planet, our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our ability to survive as a species - and that trying to hold on to that culture of white western economic domination of the world, trying to hold onto the ways of life we have constructed from that paradigm, will only finish the job?<br />
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I struggle with this now every single day. It's the work I do to make a living (my "work" is presenting on the nexus among ecology, culture, and spirituality, offering workshops and facilitated conversations, also writing for a project website on these themes, see: <a href="http://www.centerfornewcreation.org/">www.centerfornewcreation.org</a>).<br />
<br />
But the writing... the creative writing... Lately it has been paralyzing - not because I can't write but because when I go to the journal or the computer it feels too much to open, to encounter in its fullness. And when I write, I open to the flood, to the fullness. It stops me. It overwhelms. It brings up strong feelings. I try to work through them. But sometimes the words just can't match, or release, those feelings.<br />
<br />
I welcome thoughts from other writers on how you are dealing with this. Now, with the bombing in Syria, the incompetence and corruption of our governing institutions, the lack of competence among these flamethrowers in the White House (or Mar-a-Lago), this feeling of unraveling is pretty profound, yes?<br />
<br />
It seems we have to be more courageous than ever in telling some truth, in breaking free of the collapsing culture, in offering lenses that help our people to SEE, to help us all become less afraid.<br />
<br />
More and more I believe that the cultural work - that work that shapes meaning and purpose, that creates visions and new ways of seeing - is some of the most important work humans can do right now.<br />
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><i><b>To break the spell of an industrial society, an economic mode of being, this profound separation of the human from the real life of the planet, that is leading us to a precipice.</b></i></span><br />
<span style="color: #0c343d;"><i><b><br /></b></i></span>
<span style="color: #0c343d;"><i><b>To offer the vision, the conviction, the courage that can help transform what looks like precipice to threshold, a crossing over from what is old, dead, destructive, to...something else.</b></i></span></blockquote>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunwapta Falls, Alberta</td></tr>
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Think of a waterfall - the mighty river comes to the precipice, it crashes over the edge with tremendous power and beauty. Resisting it will crush you. So you go with it. You may get smashed to pieces, but eventually the river eases, its fury spent. At some point, you can put your canoe in the water again and go with the flow. Maybe you will have learned something. Maybe you will find out how simple we must become.<br />
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<i>~ Margaret Swedish</i>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-37005439387082545422017-01-19T22:52:00.001-06:002017-04-07T16:26:56.815-05:00Distraction, suppression, repression - curses of our timesI don't mean that kind where you have a tough time concentrating, lots of little things to do, restlessness, email and social media, oil changes, paying bills, daily life that becomes excuse for avoiding the blank page.<br />
<br />
No, this is a deeper plague, a stress on the psyche, near daily trauma. For me, to sit down to write, to look at that page and get set to begin the words - I am almost afraid at times of the volcano of emotion within, of what might pour out - grief, rage, fear, profound disappointment and disillusionment - I fear the truth within me.<br />
<br />
Also the danger of penetrating, life-altering insight, the kind that disturbs, that something huge is about to shift. And this is not your own singular volcano. It is bigger than you, a force in the field, something trying to break through. And the fear it could therefore shatter.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
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But shatter what? Ah, yes, you wish you knew exactly what the shattering would be, but it won't tell you that.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The frozen prairie. Pic: M Swedish</td></tr>
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The comfort I have is knowing that I am not alone in this conundrum, certainly not among artists and writers. I had the privilege of spending much of a weekend this month with 16 other women writers and artists at a monastery in the Wisconsin prairie just west of Madison. These retreats are the beginnings of gathering some community together to share the creative journey and all that comes with it. The vulnerability was very moving, as was the realization that we all seem to feel that volcano rumbling inside.<br />
<br />
There was no desire to tame it, rather to tap into it. We approach the crater's edge to peer down into the explosive about-to-burst energy from deep within for a reason - we know our creativity is rooted in there. We may fear the explosion, but, let's face it, we also want it.<br />
<br />
Community, vulnerability, and solidarity create the safe space for us to own that energy, to realize its power, to also realize it is explosive in scary ways only because it has been suppressed and repressed for so long.<br />
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This feels like the times, to me. It feels like the energetic reality of a cultural orientation in the west that has fiercely repressed many of the most basic expressions or manifestations of what it means to be human. Just one example: allow sexuality, sexual energy, its freedom and a really scary thing could happen. You could discover that heterosexual coupling for life is not the norm, not an easy box into which to fit what we once understood to be two clear genders set that way by god himself, a relationship governed by religious belief rather than the passions and love of two people.<br />
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I mean, the reverberations have unsettled lots of people - not just because of what they now see in others, but what they see or intuit in themselves.<br />
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Or the "new cosmology" and the "new physics" that have upset the old religious belief systems based on an ancient cosmology we now know created lovely myths and stories but did not exactly describe the universe.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">NASA - <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/main/index.html" target="_blank">Chandra observatory</a></td></tr>
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A lot of people still cling with a kind of desperation to these old belief systems that explained life, offered a framework of meaning that was comforting.<br />
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What happens when the force shatters all those frameworks? What happens if we come to realize that we really don't want to be "shoppers" and "consumers," that that is a form of mental illness and addiction which we came to believe was the norm, the framework, the given by which we operate in the world? What happens if collectively we let that go, looked at all our stuff and said, oh my god, what have we done, and started to get rid of it all?<br />
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Well, the Earth would cry with relief, for one thing. She could start to heal all the devastating damage done to her precious, complex ecosystems, which humans have done a fine job of shredding.<br />
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Maybe this is what you end up with after all this. Maybe what you get is this moment in the political culture. Maybe you get tumult and chaos and a boatload of fear. Also anger and the need to blame - to blame, um, whoever is channeling the new energy, whoever is helping to blast away what has repressed and suppressed truth for so long.<br />
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Like writers and other culture workers, like humanities teachers, like "foreigners" and people of "odd" cultures and religions.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t5AnsWesic8/WIGVA_KHmZI/AAAAAAAABdE/_UxRy8IgRgIKMRfBlivzZdVmRk-ms54gQCLcB/s1600/east%2Blos%2Bangeles%2Binterchange%2B-%2Bgoogle%2Bearth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="204" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t5AnsWesic8/WIGVA_KHmZI/AAAAAAAABdE/_UxRy8IgRgIKMRfBlivzZdVmRk-ms54gQCLcB/s320/east%2Blos%2Bangeles%2Binterchange%2B-%2Bgoogle%2Bearth.jpg" width="320" /></a>The English feminist writer and columnist, Laurie Penny, writes: "Much of modern life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly frightening.”* And I believe this. The ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning wrote many years ago that our psyches are not built for the world of steel, concrete, competition, and aggression that we have created and that we are being traumatized every time we walk out into it. Makes sense when you think about how irrational all that angry aggression is "out there." Who is everyone really fighting?<br />
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There is so much story in there, so many poems and essays. And on my good days I think maybe that can help, maybe finding them and writing them is one of the most important things we can do right now - drawing them, composing them.<br />
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I think the cultural work is crucial, critical, necessary, and urgent if we are to get ourselves through this enormous transition going on in the human community right now on a planet showing every sign there is of trauma, devastation, unraveling. Repression and suppression are not our allies, they are destroyers, from the inside out.<br />
