Self Care in an Apocalypse

when the going gets tough, the tough slow down

Today I'm going to do a philosophical rant that I put in the category of self-care during an apocalypse. I'm going to be talking about why the goal gets further away the faster you run. I will tell a charming, funny and horrifying story without my daughter's permission and I'm going to be looking at a permaculture approach to spirituality. I'll also be looking at Empire vs Sovereignty and Means vs Ends and why it is that things are spinning into control.

What I feel that we’re doing is biding our time while world events play out. My recommendation to you is to go as slow about your day as you can get away with, to take so much time doing things that it's ridiculous, and to spend as much time doing nothing as your life permits.

Imagine time as a pocket that keeps expanding the more you put into it, so it takes more to fill it up. But if you take things out of that pocket, what I find is that it still accommodates whatever it is I need to do. Time is a hamster wheel where we create as much time as we need. The faster we run the faster that Wheel of Time Goes and the faster we have to go to keep up with it. But if we slow down we can even step off the hamster wheel and take a breath and let things play out.

There are things at work in the world we can’t control, can't make better and can't make happen faster. They're something that needs to play out. In the meantime we can savor own lives and look at what we want to get out of our day, and not set ourselves deadlines as much as possible.

I've been trying to not give myself homework and it’s helped that that my email is down so I'm not getting notifications. So I go to Substack when I'm ready to read something. What I read, I read deeply and respond, rather than trying to skim because all the others are stacked up behind. If I need to read something, it will find me!

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My daughter and her husband flew to New Zealand for their honeymoon and first anniversary, staying at an AirBnB before going on to Auckland. On their way to the airport, mid-trip, they realized they’d left their bag of snacks and called to see if they could pick it up. The landlady answered the phone and demanded, “What was in those gummies? My husband called from work and he’s feeling strange. What was in them?”

Veronica stammered, “CBD” and the woman said, “That’s cannabis, right? What else?” When she said “THC” the woman didn’t know what that was and said, “I’m going to file an incident report. I hope you’re not leaving New Zealand!” When Veronica got off the phone, she was shaking and as close to a panic attack as she’s ever been. She wanted to fly home immediately, afraid they’d make an example out of them and she’d never be able to go back.

Now, Veronica travels with snacks that would fill a backpack—chocolate, toffee, swedish fish and in with them, four cannabis gummies so they could sleep on the 14-hr plane ride. What are the odds, of all that, the husband would eat one? And in the two hours since they’d checked out? It was something too contrived to be just an accident. Along with the legal fears, she had drugged someone against his will! What lesson was this trauma supposed to teach her?

At the airport the woman texted that she’d talked to a doctor friend who said that he’d sleep it off and be fine, so she wasn’t going to file a report. By the next day, she texted that they had had some giggles over it and he had learned his lesson about taking candy from strangers. So maybe that was the lesson was for him.

For Veronica and James, it had been a year of things that spun wildly out of control in crazy coincidences. And then, at the last minute, worked out by the skin of their teeth. And worked out better than they could have imagined, and never would chosen without the chaos that pushed them into freefall. So maybe the lesson is to trust.

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How do we talk about these things without getting into spirituality, which sounds New Agey, or religion and all its problems? I’ve been posting about Jewish and Christian scriptures and some have said that religions are the problem. But I think that religion—like money, government, education, technology—is just a means to an end. The end for which they’ve all been used is empire, power over others.

But why give up the means of power because it’s been used for the wrong ends? All of these means can be used for sovereignty, or power over ourselves. Rather than allowing them to define God, and deciding if we believe in that God or no God, I think we should reclaim God. Define a God who’d be an asset to our lives and then decide if there’s evidence for that God’s existence.

Permaculture says, ‘Let nature do the heavy lifting.’ Much of what’s happening in the world is tragic, violent and destructive. It wouldn’t be my choice to have things happen this way. I’m very glad not to be in charge. But what if it’s the only way to bring about a change that’s better than we could imagine? Maybe these things aren’t happening without meaning.

As the Buddhist monks say, ‘Things are spinning out of control. How exciting!’ Maybe things are spinning into control. And it’s up to us to bide our time, try not to worry and let spirit do the heavy lifting.

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Other videos in the Self-Care in an Apocalypse playlist:

Illustrates the proper way to throw a pity party, including who NOT to invite, what to wear, what to eat, what to do. For partner pity parties, teaches how to be a puppy but for true wallowing, one is the loneliest number. Gives an example from Jacques Lusseyran on advice we should NOT take until we've had our fill of self-indulgent complaining and feeling sorry for ourself.

In a recent talk in Black Mountain, NC, Charles described how we're in the space when the story shifts, the glitch in the matrix of being and relationship. I compare his ideas to A Course in Miracles with the synchronicity that lets us step out of the story for a moment. And I give some thoughts on Clif High and how the Yugas fit with either.

Do you miss the slowed-down pace of sequestering and self-care? I feel you. In this episode I explore wasted time, and whether there is such a thing. I look at reading and the art of the good excuse. Along with social obligations, I look at political activism and whether we're dealing with a runaway train. An elastic concept of time and an imaginative sense of purpose is proposed as a way of keeping the sanity we gained in the pandemic, contrary to their intentions.

I begin this video with the story of my daughter's wedding, which I'm taking as an omen for the community we're going to build when the empire crumbles. Then I read my poem on the double bind of being a Cassandra during these troubled times, and my vision for how it's all going to turn around.