I am going to ask you to do something a little crazy.
(Here might I remind you: you can simply choose to believe I AM crazy, and save yourself a lot of trouble. ...Or you can lean into staying with the trouble, as Donna Haraway invites.)
I’m going to urge you to increase your sensitivity.
I admit this initially sounds appalling.
Isn’t resensitizing purely counterproductive, even damning, to the task of surviving in these times? These times where we are constantly inundated with distressing news and so much media stimuli as to render us numb. While the global elite are strolling into war, dropping bodies and bombs in casual power grabs while the world suffocates in its own filth—who has the energy to empathize with every suffering face we see, to react to every catastrophe descending around us? Who has the courage to face such a terrible-trending future?
In this dying civilization, isn’t desensitization rewarded?
Naturally, yes. This is true in the short term and in limited acute survival situations.
But it is not true in the long term. And in all other situations.
In the long term we need to come back to our senses... in every meaning.
For the vast majority of human evolution, we lived webbed within a continuum of relationship, and intimacy was our currency.
We pursued intimate, endless knowledge of our conditions for survival, eking our way towards thriving and out-navigating decline as best we could.
We stretched our senses into deep literacy with scents, with sounds, with visual patterns, and with tactile stimulation. We could translate the difference between soils just a stone’s throw apart by their microbe quotas. We could read a coming weather system, days away, through our own eyes, ears, and nose.
We knew our worlds with every atom of our being, and that’s how we knew we belonged.
To come back to our senses now
is to have to bear witness to how broken, wretched, neglected, hurt and scared everybody is.
How violent we have been.
How destructive we have been.
How ignorant we have been.
It’s an excruciating pain that can liberate us, if we choose to stay with it and allow it to break through.
To embrace our power as sense makers means to imply that there’s something about being embodied that is sacred to producing intelligence.
Something our technophallic AI can never outdo.
Because our nerves, our senses and our unconscious mind are very much co-piloting our sense making.
Our senses are raw with power; our nerves are razor sharp, honed by millenia; our unconscious is outrageous in its mythic connection-making power.
Thus we can see and know more even than our finest algorithms.
Without our power to imbue meaning, we wouldn’t actually see much at all.
The senses and the sense-making co-developed.
We are extremely refined sensitive intuitive sense-making organisms.
We are much more than devices. We are kin, ready to know and be known, ready to extend our senses into the far reaches of the unknown, and in generating meaning, extend Life everywhere.
And thus can our sensitive body-minds warp and stretch into the knowledges of other bodies with whom we share ecosystem ties. Like a mycelium’s mind.
We are much more than machines. We are infinite symphonies of reinvention and growth.
We have the power to see anything true, given enough time and good luck.
Anything true at all.
We have to make the difficult and bold decision
to come back to that.
I am asking you to resensitize for the revolution. To trust there is sense to be made from this mess. To trust we actually belong to this mess, and the mess is a product of our failures of sense-making thus far.
I am asking you to resensitize for the resistance. To hold our ground in the midst of inner and outer collapses. To discern what needs saving and what deaths needs witnessing, what compost needs turning. To midwife new worlds, beginning with our sensitive handling of what we experience.
As treacherous as it is, it is the pathway out of perpetual disaster.
As painful as it is, it liberates you into your true form.
As confusing and frustrating as it is, you are also making great sense that will bring about inner peace. That’s why it is hard. Such peace is not won easily, especially in an increasingly disorganized world.
The more you integrate, the more you become emboldened to change conditions within and beyond/including you, for the better.
You have this option.
Do you dare choose it?