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The book about the Athabasca River in Alberta, witnessing the narrative of global warming in a shrinking glacier, witnessing the devastation to boreal forests, the river, the First Nation peoples downriver from the tar sands industrial site, the connection of all that to our lives on a daily basis - fueling that daily trauma - I need to get that submitted and out into the world. And the poems, the essays that keep showing up, they need to be honored. Distraction, suppression, repression are their enemies. Truth, honesty, vulnerability, trust, a little passion - they deserve those things.<br />
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<i>~ Margaret Swedish</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I found the Penny quote here: <a href="http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/start-new-year-refuge-resistance/">http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/start-new-year-refuge-resistance/</a></span>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-48756204372983892222016-12-28T15:26:00.000-06:002017-01-19T22:53:16.466-06:00A writer confronting these tumultuous times<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">As you can see from the date of my last post, I've had a little trouble finding the inner space to write about writing as I, like so many culture workers these days, grapple with the tumult of our cultural moment. I am not surprised by it. I've been writing and speaking of "<a href="http://www.activehope.info/three-stories.html" target="_blank">The Great Unraveling</a>," as some call it, for quite a while now. But to see it actually unfold...and so fast...<br /><br />The great Buddhist scholar and deep ecologist, <a href="http://joannamacy.net/" target="_blank">Joanna Macy</a>, speaks of this decisive moment when how we humans choose to proceed has existential consequences unlike any we have faced before as a species. That is not a comfortable place to find ourselves. And this decisive moment comes just as the culture of this nation in which I live has gone into steep decline. Even if our former paradigm of constitutional order based on capitalist western democracy was still dominant, we would have (and have had) grave cultural challenges in addressing this time of crisis, but even that paradigm itself is now unraveling.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Margaret Swedish</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Culturally, less and less is holding us together. For a social justice oriented baby-boomer who has spent her life in the work for human, political, and civil rights, I can attest that this was not what we hoped for, not what we foresaw through those eras of anti-war work, civil rights advocacy, advances in voting rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, labor rights, and our ability during the Central America solidarity movement to blunt some of the most repressive aspects of US foreign policy in the region.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But we see now what reaction can do - especially when funded by billionaires and millionaires with their immense resources to manipulate messaging and buy many of the very forms of media (TV, newspapers, talk radio stations, etc.) that once communicated those movements out into the culture.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And of course debate is raging about the ways in which social media have become a means of distorting facts and reality until we actually have a discourse on what is called a "post-truth" culture.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Post-truth?</i> There is such a thing? Actually, let's just call it what it is: propaganda and bias vented out into the world as if it is the same thing as news, facts, and reality.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So what is a writer to do?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Writers work with words. And if there is one thing we know, it's that words matter. Each word or phrase shapes a story, a line of poetry, an essay. We choose them carefully for a reason. There is intent behind them. We re-read and re-edit over and over again to "get it right," the meaning or the clarity that we are going for. Sometimes it is not the thing itself but the metaphor that opens the lens through which we are hoping to get people to "see" what we see. If the vision is not true, it won't work.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Margaret Swedish</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The lenses offered to us right now in the political culture simply do not work because they do not show us the "real" world. But they are giving a fantasy world to many people looking for glimmers of past hopes and ruined dreams, of what life was once like inside one's own tribe before the demographic shifts underway worldwide began to encroach on those tribal identities. It seems easier to retreat into what once felt sure and secure, and there are plenty of "post-truth" sources of propaganda and manipulative media trying to reassure the fearful and anxious that they can restore that old myth of unchanging certainty within the confines of former tribal identities.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In other words, those "sources" are lying to them - to them, to us, to the unraveling culture. Seems to me one role of the writer is to be clear about what we mean. This nation's people are being lied to. This is not new, it's just different now, has a different feel, because the lies are an essential aspect of the unraveling. When we cannot agree that we are approaching parts-per-million of carbon in the atmosphere that will create climate chaos and the end of "civilization" as we have known it, even though the facts say so, we no longer have a common language, common fact-based truths, facts upon which we can base our decisions on how to proceed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So, I got a bit stuck over the autumn months. I had clear intention to finish the book I've been working on for a couple of years that grew out of my trip along the Athabasca River in Alberta from the Rocky Mountains to the tar sands industrial region, what I sometimes call my "ecological lamentation," a probing of the deep meaning behind what the fossil fuel industry is doing to the planet's ecosystems, a story enhanced by the work I have done since - workshops and presentations on the ecological crisis and its cultural and spiritual meaning, on pipelines and environmental ruin and where in the world new communities are rising up to reject these things.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Credit: David Goldtooth</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But as I was finishing the manuscript, in May the forests around the tar sands burst into flames - result of years of drought and record heat - and the city of Ft. McMurray, the economic center of the industry, also burst into flames and a third of the city was destroyed. And then, over the summer, the Standing Rock #NoDAPL movement emerged, changing the story again. And then the election, and the story changed yet again. Well, I knew I couldn't end at the ending I had written. The book needed at the very least an afterword. There was something more that needed to be said about this moment at which we have arrived, when, for example, ExxonMobil rises to political power as the next step in its corporate power grab, which does not bode well for our future.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I am finally ready to write that. And knowing this, I am finally ready to submit it somewhere. We'll see what happens in 2017. Meanwhile, I do have a couple of things that appeared in Wisconsin pubs this fall. <a href="http://stoneboatwi.com/current-issue.html" target="_blank">Stoneboat Literary Journal</a> out of Sheboygan published one of my poems, entitled "Pratt Pond," which I was able to read in their public launch here in Milwaukee, and "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Wisconsin-Literary-Journal-2016/dp/0982842848" target="_blank">Creative Wisconsin</a>," the new literary journal from the Wisconsin Writers Association, published a little essay of mine in their debut issue, entitled, "Reflection from the Last Dark of Night."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Hopefully a couple of looming submission deadlines will get me hunkered down these weeks of January with my journals and at my computer with the internet turned OFF! There is so much going on inside for all of us that part of the challenge is just to settle down and allow the words to come. Even if they come out scattered in a thousand directions, there will be plenty to pull in, to wrestle with, about which to find some <b><i>truth</i></b>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Thanks for reading. My biggest and most important intention as the number on the calendar changes is to just get back to writing, and more writing (also, for my work, more speaking and workshopping and connecting with creative grassroots communities), and to connect more regularly with the community of writers in this area because we all keep saying how crucial that is to keep our sanity, to stay rooted, and to support one another.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><b>For the New Year - Margaret Swedish</b></i></span></span>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-75652467459825070212016-10-10T23:31:00.001-05:002017-01-19T22:53:50.447-06:00Just a bit of sun's glitter on the surfaces of what it means to be alive<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><b><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i>That
I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of
the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except
my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it
is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.</i></span> </span></b> <span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">~ D. H.
