I listened to the whole recording a couple times, working in the snow in Maine. Headphones.
I think when you here someone voice this sort of wrestle, especially stuff in the grips of a vestigial G-d-as-inhuman-demand-to-betray-one's-self, it's almost instinct to offer counter words that promise that particular God's absence. But I think that maybe isn't exactly the flare of a response you are looking for in this sky. I know I think about you and your wishing over the antelope(?) well when I look for and at the relatively thriving deer here. I think it matters that you have taken Them in, into your soul-thicket. I think it's known, this taking in. Somewhere. Same place that re-members them in all the ways they can be. These vacant pits of what once where men now gone to noise, greed and thin ego.....let's imagine them tonight, a sea between us, washed from the earth, even our peripheral dreams free of them, and G-d walking in the cool of the evening, Her tawny fur and horn gone blue in the half-light, and Her dancing on the empty place they once thought they lived. No Pasaran.
Strange to think of you hearing my voice from my fireside in the snow. Strange and warm. Somewhere I realise I am supposed to respond with fear to that too: the evils of technology, etc. I was just talking to my friend Bill about the saola (yes, it's an antelope - though Bill might disagree!) while he was watching a bald eagle at a deer carcass in the snow of Wisconsin, and I just replied to Bill's comment on my previous post - which has an odd resonance with your comment here.
And I can say not much more. I am glad to hear you talking in this way. I haven't got the... integrity to speak like that this week.
I go and watch a spider climbing in front of the sky. I think of a poem by Ted Hughes: Crow's Elephant Totem Song. I think about not believing that poem. My problem is that I believe everything a little bit. It's what she left me with.
I know none of this will be helpful, and I really should have written this last night after reading your words rather than at 4am the next morning while drinking my coffee, because it’s not so fresh. I mean my memory is not so fresh, the coffee is pretty fresh I think.
A while back I remember asking Mum what it had been like in the days of the Cuban missile crisis. They’d been terrified of course, they had, for those few days, experienced the thought that everything they knew and loved would be gone.
But they’re still here, still pottering about, still worrying about stuff (currently about the kids and their dependence on their phones).
I spent the first few years on the farm in a state of high anxiety, due to a bunch of things, the climate crisis mostly, but also the rough neighbourhood we’d come to make a home in (mostly a fermentation of fears conjured up by my recently traumatised overactive imagination), the Chinese being bullies on our western border, the nearby volcano erupting, the typhoons, the president at the time encouraging a frenzie of nightly poor-people murders by enthusiastic cops. I’d be surprised to wake up most mornings and I whipped myself into quite a state. What would I do to the family if the Chinese did make a full on invasion?? Would we evacuate if the volcano erupted big time (we decided no…, dying while stuck in a Filipino traffic jam didn’t seem a good way to go). What if there was some sort of collapse and the cities emptied and all headed our way?
It seemed, to me at least, that there was plenty to worry about.
But here I am, I’m still here thankfully, I’m still pottering about.
These days I worry about my seedlings getting too leggy (I need to get a bit more light into the nursery) but that’s something I can fix. That’s the only thing I’m worried about at the moment, but it’s not really a worry, it’s just a concern. It’s also concerning the amount of things on my to-do list but the world ain’t going to end if I don’t make it through and tick off everything in there as done.
I can’t change the world, if our world is going to end, it’s going to end, it’s unlikely you or I or anyone else could stop it. But I can affect things around me, I can, like Caroline said, show up and be dependable and be someone to trust. I can do that, I can work on that. That’s the sort of things I can spend my precious time being worried about.
Getting off social media and not reading the news has helped, or rather getting my news delivered via Monica (“did you hear about …., she “appears” to handle it better … “appears”) or via occasionally watching the news presented by a late night comedian. Get the anxiety already filtered down into manageable-for-me bite size pieces.
Sorry, like I said, it’s usually not helpful having someone say shit like this whilst in a deep funk, nothing helps except that switch in your brain that tells you to chill the fuck out. I don’t think we’re emotionally capable of handling all this stuff, I know it seems like putting my head in the soil, but I still know what’s happening in the world, but let me worry about the things I can manage.
And I can learn to like Chinese food, it’s got to be better than the Russian shit that you guys might end up eating.
