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Helpful Hints for Dying Well

5/10/2018

PEGI EYERS

It’s time we stopped ignoring, denying or being afraid of death. If we are old enough to die, then we are old enough to be mature about it.

DEATH TIP #1
Once you are gone, no one is going to care about the details of your life.

DEATH TIP #2
Once you are gone, your belongings will become a burden to the world.

DEATH TIP #3
Once you are gone, your egoic struggles will amount to nothing.

DEATH TIP #4
Once you are gone, the world will not be significantly altered. Let's hope it continues to be the green planet it was meant to be.

DEATH TIP #5
Once you are gone, your life will be mythologized.

DEATH TIP #6
Once you are gone, your bones will either be dust, or ever-fading, ever-hollowing artifacts.

DEATH TIP #7
Once you are gone, the masks you valued in life will fall away, one by one. And for some mysterious reason, after you are gone the impressions that others held of you, will consolidate into a memory of the "real you."

DEATH TIP #8
While you are still alive, resist the urge to avenge your mortality on others, and be kind to those who care for you in your last days and hours. Do we not all share the same fate? Impending death will lay bare the core of your truest self.

DEATH TIP #9
While you are still alive, instead of worrying about death, why not contemplate the miracle of being born into this place and time? What are the chances of that happening? What is your role in this world? Is it to be a witness, or to leave a mark?

DEATH TIP #10
While you are still alive, consider the possibility that all your trepidation about death is probably for nothing. Chances are, the spirit world is a glorious, wonderful and comfortable place.

DEATH TIP #11
While you are still alive, and as humans have done for millennia, it is our challenge to come to terms with the existential angst of "being here/not being here." The best and most time-tested response to what we cannot comprehend is courage. And grace.

DEATH TIP #12
While you are still alive, cultivate your intuitive, dreaming and visionary skills, and practice remote viewing and shapeshifting between the worlds of past, present and future. As all the great mystics have known, these are the aspects of you that will move forward into the spirit world.

DEATH TIP #13
While you are still alive, don't wait for your final days to realize that our souls, or spirits, or that ineffable parts of ourselves, are made up of LOVE. And that LOVE is the currency, or vibration of the universe and all of Earth Community, including us. Our society has tried to obscure this sacred fact in countless ways, but that doesn't make it any less true.

DEATH TIP #14
Be grateful that you have had the opportunity to take part in the great cycle of birth, life, death and regeneration. And die well ~!

Skipping Skeletons © Allison Schulnik

Pegi Eyers is the author of Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for neurodecolonization, social justice, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
PURCHASE LINKS
Amazon.com
www.stonecirclepress.com

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A Pre-Emptive Kindness and Tarry This Night

4/6/2018

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REVIEWS BY PEGI EYERS

A Pre-Emptive Kindness by R.D. Roy (Hidden Brook Press)
Tarry This Night by Kristyn Dunnion (Arsenal Pulp Press)

It's not that difficult to imagine dire scenarios in the future, when the symptoms of collapse seem to surround us each day in societal breakdown, wonky weather patterns, ongoing ecocide, political turmoil, economic riptides and deliberate stupidity. And yet the capitalist machine rolls on, as big oil continues to provide us with every luxury, amenity and consumer good we could possible imagine. Settler Futurity, or the expectation that our way of life will continue unabated for decades (if not centuries more) seems to be at the height of our cognitive dissonance and denial.

That's why looking to fiction can provide us with a much-needed reality check on how the many layers of our personal and collective worldview may play out, in what promises to be an apocalyptic future. The resources required to feed our "endless growth" civilization are not infinite, and among other inevitabilities, when peak oil arrives it will all come crashing down. Are beings from outer space going to save us? Will we all collectively begin to reject capitalism and stop driving cars? Will Mother Earth and her climate disasters such as floods, hurricanes and fires, provide greater smack-downs than those we've already experienced? Will the plague of all plagues arrive to deplete our numbers? Or will the elite New Agers among us achieve "spiritual enlightenment" and somehow "shift" our reality to a golden era of peace and prosperity?

There are no boundaries to the human imagination, and we can just as easily create massive problems for ourselves and Earth Community, as we can access our substantial powers of healing and remediation. And like R.D. Roy and Kristyn Dunnion, some of us are particularly skilled at creating new worlds through speculative fiction. For Roy, tracing the arc after a collapse scenario is distilled into basic human hunger and the imperative for territory and clan in urban wastelands; and the return of tribal wisdom and the re-indigenization of survivors in the forests and ecosystems that remain. Considering how humanity has screwed up the civilizational project, returning to an low-tech archaic hunter and gatherer society is incredibly appealing!

