ORGANIC TECHNOLOGY

When the Old Systems Collapse — What Will We Have Left?

The current situation is only a warm-up. But what we are seeing is our enormous capacity for rapid change. And that there is still hope.

Mother Earth is alive. And we are a part of her, not her master as we have been foolishly taught for so very long.

The coronavirus, in my humble opinion, is merely a shot across the bow from the immune system of the living planet. It’s a hint of much worse things to potentially come. And if we as humankind choose to keep sticking our fingers in our ears and closing our eyes and hearts to what has been happening to the biosphere at large, it’s only going to be the first crisis of many.

The hope part of this piece comes in the recognition that maybe we are up for the challenge. All we have to do to make big changes is to all be scared into thinking we’re going to die from lungs coated in fluids.

Gee. Nice, right?

Maybe this coronavirus thing is going to have the silver lining of waking us up globally and kickstarting the movement away from fear and towards more love and trust overall. Maybe I’m just being optimistic, but maybe not. Maybe it’s just a messenger, sent to us as Kristin Flyntz wrote in her amazing letter here.

Here’s an excerpt:

We are not well. None of us; all of us are suffering. Last year, the firestorms that scorched the lungs of the earth did not give you pause. Nor the typhoons in Africa, China, Japan. Nor the fevered climates in Japan and India. You have not been listening. It is hard to listen when you are so busy all the time, hustling to uphold the comforts and conveniences that scaffold your lives. But the foundation is giving way, buckling under the weight of your needs and desires. We will help you. We will bring the firestorms to your body We will bring the fever to your body We will bring the burning, searing, and flooding to your lungs that you might hear: We are not well. Despite what you might think or feel, we are not the enemy. We are Messenger. We are Ally. We are a balancing force. We are asking you: To stop, to be still, to listen.

But we are here and listening. Do you see us?

The holistic counterculture has been building up for many years now, and we have a functional nervous system these days thanks to the connections we’ve made via the internet.

Let’s hope that it’s enough.

#Onelove

I like to sign off on many of my posts and comments with #onelove and this is why —

• When we see how a tiny virus can spread through our collective lungs across the entire planet in a matter of weeks, how can we not see that we share the same breath?
• When we understand how intimately interconnected we are across location, race, age, sex, and any other superficial demarcation we use to define ourselves— how do we continue to use violence and domination to suppress one another?
• When we start to fearfully realize that without our lungs working to provide oxygen to our organs, our whole body will die. And that this illness parallels what is going on with Mother Earth herself?

If we start to realize that the complex tangle of life, death, plants, forests, animals, people, air, water, land, and sea, etc. are the cells, organs, and biological processes of Mother Gaia, suddenly the drastic changes being called for by the environmental movement start to make a whole lot more sense.

Would you drink Drano if someone would pay you to do it?

Would you stuff trash into your own flesh, if it cut your monthly cost of living?

Would you shove fracking fluid into your body to pull out energy and burn it to pull the smoke back into your lungs, just because it made a ton of money?

Would you cut off your own skin to drill into the bones of your body underneath if it was lucrative enough?

I hope your answer to these ridiculous questions is a resounding NO!

We are indeed, all one. And we need to start acting like it.

This is about far more than cutting or offsetting carbon emissions. This is about redefining our place in the world as human beings. This is about how we choose to relate to life itself. This is about the agreements we make about making this relationship work.

The importance of the economy pales in comparison to the importance of being able to breathe. We all know this.

Yet we continue to chase what we think of as the almighty dollar, barely ever taking time to stop and breathe and reflect. Now many of us have a chance to make time. So, what are you doing for the next few weeks?

We have entered our rite of passage as a species. And we are now facing death, in many cases quite literally. This rite and the standoff with dying has been offered to us as a gift to help us find our soul purpose in the world. We are being asked to rise above our egos and come together to survive and to evolve.

To all the naysayers who say there is no time, just take a look around at what’s happening during the outbreak of this pandemic and see what’s possible to change.

There is still hope. But we must choose to use this coronavirus situation to wake us up, not to shut us all down. And we need to contemplate the relationship of our individual lives, our local ecosystems, and the global challenge we’re all facing together.

The money system as we know it is completely broken.

I was reading a piece by umair haque today that talked about how a mere 400 or so people control and hoard the wealth that the other 7.99999999995 need to thrive. He’s so right. And it’s SO OBVIOUS!

Charles Eisenstein calls the financial system a “flesh-eating bacteria” that is destroying life as we know it. And it’s not that money itself is evil. It’s how we are choosing to use the money on a collective level — to exploit the powerless and hoard the resources that support life out of a sense of overblown fear.

Our world is governed by exploitation and abuse, whether of the planet, each other, democracy, the future, organized by bands of brothers, for their own selfish advantage.

