Daniel, all I can say in response to this very powerful essay is please keep doing what you are doing: Sharing your own reckoning with this moment with the rest of us, and creating spaces (such as online courses) where we can reckon with these questions together. I think the world is a richer and more inspiring place for the work you do, and -- though I can relate to the sense of existential dread and meaning crisis -- I personally derive a lot of clarity, insight and enrichment from your work.
Beautifully said, Matthew. Daniel - the MAGA Murder Bill is morphogenically radiating and folks like us with big, broken-open hearts feel it. I've felt it a lot and posted on LinkedIn (of all places) about my experience on Tuesday.
...
I can't shake the MAGA Murder Bill. It feels like a new type of emotion.
All my senses are heightened. I'm not in danger, but feel fear. I understand why this is happening, how it happened, and what's going to happen, but feel dumb. I'm on purpose, fulfilled, and aligned, but feel like I'm missing something. I love my life in so many ways, but also... I want to crawl out of my f'n skin.
I'm committed to peace, but also just wish there was a face I could punch that would make an actual impact. Even if I was lucky enough to meet Stephen Miller in a dark alley, would it change anything?
What is this? It's not just dread or depression or hope or rage. Existential activation? The tension between opposites that births the bird of good omen?
What are you feeling?
...
The responses were similar to what you and others have shared. I found it quite cathartic and healing. I also take solace in works like The Dawn of Everything and Before War (I just re-connected you with the author, Elisha Daeva) that paint possibilities available to us as we hospice / contain the current fuckery.
As long as we are alive, and have the capacity to respond, we have an obligation to Life to pray ourselves in to becoming good enough ancestors.
Daniel - you and your work are beautiful and imperfect. To me, your writing, as much as your willingness to be yourself and learn in public - serves as a desperately needed node of coherence. From wherever you chose to write, please do not stop sensing, synthesizing, and making an honest attempt to find and articulate Truth.
While I can’t tell you what to do or where to go, I can tell you that your work and voice are immensely important. For me, you are a voice of sanity, curiosity, sincerity and vulnerability amidst a lot of posturing and bullshit. That still matters, even as the world falls apart. Especially as the world falls apart.
Wherever you go and whatever you do, I hope you keep writing, teaching and sharing.
I have nothing new to add to all of the wise and beautiful responses already offered by this amazing community, yet still I feel called to add my voice. Your writing is important, as all here have pointed out. I especially love how you show up on these pages with authenticity, vulnerability, and Important information. Some of the information may be hard to digest, but that is the world we are living in, no fault of yours.
I appreciate how you weave back and forth between the political realities we are faced with and the spiritual. We are each circles of experience and influence and where our edges meet, there something can happen, hopefully something creative and wholesome.
We should all feel called to show up in the world as fully ourselves as we can, and offer whatever it is that we feel called to offer. Size doesn't matter. You are already doing that, and what more can anyone do? Thank you for your honesty and your caring. Take care of yourself.
Those of us who are awake and aware of the imminent possibility of environmental and political collapse can't help but be in the kind of quandary you describe. I myself am going in both the directions you mention at the end of this piece: seeking communication and guidance from the non-physical entities who care about what's happening on this planet, as well as channeling a lot of my energy into creativity--my own and others. Human creative imagination has the power to get us past this crisis, or help the survivors build a better society when the literal and metaphorical storms blow past, and the time comes to sift through the wreckage.
Even as I look for escape routes and safe havens, I am also trying to release my childish need for "safety" and "security." It's hard to escape a kind of fatalism these days, "what will be will be." But at the same time, we have agency over how we choose to spend our precious time, in these end days.
Me, I choose a steady creative practice that helps me connect with the Earth and the Cosmos. I choose to try to be a beacon for other creatives and anyone seeking a bit of tranquility in troubled times. While it's important to stay informed, it's also true that anxiety and fear only amplify more anxiety and fear. We can choose how we respond. On the emotional spectrum, I choose light, love, freedom, laughter. We need more of these positive vibrations in our world!
