Octavia Butler said “the only everlasting truth is change,” and one of Shakyamuni Buddha’s core teachings is on the nature of impermanence. While change is a constant, it feels as though the current rate of change is practically indigestible.
I remember asking a non-dual spiritual teacher about the practice of accepting what is, which felt in deep tension with my activism at the time. “How can one ‘accept’ or ‘be at peace’ with the violence and climate crisis unfolding around us?” Among other responses, she affirmed how natural it is to care for and protect what you love.
It was that seeming lack of care–especially by those in positions of power–that pulled me up from deep in the technocratic and legal underpinnings of westernized energy law and its political-economic enactment over five years ago.
As an energy justice and utility activist I spent my time writing briefs, attending hearings, building coalitions, and drafting legislation, only to find that decision-makers deferred to theoretical economic models of systemwide costs and benefits over peoples’ lives when it came to staying connected to the electricity grid and preferenced corporate utility profits over community health and just climate outcomes.
This ‘lack of care’ mirrored my own lack of attention to my body’s needs, sensations, and health. As I became more somatically aware, I began to sense how my body, emotions, and mind were consumed with opposing the destruction I witnessed all around. My activism had become a compulsion driven by a nervous system cycling between fight, flight, and freeze. I was throwing everything I had at it, and hoping for the best only to consistently find it wasn’t enough– that the pathways offered to make change were often dead ends.
Here’s where I’m at today.
Mother Earth will alchemize whether we align with her or not. Yet a chasm exists between an intentional cultural burn and a devastating, runaway fire that razes entire towns.
While I’m not sure we can ever accept the magnitude of calamity unfolding (and that has already unfolded), I do believe metabolizing these circumstances has the potential to be alchemical, acting as a catalyst for our own unfolding and realization. In turn, our inner work clarifies the scope and impact of how we act and what alternatives we might create in the external world.
As the Alchemist said in Paulo Coelho’s well-known fable of the same name, “when something evolves, everything around that thing evolves as well.” Or as writer Brianna Pastor shares, “When the flowers around you are growing, you have no choice but to grow too.”
This is the transformative power of fire.
In the words of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira,
“We are all nested in a larger metabolism driven by a metabolic intelligence. If this metabolism is sick, so are we. If we have made it sick and thus made ourselves sick, we have two options: either we heal or we die. We will need to choose between metabolic integration and regeneration or self-destruction.”
—> Listen: A beautiful, prayerful song by Ganavya called “sees fire.”
—> Referenced: Paulo Coelho's book The Alchemist
—> Referenced: Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's book Hospicing Modernity