I have been radio silent and I apologize for that. To be honest, I feel ashamed.
First, ashamed to not have published more often. I expected this trip to be inspirational, a boost of my creative juices. Instead, it feels like my writing brain has gone on strike. But why?
From one angle, the writing feels disconnected from my heart. Writing about travel and money, spirituality and consciousness, all such drafts felt stillborn, like silent piles of lifeless words. I don’t care to write about what does not deeply move me. But what would that be?
It’s hard to put into words. This feels like a time of endings. Endings in my life but also in the culture at large (micro mirrors macro). It feels like the myths woven into my life are dying.
For one, I feel ashamed to be an American.
Ashamed to witness what this nation is turning into, what it now stands for, how it is run, and who it is run by. I feel ashamed to be part of a system that embodies hubris, exports violence, and allies itself with an ideology of mass killings, displacement, and starvation.
We bomb schools, hospitals, universities? We conduct double tap strikes? We assassinate politicians and their families? How is any of that okay? It’s not, of course. It is what a ‘Great Satan’ would do.
I feel ashamed also to be safe and comfortable, to bite my tongue, while watching one vile revelation after another. Gaza. ICE. Epstein. Already yesterday’s news thanks to Iran and Lebanon.
Behold a nation carrying its shadow like a barrel full of toxic PFAS. Behold as we project it unto others in the form of organized violence. Behold as our house is ruled by greed, grift, and cruelty.
How do you come to terms with that?
In the past, I would have retreated into denial and distraction. I would have shut it all down, pretended I was not political. Politics? A sure way to ‘kill the vibes.’ Working in finance reinforced this attitude for the market rewards mercenaries. Convictions appear as a costly handicap. “Greg, this is not fucking Charles Dickens World, okay? You don’t go around talking about principles,” as opportunist archetype Tom Wambsgans puts it in Succession. Keep your head down and your eyes on the ball of money.
That’s over, thank God. I no longer want to bypass reality, however nauseating it may be. How could I not let myself be shattered? How could I not let the acid of revelation disintegrate my worldview? How could I not stand in shock as the masks came off?
But what is a healthy response when the atmosphere turns septic, when the discourse is a fever dream, when rot is being exposed but not treated?
What does one do with the anger, the grief, the shame, the feeling of impotence?
Writing feels like an escape into the comfortable space of my head, away from the tension of truth held in my body. And even on the page I find no solace. I have no answers. Writing does not answer that heavy question dangling around my neck: now what?
What does this age ask of me?
What can I contribute but outrage and tears?
I don’t want to join a battle where each side inevitably believes it represents the light and fights darkness. I don’t want to join the dance of fear and greed. I don’t want to walk the ancient path of resentment and violence.
I want to be part of the healing. I want to create and empower, inspire and awaken. I want to be truthful, loving, and kind. I want to find what lies beyond the hunger, beyond the injustice, beyond the catastrophe.
“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate [what] seems important, or from holding views which others find inadmissible.” — Carl Jung
Charles Eisenstein called this a “time between stories.” What do we do when the fabric of our reality is torn? If the old stories are dead, how do we release them? And how do we bring new ones to life?
The only thing I am confident about is that the answers are not waiting on the screen. We won’t find them on Substack or YouTube. ChatGPT doesn’t know. These can help us discover, share and connect, but they cannot animate a new living myth. If we are stuck, we will have to move.
I am reminded of the book Black Elk Speaks about Oglala Lakota medicine man and visionary Black Elk. “Everything an Indian does is in a circle,” he explained, “because the Power of the World always works in circles.” But his nation’s “sacred hoop” was broken and his people forced into the reservation’s “square boxes.” A catastrophic end to a way of life, “for there can be no power in a square.” How does one respond to such trauma?
One day, “word came to us that the Indians were beginning to dance everywhere.” A Paiute shaman/prophet had shared a vision of multi-day ceremonial trance dances, the Ghost Dance. These were supposed to re-connect the tribes with their ancestors and restore the world to harmony. Buffalo would re-appear, white settlers would return east. “The people were hungry and in despair, and many believed in the good new world that was coming.”
