The lessons of Autumn/What we see in the mirror

We have a running joke amongst our friends here that everybody is so into the seasons because it’s the only thing that ever changes in this godforsaken little town. They have captivated me though, and quickly became an integral part of the deep, transformative learning process I am engaged in, which encompasses my entire Karlskrona life. It’s an intense, high-pressure container, a dance with all of my lenses of self-reflection and with the greater forces that juggle me, demanding my undivided presence. All my focus is on my personal challenges, my classmates/housemates/friends, and the classes that teach us about paradigm shifts and leadership, the plights of our world and planning strategically for a different future. Everything here is a mirror of everything else, and currently heartbreak is the micro-level but most salient fractal in this learning process. It is myopic, but it does engage my entire being. As such it brings into sharp focus, in a tangible case study, what my being must be undertaking on higher levels too. And I would probably be adrift in it all, were it not for the wisdom of the seasons to guide me, helping me understand where I am, and what is needed.

I was so thrilled when autumn arrived. She came in the first weekend of October, when we were on a retreat with our class in the woods of Mundekulla. The trees changing color, the leaves piling up on the ground, the humid scent of the season. The winds picking up, the forest turning bright yellow and orange and red, the pinecones and acorns on their moss beds. I’ve seen the storm dance through the tall grass by our beach. I’ve seen the sea raging. I’ve picked rosehips and bags full of apples, and inspected many different leaves. I’ve spent dark forest nights sleeping on shores with the geese calling and the heron’s haunting screech. It has all been so breathtakingly beautiful. I welcomed the rain and the cold. The winds howl around the old house at night, sometimes so loud I wake up and lie awake to listen. October coincided with grief for many of us. Some days the air in our houses was just palpable with gloom. But outside our windows, autumn shows us the beauty in letting things go. Heartbreak helps me to easily identify the rungs of the descending ladder. Autumn is the Fall, and she invites us to lean in and keep shedding, shedding, shedding, through the tumultuous agony of loss, along with her.

The days kept shortening, and we began to light the fire in our fireplace at home. It has added a whole new layer to our house, and we are now learning the Swedish art of making the most of the winter season. We spend evenings, real fredagsmys, with the fire crackling, candles and tea, and playing board games or werewolves or sardines. Big house dinners with all the Mustards and guests around the kitchen table, late nights reading or talking in the living room. A house without Internet is paying off in coziness and quality time. I adjusted to the darkness without a fuss, until two days ago. Stepping outside after a day of hard work into a rainy night at 5PM, the darkness felt outright oppressive. I can’t think clearly with so little light around. I often feel like an animal underground, waiting in the humid cold for a dry sunny day to sort everything out. But today we woke up with the first snow, and we walked to school singing Christmas carols in the crisp morning air. Winter has arrived. The color scheme has changed. White of the frost, brown of the dead leaves and naked trees and old grass, here and there some dark evergreen, and the vast blues and grays of the sea and sky. The latter two are becoming more prominent in the scenery of the sparser woods. As I descend down the ladder, venturing deeper and deeper into the vaults of my being, I can feel I'm getting closer to the eye of the needle. Through it, on the other side where the ascending ladder begins, lies the chrysalis of a new future. I can tell it’s here, in winter, somewhere hidden in the snow. This new season, I’m sure, will show me the way to it, if I care to tune in.

To zoom out a bit, here is an excerpt from my recent take home exam. Same thing, but a broader perspective:

"At this point I would like to seize the opportunity to diverge on an implicit assumption underneath all this talk of the sustainability challenge and our suggested approaches, strategic or other, to address it. This entire discourse, like any other, is a discourse between humans, addressing humans only, and leaving out anything non-human as a conscious, equal partner in this challenge. Our necessity to collaborate, however, extends beyond humanity. We are a self-important, self-centered species, and in the mess that we have created (climate change is now beyond doubt accepted to be anthropogenic), we continue to gloss over our most important lesson: we humans are not alone, and we are not separate. As always, this lesson is omnipresent, in the lateral vision of our common perception: always there but out of focus. It is in the inclusion of the three ecological sustainability principles in the FSSD. It is in society’s ‘design errors’ we have identified. Everything outside of us holds up a mirror for us to look inside for the answers, yet somehow we continue to believe it is the ‘outside’ we see through the looking glass. These societal design errors only mirror the design errors in our own mental makeup. We are so entrenched in our belief of separateness that we seize the first opportunity to push anything that is not us out of the equation. We are so entrenched in our belief that we are at the top of the hierarchy of consciousness, that we continue to imagine we must shift the entire course of the planet all on our own, as the only, lonely conscious entities in the dead universe. How blind we are! Society’s necessity to reinvent itself is not a challenge that exists in a lifeless vacuum. This necessity is only there in response to nature’s systems change. Our planet is responding to the rashes on her skin with or without our decision to do something about it ourselves.

Speaking with the words of Chief Orval Looking Horse, chief of the Dakota and Lakota First Nations, “to understand the depth of this message” is to realize the full and literal meaning of the saying ‘the world is our mirror’. The full and literal meaning of 'mother' when we say Mother Earth, and the meaning of the lack of the word 'mother' when we say earth, is that She is as much alive and conscious as we are. Consider this excerpt from an interview with the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nath Hanh:

“We have the complex of superiority as human beings. We think we have that kind of intelligence, that kind of consciousness, that other living beings do not have. [But] we know that when we look inside our cells as a human being, we see that the human being is made only of non-human elements. (…) Not only do we have human ancestors, but we also have animal ancestors, and vegetable ancestors, and also mineral ancestors (…) So when I produce a thought, every ancestor in me, collaborate with me in order to produce that thought. When you produce a thought, Mother Earth is producing that thought together with you.” (Thich Nath Hanh, 2016)

So the planet breathes, and perceives, and thinks with us. She is aware of our common plight. And she is acting on it. This ‘highest level’ change is already happening and will only accelerate (Harmann, 1996; IPCC, 2013). As Willis Harmann said: “fundamental change is very likely inevitable – though positive outcomes are not.” The question then becomes what “we will do to weather the transition.” (Harmann, 1996). Our place is not to direct the course of nature’s change; our place is to adjust and align our society with the system in which it is embedded. When we look around us, we can recognize the same alive, conscious collaborators that we are ourselves. We can recognize them not only in our fellow human beings, but in every stakeholder of a sustainable future for our planet: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and the very planet herself. It is from this place, realizing that “we are held in the web of life, within flows of energy and intelligence far exceeding our own” (Macy, 1995), that we can start working from a place of synergy, sharing our positive vision of the future with the changing planet, and raise the odds of ‘positive outcomes’."