Do we have any choice?

leveraging change without demand

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Greetings Lovelies, I haven't written much these past few months, in fact nothing because I'm already feeling numb and exhausted from all the ongoing hysteria at the current crisis¹ to want to add my 5c into the pot, especially when my thoughts just keep rambling off into mostly irritable grumblings² ending in even more vague demands. But not one to give up I have been writing and rewriting and moving paragraphs around because somehow I need to talk about the knowing that we all have the right to make a choice and from that we can bring about the change we want to see. Somewhere there is the fact that the power to transcend paradigms is the best leverage point in effecting change. And most importantly is the understanding that enforcing certain types of behavior becomes enslavement. And a lot of it is about how I am so sick to death of all this demand with no conversation about how to nurture choices that are freely made for the good of all because of the way we maintain our relationships.

I am hoping to write this, to inspire all of us. All of us who who feel the weight, the demand and the desire to make different choices somehow within a system that doesn't support a lot of the choices that we would like to make. To offer some encouragement of where we can maybe shift our intentions and therefore attention. I writing this to clarify choices that might be able to support, rather than demand, changes that would give room for some dignity to sentience on this incredible and beautiful Mother Earth, choices which desperately need to start with the freedom of choice, if we’re going to do anything different.

So forgive but please bear with, because if you are like me and feel that our civilisation, one that supports endless growth for ongoing profit acting as if all sentience on this planet can be quantified into countable units balanced on an excel spread sheet, is a paradigm that we need to transcend before we reduce the meaning of personal good health to being plugged into a wall, hear me out.

It’s long, these thoughts. I have to tackle several angles while trying not to get carried away in all the wrongs³ that need to be righted because that is not the point at all. I have to somehow inspire agency in a place of no support. I have to encourage revolution by personal imagination when there is no room for wildness or wild things. So please, take a minute, its mostly my messy story around my messy choices and how by becoming better at my relationships I can better govern myself.

Firstly the demand that we change. Demanding to do it different is divisive at its core, inherently a challenge to agree or disagree about say how we should do this thing and not do that thing because of the ongoing crisis. Dont drive gas guzzling cars, dont eat meat, dont use fossil fuels etc. dont vote this way, dont fly. Or the reverse, only work with these companies, become plant based, support Ukraine etc. Always wear a mask. This constant assessing and weighing of our choices. Of so many choices.⁴ The demand that we do something different and then the immediate judgement about how that is actually the worse possible choice you could make for x reasons. And in the contextless void of social media there is always x reasons. And it doesn’t matter how much I admire somebody or the advice they are giving, whether it’s a righteous demand, a shaming demand or a rallying call to arms it becomes absolutely exhausting, leading to the invariable feelings of apathy and hopelessness that whatever we do anyway it doesn’t really matter. And it doesn’t matter if these demands are from social media or in the news or just amongst friends, they start to become so ineffective that they just morph into signposts good for tribing up⁵, virtue signaling each other or cancelling out each other. And even though these demands might educate or inspire, most of the lovely and beautiful people I know, myself included, are still participating in a big infrastructure that is at direct odds in supporting dignity and freedom to all sentience of life on this incredible and beautiful Mother Earth.

We all get to make choices in this life. It’s part of our striving. “The striving to be alive, to be human, to be here, to be contributing to the vast network of love that supports human existence.”⁶

And even though I personally love telling people what to do, being rather action orientated, I know that we all have our own way in finding our truth and our own way in how we strive for that, and that we are all born able to make the right choices.

Body Language by Francis Bacon

The crux for me was in thinking about how many children people should have, as a whole. I was and still am thinking that, if I look at how we use our resources on this planet that having lots of children might not be responsible. And yet I also know in my heart that it would be a huge failing if we had to default to telling people how many children they could have, and more importantly enforcing that policy. It became very clear to me that there are things that we have to feel in our hearts, we have to figure for ourselves when it comes to primary behavior. That making rules that control instinctual directives, hunger, sex, fighting, movement, having to enforce those rules is a loosing strategy. It is indeed no strategy and is not going to bring about communities of consciously aware and vibrant people. Is not going to reflect in anyway how just incredible and amazing humans are in our capacity to create beauty on this earth. At its best it is going to look like a form of soft enslavement with the people who enforce the rules (and get to eat, have sex travel and fight anyway they want) in charge, with the rest of us obeying.⁷

You might notice that I used the words right choices. Because this is where it gets tricky. How to know now whats right? previously given a strong culture that is held tightly by people and place its achievable. However when there is no container, no culture and no context we become a desperately governed people. And have been. As we enter into this godless machine age I believe we are all being given the opportunity again to make self government work within the greater whole. It’s a big hope, and a big ask but it’s what I believe has the power to transcend paradigms, so that supporting dignity and freedom to all sentience of life on this incredible and beautiful Mother Earth becomes possible.
It becomes possible to implement change through freedom instead of demand, to be able to live in a world where we can trust ourselves and each other to make the right decisions and so I need to say a few words about choice, for whether we are engaged in life or not we are enmeshed in our choices, our agreements and the relationships that hold them.

