The Altitudes of Chicken Little…

The sky is most definitely falling, but which sky?

“May you live in interesting times.”

I remember some timeless moment ago finding myself introduced to this quote as “an ancient Chinese curse.” Curse or no curse, these times certainly qualify for the descriptor.

Of late my mind often wanders a journey between three poles of attraction. What is the state of this world, this human endeavor, in context? What is the nature of being, in the most profound depths of beauty? And what is the nature of predicament in which this particular soul finds itself today?

Working backwards, the latter tends to drive the focus of my hands and feet from daylight to daylight. Within that, the second item is often the ground of inquiry that drives a persistent keel of upright attitude in an often turbulent stream of experience. Finally, the former calls for a more stratigraphic consideration with layers of state ranging from sweeping evolutionary timescales of planets and life itself all the way through immediate social economic conditions of the present moment.

The weaving of these three attractors conditions a certain karmic structure of the soul, if you will. Bounded within transcendent awareness, this emergent structure of a self, or “point” of perspective, lives a sacred dance of turning towards, into, and away moment to moment, always in love, though ephemeral in appearance or fixed impact.

Some chicken, eh?

In any case, the nature of being, as it is so infinitely vast, resists and retards any efforts to break that Oneness, provides a certain ground of presence. Indescribable, profoundly uncertain and diamond perfect of mythological proportion, this Tao compels the realization of spacious freedom at the quantum field dimension of ever presence.

Within that lives the journey of a soul; any soul really, but to keep things honest – this soul — through which in this moment come these words. This journey. This life. This clarity. This confusion. This moment, for I know no other.

That journey, grounded in spacious freedom, takes us across this chasm of life in a turbulent world, in an interesting world. The guide star of that journey is the always hinted abundance of a flourishing wellbeing for the living systems of which we find ourselves a part.

The fullness of that realized abundance is a new Wholeness revealed as love which, like water, finds its way into every nook and cranny of this infinite diversity we call life.

Which is all fine and nice, but the sky is falling.

As I live in that multidimensional, sometimes entanglement, sometimes tapestry, I am drawn again and again to see, with some concern, the powerful risks we face, not just in the brokenness of our spiritual hearts, but in the simple materiality of our world today.

These risks do not portend simply some future loss, though certainly opportunities abound in that regard, and across scale. The risks to which I refer live with us today, have been for some time, and have grown in their atrocity commensurate with the population boom of our species.

This brings me, if we may be so fortunate, to the point of this reflection.

I have, personally, great concern for the well-being of the world today. I am so saddened by the countless lives trapped in abject despair. My heart breaks even deeper with each revealed instance of our collective human carelessness and practical indifference. While threats of spreading war lie close at hand in the media landscape, we near centuries of poverty in the communities of our close brothers and sisters across the land.

All this concern could be dispelled completely in a moment by nothing more complicated than a tumbling rock appearing around the corner of the sun this afternoon; tomorrow, proof, new concerns.

Much of my work today consists of contemplating the meaning and possible nature of “response” in the context of global civic poly-crisis (which is really a metacrisis, but that is a different story.)

In that context, I often reflect that – on the front-end, there is always a place to stand from which raising alarm and acting with concern is nothing more than the conventional matter of Chicken Little’s confusion. In other words, whether what we seek to protect is just the privilege of mostly white, northern hemispheric, “Western” WEIRD civilization, or declarations of “life itself,”, each of these many scales are just so many lines in the sand. On both sides of these countless lines we find suffering and joy, precious grace and despair.

Imagining that a current evolutionary metacrisis as a context which demands some reply, and I do, sets up an interesting paradox in the light of this little Chicken’s concern. If some reply is effected, and that reply met with wild success, evidence of its fundamental need might in fact be wildly scarce at best. Always the room to plausibly say, “it was never (going to be) all that bad.” On the other hand, failing to respond, or inadequacy of response seems likely to resolve to such a breakdown at its particular scale such that the degree of catastrophe simply washes away in the evolutionary sentiment of time.

So I say the sky is falling, but which sky.

Short of that mote rounding the bend of the sun, most reports seem to suggest that the fullness of life on earth (and even then) is not quite so very at risk of anything more than perhaps a greater substance of this sixth mass extinction. Bam, smack, a whisper in geologic time and some descendents of we or our neighbors are flourishing again. So maybe not that sky, and even so, perhaps on other satellites of other stars…

So not all of life, but certainly humanity itself must be at some great risk of perishing in this extinction!?

I’ll recall an off-color joke I remember from my childhood in the Mountain West.:

The Lone Ranger and Tonto are out of bullets, and in the middle of a storm of swirling Indian war party closing in on all sides. The Masked Man, turning to his compatriot, proclaims, “Well old friend, looks like we’ve had it.”

Looking back, Tonto smiles wryly, “What you mean we, Kemosabe?”

I have heard the love and whispers from our “more indigenous” brethren of some felt sense of accountability to help their lost relations find once again the path of right livelihood in the world. Should we in our “modern” sensibilities manage to destroy, as have so many before us, the totality of this regionally predominant “civilization,” I think there are many likely pockets where human beings in contexts much less departed from the family of flora, fauna, micro biome and material earth herself, will continue to flourish in resilience much as “we” have done for hundreds of thousands of years.

With political divisions, unprecedented gaps in social equity, rampant pollution and deforestation, the apparent decline of United States, the substantial rise of a most sophisticated totalitarian state model in China, the terror of climate change and looming tens and likely hundreds of millions of climate refugees, is easy for we in our comfortable armchairs to bemoan the end of civilization. “Welcome to the party,” nods smiling the world’s disenfranchised poor, “we’ve been looking forward to the end of civilization for some time.”

Or perhaps mine is just a crisis of faith. Though I’m not particularly an acolyte of “God is calling his children home,” I’ll humbly not rule it out altogether. Perhaps the techno-optimists (though I doubt it) are right after all and AGI will swoop in, mere moments from “the end,” and reward us all for our digital servitude (cough, cough, “allegiance,” I mean, of course.)

Seriously though, perhaps just a crisis of faith. There are so many well-intentioned, and courageous individuals and collectives all around the world doing the best they can, like me, see to do. Maybe that is how nature works, a seemingly disorganized natural and emergent synergy grows right through the turbulent times, revealing a flourishing garden of Eden on the other side.

Maybe this is just Evolution’s Brushfire and we can all celebrate this cleaning out of the old, decomposition and nurturance of the next phase of life flourishing?

Maybe, and quite likely, I’m simply an unsettled arc of soul’s light and all of this “end of the world” is simply my own restless nature striving for that coherent sense of Wholeness with the One. Is this just my own personal sky that’s falling, and is it really?

With what gesture and what view do we simply waive away suffering? Where is the intersection of sight, recognition, and responsibility? Is lightning accountable to the forest fire? Are we accountable to the earth? What is the story of care and neglect, again, where do we stand in the shared passion of this world?

Life, awareness as life, arises as a stratigraphic game of call and response. Existence itself a lively dance of the wave particle, perhaps love itself turning ever instantly into something more, something less.

I find moment to moment that I believe. I believe in something, perhaps that something is necessary, perhaps it is nothing. Perhaps I am belief itself, belief in the name and that which contains the name, but cannot be contained by it. I smile, “I believe in love.” Why not believe in that?

If it is not too far reach, I remember Leonard saying, “there is a war between those who say there is a war, and those who say there isn’t.… I guess you call this love, I call it service.”

Cluck cluck.