The Rascal’s descent
Day 11 and a tsunami of dizziness hits me, tidal waves up me, floods my head repeatedly. I’m heading to the floor, again. I'm underwater in a murk that mirrors our global meta-crisis.
Act 1, Scene 3, of the rascal, the mongrel and the mutant.^ Descent
One planet, one health. Humanity as one planetary citizen among millions, all equally deserving to be here and to thrive. We can choose to re-create ourselves as a modest, economically and demographically downscaled component of a biodiverse and rewilded Earth. An ecological civilization will accomplish far more…
Eileen Crist
Flattened
Tuesday afternoon, day 11, and a wave of dizziness hits me, steamrollers up behind me, wallops me over the back of my head repeatedly and I’m taking myself down to the floor again. Wow. I had managed a small conversation with a friend in the morning, cut it short after 20 minutes, and spent two hours taking it easy in recovery. Or so I thought. There was no recovery to speak of and by one or two in the afternoon I’m stretched out flat, on my back or front, staring at the carpet or ceiling, doing nothing more.
With this, pretty much from the start of these symptoms on day 1 after the vax, comes an adrenaline-endorphin rush through my body. If you’ve ever run down a steep hill on a rock trail or, psyched yourself into a plunging ski-line drop down a deeply-powdered snowy couloir, you’ll know the feeling as you get to the bottom and stop. It’s like my-your-our bodies are still catching up with us. We’ve run and plunged ahead of our skin and blood which rushes back into our bodies, flowing through us in waves. It is quite delightful in those outdoor contexts.
Delight is not really associated with this feeling after eleven days. The rush moves through me on the floor and standing. It accentuates my loss of balance and dizziness. It retards my already very limited ability to concentrate and I can feel it taking over after even a short period of reading or talking. I reduce what I am doing further to try and manage it down, hoping this limits the cycle of feeling feverish, to chills and head-stomach-ache too. In some clearer minutes I have on the floor, I haul my computer down emailing Alex, my doctor. My list of symptoms and severity runs across multiple short-paragraph dot points.
Oh the wild hunt is quick and is quickinging
turns all the objects to kindling…We’re asleep at the wheel and the rapids are nearing
For the wild hunt is running, is crashing
the hell hounds, oh the hell hounds are howling, are rushingThe Wild Hunt, Johnny Flynn, Robert Macfarlane, Heloise Tunstall-Behrens & Luisa Gerstein
I am not going to write such a list of symptoms for our world, for humanity, all sentient species and planetary meta-crisis. Such lists are easy to find. Just like my list of personal physical impacts, when written these are a little abstract. In part they have to be. We are summarising a significant amount of interconnected complexity even if that list is just focused on one aspect of it—say, a human body, global warming or racism.
Yet, really, it’s rather obvious. E.g. we all know, with abundant research to back it up, rising income inequality makes everyone poorer than they could be. We know we are faced with precipitous earth and sea stability changes, tipping points that can flip vital life giving systems like Amazonian rainforest and the north Atlantic conveyor. When I can, and when I’m not disassociating from myself or the planetary meta-crisis, being flattened to the floor seems like the least of our worries.
Extenuating situations
Our bodies, planetary-weirding, and creating more poverty are deeply interconnected. As my beloved gently puts it to me—as I’m lying here we’re texting and talking when we can, we are separated by pandemic rules and now permanently on different continents—so many people are experiencing strange and inexplicable ailments. She and I don’t believe these are disconnected. Our extenuating circumstances are, if you like, the very conditions we’re able to correct—fossil fuel consumption, biodiversity destruction, income and race radical-inequity and more.
My doctor emails back. It is time to visit his surgery for the first time.
As Ken Wilber put it, in his beautiful and heart-wrenching book Grace and grit1, when you or a loved one is sick start with the physical, the concrete. If there’s a diagnosable physical cause for our ailments—global or personal—let’s fix it:
Personal, do I have some strange and pretty unlikely coincidental infection?
Global, in addressing inequity is not only about caring for those less fortunate. Less inequality benefits everyone. Yet, the disparities, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer continue to become more extreme. This simply can't be a coincidental impact.2
I.e. deal with the immediate when we can but don’t forget about the interconnections.