Yeah, I don't know. I thought I was worrying either about mass extinction or about edging the pond. After the US election result I was just kind of "sigh - well that's what I expected." And then, Saturday morning, this hit me out of the newspaper. We started getting the newspaper this year for... reasons.
And the fact is, it came at a time when I was already stressed out.
Something I am noticing with this is that literally everyone I have spoken to about this has said something about burying their head, or something similar and that's really new for what's happening now. I mean, there have always been a lot of people responding like that but this time it's everyone - literally everyone except one person I spoke to.
People always talk about "systemic change" and this confuses me.
What if the way to stop these crazed billionaires, these wanna-be-facists, these corporate monopolies is to simply stop giving them the attention they crave, stop paying for their shit, stop shopping at their stores, stop reading news about them.
Maintaining some sanity is going to be very important if shit gets real. I've got a friend who's been (excitedly?? enthusiastically??) writing about collapse for years, he's probably the most prepared, skill-wise, for surviving a low energy future, if it should happen. And yet last year, a drought year and all the shit going on in the world, it broke him mentally.
How are we meant to help others if we can't help ourselves?
There's so much to distract us, try not to let it get to you, all this high level of anxiety and stress, it's not healthy.
Thanks for asking. I wasn't - obviously - I mean I recorded that thing at 2am or something. For the rest of the week, I would wake up in the small hours (as I think I usually do) and then, instead of going back to sleep, think 'oh shit' and have some kind of anxiety attack, I suppose.
The thing is, I guess that if I were going to do anything as radical as you have done with my life, then it would be because of exactly such a week of lost sleep - or rather more than that.
Sitting outside drinking tea on a bright spring morning, toddler asleep in his buggy and a couple of bombers going over. it's whiskey-flavoured tea. Bit weird really.
I'm sorry Nicholas, I might have been a bit casual about the Russian food comment. Things are obviously a lot worse there than I understood them to be (having just mistakenly watched some ... ummm..., news from the white house)
haha, no it took a lot more than lost sleep for me to do this (my normal wake up time is about 4-4:30, sometimes earlier). We had a bit of a traumatic life shattering event happen to us here, it causes you to reassess what's important. Things like having a retirement fund, or providing for your childrens college fund become less important. Economically the worst decision I've ever made, so I'd never recommend it, but I'm loving it. I'm with my family every day, no bosses, etc. Living for the moment, etc etc. I doubt I'll be on my deathbed and regretting that I didn't have enough money.
Wish I could share a few whiskeys with you sometime!
And another thing to add, when I was living in the US, my boss was well over retirement age and had no ability to retire. His pension had been wiped out by the dotcom bubble burst. It made me realise that we tend to take a lot of things for granted about our financial security with banks and retirement funds etc. As much as I hate the idea of private land ownership, it just seemed a little more secure than money in a bank. I mean they can still take land away from people, but I imagine it's a lot easier to scrub some ones and zeros from a bank account.
I think I spent a lot of time thinking of all the possible scenarios, and I was going through quite a doomer stage at that point, and it just seemed the likelihood of me making it happily to old age and dying naturally was pretty slim. Now, I'm not so sure, I tend to try not to think about those things anymore. Especially with two young girls. Did you ever see the movie High Fidelity, the premise of it being "does listening to sad music make you a sad person?". I used to listen to a lot of, as Monica would call it, slit-your-wrists sort of music haha.
I like that you write from the far side of certainty, looking directly at what is so hard to look at. I wish more people would do that, more writing WAS that, mine included. You seem to have taken on the shadow of humanity. That's a lot. I hope give yourself a break once in a while. You deserve it, good man.
I am with my family going on the bus to the Botanic Gardens. It is a beautiful day. And I really appreciated this comment. I felt really weird after putting that out there.
I'm glad you did put it out there. I think we all feel such things, and not in neat, orderly ways. It's ragged and guttering. Thank you for going there for us. And enjoy the Gardens.
This was not 'too gloomy'. These are things we need to think about in the night, sometimes. Otherwise, our faith, or lack of it, are facile. And you are right about yet another 'F'.
I listened to the whole recording a couple times, working in the snow in Maine. Headphones.
