I feel all the usual feelings one would at witnessing such a thing but throughout my life I’ve seen this horror play out again and again, in what seems lately, like an ever increasing crescendo. Now I feel like I’m over it. I just see the absolute folly of it all. If war was the practice of lobotomy I think I’m at the stage where we go “you know what? This lobotomy thing we’ve been doing doesn’t seem to be working out so well.” And at that point we all just stop and never do it again because we know it’s just sheer stupidity. I’ve seen this show, I’ve heard this song. I know how it goes right to the end. I don’t feel I need to do it again. This might all sound kind of dispassionate but if you keep whacking yourself in the face with a stick and refuse to stop, after a while people are going to stop trying to convince you of the negatives of face whacking. They’ll give up and let you just whack away. That’s where I’m at. I’m just watching the face get bloodier and bloodier and I’m thinking well ... I thought you might have worked this one out by now humanity and you haven’t. I dunno? Maybe you aren’t going to make it after all.
The Azeris and the Turks eradicated Artsakh just a fortnight ago; surely it was in the air already? As in death and misery and mass murder occurring on a comparable scale? And didn’t that maw begin to open earlier, much earlier, anyway? We pick up things from the aethyrs, and I’d be the last person to deny that, but how much is our awareness triggered by what makes it into the media? Then again, I am but cataloguing peripheral reactions. There are numerous levels on which all of this is being processed. Some part of the spectator has transcended shock and entered a state of sheer morbid fascination, hypnotized by the rhythm of morbid tableaux, compassion circuts overloaded and beginning to erupt in bright cascades of blood red sparks.
And, of course, an old fault line splitting the left has just become a gaping abyss. Kinda hard not to take sides, and to do so with wild abandon, eh?
Sometimes i see a dying bee on the hot black tarmac of my driveway and no matter what i do with my uncertain offerings of sweet flowers, sugar water, a shady spot under a leaf, that little bee rotates, flips and spasms, seemingly demented or possessed until i walk away. Later, i return to find it dead and wonder if our toxic world caused this and if i could have done something else, or if it was simply exhibiting natural death throes. My heart becomes that bee, rotating and flipping in spasms with the uncertainty of what to do and i am afraid that if i see another bee die and can do nothing to save it, my heart will also die because the only action i can take is to stop caring.
Isn’t it really about our realization that this was coming; always coming? We kept saying it… the debt, the betting on the future, the lack of accountability for one’s own well being, and WE kept telling them it isn’t sustainable. We kept foretelling that one day the camel would fold. We said, over and over, none of this is real, and all of it is. And, now it’s here. And, the they that are them are still denying it and pretending we can spend (on munitions and other peoples’ lives) our way out of it.
So much to say here. I don’t know that I agree with your assertion that “this” is the shift. I think the shift happened a long time ago; this is yet another consequence of the shift. And I’m sad. I’m not angry anymore. Que será será.
1995, while still acting as a christian clergy, i wrote a litany, the refrain of which is "What is broken is revealed." The short stanzas were very reflective of your quotes from Gordon White, including one about how a broken heart reveals a greater capacity for love; broken chains reveal the feeling of freedom, and so on. And once, while working for hospice, I put my hand over my heart, because I had a sudden pain. The nurses were concerned and sent me to my doctor, who did a raft of exams. She said, There is nothing physically wrong with you. Your physical health is perfect. Tell me what is going on in your life. So, I told her. Ah, she said, I am diagnosing you with a broken heart. And, I said, Ah, so that is what a broken heart feels like. The heart remembers its history, as it does these days.
My heart is weary and looking for restfulness. I've been learning about the role of economics in these large, drawn out conflicts, and that adds feelings of guilt to my heart.
Gordon's closing lines above resonate with me. The pathos it radiates makes me feel a kind of bittersweet resignation: we are only half human with a promise of becoming fully human if we so choose.
There is a long story behind these feelings; but as a brief summary, "I believe we are spiritual beings with a mission in the physical universe".
Why do I choose to believe this? That is another long story along philosophical pathways (if the mixed metaphor can be excused).
For most of my life I've had a sense that we're rushing toward some confluence of inevitabilities, none of which on their own would be desirable, all of which together are going to irreparably change how we live and how we see our present and future. Every time something like this happens that storm looms closer.