Lawrence</span></b></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Last night I was out with my brother driving in the Wisconsin countryside on a crisp, clear October night - deep night, about 1:30 in the morning. The half moon - so bright and orange, its roundness palpable, and so near it felt like I could reach out and touch it - was setting in the western sky freeing up the light of the Milky Way. We stopped on a dark rural road and got out of the car to get a little dose of awe and wonder.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Home. My home galaxy. These days I find this so comforting, to gaze up into the swirl of billions upon billions of stars and who-knows-what-is-out-there and recognize it as my "place" in the universe.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Sometimes it feels crucial to enlarge</span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"> - especially when one begins to feel almost claustrophobic on this increasingly crowded, damaged planet. To enlarge, to get things in perspective - even when that perspective is one of the foundations of the deepening crisis of the human here on Earth. </span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">We have been dislocated by what we now know about our universe. It almost seems that the larger the universe becomes in both space and time and the less significant we understand ourselves and our planet, and even our solar system, to be in the greater scheme of things, the more we insist upon our self-importance, upon old belief systems and cosmologies. We can understand this, yes? this extreme existential anxiety, this crisis of meaning, this need to cling tightly to what we once thought the world to be?</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">You know, that big question about meaning and purpose - is there any?</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">I love the D.H. Lawrence quote for all sorts of reasons, one being what he states about the mind. We westerners believe our mind is not of Nature, not subject to Nature, is our biggest boast to importance and supremacy over even life itself, and certainly <i><b>over</b></i> Nature, which we have learned to manipulate, rip into pieces, combine into new pieces, and sit back and be proud of ourselves.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Even as the ecological crisis, reflection of what all that ripping and tearing and reassembling according to our whims and desires, unfolds as a direct result of that extreme, and extremely false and impossible separation.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Because the mind, too, is purely of Nature, of how Nature connected all sorts of nerves and neurons and veins and electrical impulses and created these complex brains that can think. There is no mind outside of Nature.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><b><span style="color: #990000;"><i>Just the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of water... </i></span></b></span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;">Is it the claustrophobia that is making us mentally unstable and so fearful? Is it the smallness of the planet that is making us fear "the other" who is now so near to us? I just viewed a brief video focused on the question: where are the one billion people who will arrive on the planet between now and 2030 going to live?</span></span></span></span><span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;"> That will put our global population at some 8.4 billion in 14 years. When I was born in 1949, the global population was 2.5 billion.<br /><br />No wonder we are freaking out! Western culture over a thousand years and more has been predominantly white and dominated by males. It's not that the world was ever majority white, just the dominant western culture, the one that arrived here on this continent as a Conqueror, that enslaved and slaughtered as its path of nation-building. Mind over matter, right? The matter being African bodies and the lives and cultures of those who were living here long before the White Man arrived.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;">If we think humans are being de-centered and dislocated by our cosmic reality, our awakening to the magnitude of the universe, imagine if you are one of those white males and you are looking around and realizing that all the languages and cultures that surround you are announcing that you're time of dominance is over. Except what you are experiencing is not that it is over, but that it is under threat, and so you have this compulsion to lash out at those others so you can get back into that familiar location.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;">And if your culture is Judeo-Christian, and your God is so human (and so male, also white), and you believe humans are made in the image of God and that incarnation is only through the human, and especially a male human, what is that mind-boggling expansion of space and time in your consciousness (including the inevitable end of the human, the Earth, the sun, and solar system, even as the universe goes on and on) doing to your sense of identity, meaning, place, and purpose?</span></span></span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qs83PUUHR10/V_xmRQA7k1I/AAAAAAAABQc/YkTcL4K-g9ohFr_sgxy2eU_Qigshb5oFACLcB/s1600/Hubble%2Beagle%2Bnebula%2B2%2B%2528sm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qs83PUUHR10/V_xmRQA7k1I/AAAAAAAABQc/YkTcL4K-g9ohFr_sgxy2eU_Qigshb5oFACLcB/s200/Hubble%2Beagle%2Bnebula%2B2%2B%2528sm%2529.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hubble Space Telescope</td></tr>
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</span></span></span></span><span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;">I ponder these things - a lot! - because as a writer and speaker and workshop leader and contemplative seeker, these ponderings loom large for me, rise like ocean wave after ocean wave, washing away a lot of cultural detritus and revealing some pretty stark truths about us at this moment - especially in this culture, and in these times of chaos and turbulence, ecological, economic, cultural, and spiritual.</span></span><b><span style="color: #990000;"><i> </i></span></b> </span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">What does it mean for a writer, for <b><i>this </i></b>writer? Just that this is part of the context for all my work, that this is backstory and backdrop for all my work, the work that pays the rent and the work of a creative non-fiction writer and incipient poet who is walking through this world with a deep sense of dislocation - and kind of welcoming that, when I am not terrified of what it means, what I see, what awaits us in our future since we don't seem bent on addressing these consequential changes to "mind" with humble acceptance, curiosity, openness, and intellectual humility and vulnerability.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">We live in a terrible time for our political and social culture. The toxic nature of our national discourse is not what it appears to be on the surface, but is rather how we are coping with the enormous changes to our human experience on this planet, not least of which is that we have so far extended beyond the limits of the Earth's biocapacity that we are facing the possibility of ecocide unfolding over the next few generations. That, too, faced consciously or not, is rewriting for us what it means to be human, and what it means that we have minds. </span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">We have used them badly.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">The writing I most love reflects the mind that glitters on the surface of the water, that lights up our reality, even when that is painful, and does it with beauty and truth.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">Humans have no existence by themselves. But we have tried to live as if we do. I write in part to expose this. I write and speak in the hope that I can help reveal our interconnectedness with everything else, and thus to show how crucial and consequential our lives are - because how we live impacts everything else around us.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption">And so also of the stories we tell and the poems we write.</span></span><br />
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<span class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" tabindex="0"><span class="hasCaption"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><b>~ Margaret Swedish </b></i></span></span></span>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-14095040551481543802016-09-06T21:04:00.000-05:002016-10-10T23:32:22.004-05:00"...an actual shock of experience..."Came upon this quote today from a Facebook page devoted to the great Joseph Campbell.<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Creative artists ... are mankind's wakeners to recollection:
summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not
as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the
consciousness of being. Their task, therefore, is to communicate
directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual
shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for
the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication
across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to
another.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Joseph Campbell, "The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology" (Copyright © 1968 Joseph Campbell Foundation)</span></span></blockquote>
And I thought - what a great way to think about my vocation as a writer. To be a "wakener to recollection." To reach from one inward world to another, the linking of creative consciousness. Poets may do this best because poetry breaks with the rational mind that is so often our stumbling box.<br />