There was a period in my life where my choices felt extremely dynamic, very intuitive and free. I was so free I had a halo of glitter around me and I barely needed a thought. Synchronicity off the charts and thank god angels abound. I was a wild child, hitchhiking and living off on my own, slaying the demons that arose in the form of random or thoughtless lovers as well as a pin pricking good time friends. Somehow I survived with nothing left to loose and it felt astounding. And its definitely a place you can long for, want to hark back to, thats so attractive to the strangers I would inspire on railway station platforms, telling them that anything was possible. I was in a complete state of carelessness. Careless with my body, careless with intention and dreams, careless with my words. I was in a tail spin and it was exhilarating and the way that I stayed alive was that I kept moving and I had some insanely good people looking out for me.

And if I look back to that time it felt like I had infinite choices even though I pretended not to care about any of them. And so I sailed along following the wind and well, it was a good look. However it became apparent that when things aligned, when it came to the actual work I would quickly stagnate. Get sticky. Bunch up, quagmire and oh yeah time to get moving again. Relationship with anything was really difficult, and even though some good folks stuck by me connection was hard and I regulated by being pretty checked out. But not completely. Because I was of course underneath of it all absolutely terrified.

And I would see people who felt like they had no choice and I would shake my head wtf? I mean how does that happen that you get to a place where you have no choice? Little did I know that there’s a real difference about being able to consciously choose rather than just flying by the seat of your pants, even if your gods do love you. And though I made it look so much fun, all that freedom got, after a while, exhausting. Always having to do something else when things got sticky, when the work somehow didn't bring the fruits of success, community and legacy that I really longed for. So although I was exquisitely carelessly free I was alone and undone.

Ma Diva Padma, Osha Tarot.

And I did eventually get to the place where I got stuck, where I felt I had no choice, because its not so much that you dont have a choice but that you don't have the strength to face the consequences. Unimaginable or imaginable consequences, I was completely overwhelmed and I froze. When we are devoid of relationship to what we are doing, when we are going through the motions or existing through someone or something else, when we don’t have a balance with our sense of self, in other words when we are overtaken or being overtaken by someone, something, somehow, when we are literally prey to our demons and not in possession of our sense of self choice becomes a pretty awful thing. For me being stuck came about by falling for the wrong guy (although perfectly right at the time) but honestly it also came about by having made a whole bunch of careless choices that led me into this place of having no choice. Shitty choices like thinking it was okay to sleep with my best friends guy. The same guy that I told her to leave because he treated her like shit⁸. (Not that that would happen to me of course). After all my carefree ways I was in a perfect position to not give a damn. This part of my life, which is not easy and feels shameful to write about , is about a series of choices I made while trying to engage, striving to find love and how I ultimately found my self worth, through a place which had abandonment at its core.

And of course I spent quite a while trying to blame it all on the guy, he is after all a soul eating pathological liar but I also knew he could of been anything or anyone. Having lost possession of my self I was prey for the eating. I had to sit for a while in how impossible all my choices were and what to do with that. I had to sit in my entrapment and the time had come where I had to strive to feel my worth. And thanks to sitting there, with my young son, shrouded in regret and massive confusion about how I had ended up in this place in time, I got to find a piece of myself, bit by bit.

So it’s at this part of the telling that I really want to launch into how I reclaimed my self™ and found my own way home. But thats its own demand as well, wrapped up in that inspirational rallying cry of look see here’s my story, this is what you can do too!⁹ And that’s just not the point of this outpouring. Part of striving to stand in the beauty of being human is to learn how to make better choices by making awful ones and what I learnt was that I floundered in my choices because I was floundering in my relationships. How I connected with reality. A lot of the time, when I made my choices they were crap because my heart wasn’t in it.

