I have written about awakenings. I have talked about my belief in the upward spiraling evolution of humanity. I have hemmed and hawed about the opportunity within crisis and the inevitable need for collapse in order for rebirth to flourish. Yet upon having your every day nervous breakdown and going to a shrink to see if she could patch me up, I noticed that I have been denying something- I am scared shitless. I have been hiding the opposing “doom and gloom scenario” in secret pockets of my mind and body. While talking to this shrink, I realized I refer to this as “It.” This scenario threatens me with thoughts such as: I have to pay off my credit cards before “It” happens. I don’t know if I want to have a child when I know “It” is coming. I better learn how to grow food before “It” comes.
What is “It” you ask? It is the place created when climate change meets peak oil and they get together and visit nuclear war, fundamentalism, and corporate capitalism. This charming little preview of hell gives rise to a landscape filled with such an apocalyptic wasteland that I am startled I have managed to function inside the same psyche that has created such a nightmare.
In my nightmare, oil has peeked, nuclear war has erupted, and dwindling resources along with the rise of fundamentalism has left us clawing desperately at the last remaining droplets of oil, scraps of fertile land, and drips of clean water that we believe is our god given right to possess at all costs. It is where the streets are crumbling and cars sit in yards decaying and mocking us with their obsoleteness. It is the insatiable desperation of countries to hold onto their infrastructure even if it means atomic warfare. It is the massacring of the planet and extinction of more and more species. It is the cement world with lifeless deserted buildings and useless technology that sits dead with empty promises. It is the sad and empty day when we realize the nugget of truth in the native American saying, “Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.”
You may think I am crazy. Perhaps I am. I didn’t consciously one day imagine this all and think, “Yes, that is how the future will unfold.” But with the intake of more daunting information, this It formed piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle.
The light in me held its own, however, and did in fact create its own view of the world yet to come. This is the view that I usually write about, talk about, and acknowledge as it usually elicits smiles of warmth instead of awkward stares and recommendations for Paxil. This is the one where humanity experiences a collective awakening. We get out of the shopping malls and into the forests. We heal the planet, not out of zesty political ambition, but out of a conscious recognition that this living being deserves our love and respect- that we actually cannot live without it. In this version of the future, we use clean energy, we slow down, we light our children’s Adderall on fire. We have community potlucks. We use the media as a contagious hot spring of ideas, visions, and positivity. We build faith that life will go on, that our planet will heal, that a new consciousness will be born. Religious tolerance blossoms from an indifferent social more to a thread of unity within all beings. The earth does not bow to us, we bow to her.
So I had a choice to concentrate on apocalyptic hell or utopian paradise. I picked the latter and shoved the other deep down into my subconscious.
Well, we all know that things shoved deep into our subconscious don’t conveniently disappear and before long I found myself talking with a therapist about this strange and unexpected anxiety I was feeling. Eventually we began to discuss the sense of urgency when it comes to accomplishing certain things like paying off my credit cards and putting money in savings. She asked me to share why I felt so rushed in doing these things, and I replied “to feel safe in case something happens.” When she asked me to elaborate on this, I found myself talking about a world that makes the Great Depression look like the Golden Age. When I finished with my version of the It and looked up at the adorable little blonde woman who had stopped taking notes on her clipboard, I realized that anxiety was the only logical thing to feel. I realized I had better take a look at my fears before I let them dance away in the night and create their hellish stories.
Acknowledging beliefs, no matter how scary they may be is an essential part of the process of healing. We wouldn’t be in the place where we were if we were not damaged at some level or another. We cannot say that the health of the planet doesn’t reflect the health of its people. We shouldn’t embrace this negativity but it cannot be transcended until it is acknowledged.
The truth is we don’t know what is going to happen. The solutions rely on a collective awakening. One person cannot combat an exploding population, a heating planet, the end of oil, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and economic collapse. So how do we have faith on a collective awakening? Well, if you are a border line control freak and organize your vegetable bin, then finding a way to trust your fellow humans and to a certain extent let go of the future, is like asking a four year old to leave Chuckie Cheese without a temper tantrum.
Now I know that believers of the secret may argue that acknowledging this nightmarish reality is actually increasing the possibility of if happening. I believe in the law of attraction. However, I think that the law of attraction is based more on our beliefs than our thoughts. We can think about rainbows and sunshine all we like but if our core beliefs are wandering away towards hurricanes and earthquakes than that is what we will attract. Beliefs must be acknowledged before they are transcended. Anyone who knows about affirmations can atest that if you say “I am rich with overflowing abundance” when you have -19 cents in your checking account and you put water in your creamer to make milk, that every cell in your body is calling you a big fat liar.
It is a tough paradox that the more you read the facts and increase your knowledge, the more you realize the threats and dangers. Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is the key. What does the planet need- a bunch of blissed out people or people who hold they key to unlocking new doors? However, this key cannot be used if we are burying fears in secret caverns of our heart. So I invite you to write back and share your fears, share your story, share ways we can cope with these fears in healthy and appropriate ways. For anyone who had to put Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over down during Chapter Five’s Banquet of Consequences and was tempted to bury it in the back yard, write back and share what was going through your mind during this book.
We can talk about the keys we hold and how we can collectively use them to unlock doors we did not even realize were there, but first we must ask ourselves if there are any monsters under the bed that we are too scared to look at. Then our visions for the future are not desperate things we are clutching at because we don’t want to look the other way and instead they are real alternatives which we strive for with wisdom and authentic joy. •
Katie Liljedahl ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