When I was a kid, decades ago, it was way off on the horizon and it seemed less certain. Now it is nearly overhead, and everyone is behaving as if they can't see beyond the next hour, even if they don't know why. We can only guess at how bad it's going to be, and what life will be like after it passes, but we're past the point of debating whether it's coming.
It falls to us and our descendants to pay the price for poor decisions made in the last few centuries. That's our lot. Accepting that has been difficult, but I'm past grieving. Mostly past it. There's only so much you can do to harden yourself. While the absurdity of it all sometimes invites laughter, things like this are not very funny, and there will be more like it than anyone should have to bear.
Yeah, absolutely -- confluences of inevitability. Like watching a storm hit in slow motion, but faster than you can move. Reminds me of these dreams I used to have as a child, when someone is chasing you but you can only walk really slow.
I feel angry and afraid. I am depressed. I want to lash out. I want to hide. I want to take my family somewhere way out in the woods. I want to build a community of people out in the same woods. I don't know if my feelings are my feelings or if I have been trained to feel this way. I can't know if unresolved trauma will even allow me to feel my actual emotions. I enjoy everything that other people around the world are fighting and dying for, but still, I'm not content.
No amount of knowledge or time passed seems to lessen the impact of these types of events on me. I'm unfortunately not jaded. I still am shocked every time. I saw things online the other day that will haunt me forever. I'm no revolutionary but I am guided by love, I hope. I feel like participation in the industrial growth society is a waste of time and we should just stop doing it. I also feel like ranting. lol
I got the news alert on my phone and I thought, oh, I guess this is the end of the world. And then I went about my daily life because I don't know what else to do. I didn't realize how much I've numbed myself to the tragedy of it all until I read your post.
A few months ago I read John Michael Greer's essay about how we're in the "long decline" of civilization and it made all the sense to me. I don't feel sad about the idea of civilization declining, but I wish there didn't have to be so much violence and suffering on the way down. I feel helpless and angry and sad.
Oct 11, 2023·edited Oct 11, 2023Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
I think there is something real and true in the notion of "the heart" ... which isn't the pulsing, muscular multichamber 'pump' of William Harvey's description. In chi gung and Tai chi ... and traditional Chinese medicine there is the middle of the Three Dantian which corresponds with the heart area. And some of India's traditions there is the notion of the chakras, one of which is the heart. Or, rather, it is located near the heart, and is conceived not as the physical heart organ, per se, but as an "energetic" center in "the subtle body" -- or something to this effect.
The heart chakra of Indian subtle / energetic / emotional cartography is called anahata, a word meaning literally "unstruck". I once read that it is called unstruck because it is like a musical instrument which vibrates without its "strings" having been struck or plucked. It just has its vibration, and does what it does without the need of the intervention of strumming, stroking, plucking.... It's a nice image. I can remember feeling that and knowing just what they mean. And the word "unstruck" also evoked for me a sense of nothing having been injured, broken, harmed -- a sense of it not being strikable in a harmful way, not really. Not ultimately.
But I haven't had that kind of innocence in a long time.
There is a place in my spine, just behind the area where the heart chakra is said to be, which has been constrained, tormented, I dunno... just fucked up... for a long time. Maybe this is the residue of too many heartbreaks? Too many blows. Too much shock and horror. I haven't had direct, conscious access to a certain quality of innocence -- for years. And I'm now worn out and tired.
The various wars ... Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and this latest one in Israel / Palestine ... have combined with other injuries to my heart, most notably the complete and utter lack of an appropriate response to the climate and ecological crises (metacrisis, polycrisis...). I can feel ... a sense of hopelessness, a dwindling capacity for hope in the form of believing in the possibility of healing and ... appropriate responsiveness ... in our world. A feeling that nothing I could do -- or not do -- can really make a difference in relation to the general pattern in our world, a pattern of endless atrocities and horrors ... which I can see and feel but which I cannot lately feel will ever cease to be. History seems to me an unending pattern of exploitation, abuse, violence and just plain horrors. And when my heart was less ruined I felt that my life could matter, that I could offer something. But now I just feel utterly overwhelmed with sorrows which have no balm, no hope of healing or resolving. It is overwhelming, and so it is all trauma. For that is what trauma is. It is a state of overwhelm.
