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If you have gone down the Rabbit Hole, even a little ways, you may be wondering where the hope is. We want to clearly suggest that TEOTWAWKI is here now. This means: the end of the world as we knew it. Everything is changing and each of us must take responsibility for ourselves, our family and our community in the ways that feel right. Hope is very personal now as we each find our sacred work (perhaps building a "sacred" lifeboat).
Here are some writers and activists who have felt the feeling, and speak to us of the hope or healthy hoplessness they have found.
I especially suggest a wonderful article by Meg Wheatley whom I have admired for at least a decade, sharing her heart and ideas about the deep value of embracing our hopelessness as we create the new culture. Enjoy!
Here are some quotes from a book with the most wonderful title: Hope In the Dark: Untold Stories, Wild Possibilities, Rebecca Solnit, 2004, Nations Books, $12.95
Cause and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, and a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those mllions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change come upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It's a bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. (p.4)
Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now. I say this to you not because I haven't noticed that this country has stayed close to destroying itself and everything it once stood for in pursuit of empire in the world and the eradication of democracy an home, that our civilization is close to destroying the very nature on which we depend- the oceans the atmosphere, the uncounted species of plant and insect and bird. I say it because I have noticed: wars will break out, the planet will heat up, species will die our, but how many, how hot, and what survives depend on whether we act. The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave. (p.6)
. . . quoting her friend, John Jorden:
When we are asked how are we going to build the new world, our answer is, "We don't know yet, but let's build it together." In effect we are saying the end is not as Important as the means, we are turning hundreds of years of political form and content on it's head by putting the means before the ends, by putting context in from of ideology, by rejecting purity and perfection, in fact, we are turning our backs on the future. (p.106)
Taking control of the future lies at the root of nearly every historical social change strategy, and yet we are building movements which believe that to "let go" is the most powerful thing we can do - to let go, walk away from power and find freedom. Giving people back their creative agency, reactivating their potential for a direct intervention into the world is at the heart of the process. With agency and meaning reclaimed, perhaps it is possible to imagine tomorrow today and to be wary of desires that can only be fulfilled by the future. In that moment of creation, the need for certainty is subsumed by the joy of doing, and the doing is filled with meaning.
Next is a quote we like:
"The most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen"
was how the writer Arundhati Roy described the anti-war anger that swept across the world almost two years ago. A French study now estimates that 35 million people demonstrated on that February day and says there has never been anything like it; and it was just a beginning.
This is from James Howard Kunstler whose book takes us deeply down the Rabbit Hole and ends with the true beauty we are likely to find.
These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope - that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.
From The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Howard Kunstler, 2005, $23.00, Atlantic Monthly Press.
We provide this site as a toolkit and as inspiration for you to build and launch your own sacred lifeboat.
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