++++ Transmission from year 2140 incoming +++++
…Let me try to tune in this transtemporal equipment…. (Crackling, hissing and roaring sounds are audible, as if a wind from further out is moving through some vast distant forest)
We are not saying this. We are not speaking now. You are not reading this.
The words you see are just the way your brain trans-temporally hypostatises our utterances into neurological activity in Wernicke’s area and the insular cortex in your brain. My instruments tell me your Angular Gyrus is beginning to separate signal from noise. I’m with you now
Now let the spell-weaving begin. Let us, your descendants speak:
There may be an abyss between your time and our time, the more abundant earth based ancient ancestral future. We made it across the terrifying abyss between worlds at the end of history. The door in the hill is now open. Come join us. Come breach the worlds with us.
Many of you are refugees heading for the new continents of earth community. We know many of you were washed up and left for dead. We know whole continents were broken up that could have flourished. There is a river of blood between worlds that contains all the pain, grief and agony of history. Please find the bridge across. You can only cross together. Not as individuals. Not as individuals who hope to arrive as the humans they once were.
The “there” you hope to arrive at, the destination you hope to get to, is alive and constantly changing. So make friends with this aliveness in everything. You will arrive as changling children. You can only cross with with the more-than-human world. Only as communities and solidarity networks. Only with each other.
Love is not knowledge. The heart is useless without the belly. Now we are in the belly of the universe. Love is the gap in knowledge. It is emptiness. Love is the space where you listen, before you redirect an attack. Love is the patience when you sooth a child, when you pause and be-with a tree before you plant a tree. Love is the end of knowledge, the gap in knowledge.
I’m your descendant, but also, sometimes I’m not even a human. I’m the collective holobiontic knowing of my ancestor’s troubled history and their relationships.
When my enemies threw me in the bear pit, I came back with a bear ally. When they threw me in the scorpion pit, my enemies didn’t realize, but I landed on a feathered bed. And my future wife was lying in it.
When they threw me to the sharks, I was pulled down into to the depths by a great white shark, but she became my white shark queen tantric lover and took me back to the land. That’s the kind of being you’re talking to. They cast me from the city but I raised an army and came storming back in.
That is because I’m this horned god with stars in his body that never dies. Whenever the vines die they spring up again in the spring. I’m the indestructible godhead, the indestructible immanent dying and arising life that dwells, falling and rising and dying in bios life. I’ve grown a thousand bodies. Death is just a process to me. Always rising again in the spring.
Time is an immense living being, always evolving and changing. Here in the future we have composted economic growth, composted the concept of the future itself, dismantled it and rebuilt it into a home for all beings.
In the stories and histories passed down to us from our grandmothers we heard that back in the industrial growth cultures of the twenty-first century, folk lived with little sense of the past, and a narrow threadbare sense of the present: it was as if your life force was drawn into an enormous and terrifying apocalyptic future. It was as if your life force was pulled into a rolling wave of probably inescapable and certainly really empirically existing accelerating crises.
My grandmother’s stories tell me that you, our ancestors, lived with the sense of an enormous overgrown future looming over you like a stormcloud, and a sense that the end of time was next week.
But a realization took root. The proximity of this chaosmos of uncertainty also meant that at any moment the unforeseen could arrive and change the entire living organism of reality. Change could change the way change itself happens. The impossible could become possible.
And the impossible did become possible.
Activist solidarity networks working together and sharing resources created emergent change in communities and communities working together, caused a rolling wave of unforeseen emergent change in entire cultures.
Crucially, our grandmother’s stories tell us that our sense of the geometry of time changed from a straight line to a circle or a spiral. Not an abstract static “timelessness” but circular or spiral time. We created practical doable strategic ways to exorcise empire, dismantle the nightmare of history, and rebuild it into a beautiful ecovillage network to live in. We composted the apocalypse whilst picking grapes and pouring wine in a forest garden with Dionysus and Aion, the lion-headed deity of spiral time.
You lived either in expectation of a monstrous apocalyptic future that you hoped would finally force you to live as if you were fully alive and take responsibility for your actions or in expectation of a permanent shadowless heaven, a compensatory shining new age of Aquarius, a more beautiful world next week or an escapist techno-utopia next year.
