MWA Newsletter, -  Dec 16, 2019

As the sun returns

It’s the dark time of the year, just five days until winter solstice and the beginning of the sun’s return. Night skies are brilliant with stars, the snow is bright from the moon even when it’s covered with clouds. The air is crisp and cold. Sometimes the body just wants to stay indoors and be warm.

We feel this way, sometimes: just stay indoors where it’s warm. Not go out and face the hard things. And this time, after talking so much about hard political and environmental things, I want to just say – the night is beautiful and the sun will start its return soon.

We don’t know how long it will take for the return of the other sun – the return to a whole, connected, and lively life, of community, emotional safety, safety for immigrants and red and black people, for refugees and hungry people – could these come back in my lifetime? In a few generations? When they’ve been gone for most of us for thousands of years? It’s hard to imagine and hard to say; disasters don’t always bring renewal, and we seem to be looking at disaster. Still, grasslands need fire to regenerate. What about human society? (It’s a question, not an answer. I wouldn’t dare, without extensive historical study.)

Still, I assert that the sun is returning. Here are some marks:

• There is a growing understanding that we are part of the earth, that animals and plants are our relatives if not our selves. As I see it, this is the real return, with the items below details of it.
• Increasingly since Standing Rock, indigenous people are leading the environmental movement, and they are being supported respectfully by large numbers of nonnatives. This is important because those indigenous people are closer to remembering our belonging to the earth.
• Collapse is being discussed. Environmental collapse, societal collapse, it’s being noted as a very real possibility, and people are talking with each other about what to do. Positive Deep Adaptation is just one example.
• Alternative agriculture is growing and spreading. Ways of farming that also nourish the soil, conserve water, sequester carbon, and the like, while producing food, are being discussed, practiced, found profitable – and are being done.
• Capitalism is being discussed as a problem; it’s possible to raise the question now without being called names, though answers vary. This means it’s possible to question core assumptions of this society.
• Are the impeachment hearings a sign of hope? Are the masses of protesters in the streets around the world a sign of hope? I don’t know; they could be a sign that governments are becoming more brutal and people more desperate.

There is this, from George Lakey in How We Win : “When a society heats up, it becomes more pliable, and that can mean bending in scary directions. Where these pliable times take us depends on the movements we can build.” That scary heating up – he finds hope.

I don’t know what will happen. I do know that life works better with action, with involvement, with meaningful work of any kind. That, we can all choose. And though the sun’s return may be subtle, we can be part of that return.

No new announcements; see November’s newsletter. No new asks; enormous gratitude to all those who have supported this work financially and in so many other ways. This month, nothing but this reflection. Love to you all.

Shodo