In the little canyon that I’m moving to live full time, where we are off grid, with spotty or no cell phone my choices seem somewhat easier or say feel more clearcut because the land is in definitely in charge. We are all directly involved in how we share our resources and how that impacts each other. Hands on in the very literal sense and we all know how important touch is for relationships. We are also acutely aware of how we support each other and how remaining on good terms facilitates that. Scott who likes to build the roads. Dave who keeps a fire truck handy filled with water just in case. Dan who's helping slow down the stream to bring back beavers. This isn’t organised, just reflects all of our personalities and we work pretty hard to maintain a system of etiquette, a way of communicating because basically we need each other. The land holds that, the canyon holds that and is happily the boss of it. No matter what we do, the canyon has the last word and we all feel that. And most of all we trust it. We trust the canyon to well be the canyon. It’s the higher authority.

Being in really close contact with how we each get to enjoy the resources on hand, how we all affect the resources and how we all depend on each other to make good and very much contextually driven choices is a tight feedback loop. Less noise to signal ratio. Being able to feel the cause and effect of the canyon provides clear context, one that we feel when making our choices. This land held context helps focus us on how we can work together rather than over each other. It’s very different¹⁰ from being in a system where what you do and what you consume is barely relatable. How what you think, say or do does not necessarily impact anything around you or has large impact somewhere far away. Where how you live can be unrelatable to where you live. In a place where we have hidden the land from view and can pretend it doesn’t matter. In a system that what we consume has no understandably discernible impact on our personal resources means that the feedback loop is, well, really loopy. And hard to relate to, other than just a general feeling of dread, or existential guilt, or outright belligerence or even worse, greed. The noise to signal ratio becomes high and it starts to sound well very loud and very noisy. A demanding loud noise which we desperately virtue signal over so at least we can try to identify and be in our preferred tribe.

And I’m not suggesting that we all go and bury ourselves in the wilderness where maintaining white laundry¹¹ is a challenge and work becomes consumed by moving rocks around but I am making the point that being in direct relationship, with how you support yourselves, with how you connect to the resources that you need, with how you play in your space means its alot easier to make the choices that are right for you and the people around you. Which brings me to the one incredible thing we all have access to, a thing that makes this paradigm shift possible and something we all given as, a gift, just by being born, the gift of relationship. And that how we make the right choices is directly connected to how we are in right relationships.

In trying to figure out how to implement meaningful change in our current civilization, specifically the first world western civilization, I want to remind us of Donella Meadows and her 12 Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,¹² that if we are looking to implement change we have to start to transcend the current paradigm, one of top down government that pertains to be the higher authority, the scientific voice of reason and yet is so easy to game and corrupt.

As someone who loves efficiency (I make an excellent short order cook but horrible finish carpenter¹³) I am very much attracted to the idea of leverage as a way of empowering ourselves. Donella talks about where the 3 most effective places to apply leverage are:

3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

Demanding that change happens doesn't make the list. No matter how fervently we believe it has to happen, no matter how desperate we are to solve an issue.

Exercising our right to freely make choices based on our relationships with each other, the earth and the all that is¹⁴ will give us the power to transcend the current paradigm and break free from a top down structure seated in control.

This requires us to become up close and personal with what we are in relationship with. What agreements we make. And are we not longing for this connection? Is that not what we hear from those who are leaving life, that what they have cherished most is their relationships? This is where our leverage lies. We can all choose to be in close relationship with what we do and how we do it and who we do it with.

We all know the feeling we have when we pick a ripe strawberry from a garden that we have watched with eager anticipation with the passage of the sun and the passing of the days. The feeling of being reconised and held by people who know and love us. We all know the value of well nurtured relationships. We all know how it is exactly this richness and engagement that helps us make good choices. It’s no surprise that one of the ways I crawled out of my entrapment was when I became a herbalist and began relationships with the green beings around me, the herbs, the plants and the trees. Not only did they communicate their love and support in a non verbal language that felt like the only thing I could trust they allowed me the space to do the same. To unravel and ravel. To shimmer in time with them. To start to trust. To work through my feelings of abandonment. And when I look at alot of the current for profit and constant growth systems in place I can’t help thinking that it’s held together in part by just how much people hate their lives. Hate the choices that they have to make, like work all the time and not see their children so that they can afford to have children. Hate who they are and what they’re doing and the why of it. Just hating their lives. I think about how many relationships we are in, with our food and land and each other and how little mind we give to the agreements in place. How so many of us can barely stand to be in relationship and spend most of our time lost in some story, gaming or netflix.¹⁵ And yes. Its hard to be in relationship, it requires working with our feelings and being uncomfortable and getting to grips with all the aspects of life that just dont feel fair. Loss, grief, disease and violence. It requires a lot of practice and a lot of painful mistakes. It requires being in love¹⁶.

