8th May is the feast day of Julian of Norwich. We do not know her true name. The name we celebrate comes from the church of St Julian in Norwich where she was an anchoress for most of her life. Mother Julian was a visionary and a counselor in the late 14th century. These were days of plague and political unrest. Power vacuums would suddenly suck whole regions into chaos with no apparent rhyme or reason. Deadly diseases raged through villages, sometimes leaving only one or two survivors who spent the rest of their lives with guilt and grief. The age of Classic reason had crumbled and left the western human world with little but the irrational fancies of men from which to fashion meaning. Meanwhile, a couple hundred years of warm weather, likely caused by deforestation throughout Eurasia as new farming methods spread out from the Mediterranean, had led to generally good harvests and paradoxically created a whole new class of useless second sons with nothing but greed and desperation to drive them across continents spreading misery.

Sound familiar?

This is not the first time we have done this. Not even the worst time, though we are having global effects, not regional. I would say the worst was the decimation wrought in the 16th and 17th centuries to the lands I now call home. Millions of people died through the spread of passive and active violence. The ecosystems and cultures of the western hemisphere were devastated, sending the entire planet into a Little Ice Age that only was remediated by the mass burning of fossil fuels and rising levels of carbon in the atmosphere. It was an all-consuming apocalypse… Yet here we all are still…

In any case, we late moderns are not living in unique times. Humanity has done this before… and may well do it all again in some day of future forgetful ignorance.

But Julian lived through one of these end times. Her response was to see the good in the world. Her advice to the thousands who came to her tiny cell seeking wisdom was to know that the world is suffused with love. While the pundits of the day were generally preaching fire and brimstone and eternal damnation and causing no end of pain in their quest for self-aggrandizement, Mother Julian talked of beauty and wonder and magic found in all things. We still remember her words: “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

Wisdom to cling to in the midst of our recent self-inflicted catastrophes… All shall be well. All is well. We just have to look for that goodness, see it, feel it, know that it is there despite all the valiant efforts of men.

The other day I was listening to Nate Hagens going on about something. I was not listening very closely because I was also cooking dinner. (I have priorities…) But something he said caught my attention and has not let go. He was talking about a friend’s tepid response to his Earth Day video. She didn’t actually want to watch. She wanted to be out in the world doing things. It’s not that she doesn’t accept that we’re completely screwed in so many ways it’s impossible to keep count. She just doesn’t need to hear about it any more. She wants to do what she can for her part of the world.

Nate seemed to commiserate, but the whole thrust of his talk was how we have hit peak information. He thinks we just can’t take in any more. And that might be true. I have a very hard time opening the newspaper right now. But it’s not that I can’t take any more. It’s that I don’t want to. It is not helping. It is hurting me and therefore my ability to do anything good for others. It is not doing anything. Truly, taking in information, data, and analysis on all this has never been the best response. The best response is exactly what Nate’s friend did on Earth Day. She was out in her community doing real work, helping to mitigate the harm in her small part of the world.

It is important to know the big picture, to know where the harm comes from and how our lives and actions and intents feed into it. It is necessary to feel the hurt of distant peoples and places so that you will stop contributing to that pain. But there is not one thing any individual can do “for the planet”. Not that has any real effects. What we do, what we need to do, is patch up our own lives, do real work with our own hands and backs and brains, mend what is here and now in our own community. Knowing about the macro-economics of oil is good framing, but it does nothing, it accomplishes nothing, it may even be counterproductive if talking and demonstrating are all you are doing, if that is taking your creative time and skills away from the real tasks that need your efforts. (Particularly if that talk and demonstration involves cross-continental travel…)

The best thing you can do “for the planet” is to take care of your own needs, by hand, using local resources, and creating no waste. Learn how to make what you need and mend whatever is broken in your world. Grow and preserve and cook your own food. Make clothes and shelter. Clean up the many small disasters around you. Look in on your neighbors. Create reasons to gather together. Be witness, yes absolutely! And not just to the catastrophes this system is piling onto humans. Notice everything. See everything. Feel everything. Really live in connected relationship with your world. This is how you know what is needed and how best to use your skills and resources and lived time.

This is also just how to live, full stop. Even were there not catastrophes, the most morally logical path lies through your neighborhood. This is simply how to do and be good people. But it’s also how to be happy, full of joy, contentment. Being alive to the real world around us, seeing the love and the connection and the magic, is all we need in life, it is all we want. It is the meaning of life.

