When I sit down to write a book, it is faith that keeps me at the keyboard, not certainty. Certainty would end me up with a very boring, predictable story filled with wooden characters living in a stage set world. When I reach out to a friend, it is faith that helps me listen with curiosity and share myself back. I don’t know what story we are writing but I know that it matters. What we lack when we are certain is the vibrancy and the intensity of experience. I want that, even if it means I am never on solid ground.

This past spring  I published my first book, a novel called “The Sky Was Ours” that took me more than a decade to finish. For a few more weeks, as I finish out a run of events and promotion, I’ll be too busy to face any larger existential questions about next steps. But I can already sense what’s coming after: stillness. Suddenly, it’s going to be very, very quiet. And then — I’m bracing myself for it already — I’m going to have to make some tough decisions about what to do with the next phase of my life.

As complex systems slip into a state of involuntary retraction and decline, things that once seemed solid start to crack open and come apart. When we peer into the cracks, we realize that they are portals. To enter, one must first release their tethers to the dominant cultural paradigm – a single, stale, synchronizing story – that hitches progress to inequality, entrenches emiseration, and has brought us to the brink. Letting go before it carries us where we are otherwise inexorably headed does not guarantee ease or salvation. But does leave us in proximity to possibility.

New space is opening between stories.

Although EcoGather exists and operates primarily in virtual spaces and relies upon digital community to connect across cultures, geographies, and lifeways, we often long to presence ourselves more in the spaces that we inhabit. We hold gratitude for the ability to connect through computers with a craving for tangible presence. To better balance this, we’ve been emphasizing art as a means of manifestation. A way of communicating in a less lexical manner, a way of getting to the emotional undercurrents of our work together, a way of bringing our collective imaginings and aspirations to a shared visual field.

The very fabric of modern human life as we know it was built on death – so much needed to die in order for this current form of modernity to exist. So much continues to die so that modernity can exist – the newest technologies and comforts the West insists are necessary to civilization and progress rely directly on ecocide and genocide. With this knowledge in mind, any reluctance to accept modernity’s long-overdue death comes wrapped in a sheet of denial, woven by threads of guilt and a subconscious understanding of one’s own complicity in harm.

Imagine a global network of mutually supportive local communities making mindful and appropriate use of digital, information, and communication technologies to share and exchange the non-material resources that can and should flow freely around the globe: knowledge, ideas, practices, skills, innovations, and culture. Material resources – tangible things – are sometimes exchanged among and between them, but only to the extent socially and ecologically sustainable and not primarily for the purpose of making a profit. This arrangement offers an alluring alternative to the kind of totalizing globalization that drowned out local cultures and subsumed place-based economies into a homogenized global system that extracts, exploits, and erodes the planet’s life supporting capacity.

Beginning on Friday, August 2, 2024, global financial markets took a dramatic turn that has impacted both the high-flying US tech stocks and markets in countries around the world, particularly in Japan. Many people—avid market watchers, lay investors, and collapse-attuned folks scanning the horizon for signs of worsening instability—are wondering what is happening here. I’m someone who falls into all of those categories, having been concerned about collapse before the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and watching the markets quite closely ever since, but only in a non-professional capacity. I became a member of the Sterling EcoGather community through the “Surviving the Future” courses, and have been coming here regularly to connect with others who are similarly concerned. While I claim no insight into the future, I have been able to identify a number of factors at play here that are worth noting and connecting. Additionally, while I may not be privy to the kinds of inside information available only to those who organize their entire lives and careers around finance, I am well-read on this topic, practiced in seeing the connections in complex systems, and capable of bringing a collapse aware perspective to current events—something that most financial commentators lack.

Liberation, freedom from oppression, and social justice demand of us an awareness of justice and inequality, a deep and thick empathy, and actions that organize, resource, and shape change. All of these are learned skills. We learn them from each other, from our ancestors, and from our history. We learn by taking risks, finding brave spaces, and by listening. The outcomes of this kind of learning are wellbeing, hopefulness, and optimism.

Our stories allow us to connect with folks – be it around food systems, the environment, or creating a brilliantly neuromixed world. They make it possible to feel each other’s experience. Stories usually solve more than one problem at a time – and in this case that means they can connect people with different experiences at the same time as they create a world we want to live in or even can live in for longer. They help us look in two directions at once. We are looking backwards to gather the seeds we will plant that will grow to be a world we want to inhabit in the future. This is a different kind of activism that I feel could both grow out of a neuromixed world and grow into one. Worldbuilding is not agitating for or against anything – it is the creative endeavor of moving together into the future. Something that neuroqueer folks have always had to do.

