Especially "radical presence as an infinitely flexible adaptation"
And
"I guarantee that where you are is waiting patiently for your attention": more and more, 'the moment', this particular moment (connected to all moments and containing all things, bringing them to me in this very particular, often very humble way), reminds me it is always there, waiting for me. And the moment always loves my recognition and attention and respect, and returns these magnified. Sometimes hope seems an abandoning of the moment. It feels the relationship is founded on faith.
And finally, do you know the Diane di Prima poem Rant? With its great line
"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination"
Just after publishing this piece I came across a story in the Rebecca Solnit book I got from the op shop last week, The Faraway Nearby. She tells how in Myanmar monks and nuns publicly protested the military junta by "the rare and extraordinary rite known in Pali as patam nikkujjana kamma, the overturning of the alms bowl so that nothing can be put in it... Overturning the bowls banned the military and their families from giving alms, effectively excommunicating them... The monks marched through the streets holding their bowls upside down, a denunciation made scathingly public. To refuse to accept the gifts was to refuse to confer the reciprocal gifts, to break the threads that tied those secular people to monastic life and to the life of the spirit."
Rosie, unfortunately I can only click the "Loveheart" button once.
Sorry I am not in a position to upgrade to paid, yours is one of the first I would. So much sense comes through in your newsletters.
I also understand the Upside-Downland minority problem although for me it's the first world-third world thing, I struggled with Dougald's group calls because of this.
Thank you for the reciprocal gift of your words! Comments and feedback are precious to me because they are a kind of fuel that helps me keep going, just as much as subs do.
Was gonna say, I read Frankisstein after your recommendation and now I pacify my malevolent thoughts towards AI-loving billionaires as them just needing sexbots to replace the human relationships that they fail to succeed at. It’s helped, I’m a little more forgiving towards them.
She writes "The powerless need to dissemble— that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars— and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters."
I don't think we need to forgive billionaires necessarily, but I think they are pitiable in their lonely hubris.
Wow yeah good article. I see a lot of that here. In a place like the Philippines there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor. I'd never met/known people with such wealth until I came here. I remember when I first lived here in 1999 there was an article listing all the richest people in Australia and the Philippines. Murdoch was number one and then there were something like 50 Filipinos before the next Australian got a mention.
Nearly everyone is raised by yayas (nannies) whose job is to please, and hence keep the child happily sated with whatever desire they need. A whole culture of rich, privileged kids without boundaries.
I think a lot about the idea that one of the inheritances the children of the wealthy receive is an internalised set of beliefs around being important, interesting, talented, and worthy of taking up space-- whereas the children of the poor often receive an opposite set of beliefs.
Sometime around 2019 I read an amazing, fearless essay by Catherine Ingram, titled Facing Extinction. She has since removed it from the Internet, but just now I found two quotes I had cached and then forgotten:
"You may find yourself in the company of people who seem to have no awareness of the consequences we face or who don’t want to know or who might have a momentary inkling but cannot bear to face it. You may find that people become angry if you steer the conversation in the direction of planetary crisis. You may sense that you are becoming a social pariah due to what you see, even when you don’t mention it, and you may feel lonely in the company of most people you know...
I once asked Leonard [Cohen] for his advice on how to talk with others about this. He replied: 'There are things we don’t tell the children.' It is helpful to realize that most people are not ready for this conversation. They may never be ready, just as some people die after a long illness, still in denial that death was at their doorstep. It is a mystery as to who can handle the truth of our situation and who runs from it as though their sanity depended on not seeing it."
And: "Courage is often confused with stoicism, the stiff upper lip, bravado that masks fear. There is another kind of courage. It is the courage to live with a broken heart, to face fear and allow vulnerability, and it is the courage to keep loving what you love 'even though the world is gone."
That is so helpful Rosie! I am silent with many people for all reasons Catherine gives and having that thought from Leonard makes sense of why it's wise to be.
