Dreaming the World

It’s a mostly cloudy morning after a rainy weekend. There is a distinct chill to the air and house, although it is not really cold. In fact, the weather seems to be on the mild side of seasonal norms.

I imagine this past weekend was difficult for many of us. The government seems intent on becoming ever more violent, our leaders demonstrating repeatedly that they are unhinged. My newsfeed, when not overflowing with the current insanity, is filled with dire environmental news. As an ecologist, I find those tends profoundly disturbing. I also find the scope of our shared problems, and the disconnect between the urgency needed to address them and our governments’ actions, deeply disheartening.

In many ways we are witnessing the nasty underside of what has always been present in settler colonial contexts. Still, I inherited my family’s hope for something different. Of course, I also inherited their fear that nothing would really change.

One of the news items that caught my attention was a piece about the chasm confronting Social Security. The article reported on a new study that suggested that if nothing is done quickly, those who need Social Security the most will find themselves in a situation where they would be better off in a “third world” country. Dire stuff indeed.

Of course, we have been on this trajectory for a long time. Many years ago I was visiting a friend on the Hupa reservation in California. She was apprenticed to a local shaman so we had much to speak about. While I was there I was visited by a vision. In the vision I saw the Amazon surrounded by deep ice, and told that the fate of the Amazon would also be the fate of the world.

Visions like that are notoriously difficult to interpret. They are also very often both personal and collective. Forty plus years out, with a much deeper connection to the Amazon, I now understand the ice as metaphorical. The icy heart of late capitalism and the frozen hearts of so many with money, power, and influence has indeed created a collapsing Amazon. This does not bode well for the planet.

In periods of intense social conflict there are inevitably many ironic moments and situations. How strange that an enormous company that calls itself Amazon is seemingly committed to the destruction of its namesake.

All this brings me back to something Jesus said, “By their actions you shall know them.” At this point we know them pretty well.