Much of the suffering and chaos painfully experienced by people today arises from being forced into lives that are out of alignment with the world. Not world as in ‘society,’ but World: the living Earth, our home.
When the spine is out of alignment, through a slipped disc, scoliosis or other injury, we feel pain. If misalignment continues, pain spreads to other muscles and joints that are bearing extra pressure to compensate for the problem. A lifetime of such adaptive measures can produce so many hurts that it’s challenging to trace back to a root cause, and there might be more than one. Maybe some stress or trauma caused misalignment to begin. You try to deal with pain in your neck, but it’s originating in the chest, from suppressed fear. A pain in the back is coming from the gut, from undigested grief.
It is not much different in the social body, where the misalignments are so many and built into living that it can feel overwhelming and demoralizing to look at things honestly. Work schedules run regardless of seasonal changes and the daily requirements of our sleep cycle, which includes need for darkness. Our food, medicines, products and entertainments typically bear little connection with the territories where we live, or people we know; these most personal materia are foreign, meaning without real relationship to us, and can be full of harmful, distortive ingredients, be they chemical or ideological.
Meanwhile, we live and work in buildings designed to be functionally the same, anywhere, with standardized comforts and controlled environments, and in these spaces where we spend most of our hours, we often sit and stare at small screens. We have to: we must sell our labour to survive, if we’re lucky enough, and income generation and management dominate our time—conflicting with care for those we love, and ourselves. Our money is also not our own: it is used by the State, in part, to fund wars and corruption beyond reckoning, including oppressive measures taken against its own citizens. Us.
That’s life in the Rogue Culture: an isolated, segregated and increasingly distressed humanity, serving and profiting a small group of people and enabling, if not individually responsible for, global violence. But Earth is not a State. People are not data or ideas. We know life has more meaning and value, so we are forced into constant cognitive dissonance and emotional and physical suppression just to get through our days with a little optimism and sanity. More contortions.
Outside is the living, breathing World. Right there! Sometimes we get out of this life ‘for exercise’ or ‘vacation’ (a word that, tellingly, originally referred to the breaks taken by institutions such as courts). But, we seem to always be separated from the land and animals and stars, from freedom and unity. Animals flee from us. The night is scary. We don’t know the names of plants or their natures. We have no idea how to survive out here – wherever ‘here’ is. We are strangers stumbling through the very places that we call ‘home.’ We are not aligned.
Addressing long-term misalignments, whether personal or cultural, is not a straight journey to an easy fix, but rather, a process of mindful meandering, giving patient attention and care to the wounds and pains requiring them. Re-learning.
This care becomes a practice, and things change.
I’m the first person to point out that, at times like these, with crises pressing so hard, words like ‘patient’ and ‘meandering’ and even ‘care’ seem rather foolish. It is the training of the Rogue culture to expect certain and dramatic solutions, and all our anxieties say we must have them.
All I can respond with is an Earth truth: trees and people grow from seeds, and don’t mature overnight. So if we want a better world, we begin at the beginning.
At least, that’s what I keep returning to. If I ask why humans got into this crazy situation of being so contorted, I get many possible answers. I land in a tangle of speculation, which stalls me in thinking, which isn’t very helpful. And the thing is, as a misaligned person - which with some exceptions, most of us are – I don’t even know how it feels, let alone what it means, to live a life aligned with the Earth.
But while I don’t know what an entire life of harmony is like, I can and do know how alignment feels—in moments.
It’s been a wintry Christmas in rural Nova Scotia for the first time in years. Snow began on Solstice. In the mornings a thick white mist covers the land, turning a shy, softly glowing pink at sunrise. Meadows of goldenrod and blackberry look like lace. The winter birds hang out at the feeder. Often it’s cloudy, and the days seem to barely gain purchase before dusk brushes them away.
All of this – the wan light, the muted activity, the stillness of hibernation in the plant kingdom - feels solemn and gentle and forgiving, the embrace of cool comfort, a deep dive into rest. Solstice messages often emphasize remembering there is always light in the darkness. While that’s true, I prefer to see this season as a time of honouring darkness. We live in an age when night itself is being pushed into rarity and extinction by ever-increasing light. This is no accident: light means work and wakefulness. Productivity. Consumption. Night and all it traditionally brings – dreaming, rest, intimacy, quiet, hearth time, and connection to soul and spirit - is fundamentally at odds with a dispirited, 24/7 world.
On Christmas Eve day, snow fell in straight, hypnotic lines, like slow-motion currents in air that offered no resistance. Maybe 12 hours like this. I walked to the mailbox on the deserted road, passing the odd house with smoke puffing from its chimney, the odd barn, while whitened fields rolled on and on... Distances were hazy, hypothetical. The little red light atop the postal carrier’s car appeared once, shining weakly ahead, then was lost. The snow made a sound like countless tiny pebbles landing on everything: the road, my coat’s nylon shell. Falling and gathering, falling and gathering.
Was I walking or swimming? Dreaming or awake? Both. Neither. I walked in wonder. This was just another ordinary and extraordinary day that will never happen in the same way again.
Such moments fall through our lives continuously like rain and snow, like autumn leaves and summer pollen. Gazing into my cat’s eyes, sharing tenderness unexpectedly with my husband when I’m in a shitty mood. These moments are Life itself, insisting on its wild artistry, its shimmering and mysterious design. Wonder connects us to life and each other: it is our capacity to feel how we are, always, part of this awesome current, never separated.
Instead of asking why or how we got separated from the Earth and fractured as humanity, we can ask simply: How can we make honouring Wonder the root of everything we do? It is like finding one’s spine, one’s breath. It happens moment to moment.
Ancient peoples, naming gods in stones, trees, and mountains, recognized that the Earth is where we begin. It is where we must start, if we want to live lives of truth. The ground beneath us and the vault above our heads. We are people of Earth, part of a grand creation. Making alignment our goal changes how we perceive, prioritize, decide, plan, walk in the world, love one another.
This piece was heart-food to me. Your writing has beautiful physicality and particularity, as always. But what I find especially nourishing is its heartfeltness, which for me climaxes in the 5 paragraphs beginning with the Christmas snowfall. Or just above them, actually, with the blue-white path through the woods, and ending with the brown-white open field. Blue to brown. Mike
The photo of the garroted tree is a perfect companion to the opening sentence. The pain of the world so explicitly communicated. That image will live with me as it should.