I'm appreciating your question and feeling into "my heart". On this matter it's still being distracted by "my head", which has been observing a kind of morally righteous gloating from right wing commentators over the apparently celebratory response of some of "the left", though I haven't been following the news itself so I don't actually know what is really going on with that. My head can't really get around what's going on. My heart centre felt more while watching the World Council of Health expert hearing on the DNA "contamination" in the covid jabs on Monday, and the feelings were of a kind of yearning, gaping sadness. At one level a helplessness and at another a deep understanding that all these events are all part of one process of disclosure that we cannot avoid going through, though how we go through it is up to each one of us - that we are not as helpless as we believe we are.
Feeling for your heart too, Rhyd, and for everyone else's here. Much love to all.
Part of my feeling has certainly come from watching that strange right/left thing, which is actually a bit of a re-orientation for each side, but neither side realises they are doing it.
I'm seeing comments on a Giles Fraser Unherd article simply saying that what's happened is terrible, what's happened to the Palestinians is also terrible, and we need more love and empathy all round, getting a high number of downticks. This leaves me speechless and very uneasy.
Oct 11, 2023·edited Oct 11, 2023Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
I want to add something to what I said a moment ago.
I've come to understand the notion of "self" as referring to something (though not a thing, really) which is a thousand percent (meaning utterly) relational. It (and I, and you) emerges and exists only in relation, as relations. It is nothing else. We are nothing else.
That's why what's happening in Israel / Palestine is overwhelming for me. It's happening to me -- not to some distant others. Whatever happens to anyone happens to me. Every injury borne of non-love is my injury. This sounds a lot like what Jesus said, doesn't it? Whatever you do unto others you do unto me, he said. (I'm both not a Christian and I am a Christian in just this way.)
But it wasn't something unique to Jesus, this being all intertwined at every level of being. That I have it too means only that you have it too. Jesus wasn't all that uniquely special, I suspect. He knew something about how the world is which is like knowing a basic fact of the nature of things. His wine grapes grew in sunlight. His bread grew in sunlight ... and air and water. That's why when any of us drink wine and eat bread we are imbibing one another. It's physics, yes. But whatever vibrates in the heart isn't merely internal to a 'self' as if a self were a thing, an object. We're relational beings through and through. Whatever we do unto one another we do unto ourselves.
Oct 11, 2023·edited Oct 11, 2023Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
My heart is breaking over the thought that it doesn't have to be this way. My heart breaks when I truly believe that it doesn't have to be this way, but that we are choosing to go down this path.
But maybe I am wrong, maybe it does have to be this way? I don't really know.
My heart is breaking when I see people literally calling for genocide, of anyone, it doesn't matter. I see people calling for genocide and that really breaks my heart (of course, they don't use this word, and deny that that is what they want, but it is in fact they want).
It also breaks my heart that it appears that a lot of people seem to not even want to try anymore. After 75 years, there is so much hatred and grief on both sides, that it just seems impossible, because the people who could do something about it are just so trapped in the past and all of the terrible things that have come before. This latest has just made it worse for everyone. Most people seem to be retreating to their usual positions, though now more extreme.
It breaks my heart when I read people who seem to genuinely care about people in some situations, e.g., when covering covid or the vaccines, and then immediately turn around and advocate for indiscriminate bombing of Gaza.
It breaks my heart that there is so much unhealed grief and trauma. My heart breaks for the Jewish people; has there been any other group in history so consistently oppressed and reviled? It breaks my heart to see this group of people, deserving of compassion, turn their trauma onto another group of people, doing to these others what was done to them.
It breaks my heart that healing is possible, but we chose to pretend it is not. It breaks my heart that we pretend what will really heal us is for those evil people to done away with.
It breaks my heart that a Jewish mother loses her child. It breaks my heart even more that she then turns around and demands an Arab woman lose her child. It breaks my heart that an Arab woman loses her child. It breaks my heart even more that she then turns around and demands a Jewish woman lose her child.
Lastly, for now, this piece I read yesterday broke my heart:
I feel all the usual feelings one would at witnessing such a thing but throughout my life I’ve seen this horror play out again and again, in what seems lately, like an ever increasing crescendo. Now I feel like I’m over it. I just see the absolute folly of it all. If war was the practice of lobotomy I think I’m at the stage where we go “you know what? This lobotomy thing we’ve been doing doesn’t seem to be working out so well.” And at that point we all just stop and never do it again because we know it’s just sheer stupidity. I’ve seen this show, I’ve heard this song. I know how it goes right to the end. I don’t feel I need to do it again. This might all sound kind of dispassionate but if you keep whacking yourself in the face with a stick and refuse to stop, after a while people are going to stop trying to convince you of the negatives of face whacking. They’ll give up and let you just whack away. That’s where I’m at. I’m just watching the face get bloodier and bloodier and I’m thinking well ... I thought you might have worked this one out by now humanity and you haven’t. I dunno? Maybe you aren’t going to make it after all.
