Tag: climate change

From Collapse to Sanctuary: An Appeal to Heal

Published on by Gabriel HeartmanLeave a comment

spent-planet

Industrial collapse and emotional/spiritual healing. They sound like unlikely bedfellows. There are not many voices in the grids that link the two intimately. Those that see an imminent global economic collapse, the likes our civilization has never experienced, are still mired in the content of convincing others that it is actually coming or what the best ways to prepare are. Not quite able to make that first step to building sanctuary. Those that are very aware of how our wounded hearts and souls have created a deeply unsustainable way of living are seeking their own healing to help themselves and the planet. But the thought of an actual collapse is swept under the proverbial rug so as to not feel the enormity of the fear that comes with that. If they continue with their healing that is all they can do to help the world change course.

The dire situation we as a species find ourselves in is a direct result of our collective emotional and spiritual wounding. The choices we have made have been to seek a medication to that wounding or a justification of our unworthiness as human beings. Organized religions and professional therapies have tried to offer a salve for the pain, but come up short on true transmutative healing and in many cases replaces one medication for another. There is a collective shadow that grows larger by the day and it seeks to be healed one way or another. The balance of life seeks equilibrium and the tipping point is soon approaching.

To project our current crisis onto the Illuminati, the Bilderbergs, the Republicrats or some other third party is a convenient way to take the co-created responsibility out of your hands and put you in state of indentured victimtude. Yes, there is corporate greed. Yes, there are those who have a shit load of power that are making things indelibly worse. But guess what, you drive the car that consumes the gas that is running out of short supply that is found in foreign countries that we want to bomb to take control of it or found in areas that can only be accessed by raping the very Earth that provides us our daily bread. You buy the products that are manufactured by the poor in poor countries who are owned by multinational corporations that have executives that earn a gazillion times more because they are really good at taking advantage of humanity. You buy the food that is raised in holocaust-type environments that use copious amounts of toxic chemicals and that spill tons of it into our waterways. The list goes on.

Now, I fully admit my own role in this co-creation. I did, and to a lesser extent still do, some of those things listed. I still own a vehicle, but is on the market. I still buy some plastic products that are the bane of this Earth. I buy produce that had to be shipped to its location. But what I am doing is transitioning. I, along with my two friends, are moving our way to sustainable sanctuary, one emotional step at a time. I do not intend to come off judgmental or holier than thou. I am intending to bring into awareness our own responsibility in the current situation and that it takes time to move from one lifestyle to another. From unconsciousness to consciousness.

Collapse and healing will be one in the same when it happens on a grander scale. When costs skyrocket or delivery is stopped, and you can’t get the things you once took for granted, there will be an emotional response. You will go through shock, anger, depression, or other uncomfortable feelings. Others will do the same. The solutions to get those old needs met will range from barter to theft and maybe worse. When medications are abruptly taken away, the parts of us that needed them will do what they need to get them back depending on the level of dependency. And I am afraid the world is full of medicinally-dependent people. I was one of them, and still have a few to heal through.

My purpose is to wake something up in someone. Make a connection or two. You may just ignore me, but you would also be ignoring yourself and I am not okay with either. You may just call me a doomer or a hypocrite (because I am using a computer which is fueled by electricity which is fueled by some non-renewable source), but you would be missing my point and I am not okay with that either. I honestly want you to wake up. I want you to take a step in the direction of real change and empowerment. For yourself, humanity, and the planet. Feel for yourself what is happening in the world and to the world. Feel what is happening inside yourself and to yourself. They are one in the same actually. And when you really feel that, you have only one choice. Take responsibility, take back your power, and heal your way to sanctuary.

Three Countries, Seven States In 14 Days: Exodus To Sanctuary

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

 

Lake Powell Lowering Water Levels
Lake Mead, Arizona- Dangerously Low Water Levels

By Jillian Vriend

This blog title has been floating around in my mind for two weeks, yet this is the first time that I’ve really had a chance to sit down and write about our journey so far. A journey that has, indeed, brought us through three countries (Canada, the United States, and Mexico) and seven states (including two in Mexico) in a short fourteen days.

