“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
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.
Divine Self Embodiment Blog (Formerly SoulFullHeart) 