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The world is in such crisis, such anxiety, depression, grief, and fear. Because most institutional leaders, politicians, and other protectors of the status quo, or business as usual, avoid talking about the crisis at all, we are left to ourselves and to one another to try to read, to hear, to see accurately what this crisis is and what is bringing it about.<br />
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We have to find language for that, metaphors, stories that help illuminate this darkness of ignorance, some of it quite deliberate.<br />
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Precisely because our human predicament is so serious, so urgent, so overwhelming, I find myself asking more and more about how best I can approach that predicament with the words I write. But I am convinced that our artists and other creative culture workers are essential to the wakening, a primary vehicle for it. I try to write now with that consciousness, the hope that my work can be attuned to the human experience of the "Great Unraveling" as industrial civilization approaches collapse.<br />
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To write: "...<span style="font-family: inherit;">in such a way that an actual
shock of experience will have been rendered." More and more as we humans continue to speed toward an ecological precipice, I believe that we must render more actual shocks of experience - to help us all to<b> <span style="color: #990000;"><i>SEE</i></span></b>.</span>Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-64971541869868288392016-08-07T18:32:00.000-05:002016-09-06T21:09:13.023-05:00We have some things to talk about, yes?February - my last post on this blog was in February.<br />
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A writers blog means a writer is writing about writing. So, where did it go?<br />
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Being a writer means there are times when you back off, get some distance, when you feel changes to which you need to pay attention. It's not that I'm not writing, it's that something about the writing, about being a writer, is changing.<br />
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The unraveling of the culture is having an impact. The outcome of years of this nation's glaring incapacity to <i>SEE</i>, much less ponder, discuss, reflect on the massive changes underway in our world is now clearly visible in this stunning political year. We see it now, this clinging to an old way of, of what? of <i>feeling</i> what it is to be a U.S. American, clinging to cultural identities that largely don't exist anymore.<br />
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One day white middle class Americans looked around and found their cultural geography completely altered. And no one has really wanted to talk much about why this has happened, the political, economic, demographic, and ecological shifts underway. One result is this awful political year we are enduring, the outcome of which we are also fearing, no matter what happens in November.<br />
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What's a writer to do? Keep writing. But it would be hugely helpful if writers and culture workers of all kinds would recognize this new turbulent context in which we do our work and help illuminate it, get some of the necessary discourse going, help encourage, inspire, clarify, reassure, challenge, and more to shake things up, see if we can't reverse some of the extreme fragmentation that has become a hallmark of a nation that really doesn't know what it is anymore.<br />
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Fortunately a lot of that good work is going on, and a lot of it is also being fiercely resisted. I have great hopes in the courage of many writers, artists, musicians who are working so hard to reveal us to ourselves.<br />
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I'm feeling like starting up a conversation about writing again. I'm feeling like this blog is one place where I can share some of my own thoughts about it all, especially from this specific vantage point of Milwaukee, which struggles mightily with realities of racism and segregation, deeply entrenched poverty that has gotten worse, not better, a city that has become an icon of structural injustice thanks to Matthew Desmond's critically important book, "Evicted - Poverty and Profit in the American City" - which just happens to be about Milwaukee.<br />
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Yeah, I'm going to be doing some thinking out loud here. I hope you will join me by subscribing to receive updates and add comments. Let's see what we're thinking about these days. Maybe that can help us.Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-36976178247051094752016-02-09T12:39:00.002-06:002016-09-06T21:08:46.924-05:00And then emerging from the darkness...<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Yeah, remember me? I last posted in October on the theme of "Writing in Darkness," and then I went dark - like the winter sun over our cold northern Great Lakes.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-stkqDMFr8ig/VrovbpxcalI/AAAAAAAABEE/rnoCBDCD8gQ/s1600/for%2Bblog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-stkqDMFr8ig/VrovbpxcalI/AAAAAAAABEE/rnoCBDCD8gQ/s1600/for%2Bblog.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Steam rises off open water of Lake Michigan </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I've been writing in the darkness - of early morning, of frigid cloudy days, of the late afternoon darkness that is so tough for a lot of us who live in the North. It's part of what makes us who we are, living through these cycles. It gives way to tremendous creative ferment, if one is not afraid of it, not afraid of the darkness - both without and within.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I again commit to keeping up with this blog. We'll try again.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">It's not that I have stopped writing. Stoneboat, a literary journal based in Sheboygan, published one of my poems in their fall edition, "2070." It's one of my ecological poems, one of my apocalyptic poems. A lot of art these days is full of this foreboding, poetry included, or even especially. Also Hollywood films. We know what's coming. Whether conscious, deliberately unconscious, pushed back from our attention because it is too terrifying and the changes in our lives required to keep the worst from happening too unwanted - we all know...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">...as the seas rise, the storms rage, the droughts intensify, the Arctic melts, the climate refugees begin to leave their homelands, coral reefs die, and plastics fill our oceans. This past week we reached an average 405ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Expect to see more of the theme in poems, essays, novels, fine arts of all kinds.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N-c2dd80_wA/VrowQMe9k8I/AAAAAAAABEM/AKM5G6stvzI/s1600/for%2Bblog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N-c2dd80_wA/VrowQMe9k8I/AAAAAAAABEM/AKM5G6stvzI/s1600/for%2Bblog.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lake Michigan winter sculpture</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">It's not all I write about. That would kill me, kill the spirit. While it is incumbent upon us to tell the truth about these things, it is also essential that we tell other truths - about love and fear and loss and joy and bliss and tragedy and all the rest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Getting things ready for submission - that is always the challenge of the limited time most of us have, still needing to find other ways to make a living, so under-valued is the art of writing in this economically oriented culture of ours.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">So, this blog emerges from darkness and comes back into the light of day. There is so much I want to share here.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Last word goes to Natalie Goldberg:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">"Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life...our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist - the real truth of who we are..."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">To which I offer my own resounding, YES!</span><br />
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<b><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Text and photos: Margaret Swedish </span></span></i></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><i><b>Please visit the Stoneboat website and see all the good things going on there. And then maybe you want to order the <a href="http://stoneboatwi.com/index.html" target="_blank">Stoneboat 6.1 (Fall 2015)</a> edition. It is full of great writing! </b></i></span></blockquote>
Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-83177825859005226142015-10-19T15:45:00.000-05:002016-09-06T21:06:01.990-05:00Writing in darkness<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="color: #0c343d;">In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you're doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that's where they may be seen by others, that's not where they're born.</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">~ Rebecca Solnit, in her magnificent book, <i>The Faraway Nearby</i> (p. 185)</span></blockquote>
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This really struck a chord for me. Like a string instrument - a chord with a lingering resonance. It feels like the times we're in. It feels like our human moment.<br />