Drive to another world
It is the next morning and I’m feeling quite fragile. I drive over to the doctor’s surgery. That’s unusual for me, I would usually far rather cycle the eight miles/thirteen kilometres and that’s something of a measure of how unwell I’m feeling.
Alex ushers me in—I meet his medical students too on placement, Fianna and Moireach—and we set off into checks. Yes, my balance is off. No, my temperature is normal at the moment. Ouch, my blood pressure is some 50% higher than what I’d usually get. Etc.
And then I am somewhere else.
The group of others I am with are exciting and wonderfully engrossing. I’m deeply engaged with them and them with me. It’s both sexy, becoming interested in one another, and we’re reaching for something important, co-creating something wonderful while…
I shift.
I wanna line my walls with photographs you sent…
Can't live without your love inside me now..
I wanna fuck your love slow
Catch my heart, go swim
I don’t come ‘back’. Experiences like these for me—full technicolour alternative realities—take me to a somewhat new track. It’s like I was following a different set of railway lines on a parallel course to our normal world and my life. Then, stepping out of that place I’m never fully ‘back’ and instead on a merged course, one part of me always in that new and different world.
Hold steady
Alex has his hand on my shoulder supporting me. I’ve been out, passed out, for 15 seconds. My alternative world feels far longer than that.
Then I do it again, pass out. This time for around a minute they say. This time the full technicolor alternative world is present again but my recollection of it is less nuanced, less available to me when I come around again.
Fianna, Alex and Moireach are all holding me steady. They help me to the medical bed in the next room and I stay there for the next 3 hours with Fianna and Moireach spelling each other to keep an eye on me. We chat, a little. It is quite draining and my words come slowly. I feel like we’ve been talking the whole time. I realise later that our two small conversation topics have filled nothing like those 3 hours—time slips again.
Paradoxical murk
A ghosteen dances in my hand
Slowly twirling, twirling, all around
A ghosteen dances in my hand
Dancing, dancing, dancing, all aroundHere we go…
Things tend to fall apart
All around me I see humanity engaging with care, in caring for others and ourselves. We are co-creating thriving alternatives, our next economies and contributing to the large-scale systems-change which meets our meta-crisis. At the same time, these activities can feel like a disconnected and connected bubble—I feel vitally and deeply in collaboration with people all around the world and in my communities while it seems like I am wading through sinking-sands, molasses and treacle all at the same time.
If that sounds paradoxical and difficult it certainly is. Yet, as Martin Shaw put it:
Paradox and uncertainty can’t be dismissed out of hand. They are the identifying brands of now, our hashtags, our tweets, our sat navs into the murk of consequence.3
At the same time there is much we can do to transcend those inherent limitations especially through what we see, how we make sense of it and our connections.4
However, this murk is inherent with what we do. Our step, our paradigm shift if you like, is to embrace all murk while continuing to act. That’s a both-and just as my parallel worlds are. I’ve stepped, in my conscious-unconscious states into another place. Its pattern parallels with global meta-crisis are the paradoxical nature of crisis elements—e.g. see the income inequalities pieces above.
On ‘returning’ I remain in both places—my current geographical location and where I was deep in that conversation with the ‘others’.
It is late afternoon. By the time the ambulance arrives, to take me to the hospital an hour and a half away, I can walk myself up its steps. My paradoxical feeling of being in two places walks up with me just like our world’s murky paradoxes walk with us all.
Next
Act 1, Scene 4 The Rascal’s boom, crash, bounce here>
A&E—Accident and Emergency—machines, doctor assessment, X-rays, blood… at least there’s nobody yelling clear, no defibrillator, no real drama.
Are we missing the point?
A beginning, act 1, scene 1 The Rascal's Immunity, is here>
Notes
^ I am deeply indebted to my dear, dear friend Teresa Zimmermann including inspiration for title, to write, comments, to integrate the songs … and so much more.
^ Picture: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.
See the OECD’s In it together: Why less inequality benefits all and Income inequality for the OECD’s graph of the growing gap.
Courting the wild twin by Martin Shaw. Amazon or Public library
For example see Shamanic sensemaking here>