There’s a light rain, on a bracing October morning in the Oceanside region. It’s Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I chose to stay on the island, rather than trek back to the mainland. There’s an air of strangeness and uncertainty this month that made me feel it wiser to stay put.
Heavy water droplets fall from increasingly leafless trees onto my old car’s roof, as I sit in the parking lot at a trailhead. I just got the chill out of my hands, so I’m not springing out the door to get back into the cold. Though, within five to ten minutes of the hike I know it’d all balance out, warming from the core to the arms to the fingertips. I’ve got some podcasts queued up, one about questioning cultural narratives, and another about Beethoven. Story and the arts, interdependent and inescapably intertwined, and essentially human.
We are living in the era of incomparable change. It is a time of great uncertainty, deeply uncomfortable introspection and critical self-inquiry, cultural shifts and paradigmatic upheaval. Many of us can do little more than hide our faces right now, emotionally overwhelmed, adopting an uneasy and inhumane personal masking — precisely when it is crucial that we open all lines of communication, to see each other, face-to-face and vulnerable, and to challenge the specious notion that we could ever resolve our world’s problems, hidden behind social and psychosocial and sociopolitical barriers, various digital screens and tracking devices.
No, we must step into our next-level beingness, if ever this charade of world health and wellbeing is to be adequately quantified, qualified, truly understood, and successfully addressed. It is yet another era of shadowplay; political, economic and sociopathic gamesmanship, whose aim is to serve the very few, while expediting a general spiritual extinction of the rest of us, our fine planet, and the lives, dreams and aspirations we have held in our hearts, at the very least, since childhood.
We must ask better questions, demand truth and transparency, pursue justice, and reclaim the natural way of things. There is no one who is coming to save us. A better way is known. Let’s go.
Solvitur ambulando