9. Feedback Loops
a spell for the cleansing of lens
This one is rather a doozy of a rant. I know it’s a journey. If you’re willing to stay with it, it is my hope that it offers some freedom on the other side. Let me know what you think…
“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.”
- Meister Eckart.
The rising heat of the summer is already frightening. I mean, maybe it’s just my brain on Athropocene… Or maybe it’s the fact that I was shivering in the house just earlier this morning and now this. Either way, there’s a surrealness here, an alarm calling me out of a fever dream that I struggle to wake from.
My heart beats faster and not in a good way.
I remember when hot summer days were exciting. Languid even, depending on how you define that word. The feeling of a youthful joy extended beyond what we thought was our rationed portion…
Now?
It feels like the opening scene of a horror movie. Everyone’s still having a good time. Life appears to be what we’d always thought it was. But the Hitchcock violins are slowly building and no one seems to be aware of them and I am feeling SO out of place.
But no, let’s play nice, eh? This is no polite conversation, is it?
Not something suited for parties.
Or for meet-ups after work, or for catching up over lattes, or for heart-to-hearts under the setting sun, or for late night gatherings around the fire.
It’s not polite conversation for anywhere, really, other than in some distant, highly antiseptic, glass and steel lab where they must have figured this all out already...
Right?
They better get on with if not. My AC isn’t cutting it any more and my electric bill is going up and MY COMFORT IS VERY SERIOUSLY BEING FUCKED WITH!
But forgive me if you’re picking up on some vitriol.
I assure you, it is to myself only that I am so caustically lecturing here. It seems as if I both know and do not know these things at the same time.
How is that even possible?
These two parts: the one who knows but can’t do and the one who does but won’t know. I am split in twain. But what taint twins me so? And who is to blame?
Only my self, if I’m honest.
But this is summer weather. Peak summer weather, right after the solstice. I’ve been told my whole life that this is how it is meant to be. Something to be longing for, welcomed with gratitude. That I should go down to the river and take a dip; have a drink or three at the barbeque.
We’ve got sandals and shades, sun-hats and parasols, after all. What’s the worry?
It did used to be a lucky break, didn’t it?
How many millennia of humans would time travel here and think, “The blessings of high summer have come in their fullness, glory be!”
Far away inside me, something screams at the top of its lungs.
I rub my chin, tilt my head, gaze blankly out the window.
Yeah, I think that describes it pretty well, I think… but what if….
Somewhere at the back of my insides, something weeps bitterly, tearing into the earth beneath it.
No, no, too dark. Weighed down like that, we’ll get nowhere.
I carry within me a cry that has been refused by the outside world for so long that it has forgotten vocal cords even exist.
And the vocal cords?
They somehow feel embarrassed by the whole thing and look away.
They cough, politely.
The chorus of Sting’s “Fragile” floats through the air, into my workspace from my wife’s home office.
“On and on, the rain will fall
Like tears from a star, like tears from a star.
On, and on, the rain will say
How fragile we are, how fragile we are.”
Feedback loops.
Sunlight + carbon + atmosphere / Not enough trees
Sunlight, the blessed life-giving gold pouring down through the atmosphere. It has done so for millenia.
And then, suddenly, this is a problem?
Why is this a problem?
IT IS ACCUMULATING TOO QUICKLY.
IT IS NOT SPREADING WHERE IT NEEDS TO GO.
THE PLANET IS HOLDING TOO MUCH OF IT.
Why would this happen?
Allow me to hypothesize that our beloved planet is showing us EXACTLY what it is that we are doing: accumulating heat, power, energy.
Always wanting more.
Did you know that the whole reason we burn nuclear fuel for power is because it MAKES STEAM MORE QUICKLY? That’s the whole secret. It’s just the fastest way we can heat the tea kettle to whistling and have the little pinwheels spin up juice for us.
It’s atom splitting steam-punk and the waste lasts for millennia.
Well, we’ve got heat now. More than we know what to do with.
Maybe more than we can live with.
But hey, enough wallowing in the doom and gloom of it all.
WHY ARE WE STUCK HERE?
Feedback loops.
Anxiety / What do we fear?
We push it away, mostly.
But secretly, we know that this is the taint that twins us in twain. Our anxiety is not OTHER, it is US. It is an inside job. It is something we have already said “yes” to, given belonging to, long before we ever thought about pushing it away.