I work alot on being in relationship, helped by the support of my green ones, with their abundant love. And also by the group work that I do. Looking back on my disastrous attempt at being in a deep and meaningful relationship, one that also affected children¹⁷, who were the real victims of my crappy choices and bad behavior, I decided that I probably needed help and that I should maybe work on how I could be in better relationship with humans. I joined a group thats specific intention is to maintain interest in relationships. Keep eros alive. So that I can be more conscious when I’m being careless or am in pain and need support. So that I can nurture joyful curiosity. It’s not work that we can do on our own. It’s a monthly practice and it’s transformative and its a place where I exercise choice about how I connect.¹⁸

And while I’ve talked about avoiding relationship by being checked out we need to look at the other way to avoid all that hard and messy relational work. One that has the added benefit of making you look like a really productive and useful member of society which is by being in control, in complete control of the system you are in, where you are in charge, which means that nothing can change without your say so. It is the opposite of eros.

In the canyon, being in relationship and the choices we have to make for ourselves and with each other is simplified by there being very few people and that also the land is very bossy. There are rattlesnakes and ticks to slow you down and keep you grounded, there are bear and cougar to help keep you humble and aware and there is also deer, biscuit root and so many acorns to keep you full. Lizards and ground squirrels and especially turkeys to keep you amused.

Non of it is within my control. It’s not a system I can control. It’s simply something I am a part of. It’s something I am directly in relationship with and it is alive and it is constantly teaching me about my choices. It is also magical in the wonder of it as well as being extremely hard and terrifying. In short it’s real. The community is small¹⁹. It quickly becomes evident if one of us falls into a place where we are not able maintain our relationships or make the right choices in the context of where we live and our resources. And then we all have to figure out the best way to manage that with support of some kind, for that is surely what is needed in times of illness or injury, heartbreak or despair or anger, that we can be carried by those around us until we find our strength again to engage. We cannot demand that someone behave differently but we can support them until they find there own way home. And depending on the context, that support can look like a whole lot of different things but however harsh or gentle it appears it is context driven.

We cannot pretend that we are like a machine when we live within a living alive universe. It’s just not real. It has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with being in power to maintain control.

Sergeii Chekhonin, Tarankanische, or The Terrible Cockroach

Right now we are in a place where we tend to be constantly fiddling with the 3 least effective of Donella’s leverage points:

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).

Controlling the size and shape and movement of a thing tends to be the first and most obvious reaction when it comes to talking about creating change but it doesn’t change the purpose or paradigm of the system or the goals. It just makes the system run in a slightly different way.

This seems especially important to point out right now as we are in an unprecedented time of being in touch across the earth. And there is a huge push to “solve” the consequences of our collective choices, choices that have been scaled up to unimaginable sizes and speed thanks to our incredible technological advances and globalisation. Choices that have led us to the new world civilization. And this demand that we change this quantity of x and the shape of y and the whereabouts of z and the flow of xyz seems to escalate quickly into policies that are only concerned with how we behave rather than the why and only work through policing each other, that are only functional through control and one that has all its roots in distrust thanks to corruptible people in power and the complete lack of real context. It is a time of scarily weird and inappropriate coercion or oppression politics, the pandemic response being a prime example.

And I think that we all know somehow inside ourselves that trying to exert control as the main incentive for how we behave, how we are in our relationships, violates us as free people.

As so above, so below, it’s no wonder that we are slowly diminishing personal freedom at the same time that we are eradicating the wild spaces. When we pretend that we have a machine, Mother Earth, that has quantifiable moving parts that can be dived up here and there. When we decide to control how species reproduce and how weather behaves rather than focus on how we tend our relationship to the all that is, each other and all sentience life. When we behave as if there is no god, spirit, greater authority. No bossy land.

Being in control is not being in a relationship. It is the ultimate separation.

And we are all right now supporting this current paradigm,²⁰ we are after all in some way or another in relationship to it, a system that thinks it’s okay to continue to destroy the absolutely one thing that is irreplaceable, the elders of our world. The great whales, the great trees, the ancient forest and ancient reservoirs above and under ground, the great beasts and the great landmasses of wilderness that hold untold wisdom. The great and ancient mysteries of our oceans with the ancient beings who live there. Those ancients that reside in only the wild. The timekeepers, the wisdom holders, those who have forever been our guide posts of how to be in relationship with the all that is and our place in that.

Emily Carr, Somberness Sunlit

We can’t replant old growth trees or monitor wild things and without this wisdom, the wisdom of our elders, how we create a future for our young has become the new unknown. Replacing the wild, the wild that we have destroyed in our attempt to profit from it, the vast swaths of immense wilderness that are the liver, lungs and kidneys of our planet, that support abundant and diverse life on earth, isn’t possible. And we are feeling the consequences of that.