For Dunnion, not only is the ignorance of religious fundamentalism terrifying in its implications today, her projection to a future where religious fanatics have engineered social collapse is a nightmare scenario. Examining the psychosis of a cult leader and his followers from every possible angle, her riveting novel Tarry This Night includes the worst of the human condition - the "Great Father" archetype, blind obedience to authority, subjugation of the weak by the strong, patriarchal dominance, forced polygyny, pedophilia, lateral violence, brutality, victim-blaming, manipulations, greed, delusion, salvationist myths, isolationism, and (wait for it) cannibalism.

Even today we find evidence that the "heavenly scriptures" can be spun to fit the ideology of exceptionalism for any "chosen people," but Dunnion shows us just how far this fantasy can go. There does seem to be a dire sickness that results from blind faith, or adherence to monotheistic dogma and organized religion. One can't help but notice how this cautionary tale mirrors the same freedom from oppression women are seeking today, and that patriarchy has always been at the root of the problem. Beautifully written, both tragic and full of hope, Tarry This Night is a fusion of underground bunkers, bombed out landscapes, dead zones, marauding bands, survivor factions, green forest sanctuaries and the bold resistance of heroes and heroines. By all means stay with this incredible story to the end.

Looking to R.D. Roy's dystopia in A Pre-Emptive Kindness, we find a brilliant statement on the eternal divide at the root of humanity between the so-called "civilized" and the "pagan," or what the late Daniel Quinn referred to as the "leavers" and the "takers." Our modern fear of "being blasted back to the Stone Age" is a deceit and unfounded (if not out-and-out racist), when we consider the current consensus on how low-impact indigenous societies are the most sustainable way to be living on our particular planet. Indeed, the time-tested worldviews of IK (indigenous knowledge) may be our best way forward! As a projection of both western and tribal worldviews, two very different groups are contrasted in A Pre-Emptive Kindness, as they deal with great changes in their short evolution and move toward an inevitable encounter with one another.

In a time of mega-storms, killing sun, and unleashed biological warfare, Roy offers stunning detail on urban living in a collapsed city. Clans mark territory; the detritus, fittings, and materials of civilization are strangely re-purposed; the "man the hunter" archetype rules; the population has lapsed into illiteracy after a few short generations; many suffer from horrific skin diseases; starvation is looming as all the urban plants and animals have been depleted; and dogs, our loyal companions for millennia, are now a source of food. Operating more from base instinct than formulated thought, the more awake and aware among them realize it's time to leave the city.

Roy makes a powerful statement on indigeneity and resilience by portraying the forest dwellers as intraconnected and thriving in Earth Community. In contrast to the dysfunctional and sick urban dwellers, they find ways to work together, gather in council circles around the fire, reinstate Elder-honoring and storytelling as important to cultural life, and teach the children the Old Ways of hunting, gathering, tracking and plant medicine. Isolated for many years, wary of threat and secretive by nature, members of this tribal group have recovered their animist ability to connect with trees and other beings, and magic occurs in their relationships with the forest creatures and other elements in the wild. As the teachers ask the children, "Can you hear the forest singing?"

Yet after a few generations of putting community ahead of the individual (the tribal way), a rogue element has begun to promote the values of individualism and ownership once again, to plunder from nature instead of acting in reciprocity. Unlikely mentors and leaders step up to provide a moral compass, at the same time the urban scavengers are detected on the perimeter. As the city folk crossed abandoned farmlands on their way to the forest, the opportunity to kill a majestic and magical stag is missed, and somehow the new idea of a plant-based diet begins to take hold. Roy's masterful story of a post-collapse world begs the question of how human groups can evolve so differently, over time and in diverse locations, and hints at the possibility for clashing worldviews to converge. And as the title suggests, the important pre-requisite for a new and hopeful era in human history could be A Pre-emptive Kindness.

Readers of such amazing speculative fiction must of course make the connection to our dire situation today. If the worst indeed comes to pass, how will the human heart, mind and soul respond to such massive change? Will we regret the civilization we left behind, feel nostalgia for what was, and for all that we used to collectively understand? In the present moment, can we even fathom how our beloved habits may be fading, in front of our very eyes? In a time of apocalypse, do we hold on, or do we move on?

A poignant passage from Kristyn Dunnion's Tarry This Night offers a clue. "Their whitewashed log cabin with creaking veranda and garden out back. The purple flowers that flourished each spring. That happy, safe past slams into her. Ruth pushes each picture away, just as she was taught. She clears her mind. Imagines a zero, a sphere of nothing. But the thread of memory is stitched deep in Ruth's body. It circles her bones and pulls, old truths knotted in time." For the survivors of tomorrow, we can only hope they will build a new world from our best memories - a place to heal and live in harmony with all human factions, and especially, with our beloved Earth Community.

_Picture Credits_

"Good Friday" painting © Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri AO and assisted by Milanka J Sullivan, 1994

"Centrist Duo" painting © Andrew Morrow >website<

Indigenous street art in Redfern, Sydney, Australia

Solstice Ceremony Nu York, After Culture

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What Have You Done, Toronto?

