Kisses On The Wind

'we’re dwelling in a time between two worlds'

I used to want to stop climate change. I used to want to change the world. And not just a little, a lot. I didn’t keep these ideas to myself nor did I keep them just as ideas. I used to block bridges and roads, shout into microphones and give talks about how we’re heading for extinction and what to do about it. 

I travelled across the country to meet activists in AirBnbs, where we put our phones in Faraday cases and knew only too well that the Police were trying to work out where we were and what we were about to do. I gave them lifts in my car and dropped them off at the M25 so they could bring it to a standstill in the hope of stopping climate change in the process.

I so desperately wanted to inspire and encourage change in everyone that I built advertising funnels to recruit hundreds more people to block roads too and go to prison for doing so.

I worried about knocks at the door and being taken away in handcuffs in front of my children as some of my friends had been, or at least getting raided and having my laptop taken away.

It was also at this time that running out of Citalopram or Sertraline meant feeling as if some internal thermostat was set to a constant, simmering, white noise of anguish, grief and despair so total and complete I honestly wanted to die to make it stop.

If it wasn’t for my children I’m quite sure I would have done it. I had a very good plan that would have worked quite well and no one would have known it was a suicide. There’s a very long, very narrow and very straight road lined with trees when you take the back roads to Falmouth from my village. One more head on collision, one more Cellotaph memorial stuck on to a resolute tree and no one would have been the wiser.

Instead, my love for and from my children kept me going. It was for them that I went to London, blocked roads and carried banners. And yet, each time I went on an action I left my family behind me and very nearly lost them in the process.

Heart broken, grief stricken, angry, resentful and so lost because I was so sure that everything had to change; that we needed a transformation so monumental in a time so incredibly short that anything and everything needed to be done to bring it about - and how on Earth was I or anyone else going to make that happen without giving it our all? Even our freedom.

There is a bravery in that but there was also something missing, that position necessitates a hole, a lack, an emptiness that seemed to be beyond my capacity to fill regardless of how hard I pursued it. 

What scheme did I need to be a part of? 
What movement? 
What action? 
What behaviour change intervention? 
What policy? 
What new political economy? 
What Doughnut or Degrowth model was most ‘right’?
What intervention, what plan, what spell of words that once constructed would unlock the hearts and minds of millions of people into action?
How wrong and terrible was every other idea that wasn’t rooted in my own values?

I so desperately wanted everything to change and I wanted to be on the team that was making it change.

And that right there was the problem. 

In the time that has passed since then, in the letting go, in between the brain zaps that come from antidepressant withdrawal and the guided meditations, in the long slow months and years of rebuilding myself piece by piece, of finding an ember of self-love sufficient enough to rekindle a confident fire; my grief, my anger and my frustration have shown me only too well that wanting what is present and lived to be other than it is, is the cause of all my suffering. 

That indeed, I am the cause of all my suffering - not the kind of cause that would make me seriously consider driving into a tree to be rid of; not a blameful cause but a creator.

I didn’t need to do away with myself, I needed to do away with my thinking. My unconscious, reactionary thinking in which I thought I was the voice in my head instead of the awareness that was hearing it.

A subtle yet monumental shift in perspective that showed me that the prison door of my cell only kept me trapped inside because in all the pushing on it I’d never thought to consider that it opened inward. 

I realise now that even though my experience of my pain was real, its creation was all self-chosen. I chose to listen to those thoughts as truth. Unconsciously or not, I chose to identify with them. I accepted them all as true. I confused my beliefs about reality for reality and so never thought to check where it was that I had found them, been given them or created them. I hadn’t done due diligence on my model of reality.

And even though I now realise I created it, I also realise that it couldn’t have been any other way, it needed to happen. A goldfish can only come to know water by first finding itself gasping in the air. 

But unlike most goldfish, I now see it as a gift.

As Kahlil Gibran so beautifully put it:

“[Pain] is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

     Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:

     For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

     And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.”

If I hadn't drunk the potion, I’d still be sick today.

At the time, my response to the very real madness of the world didn't feel like a response, it felt like a reaction, automatic and obvious with no control at all on my part. It was all happening to me. It didn’t feel like a choice but as the voice quietened down and gave more room for that which hears it, it’s clear to me now that it is.

As that room grew, it became expansive beyond measure, creating all the time in the world in which to respond. In that space I began to see that in supposing that once everything else has changed, then I could be happy, I was choosing to be a victim; that I was loving myself and the world conditionally.