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We are dwelling in darkness. Some of that darkness is terrifying. We walk through it blindly. We don't know what's inside it, where the next step will lead us, or if our foot will land on anything solid, anything that can hold us up.<br />
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And what could be more terrifying than the thought that within that darkness we might merge - with the unknown, with what we cannot see, whether safety or threat, whether dreams fulfilled, or forebodings.<br />
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We are in a time of creation then, by Solnit's description. But to what are we giving birth? That's where the portends can make one shiver a bit with fear and anxiety. Something is ending, something huge, something that has formed an arc of meaning for western humans for a very long time. Religion wedded to philosophies wedded to old cosmologies that describe a world that no longer exists, that never existed except in human imagination as we tried to understand our surroundings, to make sense of the world around us - which in the span of only a few centuries has gone from an Earth-centered universe with a revolving sky, a ceiling, just above us, to unlimited vastness beyond our comprehension - all of that is collapsing upon itself under the weight of how much of it we now know is simply not true, not an accurate description of reality. All the culture is feeling it, from the most intimate places in our lives to the vast scale of the planet's eco-realities.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z_WiWO432wQ/ViVK9SAgj3I/AAAAAAAABAA/4K4ZKXQzS0w/s1600/Hubble%2Bdeep%2Bfield.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z_WiWO432wQ/ViVK9SAgj3I/AAAAAAAABAA/4K4ZKXQzS0w/s200/Hubble%2Bdeep%2Bfield.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hubble Deep Field</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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Shouldn't surprise us that there are so many millions of people that would rather cling to those old certain smaller cosmologies, thank you. I mean, if our worldviews are shattered beyond repair, how will we see our way forward? How can we manage THAT scale of darkness - infinite, infinite before we arrived here and infinite when we are long gone from here? The gods birthed in the old cosmologies are as shattered as the cosmologies themselves. Watching people struggle to salvage them - a god outside us, or acting from outside us, patriarchies built on that old god, religions bent on forcing our soaring human consciousness into the smallness of old orthodoxies - this is part of the long deep sorrow of our days.<br />
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Reading Solnit's book, I could not help but see our need to create stories inside this vastly expanding sense of time and space. But what do our own small personal stories mean in such a space? As she writes, and as Buddhists iterate, and as the new physics and new cosmologies indicate - when do the stories begin? when do they end? The best we can do, it seems, is to use our stories, those particular "locations" along the path of evolving existence, as our own unique lenses through which to view our utterly mysterious journey through space and time. In those locations we can converse with one another, share what is common and what is unique, perhaps identify with one another's suffering, pain, joy, exuberance and allow deep wells of compassion to open. I mean, we're all in this together, this one story emergent on the planet. We have both a lot in common and a lot to learn from one another (which can never be done by imposition or proclamation of a singular truth or worldview).<br />
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When does the "I" begin, this identity and narrative of my life that feels so important and crucial to me? and when does it end? What gave birth to the meaning framework into which I was born and what will end it - because that is always what happens, another form of extinction, an inevitable part of the evolutionary process. What is no longer needed or adapted to its environment tends to disappear. That is the nature of reality. <br />
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Did my mother end the day she died, the day I heard that last intake of breath that was never released? And yet I recently dreamed her entering through a portal into my being with what I can only try to approximate by saying that it was like rushing water pouring into my consciousness, that I could perceive, that I could hear. I can still call up the image, which is mostly sensation, and yet vivid as can be - to me.<br />
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I don't know what that is. I don't have the slightest clue what that is.<br />
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When I write, having no idea if the words will ever be read by anyone but me and a few chosen readers, I feel like I am writing in darkness wanting to bring the words into the light. I want to create, and in order to create, creation has to unfold within the world. We can decide to open to it, to allow it to unfold through us, to participate - or not.<br />
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To say we live in dark times has been said of many other times down through history. But this darkness of our time, this particular unknown, feels of a different magnitude. This time, as a species, we have no idea where this story is going. There are people trying to write one that keeps humans alive in the narrative, and there are those making a world in which that may not be possible. Is that an end? or is it just continuation without beginning or end: humans - here today, gone tomorrow?<br />
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There are those opening their arms to the Great Transition occurring whether we want it or not, believing that if we welcome and cooperate with what we cannot see, but which is intimated now in just about everything we do or don't do, we have a chance at still being a part of it, part of the story evolving on this planet; and there are those fiercely resisting because it is too damn frightening, too big, too overwhelming, because "I will not know who I am in it because all the ground I stand on, all the walls that hold me in place, all the signposts that tell me who I am, will collapse."<br />
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But they're going to anyway. With resistance, they will collapse in a world overtaken by fear (as is already occurring) and one that is well-armed. That kind of darkness I would prefer not experiencing. Fact is, destruction rather than creation comes out of that kind of darkness (think Syria or Iraq or Yemen; or Charleston or Sandy Hook Elementary School or Umpqua Community College in Roseburg OR, or the Sikh Temple just down the road from me), though even that will someday yield to some new form of creation, but perhaps not one we'd like to live in.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qiHFLQ06EeU/ViVM6z66pUI/AAAAAAAABAU/0GqMi1slqu4/s1600/sunrise%2B%2528sm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qiHFLQ06EeU/ViVM6z66pUI/AAAAAAAABAU/0GqMi1slqu4/s200/sunrise%2B%2528sm%2529.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
"Merging is dangerous..." We are merged with our mother's bodies before birth. We merge back into the unknown at death; we dissolve back into the darkness because we can no longer be "seen" (though perhaps in our dreams, as with my mother, we can still be "sensed").<br />
<br />
When I sit down to write something new, I am entering into a kind of darkness, yes. Solitude is a kind of darkness. Awaiting the words, or struggling to find them, is a kind of darkness. Poems and fine art, stories, memoirs like Solnit's - to write or create these things, one has to go into dark places and find them. This takes courage. Not everything wants to be faced. Not everything wants to be dug up, even some necessary things. You never know what lies underneath, what was buried for a reason, and then what lies underneath that...<br />
<br />
When does the story begin and when does it end? Maybe when we realize there is no beginning or end, we can get over the need to "understand," even to forgive, and come to an acceptance of this difficult path that is all about the struggle of life to emerge, that was always painful and difficult, propelled by something that keeps pulling us on (I was going to say forward, but we don't know if that's true or what it means), that is the reason why we so often do not do well with our fears, form tribes, take it out on one another, feel threatened by those "other" than us that challenge our ephemeral certainties and belief systems and constructed identities.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BKlni5dSW_w/ViVSXXe48fI/AAAAAAAABBE/MHyFpIgd2DU/s1600/water%2Band%2Blight.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BKlni5dSW_w/ViVSXXe48fI/AAAAAAAABBE/MHyFpIgd2DU/s1600/water%2Band%2Blight.jpg" /></a></div>
Maybe as we draw water from those wells of compassion we would find that we drink in empathy, that we find the water is a common source of life and that we all need it, that more than anything that's what holds us, or could hold us together, that without it we have a world torn by divisions and violence against other humans, other sentient and non-sentient beings, and the very planet itself that gave birth to us. <br />
<br />
<br />
Is writing my story, or any story, all that important in times like these? Maybe in times like these, our stories are more important than ever. Maybe that's where we begin to find our common bonds.<br />
<br />