In a culture as obsessed with speaking – and feeling heard (which isn’t the same as being listened to) – as ours, it’s no wonder language first felt like a slinky to me. The fragile single helix was slinking and moving out of control, taking on the form of the plastic branding of the consumerist culture we live in. What looked like a single helix was actually a broken strand of DNA, the helix of speaking, expression, language ripped from its pair: listening.

I remember thinking of myself as a kind of sad magician, one who had spent years pulling a rabbit out of a hat in front of a live audience. I myself didn’t know how the trick worked; I only knew that when I reached into the hat, I’d always feel the heat of a huddled body, those restless ears, that reassuring scruff of fur. So I counted on the rabbit to be there. But one day, nothing. When I reached my hand inside to do the trick, I felt only the hollow of an empty hat.

We are here. And like any generation before, we cannot chart a new path forward without the support and wisdom of our elders. But we cannot do it with our elders unless you help us face and change the realities in which our young minds and bodies and spirits can no longer survive. We need you to start asking with us: what does thriving—REAL thriving—look like? What can it look like if we are brave enough to imagine new worlds, and then to build them, together, in the shell of this broken one?

We see change as a paradigm shift – a new way of thinking and seeing the world that breaks down the old systems and builds up more relational, more humane, and more collapse-responsive ways of being. Good ideas are not enough. To truly make an impact, we need to find people and build communities and coalitions – but how? That need to create connection and build bridges is THE work of change shaping. It is the heart of finding, making, and inhabiting a world in which we share care and build alternate futures.

A year to the day.

The waters fell, the waters rose. Again. Boundaries breached. Again.

Imbalance seeking its own resolution. The atmosphere holds what it can. Then water finds its level. Pulling banks into beds, collapsing edges, toppling centuries of habit and habitation, exposing roots. These waters, misplaced and muddy, overwhelm our profuse, precious human lives.

At every turn, language distills a direct experience of the world into pre-digested sound bites, transmitting to me in a moment what took my ancestors an impossibly long time to discover for themselves.

Language-based learning makes an incredible amount of understanding possible, and it is tempting to believe that this can replace our first-hand experience of building relationships with the living world.

It cannot.

When was the last time you sat still and knew another person, another creature, a place, or your own body, without the mediation of words?

How shall we reconcile the deep and sacred well of language with the terrifying speed at which it allows us to simplify and commodify the deep and sacred world?

Without stillness, there can be no knowing.

As the mountain of modernity erodes around us, we’ll need the actors, and the public health workers, and the engineers, and the countless other people with varied skills and passions. But we’ll need their efforts redirected. We won’t need the money-making bits of us – the parts that we are told are “marketable” or “successful.” We’ll need the powerful parts, the messy parts, the parts that threaten the savage structures of legacy systems, and the parts that can salvage the best bits of the past and present to restructure and resystem and reworld. I think we will find that those very same parts are the parts that make us human.

By now, readers likely know that Juneteenth commemorates the day upon which exuberant freedom celebrations officially reached Galveston, Texas. On June 19, 1865, General Granger brought news of emancipation — and the power to enforce the liberatory law — to the hold-out state of Texas, which was the last jurisdiction in the 10 state Confederacy to surrender. Certainly, this was a change well worth celebrating. Certainly, the project of liberation — a project that requires our collective collaboration — is far from over.

If you’re not scrutinizing the phenomenon, you might think that being an audience member is a largely passive activity, with only punctuations of active participation: a laugh, an applause, perhaps a standing ovation. I think this gets the relationship all wrong. Performer and audience is much like the relationship between speaker and listener. Contributing well to an audience requires presence and bravery. You have to let the performance change you, like rock carved by the river. And in turn, the small flecks of rock change the river, giving part of herself to the ground below the river, joining more deeply with the river. The rock and the river’s give and take, push and pull, listen and speak, is a dance.

Some of my fondest memories include shimmying vigorously alongside my wackily gyrating friends. Those memories are so dear to me because I find an unabashed dance to be a sliver of humanity: the poetic juice of a person comes out in movement in such a sincere, colorful, flavorful series of twistings and flailings and side-steppings that I can’t help but learn something intimate and unique through observation. And there is no wrong way of dancing. All dance is emotion. And every emotion is valid.

If Governor Scott really wants to protect farmers, he would work with the legislature to phase out neonics over a very short period while also providing financial support, education, and and incentives to help farmers who had been relying upon them to transition away from high-input, extractive and degrading agri-industrial systems, towards lower energy, lower input, and more sustainable systems that maintain resilience and self and community based sufficiency.