Existing in Today's World

“When the culture is going through a paradigm shift, it clings to the old familiar way of doing things.”

-Fantastic Fungi

Everyone is back in 90s clothes. High wasted jeans, converse, crew neck sweaters, crop tops, fashion… old cars, riding buses, re-using our cups, recycling… learning skills like canning, gardening, growing, preserving… we are rejuvenating a ‘simpler’ way of life within the context of a world that moves unbelievably fast.

We look back to move forward. Par. Check mate.

Here we stand at the precipice of change. Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old Swede is on the headlines calling politicians out for denying her of her future. Our worlds are shifting. The way of life as we know it is shifting. And we are being called to change towards a state of being that coincides with the earth which we reside.

We are recycling what has been made, and giving rise to the artisan crafts. Our meaningless jobs, coupled with our existential need to belong are pushing us towards something… together… but what it is no one knows. Many people find solace in churches. In temples. In organized religions that give them answers to why we are all here. And yet there is a hole.

There is a space where the why does not quite link up with how we exist within this world. 

It should be simple. There is one earth worth of resources given to sustain all life on the planet. These resources are in essence enough to continuously carry out life forever… and yet, we are hyper-focused on consumption. On what is already available and how to use it. We neglect the decomposition. We neglect death and demand life. We forget the importance of letting things decompose. 

This is the root behind capitalism. Eternal life. Eternal growth. Expansion. Profit. Never-ending demand. There is no source of replenishment. There is nothing that feeds back into the system. We have asked the system to give to us endlessly without asking what we give to it. 

We must let our earth be old. We must let ecosystems remain in tact so that we can learn what to strive for. We must watch the world as it is to learn the world that we are. We must exist within the framework of life and death as a part of the web, not separate from it. We must take care of what exists already, with all of the life and death that it is, and celebrate each birth and each death with reverence. We must allow the seasons to express themselves.

Only then will we see how desperately we yearn for the connections that cannot be found… only felt when we fall into the whole. Our lives are compositions of connections. Ourselves to each other. Ourselves to our food. Ourselves to our communities. Ourselves to our place. Ourselves to our selves that sustain us when all else falls away. I believe that each human is here to fill a specific niche in society. 

I believe that we have purpose, and that our purpose does not have to be grandiose, but rather how well we can exist within the world that we are in, as we are, already.