Ah. Daniel and all the sincerely intelligent commenters (that's all of you!) -- I feel you. We feel each other. Because we are allowing ourselves to experience the reality of our collective situation. It's so much easier not to feel this. But, if we turn away, take 'refuge' in despair or hopelessness or apathy or hedonism (all variations on a theme), we keep coming back for more. Something inside us (that probably did not originate there) twinges or rings or blasts until we are awake once again to the Terror of the Situation, as Gurdjieff called it. This very fact is what gives me hope. We will find a way -- though that might involve a heavy dose of connection to alternative dimensions/realities where miracles are everyday occurrences.
Daniel, you have created a community here. I recognize names and perspectives from classes and other posts in this substack. There is a quality here. A wish to be as authentic and compassionate as possible. I echo the other commenters' encouragement to keep connecting with us.
Carol - Your mention of the community that has arisen around Daniel's newsletter strongly resonates with me. I think there is enormous creative power and potential in true communities of all kinds, including on-line ones. I am convinced of this, as a truth that can't be measured or quantified, and I believe it is a hopeful truth. These communities don't have to organize into movements to make a difference. I think their potency lies in the fact that they are a living, creative field of human consciousness. And I agree that this is such a field.
We are in that moment in time when the majority believed the Earth was flat.
The majority only believe there reality to be real. When in fact reality is much larger, the majority limit what is Possible by using believed in belief as truth When in fact they are true. All These current events which are occurring, are being created by our Heavenly Sphere to awaken us. If the majority of us were awaken these events wouldn't be happening.
When there is a larger enough collective that Knows thy Self in this manner and comes together as one pure source of higher knowledge and wisdom, the world will shift its knowing and it will self write itself .
Get to Know not Believe the Heavenly Sphere and its Attainment
Michael Raven - To edit your statement, there are three little dots on the upper right. If you click on those three dots above your post, the word "Edit" will pop up. By clicking on "Edit" you can make any changes you want to your post and then hit Save again and Voila! it is corrected.
I keep thinking about what it must’ve been like for the Jews carted off to concentration camps, to have had faith in God and then have that happen, to be subject to such utter cruelty, sudden loss, dislocation, and murderous insanity. It must have really pulled the rug out from underneath them to experience such physical degradation and emotional exhaustion, and spiritual confusion. What we are going through today in no way compares with the incredibly personal and dramatic nature of that. I find it helpful to reflect on this because it makes me aware of how incredibly good we still have it. Just the fact that we can have so much information about what is happening is an incredible “luxury” and a choice.
When it gets to be too much for me, knowing my complete powerlessness in the face of it, and knowing my inclination to go deep into the negativity and fear, I have to reduce my screen time. Call it sticking my head in the sand or whatever, all I know is that I have to acknowledge my own capacity limits.
What also helps me survive is looking for the good in what’s left. You are part of that goodness and I will pray for your finding a path that gives you strength and clarity.
Yes. And I think about Victor Frankl almost every day. What you've written here is resonant with something I came here to say: instead of fixating on all that we are losing and have lost, I find it very helpful to focus on what we have left. The movie Wall-e is incredibly poignant in this regard: at the end, they are joyously ready to set about regreening earth with one simple plant. And then I look around me, and see all of the trees, birds, beetles, bookstores, guitars, farmstands, ripe tomatoes, etc — I mean, WE STILL HAVE A LOT. And we now know how precious it is, in a way that we clearly never have, at least not the vast majority. Also: you might enjoy this piece I wrote back in 2017. My great uncle was a Holocaust survivor, and I moved to Massachusetts for a few months to (unsuccessfully) write his story. I wrote this as the intro for a community meeting I was leading back then, the tip of the iceberg. https://allisongustavson.substack.com/p/beauty-courage-and-hitlers-business
Thanks for this nice comment. What a story in that post! I had family in Newton too. The movie trailer was quite moving. It is more disturbing than ever to see the camps now, with what’s happening today.
Hi Daniel! I’ve been lurking in the shadows of your Substack since I first discovered you (perhaps a year now) and although I have little worth adding to the creative and compassionate responses to the questions posed in your essay, I do want to say this, from my heart..