We made the decision in June to leave the west coast in British Columbia, Canada and move to the pacific coast in Mexico. Motivating our decision at that time was our increasingly urgent sense that significant global collapse is coming; a collapse of industrial society that will bring the end of easy gas, easy water, easy electricity, easy food. A collapse that will call us to become self sufficient and yet compel us to be in community at the same time. I’ve written more about that here and here. We felt that the most practical course of action was to move to a place that has a long growing season, temperate weather, and is already living a more simple lifestyle with less infrastructure to collapse.

During our months of planning, we imagined many scenarios about our initial journey to get to our sanctuary, an eco village two hours south of Puerto Vallarta. Our biggest tension feelings were around my husband Wayne being able to cross the U.S. border after receiving a five year ban in 2009. He got this ban due to us living together as an engaged couple in the U.S. and after having a ‘record’ of many years of monthly crossings into the U.S. from Canada for the emotional and spiritual work that we were both involved with in Ashland, Oregon. We were outraged and devastated when he was banned at first, but adjusted our life to Canada, including raising my daughter there until she graduated from high school.Β Our plans were hopefully optimistic about Wayne being able to cross into the U.S. now that the five years were up and we hoped to do some camping in Yellowstone and Zion National Parks, and also spend a few days taking in the vortex energy in Sedona, Arizona.

However, none of that was to be. Wayne called me after being refused at the border in an attempt to cross by Amtrak. He had been allowed on the train in Vancouver, made it to the border crossing in White Rock, and then been escorted off the train and told he needed a waiver to cross. A waiver that would take a minimum of five months to get. The biggest distress he experienced was being handcuffed as he was escorted off the train by four border guards carrying weapons and wearing bullet proof vests, treating him as if he were a dangerous criminal.

We digested this experience over the next few days and decided that Wayne would fly to Puerto Vallarta and we would meet him in a town close to the Mexican border crossing in Nogales (this turned out to be the fairly large city of Hermosillo) after Christopher, Kathleen and I traveled for about a week through Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and crossed into Mexico at Nogales, Arizona. Although this was an easy decision on one level, it was heartbreaking for us on another as we had all been so looking forward to taking in these sacredly natural places in the U.S. with Wayne.

The whole incident seemed to reinforce our desire to leave the U.S. behind and, as a citizen, I felt a deep disgust at the punitive way the situation was handled and further distancing from feeling like an U.S. citizen in any way. This situation illuminates how vulnerable border crossings are and anyone expecting to be able to cross easily post collapse is in denial. These borders are already militarized and the border guards are the judge, jury, and executioner. You cannot appeal what happens at a border crossing and you are completely at mercy of their discretion. Β It is easy to imagine how easily these borders will be shut down once collapse begins, especially if it is a disease like Ebola which causes the collapse. This is one of the biggest reasons why we are leaving now while travel is still relatively easy.

We began our one week journey to cover 1,000KM in two cars with three dogs, one of which weighs over 90 pounds. We discovered very quickly that we couldn’t drive more than six hours in one day as the dogs needed frequent breaks, Kathleen is a newer driver, and I didn’t feel comfortable driving one of our vehicles- a large passenger van packed with our belongings- which left that driving to Christopher. We shuffled in and out of hotel rooms, trying to maintain our vegan diet (we only ate a bit of dairy but no meat) and some kind of daily exercise for the dogs. Every day, every city was an energetic adjustment, along with every hotel room offering its own frequencies of goodness and density.

There were many times that being in the U.S. felt like being in a foreign country, one whose priorities seemed to be majorly screwed up. This was demonstrated in the never ending succession of factory outlet malls, fast food restaurants, subdivisions created around the illusion of unlimited sources of easy gas and electricity. The cities built unsustainably in desert locations, their water sources diminishing every day. The acres and acres of monoculture, chemically dependent agriculture, and even evidence of chem trails in the sky near Spokane, Washington.