The current crisis is happening not because of carbon management or climate change but because we are not in relationship with our resources and instead choose to continue to support a system that sees the world as a machine that we need to perfectly control. Shifting that dynamic, transcending that paradigm can far better inform our behavior than trying to shift around how we control resources that we mostly throw away anyway.

What we do now and more importantly what relationships we choose to nurture and how that informs the kind of agreements that we choose to be a part of is something we have all got the freedom to do. We have all got the freedom to make choices about how to keep eros alive, to be in a place of curiosity with enough generosity of spirit to know that others also have the same freedom to choose. To know that the tighter the feedback loop we have between ourselves, our resources and the greater authority, the easier it is to discern what choices are appropriate for the context that they are made in. To know that sometimes we won’t be capable to choose or exercise choice and that we will need help and the better our relations are with the community around us the more readily we will be able to access help and be held in support.

Instead of the demand that we change I would rather ask of you to consider your relationship to your world and what choices arise from that. Can you relate to where you live and how it provides for you? Are you able to be in love with your life because of the choices you make and the relationships you are in? What relationships and choices do you have that you just cant stand or that are made for you?

And what do you want to do about that?

P.S. 21 footnotes! Thank god I managed to to include all the tangents that needed elaboration here rather than clogging up the actual essay. I mean this really needs a book but for the footnote lovers you can just read without scrolling around, they will still mostly be valid.

1. So this ongoing crisis refers to whatever you believe is absolutely necessary to change so that we can further the future of humanity. It’s just how the media happens to be framing things right now. (I am curious as to what their end goal is and secretly believe its so that things dont change at all but thats just my personal hunch).

2. If you want to read really good irritable grumblings I would support Chris la Tray who does it with at least some depth and wisdom

3. Its endless when trying to make right things out of a wrong system. An endless distraction of information devoid of context and more importantly relationship, like my lovely vegan friends trying to save the planet by eating specially created products full of sugar and laced with fat imported from far away bound in indentured deforestation farming that shackles local economies enslaving indigenous, for example.

4. This is its own essay and I had to keep pulling back but it’s interesting how our personal choice of where and how we want to live are seemingly more and more curtailed while the really important choice of what type of chocolate or plant milk we want to consume has become endless….

5. A word not in my spell check, so unfortunately, when my dyslexic brain looked up other possible spellings, I came across a part of the porn industry that I didn’t know about or really want to.

6. Quoted from Nick Cave, god bless his little cotton socks and who would have thought but no surprise its a poet who says it so well, says it over and over in so many ways in his Red Hand Files, one of my most favourite mailing lists to be on.

7. Seem eerily familiar to a lot of current corporate governments?

8. And if your wondering I am still aghast at this part of my life and my behavior and its about the hardest thing to know that these were the mistakes I made to be able to get better with my choices.

9. And unfortunately the formula for most marketing strategies these days, fostered onto well meaning and creative people, often home business trying to make some money to live. Talk about compromise.

10. And basically the reason why I’m choosing this quite difficult and intimidating way of life, because it has very defined parameters which help me immensely when it comes to feeling good about my choices. And also because even though those anti 5G folks are obvs. whacko, living without the hum feels really good.

11. How do people out in the middle of nowhere do this? While still maintaining healthy grey water? Recommendations welcome!

12. A must read. I cannot commend enough how incredible Donella is and how inspiring her life is.

13. Because sometimes it’s more efficient to just bang it on in.

14. A general word to describe a higher authority, one that we cannot gain control over no matter how hard we try. Creator, God, Allah, Mother Nature or Spirit are other words to describe this other than human force. How you call it and work with it is another important freedom of choice for all of humanity.

15. Truly an opiate of the masses.

16. Interestingly enough the lovers card in tarot is all about choice. Being able to choose to be in love. being able to commit to that great act of loving.

17. If anything can inspire you to focus on the quality of your relationships it might be because it’s the children who inherit them.

18. For more information on this transformative group work and how to access it please email me sashasideways@yahoo.com

19. And although this is possible to do on a larger scale at some point the numbers will overwhelm the reality based directive. Because thats how magical we are….once we get to be a certain amount we literally escape reality! And then our reality flounders and our relationship to the earth becomes less tenable. I am hoping that the effort to create all this amazing tech has been to facilitate small manageable grounded communities so that we can mesh network and figure things out that way.

20. One easy way to shift our relationship with the government is to all just collectively stop paying or filing our taxes. If anyone who has excess resources wants to join me with getting this mass movement of the ground please email me at sashasideways@yahoo.com