I was choosing to start an argument I couldn’t win and complaining of my losses - I was holding my own joy to ransom, making it conditional on the behaviour of others I couldn’t control when the only thing in the entire universe that I had any kind of control over at all was myself.

“If only they would do this”, “if only they would understand”. “If only we could come up with the winning idea, the winning plan and we’re all saved” - then I’d be happy.

In much the same way the metacrisis unfolding before us isn’t out there in the world. It’s in here, it’s in us, in billions of us, in the way we create our experiences and indeed the world. It starts inside us, upstream of everything in the unseen lenses of belief we see and make sense of the world through. We don’t need anyone or anything else to change; we need only change the way we look at things so that we can look upon the lenses and try to hear the silence between the cacophony of our thoughts.

And in doing so we may hear the whispered invitation to wake up to a world that is all the while a projection of what’s inside us and that instead of chasing our shadows we can pause long enough to find the light from which they are cast, prise back the ancient puppeteering fingers that generations of survival have sought to clasp our hearts closed with to keep us safe, and in the radiance of their opening, find the world we’ve all been looking for, right here in our souls.

And perhaps, in the absence of our fearful shadows, we might begin to see things as they are in a new light. We might see that this is not the end of the world but the ending of a world and that none of us can have any certainty of what lies ahead. 

We may come to realise that we have been born at the end of a version of civilization, one that has come to a natural, unnatural conclusion. That there have been many others before it. That there will no doubt be many more yet to come and that indeed, in being here now with a front row seat we each have a say in how this unfolds and what is to come next.

We each have a responsibility to help each other through it in whatever way we can, so instead of reacting to it, running from it and bargaining with it, we can instead hope to respond to it with all that we are.

In wanting everything else to change, for things to be other than they are, I denied myself the opportunity to do the only real thing I could, which is to change myself, to change my point of view, my understanding, my ways of knowing, my ideas of what it is to be alive, to be human. To transform. It’s one thing to demand it of others and of systems, it’s another to do it myself.

In wanting everything or everyone else to change I created only victimhood - I created a position of lack, of incompleteness and a loss of agency. I robbed myself of my own power when I hoped for others to change so that I didn’t have to learn, evolve or adapt, so that I could stay in my ‘rightness’ and wait for others to find their way here too instead of loving them more deeply, more unapologetically and unconditionally.

If indeed we come here as the mystics say to evolve as souls and learn great lessons, perhaps it is the challenge of these times that our spirits came here to take up. So sure were we in our love for All That Is, we chose to come into this world at this point in time to prove it. To show that we were capable of such love or to at least die trying before having another go. 

I would never have thought such miracles were possible, were it not for having experienced one myself - a miracle of understanding given by the drinking of a potion, the singing of sacred songs and a shifting of coals of an animated fire, all wrapped in the silken ribbons of an ancient culture's care.

At the greatest depths of my grief, the resounding echo of a people from another land and another time invited me into a ceremony my culture is experientially blind to and gave me medicine to heal my wounds. A process and a medicine that turns pain into wisdom through the shimmering and opening of the heart and that shared with me their insight into the workings of mind and the wordless currents of the soul.

Those experiences showed me that I need never make my happiness conditional on anything because I am already whole and that my happiness and my love are my only real home, the foundation of all my awareness, obscured only by my self-constructed experience. 

I am not the recipient of cold hard data about the world, they showed me. Indeed, I give everything its meaning and I feel those meanings that I create with every fibre of my being; those feelings then drive me here and there responding to my meanings as if they were real and in the world and not just in my mind.

As Wordsworth said a few miles above Tintern Abbey, I half create and half perceive everything I come into contact with. 

I bring myself to every moment. Every thought and memory, every past transgression, every wound, every doubt or uncertainty, every flaw and every strength, every dream and all my beliefs. They pour from my eyes as scattered waves mapping and receiving the world, signals through which I have created a model of the world which I take for the world itself.

That model is the lens through which those scattered waves are focused, the lens through which I see and through which I also shine into the world. 

Much of the model was made in haste, a lot of it in fear and mostly as a child. In the shining out, the scratches on the lens cast shadows on all I see and from having done so for so long I truly believed those shadows were in the world and not in me.

And it’s here, upstream of all the policies and the tactics, beyond the reaches of the mind in the centre of my heart that the light is coming from. From here I can see that it’s the lens that is flawed, not me, not the world.