2/18/2018

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BY PEGI EYERS

"Gardens Manufactured" by Cheryl Molnar

Already millions of acres of farmland surrounding the Greater Toronto area have succumbed to development in recent years, in Ontario's (so-called) protected Greenbelt zone. For those who can afford it, the demand is desperate for traditional detached family homes and townhouses. The building boom is continuing to explode as the population of Toronto is projected to hit 13.5 million by 2041. As the last great resource colony on the planet, Canada remains open to millions of immigrants from all over the world, and once an ecosystem is razed it is gone forever.

What Have You Done, Toronto?
Building Up, Going Down

First
The farmhouses start
To look abandoned
Boarded up
Rundown grey ~
Then the fields go fallow

Farmers dead, gone, sold out

Then
The signs go up
“For Sale”
“Project By”
“Chief Engineer”
Oligarchy buys in
Planes in a bleached sky
Terminus at Pearson

Next
The land is denuded
Creatures of the forest
Annihilated
Cracked branch
Sawdust flows
Trunks stacked high
Earth Pain
Earth Sorrow

ECOCIDE
Broken bones of the land
24 hours a day 7 days a week
My dear friends
The great trees
Life-long sentinels
I SEE YOU
(Good-bye)

Destroyed in broad daylight
Hide this from my vision
Or I too may surely die

Next
The machines arrive
Giant earth movers
Believe it or not
Settler fields are a cut above
These great mounds
Artificial hillocks
Geo-engineering

Then
Black tarps
Snaking around
Building to code
Partitioning the living
Yet you know
their days are numbered
Whatever is left
of Earth Community

Is colonized, maintained and controlled

Now
The land stripped and raped
Exposed,
Gone forever
Waiting for the final blow

A year or two may pass

Then
The grid arrives
Construction requires
Streets fencing bricks
Wires hardware tunnels
Hard hearts hard hats
The gated community

Wut
Planting shrubs
where once were forests
Homes clogged side-by-side
Or a high-rise crane
Mega-build
Digging cavities
Deep in the Mother

Boxes in the sky!
Here comes the insanity
            The allergies
            The depression
            Calls to the shrink
            Screams in the night
            Erectile dysfunction

The elevator that stops at extinct

Bring home more crap
Looks great in the store
But not in your apartment
Fantasies stacked high
Enough rubble to fill Lake Ontario

A hell’s brew of
Metal, glass, glue, ceramic
Plastics made in China

What have you done, Toronto?
You set it in motion

NATURE IS LIFE
You chopped that down

NATURE IS LOVE
You impaled your own soul

NATURE IS LAW
Here come the fires, the floods and hurricanes

Earth’s sorrow and Earth’s joy
> As above so below <

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Apocalypso

2/18/2018

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PEGI EYERS

Apocalyptic themes have been showing up in cultural production for decades now. Here's a song "Apocalypso" written by Jimmy Buffett and performed on the David Letterman Show in 1994. Massive climate disaster has already hit many islands and regions in the Caribbean, making the sardonic boomer notion of "dancing through the apocalypse" somewhat retrograde and irresponsible. And yet human beings have always had the ability to find light and humor in the most tragic of events, so maybe Jimmy is on the right track. Get a groove on anyone?

Apocalypso by Jimmy Buffett

They say this universe is bound to blow
But I say we crank up the calypso control
Apocalyp, apocalyp, apocalypso

Now I'm no dancer as dancers go
But this is one step that you need to know
Apocalyp, apocalyp, apocalypso
We'll be dancing when we go

Planets come and planets go
Apocalypso
Undisturbed the dancers flow
Apocalypso
Old galaxies can be cold
So I'll hold you close
When this earthly light is burning low
This dance will take you to the next plateau

Apocalyp, apocalyp, apocalypso
We'll be dancing when we go
We'll be dancing when we go

Planets come and planets go
Apocalypso
Undisturbed the dancers flow
Apocalypso

Yes we'll ride that final tide
Apocalypso
Gone away just yesterday
Apocalypso

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Welcome to "Rejecting Empire"

2/18/2018

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BLOG BY PEGI EYERS

"Miranda ~ The Tempest" by John Waterhouse

Welcome to REJECTING EMPIRE, the new blog by Pegi Eyers that engages with the collapse, or eroding, of natural ecosystems and human societies in our time. What does it mean to be a witness to this massive change, with all the eco-grief and horror it entails? How can we face the trauma of climate events with resilience and healing for ourselves, others and Earth Community? Many believe collapse is already happening, and REJECTING EMPIRE will engage with the mutual processes of letting go (or tearing down) of the old world while simultaneously building up the new. What would a post-collapse post-oil post-capitalist world look like? Can we weave Apocalyptic Magic together, for a sustainable future? Stay tuned!

Follow REJECTING EMPIRE blog for cutting-edge critique, social commentary and anti-colonial discourse. With a focus on Apocalypse Studies, prepare to be challenged!