Every morning and evening when I check Substack, I first look to see if there’s anything from you. If so, my heart races a little with happiness because I know it’s going to be so RICH with the REAL that I will have layers to think about and work with during the quietness of my morning chores, or evening ritual. My own personal mid-life project as well as my understanding of and relationship to our collective world crisis/shift/meltdown/transformation/evolution has also been informed by years of psychedelic work, which I feel like I’d be sunk without - and yet the question of how to show up daily, in this dimension, under these conditions, pervades. And while there seem no clear answers to much right now, simply continuing to share the stories and the thoughts, ideas and feelings around it all helps SO much. So thank you for your leadership role in that, and I’m sure there are many, many more like me, deeply touched by your efforts and quietly and gratefully cheering you on. I’m personally headed to mexico- but just for the winter. I need some distance and perspective from it all, but I’m also not ready to give up. I sense- and hope I’m right- that you aren’t either..💕
I think most of us are discouraged because we failed at preventing and now we are at the stage where having to act with courage, principles, and selflessness carries a very high cost and painful consequences.
I sympathize Daniel, and besides, how many times can you keep driving the message home? But I think it was Jem Bendell who said that you do it because it's the right thing to do regaradless of the likelihood of success. Yes, of course the current planetary situation looks horrendous and getting worse. But I suspect you believe in the ulimate Buddha-nature of humanity. However distant a widespread awakening looks at the moment, maybe we could believe, in the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, in "the possibility of possibility."
If there is any possibility of "the birth of the future human" as Chris Bache put it in "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," the only sane and sensible thing to do is to work for it in whatever way feels aligned with one's abilities and interests, even though in all likelihood the beneficial effects of such work might not come to any kind of fruition for decades or longer.
There's an analogy related to alcoholics. Some see their lives falling apart in time to make the change while their life situation is still mostly intact. Others have to be, sometimes literally, lying in the ditch knowing that the choice is to live or to die before they're ready. I suspect humanity is in that second group. My hope is that absolute necessity will be the mother of invention so to speak and that sometime soon, when the crack has widened enough, the truth of Victor Hugo's statement that "there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come" will become evident.
Chris Bache also said in that book that what every human being says and does matters more now than it ever has. If that's true, it's as if all energy is contributing to the morphic field whether positive or negative.
As you noted today Daniel, you have a moderate-size following. I doubt I'm alone in that group in asking you to keep going "because it's the right thing to do."
It really is eerie how muted the resistance is. People just seem gobsmacked. But I wonder if maybe the revolution that everyone is hoping for is much less organizational, and much more of an emergent thing, than we tend to think it is. I wonder whether maybe the most durable transformation doesn't occur according to a plan. It seems clear to me that in the most organized movements, the organization often ends up being part of the problem -- because of the orthodoxy it tends to demand.
I'm just some schmoe, but my go-to is always to make the effort to tune in, first -- that dialogue with the invisible powers, as you say. I've been reading Cynthia Bourgeault's "Eye of the Heart" recently (which I love and recommend), and she talks about the idea that the physical universe isn't just entropic in terms of physical energy, but it's morally entropic, emotionally entropic, ideologically entropic, etc. This makes a lot of sense to me -- and it speaks clearly to the need for invocation. Maybe the emergent way always begins with the prophets? If so, the prophets definitely begin by tuning in.
I can't say that I know you well (obviously), but my guess is that it's against your constitution to become apolitical for too long. I bet if you did, there's a part of you that'd never leave you alone. :)
It also occurs to me that maybe the kinds of changes that need to happen require of many of us a greater degree of steeliness than we realized -- without losing the inner softness -- and that part of what's happening now is folks are being made ready in that way?
Daniel, thank you for speaking so honestly from the edge.
I hear the grief underneath your questions—what to do, where to go, whether anything still matters. You’re not alone. Many of us who once believed we could midwife a more awakened world now find ourselves holding space for its slow unmaking.
Maybe the role now is not to fix, but to witness truthfully. To walk tenderly through the unraveling. To remind others (and ourselves) that heartbreak is not the end of the story—it’s the place where something truer begins.
Art still matters. Beauty still matters. Staying awake matters.
And your voice—even uncertain, even exhausted—is still a lighthouse.
With deep respect from one soul traveler to another.
Of all the beautiful and poingnant comments here this one really gave me goosebumps and resonated with me. I think you’re really on to something. Thank you
Yet another prescient, cogent, and potent essay Daniel.
We love you!
Keep on keeping a firm hold on to your pen, and keep writing your spells for those like myself for whom you are able to articulate so perfectly all that we want to scream out loud.
