Eco-Grief, Global Mourning & The Imaginal Realm
Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash
You’re angry Sweet Friend, so very angry in your grief.
You look out upon the rape and pillage of the earth with impotent rage. Your red-blooded heart wails and roars: “Give me someone to fight, give me somewhere to rally, let me be the one to sound the horn… please... give me some way to hope”.
Yet hope is always found in the most unexpected of places.
Ours is a generation called upon to witness an eco-Auschwitz; like stars in the night sky species are being extinguished and their precious light is blinking out of existence into the infinite void of modernity. Like the night sky above the great urban deserts of the world, the grief is like a blanket of darkness punctuated by fading stars of hope. They fade because too many have wished in vain upon them already, and as every child knows: the furnace at the heart of every star is the eternal light of hope.
Yet hope is just another name for dreams.
It is not just the Amazon Forest that burns Sweet Friend, the great stands of poetries within you also burn, the stream of consciousness itself has been dammed, the winds of inspiration blow hot and dry across the desert of the imagination… and it feels as if the Old Gods themselves are dying off, in this the great extinction of the imaginal realm.
The natural habitat of all the nymphs and muses and demons and Gods that once comprised our inner ecology has been under attack for centuries now. The old-growth metaphors were hacked down and replaced with new technologically enhanced versions that glow with the cold and loveless light of an LED screen in the middle of the night. The wild free similes we read of in children’s books now seem like silly superstition.
Photo by Alice Alinari on Unsplash
Little wonder humanity’s iceberg-like faith in itself is melting so rapidly. For the Land of Dreams – some call it Mythos – is the native country of the soul. That is where you belong, that is the country from which we all are refugees. It is there that we must all regularly return to drink from those crisp, clear waters of remembrance.
Don’t forget that you are made of song and stardust Sweet Friend, that your heart’s a harp for angels.
The imaginal realm – that fae oasis of soul and mystery – is what nourishes the human spirit you see. When the War on Mystery began few realised that it could spread across the face of the Earth herself, commoditising sacred lakes, ‘mis-managing’ natural ‘resources’. At first, it only seemed concerned with our faerie tales and solstice gatherings within the old stone circles. Yet here we find ourselves, wailing and roaring in this, the age of Global Mourning.
So yes, write to politicians and take to the streets with placards and songs and fraternity, chant beside our children and their pets oh rising tide of humanity. Recycle and reuse, but most of all refuse: refuse to let them denude the Imaginal Realm. Defend whatever mystery you hold dear; build shrines to beauty and all that roars with magic to your eyes. Throw handfuls of stars with mad abandon at the hopelessness of the encroaching dark.
For this is not just a battle for what lays without, it was always also a fight for lays within. Indeed, as the old tales tell, the two were always one.
With Heart,
Jimi