Thank you for this.
The Azeris and the Turks eradicated Artsakh just a fortnight ago; surely it was in the air already? As in death and misery and mass murder occurring on a comparable scale? And didn’t that maw begin to open earlier, much earlier, anyway? We pick up things from the aethyrs, and I’d be the last person to deny that, but how much is our awareness triggered by what makes it into the media? Then again, I am but cataloguing peripheral reactions. There are numerous levels on which all of this is being processed. Some part of the spectator has transcended shock and entered a state of sheer morbid fascination, hypnotized by the rhythm of morbid tableaux, compassion circuts overloaded and beginning to erupt in bright cascades of blood red sparks.
And, of course, an old fault line splitting the left has just become a gaping abyss. Kinda hard not to take sides, and to do so with wild abandon, eh?
I feel this. Thank you.
Sometimes i see a dying bee on the hot black tarmac of my driveway and no matter what i do with my uncertain offerings of sweet flowers, sugar water, a shady spot under a leaf, that little bee rotates, flips and spasms, seemingly demented or possessed until i walk away. Later, i return to find it dead and wonder if our toxic world caused this and if i could have done something else, or if it was simply exhibiting natural death throes. My heart becomes that bee, rotating and flipping in spasms with the uncertainty of what to do and i am afraid that if i see another bee die and can do nothing to save it, my heart will also die because the only action i can take is to stop caring.
Oh wow, thank you for this. That really describes how my heart feels right now.
<sigh - deep breath - long slow exhale>
Isn’t it really about our realization that this was coming; always coming? We kept saying it… the debt, the betting on the future, the lack of accountability for one’s own well being, and WE kept telling them it isn’t sustainable. We kept foretelling that one day the camel would fold. We said, over and over, none of this is real, and all of it is. And, now it’s here. And, the they that are them are still denying it and pretending we can spend (on munitions and other peoples’ lives) our way out of it.
So much to say here. I don’t know that I agree with your assertion that “this” is the shift. I think the shift happened a long time ago; this is yet another consequence of the shift. And I’m sad. I’m not angry anymore. Que será será.
Sad, not angry -- yes. That's how I feel.
1995, while still acting as a christian clergy, i wrote a litany, the refrain of which is "What is broken is revealed." The short stanzas were very reflective of your quotes from Gordon White, including one about how a broken heart reveals a greater capacity for love; broken chains reveal the feeling of freedom, and so on. And once, while working for hospice, I put my hand over my heart, because I had a sudden pain. The nurses were concerned and sent me to my doctor, who did a raft of exams. She said, There is nothing physically wrong with you. Your physical health is perfect. Tell me what is going on in your life. So, I told her. Ah, she said, I am diagnosing you with a broken heart. And, I said, Ah, so that is what a broken heart feels like. The heart remembers its history, as it does these days.
That is beautiful. Thank you.
My heart is weary and looking for restfulness. I've been learning about the role of economics in these large, drawn out conflicts, and that adds feelings of guilt to my heart.
Gordon's closing lines above resonate with me. The pathos it radiates makes me feel a kind of bittersweet resignation: we are only half human with a promise of becoming fully human if we so choose.
There is a long story behind these feelings; but as a brief summary, "I believe we are spiritual beings with a mission in the physical universe".
Why do I choose to believe this? That is another long story along philosophical pathways (if the mixed metaphor can be excused).
For most of my life I've had a sense that we're rushing toward some confluence of inevitabilities, none of which on their own would be desirable, all of which together are going to irreparably change how we live and how we see our present and future. Every time something like this happens that storm looms closer.
When I was a kid, decades ago, it was way off on the horizon and it seemed less certain. Now it is nearly overhead, and everyone is behaving as if they can't see beyond the next hour, even if they don't know why. We can only guess at how bad it's going to be, and what life will be like after it passes, but we're past the point of debating whether it's coming.
It falls to us and our descendants to pay the price for poor decisions made in the last few centuries. That's our lot. Accepting that has been difficult, but I'm past grieving. Mostly past it. There's only so much you can do to harden yourself. While the absurdity of it all sometimes invites laughter, things like this are not very funny, and there will be more like it than anyone should have to bear.
