Staying Feral During the Last Days of Rome
“It’s time to evolve. That’s why we’re troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything’s failing? It’s because they’re no longer relevant.” — Bill Hicks
Whether or not you live here in the United States, November 2024 has been quite the month so far.
How is your magical nervous system doing?
Are you on the side that’s been grieving, raging, feeling the pits of despair and hopelessness? Or are you on the side that’s been in jubilant celebration, feeling the euphoric anticipation of being saved by the Great Orange Hope?
Or are you, like me, in the uncharted wilderness of the middle somewhere, feeling neither of the above? Have you naturally tuned out of that cacophony, instead tuned into frequencies only audible to those feral creatures with a fundamental dissonance to external authorities — especially ones so palpably entrenched in distortion?
If so, did you hear the strange and unmistakable crack of the wrecking ball against a house of cards tethered to a seemingly impenetrable foundation of corruption and exploitation?
(It is a law of Nature that unsustainable systems, however stubborn, ultimately arrive at their moment of self destruct.)
The last few years for me, and perhaps for you too if you’re feral, have been an unequivocal divesting from the ‘side’ to which I had previously felt a natural belonging for all my adult life; a departure that came from the felt-sense cognition that, while form and context were different, this ‘side’ was essentially running the same energies as the ‘other side', to which my natural dissonance was still very much intact.
Both operate from the colonial-totalitarian schema of divide + conquer, entrained into our nervous systems by the cattle prod of fear-mongering. To argue that one is less sinister than the other, and thus preferable, only bolstsers and strengthens the whole monolithic monstrosity, while blinding us from the wild and liberating truth that we all deserve way better.
Being feral, I couldn’t contort into conforming to a hollow experience of belonging for the sake of belonging, especially when it so clearly felt like a violation of my soul-body. Like so many others, I found myself out in the wilderness of not belonging to either ‘tribe’, reluctant to form another one based on ideological — or any other sort of — conformity, which is the seed, the essence of (overt or covert) totalitarianism.
(And this, it appears, is our collective trajectory at this time: evolving away from outsourcing safety + belonging through ideological tribalism, and maturing into resourcing ourselves with safety + belonging from within first, then sharing that as a gift with the people around us. The paradox is that this deepens and enriches our inherent nature as relational and loving beings.)
Being feral, I delighted in diving into the sparkling, rejuvenating waters of nuance — that quality which affirms the diversity, difference and subtleties of the subjective experience of different bodies with different stories. A quality that by its very nature is an antidote to the dull march of dogma and conformity. A quality that is anathema to totalitarianism.
The wild soul-body loves and is nurtured by nuance, as is Nature, where we see nuance in the form of biodiversity.
And to my dismay, nuance and difference had become contraband qualities on both ‘sides’, punishable by hate, and projections of distorted conflations.
But back to that wrecking ball. Whether or not it feels like this to us right now, we live and participate in a sentient and Self-organizing system, call it Nature, the Cosmos or the Universe. And that sentient, Self-organizing system is always, implacably moving in the direction of evolution. Indigenous cultures and mystics have known this for millennia; emerging fields of research around complex systems, dynamics and chaos mathematics are slowly catching up with them.
From these emerging fields, a particular concept derived from research and observation speaks with clarity to these times. It’s known as the strange attractor. A fundamental quality of strange attractors is that they are fractals — that self-reproducing pattern of symmetry and underlying order found everywhere in Nature, from our cells and DNA to tree rings, seashells, flowers, galaxies and practically everything in between, including in the roiling energy of chaos.
Strange attractors are an organizing principle — which is to say, they’re not localized in time and space, they’re non-physical. They’re present when a system is going through a period of non-linear change, which may be experienced by the limitations of logic as nonsensical, and which also precipitates chaos. Strange attractors are present in systems when they’re shifting to a new pattern, a new fractal.
In alchemy, this happens when a substance or thing transmutes from one elemental expression to another — such as boiling water rarefying into steam.
(And if you follow any of the esoteric systems of mapping the larger, cosmic, non-linear cycles of time, you’ll be acutely aware that they all speak of this time as a threshold moment in a significant elemental-evolutionary leap, which will bring about some measure of chaos and discomfort.)
Another marker of the evolutionary presence of strange attractors is the Self-organizing order underlying chaos, which often can’t be perceived by our current neurological capacities that operate within the bounds of known and familiar systems and structures. We’re moving towards something completely new and unknown — beyond the city limits of logic, into uncharted and wild terrain.
Feral times: solar flares making Aurora Borealis in the Mojave high desert
All of which to say, logic is not the space for the outlandish innovation of evolution. We have to venture beyond the logical boxes and boundaries of consensus reality if we are to be agents of evolutionary change. Logic does not beget evolutionary innovation. Rather, logic is what maintains and develops structures of understanding and working with a system once it has stabilized, until that system is once again ready to evolve.
Still with me?
None of this precludes our collaboration in this process. From a whole systems (or holistic) perspective, our participation is required. We get to be co-creators (which is not the same as mind-based controllers.) In this fertile intensity of all possibilities, that means allowing and saying yes to our most outlandish, heart-based visions of what this world and our lives could potentially be, to let them be felt and experienced in our bodies. Right now, the potency of that is supported by Nature, as we shift from the known into the great mystery of new emergence.
All of which to say, none of this is going to play out in the way our minds fearfully dread or eagerly anticipate it to.
In the art and practice of my own life and my work with others, here’s some of what I’m going to be participating in to be the death doula to what’s passing, and midwife to what’s coming in:
cultivating the capacity and willingness to release familiar and comfortable projections, which are rooted in our familiar, comfortable biases — those places from which we access tribal belonging, and from where we shoot arrows of bad othering (which actually give us a dopamine rush, keeping us systemically addicted)
embodying the Truth that to preach love while dehumanizing the other, the ones who are different from us in some way, is a harmful distortion and a desecration of the powerfully transformative power of Love
committing to the moment-by-moment practice of humanizing the perceived bad other, within/without; while simultaneously putting heart and energy towards the issues that align with our values, towards advocating for Nature, other humans and the liberation of all beings
reclaiming our colonized nervous systems by feeling and seeing through the polarizing, energy-plundering, fear-mongering, nuance-murdering propaganda on both ‘sides’ as the final flails of a dying system.
There’s so much more. For now, in the wake of the US elections, this will suffice.
Staying in the heart and staying in compassion are not simply pleasant platitudes. They’re radical acts of participation and collaboration with the age that we’re shifting into. During these periods of intense polarization in the collective, this heart-rootedness might make you feel a bit feral and wild. It might trigger the ancestral fear of survival, of being rejected from the group, of not belonging and being left out to die.
If so, acknowledge these feelings with infinite compassion for yourself and your ancient forebears. Slowly begin to settle yourself into physically feeling the safety of your present moment, gently resourcing yourself to attune to the possibility of belonging to your Self first and foremost. Eventually, you become a lighthouse of unconditional belonging during these chaotic times of big change.
If you’re a feral one (or feral-curious) I’m incubating a monthly-ish virtual happening to support, channel and work with our wild, visionary and world-creating energies during these potent times.
Stay tuned.
When engaged with resourcefully, the primal and creatively fertile energy of chaos does not have to feel chaotic.