When I was 18 years old, I was in a car accident. I was a fairly devout atheist at the time. I fell asleep at the wheel going 65mph, ricocheted off of the cement highway divider, and slammed on the brakes reflexively as I woke up. My steering wheel and brakes locked and I did a few 360’s before careening back towards the divider. Time slowed, as it does during such events, and I had the utmost certainty that I was about to die. So I did the most uncharacteristic thing for the high-strung teenager that I was—I relaxed. I let go of the steering wheel, closed my eyes and waited. I felt utter peace and acceptance. And then, there was this presence—compassionate, ethereal, protective. Not a thing I believed in, so that rocked my world as much as nearly dying.
Needless to say, I did not die. But sometimes I wonder…Life has gotten really weird since then. I went on quite a few spiritual adventures, and more misadventures and decades later here we are. The most bizarre dystopia I couldn’t imagine. With everything collapsing.
I studied and practiced Buddhism for a good while. In the Tibetan traditions, the Bardo is the liminal space between death and rebirth. During this transitional time, one is said to face karmic horrors, challenges, and opportunities to awaken. According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it can get pretty weird.
And I cannot fathom how strange this all is. Today, I have a migraine because the valley where I live is surrounded by forest fires and thick with smoke and the smell of burning. The hummingbirds are going through my feeder more than 10 times faster than last summer. My neighbors are being kidnapped by masked dunces and taken to concentration camps where they are abused, neglected, and sometimes die. Billionaires have hijacked world governments and created military surveillance states. Artificial intelligence sexually harasses people and undermines our ability to think while devouring precious waning resources. Young people don’t want to have children, and can’t afford homes. Working people’s tax dollars fund genocidal war games. And, you know, all the rest.
And with all this, and the depressive funk that has stopped me in my tracks for almost 2 months now, I am still wondering about love. I won’t bore you with romance and fantasy. I am wondering what to do with the heartbraking love I feel for the mountains and trees that are burning, the children that are starved and raped, the entire beautiful species that are disappearing.
I am not the first to suggest that humanity itself is in a bardo of sorts—an in-between place. The worst of us seem to be hoarding and cannibalizing all that they can as the ship goes down, but what about the rest of us? There are many more of us who still love, I think. Is there some way to wake up? Can we do it collectively?
I’m not Buddhist anymore—I found myself in a religious institution there with the same foibles and harms as any other. But there are still some good teachings, insights and myths—like all the other religions. Buddhists foretell of the coming of the next Buddha (awakened one), Maitreya, the Lord of Love. I don’t know a thing, but I have speculated that the next awakening would have to be collective, because of the state we are in. And maybe that’s all any awakening is—remembering that we are not separate or individual, that we are one being, one Earth, and beyond, together. As the late Vietnamese Zen master, Thich Nhat Hahn, said—we “inter-are”.
I am not naive enough to think that we can snap our fingers and turn around the devastating harmful processes bringing down ecological, social, economic, and other countless systems right now. Nor am I naive enough to think that my tiny human brain comes close to grasping what is possible. But I am curious about what could happen if our young species relaxed our grip. We’ve lost control of the vehicle. Can a greater presence that unites us, and has something to do with Love, take the wheel if we discover our capacity to surrender what we thought we knew?
A Love in the Time of Collapse poem for you:
Ruby Throated (Hummingbird)
Tell me
they are of this world
while I watch them hover
and dart
through portals in the sky,
carrying light on their invisible wings
gathering sweetness
and creating the tiniest
miracles
People are at war
again
but these Harbingers
have something else to say