A New-Fashioned Tale of Change
Standing in the Eye of the Hurricane
As I hang Christmas lights outside my house, prep my fabrics for a natural dye session later this week, and make mandala drawings in the mornings—you know, live my normal life—I simultaneously feel like I’m standing in the eye of the hurricane—in a weird stillness where we celebrate the holidays and go about our routines as the political wind and rain build all around us and we wait for the other shoe to drop in January.
A few months ago, my sister sent me an evocative quote from a novel called North Woods by Daniel Mason. At the end of the book, a character who is a naturalist feels intense grief about being born in a time of so much environmental degradation and mass extinction.
But then, she has a realization: “…the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”
A tale of change. This feels, of course, like where we are with everything right now. And it even feels like we’re living within a crucial tipping point of our own making—a brink where the stakes are very high and our capacities as humans will be sorely tested.
A “Particular Type of Thinking”
Perhaps in the future, people will discuss the years that include your and my lifetimes as part of an era of unprecedented change in human history. Hard to say. Also hard to fully appreciate when you’re immersed inside it. Non-stop change is, really, all we know.
And as I move about my life waiting for the other political shoe to drop—and wondering what I’m going to do when it does—I’ve also been thinking about a Stan Rushworth quote that a friend sent me. Rushworth is an author, activist, and citizen of the Chiricahua Apache Nation. Rushworth maintains that social change activism requires us…
“ … to come back into believing in ourselves as human beings. It is not human beings who have made things so colossally dire; it is a particular type of thinking – a predatory kind of thinking. That predatory psychology is justified as being the natural state of Man. But it is not true, and everyone knows in the deepest part of their heart that they are way better than that…”
Yes. We are living in a tale of big change and uncertainty—courtesy of a long-term pattern of predatory thinking—but who decided that’s our natural state?
Humanity vs Individual Humans
Right before Thanksgiving, I went to see the movie Lee. Have you seen it? It’s about the American war photographer Lee Miller. She was one of the first to see and photograph the bodies in the concentration camps. Talk about stark examples of predatory thinking.
(She’s actually most famous for a photograph of herself in Hitler’s bathtub right after the allies took over Germany and confiscated his apartment. A surreal photo for a surreal moment in time.)
Which is why Stan Rushworth’s assertion is so important. To believe that the predatory thinking that created WWII, and that has brought us to this point now, is not our natural state is critical for the changes we need to make as humans. The vast majority of us are completely sick of predatory thinking, even if we blame it on different causes.
I mean there’s so much simmering rage with the predatory thinking that created the predatory structures of late stage capitalism that tens of thousands of people openly mocked the murder of a health insurance CEO on social media just this weekend. I wonder if the billionaire class is taking note?
Of course, its pervasiveness makes it feel natural. But the only way we can “come back to believing in ourselves as human beings” is to believe that predatory thinking is not our natural state.
This feels hard because believing in humanity can feel hard. Very hard.
But then I remember that I know and love so many great humans, and hey, they’re part of humanity.
And then I remember that when I lose faith in humanity, I lose faith in myself. And when I lose faith in myself, well, I lose.
So, as an individual shackled in an economic framework of excess and separation, perhaps the most important change I can offer is the state of my heart and the state of my mind. To really make room in my heart for the possibility that humanity is truly capable of peace, love, and cooperation on a global scale. And to start with believing that about myself.
In fact, we owe it to the planet and all the other living beings that reside here—the other mammals, the plants, the birds, the reptiles, the insects, all of it—to do this work of believing in ourselves as human beings. To know in our hearts that we are better than the predatory thinking that got us here.
And if we can’t believe in everyone, let’s believe in someone. And then another someone. Truly, there are so many wonderful someones in just my life alone.
And as a someone whose favorite word is “possibility,” perceiving life as “a tale of change” gives me the wiggle room I need to grow and act that “a tale of loss” does not. Because no one knows what the future holds. No one. No matter how sure they sound. No matter how much they insist they do.
And some of the hardest, most painful moments in my life have surprisingly also been occasions of true opportunity.
I don’t say any of this glibly. I am not casual about hope or possibility. Sometimes I feel very afraid. And I’m not saying that things might not get bad. I’m saying the only choice we have is to believe in ourselves as human beings. One moment at a time. One person at a time.
I also think it takes real courage to be hopeful or to believe in our better angels—to risk being wrong about big things. To possibly suffer. But if we’re honest, at any point in our lives we may be blindsided. We may suffer. There are people all over this planet suffering deeply right now. Who were deeply suffering last year. And the year before that.
And at the same time, there is joy and beauty and light happening all over this planet all the time as well. One does not negate the other. Being alive on planet Earth is strangely, poignantly like that.
What do YOU think? How are you experiencing life in the eye of the hurricane? Please leave a comment and share—or just hit the like button if that’s more your jam.
Your message is so timely, Sarah. And just what I needed. Thank you.
And you are absolutely correct that having faith in humanity requires courage. And that we owe it to each other and to the planet, to do so.
There is nothing wrong with wearing our rose-colored glasses; they go well with our big hearts and strong belief in the goodness of (most) people. I don mine to brighten the path when it's rough and they never fail me. Thank you for being someone in whom to have faith, my dear.