But the US government believed it saw preparations for an insurrection and banned the movement. Hundreds were gunned down at Wounded Knee. The ‘good new world’ did not manifest, yet there is much to learn.
First, it is a sobering reminder not to lean too much on others’ visions. Clarity about the present beats seeing possible future paths. A crisis asks us to re-connect with our deepest inner knowing, with the truths we carry in our souls.
And notice how intuitively the Ghost Dance seemed to answer the situation:
Are people fragmented, divided? Gather. Get in sync.
Weighed down by the trauma of defeat? Rise, move, release.
Lost your spirit? Enter altered states of consciousness. Re-connect with the world beyond for support.
Imprisoned in a lifeless square? Form a living circle.
I’m not saying trance dance is the answer to what ails our culture, but it feels directionally more relevant than reading another book or listening to another podcast.
We are conditioned to watch our visionaries, founders, bring ideas to life with the power of capital, technology, and persuasion. The marketplace votes on how our culture changes. But the answer to a crisis mirrors its nature. Our spiritual crisis will not be healed by the archetypes that created it.
Should it surprise us if we had to humble ourselves and learn from the people whose cultures were steamrolled by the machine of conquest and progress?
“I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. People are gonna say what the hell is going on. It’s just too nuts.” — Terence McKenna
“In traditional cultures, when someone returns from a vision quest, the first thing they do is share their vision with the elders of their community,” Chris Bache writes in LSD and the Mind of the Universe. “They do this, first, to receive their counsel on what the vision means and, second, because their vision does not belong to them alone. Deep visions are not private matters.”
Read it again: deep visions are not private matters. What if during our individual journeys of healing and growth we receive bits and pieces of the answer? These would not be for our entertainment. And yet even creating spaces to share them would not be enough.
Black Elk’s private big vision was turned into a public ritual. Painted riders and horses enacted his encounter with Spirit. To impact the community, energy had to move from behind the veil to the visionary, from the individual to the collective, and from the mind into the body. The story had to be enacted and witnessed to be held.
What is our way of gathering around the sacred tent? The doomer take would be that we don’t have anything similar. We can enact the current myth, say on national or religious holidays like Easter and Christmas, July 4th, or the Super Bowl. We can passively receive new stories through art and entertainment. Are public demonstrations and marches the closest we get to enacting new visions together?
I believe we still yearn for active participation. Removed from noise and narrative we know our ways with absolute clarity.
If we are atomized, we gather.
If we are stuck, we get in motion.
If oppressed by silence, we make noise.
If the world darkens, we share our inner light.
When the collective is wounded, healing happens in community.
Ritual binds the individual to the community and the cosmos. — Joseph Campbell
Black Elk was depressed. The tide of history had not turned and he believed he had failed his people. “It was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it,” he said, “of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.”
It is a warning not to be complacent when the questions are thorny and the stakes are high. But it also reminded me to be compassionate with myself, to accept my human limitations. What can we do but show up, do our best, share our light, and surrender our expectations of how and when a better world will come to be?
My writer’s mind would like to answer the big questions to great applause. That’s the trap, the distraction from the question that demands to be lived every day: how do I help create the world I love with all my heart?
The state of the world is the question. Our lives, how we live, every moment of our Being and doing, is the answer.
After a solitary year on the road, my mind is gravitating to spaces of community, of devotion and healing. I yearn for honest conversations and gatherings that lead us to our truth, that brighten our inner light, that lift the weight by sharing with each other and connecting with the divine.
I find myself disinterested in thought-leaders and founders. I am looking for emergence and co-creation, for spaces that catalyze energy and ideas. Where do we get inspired and tap into our power? Where do we move and let ourselves be moved? Where does the air feel alive and sacred?
It is maddening to love this world, yet that is what we are called to do, in spite of it all. Happy Easter.
Praise be to all names and faces of God.
May Peace be upon the world.
— Frederik
Pause for beauty; it is food. — Robert Falconer, Spirit
No one is making you live here. Perhaps give today’s Germany a try while the US does the heavy lifting of keeping the world safe from terrorist nations like Iran.
Amen, amen, amen. Thank you and may this be the beginning of a true and faithful Resurrection. For all of us.