Kate Wiseman
https://www.facebook.com/groups/deepadaptation/permalink/1764822427038651I also wonder how much of this approach is our own discomfort at provoking in others the self-same difficult emotions that arose in us when we learned how bad the situation was? The understandable, but socially unacceptable appearance of fear, rage, grief, despair. These difficult feelings are repressed by most, not readily welcomed between us. Will we, as the messenger, be shot along with our painful message? Are we afraid to risk the transgression of social norms; a suicide by social rejection? A rejection which is painfully and viscerally processed in the soft, vulnerable animal of our body as a threat to our existence.
And I wonder if we are moved by an even greater fear; the rising to the surface of the true scale of those emotions lurking in the dark of our unconscious? Is our avoidance, the avoidance of the amplification of our own emotional responses in the communal feeling-togetherness which is a hallmark of our shared humanity? Do we fear that in community, the rising flood waters of emotion will break the banks protecting our most precious fantasies of independence, individuality and immortality? Do we fear that the turbulent waters will wash away everything we longed for, hoped to be, wanted to have, exposing us in the nakedness of our inter-neediness as the wretched, dependent and mortal creatures that we fear ourselves to be?
Of course, I am not arguing or advocating for any particular approach in communicating the climate and ecological emergency. Rather to expose ourselves more truly in the self-protectionist opinions and beliefs that we may hold and to invite ourselves to ask tough questions about what we think is right or wrong, skillful or unskillful action as we face the greatest catastrophe in the history of humanity.
Does the last grain of sand to slip through the narrow neck of the hourglass believe that it has time for time to take time?
Will we hold ourselves knowingly and lovingly in the consciousness of our own fear and denial and act from there?
Or, will the loyalty to our belief in the taking-of-time be prised from the cold, rigid, dead last pair of human hands?
No one to chisel the epitaph ‘it takes time’ ‘on the tombstone of our humanity.