conscient podcast

a calm presence - when spirit becomes one

Episode Notes

A bonus episode in between seasons 5 and 6, featuring my new year’s 'a calm presence' reflection on hope with writings and stories by Peter Schneider, John Crier (as told to Vanessa Andreotti), Richard Heinberg, Zia Gallina, Naomi Klein, Azul Carolina Duque, Jem Bendell, Robert R. Janes and Hildegard Westerkamp. 

To read the original posting on Substack see https://acalmpresence.substack.com/p/when-spirit-becomes-one-5f5

Episode Transcription

when spirit becomes one

a new year’s reflection on hope

I’d like to share with you a special new year's edition of a calm presence (and then I’ll go back to my break from production).  

It’s a story about hope.

Hope and also hopelessness and I have it warn you that this essay is a bit long. 

Sorry about that but it’s been a crazy year. Lots of stories to tell. 

So, let’s start. 

December 3, 2024. We held a party for my 65th birthday here in Ottawa on unceded Algonquin-Anishinaabe nation territory and I asked friends and family to share ‘stories, poems and songs about hope’. 

It was an uplifting experience. 

Here’s one by Peter Schneider: 

• Hope is embodied in the quality of compassion that each of us has, our ability to see one another, feel one another’s happiness and also our despair, and to reach out - with a kind message  - a coffee, an hour of conversation.

It concluded with:

• Above and beyond all, hope is resistance against impossible odds, the refusal to abandon, the drive to build and rebuild and renew when all seems lost or absurd… I can’t go on. I must go on.

I can’t go on. I must go on.

Does that sound familiar?

I think we’ve all experienced this feeling at one point in our lives, maybe last year? Maybe even, today? 

It certainly struck a chord with me and continues to resonate. 

Where is hope?

What is hope? 

With these beautiful words in mind from my birthday celebration I went back to some of my favorite readings and podcasts from 2024 and selected a few excerpts that inspired me and continue to guide me. 

I think they might be of interest to you. 

But before going any further I want to express my deep gratitude and respect to those I am quoting in this essay and to our three narrators, in order of appearance, my son, historian Riel Schryer, my wife, artist Sabrina Mathews and my daughter, scientist Clara Schryer. 

Here we go.

The four mountains (collaboration with Cree elder John Crier) story as told to Vanessa Andreotti:

• In this mountain, no one reaches the top still carrying their body. Only your spirit reaches the top. At some point along this mountain’s path you will have to shed your body. When the day of shedding the body comes, you are ready to pass away to the place of the ancestors. You are grateful for what you have been taught in this body, you have settled what needed to be settled, you have prepared your family, you have passed down your stories and your songs, the people you have mentored have become mentors themselves, you have helped people to switch mountains, you are at peace with the enormity, timelessness and incessant movement of the land. You go with empty hands. You leave everything behind. You leave no footprints. You become an ancestor and you meet those who have come before, those who are yet to come, and all the invisible relations, both human and non-human, who accompanied you in your path in all four mountains. When you shed your body, you integrate all the experiences you have had in this life and your spirit becomes one with the mystery of creation. 

I think that I’ve arrived at the foot of the elder mountain. Not because I’m old or wise or anything like that, but simply because this is where I am at. 

I can see the baby, warrior and hunter/provider mountains all around me and I can feel the ground at the base of this elder mountain. 

I can feel my body shedding, little by little. 

My spirit seems to be growing but my body is starting to let go. 

Yes, I’m working on integrating my life experiences, for whatever value they might have, but I’m also working on letting them go. 

I think I might be beginning to understand what becoming one with the mystery of creation really means.

Richard Heinberg’s Envisioning a Livable Future:

• We have a relatively brief chance to prove this cynical condemnation of our species wrong. We won’t do so through party politics. We won’t do it through achieving “net zero” using a new generation of gadgets. It’s likely that we can only do it personally, through reflection and self-transformation, and in small communities devoted to kindness, systems thinking, and love of nature. We need to become a species that deserves to survive. In the end, we will thrive not because we believe human beings are superior to the rest of life, nor because of our great music, impressive architecture, or even our wit and humor. If we persist, it will be because we have given the biosphere sufficient incentive to let us stick around. Most big-think essays, like this, end on a note of inspiration and hope. For once, I’ll resist the temptation to go that route. Can we humans make ourselves useful to the rest of life? It’s an open question.