I describe this facing into it as bearing the unbearable, when I can talk about it. But as you mentioned when nettled by Dougald, it helps to give our poor wee nervous systems a break from it all too :)
Love reading your work - so often about my home town- and grateful that your presence is here on the wonderful new home I have discovered through Substack.
Thanks Zoe. I feel like the discussion has shifted a lot even since the essay was published. Maybe it was the advent of the pandemic just the next year, or maybe climate change has become more undeniable. I had totally forgotten the excellent Cohen quote. It's interesting because my piece (that I wrote before refinding these quotes) could be seen as a response to Ingram's statement "It is a mystery as to who can handle the truth of our situation and who runs from it as though their sanity depended on not seeing it."
Word, Catherine Ingram!! I am eternally grateful for being able to face these times with you, Rosie. Thank you for this piece. There's a lot in here we've discussed at length and you've captured it beautifully and succinctly.
I’m going to copy my favourite sections of this into my diary, because I want to absorb these words again, in as many ways as I can think of; bathe myself in these sentiments. Made me cry, touched some nerves.
"There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
Ursula K Le Guin saved me again and again. Her books have been essential on my inner journey this past year.
M. E. Rothwell explains the firehose: "To summarise, once the number of connections between nodes in a network passes a certain critical threshold, the information environment gets worse. Past that threshold, perhaps counterintuitively, the greater the exchange of ‘information’, the more uniformity we see. Combine that with a selection bias for simple, extreme memes, and you start to understand why our public discourse looks like it does. I’d go as far as to say that the structures of our information networks explain a lot of the political morass we’ve found ourselves in over the last decade.
The question you may be asking yourself at this point is what can we do about this? Well, if as I’d venture, the density of our information networks is part of the problem, the obvious solution is to pull back. Reduce the number of connections between you and other nodes."
Sometimes I think we're all just wandering around Ideaspace, picking up fallen fruit from the same orchard. How else to explain the way that everyone seems to be saying the same things at the same time?
Iain McGilchrist writes: "Finally, the right hemisphere is less ‘will-ful’ than the left hemisphere, and therefore more open to relinquishing control. It can understand the value of what in Buddhism is called emptiness, and the part played by negation in creativity: the power of silence and stillness, of not-knowing and not-doing, of withdrawing in order to permit something truly other to manifest itself. It is the substrate of the mature self as opposed to the immature ego. It can understand that suffering can be generative. And it can understand the valour in vulnerability, and the dark side to what we think is merely good. None of this makes sense to the reductive materialist. And this is another sense in which the left hemisphere leads us away from the truth: the truth of the divine."
You did one of those classes with Dougald Hine! I haven't but have followed him since the DM days. His old buddy Paul K seems to have gone down a darker path, unfortunately. Love all this. Desperately long for the absolute agency I was told was my birthright but trying to let myself be buffeted & lean in. The wind in these parts helps.
Yes I have been following since Dark Mountain too, but these days Dougald is a friend! I followed Paul Kingsnorth for quite a long time but his veering off into Christianity kind of lost me.
I have been thinking lately about how we can dress to harness the wind: billowing silhouettes, ribbons / banners & so forth. Makes it more fun
I have a dream about moving to Welly and living in a knee-length officers' coats they sell at the army surplus, so that it flaps in the wind and makes me look grim and wizened and decisive all at once
Such wisdom. I wish we were neighbours, and could sit and watch the ocean together.
Great writing thanks
Many yesses, yes all the way down, thank you.
Especially "radical presence as an infinitely flexible adaptation"
And
"I guarantee that where you are is waiting patiently for your attention": more and more, 'the moment', this particular moment (connected to all moments and containing all things, bringing them to me in this very particular, often very humble way), reminds me it is always there, waiting for me. And the moment always loves my recognition and attention and respect, and returns these magnified. Sometimes hope seems an abandoning of the moment. It feels the relationship is founded on faith.