One moment sticks out to me as deep evidence of the trouble that we are in related to climate change. We drove over Lake Mead Arizona- which is fed by Lake Powell, the primary water source for Las Vegas and Phoenix as well. The water level is now so low that you cannot see the water when you drive over the bridge spanning it. There is evidence everywhere of greatly decreased water levels. We spent a total of six days in desert conditions- including in a campground in San Carlos, Mexico, with temperatures hovering in the 90s and even low 100s. Our every thought became about surviving the heat and keeping the dogs cool as we made go of it without air conditioning. It is impossible to imagine how the millions of people who live in these desert areas will be able to survive without air conditioning, trucked in food, and piped in water. We were all relieved when we passed into more tropical and temperate conditions as we headed to MazatlΓ‘n.

It is more difficult to see evidence of collapse in the U.S. as the infrastructure as been so deeply created to support the current lifestyle. It became much more evident as we entered into Mexico, especially into the poor border state of Sonora. Many of the concrete dwellings along the toll highway there have been abandoned and even the resort like settling of San Carlos suffers from unfinished developments and bankrupted businesses. But still, it feels like more people here in Mexico get that modern conveniences are a luxury, not a given right. The water is already undrinkable, the roads are already falling apart in many places, the local economy is already experiencing contractions. The fall is much closer and not as far as the U.S.

Right now, we are in a campground in Mazatlan. We were blessed to be here during the β€˜off season’ and are able to camp right on the beach with a β€˜million dollar view’ that is only costing us 500 pesos or less than $50 a night. We are sleeping in tents while empty high rise condo buildings surround us on both sides. We are letting the waves and sea air aerate us and rejuvenate our energy before we move on to our final destination in Puerto Vallarta. We experienced a tropical thunderstorm last night and every thunder boom and lightening strike seemed to remind us that we are guests on this planet and very vulnerable to the weather. This is what we’ve forgotten in our dry wall, air conditioning existence. This is what we must remember and will be forced to remember very soon.

Jillian (Jelelle Awen) is co-creator of SoulFullHeart. Visit soulfullheartwayoflife.com for more information.

Tribulation: A Novel Inviting Us To Feel Life After Global Collapse

Published on by Jelelle AwenLeave a comment

“A man lives who hears the the song of the red-tailed hawk and flies with it; A man lives who begins and ends each day with his new family and needs no other people; A man lives, who learns something new about the ground he walks every day, and needs no other place; A man lives who knows he is in the world not on it, a part of it not in charge of it, with many brethren of all kinds, and has no right to take more than he needs.” From Tribulation

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By Jillian Vriend

Information about the inevitable global collapse of our short-sighted, technology- and cheap-fossil-fuel-dependent world is usually presented from a mental perspective and from an energy of “proving” that intense changes are coming and when they might be coming. Most of what is out there is mental analysis presented by mostly men who seem to be overly dedicated to researching thoroughly because what they are offering is admittedly to a stubborn audience in deep denial. They use logic and reasoning to try to pierce this denial and to wake up, first and foremost, a person’s awareness to what is happening. While this initial awakening is crucial, I’ve felt something missing from what I’ve digested recently from these mostly male sources and ‘experts’ on collapse.

What I feel is missing from the collapse picture and from our world in a big way is feeling, intuition, compassion, vision, surrender, and connection to a bigger context. Basically, a feminine energy (in both men and women) that can hold and respond to what is happening and what will happen from the heart rather than just from the head. I feel called to provide some of that energy through my connection with the Divine Mother, as I’ve done in previous conversations that I’ve shared on this blog. I also felt compelled to share images from our world with only music as backdrop to invite the heart to digest what is happening rather than just the mind. I feel strongly that is our individual capacity to emotionally digest what is coming that will become the most valuable currency in the future. I feel that survival and practical skills in combination with emotional maturity will offer the most grounded chance for those awakening to this reality.

One of the most difficult things for people to imagine is what the collapse will be like and how it might feel to actually live through it. This is where I feel that fiction writing can be very helpful as it sparks the imagination (connected to our third eye/visionary access) and elicits our emotional reactions in ways that just being presented the “facts” of what is happening cannot. Telling and hearing stories has been an important aspect of human consciousness throughout our history…we’ve moved from sharing orally around the fire to spending millions on block buster movies. Most of these stories feel like they feed our denial, keep us asleep, and allow us to act courageously in a vicarious way. Most of these stories bear little resemblance to most our lives and purposely avoid reflecting the subconscious (and sometimes conscious) misery and suffering that so many people feel. Most of these stories act as drugs, whether to keep us from feeling or to drop us into feeling as a way to off gas our pain without actually connecting it to ourselves.