On January 21st I suddenly lost hearing in my left ear which led to disabling vertigo. Every night when I meditated I prayed it would go away (and of course I sought medical intervention--both traditional and alternative--as well). Altho it's gotten better I still have it. That led me to the knowledge that no matter how much we want something to be better--from illness to what's currently happening in our world---there's nothing, really nothing we can do to impact what will be (and I say this after participating in my share of protests, etc). So, Daniel, I humbly suggest you do whatever makes you happy in the time that we have left. And if that includes continuing to do things--like your writing and seminars, so much the better.
As Americans . . . mostly oblivious, distracted, spoiled by all the years of relative peace at home, having never been invaded or occupied, a bit smug perhaps, taking apparent stability for granted . . . we were easy marks for the takeover that has been in the works for years. Now . . . what to do? I and surely many others here are running with a quandry paralell to yours. My sense is to wait and watch and have a back up plan ready to go. Live in a space of readiness. Watch for signs. Consult one's favored oracles. Trust one's instincts.
I am an opposite creature than yourself which I enjoy in every aspect I've encountered here and in your books. I live in the relative depths of nature in one of this countries great bubbles of beauty and stability . . . soon though to be likely rocked by ICE as a good 15% or so living here are hispanic orchard and vineyard workers. It's gonna get messy but for now, I trust my lucky perch on the edge of it all to do as your friends suggested: "hospicing this civilization in its death throes, or following the Bhagavad Gita and courageously embracing our tragic karmic fate." If you love NYC, stay and watch and continute on for now . . . .
To me it seems that any rural - or small town - community these days is 'multi-cultural and multi-ethnic' and in need of people who know how to do it all in a participatory manner. Maybe you are needed there?
Daniel, all I can say in response to this very powerful essay is please keep doing what you are doing: Sharing your own reckoning with this moment with the rest of us, and creating spaces (such as online courses) where we can reckon with these questions together. I think the world is a richer and more inspiring place for the work you do, and -- though I can relate to the sense of existential dread and meaning crisis -- I personally derive a lot of clarity, insight and enrichment from your work.
Beautifully said, Matthew. Daniel - the MAGA Murder Bill is morphogenically radiating and folks like us with big, broken-open hearts feel it. I've felt it a lot and posted on LinkedIn (of all places) about my experience on Tuesday.
...
I can't shake the MAGA Murder Bill. It feels like a new type of emotion.
All my senses are heightened. I'm not in danger, but feel fear. I understand why this is happening, how it happened, and what's going to happen, but feel dumb. I'm on purpose, fulfilled, and aligned, but feel like I'm missing something. I love my life in so many ways, but also... I want to crawl out of my f'n skin.
I'm committed to peace, but also just wish there was a face I could punch that would make an actual impact. Even if I was lucky enough to meet Stephen Miller in a dark alley, would it change anything?
What is this? It's not just dread or depression or hope or rage. Existential activation? The tension between opposites that births the bird of good omen?
What are you feeling?
...
The responses were similar to what you and others have shared. I found it quite cathartic and healing. I also take solace in works like The Dawn of Everything and Before War (I just re-connected you with the author, Elisha Daeva) that paint possibilities available to us as we hospice / contain the current fuckery.
Agreed Daniel, you have a powerful voice. Keep going...
As long as we are alive, and have the capacity to respond, we have an obligation to Life to pray ourselves in to becoming good enough ancestors.
Daniel - you and your work are beautiful and imperfect. To me, your writing, as much as your willingness to be yourself and learn in public - serves as a desperately needed node of coherence. From wherever you chose to write, please do not stop sensing, synthesizing, and making an honest attempt to find and articulate Truth.
While I can’t tell you what to do or where to go, I can tell you that your work and voice are immensely important. For me, you are a voice of sanity, curiosity, sincerity and vulnerability amidst a lot of posturing and bullshit. That still matters, even as the world falls apart. Especially as the world falls apart.
Wherever you go and whatever you do, I hope you keep writing, teaching and sharing.
I have nothing new to add to all of the wise and beautiful responses already offered by this amazing community, yet still I feel called to add my voice. Your writing is important, as all here have pointed out. I especially love how you show up on these pages with authenticity, vulnerability, and Important information. Some of the information may be hard to digest, but that is the world we are living in, no fault of yours.