But we separate ourselves from the silent screamer and look away, embarrassed.
We cough politely…
I’m not even talking merely “climate change” now.
I’m talking: “Do they love me?” “Am I safe?” “What’s wrong with me?” “What did I do?” “What is going to happen to me?”
These fears inside us are all things we’ve already said yes to. They are there because someone, somewhere, sometime learned that this was how you survived. And they passed that little bit of neuronal wiring on down to us, century over century over century.
These secret ancestors are not away from us; they are HERE, beside and within us.
They whisper freely their hard won secrets of survival. Their “yes” became our “yes” when we were born, before we were born, a contract signed upon coming into life.
But don’t worry; all contracts are negotiable, if you make the effort to look at the fine print…
Feedback loops.
Our hand burns? We take it off the stove. Easy.
Our soul burns? We numb.
Our planet burns? We look around not really sure that it’s a thing. We wait for someone to tell us what to do. We cough politely.
Somewhere inside, we know it’s a thing. But we so want to be convinced it is not.
What pain burns inside us so strongly that the entire planet is transforming itself into a wasteland in order to reflect our own burning back at us, to show us our own inner suffocation and inability to release?
“When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.” - Meister Eckart
Our souls are burning and they need us to hear their cries. They wish us to see how blind we have been to their/our suffering.
After all, ignorance has always been an inside job. The call telling you not to worry about it is coming from inside the house, and yes, it’s got the knife and the mask too…
But there is still that ache buried deep in the heart, those tears that have lost their way to the eyes, the cries kicking feebly in the diaphragm, that anger burning in the side, that deep despair bubbling in the gut…
Feedback loops.
We have condemned our souls to the hell of our own unwillingness. Our unwillingness to simply pay them the attention they’re due. And they are creating a world around us to reflect this back at us, trying desperately to get our attention.
We will see, one way or another, willingly or no, what the price is of such willful ignorance. Nothing ever goes until it’s done with us, until it’s had its say and been paid its proper dues.
Till then, it waits. We need its tutelage. Its message for us will not be ignored.
Feedback loops.
Burning.
This beautiful world, going up in flames, drowning in waste, suffocating under a blanket of smog, our astral lawn scattered with the remnants of broken toys.
This is you, too. It is your soul. The world merely builds itself to fit the soul’s purpose.
Yet you know, too, the beauty still alive in the world. You see it everyday, if your eyes are in any way opened. And if they’re opened long enough, you probably also see the precious fleetingness of that beauty, too.
What we need is to be brave enough to risk applying the truth of fleetingness to our own pain.
The world will not heal until our souls heal, and our souls only heal with attention and with time. And we haven’t got much time; they are STARVING for attention.
Somewhere, deep inside you, a hand rests on a burning stove.
It has been there so long that its bit of neuronal wiring has gone numb; yet the voices of your ancestors still scream within that numbness.
Can you let that feedback loop find its way back to you again?
Can you admit what burns and allow the centuries of wisdom accumulated there to teach you exactly which hand is stuck on what stove and just how you might go about actually pulling it off?
This is a re-learning, and it WILL hurt. But not any more than your soul is already hurting. You are coming home to a pain carried always inside you. It is nothing new, nothing extra.
Nothing unnecessary.
And on the other side awaits a feedback loop reclaimed. A little bit of soul that you have learned to trust and that now knows it can trust you too.
A breath, at last. Some fresh air.
And hope, because it is not only the pain that was numbed.
We numbed ourselves to the joy as well.
And in reclaiming one, we earn the right to the other.
Feedback Loops.
It will take time and work and attention. It will take suffering consciously the forgotten pains we already carry. It will take relieving ourselves of all our illusions.
But on the other side, our soul’s load will be lightened. The ringing bell of the universe will no longer find us dumb and unresponsive. And the joy that is life will no longer have to turn its face away in sadness at our refusal to meet its eyes.
Let us come home again, together, an orchestra of joy forged through the digestion of pain too long carried. And let us sing.
With love,
Ian Reclusado
of The Kind Knife
"How could you be certain of anything after a week like that? What had been certain before was what anyone could see: dead men stayed dead, bodies stayed in tombs, Caesar was Lord of all the earth, and love was powerless before soldiers with hammers and huge nails. Then Sunday happened, and everything was up for grabs." - Barbara Brown Taylor.
Another very deep post for me. I'll have to reread it several times to absorb it all....