Yeah, absolutely -- confluences of inevitability. Like watching a storm hit in slow motion, but faster than you can move. Reminds me of these dreams I used to have as a child, when someone is chasing you but you can only walk really slow.
Yes, this is so well expressed.
I feel angry and afraid. I am depressed. I want to lash out. I want to hide. I want to take my family somewhere way out in the woods. I want to build a community of people out in the same woods. I don't know if my feelings are my feelings or if I have been trained to feel this way. I can't know if unresolved trauma will even allow me to feel my actual emotions. I enjoy everything that other people around the world are fighting and dying for, but still, I'm not content.
No amount of knowledge or time passed seems to lessen the impact of these types of events on me. I'm unfortunately not jaded. I still am shocked every time. I saw things online the other day that will haunt me forever. I'm no revolutionary but I am guided by love, I hope. I feel like participation in the industrial growth society is a waste of time and we should just stop doing it. I also feel like ranting. lol
thank you for you.
Thank you for you, too, and for what you wrote.
I got the news alert on my phone and I thought, oh, I guess this is the end of the world. And then I went about my daily life because I don't know what else to do. I didn't realize how much I've numbed myself to the tragedy of it all until I read your post.
A few months ago I read John Michael Greer's essay about how we're in the "long decline" of civilization and it made all the sense to me. I don't feel sad about the idea of civilization declining, but I wish there didn't have to be so much violence and suffering on the way down. I feel helpless and angry and sad.
Same
Very long decline, and in it's like we don't know how long it will really be, it just keeps declining...
I think there is something real and true in the notion of "the heart" ... which isn't the pulsing, muscular multichamber 'pump' of William Harvey's description. In chi gung and Tai chi ... and traditional Chinese medicine there is the middle of the Three Dantian which corresponds with the heart area. And some of India's traditions there is the notion of the chakras, one of which is the heart. Or, rather, it is located near the heart, and is conceived not as the physical heart organ, per se, but as an "energetic" center in "the subtle body" -- or something to this effect.
The heart chakra of Indian subtle / energetic / emotional cartography is called anahata, a word meaning literally "unstruck". I once read that it is called unstruck because it is like a musical instrument which vibrates without its "strings" having been struck or plucked. It just has its vibration, and does what it does without the need of the intervention of strumming, stroking, plucking.... It's a nice image. I can remember feeling that and knowing just what they mean. And the word "unstruck" also evoked for me a sense of nothing having been injured, broken, harmed -- a sense of it not being strikable in a harmful way, not really. Not ultimately.
But I haven't had that kind of innocence in a long time.
There is a place in my spine, just behind the area where the heart chakra is said to be, which has been constrained, tormented, I dunno... just fucked up... for a long time. Maybe this is the residue of too many heartbreaks? Too many blows. Too much shock and horror. I haven't had direct, conscious access to a certain quality of innocence -- for years. And I'm now worn out and tired.
The various wars ... Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and this latest one in Israel / Palestine ... have combined with other injuries to my heart, most notably the complete and utter lack of an appropriate response to the climate and ecological crises (metacrisis, polycrisis...). I can feel ... a sense of hopelessness, a dwindling capacity for hope in the form of believing in the possibility of healing and ... appropriate responsiveness ... in our world. A feeling that nothing I could do -- or not do -- can really make a difference in relation to the general pattern in our world, a pattern of endless atrocities and horrors ... which I can see and feel but which I cannot lately feel will ever cease to be. History seems to me an unending pattern of exploitation, abuse, violence and just plain horrors. And when my heart was less ruined I felt that my life could matter, that I could offer something. But now I just feel utterly overwhelmed with sorrows which have no balm, no hope of healing or resolving. It is overwhelming, and so it is all trauma. For that is what trauma is. It is a state of overwhelm.
My heart is overwhelmed.
"I haven't had direct, conscious access to a certain quality of innocence -- for years. And I'm now worn out and tired."
So much.
Thank you for all of this.
I'm appreciating your question and feeling into "my heart". On this matter it's still being distracted by "my head", which has been observing a kind of morally righteous gloating from right wing commentators over the apparently celebratory response of some of "the left", though I haven't been following the news itself so I don't actually know what is really going on with that. My head can't really get around what's going on. My heart centre felt more while watching the World Council of Health expert hearing on the DNA "contamination" in the covid jabs on Monday, and the feelings were of a kind of yearning, gaping sadness. At one level a helplessness and at another a deep understanding that all these events are all part of one process of disclosure that we cannot avoid going through, though how we go through it is up to each one of us - that we are not as helpless as we believe we are.
