Summer Solstice musings

The inevitability of change & the superficiality of belief

Scorzonera flowering at a farm in Paonia, Colorado [photo by the author]

Here in the northern hemisphere we are in the midst of the longest days and shortest nights of year. The farther north you live, the more pronounced the effect. I once took a night train through Norway at this time of year and it never got fully dark. In the seats ahead of me, young people playing guitars didn't put down their instruments til morning's brightness. The vibe was at once surreal and comforting, a dimness that never darkened but lit by the golden tones of the gentle strumming. A candlelit mood, I dare say.

Tonight I am at a cabin on the West Slope of Colorado. The sun's been down for an hour and a sliver-thin but bright sickle moon is sinking slowly toward the horizon, its horns pointing towards Venus. But once upon a time, I wrote:

"There, see that?" I say. She nods. "That is Venus. Or what we call Venus. But I know that it is Earendil the Mariner, in his ship the Foam Flower, with the Silmaril upon his brow, sailing on and ever on, in the eons between stars."

"I can see him," she says. "The mist is in his eyes."

"He longs for his beloved, Elwing, but she is the gull above the surf. He is on different seas."

That's from a short story I wrote back when I did fiction, which I'd like to take up again someday. There's things you can say that way—through imaginary mouths—that don't come out any other way, and that reach us in place untouched by a recitation of facts or figures.

The truth is that we are drawn and shaped by narrative, by the emotional and the subjective, rather than by proofs and demonstrations. There's nothing wrong with that, but we should be clear with ourselves about it. It's easy to believe that we “know” things that we actually don't—things that we actually couldn't know, because they are far away or otherwise beyond the immediate reaches of our senses.

Terence McKenna, who was born and is buried in the nearby town of Paonia where I've been spending a lot of time, said in 1985:

“I don’t believe in belief. I think belief is a tremendously stultifying force. What I’m interested in is freedom, and I noticed very early that a belief absolutely precludes the possibility of holding to its opposite, and therefore if you believe something you have... limited yourself.”

Our lives would be simpler and much happier if they were highly localized, in part because it would change our collective relationship with belief. Right now, we are arguably in the most globalized time period in human history, the least localized moment yet. It won't last forever of course, and relocalization is sure to follow its dissolution, but whether that transition is sooner or later is impossible to say.

So many logistical aspects of our lives are intangible to us: where our food comes from, how our machines are manufactured, the full costs of our energy production. Previously, all these things passed through our own hands, granting us intimacy with their textures, their weight, and their own imbued aliveness. You dug that root, you sharpened that stick, you started that fire. We are very far from that now in our everyday material lives.

Yet, so close within. Everything is still inside us that observed and that learned and that taught. The senses that led us to harvest, weave and burn are still the same senses. Yes, they are dulled by inactivity, a bit rusty so to speak, but we are still the same animal, despite the changes in costume.

I don't feel qualified to write about the animal that we are. You can only write what you know after all, and I will make no claims of being less alienated than anyone else from our authentic selves. As far as I can tell, the disease of distraction is virtually universal in the US. We are all stumbling around mostly blind, ignorant and unaware, in inverse proportion to our shallow arrogance.

Not that we can help it. We are victims of perhaps the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever developed. The fact that we deny its existence is the ultimate testament of its success. We believe that propaganda is something that other countries do—"authoritarian" ones. Which we somehow are not, even though we have the highest prison population in the world, both by total number of people incarcerated, and by rate per capita, and are one of the very few places on earth where the death penalty is still inflicted. But yeah, we're "free."

Free to starve and free to be homeless, that is, if we don't participate in the wage slavery system. At one time in the US, people actively discussed whether wage slavery was actually an improvement over literal chattel slavery or not; it was a debate. We forget that modern employment is just that—modern. Go back a century, and many people lived without it. Go back a couple more and it didn't exist. Our current structures are neither ancient nor inviolate. Yes, they are treated as inevitabilities, but that's just a pose. Ultimately, in the scope of history, our civilization—and civilization itself—will be a flash in the pan; a hot sizzle, for sure, but fleeting.

I can find such thoughts comforting at one level, but at another—where so much that lives and breathes suffers—they are irrelevant. Yes, our destructiveness cannot last forever, but what of everything being destroyed now? The forests, the rivers, the marshes, the prairies, the deserts. Chopped down, dammed up, drained, tilled under, and mined. Habitat is lost to oil and to lithium, to coal plants and to solar farms, to pipelines and to windmills.

Roadside thistle in New Mexico [photo by the author]

I mourn, perhaps, the plants most of all. The words of Treebeard, the Ent, resonate with me: "I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me." This is why I have taken up the title of, "Plant advocate." Because almost nobody is on their side. Never mind that we literally cannot eat or breathe without plants; we treat plants like furniture, like they aren't actually alive. It's actually really strange. If we survive these times, we will eventually look back with horror at what we believe now. Recall that Victorian scientists claimed that non-human animals feel no pain, and the noises they make when subjected to invasive experiments are merely reflexes.

The collective plant blindness of our culture is possible only because we are so sensually disconnected. Not materially disconnected. That's impossible. We are no less connected to nature—no less entwined in it, no less dependent upon it—than we ever have been. All that has changed is our perception of it. That we even refer to "nature" as "it" or as something somehow apart from us, is itself an expression of the heresy.

Near the Grand Mesa, Kelly Moody teaching an ecology class [photo by the author]

How to reconnect? How to re-relate? I can't answer that. I'm fumbling around like everybody else. I don't think it's about individual action, though. I mean, yes, what you choose to do can affect you. But it's a fact that "we're all in this together" and only through mass action will things really change. One way or another, this will happen, even if it's just because circumstances will dictate. Choice might not be part of it. Imagination surely will be, though.

The moon has now set, and it's darker than it ever got that night on the Norwegian train, and the wind is the only sound. Earendil's ship is approaching the farther shore, and soon Elwing will greet him. Myself, I am grateful for the mountains and the trees that graced my vision when I typed out the first sentence, and are now hidden. In the morning, when they are revealed again, we will all be one day closer to a consciousness that we might not believe in now, but that is ultimately irresistible.

[Mentioned in the last photo caption is

Kelly Moody

. Go check out her substack.]