Searching for THE ANSWER

I was born in 1985, at 345.72 ppm of carbon to two middle-class artist parents. As a child of the nineties, I remember learning about the Amazon rainforest and being totally captivated by it, and then feeling the concomitant horror when I learned about the slash and burn agriculture that was destroying it. I wanted to stop this destruction, but of course was helpless to do so. I distinctly remember feeling confusion and skepticism when being fed simplistic "solutions" to general environmental destruction like, "turn off the water while brushing your teeth," and "turn off the lights when leaving a room." I remembered thinking that this certainly did not feel like enough to address the problems at hand. 

I was very lucky to be taught critical thinking skills by my intelligent and educated parents, which did lead me to question some of the basic brain washing and social conditioning of society, but only at what I consider a superficial level. I felt discontent and angst, but was not able to question "society" at a deeper level until much later in life. 

I graduated from a prestigious art school in 2007, and this is where my journey into Buddhism began. I thought I had found THE ANSWER. What do the world's problems mean when THE ANSWER lies in the metaphysical realities that we can't see? What do the world's problems mean when the world we think we see is really an illusion? I practiced until I couldn't anymore, and that was sometime around 2022. I wasn't able to see collapse until my personal spiritual practice fell away and I was left with the stark realities of the material world. 

After hearing an interview with Peter Kalmus on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, I read his book Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution The graph in chapter 2 floored me. The terrifying reality that climate change is NOW, hit me in the face and woke me the fuck up. The irony of trying to wake up for over a decade, and then realizing how asleep I had been... humbling to say the least. 

After following Peter Kalmus on twitter, I was quickly introduced to collapse through podcasts. I remember raking leaves for hours in October of 2022, with my ear buds in, absolutely inhaling the Breaking Down: Collapse podcast. I listened to so many episodes back to back and remember having that 'holy shit' moment that I had with Kalmus' book, but over and over again. That and The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens  podcast really quickly launched me into an understanding of collapse.

I think 'Holy Shit' is the perfect phrase to describe both that newfound awareness and really the whole thing. As I write this, we are at the end of the second week of the second Trump term, and I am still having those holy shit moments. Luckily, I have had the support and community of Collapse Club, without which, I would certainly be in a much worse place. Those zoom meetings have grounded me in the groundlessness of uncertainty. They have made me feel sane in an insane, and profoundly sick society. Nothing is a magic bullet and nothing can 'fix' collapse, but having other folks to supportively and non-judgmentally listen to me cry, rage, ruminate and wrestle with this impossible predicament? And to be able to then listen to other folks and how they are living with and grappling with collapse? My god, what a gift. 

Just like in spiritual practice, I have to do the work, I have to go through it myself. I have to learn to sit with my emotions about all of this and no one can do that for me or even tell me what to do. I have to learn how I am going to live with collapse and that is not easy to answer. Some days there is hopelessness, despair, rage, grief, or apathy, but also some days there is joy, curiosity, peace, excitement, exuberance. I do know that it is a hell of a lot better to learn how to do this with other people! I may never have THE ANSWER, but I am much more comfortable with that. I am very skeptical of anyone who claims to have THE ANSWER about anything, really, and I feel as though I have a healthy balance of openness and skepticism. 

After living in the world of philosophical materialism for the last 2.5 years, I have (finally) been completely re-opened towards the nonmaterial/spiritual/metaphysical, and at the moment I am loving imbibing information that points towards consciousness being nonmaterial. I am embracing the weird, the unexplained, and the mysterious, and am still in search of TRUTH. I am still making art, tending my chickens, going out dancing, running in the woods, listening to podcasts, and reading cool books. I am trying to help preserve the NJ Pinelands . I am still looking mortality straight in the eyes as I work with the imminently dying as an inpatient hospice nurse. 

The phrase, "Happy Global Hospice Day," shared often in meetings and in the collapse community is actually what gave me the idea to go into hospice, which, funnily enough, was my original intention when I became a registered nurse. So I do these things, and even if I don't have THE ANSWER, I have the support of the community, where I can keep learning how others are living with the knowledge of collapse. As things unfold and new horrors arise, things will get more difficult (as we have seen these last two weeks), and being bolstered by this community so I am not just a puddle of despair has truly been a blessing.



A note on holy shit:

The phrase Holy Shit, is a perfect utterance to convey the grave seriousness as chills run up and down the spine as anticipatory fear makes itself physical. Sacred feces. Isn’t the unconditional supposed to be so vast as to contain the profane so that it can’t actually exist but in our deluded dualistic minds? Like everything is holy? Including the microplastic and PFAS and the oil spills and mass graves and all that? Holy shit, I say!, as I contemplate the highest truth of mind-bending unconditional love that contains and embraces every cursed and profane thing on this planet…