Calm Grounding: Don't sweat the big stuff

Sixth meditation on the Benefits of Collapse Acceptance.

We're seeing a lot of bad news lately. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt, forests burn, cities are flooded, and war rages. This cavalcade of disasters, reported from distant places, can set our nerves on edge, driving us into disabling anxiety. We may become so distracted that we are unable to enjoy the lives we are actually living, here and now.

Collapse Acceptance shifts our perspective so we don't need to keep track of the latest reports of far-away trouble. We already know that collapse is happening, so it is no surprise to us when we hear that something new has gone wrong. Calm Grounding allows us to keep our attention where it can do the most good—right here in our natural lives.

As we seek serenity we face a couple of challenges, living as we do within Global Industrial Civilization. First, our senses are unnaturally extended by electronic technologies: we can see around the world without leaving our room. Second, we have been deceived by the depraved idea that humans control the Earth: we are told to believe that we can—that we must!—fix what has gone wrong.

We have built an idol of Homo Colossus, the human who sees all and controls all. We imagine that our meddling with the world is “progress,” and our murderous exploitation is “dominion,” sanctioned by our patriarchal deity. We stride the world, build our cities, dig our mines and our wells, and gorge ourselves on power that ought to have remain hidden. We tower mightily above the world, but at our feet there is a wasteland where there used to be a Garden.

On the journey of Collapse Acceptance, we learn to relinquish the false idol of Homo Colossus. We see the futility and evil of the way that we have traveled. We renounce that way, and we turn back to our origins. We reclaim our existence as natural creatures who are part of the community of life.

This lets us attend to what is real and true. We discard the need to scroll perpetually through reports of doom, because we know there is no wisdom or security in the endless list of trouble. We let go of the deluded notion that we can, at this late date, exert special human powers to cure all the things that have gone irretrievably wrong, and which are worsening at exponential speed.

Instead, we reconnect with the greatest power of all—that of the Earth herself. We know that the Earth gives life, and also that she requires justice. We know that balance will be restored, though it may follow upon a fearsome deluge. We no longer chase phantoms of misery, nor do we indulge in fantasies of power. Calmly grounded, we root our lives in the Earth where we stand.

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Karen Perry’s Fifteen Benefits of Collapse Acceptance give us a vocabulary to talk about something that’s difficult to put into words. This series explores the Benefits, in intermittent dispatches.

Photo by Matthew Painton.