I appreciate how you weave back and forth between the political realities we are faced with and the spiritual. We are each circles of experience and influence and where our edges meet, there something can happen, hopefully something creative and wholesome.
We should all feel called to show up in the world as fully ourselves as we can, and offer whatever it is that we feel called to offer. Size doesn't matter. You are already doing that, and what more can anyone do? Thank you for your honesty and your caring. Take care of yourself.
Well said!
Those of us who are awake and aware of the imminent possibility of environmental and political collapse can't help but be in the kind of quandary you describe. I myself am going in both the directions you mention at the end of this piece: seeking communication and guidance from the non-physical entities who care about what's happening on this planet, as well as channeling a lot of my energy into creativity--my own and others. Human creative imagination has the power to get us past this crisis, or help the survivors build a better society when the literal and metaphorical storms blow past, and the time comes to sift through the wreckage.
Even as I look for escape routes and safe havens, I am also trying to release my childish need for "safety" and "security." It's hard to escape a kind of fatalism these days, "what will be will be." But at the same time, we have agency over how we choose to spend our precious time, in these end days.
Me, I choose a steady creative practice that helps me connect with the Earth and the Cosmos. I choose to try to be a beacon for other creatives and anyone seeking a bit of tranquility in troubled times. While it's important to stay informed, it's also true that anxiety and fear only amplify more anxiety and fear. We can choose how we respond. On the emotional spectrum, I choose light, love, freedom, laughter. We need more of these positive vibrations in our world!
Beautiful!
Ah. Daniel and all the sincerely intelligent commenters (that's all of you!) -- I feel you. We feel each other. Because we are allowing ourselves to experience the reality of our collective situation. It's so much easier not to feel this. But, if we turn away, take 'refuge' in despair or hopelessness or apathy or hedonism (all variations on a theme), we keep coming back for more. Something inside us (that probably did not originate there) twinges or rings or blasts until we are awake once again to the Terror of the Situation, as Gurdjieff called it. This very fact is what gives me hope. We will find a way -- though that might involve a heavy dose of connection to alternative dimensions/realities where miracles are everyday occurrences.
Daniel, you have created a community here. I recognize names and perspectives from classes and other posts in this substack. There is a quality here. A wish to be as authentic and compassionate as possible. I echo the other commenters' encouragement to keep connecting with us.
With gratitude.
Carol - Your mention of the community that has arisen around Daniel's newsletter strongly resonates with me. I think there is enormous creative power and potential in true communities of all kinds, including on-line ones. I am convinced of this, as a truth that can't be measured or quantified, and I believe it is a hopeful truth. These communities don't have to organize into movements to make a difference. I think their potency lies in the fact that they are a living, creative field of human consciousness. And I agree that this is such a field.
I think a good metaphor would be helpful
We are in that moment in time when the majority believed the Earth was flat.
The majority only believe there reality to be real. When in fact reality is much larger, the majority limit what is Possible by using believed in belief as truth When in fact they are true. All These current events which are occurring, are being created by our Heavenly Sphere to awaken us. If the majority of us were awaken these events wouldn't be happening.
When there is a larger enough collective that Knows thy Self in this manner and comes together as one pure source of higher knowledge and wisdom, the world will shift its knowing and it will self write itself .
Get to Know not Believe the Heavenly Sphere and its Attainment
Edit
When in fact , they AREN'T true
Michael Raven - To edit your statement, there are three little dots on the upper right. If you click on those three dots above your post, the word "Edit" will pop up. By clicking on "Edit" you can make any changes you want to your post and then hit Save again and Voila! it is corrected.
Hi Lee , meant to let you know , when I clicked on those 3 dots , edit isn't an option.
Odd! It is for me.
I keep thinking about what it must’ve been like for the Jews carted off to concentration camps, to have had faith in God and then have that happen, to be subject to such utter cruelty, sudden loss, dislocation, and murderous insanity. It must have really pulled the rug out from underneath them to experience such physical degradation and emotional exhaustion, and spiritual confusion. What we are going through today in no way compares with the incredibly personal and dramatic nature of that. I find it helpful to reflect on this because it makes me aware of how incredibly good we still have it. Just the fact that we can have so much information about what is happening is an incredible “luxury” and a choice.