And finally, do you know the Diane di Prima poem Rant? With its great line
"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination"
https://youtu.be/VKpBeQDUp7U?feature=shared
I quoted that poem in my very first Substack post ... Which I edited from the 'Coming soon' placeholder post that is impossible to erase... https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/p/coming-soon
"bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical"
Well of course!
Sammy said Tower Times brought this Moondog song to mind...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E86phiV8w2M
Just after publishing this piece I came across a story in the Rebecca Solnit book I got from the op shop last week, The Faraway Nearby. She tells how in Myanmar monks and nuns publicly protested the military junta by "the rare and extraordinary rite known in Pali as patam nikkujjana kamma, the overturning of the alms bowl so that nothing can be put in it... Overturning the bowls banned the military and their families from giving alms, effectively excommunicating them... The monks marched through the streets holding their bowls upside down, a denunciation made scathingly public. To refuse to accept the gifts was to refuse to confer the reciprocal gifts, to break the threads that tied those secular people to monastic life and to the life of the spirit."
Rosie, unfortunately I can only click the "Loveheart" button once.
Sorry I am not in a position to upgrade to paid, yours is one of the first I would. So much sense comes through in your newsletters.
I also understand the Upside-Downland minority problem although for me it's the first world-third world thing, I struggled with Dougald's group calls because of this.
So much gold here once again Rosie, thank you.
Thank you for the reciprocal gift of your words! Comments and feedback are precious to me because they are a kind of fuel that helps me keep going, just as much as subs do.
Was gonna say, I read Frankisstein after your recommendation and now I pacify my malevolent thoughts towards AI-loving billionaires as them just needing sexbots to replace the human relationships that they fail to succeed at. It’s helped, I’m a little more forgiving towards them.
Ha! Yes. It makes me think of this classic Rebecca Solnit essay (written, I think, in 2016, but republished by LitHub last year: https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-loneliness-of-donald-trump/ )
She writes "The powerless need to dissemble— that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars— and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters."
I don't think we need to forgive billionaires necessarily, but I think they are pitiable in their lonely hubris.
Wow yeah good article. I see a lot of that here. In a place like the Philippines there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor. I'd never met/known people with such wealth until I came here. I remember when I first lived here in 1999 there was an article listing all the richest people in Australia and the Philippines. Murdoch was number one and then there were something like 50 Filipinos before the next Australian got a mention.
Nearly everyone is raised by yayas (nannies) whose job is to please, and hence keep the child happily sated with whatever desire they need. A whole culture of rich, privileged kids without boundaries.
I think a lot about the idea that one of the inheritances the children of the wealthy receive is an internalised set of beliefs around being important, interesting, talented, and worthy of taking up space-- whereas the children of the poor often receive an opposite set of beliefs.
…so many lots all o er this, but most especially the reminder to not throw away energy…
Sometime around 2019 I read an amazing, fearless essay by Catherine Ingram, titled Facing Extinction. She has since removed it from the Internet, but just now I found two quotes I had cached and then forgotten:
"You may find yourself in the company of people who seem to have no awareness of the consequences we face or who don’t want to know or who might have a momentary inkling but cannot bear to face it. You may find that people become angry if you steer the conversation in the direction of planetary crisis. You may sense that you are becoming a social pariah due to what you see, even when you don’t mention it, and you may feel lonely in the company of most people you know...
I once asked Leonard [Cohen] for his advice on how to talk with others about this. He replied: 'There are things we don’t tell the children.' It is helpful to realize that most people are not ready for this conversation. They may never be ready, just as some people die after a long illness, still in denial that death was at their doorstep. It is a mystery as to who can handle the truth of our situation and who runs from it as though their sanity depended on not seeing it."
And: "Courage is often confused with stoicism, the stiff upper lip, bravado that masks fear. There is another kind of courage. It is the courage to live with a broken heart, to face fear and allow vulnerability, and it is the courage to keep loving what you love 'even though the world is gone."
That is so helpful Rosie! I am silent with many people for all reasons Catherine gives and having that thought from Leonard makes sense of why it's wise to be.
