23 January 2022

Last Tuesday, I presented at my local Accident & Emergency Department with severe chest and arm pain and shortness of breath. The doctors suspected I was having a heart attack, and so I spent the next seven hours having tests of all kinds.  Eventually, they ruled out a heart attack, and sent me home saying that I would be referred to a cardiac specialist.

This was a scary experience, as you can imagine (my husband wasn’t allowed to stay with me due to Covid restrictions).  It was also very sad to experience our beloved NHS in such a state of mayhem and disarray – but that’s a different blog!

Three years ago, after fully waking up to our dire interconnected predicaments, I transformed my life entirely.  I shut down the business that I’d been leading for the past 35 years, to focus exclusively on creating local community resilience and supporting individuals and groups to face reality from a place of wellbeing, resilience and courage.

Yes, I’d experienced profound grief during this time – and I knew enough from my various spiritual insights to allow myself to truly feel this, rather than to distract or self-numb.

And I really did find the “gifts on the other side of grief” that so many people talk about:  an even deeper wellspring of love, compassion, deep listening and courage.

You may have seen the many warnings recently from mainstream media of all kinds that we might not be able to get our pigs in blankets this Christmas.

Horror of horrors!  As if life wasn’t bad enough! 

Note for my non-UK readers:  Pigs in Blankets are a peculiarly British tradition where small pork sausages are wrapped in bacon and served with the Christmas turkey.

We are mostly told by the media (and the Government) that this is just a “temporary supply chain problem” caused by the pandemic.  Well, not really true.  The pandemic has certainly exacerbated issues, but the media aren’t telling us the whole truth.

A Climate Scientist, a Climate Change Denier and a Doomsayer predicting the ‘End of the World as we know It’ all walk into a bar…

Change the setting of a bar to a mainstream media interview, and this is often how these sorts of conversations go.  We have to have ‘balance’ right? Maybe we’re past that point.

Instead, what about this as a premise? 

Here are three people (or 15,000 people, which is the number of people who have joined the Deep Adaptation community) who have all accepted that we face extreme disruption to our way of life, and possibly even societal collapse.

But they are diverse: different political views, different backgrounds and cultures and socio-economic groups, and they live very different lives in very different countries all over the world.