When it gets to be too much for me, knowing my complete powerlessness in the face of it, and knowing my inclination to go deep into the negativity and fear, I have to reduce my screen time. Call it sticking my head in the sand or whatever, all I know is that I have to acknowledge my own capacity limits.
What also helps me survive is looking for the good in what’s left. You are part of that goodness and I will pray for your finding a path that gives you strength and clarity.
Yes. And I think about Victor Frankl almost every day. What you've written here is resonant with something I came here to say: instead of fixating on all that we are losing and have lost, I find it very helpful to focus on what we have left. The movie Wall-e is incredibly poignant in this regard: at the end, they are joyously ready to set about regreening earth with one simple plant. And then I look around me, and see all of the trees, birds, beetles, bookstores, guitars, farmstands, ripe tomatoes, etc — I mean, WE STILL HAVE A LOT. And we now know how precious it is, in a way that we clearly never have, at least not the vast majority. Also: you might enjoy this piece I wrote back in 2017. My great uncle was a Holocaust survivor, and I moved to Massachusetts for a few months to (unsuccessfully) write his story. I wrote this as the intro for a community meeting I was leading back then, the tip of the iceberg. https://allisongustavson.substack.com/p/beauty-courage-and-hitlers-business
Thanks for this nice comment. What a story in that post! I had family in Newton too. The movie trailer was quite moving. It is more disturbing than ever to see the camps now, with what’s happening today.
Truly horrifying. This post from Jim Stewartson is making me insane. I don't know what I'd do if I were Stephen Miller's mom, but I have some thoughts. https://www.mind-war.com/p/i-asked-chatgpt-to-analyze-stephen?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=689180&post_id=168108242&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1831a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Hi Daniel! I’ve been lurking in the shadows of your Substack since I first discovered you (perhaps a year now) and although I have little worth adding to the creative and compassionate responses to the questions posed in your essay, I do want to say this, from my heart..
Every morning and evening when I check Substack, I first look to see if there’s anything from you. If so, my heart races a little with happiness because I know it’s going to be so RICH with the REAL that I will have layers to think about and work with during the quietness of my morning chores, or evening ritual. My own personal mid-life project as well as my understanding of and relationship to our collective world crisis/shift/meltdown/transformation/evolution has also been informed by years of psychedelic work, which I feel like I’d be sunk without - and yet the question of how to show up daily, in this dimension, under these conditions, pervades. And while there seem no clear answers to much right now, simply continuing to share the stories and the thoughts, ideas and feelings around it all helps SO much. So thank you for your leadership role in that, and I’m sure there are many, many more like me, deeply touched by your efforts and quietly and gratefully cheering you on. I’m personally headed to mexico- but just for the winter. I need some distance and perspective from it all, but I’m also not ready to give up. I sense- and hope I’m right- that you aren’t either..💕
Thank you!!
I think most of us are discouraged because we failed at preventing and now we are at the stage where having to act with courage, principles, and selflessness carries a very high cost and painful consequences.
It feels almost impossible!
I sympathize Daniel, and besides, how many times can you keep driving the message home? But I think it was Jem Bendell who said that you do it because it's the right thing to do regaradless of the likelihood of success. Yes, of course the current planetary situation looks horrendous and getting worse. But I suspect you believe in the ulimate Buddha-nature of humanity. However distant a widespread awakening looks at the moment, maybe we could believe, in the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, in "the possibility of possibility."
If there is any possibility of "the birth of the future human" as Chris Bache put it in "LSD and the Mind of the Universe," the only sane and sensible thing to do is to work for it in whatever way feels aligned with one's abilities and interests, even though in all likelihood the beneficial effects of such work might not come to any kind of fruition for decades or longer.
There's an analogy related to alcoholics. Some see their lives falling apart in time to make the change while their life situation is still mostly intact. Others have to be, sometimes literally, lying in the ditch knowing that the choice is to live or to die before they're ready. I suspect humanity is in that second group. My hope is that absolute necessity will be the mother of invention so to speak and that sometime soon, when the crack has widened enough, the truth of Victor Hugo's statement that "there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come" will become evident.
