A Commitment to the Great Turning

When I turned sixty, seventeen years ago, my husband and I bought an old cape in Addison, a decidedly unupscale town far Downeast. The house sits on a knoll twenty feet above sea level and faces Eastern Bay.  Lobster boats sit at anchor on the far side.  In low tide, sandpipers, plovers and Arctic terns mill about on the rocky outcroppings. The house once served as the town post office and once as the town poor farm. Bob and I were, back then, contemplating lazy days of afternoon bridge and building sandcastles on the beach with the grandchildren. 

The question of what it means to own two houses, of how that ownership is related to the future of life on this planet never entered my mind; nor did the question of what living in two places does to one’s connection to community. I didn’t, back then, have any sense that a big third act was in my future, that I couldn’t rest, couldn’t leave this life without doing everything I could to preserve it before my time ran out. 

Nor did I realize then that the little time left to me before the great unknown sweeps me up is likely the same amount of time our civilization has to make the enormous cultural and systemic changes necessary for life as we know it to continue to exist on this planet. What an incredible responsibility.  And what an amazing opportunity to do something life altering for future ancestors thousands of years in the future who are counting on us in this moment, shaking us awake, begging us to do something. I swear I can feel them nudging me in my sleep.  I don’t know how to turn away from this.  

In two weeks, we will turn over the key to that house to another couple, in their early sixties, just as we were when we moved there.  I am comforted in my grief about losing that place with all its memories of the grandchildren when they were small and slept beside us in the bed and devoured my homemade blueberry muffins and found periwinkles to hum to at the beach, by the fact that the people who bought our house will live in it full time.  They will put solar on the roof and heat pumps in the wall.  They will be there in the winter to support the next-door neighbor who is in her late 80’s, they will help weave a community in flux because broadband came down the road and now people from LA can live next door to clammers and lobstermen.  But still the loss of that house and that amazing slice of land, once home to fishermen and lobstermen and only a century or so ago to the Passamaquoddy, brings me great grief.

What is ownership I ask myself?  Some guarantee against loss and suffering? Some fantasy that life isn’t really about change?  I feel such sadness that I won’t wake to Eastern Bay’s gorgeous pink and orange sunrise with the little clouds shaped like elephants that march across the black horizon.  Whose sunrise is that?  Did I own that sunrise in that place? I can’t see the sunrise in the woods in Freeport. The trees are too dense. But I can get up early and ride my bike 3 miles to Wolf Neck and there will be sunrise. There are sunrises all over the world. 

And that is the question raised as I pack up and give away the brown pottery plates from Japan, the glass candlesticks from Dansk, the wicker chairs, the thousands of things big and small I acquired for that house. What does it mean to own these things, to want to hold on to these things?  Will they bring me comfort, security, peace, beauty, love?  How many more things can I own and crave and buy and ship and dispose of before everything collapses?  

Our hope in selling the house is to plant ourselves more fully in the community of Freeport and to commit to the work of what Joanna Macy, the environmental activist and Buddhist thinker calls, The Great Turning.  Now the question is how to connect to this community in a way that brings solace and joy and new thinking, that supplants the loss of comfort and kick from the things I owned or want to own?  

A good friend, T, recommended a book this week, “A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century.”  “Read the part about campfires”, she said, when I shared some of my uncertainty and grief with her. The authors, Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein describe how our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have assembled a campfire to solve the kind of existential problem we are facing:

The exchange of ideas that has occurred around the hearth for millennia is more than simple communication. It is the convergence point of individuals with different experience, talent, and insight.  The linking of minds is at the root of humanity’s success.  It doesn’t matter how smart an individual is, and it doesn’t matter how much they know.  In nearly every case, when minds come together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  For the problems humanity faces….we need multitudes of people plugging in and parallel processing. 

The Age of Information brings the promise of a collective campfire, a decentralized thing where people who have never met in real life can be warmed by the presence of other minds, sharing ideas and reflections.

But the online world, though it holds promise, does not have the structures that made discussions around the hearth so valuable.  The virtual campfire is… a free for all.  We don’t really know one another, our visible history is often misleading, many users are anonymous, and some participants have a dog in the fight.

Traditional campfires are waning in frequency and virtual campfires often bring new problems; are there other ways to bring about a campfire renaissance?

I’ve been dreaming campfires ever since.  During the summer of 2020, like many people around the world, we did have a campfire renaissance.  Every Saturday night, a group of  friends, the Firepit Gang, all quite shaken by Covid and the political and racial upheaval of the summer, gathered around the campfire at our Addison house and told stories. I am sure we will all remember those evenings when the bay turned pink as the sun set and the fire crackled in the silences for the intimacy and insight and sense of connection it offered us at such a difficult time.   

Sadly, the virtual campfires I’ve been hanging out around while doing the work of The Great Turning, leave me feeling like a hungry lion, fed something unrecognizable that resembles food but yields only a vague satisfaction and a longing for something more. When last Monday’s hour-long webinar where I spoke for fifteen minutes to hundreds of invisible people from all over the country interested in learning more about Third Act ended and the Zoom screen went blank, I felt a terrible emptiness.  I’d spent all day writing up what I hoped would be a moving talk, I spoke into the tiny little camera at the top of my computer with all the feeling I could muster when you are speaking into a vast black unlit universe. 

When we were finished, there was no one to talk to on the way out of the hall, no one to pat you on the back and tell you what part of your message made some difference. I can’t believe it was any more satisfying for the people listening either. I imagine they too are hungry for a campfire that touches with warmth and enlarges vision.  Ironically, the title of the webinar was something like “Making Connections, Going Deeper.”

Without the digital world of Zoom, of course, I never would have had the opportunity to participate with some of the kind, smart people I’ve met at Third Act.  But now that I am here with them, the question remains: how can we have real connection in a virtual world with these new forms like Zoom rooms and Webinars?  My friend, C. tells me that in her organizational work, with smaller numbers, she has experienced the connection of a campfire and ideas have been generated and problems solved.  There is much to learn!

And lastly, what about the community here in Freeport which answered my call last Fall for collective action when I was feeling isolated and alone with my grief and fear for the life on the planet? They have, as I have written, come eagerly and open-heartedly towards the invitation.  We have assembled ourselves into working groups and all the working groups have members and are planning their work together.  Yet, I feel hungry.  Most of our connections, because of Covid, have been on Zoom. Even though we are a small town, not all of us know each other, our reputations, our skills, our stories. There are differences among us about mission and we have not yet had enough time with each other to build a truss of trust and respect which will support us through differences and tensions. 

Now is the time to go shopping, to buy a new bedspread, or, always a tease, a new pair of shoes!  But wait!  Sit down, Kathleen, understand the work ahead of you.  Build a campfire. A real one when the snow melts.  Invite people who share this vision of responsibility for the future ancestors to come sit around it.  You know how to do this.  Face the enormity of the task together.  Be patient.  Listen.  Tell stories. Hold each other’s pain and grief and joy.  Invite the neighbor who plays guitar and the neighbors who sing.  Listen to new points of view.  Find common ground.  Discover, dream, imagine whole new ways of living in harmony with nature, with all the living things. 

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Here is my action plan for this week’s blog.  Don’t worry, reader, I’m not going to ask you to sell your second home if you are fortunate enough to have one. This is much easier and will only take a second!

Close your eyes, hold very quiet and imagine a time thousands of years from now.  Imagine the unborn ancestors, the frogs and butterflies and wolves and children.  Do you feel a tug at your sleeve, hear a whisper in your ear?