I think when you here someone voice this sort of wrestle, especially stuff in the grips of a vestigial G-d-as-inhuman-demand-to-betray-one's-self, it's almost instinct to offer counter words that promise that particular God's absence. But I think that maybe isn't exactly the flare of a response you are looking for in this sky. I know I think about you and your wishing over the antelope(?) well when I look for and at the relatively thriving deer here. I think it matters that you have taken Them in, into your soul-thicket. I think it's known, this taking in. Somewhere. Same place that re-members them in all the ways they can be. These vacant pits of what once where men now gone to noise, greed and thin ego.....let's imagine them tonight, a sea between us, washed from the earth, even our peripheral dreams free of them, and G-d walking in the cool of the evening, Her tawny fur and horn gone blue in the half-light, and Her dancing on the empty place they once thought they lived. No Pasaran.
Strange to think of you hearing my voice from my fireside in the snow. Strange and warm. Somewhere I realise I am supposed to respond with fear to that too: the evils of technology, etc. I was just talking to my friend Bill about the saola (yes, it's an antelope - though Bill might disagree!) while he was watching a bald eagle at a deer carcass in the snow of Wisconsin, and I just replied to Bill's comment on my previous post - which has an odd resonance with your comment here.
And I can say not much more. I am glad to hear you talking in this way. I haven't got the... integrity to speak like that this week.
I go and watch a spider climbing in front of the sky. I think of a poem by Ted Hughes: Crow's Elephant Totem Song. I think about not believing that poem. My problem is that I believe everything a little bit. It's what she left me with.
The emptiness of her footprints!
I know none of this will be helpful, and I really should have written this last night after reading your words rather than at 4am the next morning while drinking my coffee, because it’s not so fresh. I mean my memory is not so fresh, the coffee is pretty fresh I think.
A while back I remember asking Mum what it had been like in the days of the Cuban missile crisis. They’d been terrified of course, they had, for those few days, experienced the thought that everything they knew and loved would be gone.
But they’re still here, still pottering about, still worrying about stuff (currently about the kids and their dependence on their phones).
I spent the first few years on the farm in a state of high anxiety, due to a bunch of things, the climate crisis mostly, but also the rough neighbourhood we’d come to make a home in (mostly a fermentation of fears conjured up by my recently traumatised overactive imagination), the Chinese being bullies on our western border, the nearby volcano erupting, the typhoons, the president at the time encouraging a frenzie of nightly poor-people murders by enthusiastic cops. I’d be surprised to wake up most mornings and I whipped myself into quite a state. What would I do to the family if the Chinese did make a full on invasion?? Would we evacuate if the volcano erupted big time (we decided no…, dying while stuck in a Filipino traffic jam didn’t seem a good way to go). What if there was some sort of collapse and the cities emptied and all headed our way?
It seemed, to me at least, that there was plenty to worry about.
But here I am, I’m still here thankfully, I’m still pottering about.
These days I worry about my seedlings getting too leggy (I need to get a bit more light into the nursery) but that’s something I can fix. That’s the only thing I’m worried about at the moment, but it’s not really a worry, it’s just a concern. It’s also concerning the amount of things on my to-do list but the world ain’t going to end if I don’t make it through and tick off everything in there as done.
I can’t change the world, if our world is going to end, it’s going to end, it’s unlikely you or I or anyone else could stop it. But I can affect things around me, I can, like Caroline said, show up and be dependable and be someone to trust. I can do that, I can work on that. That’s the sort of things I can spend my precious time being worried about.
Getting off social media and not reading the news has helped, or rather getting my news delivered via Monica (“did you hear about …., she “appears” to handle it better … “appears”) or via occasionally watching the news presented by a late night comedian. Get the anxiety already filtered down into manageable-for-me bite size pieces.
Sorry, like I said, it’s usually not helpful having someone say shit like this whilst in a deep funk, nothing helps except that switch in your brain that tells you to chill the fuck out. I don’t think we’re emotionally capable of handling all this stuff, I know it seems like putting my head in the soil, but I still know what’s happening in the world, but let me worry about the things I can manage.
And I can learn to like Chinese food, it’s got to be better than the Russian shit that you guys might end up eating.