Chris Bache also said in that book that what every human being says and does matters more now than it ever has. If that's true, it's as if all energy is contributing to the morphic field whether positive or negative.
As you noted today Daniel, you have a moderate-size following. I doubt I'm alone in that group in asking you to keep going "because it's the right thing to do."
Vaclav Havel, via Meg Wheatley: "Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out
well. It is the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out."
It really is eerie how muted the resistance is. People just seem gobsmacked. But I wonder if maybe the revolution that everyone is hoping for is much less organizational, and much more of an emergent thing, than we tend to think it is. I wonder whether maybe the most durable transformation doesn't occur according to a plan. It seems clear to me that in the most organized movements, the organization often ends up being part of the problem -- because of the orthodoxy it tends to demand.
I'm just some schmoe, but my go-to is always to make the effort to tune in, first -- that dialogue with the invisible powers, as you say. I've been reading Cynthia Bourgeault's "Eye of the Heart" recently (which I love and recommend), and she talks about the idea that the physical universe isn't just entropic in terms of physical energy, but it's morally entropic, emotionally entropic, ideologically entropic, etc. This makes a lot of sense to me -- and it speaks clearly to the need for invocation. Maybe the emergent way always begins with the prophets? If so, the prophets definitely begin by tuning in.
I can't say that I know you well (obviously), but my guess is that it's against your constitution to become apolitical for too long. I bet if you did, there's a part of you that'd never leave you alone. :)
It also occurs to me that maybe the kinds of changes that need to happen require of many of us a greater degree of steeliness than we realized -- without losing the inner softness -- and that part of what's happening now is folks are being made ready in that way?
Daniel, thank you for speaking so honestly from the edge.
I hear the grief underneath your questions—what to do, where to go, whether anything still matters. You’re not alone. Many of us who once believed we could midwife a more awakened world now find ourselves holding space for its slow unmaking.
Maybe the role now is not to fix, but to witness truthfully. To walk tenderly through the unraveling. To remind others (and ourselves) that heartbreak is not the end of the story—it’s the place where something truer begins.
Art still matters. Beauty still matters. Staying awake matters.
And your voice—even uncertain, even exhausted—is still a lighthouse.
With deep respect from one soul traveler to another.
Of all the beautiful and poingnant comments here this one really gave me goosebumps and resonated with me. I think you’re really on to something. Thank you
Yet another prescient, cogent, and potent essay Daniel.
We love you!
Keep on keeping a firm hold on to your pen, and keep writing your spells for those like myself for whom you are able to articulate so perfectly all that we want to scream out loud.
On January 21st I suddenly lost hearing in my left ear which led to disabling vertigo. Every night when I meditated I prayed it would go away (and of course I sought medical intervention--both traditional and alternative--as well). Altho it's gotten better I still have it. That led me to the knowledge that no matter how much we want something to be better--from illness to what's currently happening in our world---there's nothing, really nothing we can do to impact what will be (and I say this after participating in my share of protests, etc). So, Daniel, I humbly suggest you do whatever makes you happy in the time that we have left. And if that includes continuing to do things--like your writing and seminars, so much the better.
As Americans . . . mostly oblivious, distracted, spoiled by all the years of relative peace at home, having never been invaded or occupied, a bit smug perhaps, taking apparent stability for granted . . . we were easy marks for the takeover that has been in the works for years. Now . . . what to do? I and surely many others here are running with a quandry paralell to yours. My sense is to wait and watch and have a back up plan ready to go. Live in a space of readiness. Watch for signs. Consult one's favored oracles. Trust one's instincts.
I am an opposite creature than yourself which I enjoy in every aspect I've encountered here and in your books. I live in the relative depths of nature in one of this countries great bubbles of beauty and stability . . . soon though to be likely rocked by ICE as a good 15% or so living here are hispanic orchard and vineyard workers. It's gonna get messy but for now, I trust my lucky perch on the edge of it all to do as your friends suggested: "hospicing this civilization in its death throes, or following the Bhagavad Gita and courageously embracing our tragic karmic fate." If you love NYC, stay and watch and continute on for now . . . .
To me it seems that any rural - or small town - community these days is 'multi-cultural and multi-ethnic' and in need of people who know how to do it all in a participatory manner. Maybe you are needed there?