Capital R Reality is Upon Us. Shall we dance?

​In the last two days, I've spent time with two of my oldest friends, my nearest and dearest.
You know the ones... if you're my age, they're the folk with whom you don't measure time in hours or days or even years, you measure in the whale-deep roll of decades. The wobbling flip of life cycles. Numbers of marriages, qualities of deaths. The friends who are woven into the rich tapestry of your history, where that history in itself is a tangible container, one you drink from together, holding the glass to the light and admiring kaleidoscopic colours as they refract around the warm room of your life. The people who have held your skins as you've shed them, have kissed the new flesh as it emerged, and you've all survived, you're still in it together. Those friends. The ones you tell the truth to, all the way through, because there is no other way with you.

As is the way with these meetings, we cover a lot of ground. Slowdance our way through echoing chasms of silence, the easy kind, shoulders touching, nothing needing to be said, the warmth of body contact says it all. Much laughter. Some tears. HiStory. HerStory.

And of course we wander from the personal to the global. Both of them ask me pretty much the same question.

'What do you think is going on in the world right now? What's your take?'
Ah. That.

There are so many layers to this. Tragic, amazing, terrible, wonderful layers. And as always, I'm not saying that any of this is true, just that it is true for me.
For me, this is about Capital R reality. The reality that you know, deep in your guts. The voice that whispers that you should cross the road now, there's something hinky down that alley. The creature flick eared in your belly who urges, now, here, no, yes.

Our animal instincts are attuned to currents we cannot see, the currents of wind and wave, and we are all connected, so we tap into the human currents like a faint radio station we nearly tune out, but the static crackles uneasily through our dreams and we make shapes in the mist, dismiss them in the light, but deep down we know, we know. We know the thing we are avoiding. We know its shape in our bones. And it is too awful to contemplate, so we find a million distractions, skitter off the skin of the thing.

What I see is that for a very rare time in human history, an entire species is facing the same thing, all at once, and has the awareness to know it, track it, map it, make meaning of it... as it happens. This is incredible. Because the thing we are facing is ultimately immutable.

Death.

The death of everything we have come to take for granted. Existing political structures, economic structures, social structures, medical models, ways of life. The death of our comfortable relationship with this blue jewel of a planet; our home. Death in the oceans, death of ecosystems. Death of food supply chains, of the cleanliness of water. Death of our privilege. Death of comfort. Death of hope, if hope is measured by the idea that we can continue to blithely travel along leaving seared footprints of ash and bone, not changing our attitudes as the mother of all hurricanes comes to sweep a wall of water over our petty structures of hubris and control. Clinging to habits and ideologies, arguing over whether we are being manipulated by shadowy forces, whether a microbe was engineered, what's the agenda, who's to blame, oh my.

These are ripples on the surface.

Capital R Reality, for me, is the ocean itself.

Capital R Reality.
There are over 7 billion of us on a planet that can viably support half that number, living the way we do. It took 123 years to grow from 1 billion to 2 billion, and only 33 years to get to three.
For me, Capital R Reality is that everything that we take for granted is ending. There are too many of us. The movement toward homeostasis is a constant force in biology and chemistry. A closed system will always equalise. Our planet is a closed system. The pressures we are placing on it have now moved to the point where we are in wild exponential curves, chaos equations, tipping points and cascade reactions. And when this happens., the fractures and faultlines open up, often all at once. Events change very fast. Tomorrow is no longer like today.

Tomorrow is no longer like today.

Whether it's floods or bushfires, despots or democrats, social movements or conspiracies, it's irrelevant whether some human force did or did not do a thing that resulted in a catalyst for mass upheaval. We are all the catalyst. There are too many of us. And while our attention is swept into the latest soundbytes of disaster, we are caught once again in the crosschop on the surface, in the drama, in the illusion of control, and we miss the siren song of the ocean within which we swim.

There are simply too many of us, consuming out of balance.

The thing that I'm seeing and feeling in the conversations I'm having is that deep down, we know. The wolf is howling through the forests of our hearts. We mourn. We know our comfortable lives are ending. The tracks have switched and there aren’t any road signs apart from an unhelpful dashboard flashing with warning lights.

We’re scratchy and irritable and anxious and depressed at the latest restriction, urgently scrolling the newsfeeds, imbibing daily cocktails of fear with no release, wondering why we aren't coping. Grief demands to be felt and the size of this truth is so huge our consciousness bounces and ricochets off it, finding tiny externals to fixate on, be outraged by.