I’m a gardener. The first lesson you learn in the garden is that you are only part of that garden. You have to work together with so many other beings. And the best work produces benefits for everyone in the garden. The second lesson is that you must pay attention, notice everything, be aware of the needs and how to tend to them. You are the garden’s legs and hands. The garden is counting on you, so you must be mindful of all needs or no needs are met. But the most important lesson in the garden is that everything will always work out pretty good. Maybe not all will be well, but it will mostly be well. It will hardly ever be exactly what you might have planned, but it will always be amazing. There will be nourishing food. There will be burgeoning beauty. There will be surprising delights every day. Even amidst all the weeds and infestation and blight and frost, there is wonder. And all you have to do is be in it, giving it your whole regard and effort. And that is all you want to do! That is what makes you happiest!

This is a lesson for how to be in the world, right now and always. This is the lesson that Mother Julian taught. All the weeds and infestation and blight radiating from the center of a collapsing system are not the whole story. Not even most of the story. The story is where you are and what you do; and whatever and wherever that is, things will probably work out pretty well on balance. There will be delight and nourishing food and beauty if you just stay present to your actual life. And the more work you do in the community of your small part of the world, the more joy you will find. The real world is pretty cool. Always interesting. Always miraculously providing exactly what you need.

You will never get that from a screen. Nor even a book. Certainly not from anything that happens purely within your head. Learning about things is good, don’t get me wrong. I live for learning. But the best learning comes from doing, from experiencing. This is also a lesson from the garden… or, should I say, from the real world.

I am also a geologist. Geology is a tactile science. You learn about what you can’t hold in your hands by holding a small part of it in your hands, by interacting with it, by noticing all of it. A geologist is trained to sit down with a field notebook, a hand lens, and a Brunton compass and note everything present. The smell, the texture, the color, the relationships and the discontinuities. We take photos, sketch, write long descriptions using rather flowery language (though it all has precise meaning to other geologists…). We see and dispassionately record what is there — and what is not. And we do all this before we begin to analyze any of it. Analysis is for later, in the lab. Sometimes not even then. Sometimes we don’t engage the story-telling brain until we are writing the conclusion on a paper for publication. Because once we start making up the story, we start believing that story, we start fitting what we see to what we believe, we stop seeing what is right in front of us.

I often wish everyone could be trained as a geologist. Or a naturalist. Or a gardener. Because learning to see in this way is learning to be embodied in the world, to sense before trying to make sense of the world, to be perceptive. And it is very difficult to deceive a perceptive body. When you are fully alive and awake, the storytelling of others is meaningless unless it resonates with your embodied experience. All this news becomes so much noise. Even where it might affect you personally, it is not your real life. It is not the doing and the being that is you.

My ex-husband works for PBS. Obviously, there are concerns about his job and his ability to pay back student loans from our kids’ educations. My youngest sister works for the CDC. For now… My job is somewhat more insulated from the DOGgiE Boys; but lending, even in Vermont’s insular economy, has dropped off precipitously. Risks are not being taken in these certainly uncertain days. This is all to say that the news is affecting my people. Economic collapse will do that. But economic collapse, while it will cause pain and disruption, is not the whole story. Or even the most important parts.

Cooking a healthy dinner is far more important. Watching the sun setting under roiling storm clouds. Noticing the color of peach blossoms in the morning light. Smiling at the antics of the cat. Being with your sick neighbor and trading stories of childhood while sharing hot stew. Darning the hole in your favorite sweater so well that you forget there was ever a gash. These are some of the things that make up the real story and the real joy and, yes, some of the real hurts we experience. This is your life. And it has very little to do with macroeconomics or resource depletion or even biophysical breakdown. Because all that is abstraction. It is not lived. It is not done. It is not what needs your attention right now.

What needs you right now is you and the small part of the world that you directly experience and that you directly affect. Knowing how things are connected in the wider world is good and essential; but once you have that knowledge, there is little more you can do with it. What you can do is take care of what is right in front of you. And that is really all you can do. And all the world wants from you anyway…

I understand the need to know, to try to make sense of it all. But frankly, there is no sense. Maybe there never has been. There has just been more slack in the world to make up for our nonsense. That’s no longer true. And because there is no longer any room for more of our shenanigans, maybe now we need to stop trying to make sense of the nonsense and pay attention to the real mess we’ve created. Right in front of you, for each of you, whoever and wherever you are.

Nate’s friend was right. It is time to get out of our heads, turn off the screens, and get to work. Or even just see. Witness. Notice. Experience. Be. For most of us, there is going to be pain, maybe even misery. But as long as we are alive, there is also going to be nourishing food and burgeoning beauty and gloriously shocking wonder. And contentment. And community. And that is the true sense in the world.

As a wise woman once said, All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well…

Teaser image credit: Bauchon Window Norwich Cathedral. Julian of Norwich is featured in the lower right hand corner. By J.Hannan-Briggs, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63815917Bauchon Window, Norwich Cathedral.