I describe this facing into it as bearing the unbearable, when I can talk about it. But as you mentioned when nettled by Dougald, it helps to give our poor wee nervous systems a break from it all too :)
Love reading your work - so often about my home town- and grateful that your presence is here on the wonderful new home I have discovered through Substack.
Zoe
PS. It seems that there is still a place for Catherine Ingrams essay, although she says she has removed it on her own site. But it is here
https://jadepaws.weebly.com/uploads/4/4/2/4/44249471/ingram_--facing_extinction_feb.2019.pdf
Thanks Zoe. I feel like the discussion has shifted a lot even since the essay was published. Maybe it was the advent of the pandemic just the next year, or maybe climate change has become more undeniable. I had totally forgotten the excellent Cohen quote. It's interesting because my piece (that I wrote before refinding these quotes) could be seen as a response to Ingram's statement "It is a mystery as to who can handle the truth of our situation and who runs from it as though their sanity depended on not seeing it."
Word, Catherine Ingram!! I am eternally grateful for being able to face these times with you, Rosie. Thank you for this piece. There's a lot in here we've discussed at length and you've captured it beautifully and succinctly.
I’m going to copy my favourite sections of this into my diary, because I want to absorb these words again, in as many ways as I can think of; bathe myself in these sentiments. Made me cry, touched some nerves.
"There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
Ursula K Le Guin saved me again and again. Her books have been essential on my inner journey this past year.
To give is to receive.
Thank you.
So much here that resonates, thank you for sharing these riches 🙏
M. E. Rothwell explains the firehose: "To summarise, once the number of connections between nodes in a network passes a certain critical threshold, the information environment gets worse. Past that threshold, perhaps counterintuitively, the greater the exchange of ‘information’, the more uniformity we see. Combine that with a selection bias for simple, extreme memes, and you start to understand why our public discourse looks like it does. I’d go as far as to say that the structures of our information networks explain a lot of the political morass we’ve found ourselves in over the last decade.
The question you may be asking yourself at this point is what can we do about this? Well, if as I’d venture, the density of our information networks is part of the problem, the obvious solution is to pull back. Reduce the number of connections between you and other nodes."
https://cosmographia.substack.com/p/network-of-rage
Yes. Thank you. 🧭
Sometimes I think we're all just wandering around Ideaspace, picking up fallen fruit from the same orchard. How else to explain the way that everyone seems to be saying the same things at the same time?
Iain McGilchrist writes: "Finally, the right hemisphere is less ‘will-ful’ than the left hemisphere, and therefore more open to relinquishing control. It can understand the value of what in Buddhism is called emptiness, and the part played by negation in creativity: the power of silence and stillness, of not-knowing and not-doing, of withdrawing in order to permit something truly other to manifest itself. It is the substrate of the mature self as opposed to the immature ego. It can understand that suffering can be generative. And it can understand the valour in vulnerability, and the dark side to what we think is merely good. None of this makes sense to the reductive materialist. And this is another sense in which the left hemisphere leads us away from the truth: the truth of the divine."
https://iainmcgilchrist.substack.com/p/moving-on
You did one of those classes with Dougald Hine! I haven't but have followed him since the DM days. His old buddy Paul K seems to have gone down a darker path, unfortunately. Love all this. Desperately long for the absolute agency I was told was my birthright but trying to let myself be buffeted & lean in. The wind in these parts helps.
Yes I have been following since Dark Mountain too, but these days Dougald is a friend! I followed Paul Kingsnorth for quite a long time but his veering off into Christianity kind of lost me.
I have been thinking lately about how we can dress to harness the wind: billowing silhouettes, ribbons / banners & so forth. Makes it more fun
I have a dream about moving to Welly and living in a knee-length officers' coats they sell at the army surplus, so that it flaps in the wind and makes me look grim and wizened and decisive all at once
I don't see why you couldn't enact such a look in the Wairarapa...
Too hot & I’m not brave enough!