Well, so much for the transformative power of art, right? We’ll come back to Heinberg’s article a bit later.  

Zia Gallina’s The Light in the Darkness:

• It is now up to each of us to live with intention, as simply and as close to the earth as we can. Without lecturing. Without feeling self-righteous. Perhaps we will not change many but we can try to encourage some while not letting ourselves lapse into despair. Perhaps it will be enough. I light the candles in a dark room as the solstice approaches. It is a birthing ritual for the sun, yes, but also a ritual I need, a reminder that this is a time for reflection, for time out. And for planning. If I don’t pull within during the darkest time, I will not have the energy or the insight to become expansive in the spring. I light the candles in the dark room as a pledge, to be honest with myself and truthful with others. To do no harm. To create a safe haven, a sanctuary. To stay present. To listen harder. To act with intention. To shine my own light into the darkness no matter how faint it might be.

Naomi Klein’s On Fire, from All we Can Save

• The capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be easily distracted… might explain the way serious people can simultaneously grasp how close we are to an irreversible tipping point and still regard the only people who are calling for this to be treated as an emergency as unserious and unrealistic.

I struggle with this compartmentalizationand those who are being very serious and realistic in pointing to irreversible tipping points. I think we all do both. I struggle with that. 

The words of Naomi Klein help us understand and work through that dilemma. 

Azul Carolina Duque, in an excerpt from an upcoming conscient podcast episode:

• If we see colonialism as a disease that has taken over our neurophysiology, then what are the potential practices that art can bring that can help us neuro decolonize our bodies? And when I say our bodies, I mean our extended bodies. My body that doesn't finish in my skin, but rather that continues into the entangled web of relationships that I'm a part of, and my body that is not only the body of the present time, but a body that is in deep relationship with my ancestors before me and after me, those who haven't been born yet and those whose legacy I carry with me, whether I like it or not. And so we're sitting with this huge question, right and so we thought, okay, how about we start with a cohort of artists, interdisciplinary cohort of artists, and we do some research and see what potential exercises can begin to come if we ask ourselves this question of, well, this broad question. And from there, I began to the still, what is it that we're gesturing into with this huge question that I just asked? And the potential title that came was Reactivating Exiled Capacities.

After our conversation I went for a soundwalk with Azul in Beacon Hill Park, in Victoria BC and we listened together: 

• Azul : You hear the rhythm of those water fountains? Shou-shou-shou… I hadn't noticed the pulse they had until now.
• Claude: One of the things I notice is whether a sound is in distress or not. So much information can be passed through sound. That duck. Is that a happy duck or is that a duck that feels threatened? And these are languages I don't understand, but I try to pick up on it: subtleties, patterns… 
• Azul :  Do you ever notice the change in pressure through sound?
• Claude: I'll notice a big sonic source, like a truck that will vibrate and push me but that's the air of the truck as much as the sound. There's a combination of the... Is that what you mean? Something like that?
• Azul : No, but yes. I know what you're talking about. It's the sensation where you come out. I guess it has to do with the echo, where there's spaces that, even though they're not wider, they sound wider. It's like there's less pressure in certain spaces. Sometimes you just turn a corner and it just has so much space sonically or you turn another corner, and it just feels cozy or tight, perhaps.

Azul also spoke to me about 3 forms of hope, as part of an upcoming book, co-written by Azul with Vanessa Andreotti and members of the GTDF collective, that follows up on Andreotti’s Hospicing Modernity :

• The first one, hope and continuity, speaks about the hope that a solution will surface to indefinitely extend our current growth based economic lifestyle systems in a finite planet. So think about technological fixes like carbon sequestration, political solutions such as net zero commitments, green growth, or even concepts like colonizing another planet or reducing human population to sustain the comfort and consumption levels of a specific demographic within the planetary limits.
• The second one is a hope in consensual change. So this hope represents this idea that we can unite as a global community around already known alternatives to our current growth based system. So it's the belief that we can and will reach substantial consensus, planetary consensus, to effectively implement paths such as degrowth, donut economics, abolitionist economies, indigenous governance, land back, and other existing non growth based solutions in time. So this is the possibility of changing our course to avert the disaster and having the possibility of equitable futures through human agency and collective action and systemic transformation. And this is a hope that a lot of folks in at least the circles I'm around, are. I guess it's the fuel. So, no pun intended, that is fueling a lot of activists. 
• And then we propose this third one, which is the hope in composting harm. This hope represents the idea of acknowledging that we are past several critical tipping points, and that substantial consensus is unlikely and will inevitably is unlikely to happen. And that we will inevitably have to confront the consequences of our harmful actions and the harmful actions of those who came before us, too. So this hope says that new possibilities will emerge only after we have been taught by the partial or general collapse of our current systems… So it's about visualizing a process in which we are left with no other choice but to transform our relationships with the planet, with other species and with each other, to metabolize and repair the harm we have caused, and collectively learned to coexist differently through the awareness that we are part of a wider metabolism that is bio intelligent.

