Welcome to the great adventure

A touch of history, a taste of the future

I was born and raised within walking distance of Hatfield Forest in Essex, England.

It has been called “the last medieval forest in Europe”. It has been worked the same way and been within the same boundaries for at least a thousand years.

As a younger man I did some of that work. I swung my axe and my billhook. I spent my time among the frosty oak, ash and hazel. My working days accompanied by the Robin redbreasts, the pheasants, the silent barn owls and the deer.  

My name – Kenworthy – comes from farmers in Chester on the Welsh borders. Many of my ancestors on both sides of my family were from Yorkshire.

They probably even knew of each other just before the War of the Roses, when family fought family on behalf of two rival royal houses – York and Lancaster. Those battles began in 1455, in St Albans, just 30 miles from my forest.

I’m 50 years old. I’ve spent 30 years of my working life as a researcher, writer and activist in response to the declining state of the world.

With all that in my mind and heart, in response to the climate grief we are feeling, the fear, the despair, the frustration…I invite us now on a great adventure.

If you aren’t feeling that grief, come anyway.

In fact, you are coming, whether you like it or not. Because it is unavoidable.  

But be warned. We must accept that we will lose everything along the way.

Because what we are feeling is not just climate grief – it is reality grief. It is about the nature of our existence.

That may be why I had these marks tattooed on my arm. They are drawn in Anglo-Saxon Futhorc runes. It's a transcription from a poem. The Wanderer, written in England more than a thousand years ago.

Wyrd bið ful aræd.

It translates as something like “Fate is inexorable”, or “Destiny is pre-determined”.

You could also say something like: “Nature bats last.” 

Some readings of the poem see The Wanderer as progressing through three phases:

·       first as the ānhaga. The solitary man. He dwells on the deaths of his loved ones.

·       then as the mōdcearig. The sorrowful man. He meditates on past hardships and on the mass killings of history.

·       and finally, as the mōde. The wise man. He who has come to understand that life is full of hardships, impermanence, and suffering. He who accepts the unknowable nature of the patterns that weave all our lives together. 

That, essentially, is the timeless process I am inviting us to turn our minds and lives to.

As I said, it will happen anyway.

So, as Gil Scott Heron said: “Panic now, and avoid the rush.”

This natural process is intertwined with the shapes of the stories we tell about ourselves.

That is all we have control over.

That’s why this is all stories too.

Our grief comes from the awareness that the lives we are leading are based on unbridled war and destruction. It is that which has gathered the riches we see around us.

We war overseas to control resources.

We are destroying the world to create riches never before seen. They are being squandered. They will not be seen again in the centuries to come.  

In our western industrialized lives there is a deeply engrained desire to be comfortable. But these feelings make us uncomfortable.

It is good to be uncomfortable in such times.

In fact, to not be uncomfortable in such times is, ironically, a form of disease.

As Jiddu Krishnamurti said: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

This discomfort, this feeling of being ‘unsettled’ is our call to adventure.

All the best stories start like this.

We may need healing or therapy to prepare for it. We will need help while it’s happening.

Because the process itself is not a healing or therapeutic one.

It’s not about what we ‘like’.

It is about life, death and rebirth.

So, how do we start?

First, pause.

Take the time to look for signs in our lives. It might be a sign in nature. It might be supernatural. It might be our faith. Listen to the whispers.

Don’t drown them out.

It’s all too easy to do so.

For ours is an addictive and addicted culture.

Alcohol. Sugar. Caffeine. Shopping. Sex. On and on and on.

Do you know what the first step of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step programme is?

“Admit that our addictions have put our lives out of our control. That we need the intervention of a higher power.”

Doesn’t this sound like us?

I believe this is the first step we must take, individually and as a society.

This is the step everybody seems to be working so hard to avoid.

So, what hints are there for us already? What is the truth that we have been trying so hard to ignore?

The climate? The biodiversity crisis? That we, you and I, are out of control? That we don’t, after all, control the climate, control history?

We need help to face up to these questions. There will be someone standing on the threshold of where we must go, or even just a little further on. From the known, into the unknown. There are people who will help us, who have trod this path, or one like it, already.

Let’s not wait for them. Let’s seek them out. Then with their guidance, look reality square in the eye.

Then, down we’ll go. Down into the depths. Our depths. Down to face all our fears head on. Breath it all in. All the heartache and chaos. All the darkness.

Know that this is, actually, eventually, the only way we can go.

Everything else is a distraction.  

There will be challenges.

If not, then we are not on the path.

As Billy Bragg said: “If you’re not picking up flak, you ain’t over the target.” 

And we must die.

You know that, right?

You knew that all along.

It is overwhelming, this grief. This sorrow. This reality. 

So, let it overwhelm us.

We will find the pain really came from trying to hold it all back.

Surrender.

Let’s let go of our rationalisations, our excuses, our compromises.

Our mitigations, our trading in tokens.

Let go of the person we thought we were.

Abandon hope.

For how can anything new come if we don’t let go of the old?

The caterpillar has to turn completely to mush before the butterfly can emerge.

Your crisis too is a chrysalis.

But only if we let nature take its course.

Stop fighting the process.

And we may be reborn.

We may emerge holding gifts of insight in our fist, a new steady look in our eye.

We can return to our work and our families, more able to do what needs to be done.

To atone for what we have done.

Maybe.

I’m not making promises.

Who ever heard of a safe adventure?

So, will you come?

I know you don’t want to. Nobody does.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need to.

Maybe we’ve been through this journey before. If so, our grief, our pain, suggests it is time to go again.

We’ll be left with nothing, except the acceptance of what must be done.

Are you coming?

I know you are.

One way or another.

Wyrd bið ful aræd.