Giant Dumpster Fires Everywhere

“Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.” — Barbara Deming
(Photo credit: image by 272447 from Pixbay)

Civilization is burning. Giant dumpster fires everywhere you look.

The Neros of the world fiddling themselves, voraciously gorging their man-child egos. Fiddling and feasting while the great majority of us sit, dumbfounded and dumbstruck, watching the growing conflagration envelop and destroy all that is good in our world.

Cycling back and forth between paroxysms of anger and grief.

Truth is these dumpster fires were lit years ago. Things had gotten ugly well before COVID-19. The normal we wax nostalgic about was anything but.

Climate change and greed-driven planetary devastation.

Children in cages and active shooter drills in schools.

Racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and all the dehumanizing, hate-fueled phobias of otherness.

Epidemics of mental illness, addiction, despair, and self-harm driving a skyrocketing suicide rate.

The gaping maw of income inequality and chronic homelessness.

Authoritarianism and other forms of political and oligarchic extremism built atop campaigns of misinformation, toxic polarization, and the politics of annihilation.

Self-interested “greedership” replacing leadership in our most powerful institutions.

Sadly, I could go on. Because the list of dumpster fires goes on — and on.

These dumpster fires and others like them were lit and roaring well before coronavirus became a household word. A series of global pandemics eating away at our humanity and causing alarm and handwringing — even heartbreak — but largely met with majority inaction.

The reality of day to day living was dire for more people than it wasn’t before COVID-19. And most of us were living in a giant collective bubble of denial or avoidance — at the very least overwhelm, anxiety, and hopelessness — about the devastation unfolding around us.

For the people for whom it was most dire, COVID has added accelerant to those dumpster fires.

For the least fortunate who make up the lion’s share of our essential workers.

For those at greatest risk from the virus including people of color and those with chronic health conditions exacerbated by our broken health care and food systems.

For these folks, a reality that was bad before has gotten much worse.

And massive numbers of people globally recently joined the ranks of those for whom survival from one day to the next has grown ever more precarious and uncertain.

We’re all suffering. Many of us feeling the extreme discomfort of grief. Others feeling and expressing anger and rage — emotions that are often the fiery protectors of suppressed grief, keeping it “safe” and hidden while preventing it from surfacing out of fear it might overwhelm us. And I’m sure I’m not alone in having a both/and experience.

Grief and anger — like the elements that represent them, water and fire — are essential emotions that when unexpressed or overexpressed can have devastating consequences.

Unexpressed grief keeps us from joy in life. Anger when over-expressed as it tends to be today — with destructive violence — can eat us alive and destroy everyone and everything we touch.

As I wrote in Keen In: It’s Time We Express Our Collective Grief, we haven’t been taught how to hold and process grief in ourselves much less how to work with it on a collective, societal level. The same is true for Anger.

I’ve been doing deep soul work over the past 4 months, learning how to be with these big, darker emotions.

To be lovingly curious about them.

To connect with them and learn what they have to teach me.

To give them a home in my psyche so they come into balance rather than dominate through over or under-expression.

I’d be lying if I told you this was easy. It’s not. It’s work that’s hard AF and it takes as long as it takes to learn how to engage with and channel these darker emotions in a healthy way.

Like many of the topics I write about, working with grief and anger is a practice. And as my yoga teacher likes to say, practice makes practice.

With practice, our opportunity, as Barbara Deming writes so beautifully, is to learn to transmute the anger we’re feeling into fuel for creativity and problem-solving. Rather than being the raging machine — or raging against it in a toxic cloud of hate and destruction — what if we channeled this powerful, fiery energy into fixing that broken machine?

Or better yet, building a new one altogether.

One that serves the greatest good of the greatest number.

Terry Real observes: “Family dysfunction rolls down from generation to generation, like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children that follow.”

This statement resonates deeply with me as it is altogether too real in my family. And what is true for my family is true for our global family at this moment. Dysfunction rolling down intergenerationally like a raging wildfire, destroying everything in its path.

Will our generation be the one with the courage to turn and face the flames? To bring peace to our ancestors and create a better world for our children.

If your neighbor’s house is on fire, you’d try to help, right?

Well our collective house is on fire. The question is how will we respond?

I hope we’ll all choose to be first responders — those who run towards the fire when others run away from it.

It’s time we had the courage to come together as one and turn towards the flames. We need to stop fighting with ourselves and with one another and unite to fight the destructive fires engulfing our world.

It’s time to be our best selves and take back and harness our power — the power of our hearts and our minds.

It’s time to reconnect with our humanity. To put the civil back into our civilization in the face of great discontent.

It’s time for each and every one of us to be the leaders the world needs to respond to this wild, global fire.

To deny it or fail to respond is to condone it.

It’s completely understandable to feel helpless and overwhelmed at the sheer magnitude of it all. It’s certainly true for me at times.

But here’s a secret. There are a lot of us. A lot of hearts, a lot of minds, a lot of hands. If each and every one of us does our part to be the change we wish to see, we have the collective power to do great things.

What small actions each of us take to counteract the forces of darkness? Small actions that when combined at scale can start to solve seemingly intractable world problems.

How can we each find a way every day to contribute one metaphorical bucket of water — a firehose, or a tanker load if we are privileged to have more — to do our part to put out these raging dumpster fires?

If a majority of us on the planet rose to the occasion and chose action over apathy, compassion over judgment, courage over fear, and love over hate, think of the change we could unleash in the world!

What a difference we could make.

If you’re feeling the call and would like a guide on your journey of meeting this moment, please book a curious conversation to explore what the Vulnerability Doula can do for you.