And yet, way down in the roots and earth of us, the wolf howls that the forest is ending.

For those of us who have lived lives of privilege, we are seeing those gilded pages tarnish and tear. It's sinking in. The old world is dying. And we have no idea what the new one will look like.

We all have our ways of processing, of making sense of fundamentally terrifying times. All of these movements can be seen as flailing against the dark. Which is beautiful, the ways we face the one thing we cannot evade or escape, Death, our shadow dance partner, waltzing just behind us with a rose between his teeth.

How do we move from despair to hope? How do we not drown in that ocean?
How do I face the unfaceable? Speak the unspeakable? How do I dance with death?

To do this, I need skills to feel what is going on in my body. Tools to process and digest the waves of feeling. I need to move my body, consciously, with presence. Find a language for grief, find people with whom to grieve, to be held, to bare my soul as I face the shadow on the wall, my oldest friend, my newest one. The one with the dark face. The black night. The welcoming abyss. The void from which we all come and to which we return. The breath before the thought. The delicate edge of the first fingerprint.

For me it's extra personal. Having my three year old daughter die in my arms pressed me right into Death's skeletal embrace. I've been tangoing with the old bastard for ten years now, since being diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant with her and being told I had to terminate the pregnancy or I'd die. Making life and death decisions for that whole pregnancy. Having chemo while pregnant. Then losing her three years later to cancer... Death took a number and in the end it was hers.

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​And now I am grateful that I have danced with that cheap suited shyster of clacking bones for so many years. I have been trained to let go. And so as I feel the wave looming, the one that washes me away, washes all of us onto some strange new island as yet unmapped, uncharted... I feel some faint stirrings of despair, but mostly I feel a sense of adventure. 

If I can truly let myself perceive Capital R Reality, face the dragon in its flaming molten maw, stand firm as my eyes and heart are seared by visions of what my bones know to be true; after the grief and panic have been digested... my despair turns to action.

The struggle against Capital R Reality is the torment. Once I accept it, now I can make choices, real, empowered choices. Choices to Rewild myself, my community, my family. Choices to wean from my addictions to culture and comfort and entitlement. Choices to upskill my primitive skills, ancient social technologies, nature connection. These may not be the choices I want, Life may not give me what I like, but I still have choice, and with choice comes movement and to avoid despair we must move. Anything that stagnates in nature, dies.

For me, we are now in one of the movies we've been making for decades, fifteen bucks and a two hour adrenaline rush, training us for this time. How do I want to be? Do I want the movie to happen to me or do I want to be the heroine? Sit and do nothing with my fingers in my ears or start to actually prepare for transition times? Bitch and moan about whose fault it all is or create community that has tools to move into a new reality? Turn my dreaming function toward a world where we can't take anything for granted, so how do I re-educate, learn new skills of survival? How do I help those younger than me transition? How do I take care of my elders?

Seven billion sentient organisms are facing the same thing, all at once, with varying levels of awareness. And much as we see when we face our own personal death, some people go to meet it open eyed, others kick and scream right to the moment that final kiss steals the last sweet breath from warm lungs. Many many many people find god (little g... insert your word for 'that which is greater than us') as they face death. And now we are all here facing it together.
On this planet, right now, an entire species is coming hard against the glass of faith and belief and trust and meaning. Some react with fear and rage. Normal. Some with despair. Normal. All part of what we go through in our layers of denial. 

What I'm seeing is that once I actually let the knowledge of deepest truths rise up from the depths to become known and embodied, I call on my strengths, passions, strategies, tools, art, song, skills, service. I discover that I am resourced, that once I stop trying to make what I see fit into the box that I so desperately want to be true, and see what is actually there, there is a sense of relief. 

Capital R Reality.

And in that I move with the breathtaking realisation that each thing I do now may not have a tomorrow, so I must be all the way present for it right now. Digest my fear so I live in wonder at the beauty of this day, this breath, this cuppa with this friend. If I can't count on tomorrow I can sure as hell be here for today. And in that presence, that wonder, I can make healthy choices to prepare for a new world, open hearted, knowing I will die one day, and not knowing what that day will be.

This is my Capital R Reality. I'm not saying it's true, but it's true for me. I'm dancing in hope and grief and a sense of wonder at the beauty of humans, falling until we fly. I'm making a stand for this breath, and this love, and this, and this.

Now.
Now.
Now.


As always, feel free to share. ​