Are we too late?

As so many I feel deeply affected by the ecological collapse we are living. The other day I found myself bent over on my walk in the woods, tears landing on moss. One of the questions that came up through the blur of grief was 'are we too late?'.

I've heard that question so many times, I remember asking it as a young journalist covering environmental issues more than a decade ago. It is a very peculiar type of question, like an arrow leaving a bow ready to strike its goal. Two winters ago, up in the Arctic Sámi territories, I asked such an arrow-tipped question to my joiker friend Johan Sara. He looked at me as if I had just said something very indecent. 'That is a very direct question', came his response finally.

It is. And there is more to it. It refers to a very direct type of time as well: linear time, clock time, manmade time. This question so embedded in timing – up to a thousandth of a second, chronometer in hand – I find I can only answer from the left part of my brain and the answer would be 'very probably, things look bleak, very bleak'.

“This time is as cyclical as the seasons itself and laughs at our past-present-future one-two-three abc.”

But that is not the end of it. In the soul work I do, when taking people in solitude into the wild we put the clocks away and enter a different type of time altogether. Ritual time. Dream time. Nature's time. This time is as cyclical as the seasons itself and laughs at our past-present-future one-two-three abc. One hour spent in it can be experienced as a lifetime or a split second. This is where the earthly magic of a mytho-poetic universe lies.

When we surrender to it – even though we seem to have come to dislike this – 'down on our knees, in the dirt' as Kate Tempest says in 'All Humans Too Late' we are no longer in the center of things. The stories we've been telling ourselves crumble with every drop of rain, with every ant in our pants. It is here we start to ask different questions, indirect ones, not with a question mark in the end but with a fox tail, a falling leaf or a cricket choir. The answer won't come to us immediately as fast food. It requires being present and paying attention.

“It is here we start to ask different questions, indirect ones, not with a question mark in the end but with a fox tail, a falling leaf or a cricket choir.”

During the preparation for the solo days we train something we call owl eyes in the nature awareness community. Peripheral vision. You stretch your arms and slowly bring them further apart while keeping track of the movement of your wriggling fingers in the corner of your eyes. It is about being awake to building a relationship with that what lives at the edges and not just losing ourselves in the center of the mainstream story of today's culture. It might be worth to stretch our vision to find out what the borders of possibility are in that wild timelessness.

ldco