Solnit's quest in this book is a reminder that we are all just living in a continuum that we will never understand, of which we will never know the meaning, though we so strive to find it, to put layers and layers of understanding over the mystery so that it feels graspable, safer, comforting. But as soon as we do that, it makes the mystery or meaning smaller than us, small enough to contain within us - which means it is not ultimate, not the meaning, not the purpose, at all.<br />
<br />
And maybe that means that finding some body of truth is not the essence of the human quest either, but the quest itself is the essence, which means engaging a path that will never take us to the light of any ultimate revelation or truth or meaning.<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFtTfd0R-OM/ViVMQmzFctI/AAAAAAAABAM/V3XiGE2w9W0/s1600/little%2Blight%2Btouch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lFtTfd0R-OM/ViVMQmzFctI/AAAAAAAABAM/V3XiGE2w9W0/s1600/little%2Blight%2Btouch.jpg" /></a><br />
The purpose of story-telling then is to keep engaging the creative ferment of this darkness, because I'm telling you, after reading Solnit's book right after reading Anthony Doerr's <i>All the Light We Cannot See</i>, after reading Marilynne Robinson's <i>Gilead</i> and then<i> Lila</i>, with some poetry mixed in there, like David Whyte and Linda Hogan and returning to Alicia Ostriker - the fact is that this quest, this search, this path into the unknown is more beautiful than all the answers humans have tried to lay over the world. <br />
<br />
What could be more boring, what could be more fatal to the work of creation itself, to that magnificent gestation of darknesses and mergings and insights and living wisdom than thinking one has "found it?" The quest dies there.<br />
<br />
So, back into the story-seeking quest, to the<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="color: #0c343d;"> "amorous engagement with the unknown</span></i><span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">." <span style="font-family: inherit;">It is so much more fun than the world of certaint<span style="font-family: inherit;">ies t<span style="font-family: inherit;">hat threaten to destroy us.</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span><b><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Margaret Swedish</span></i></b><br />
<b><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">------------------- </span></i></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><b>Abou</b>t</i></span><b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/06/15/190446642/telling-stories-about-ourselves-in-the-faraway-nearby" target="_blank"><i> The Faraway Nearby</i></a></span><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/06/15/190446642/telling-stories-about-ourselves-in-the-faraway-nearby" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></a></span></i></b><br />
<b><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span></i></b><br />
<b><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Fog, water & mother photos by M. Swedish</span></i></b><br />
<br />Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-64515412850982659042015-09-16T18:32:00.000-05:002015-10-19T15:46:15.580-05:00When the writer isn't blogging....It's not because she isn't writing, only that life at times overwhelms and it's too easy to let the blogging go.<br />
<br />
Why tonight? If you followed me in the past, you know I've been working on a book that emerged from my trip to Alberta - the Athabasca River, Rocky Mountains, boreal forest - and the industrial devastation of the tar sands region two years ago now. I think of it as my ecological lament, and it is that. The lamentation is rooted in the magnificence of the eco-community that is this river, the gorgeous glacial waters, the wildlife, the stunning star-filled night skies, all of which puts the oil sands into context, that accentuates the horror that we now can witness all around the planet as industrial civilization spreads it's tentacles everywhere, and most voraciously and destructively in the extraction and production of fossil fuels for that civilization to burn and burn and burn...<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qv3DwMpn5Dw/Vfn6x6U2DwI/AAAAAAAAA9s/YIpX4BORDWk/s1600/SEH%2B-%2Blittle%2Bbighorn%2Bsheep.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qv3DwMpn5Dw/Vfn6x6U2DwI/AAAAAAAAA9s/YIpX4BORDWk/s1600/SEH%2B-%2Blittle%2Bbighorn%2Bsheep.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Someone I met along the river</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
I work on ecology as my other vocation in life, giving workshops and presentations, working with groups to promote outreach and education.<br />
<br />
Sometimes that makes the writing life challenging. One almost covers the bills, the other not at all. And so for most writers, yes? It's wrong, and we can gripe about it forever, but it is the reality in which we work.<br />
<br />
What made we want to start up again here is that the first draft of the book is almost done. It still needs lots of work and editing, but the vision of this short volume really came clear along the way, with the support of my critique group at Red Oak Writing here in Milwaukee. They really believe in this project, and that's been plenty of motivation to stay in the heart, not the head, and make this one of those cries in the wilderness that I hope will get out into the world.<br />
<br />
So I want to make use of this tool again - for my writing life. This lamentation, which is about our deeply wounded planet, has brought out some of my best writing because I'm letting it go, letting the pain come, letting the plea surface - I am lamenting the destruction of so much beauty in the world. As this pours out to the final pages, there will be room again for the poems and the essays that will come next for me. They keep knocking on my door, saying, "are you ready yet?"<br />
<br />
I'm getting ready...<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-89R12iSMweg/Vfn7IcmFwOI/AAAAAAAAA90/K-JI4cN1JyI/s1600/night%2Bin%2Bbrule%2B%2528sm%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-89R12iSMweg/Vfn7IcmFwOI/AAAAAAAAA90/K-JI4cN1JyI/s1600/night%2Bin%2Bbrule%2B%2528sm%2529.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hamlet of Brule, along the Athabasca River</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-28885769991122223262015-04-27T18:23:00.001-05:002015-10-19T16:10:59.857-05:00Writing in troubled, troubled timesI say this over and over again - among our most important humans in this time of deep crisis are our culture workers, our artists, poets, story-tellers, those with searing, truthful lenses through which to <i>SEE</i> our world, those with the imagination, the vision, the narratives that can help us imagine new ways of living - because we need them so badly now.<br />
<br />
A little while ago I turned on the TV looking for news of Nepal and ran into live coverage of the violence in the streets of Baltimore. Rocks, bricks, and other objects have been hurled at police and several are injured, some with broken bones and one described as "unresponsive."<br />
<br />
CNN and MSNBC have unfortunately decided to focus on a CVS pharmacy that is being looted, as if that's the point. Now a police car is in flames, and things are getting worse. Now other stores are being looted, more rocks being thrown...<br />
<br />
A long legacy here, one I learned something about during the 25 years I lived in the DC area, in Maryland, just down the freeway from Baltimore,<br />
<a name='more'></a>a legacy of desperate urban poverty left largely unaddressed, racism, gang violence, police brutality and harassment over years and years, profound injustice, and more.<br />
<br />
We're a mess. This is just the latest in the string of episodes from our cities in the last couple of years that are shining a fierce light on the true state of the nation. I watch this awful version of what goes for "news" on cable channels and realize how much the media itself fuels the problem with the way it covers these events, what it chooses to focus on - and the narrative that it wraps around it all.<br />
<br />
Stories and images - much more powerful than straight out reporting.<br />
<br />
And how do you account for police injuring an arrested person, in this case Freddy Gray, so badly that his spinal chord is almost totally severed? What do we really expect of people after that, especially people who have been victims of police abuse over the course of their lifetimes? White people want to tell African-Ams in a city like Baltimore how to behave after these years of abuse and neglect. Protest, but be nice, be peaceful, don't do any damage.<br />
<br />
Well, that's not emotionally honest. In fact, responding to this kind of violence with profound non-violence, self-control, restraint, and respect even for those who have harmed you, is heroic, takes incredible inner strength. Read Martin Luther King Jr., and maybe a little Mahatma Gandhi, for more info on that...<br />
<br />
We need a new story for this culture in a big hurry, one that tells the real story of who we are. We are actually not such a nice people, not when it comes to matters of justice and race.<br />
<br />
Now comes Wolf Blitzer, and he is really stoking the flames of the narrative as he starts his reporting.<br />
<br />
As a nation, we're in such trouble. We are falling apart, coming unglued. We have lost any sense of cultural cohesion, always a struggle here, but this feels different, like an inexorable social force leading to our fragmentation as a nation.<br />
<br />
In my hometown of Milwaukee, to which I returned 8 years ago after working in the DC area for 25 years, the homicide rate is up 170% from last year. <span style="color: #cc0000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>170%!</b></span></span> I try to take that in. Mostly guns. Much of that spur of the moment decisions to resolve an argument. We have lots of guns here now. Guns - concealed and open-carry - thanks to our Repub-NRA-funded state government.<br />