Jem Bendell’sThere is a Love Beyond Hope: 

• I discovered there is a love beyond hope, a love which can guide active engagement in society without attachment to outcomes.
• Freed from an attachment to hope, I was better able to see how we can live meaningful and creative lives while accepting that we have entered the era of collapsing industrial consumer societies.

Here’s an excerpt from my conversation, again from an upcoming conscient podcast episodewithRobert R. Janes and his take on hope: 

• I suppose it's rather contradictory to say hopeless, but still want to do things constructively to overcome that hopelessness. I guess that's what I mean. There are so many things we can do. We know what we need to do to weather this storm, but I guess the sacrifice and the suffering it's going to cause is just too much for people's imagination. So there's middle ground with all that. And again, this farm is a source of being helpful, and I guess underneath that, being hopeful and a source of being, what’s the mantra, hopeless but not helpless. 

On November 30 2024 I wrote the following response on Ian Garrett’s Facebook page in response to his question : ‘is it still worth pursuing environmental footprinting and reporting in the arts?’: 

• What matters most is accepting reality, reducing suffering and planting seeds for the much longer term, in whatever way makes sense to each artist and arts organizations, with a view to imagining a new world, not extending this broken one. Those who survive this period of disruption will appreciate our efforts.

I admit that’s a bit grim. It’s difficult to accept reality, reduce suffering, plant seeds and imagine new worlds while trying to survive - in particular as artists - in this broken world, even if this broken world needs artists more than ever.

Here’s that other excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s Envisioning a Livable Future: 

• Even if the die is cast, it still makes sense for those with awareness to continue working toward the best case while trying to avoid the worst. This way, we minimize whatever harm we can, while planting cultural seeds that may germinate over time. We also get to savor the joys of simple living, while all around us fret about the glitches in their apps or the downturns in their investment portfolios. It’s worth noting, however, that adopting the strategy of slowing down, simplifying, and relocalizing may not provide shelter from prejudice or violence that flow from national or global politics. That’s why it’s important to develop and live within the strongest community networks possible. Commoning, permaculture, and practices of mutual aid provide a positive way forward, as they can help us both build community resilience and create ecologically sound, right-sized local economies.

Sometimes people ask me where do I find hope? 

What does hope mean for me?

I tend not to think about hope even though this essay is about hope. 

But one clear hopeful gesture is when we receive a letter from a friend and that letter, in this case from composer Hildegard Westerkamp, helps make sense of the world and brings energy and vitality to what we’re doing and our relationships. 

So, with Hildi’s permission I set this letter to sound in a piece called flowing and I’ll end this essay with this piece. 

I wish you peace and a happy new year. 

• The time seems right for you to let everyone’s words flow through you - as if through a medium or force - back to all of us in ever new shapes. 
• This creates shifts in everyone’s perception, ideas, attitudes, feelings and approaches towards the world the way it is now.  
• I have always felt that this was precisely what I was doing with environmental sounds. 
• I recorded them (like voices that speak). 
• I listened to them and then let them flow through me (speak through my compositions, like your and everyone’s words speak through your conscient podcast) back to everyone. 
• Our own inner shift simply enables for more shifting to happen. It’s not us (our ego) that is effective here in allowing the flow of transformation to happen. 
• The ego is more like a blood clot blocking true shifting in the larger scheme/flow of things - i.e. it wants to be exclusive, can’t include the perceptions and shifting of others. 
• It’s a deeper engagement - love, passion or whatever one might call it - that not only allows, but desires for energies to flow through - reach - the nooks and crannies of human perception. Like a river. 
• We are like the water particles that collaborate for the river to find its way through the landscapes as they present themselves. 
• Opening ever-new vistas.