Where do we begin?
I am on overpass above the Santa Ana freeway holding a pink sign that reads Change or Die!
No, earlier.
I am in my cousins’ guest room watching a talk on climate change, curled up in a ball on the floor, sobbing.
No, before that.
I am in a darkened parking lot outside of a herbal tea factory, backed into a corner, calculating how I’m going to distract and then extract myself from a Lover, the one screaming obscenities and edging closer and closer to me.
No, earlier still.
I am intoxicated on psilocybin mushrooms, receiving a direct message from earth, one that screams: “Help!”
Yes.
This is where we begin.
That was the summer Siberia burned. The summer Greenland lost 11 billion tons of ice in one day and pavements in the American Midwest buckled from the heat. It was the summer I ate magic mushrooms and set an intention for them to show me the structure of the spacetime matrix and instead they told me, “Run!”
“Hurry!” they screamed. “The world is burning and it’s up to you to save it.”
That magic mushroom trip came after I joined the yoga cult but before I joined the climate activism cult. If you can call Extinction Rebellion a cult. Years later I found out it was full of Zionists but that doesn’t necessarily make it a cult.
What makes a cult a cult? I had a hard time admitting the yoga cult was a cult, but HBO didn’t in their miniseries about it—and certainly not when they quoted me in the final episode in order to tie the whole plot together.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
It’s 2019 and I am scared. Terrified. Perrified. Suspended in fear, expecting society to collapse at any moment.
I take to my Instagram stories, crying. I don’t tell my friends and family about the mushrooms, but their urgency lives in me—I feel it at the core of my being: a weight and a pain. I sob online, begging others to do something, anything.
My mother tells me I am fear-mongering. My friends are sympathetic, but unwilling to follow me down the rabbit hole. Nobody seems to be listening and those who do are not changing fast enough, not willing to get arrested or switch banks or give up shopping on Amazon.
I join Extinction Rebellion (XR) because it seems like the only rational thing to do. The spacetime matrix is collapsing, and I want to help stop it. My filmmaking dreams, the screenplay I have been struggling to finish, none of it matters now, because I have to save the world.
In XR they tell us that the State will listen if enough of us protest. They tell us if enough of us take to the streets to demand an end to carbon emissions and single use plastic and the rape of the earth then it will work.
I take this personally. I believe that if *I* can just get enough people to listen, to see and understand what is going on, then everything will be okay.
I see how poorly climate activism markets itself and I believe that if I can make it accessible—fun, even—then people will flock to the streets.
So I run philosophy clubs. I start a podcast called Climate Change in the Multiverse. I launch this newsletter. I host a book club and we read Sacred Economics. I stay in the yoga cult. I come up with pithy slogans like “Tell the truth. Save the world.” and “Evolving is complex business.” I start asking questions about karma. I leave the yoga cult. I launch this newsletter.
Have you ever played the fork in the road game?
The one where you look back and guess where you would be now if you had made different choices?
The pain and the urgency only get worse. The pandemic starts and I don’t spend my days at home making sourdough. I am out on the streets and crossing railroad tracks blocking trains transporting pipeline materials. I am making signs that read, Mother Earth is burning because we stopped respecting the feminine, and visiting houses on reserve land without clean drinking water, all the while a little voice in my head whispers, We always knew it would come to this.
I feel righteous, and broken. I learn about the blockades to save old growth forests and I want to go but it is the winter and I am afraid to live outside in the cold so instead I cry. I cry every day. Sometimes all day. The ache only gets worse. Our provincial government calls a snap election and I decide to run. I am so out of my depth, so over my head, so far beyond rationality but the mushrooms told me to run, so I run…
Without a guiding spark, there is nothing to light the way.
Stay tuned for more.
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