Money is merely a construct or an agreement. It’s as ephemeral a measure of value as the definition of a word. We can choose to change the agreements around money in an instant if we so choose. But we have to be brave enough to choose. We have to choose how to value life, not money itself.

The trickle-down theory of economics does not work when the trickle has dried up and is held in place at the top of the mountain by a sense of fear, lack, shame, and hatred.

And people with a ton of money are going to be just as hungry and displaced as the rest of us when the shit hits the fan and the global systems put in place by our current ignorance fall apart.

We have lost our sense of the sacred.

With all of our technological progress and achievements, we have lost our sense of wonder and awe. We have lost the humility that comes from being part of this amazing thing called life. And we are withering for this choice.

It’s been going on for a long time now. The current crisis just shines a light on something that many of us have always known.

Life creates and supports the conditions for life. Our past choices have shown that money and profit were more important than life itself. This is simply not true.

Now life is coming to kick our butts and teach us a lesson. It’s time to change course. It’s time for us all to take our heads out of our butts and pay attention. Or face the consequences of our mistaken ideology of worshiping at the altar of profit.

I love my old people, but damn, so many of this generation are resistant to change. With a few notably enlightened exceptions, much of the elder generation continues to vote for fear, hatred, aggression, and regression. That’s simply not going to work. Maybe the coronavirus is simply working to speed up the refresh of the paradigm.

It’s not a nice way to do it, but…

The pressure has built up from the planet, the children, and the youth. Maybe the coronavirus is just here to assist the resistance and help us make the changes we need?

The importance of the economy pales in comparison to the importance of being able to breathe. We all know this.

It’s brutal, yes, but c’mon people, it’s not like this is the first time the planet has asked us to change. Like when you are talking to a small child who ignores your first 27 polite requests for compliance, eventually, you have to raise your voice to get the attention they need. The planet needs our attention. Are we going to give it to her?

As I said, this pandemic is merely a warmup for what will happen when our global systems actually collapse. Like, for real. Right now they are simply taking an unexpected vacation from business as usual. Schools are closed until April 3rd, and then we’re at risk of going back to business as usual. That’s almost scarier than COVID-19!

But what happens when there are no grocery stores where we can go to stock up? What happens when multiple deadly viruses and fungi crop up with the changing temperatures and threaten the lives of all human beings with something like Valley Fever? What happens when there is no clean water to drink?

That’s going to be a hell of a lot more inconvenient than running out of toilet paper.

It’s time to wake up. Right now.

It’s time to make the big changes we are being called on to make. We must stop making excuses as to why this will not happen and simply do it.

It’s time to stop grasping for power and attempting to rule over one another through fear and domination. It’s time to reclaim the partnership paradigm of egalitarian respect for others, both human and otherwise.

It’s time to start realizing that we must work together with other people, all the living and non-living pieces of the planet, and ourselves.

It’s time to stop using botox to mask the effects of aging. Time to stop worrying if we will always unlovable because of the shape of our body or the condition of our career. Time to stop hating other people, building walls, and trolling the internet content of other people. Time to stop electing politicians that rule us with fear while bungling the management of our shared ecosystems.

It’s time to relinquish the habit of fear. Fear itself is adaptive. Chronic fear is not. Like money, fear isn’t evil. It’s the state of living in fear 98% of the time and numbing ourselves to the world because we’re fucking scared of life.

The coronavirus is resonating with our generalized morphic field of fear, scarcity, and uncertainty. This field has blanketed our collective consciousness for 5 millennia and then some. And this is where the panic is arising from.

What can we choose instead?

The mystics have said it all along. You have but to read the words of Rumi, Khalil Gibran, any of the prophets of any religion (before the religion got screwed up by people and their fear complexes). Try taking some psychedelics. You can plug right the fuck in to the truth. Yes, you.

The answer lies in love. It lies in wonder. It lives in humility and the lived awareness of the sense of interbeing.

The new story lies in learning to communicate with respect. It comes from the realization that we’re all children of the divine source of life. It lies in learning to live with civility, love, and patience for all the things that take a long time, but bring great pleasure.

It does not lie in the relentless pressured and overwhelming race to survive within the scarcity mindset created by the current money system.

We are all one. We still have time. We just have to choose to pivot and reset our course.

The work to heal all that we have harmed in our ignorant adolescence is going to be huge, but it’s also going to be amazing and challenging and lots of fun.

But we have to choose it. It’s the only viable choice.

Where do you stand?

More love via words:

Kaia Tingley is a writer, artist, podcaster, digital strategy nerd, and sometimes hot-tempered supernova with a wild, free soul. You can find her on Instagram here or on LinkedIn here.