Ephemera

Discerning the light of our new reality

As the dawn breaks just above the 43rd northern parallel, its bluish light filters into my room, glistening off the blanket of snow which settled upon our wee planetary spot over the past day. With any luck, it will be a white Christmas and merry will be the order of the day. Wouldn’t that be lovely.

This evening, dusk will usher in the longest night. Our northern lands will twirl through their furthest point from the sun, and the moment of the Winter Solstice will pass. In that infinitesimally brief moment, Earth’s course will change, spinning us back toward the light, the whirl of longer and longer days, and the promise of Spring. We have done this for thousands of years, perhaps most of them before we even trusted the light would return on the other side of that long night.

We gather

The rituals of the longest night are deep in our traditions, calling us through the fear and the darkness. Often feasting. Sometimes dancing. Fires blazing. Incense burning. We gather, still, to ward off the darkness and the fears it might bring, to encourage our children, our neighbours, our world. We push ourselves through the tunnel of fear and dread and into the potential of light and hope and possibility. It’s almost visceral, so deeply is it embedded in us, we who take the time to remember. And we find our hearts strengthened, our relationships deepened, our commitment broader than it was two days ago. This is the promise of this night and its timeless rituals.

Winter staircase; Photo credit, gretta vosper, 2024

But this year I find myself bereft of the courage we’ve built over the thousands of years through which we poured our children out upon the earth and taught them its rhythms, the millennia through which we have traipsed, finding shelter, sowing seeds, nursing new generations, venturing forth, finding home, again. We have broken our rhythm with life, forgotten, as we danced, that our partner was not our lover, our neighbour, our offspring, or even our communities; it was and has always been our planet, Earth, the one we call Mother.

Instead of being swept up in Earth’s arms as all our generations before have done, feeling her rhythm and living our lives within her spiral of life, death, and renewal, we forced her beneath us, breaking the rhythm of that primeval dance. We’ve distanced ourselves from her, rarely touching her with our bare toes or needing to work her soil out from under our fingernails. We live in climate-controlled environments, moving from our permanently temperate homes into our vehicular comforts and back again, immune to the Earth’s incessant thrum of life, and she, as ever, indifferent to ours. It was never her responsibility to care for us; it was ours to care for her. And so our dance has become, for us, a death-spiral. And on this year’s longest night, a night which has always called me through its depths and into a new hope, the darkness of that dance has gripped me.

Although I have been engaged by climate science for over thirty years, just this past week did I finally slam through delusion and into reality. While adding carbon to the atmosphere began to be a problem as we introduced ourselves to the wonders of coal, and with it, steam, it wasn’t until the 1980s that we began hearing more and more about our impact on the environment and our ability to change Earth’s climate. And just as we turned our diligent attention to the work of cleaning up highly polluted air systems, thereby letting the sun shine down even more brightly and warmly upon us, climate scientist James Hansen gave us a fiery picture of what Earth would become if we kept up with our fossil-fuelled mania in pursuit of what we call progress. Since then, I’ve believed that we could change things, that wearing thrifted clothes, refusing to fly, shopping local, driving a twenty-year-old hybrid, living without air-conditioning in the summer and bundled in sweaters knit with reclaimed wool in the winter would all make a difference. We even broke up with our gas company and installed solar panels on our roof this past summer.

Knitting a vest from reclaimed wool; Photo credit: gretta vosper, 2024

But none of that is going to stave off catastrophic, humanity-threatening climate change. This year, we breached the 1.5 degree limit set in Paris in 2015 and agreed upon by the Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Did you know we’d breached that once-terrifying number? Did that make the top of the world’s newsfeeds? I doubt it. That orange-faced source of hot air, perhaps equal in its ability to destroy humanity, captures all the headlines these days.

Indeed, Hansen has argued for some time that, with systems already unsettled and the carbon already in the pipe, so to speak, that 1.5 degrees was delusional. He and other climate scientists believe we will breach an increase of 10 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures by the end of the century or maybe before. The speed of the upward curve seems to be the only real question. The systems that are already unsettled - the massive amounts of methane and carbon that will be released as the Arctic continues to warm, the impact of sea ice loss, and our seeming inability or refusal to create sustainable systems within which huge populations can live and thrive while protecting those that other life forms need to survive - all spell disaster. I get it. Finally and fully.

So what to do?

Well, to be honest, despair seems to be the ticket, don’t you think? I know it well. I’ve been carrying it in my pocket for years. This week, perhaps more vulnerable than usual, caught by one of the items I read - Hansen, damn him, was, again, to blame - I wept. Not the tearing up sort of thing that happens every few weeks as the realities literally brim over, but real, deep, until-I-exhaust-myself weeping. I blew straight past the benefits provided by my Stoic practices, my half hour of body-scan mindfulness, my EFT tapping, my dozen distractions I keep to hand. Straight past them all and ending in a mess.

That was helpful.

For a moment.

Winter star. Photo credit: gretta vosper

Seriously, though, it is helpful to have a long, snorting, mucus-slavered weep. Desensitizing ourselves is not an option. Take that moment whenever you need it, because when you do, you really do. Ploughing past the realization of where we are, where you are, what we are doing and what we can no longer do - ploughing past all that is doable but only for a time. I don’t want to be able to ignore what is happening all around us and I don’t want you to be able to, either. I don’t want to pretend it will all be okay. It will not. That is now clear. It has been for awhile but it takes each of us a different period of time to come to accept that.