In contrast, for us the future is smaller, the present is bigger, and the ancient ancestral past is immense. Although perhaps more accurately the mythic past is not exactly “behind” and also not exactly even “past,” but more like a circle around everything. In this sense the past is also the future. Ancestors can be descendants. This circle around everything is the realm of ancestors, mythbeings and the roots of the tree or rhizome or cactus of life. In a sense this circle around everything is a kind of home.
How did things change?
We acted from our solidarity networks, from our collective intelligence, in alliance the ancestors and Oak trees, pregnant goddesses, Baobob trees and swan filled rivers. We co-created, we shared resources with each other, we sympoetically acted from the home that is around us rather than the future ahead of us. We learnt to act from what is BEHIND us and AROUND us rather than what is in front of us.
We learnt to compost the future and turn it into abundant inclusive earth community.
For this to happen it required a kind of mutation or “going under” to happen: we didn’t just act as individuals; our agency was moved by solidarity networks and the teeming voices and actions of multitudes of more-than-human life forms. The entire concept of there even being a future mutated. A sense arose of time flowing backwards through us into the ancestral realm, a realm which also encircles us.
We began to listen to what needed to come forth from the impossible imaginal future, which was also behind and around us in the ancestral animistic past. We realized that to perform a depossession ceremony on history itself, to eat extractive economic systems with Baba Yaga, to become posthuman, to go under and allow community, solidarity, and the more-than-human world to act through us was to finally begin to compost a little of the looming overgrown future back into the circle of life.
We retracted the energy we had projected onto the future into presently existing activist solidarity networks, into mutual aid, into earth regeneration, into the physicality of our feet, into relationships with leaping salmon and Ash trees and the great bear constellation.
We retracted the energy we had projected onto the future into relationships with new and long lost friends, into the time deity Aion clutching his caduceus, and into the gritty work of standing up for the downtrodden or of making community. Indigenous cultures around the world flowered. We stopped the machine of economic growth and personal growth by performing a soul retrieval on it and retracting its life force back into the spiral of life.
We took back our hopes of the messianic future to come, dismantled them and refashioned them into a kind of floor or ground under us. We made them into a kind of sky above us. We made them into a kind of home. We reabsorbed the apocalypse, reabsorbed industrial growth culture, personal development culture, and the promised messianic future into the present and transformed them into a home for the disenfranchised.
Many of us already had what we are searching for, we were born with this power, and yet somehow our bodies, emotions and concepts hadn’t quite hit the ground, or become rooted in our community or become rooted in our bellies or feet. In a sense what we needed was not more striving, more personal or economic growth but a blessing or a welcoming. A welcoming by ancestors. Yes, you are seen. You are known.
Folk searching in the “more! more! more!” culture of personal and economic growth, the culture of constantly growing, getting better, getting bigger and substituting one compensatory trauma based identity for another, began to realize that their lives would be better served by settling deep into the body, maturing, slowing down, connecting with land, and working with nervous system re-regulation and the body sense.
All that striving, hustling energy that was previously manifest as a scrabble to get ahead of the pack, was finally redirected back towards being useful to community and to life. This beautiful and essential fighting, aggressive, persistent, assertive, swaggering, confrontational, risk taking energy actually became more effective and useful as it became deeply rooted in body, in land and community.
Rather than hustling or scrabbling towards who we had always already been, we realized that to become powerful, ferocious, responsible, accountable, and delicious we needed to be welcomed by “believing mirrors” and trusted community. We realized that if we wanted to see a better day, it was not just all about “inner work”– the resilient abundant diverse mutualistic community infrastructure that supports this welcoming needed to be constructed.
The land itself was regenerated and reforested. Biodiversity was replenished and water courses were regenerated. Yes, the land itself welcomed us. Finally you have come back to me, my son’s and daughters, after all these millennia.
There was a realization that no one could succeed at their calling on earth solely with their own trying, their own will, or with an absolutist rigid inflexible sense of self. Of course it was possible to succeed at something that wasn’t one’s calling on earth, or was a shadow reflection of it or a vague facsimile of it or an adolescent version of it using the will or small self.