<br />
Each victim means another family torn apart. The trauma mounts. And yet polite white society, politicians, and police expect all these people to behave nicely after the latest police killing, or unwarranted traffic stop, or unconstitutional strip search.<br />
<br />
Reaping the whirlwind, that's what's happening now. The strain of holding a severely unjust order in place is finally giving way.<br />
<br />
What's a writer to do?<br />
<br />
Our poetry must be searing. Our lenses must be true and clear. Our stories must reveal. Our words must get us all out of our heads and into our hearts. We have to break the anti-logic, the thinking patterns, the knee-jerk responses of a culture rooted in making divisions among us and then enforcing those divisions with injustice and sometimes by force.<br />
<br />
[Just turned the channel to Al Jazeera America. Try it. It's a great improvement.]<br />
<br />
I'm currently reading Michael Perry's <i>Population: 425 - Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time</i>. He is revealing to me a rich cultural truth about my state that this city girl has no other way of knowing. It is wonderfully written, the characters delightful, the stories moving from comedy to tragedy to poignancy to tender and back around again. I don't know if any of these people and I would agree on one single thing going on in the political culture of Wisconsin right now, but I am fond of them all - because of how Perry is offering them to me, in all their humanity.<br />
<br />
Which is where we must meet one another now if we are to stop the unraveling from going beyond a tipping point where the nation really falls apart. I am not trying to be dramatic here. I feel us very close to that tipping point. The way the global economy has been taken over by corporate masters disenfranchising and impoverishing tens of millions of my people, the way the election of Barack Obama has brought the seething racism that has marked the nation's history since slavery back to the surface, electing politicians bent on making certain it never happens again, the rise of religious fundamentalisms that have put a cloak of God and morals over some of the worst in the human heart, and this sense that we do not have the tools or the will available to us to address the biggest crises of our times - from climate change, ecological unraveling of all sorts, terrorism, war, and more - <span style="color: #20124d;"><i><b>all of this is feeding the fear and anxiety, the rush to blame, that are tearing us apart from within.</b></i></span><br />
<br />
What can culture workers do now to serve our broken humanity? What can we contribute? Can the turn of a phrase open a mind or heart? Can a spoken word poem reach to the place of despair and open it again to a place where it can find comfort and solidarity? Can a story open an imagination to another possibility? Can a work of street art get people to stop for a moment - and think - what in the world is going on here? What is someone trying to tell me?<br />
<br />
Sounds like a mission to me. And I look for other culture workers who are already engaged in or want to share in a mission like that - because we who try to <b><i>look</i></b> often suffer from what we <i><b>see</b></i>, and the community support matters to our own psychological and spiritual survival.<br />
<br />
Okay, back on Al Jazeera America, here's the older white news correspondent with a British accent, wearing a very nice coat and scarf in the streets of Baltimore where rocks are being thrown. And he has invited two young African-Am men to talk to him and to the world about what's going on, why there is looting, why people are doing damage to their own neighborhoods. He is sincere, he really wants to know, and so they tell him. One begins to talk about being sick of police abuse. And John the Correspondent stops him and says, "But tell me, specifically, what is it they do? What has happened to you?"<br />
<br />
So the young man tells him about the traffic stops. "I show him my license and everything's good, and he still makes me get out of the car. He pats me down. I mean, my girlfriend is in the car and I feel humiliated. I don't want her, I don't want my kids, my nephew, to see me like this."<br />
<br />
Then they tell John about the beatings, about how police ARE the law in the streets. The other man says he was first beaten by police when he was 15 year old. They say that, if you try to run away, then you really get a beating. It's not just Freddie Gray. It happens all the time.<br />
<br />
John asks, so why attack your own neighborhood? "To get some attention, man. Nobody pays any attention to us. We need them to see what's going on here. It may not be cool to do these things [the looting and vandalism] but nobody pays any attention."<br />
<br />
Well, bless you Al Jazeera for actually talking to the people in the streets, for giving us another narrative. It makes a difference, doesn't it? A clear and truthful lens. <br />
<br />
Meanwhile, just as I was about to finish this, the new images on TV - that CVS pharmacy is now in flames. The governor has declared a State of Emergency for the City of Baltimore. The National Guard is being deployed.<br />
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Dehumanization is a powerful, insidious force. What will stop this? What will makes us human again?Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-66121913783140911292015-03-13T11:22:00.000-05:002015-03-13T11:24:40.292-05:00"New possibilities of perceiving" - overcoming our cultural delusion<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: #990000;"><b>Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner and outer
perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of
perceiving.</b></span> <span style="color: #990000;">~ Jane Hirshfield</span></span></blockquote>
The power of poems, and of the best creative writing, is this ability to alter perception - not just the perception itself, but the way of perceiving.<br />
<br />
Words have often failed us. Words combined with rational thinking and mechanistic science (also much of academia) have fooled us even more. That combination has given western culture a way of perceiving reality, the world, Nature, that is destroying life on the planet at scales not seen since that asteroid crashed into the planet and wiped out millions of years worth of evolution. <b><i>It is because that way of perception is delusional.</i></b> <br />
<a name='more'></a>It can help us do some things, manipulate some things, organize some things, but when it becomes a view that shapes our sense of ultimate meaning and our place in this world, it becomes quite destructive.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nP-VpnkgP2k/VQMNIN7tyFI/AAAAAAAAA3A/fckh_KMvy30/s1600/desertification%2Bchina%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nP-VpnkgP2k/VQMNIN7tyFI/AAAAAAAAA3A/fckh_KMvy30/s1600/desertification%2Bchina%2B2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Desertification in China</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The evidence is everywhere, spread now across a globe that is being swallowed up, consumed by industrial growth based on consumption of resources and manufactured stuff to feed the individual, fragmented self - if you are affluent enough to participate - which most people are not.<br />
<br />
But because that way of perceiving, especially fragmented into the small units of the individual self fortified by culturally sanctioned self-interest (= economic thinking), has given us such comfort, provided such escape from things like mortality, our vulnerability before forces so much more powerful than we are, it has become our path of denialism even in the face of the ecological wreckage and spiritual death that has accompanied the way of life built upon this delusion.<br />
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It gave us the comfort of believing we could control life itself, life and death, mortality, yes, and force permanence onto the frail ego, force permanence into a living reality where everything is in flux, where everything dies, where everything emerges and will emerge, and then die again.<br />
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A world in which nothing we hold onto actually lasts.<br />
<br />
And when you impose that kind of thinking onto reality, really bad things are bound to happen.<br />
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We desperately need new ways of perceiving.<br />
<br />
Maybe that's why the resurgence of poetry within the non-mainstream culture gives me such hope. If you love poetry, you know that one turn of a phrase, a last line after the journey through the verses, or a stunning metaphor, can open perception in amazing ways, sometimes very painful ones.<br />
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So, too, of a good story, a searing essay, a work of visual art. This perceiving business is not always easy, especially in times like these. <br />