Feeling for your heart too, Rhyd, and for everyone else's here. Much love to all.
Part of my feeling has certainly come from watching that strange right/left thing, which is actually a bit of a re-orientation for each side, but neither side realises they are doing it.
I'm seeing comments on a Giles Fraser Unherd article simply saying that what's happened is terrible, what's happened to the Palestinians is also terrible, and we need more love and empathy all round, getting a high number of downticks. This leaves me speechless and very uneasy.
I want to add something to what I said a moment ago.
I've come to understand the notion of "self" as referring to something (though not a thing, really) which is a thousand percent (meaning utterly) relational. It (and I, and you) emerges and exists only in relation, as relations. It is nothing else. We are nothing else.
That's why what's happening in Israel / Palestine is overwhelming for me. It's happening to me -- not to some distant others. Whatever happens to anyone happens to me. Every injury borne of non-love is my injury. This sounds a lot like what Jesus said, doesn't it? Whatever you do unto others you do unto me, he said. (I'm both not a Christian and I am a Christian in just this way.)
But it wasn't something unique to Jesus, this being all intertwined at every level of being. That I have it too means only that you have it too. Jesus wasn't all that uniquely special, I suspect. He knew something about how the world is which is like knowing a basic fact of the nature of things. His wine grapes grew in sunlight. His bread grew in sunlight ... and air and water. That's why when any of us drink wine and eat bread we are imbibing one another. It's physics, yes. But whatever vibrates in the heart isn't merely internal to a 'self' as if a self were a thing, an object. We're relational beings through and through. Whatever we do unto one another we do unto ourselves.
My heart is breaking over the thought that it doesn't have to be this way. My heart breaks when I truly believe that it doesn't have to be this way, but that we are choosing to go down this path.
But maybe I am wrong, maybe it does have to be this way? I don't really know.
My heart is breaking when I see people literally calling for genocide, of anyone, it doesn't matter. I see people calling for genocide and that really breaks my heart (of course, they don't use this word, and deny that that is what they want, but it is in fact they want).
It also breaks my heart that it appears that a lot of people seem to not even want to try anymore. After 75 years, there is so much hatred and grief on both sides, that it just seems impossible, because the people who could do something about it are just so trapped in the past and all of the terrible things that have come before. This latest has just made it worse for everyone. Most people seem to be retreating to their usual positions, though now more extreme.
It breaks my heart when I read people who seem to genuinely care about people in some situations, e.g., when covering covid or the vaccines, and then immediately turn around and advocate for indiscriminate bombing of Gaza.
It breaks my heart that there is so much unhealed grief and trauma. My heart breaks for the Jewish people; has there been any other group in history so consistently oppressed and reviled? It breaks my heart to see this group of people, deserving of compassion, turn their trauma onto another group of people, doing to these others what was done to them.
It breaks my heart that healing is possible, but we chose to pretend it is not. It breaks my heart that we pretend what will really heal us is for those evil people to done away with.
It breaks my heart that a Jewish mother loses her child. It breaks my heart even more that she then turns around and demands an Arab woman lose her child. It breaks my heart that an Arab woman loses her child. It breaks my heart even more that she then turns around and demands a Jewish woman lose her child.
Lastly, for now, this piece I read yesterday broke my heart:
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/but-not-like-this
I highly recommend it; Sam's grief comes through in a way that I found beautiful.
This article just came to my attention, and seems to resonate with what's happening here.
The World’s Top Industrial Countries Are in Treacherous Waters
By Richard Heinberg, originally published by Resilience.org
October 11, 2023
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-11/the-worlds-top-industrial-countries-are-in-treacherous-waters/
I love that you asked this question
Because it has me sitting here with my tea
Feeling into my heart
What a simple, sacred reminder for this morning
The neighbors decided to have their trees trimmed
The past two days have been full of the sound of saws and the smell of gas fumes seeping into my open windows
And now, as I look outside, I see brown stumps
Straight lopped off branches
They used to stand tall
And the view from my second story window framed their winding branches and green leaves
Now, I look out, as I always do in the morning, and see those brown stumps
And I think, “where will the birds go?”
This really resonates with me. Thank you for such an honest and open description of grief. Where will all of the creatures go now?