Sometimes, though, a story comes along that invites us to feel ourselves and our lives. It invites us to feel the very real possibilities of our future and offers scenarios that don’t feel foreign so much as scarily familiar. Tribulation by Thomas Lewis offers such a story. Rather than offering a dystopianΒ picture of a world that has been cranked up to extremes so we don’t feel too disturbed by it (like Hunger Games series, 1984,Β Battlestar Gallatica, the Divergent series, The Stand, Planet Of The Apes, etc.),Β this book remains firmly grounded in what is not only possible but is very likely. The author has obviously researched extensively our fossil fuel dependency, as one example, and then he imagines what will happen to modern society when the tankers can’t deliver, when the food can’t be delivered by truck, when the political systems have become irreversibly corrupt from preserving relationships with middle eastern, oil-rich countries , when the wars escalate, when the economy based on fiat currency collapses. It’s easy to imagine the hoarding, the looting, the shooting and yet can be difficult for us to feel what that would be like to live through. We need characters, like reluctant leader William and his collapse-seeing son Bill, and the others who live out the first, very messy and painful phase of collapse on a sustainable farm, to project our hopes and our fears on to.

The author provides us a picture of what it will take to survive: fertile land in a remote location, a source of clean drinking water, security systems in place (including hand guns), a community of people that you can trust with your life, gardens, farm animals. Many people offer this picture of ecovillage and intentional community living as a crucial step, but it is much more compelling to journey with these characters as they actually live this life, giving up most of the modern conveniences that have allowed for easy food, easy water, and (for most of us) easy lives. And their journey is not just about adjusting to daily living in this new, very physical reality, it is also about these characters letting go of who they were before the collapse and arising into who they become afterwards.

We feel that it is the collapse of the self image built up by the false self that will be the most difficult aspect for most people. So much investment in money earning, mortgages, professional careers, attaining the next “toy”…this investment will be impossible for many people to let go of even when life “forces” them to let go.Β We have offered with SoulFullHeart for two years now and been on our own journey for over ten years of deconstruction of the false self and its domains of control and strategy. We have let go of jobs, toxic family relationships, even previously revered spiritual groups…anything that did not seem to serve our arising authentic self and deconstruction of our false self. Reading this book confirmed these decisions as the de-construction process for us might be that much easier to bear when it happens. We have surrendered outcomes to the Divine and try to align our desires with the bigger context of our souls and Divine guidance. We have decided to leave Canada in the next few months and find a place that establish a conscious community that will feel like our “ark”, most likely in Mexico. A place where we can plant our seeds of heart and soul offering, growing not just the food we need to survive but the way of life that brings us such growth and love. A place where we can draw others with like-hearted and minded sense of life to be in community with us.

There is such growing proof that a great death is coming and we are already in the middle of a painful contraction period, the likes of which have never been experienced by our species. But, I hold in my heart (as validated by reading this book) that there is a rebirth possible rising out of the ashes of our false investments. A rebirth that offers a lifestyle of simplicity, sustainability, connection with our environment, and, most importantly of all, love.

Feeling Like There’s No Tomorrow: NTE – Near Term Extinction for Humans???

Published on by Raphael Awen2 Comments

increasing-temp

By Wayne Vriend

Let’s see if I can find some words to share what I’m feeling….which of course assumes that I know what I am feeling. I truly don’t. I’m digesting a series of articles which lay out a convincing presentation of facts from recent scientific studies detailing the earth’s recent average temperature rise. I invite you to take a look beyond the smokescreen debate about global warming, and to see the much greater climate chaos I’ve been convinced is coming, and even very much here now. Here’s one moreΒ presentation of the undeniable facts as presented by Guy McPherson, a former natural sciences professor.

