Mind the Void

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This week I recorded the audio before I wrote it. Usually I do it the other way around.

This week, it's been weird. (Apropos for your Wednesday evening weirding session.)

In normally baking hot, sunny Colorado, it is currently gray, humid, rainy, and uncertain whether it wants to be cool or warm. 

In society right now, there's a great weirdening afoot. 

My head is swimming with information. Information from news about the government, the outer world, and its breakdown. 

And internally, swirling with a dense swim through the systems of thought involved in Fractal Praxis. In furtherance of my writing projects (as announced last week), I spent all morning and early afternoon writing out various claims of the theory, and categorizing them. 

And just a few minutes ago, I had a weird interaction. I collected some produce from our gardens here at Living Systems Institute and I went to give some cucumbers to the younger chicks. I heard a loud flapping noise coming from their coop. I looked through the plastic panel window, to come face to face with a hawk. A hawk that had somehow made its way through the two small doors that the chicks use to get into the coop and it was stuck trying to get out through the window. 

I've never seen anything like that. I've certainly never handled a bird like that. So I flung open the door to the coop, but it wouldn't fly past me and out—and I simultaneously needed to play goalie to the chicks to not escape through that same door. Many of the young chicks were huddled in the corner, kind of pressed around and against the metal watering canister, which served as a kind of barrier to the hawk. The hawk wasn't actively attacking them. I don't know how long the hawk was in the coop, but it was clearly stuck. Maybe it had been there for hours. 

So I decided to run to the garage, grab my leather-palmed gardening gloves, and go and grab this predator bird—which turned out to be a juvenile Cooper's hawk. I grab this gorgeous bird around the midsection, and it's flapping its long wings, and we are both startled by the experience. It starts clasping me with its claw—thankfully I had the leather gloves on. And then as soon as I opened the door, I pushed it out from me and released it and it flew out of my hands up to the tree. 

After a moment of admiration, I went back into the coop to inspect the chicks and unfortunately one was dead. I removed the dead young chicken, and threw it in the field at first, as a kind of offering to the predator bird. A few minutes later, I would bury it. Because while I was telling the story of what happened to the property owner, I noticed another bird fly and sit on an electrical post in the backyard near us. It was the same kind of bird, but even bigger. Turns out, that was a very large, mature female Cooper's hawk, perhaps the mother of the juvenile. And it was watching the chicks, which were now in an enclosed, covered outdoor cubicle. She was watching them, and she was watching us. 

I've been here for three years on this homestead. I’ve never dealt with this particular scenario before. There's all different kinds of predators that coexist here. And this is by no means the first chicken we have lost to predators. It is indeed a principle of Living Systems Institute that we encourage wildlife. And while we don't want to encourage this particular wildlife to feed off of our chicks or chickens, it is recognized as part of the natural cycle that interactions like this would materialize.

The Cooper's hawks do a great job taking care of the many voles and bunnies that we have on the land, which are plentiful. So now it's our job to find a way to discourage them from targeting the chicks or chickens. We'll figure something out. 

But, you know, just a couple hours ago, this was not a problem I thought we needed to solve, and now we have to solve it because it has emerged. Life on the farm. Life cycles. The unexpected comes and goes, predation, death, life. 

Here we are—or here I am anyway, attempting to build a panoply of knowledge that can serve future generations. And the preservation of life ways like those we practice on this unique permaculture homestead are crucial—in ways my elder generation probably don't grasp for the most part, but that'll become more salient at a future time in which collapse has taken stronger root in our society.

I'm proud to practice and curate the life ways that I do through both Fractal Praxis and Living Systems Institute. And I'm proud to do the organizational development work that I do to help build organizations, co-ops, and small businesses that will make the world a better place, if they can. 

This is my situatedness. This is the ecosystem I occupy and inhabit the spaces that I do. And I have been overwhelmed by processing patterns, including the exploitation of power and predatory behaviors at the scale of society and government lately. And it seems an apropos time to bring this particular piece out of the vaults for your listening and reading pleasure. 

I found a piece from my archives that I created just a few weeks or months before COVID-19 hit us. And it is a bit cryptic for my present day aesthetic tastes in what it's conveying. (I’ll include video of an original performance of the original piece here... it's quite different, and worth a watch/listen.)

I'm going to attempt to perform an original variation on this piece live and spontaneously, drawing upon what's alive in me today, with the way the world is going, alongside the intuition that was captured in this piece originally from five years ago. Please enjoy.

The World is Breaking Down. Why not you too?  

*

The world is breaking down now. Why wouldn't you break down too? 

What if now were a time for you to let more of the self you cling to for safety go? 

What if for where we're going, we are going to need much more agile selves? 

Ones not attached to stories that themselves stem from mythos and societies on the brink of calamity, but that are sourced from somewhere much deeper. 

You see, in a crisis, when immediate action is called for, where does the self go? 

It is simply released for that moment—which reveals its superfluousness. 

A self is the illusion of a static phenomenon, an identity in time and space that is enduring across time. 

But what I'm here to remind you of is: selves break down. 

Selves are fragile constructs comprised of the media internalized, the meaning made from one's life, the stories reinforced about oneself. But as a construct, it costs a lot of biological and mental and emotional labor to maintain a self.

And what if selves aren't going to deliver us across this survival threshold? 

You see, the world is breaking down now. Why not you too? 

Why not take the opportunity to lose yourself—before you lose your life? 

Since you'll have to let it all go one day once you're dead—if you could let it all go now, and be the lighter, more agile for it… why not? 

When our map of the world breaks down because the patterns no longer keep, what becomes of us? We become all discombobulated, disarrayed, disordered.

And we will suffer there. Until we recognize the opportunity for a transcendent order to break through this very moment. 

There is a version of yourself that transcends the construct of self. That is the floor of existence; that is the ohm at the center of the universe.

It is being as a process rather than self as a noun, or object. 

Being as a process.

That you are. 

And from that sense-making process, the self that you may need to survive this moment will spontaneously arise. 

If you trust that you know what to do, and you become trustworthy by not investing your time and energy into the maintenance of false selves, then you shall be empowered in a crisis. 

All of the myths of society you once invested in may crumble. 

And you will be affected, but you will not be consumed. 

So again, the world is breaking down now. 

Who will you become if you let yourself break down too? 

Will you encounter the breakthrough involved? 

Thank you so much for reading and listening. Please continue to tune in each week as I continue to do my sacred work to unfurl fractal praxis into the world.

Thank you. Peace be with you. Blessed be. 

-C.