Pretending the destruction of Earth’s life-sustaining ecosystems isn’t happening and that everything we are doing is making an amazing difference may be delusional, but embracing the devastation and dancing away those final, wild hours of the best party ever is an affront to who and what we are: sentient beings, among the few privileged of Earth’s creatures to have evolved consciousness, and heavily burdened with conscience.

We cannot change the course our past has taken. We cannot arrive at this moment in time with a different record behind us. We cannot move into the future without dragging along with us the dreadful wreckage of our history. We are here. Now. Facing the tomorrow we have conjured through our past. It is time to acknowledge that and find our way forward.

Reaching for connection

After the tragedy of the 9/11 terror attack, one of the photos that circulated was of two people holding hands as they jumped from the burning building. One look, and the whole story of two people, offering courage to one another, choosing to hold hands as they jumped together, was embraced as poignant and courageous. But it wasn’t true. They hadn’t chosen to hold hands. They hadn’t even jumped together. If two people did choose to do that, their picture was never captured; the one that made the rounds was a simple compilation.

Photo compilation, 9/11

I don’t know what the person who created the photo was trying to do. Perhaps they were intentionally producing a fake in the hopes they would be able to cash in on it, selling a moment no one else had witnessed, human nature being what it will, and all that.

But what if we were to imagine that the person who created this photo was intentionally making a statement about the ultimate act of defiance, the refusal to allow ourselves see one another as separate, no matter how desperate our situation. Maybe they were reminding us that our ultimate compulsion is to hold to one another even in the most dangerous of times. Perhaps the photo was created because we cannot bear to be alone in our moments of terror. Perhaps it is our deepest hope that reaching out to one another might save us in the end, even as we streak toward the obliteration of everything we have ever known and loved. Perhaps it is the final refusal of indifference, of the fallacy of independence, of the isolation of our hearts. Perhaps, in the end, it is fear that holds us together; fear, more powerful, even, than love.

Against fear, humanity created gods, religions, talismans, and potions. To stave back the darkness, we created family and home, tradition, art, and animal husbandry. To protect ourselves from those things we feared but could not control, we created spears and hatchets, bullets, warfare, and the nuclear bomb. We crafted locks to keep people out and codes to keep ourselves safe. Some of those contrivances worked for a time. For many people, some of them still do. But we are still alone. And we are still afraid.

Throughout our history, there is nothing we have done as a species in isolation from one another. Nothing lasting. We have each walked our own paths. We have each sought our own pleasures. We have each, often privately, stared at the detritus of our personal dreams. But, as a species, we have moved toward this moment in time and as a species, we will continue our course. I do not believe we have the capacity to stop the inexorable creep toward the end of all we have known and loved. I do not believe we will find a way to staunch our thirst for energy, pressed to its limits by our unslaked hunger for convenience, entertainment, and our many, too many addictions, be they food, fashion, substances, technology, travel, the ongoing upgrading of home furnishings, whatever. I do not expect us to pull back from that precipice in time to save the wonder of our own selves sufficiently that generations to come might thrive.

Hope tucked into the stars. West Hill United, Phot credit, gretta vosper, 2018

Let’s hold hands.

So let me compile this picture of who we might be as we fall from this dizzying height.

Let us, first, be authentic. We walk around pretending that everything is all right. When did we last speak of our fears with our family or friends? It is hard. Damned hard. But still, we must find the courage and the words to speak of our realities, our despair, our greatest fears. We must open ourselves to the fears of others.

And we must create safe places for conversations to take place, spaces for the naming of pain, the demonstration of anger, the lament of betrayal, and the shame of complicity. Let’s choose to seek out the lonely and hold out our hands. It will take courage to listen to the pain and wrap our arms around it, hear the notes of discord and add to them the brave words of truth. We must feel the distance between us and weave words into that silent space. When we hold out our hands and reach out our hearts, we might be able to breathe hope through the narrow spaces that lead to the caverns of another’s sorrows and feel the breath of deep respect honouring the realities we each experience. May we reconfigure the spaces between us, eliminate the distrust, reframe the connections and find ourselves stitched, one to the other, through our hearts.

Let us hold hands as we fly toward tomorrow, both its beauty and its catastrophe. Let us lift our song against the waiting and silent abyss of fear, refusing its terror with the strength of our having known love and fulfilled our commitment to one another every time we remembered to live into goodness despite our heart-wrenching realities, celebrated and honoured beauty wherever and whenever it caught our eye, and learned a myriad ways to carry truth to one another’s hearts. Not a single person has stood witness to every beauty throughout the great expanse of time. Neither will any one of us capture the whole of what crosses the skies in our lifetime. We are ephemera. Brilliant. Exquisite. Fleeting. And, across the millennia, we have learned the importance of holding hands, of refusing to let another go alone. Perhaps that has been our greatest learning of all. To go together.

Through all the coming cycles of light and darkness, may we find ways to hold to one another as we hold to goodness, beauty, and truth; the lights of love. And may we hold that love high and bright for one another, even and especially when our own hearts feel the burden of the darkness. It is in this holding of hearts, in the holding of hands, that our humanity will continue into whatever the future might bring.

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