Yeah, I don't know. I thought I was worrying either about mass extinction or about edging the pond. After the US election result I was just kind of "sigh - well that's what I expected." And then, Saturday morning, this hit me out of the newspaper. We started getting the newspaper this year for... reasons.
And the fact is, it came at a time when I was already stressed out.
Something I am noticing with this is that literally everyone I have spoken to about this has said something about burying their head, or something similar and that's really new for what's happening now. I mean, there have always been a lot of people responding like that but this time it's everyone - literally everyone except one person I spoke to.
People always talk about "systemic change" and this confuses me.
What if the way to stop these crazed billionaires, these wanna-be-facists, these corporate monopolies is to simply stop giving them the attention they crave, stop paying for their shit, stop shopping at their stores, stop reading news about them.
Maintaining some sanity is going to be very important if shit gets real. I've got a friend who's been (excitedly?? enthusiastically??) writing about collapse for years, he's probably the most prepared, skill-wise, for surviving a low energy future, if it should happen. And yet last year, a drought year and all the shit going on in the world, it broke him mentally.
How are we meant to help others if we can't help ourselves?
There's so much to distract us, try not to let it get to you, all this high level of anxiety and stress, it's not healthy.
Are you getting enough sleep?
Thanks for asking. I wasn't - obviously - I mean I recorded that thing at 2am or something. For the rest of the week, I would wake up in the small hours (as I think I usually do) and then, instead of going back to sleep, think 'oh shit' and have some kind of anxiety attack, I suppose.
The thing is, I guess that if I were going to do anything as radical as you have done with my life, then it would be because of exactly such a week of lost sleep - or rather more than that.
Sitting outside drinking tea on a bright spring morning, toddler asleep in his buggy and a couple of bombers going over. it's whiskey-flavoured tea. Bit weird really.
I'm sorry Nicholas, I might have been a bit casual about the Russian food comment. Things are obviously a lot worse there than I understood them to be (having just mistakenly watched some ... ummm..., news from the white house)
haha, no it took a lot more than lost sleep for me to do this (my normal wake up time is about 4-4:30, sometimes earlier). We had a bit of a traumatic life shattering event happen to us here, it causes you to reassess what's important. Things like having a retirement fund, or providing for your childrens college fund become less important. Economically the worst decision I've ever made, so I'd never recommend it, but I'm loving it. I'm with my family every day, no bosses, etc. Living for the moment, etc etc. I doubt I'll be on my deathbed and regretting that I didn't have enough money.
Wish I could share a few whiskeys with you sometime!
And another thing to add, when I was living in the US, my boss was well over retirement age and had no ability to retire. His pension had been wiped out by the dotcom bubble burst. It made me realise that we tend to take a lot of things for granted about our financial security with banks and retirement funds etc. As much as I hate the idea of private land ownership, it just seemed a little more secure than money in a bank. I mean they can still take land away from people, but I imagine it's a lot easier to scrub some ones and zeros from a bank account.
I think I spent a lot of time thinking of all the possible scenarios, and I was going through quite a doomer stage at that point, and it just seemed the likelihood of me making it happily to old age and dying naturally was pretty slim. Now, I'm not so sure, I tend to try not to think about those things anymore. Especially with two young girls. Did you ever see the movie High Fidelity, the premise of it being "does listening to sad music make you a sad person?". I used to listen to a lot of, as Monica would call it, slit-your-wrists sort of music haha.
(by the way, congratulations on the toddler!)
I like that you write from the far side of certainty, looking directly at what is so hard to look at. I wish more people would do that, more writing WAS that, mine included. You seem to have taken on the shadow of humanity. That's a lot. I hope give yourself a break once in a while. You deserve it, good man.
I am with my family going on the bus to the Botanic Gardens. It is a beautiful day. And I really appreciated this comment. I felt really weird after putting that out there.
I'm glad you did put it out there. I think we all feel such things, and not in neat, orderly ways. It's ragged and guttering. Thank you for going there for us. And enjoy the Gardens.
This was not 'too gloomy'. These are things we need to think about in the night, sometimes. Otherwise, our faith, or lack of it, are facile. And you are right about yet another 'F'.
Facts matter.
And neither of those was what I was thinking of. It means a surprising amount to just have someone say something nice.