Our current global average temperature rise is under 1 degree above our historic baseline when we began recording temperature at the beginning of Industrial civilization. Now if you’ve been lulled to a sweet sleep by the persistence of normalcy and our inborn native and understandable predisposition of our false self to denial, one degree or less can hardly be worth getting worked up about, right? There are lots of other things needing our more immediate attention than that.

Go back to sleep then, sorry I disturbed you. β€˜Move along folks, nothing to see here.’ Never knowing what hit you might be the sweetest form of self love you can give yourself. I really mean that. If parts of you are not ready to see this, I so honour that you just might not be meant to see this. Most of the people on this population doubling planet have no way to grasp, hold, and process what is unfolding now. Others of us simply need to know and respond accordingly. Both are true and necessary to what is playing out.

Government and sacred civil institutions taking no overt action to alert or prepare people are totally doing the craziest things imaginable, which tells us they know major shit is going down, and their only hope is to keep the passengers on the Titanic in order. Iceberg slushies (complete with GMO-raised corn syrup and β€˜natural’ flavours) for everyone. How can civil leaders justify horrid acts such as a total surveillance state, drone warfare, GMOs, fracking, etc.? It’s all in the name of the lesser of two evils. The powers that be in government and at the helm of our most sacred instituions know what most of us don’t know but are slowly waking up to: that all of us are about to be sideswiped by climate chaos involving near term human extinction. We’ve known and admitted that we are currently losing around 200 species every single day. We just haven’t seen ourselves as a candidate for this onslaught. Most people haven’t been able to see and feel the changes coming to them personally in a meaningful and alive way. The government has all the justification needed for treating us in any and all manner of inhumanity. It feels like: “I will preserve myself before I preserve you when I can’t see and hold meaning to my own mortality.” Only people who do not truly live are afraid of their own death.

For those with the ears to hear and hearts to feel, there is a ton of good news in this apocalyptic runaway freight train. First is that only what isn’t real or alive can actually die. All of life can only be transformed; nothing can be eradicated. We offer in SoulFullHeart that you are not who you think you are most of the time. Nothing changes that for people like a doctor telling them they have only months to live. Suddenly whole layers of meaning invade every moment and every relationship. We are in precisely that time. Which do you prefer, the bliss of ignorance of not knowing something, or the depth of meaning and aliveness found in feeling and facing your own mortality?

Around a near corner for us is a complete and sudden shutdown of the set of living arrangements that we were born into and accepted as normal. Call it the collapse of industrial civilization. We’ve extracted, fought over and burned in a couple of centuries the better part of the fossil fuels that nature took millions of years of process to put there. Nature so unsentimentally tricked us into this trap. I’m pretty sure of it. Mother nature is not afraid of death and rebirth, but welcomes it as a cleansing and natural process. That’s why our current patriarchal collective and our theologies of dominion have decreed that we should β€˜subdue her, before she subdues us’. Check it out for yourself…….28 verses into the bible in Genesis. Possibly no greater and more succinct words can be found to grasp the source of our current dilemma. We went to war with nature.

As you can see then, this deal really isn’t new, in the way we think of it. When we learned way back how to grow and store grain, that was really the much deeper beginning of this present era of dominion. (It’s not really all Obama’s and Bush’s fault.) We’ve had some big empire experiments come and go since then, but not one event that so catastrophically and opportunistically changes EVERYTHING and all the things that matter to us in a one moment kind of way. We’ve had five prior extinction events in the planet’s history that we know about. We’ve just never teed up such a big deal as we have in the lead up to this present and sixth one…..making your life and mine a front row seat to experience the pinnacle of the greatest story ever told.

Our western world dominion achievment is truly shining, even with the current tarnish. Electricity coming from holes in the wall every 12 feet around the rooms of our McMansions, lifting a lever and getting clean drinking water coming out of a β€˜tap’ often with many more taps and toilets in the house than people. Groceries on store shelves completely unimaginable to our recent ancestors, along with a functioning economic system and global wars to keep it all in momentum. A few dollars for a gallon of gasoline that is said to have the equivalent power of 300 man hours of labour at our disposal at filling stations. All of that abruptly ends though in the collapse of our industrial civilization. It is so truly amazing what we’ve built. Problem is we built it all on sand, and if that wasn’t enough, we went on to hollow out the pillars, making this sudden demolition drop our most spectacular to date. Crazy what you can build with disconnect and denial! Crazier still how you can set it up for the biggest fall that most won’t believe till they see it in ashes, and even then many may not have the ability to grasp it.

