Some of what I am about to say in this article is so obvious that it barely bears repeating, except that it is also so normalized as to seem unremarkable. Thus, I speak.
One of the premises to which I am ineluctably drawn by a deep trans-disciplinary study of the root drivers of wellbeing, human and planetary, is that modernity is not a culture, it is a cult. There are all kinds of cults: religious cults, fertility cults, etc. Modernity, unfortunately, is a death cult.
Why is modernity a death cult?
Is it because it is destroying the only biosphere in the known universe with the same alacrity that people choose breakfast cereal, and it cannot seem to stop?
It transforms living eco-systems into dead dollars?
It is systematically failing to provide our children with a context adequate to foster the proper intuitions of relatedness, and instead handing their highly impressionable minds over to technology companies who sell their attention to the highest bidder?
It is creating technologies, so-called, with patent disregard for the harms that they cause, extracting from the commons of natural resources, so-called, the commons of ideas, the commons of attention?
And yet all of this is so normalized as to be considered entirely unremarkable, despite the fact that it is, of course, insane.
It has been a couple of weeks since I set proverbial pen to proverbial paper (these are both in fact digital) and this is what is now coming out through the fingertips as I listen to the birds.
I am sitting in our film studio, which cannot be closed, because it has an open wall. It is a building designed to foster the proper intuitions of relatedness. Sitting within it you cannot not be outside.
Summer is here, and in addition to making a number of calls today, and having taken several meetings, I have weed-whacked part of the meadow, and continued grinding and sanding a wooden sculpture. This I do between rational so-called business activities, activities that are concerned with putting food on the table, and so on.
Why do I do these things? I do them because my body wants to. Because I cannot sit still for hours on end anymore, not that my body now knows and feels that it is alive. I can enter into a kind of stillness of concentration for long durations, but in order to keep renewing this, to keep rekindling it, I have to be in my body. And staring at screens does not land me in the body, root me to the earth. Sculpting does. Forest tending does. And so I alternate these activities in. Are they are a waste of time? Or are they, in fact, the background space that gives definition to the concerted effort? That clears away, like the brush, like the accumulated deadwood, space around my thoughts so they can be cogent and clear.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Hearth Science Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.