It’s my lens. I made it, I constructed it knowingly or not, in collaboration with the world. I created it. It’s my model of the world. And if my model is causing me suffering, I must want for reality to be other than it is. Something in me must need healing. Somehow I must prise apart the fingers casting shadows and open my heart even more. 

Most days it is easier said than done and that’s ok. It’s only easy when I’m ready and to be ready can take a lot of time, a lot tries and a huge amount of courage but I know that that’s the work, that it’s inevitable in the end whether in this life or the next - we have all the time in the world.

In my victimhood, I didn’t want to change, nor could I see any way of everything else changing so I became trapped in my own false logic and willingly agreed to that which I didn’t want. I pushed on the closed door instead of opening it inward.

Everything else is already, has always been and forever will be changing all the time. I can rail against that door or I can find the room inside me to open up to it and let something else in, something larger than myself that I can never see but only dance with and trust in its embrace that I will be held unconditionally by my own unconditionality.

This civilization is finished. In realising that, I’ve had to come to terms with my pain, I’ve had to welcome in and honour my fear, my emptiness, my anger and my sorrow. 

So much sorrow, for all that is lost. So much sorrow from so much love. And yet somehow, my sorrow whispers, I have to love even more. I have to open my fragile heart even wider than before for it to become the invulnerable power I know deep down it is.

To do that, I have let go of the shore and let the river’s current take me. I have to trust and remember I’m not in control of this huge historic process, I am a part of it.

I am something that nature is doing and I can trust in that nature to guide me.

In my blood are the memories of what it takes to survive ice ages. We are here because of the wishes and dreams of the ancestors that survived them. The wind on my face carries the kisses they blew to me. My very life is the fulfilment of their prayers.

I in turn now blow kisses of my own and I pray that the wind carries them to the cheeks of my unborn great-great grandchildren, that I can build a home for the generations to come, that I can help to make a world worth sustaining in the transformation of this one as I myself transform.

We’ve been born at a peak moment and we’re dwelling in a time between two worlds.

One thing is ending and another, yet to emerge, is coming and it will be a product of us all, our ancestors and ourselves. It will be a product of our learning, of our ability to navigate our way from where we find ourselves now as a species in overshoot to remembering ourselves as a planetary force in planetary systems and accepting all the responsibility and awe that comes with that realisation.

A realisation that brings with it humility and reverence, through which we can hope to find an ember of love to rekindle a greater power.

Our current crises are products of our ignorance; they are catalysts not just for change but the expansion and evolution of consciousness itself. It is an invitation to wake up to ourselves, re-remembering ourselves and our nature.

In our present predicaments lie understandings that have the potential to transform the human presence on this planet, once we turn our gaze upstream of our problems, stop battering on the door and open it inward.

Our crises are an invitation to stop seeking to change things outside of us and to instead change how we relate to them by adapting ourselves, our thinking, our knowing, our ways of knowing and our being. 

Accepting that invitation requires that we face the fears that keep us from changing with unconditional love, with the strength to do so lying in each other and in knowing who we are.

We are a part of a timeless process playing out across the stars. We are a part of a planetary intelligence that’s always working things out, that’s always changing and evolving, that’s always pure creativity in full bloom and that’s been creating all life and the conditions conducive to it for 3.8 billion years. We are not separate from it, we are it and it reaches back through all that is to the beginning of time itself to the formless, dimensionless infinite source of everything.

And in its kindness each of us is given the greatest gift of all, the gift of co-creating a universe, whether we realise it or not.

Knowing this, I don’t need or want anyone else to change anymore. I don’t want to stop anything, I want to better realise the gift of creation that is already mine.

I simply want to be.

I want to be in loving relationship with everyone and everything. I simply want to be without fear, to become pure compassion and forgiveness for everything around me. To love unconditionally - all of it, every single bit of it and to know that that is enough - that that is all I could ever dream of, ask for or receive.

I don’t want to change the world, I want to change so that I can remember this way of seeing and being more often. Because it’s from here that I can see my great-great-grandchildren playing, eating food from the gardens we created, hearing stories about the ancestors who blew them kisses on the wind.

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Woodford Roberts writes uncivilised, darkly optimistic and deeply spiritual insights about living in  a time of metacrisis. Sharing the lessons given him by life, he seeks to help others to stare down the truth, open their hearts and rediscover the world worth saving inside them.

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