Your Wild and Precious Life

[...] It seems that, in the timeless parenthesis of grief and lockdown, I’m not alone in discovering that less is more, and that every still moment contains – if you look for it – an opportunity to feel freshly and radically present in the world.

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[...] Perhaps, in this hurtling age, every such moment will come to feel more intense, more freighted with significance and more worthy of gratitude. Maybe then, the truth that we are part of the huge, intricate web of life will reclaim its rightful place. But for now, if the rucksack of stones on my back feels lighter or I even forget it’s there, or if I have a physical sensation of wellbeing, I say so. Aloud.

Sometimes, the woman whose son died does not feel broken every second of every day. Sometimes, the woman whose son died feels good. Sometimes, just a couple of months after his death, she smiles and laughs.

‘One story I frequently encounter frames the possibilities in absolutes: if we can’t win everything, then we lose everything,’ writes Rebecca Solnit. She attributes this to a narrative failure:
‘the inability to imagine a world different than the one we currently inhabit’. In A Paradise Built in Hell she writes about how in the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina, ‘elite panic’ took over, and the disaster became a socio-political catastrophe exacerbated by the authorities themselves. But the purpose of her book is to show how again and again, throughout history, ordinary citizens caught in disasters of every kind tend to cooperate heroically, and often risk their own lives in acts of altruism. In emergency situations, shock and grief do not generally cause people to behave antisocially – but institutionalised opportunism does. And in the wake of any disaster, the biggest opportunists are those in power. When they fear they may lose that power, and that the growth economy will be jeopardised, they concentrate their energies on locking it down and fortifying it further.

Now, as the planet’s crisis deepens, with temperatures rising, tipping points being breached, and epidemiologists warning that the Covid pandemic is just a taste of pandemics to come, I wonder how the competing tendencies to cooperate and to grab or maintain power will play out on a global scale when things really fall apart. The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy uses the analogy of the bardo to delineate the extremities we are likely to reach before systemic change becomes possible. She considers it inevitable that climate and ecological breakdown will lead to global economic and social collapse within decades. But as with grief, the way out is through. She posits three versions of reality that are already shaping the way ahead. The first – the ‘marching order’ of governments, the military, publicly traded corporations and the corporate-controlled media – is Business as Usual. The second she calls The Great Unravelling, because with the collapse of living structures caused by the commodification of the natural world, systems fray, precipitating the long, fraught endgame.

But it’s not quite the endgame, because there is a third story, in which salvation may yet lie: a transition to a life-sustaining society. Comparable to the agricultural and industrial revolutions in its magnitude and scope, this ecological revolution – The Great Turning – emerges after we have ‘survived’ the earlier stories and are open to becoming a society that honours its debt to the future of not just our own species, but to all the planet’s inhabitants.

[...] It comes to me that all lives and all deaths are part of an exchange within a wider web of energy – like the synapses that fire within the brain’s neural networks, like the servers and nodes of the internet that connect the world of thought, like the underground fungal systems that unite whole forests, like the complex symbiosis of marine biology on a coral reef. I am part of the life that depends on all the other life: part of a connective force whose movement is so dynamic that it is
not so much a noun as a verb, like combustion, like vibration, like expansion, like the movement of air or water, or the thrust of organic growth.