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The opening quote above appeared in a new book of essays, <a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385351058" target="_blank"><i>Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World</i></a> (about to be released). A brilliant poet, Hirshfield is also Buddhist, which adds profundity to themes of impermanence and perception that are so much part of her work. While we in the West keep trying to figure things out, to <i>understand</i>, life simply unfolds, the story of the cosmos unfolds, always changing in color, texture, form, even in meaning (if there is any). Western humans try to fit a story fully beyond our comprehension into a human framework, as if that is possible, as if 13.8 billion years of cosmic inflation after the first flaring forth can be fit into the brains of this one species whose brief appearance is a minuscule happening in that vast cosmic narrative.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b_fof1Y2Etw/VQMMiL1yE2I/AAAAAAAAA24/SLHqgWYbOqs/s1600/Lk.%2BSuperior%2Bnear%2Bcopper%2Bharbor%2Bjuly%2B2010%2Bcrpd%2Bfor%2Bfb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b_fof1Y2Etw/VQMMiL1yE2I/AAAAAAAAA24/SLHqgWYbOqs/s1600/Lk.%2BSuperior%2Bnear%2Bcopper%2Bharbor%2Bjuly%2B2010%2Bcrpd%2Bfor%2Bfb.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: M. Swedish</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Aren't we merely lucky to be here at all, and to be able to perceive things like truth and beauty, to get up at sunrise and see what the colors and shapes will look like this morning, different from all other mornings before it? Aren't we lucky to have this capacity to be struck deep in our spirits by the lines of a poem, or the twists and turns of a story plot, or the one or two added brushstrokes on a canvas that changes everything?<br />
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Why isn't that enough for us - since it seems so much more worthy than accumulating stuff? I mean, along with growing the food and caring for the water and for the needs of one another on this once-abundant planet, why isn't that enough? Why must we impose small human meanings over this whole evolutionary narrative, then compete with other "meanings," and even go to war over them. Shouldn't our stories open rather than close us?<br />
<br />
<i><b>This</b></i> is worthy human work - not an attempt to understand, but to participate in, to peer into, to be conscious witness, to enjoy the ride for as long as we are here...<br />
<br />
The book review, which is about Hirshfield's new collection, <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/book/229024/the-beauty-by-jane-hirshfield" target="_blank"><i>The Beauty</i></a>, offers this line from one of the new poems, "Perspective: An Assay." And here she is at her best buddha-poet self:<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="color: #20124d;"><i><b><span style="color: #0c343d;">"Like everything just as it it, then just as it is, then just as it is." </span></b></i></span></span><br />
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Stop, take a deep breath, read it again, and ponder how much easier, less painful, richer, more tender life would be if that was how we lived.<br />
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Why isn't that enough for us?Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8416216787811433893.post-66400926498749292962015-02-09T14:07:00.000-06:002015-03-13T11:23:03.103-05:00Writing to overcome...There's been a fascinating discussion on Facebook lately about how hard it is for writers to write because they also have to pay the bills. There's been an exchange of expressed frustrations that so many successfully published writers have partners or spouses with incomes that support them, or jobs in academia, or other sources of independent wealth - which is true, of course. The culture does not support writers<br />
<br />
Here in Wisconsin, our fearless (and soul-empty) governor cut the state grants program for writers - because, you know, who needs them?<br />
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And so for me, too. I guess I look at how hard it has been to keep up with this blog in recent months simply because life has made it hard to keep up with this blog in recent months. You know what I'm saying? Life intrudes, the one that comes with the monthly rent check.<br />
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I'm making time to write again, whether or not I can pay the bills in the future, because it is necessary. One book draft is completed and now I'm trying to shop it. Even with 2 books under my belt, it's different this time because I have to approach a new publisher since I have shifted out of the world of my old one. We are also a culture drowning in words and book proposals, so trying to break through the noise is not easy.<br />
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It's the next book draft that is calling me, that needs attention, that asks why I have been ignoring it for so long. Pricks my conscience over and over again. Part of me knows this may be the most important of them all, and certainly some of my best writing. This is my ecological lament, my cry of pain for what we have done and continue to do to this magnificent planet. All the planet did was give us life and abundance. It didn't know it would evolve a species that would ravage that abundance to death.<br />
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Some gratitude on our part, no?<br />
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Poems, too. A couple of new ones chart some new ground for me. We'll see what comes of them.<br />
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Which, for whatever reason, drew my attention back to Muriel Rukeyser, whom I revere. Spending a few days cat-sitting for friends in a lovely semi-rural area (where an owl was hooting loudly out my window at 4:30 this morning, music if ever there was music!), I found myself grabbing <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393313239/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_2?pf_rd_p=1944687722&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0963818333&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1NN1Q7AYER9YP2X7T9YM" target="_blank">A Muriel Rukeyser Reader</a></i>, for some comfort, I guess, some solace, some inspiration to ease the fear that accompanies the writing life. Opened to this:<br />
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">There are many causes for waste in our life. We are very sure of ourselves in some powers and wildly insecure in others: the imbalance leads to random action, waste, hostilities out of reason. Margaret Mead describes us as a "third generation" society. She does not mean, of course, that we are all grandchildren of pioneers and immigrants <i>[though I am, for sure, and she is right, it marks the soul]</i>; but it does mean that our parents shared the attitudes of the children of foreigners, who because of their strange families, with their old country ways, their effusive gestures, the flavor of their speech, leaned over backward to rule out any foreignness, any color at all. </span></b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">We suffer from that background, with its hunger for uniformity, the shared norm of ambition and habit and living standard. The repressive codes are everywhere... This code strikes deep in our emotional life. </span></b></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">It means that our emotions are supposed to be uniform. Since that is impossible, our weaknesses send us to see any divergence from the expected with dread or conflict.</span></b> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #134f5c; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">This leads on the one hand to the immense incidence of "mental" disease which we find in America now; and, on the other, I believe we may say that it leads to a fear of poetry.</span></b></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0c343d;">T</span>his quote is actually from her book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Life-Poetry-Muriel-Rukeyser/dp/0963818333" target="_blank">The Life of Poetry</a></i>, which also changed my life [I can't even tell you what joy that is for me, reading a writer who can change my life. I have always loved that since I was a little kid buried in a good book]. It's in the section called "The Resistances," to which I can only say, oh yeah, absolutely - which is one reason we don't support our creative writers, why it takes a combination of luck and financial resources to break through for the big publishers - the writer providing the labor, the publishing house getting most of the profits.<br />
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Many of us think the culture is on its death bed. The evidence seems quite obvious to me. The repressive codes not only have not disappeared, they are being enforced by the internet, on Fox News, the Christian Broadcasting Network, Clear Channel, and ETWN. Yet the creative impulse still exists and in many ways is more vital, incisive, fierce, clear-eyed, and prophetic than ever. And we all have the internet, too. More and more young people in particular are not only not afraid of poetry but are writing some of the best poetry this culture has ever produced, telling very uncomfortable truths and violating every one of those repressive codes. Spoken word, spitting, slams - yes, fierce with their truth and the longing to break out of these awful times.<br />
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So, I am having a burst of energy in my writing, and working with the fear of the future (mine, the nation's, and our poor damaged globe's) to try to be a better writer, to hold nothing back, because I have got nothing at all to lose.<br />
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I leave you with this, posted on Facebook today by the son of a colleague here in Milwaukee for this Black History Month. I can't think of a better example of what I mean.<br />
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And Ms. Rukeyser - we shall overcome - the repressive codes, the fear of our strangeness; we simply will not surrender to the monoculture of the fears, shame, embarrassment, and insecurities passed down to us from that third generation.<br />
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Margaret Swedishhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18122528070296887747noreply@blogger.com0