When a crisis arrives and all safety nets and security features fall away, leaving us standing exposed to real reality, it truly feels like the sky is falling(!). When the sky is falling we are also at our most vulnerable – and we try to warn everyone else about the possibility of this happening to them too! We also find that during such times understanding can be lacking from those we expect to get it from the most. This is an ancient lesson that we learn about how depth is derived from struggle, and that generally people who have not faced or experienced hard times won’t be able to relate to it. Their disinterested or insensitivity is out of fear, they very much hope not to “end up in the same boat”… Interestingly though it might just be that the rowing boat to survival is a much more authentic life experience in terms of personal growth and responsibility.

You have said everything so beautifully, I need not comment further. I’m humbled by your humbleness and will drink from the dew on the leaves of your wisdom tree – thank you for sharing and for visiting my new space.

Your story fits the journey I have and am experiencing as Chicken Little living the metaphors and remembering the older myths that make for a reassembled life as human being part of Earth. The environmental issues of consumption and entitlements have boiled down to being in sync with Nature in essential ways: there is no guarantee of safety but there are ways to be grateful for small joys. In America, where my husband and I live in small pods for cooking/writing and washing and a bedroom on wheels when it’s time to move on. We learn to deal with life as part of the forest of trees. Hundreds of trees model for me the lesson of the Tree People … rooted and making a stand, flexible and channeling heaven to earth/earth to heaven. The inner world, the inner work you relate to in your essays is precisely the gift that comes from turning ‘the coin of the realm’ inward. Less has meant becoming truly responsible for a life lived well. As a sandbox elder (still in the 60’s) my life practice is infant. Gods willing I will get better with practice and more practice.

Nice move, Jacques.

I couldn’t have said it better, Jacques!

Very true Emily and well said. Thanks for your comment.

We are now more connected, but also more apart from each other and in addition more removed from ourselves. We are completely caught-up in technology and are now living our lives virtually, our eyes fixed to a screen and our minds completely preoccupied by it, with no space or time to connect with ourselves (anymore).

We will have to learn to manage our consumption of these new artificial networking systems (as well as the entertainment systems) and re-learn how to live our lives naturally without “the need” to be constantly remotely connected. We have made ourselves dependent on things we were never dependent on before… Gadgets are the new drugs of the new age.

It might be an idea for us to start learning to reconnect on a human, technology-free level again, and relearn the value of authentic human interactions, uncontaminated by the false persona inducing elements found in social networking (if only social networking did not tend to lead to that there would be no problem).

Each person is responsible for what he exposes him/herself to, for how much time of the day/night and each person is responsible for his/her own inner world. We have to cultivate the Real New World Without by cultivating the Authentic New World Within.