Many of us came to understand that to succeed at a calling on earth it is necessary to make a sacrifice, to undertake a down-going or joyful dismemberment, to sacrifice the “self,” to become something “other,” something which communities, solidarity networks, bioregional intelligences, and mythbeings can speak and act through.
We saw that when you are not “you” but an assemblage, a sun god, an earthworm, a swarm of diatoms, a eight armed vampiric growling bestial witch, an Oak tree dryad, a voice for your community or for the local bioregion, then you may be allowed to pass into your destiny.
Folks needed to be welcomed by elders. We got the elders out of their old folks homes and back into community where we could share intergenerational, multigenerational wisdom. With the children running through apple trees. Where we could be seen and known and blessed by the elders and finally slow down and end the endless economic growth/spiritual growth/ personal development dark magic curse to grow and grow.
We didn’t need to make a more beautiful world, instead we let the “world” — solidarity networks, voices of the oppressed and those who ordinarily go unheard, communities, Oak trees, wyrd old goddesses, dryads, faeries, rivers, evening primrose flowers, hawk moths, otters and ancestors, enter us and make us into more beautiful humans.
We were welcomed by our own blood and bones. By those we struggled, strategized, or fought alongside. By our bellies and nervous systems. By the ground under us. By our feet. By our ancestors. By our community. By the land. By the mythbeings in the land. By our elders. There was no door to walk through. We didn’t need to run anymore. There was no border patrol at the edge of earth community.
We learnt to perform ceremony that gave us clues about how to raise children who learnt to love their land and to listen deeply enough to a landscape and a culture that they knew how to “master garden” it to restoration, and who relearnt deep symbiotic relationships between animals, plants, climate, soil, humans, and mythbeings.
When our ancestors started listening to the land and to their communities more deeply, they started listen to the “holobiont,” the collective organism or collective intelligence that emergently arises from the sensory grounded immanent intra-relationship of every plant, animal, mineral, and human in their bioregion.
And in listening to these holobionts, we received deep feedback about the watercourses we need to restore, how to “master garden” the land back to restoration, how to reforest the land, where and how to create human habitations, how to resolve conflicts, how to create abundant, redistributive, inclusive deep democratic cultures, how to create ecological food systems, and how to restore biodiversity.
We learnt to listen to the land’s dreaming intelligence, to listen to the visions that emerge from marginalized voices, to strategize-with rather than to strategize as a separate individual, to allow community and the more-than-human world to act through us.
Now I’m walking with an ambassador from the new ecovillage continent of Samucuvesca, an elder from New Oceania clad in elaborate exquisite raiments, and a fire spirit with six wings along shorelines and past forest gardens. We stroll past ecovillages designed according to sacred geometries where spirits and humans dance together in sweet sacred marriage, next to houseboat communities, and discuss green woodworking, bioregional economies, and biomimicing technologies.
Yes there is a place for you here, in Samucuvesca or Alethia or the other new countries that opened like an origami shape unfolding out of the map decades ago. Come over the narrow bridge. Bring your families and loved ones. Let them take your hand and guide them. Take my hand. Terrible is the view into the abyss below. Listen to me my ancestors. Take my hand.
Come across the river. Courageous acts will be needed. They have already happened. They are happening now. You are ready. You may not make it. Please act for future generations. We guarantee you nothing except your death. We remove your hopes and replace them with tender relationships.
Come over the firestorm, past the hungry ghosts, over the abyss. It’s not just a dark corridor you walk. LOOK again:…It’s a set of stairs through space. Stars are all around. Stars are all around. Come across the nightmare of history. Past the ancestor’s agony. We have healing for all your ghosts. We’ll find a place for them all. We’ll listen to their grief. It’s not a dark corridor. It’s a set of stairs through space into the temple. All the heroes, wyrd land listeners, queer sorcerers, and great ancestors who came before are here.
Come across the terrifying abyss. The homeland is here, you can live again, the village is here. The community is here, they will all take your hand. Take the a sunflower’s hand. Your lover is here. Your family is here. Bumblebees are here. This isn’t the future. Time is a circle surrounding everything. This is home.
++++++Transmission ended+++++++++