We need the industrial civilization to end if we are to survive as a species on the planet. There’s no question about that really, yet part of you may still be in denial about that if you’ve invested your money and self image irreversibly in the deal. But the end of industrial civilization actually isn’t as hopeful at all for our species, as we are just now learning. We need industrial civilization to prevent our 440 some nuclear reactors around the world from going Fukushima on us. Without a power grid, that’s exactly what they do. Mother nature just doesn’t care about what we care about most of the time. She never promised that. We, in a very entitled and bratty way projected onto her our demand for her blessing on our agenda of disconnection from her. She really has no problem with our choice to fuck ourselves. Mary can’t be hailed on this one.

It’s not that Mother Earth doesn’t love us with a penetrating and embracing love. The Divine Mother just has a different reality around love. She is not afraid of death, but welcomes it like shaking your etch-a-sketch, and getting to begin again. She knows and feels that only by our cycles of death and rebirth can She, along with our entire universe, come to know itself through trial and error. We don’t know what is ultimately going on because our Mother doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s doing all of this in the fun of finding out. It’s called never ending discovery. It’s not that our species is evil, but rather that in our journey to discover love we needed to play with evil. So while this collapse feels like an unimaginable big deal that we cannot relate to, it really is as natural and normal as summer, fall, winter, and spring.

She needs us like never before to accept the doctor’s prognosis, we only have months to live. Those months are made up of moments. And it’s only in a moment that you can feel. And feeling is what moves in harmony with death and rebirth. Not feeling is what our resistance to change and metamorphosis is made up of. Mother Earth, our Divine Mother, Our Divine Father, our own Divinity, Yeshua, Buddha and Allah all agree – It’s time to begin feeling like there’s no tomorrow. Because there isn’t nearly as many tomorrows as we’ve been so gullibilly been led to believe.

Wayne Vriend is co-creator and a facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheart.com for more information.

On Mother Earth Day: Digesting The Reality Of Climate Crisis

Published on by Raphael AwenLeave a comment

earth_holding_sml

By Wayne Vriend

Recently I took in three powerful and difficult to digest pieces about the climate crisis. It seems fitting to share them today, on Mother Earth Day.

The first is a writers’ recollection, who lived nearby Chernobyl of the days and hours following the meltdown:

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/Blogs/2372899/chernobyl_the_biting_wind_the_silent_scream.html

and the second is Guy Mcpherson’s climate chaos you tube video from last year about how it’s most likely that we will experience a near extinction level climate crisis events by 2040.

And the third piece: RT released a piece on Chernobyl released on the 28th year anniversary (and it is part of the currently troubled Ukraine, no less!)

http://rt.com/news/155072-chernobyl-images-now-then/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome

My god, I’m trying to digest how momentous a time we are in – RIGHT NOW – and let it in from the divine mother’s heart and urgency…

The piece from Chernobyl shows how the authorities react to any bad news in which it always justifies lying to the masses as the lesser of two perceived evils. We are in just such a time as that, but on a much bigger scale.

The other big piece I feel is how we collectively don’t have a way to digest this emotionally and spiritually, so we just haven’t digested it, (which is different somehow than flat out denial.)

Guy’s presentation is a lot of facts, and some context at the end. It beckons the heart and the soul to respond. The response is about accepting the earth as ‘in hospice’, rather than writing a letter to your congressman or member of parliament.

Mark me down for convinced, (though I struggle to know what that actually means). The world as we know bears little resemblance to the world that is emerging in the days, weeks, months and years immediately upon us.

Soulfullheart was born for such a time as this and I must admit, I am curious as hell as to how and if that will actually play out.

Wayne Vriend is co-creator and a facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life. Visit soulfullheart.com for more information.