Love and the Great Unravelling

Who would have thought that white supremacy and genocide, violence and exploitation, military interventions and coup d’états, bottomless greed and self-centeredness, overpopulation and gross inequity, and degradation of the earth’s capacity to support life was not a good, long-term business model?

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I’m putting this out shortly after Trump’s reelection, when a lot of people will be seeking perspectives to help them navigate the demoralization and all of the dark assumptions filling personal and collective spaces. The fearful brain loves to run wild.… 

The most helpful perspectives are those that truly do offer perspective — that help us see the big picture and all the paradox it holds. You can tell by the name that the Great Unravelling is not a feel good perspective, but it connects us with an important part of reality. And we can fill out the picture right away by naming its more uplifting counterpart, the Great Turning. They go together, and both are terms popularized by Joanna Macy.

It has long been clear that what Macy called the “industrial growth society” is unsustainable and destructive, violent and counter to life, and as such, is destined to fail, to unravel. 

At the same time, there are vast numbers of people, more groups of people than ever, working in the spirit of regeneration. They are largely invisible in the mainstream media, but they are everywhere, people of all colors — healing themselves, challenging old paradigms, aligning with life, and manifesting the Great Turning. They carry the dreams and visions, and sometimes the literal seeds, of a livable future. They outlive dictators and have the earth and evolution on their side.

If you are among those regenerative workers and dreamers, as you probably are, take heart and celebrate the good company you’re in! Hold that as an indestructible aspect of human nature and the big picture, even as you bear witness to destruction and suffering.

The Great Unravelling

Destruction and suffering are also a part of the big picture, context for our lives and our healing. Like the wide range of regenerative activity in the world, there is also a wide range of actions and systems, wounded people and beliefs, that undermine life — degrade ecosystems, kill off species, perpetuate climate chaos, prioritize and profit from war and violence, etc, etc.

The Great Unravelling is the territory of existential threats and the failure of those in power to respond accordingly — a failure that is true not just for the major parties here in U.S., but for those in power around the world, with perhaps a handful of arguable exceptions. These are systemic failures, not attributable to “bad” people. 

It’s a certain worldview that created these systems. As always, I start with the illusion of separation as the original trauma, the original wound that took us out of alignment with life. It’s a disconnection that gives rise to an emptiness that, try as we might to fill it with comfort and possessions, will never be filled. I covered it in detail in Active Peace.

American capitalism grew quite naturally out of the myth of the frontier: endless opportunity and riches that, joined with white supremacy, justified the genocide of the Native Americans, the slavery of Africans, and the violent taking of over half of Mexico (there were those who wanted to take it all). The violence running throughout the American story is sickening and it’s clear that high ideals, when they were present, almost always gave way to political expediencies that benefited the elites (as they still do).

Once the frontier closed in the late nineteenth century, we simply continued the process, which had already begun, of looking for other lands, countries, and people to exploit.

Who would have thought that white supremacy and genocide, violence and exploitation, military interventions and coup d’états, bottomless greed and self-centeredness, overpopulation and gross inequity, and degradation of the earth’s capacity to support life was not a good, long-term business model?

The housing bubble and the recession of 2008, as depicted in the film The Big Short, offers a kind of microcosm where the unsustainability of the system (including the greed and toxicity) was clear to anyone willing to really look, as few were. The denial and short-sightedness was built in, and many eventually suffered as a result.

An even stronger example is the continuing degradation of earth’s life supporting capacities. It’s a heartbreaking example that shows the failure of the political system as a whole to grapple with reality and respond accordingly.

It seems pretty clear, that the failure to reckon with history—to learn from it and take responsibility for and repair the harm caused—is another important factor in the Great Unravelling. There can be no peace without justice, and no justice without self-reflection, responsibility taking, and reparations. 

The failure of these systems and the collapse of so much of civilization as we know it, is the logical conclusion of worldviews and narratives rooted in endless growth and creature comforts for the most privileged, at the expense of the earth and people deemed expendable. In the end, it is a moral and ethical failure on a grand scale. 

Love and the Great Adventure of Our Time

Healing the disconnection that lies at the root of the Great Unravelling is surely the great work and adventure of our time. Burrowing down into the roots of how to heal such deeply ingrained beliefs and insecurities, we find love as the clean burning fuel. Not as a sentimental and transient emotion, but as the very ground of being itself. As I wrote back in 2020 after quoting the cosmologist Brian Swimme:

The universe and everything of it—all of evolution and our every move too—can now be seen as a continuous unfolding rooted in love, in attraction and allurement.

And so, friends, let’s let the awareness of the Great Unravelling and the Great Turning keep us humble and connected. Like our growing awareness of the impacts and collective nature of trauma—our collective woundedness—the depth of our predicament can be a great equalizer, a way to appreciate the tenuous nature of our lives and the importance of finding what is ours to do.

Let’s let love hold us as we build our capacity to meet disconnection with connection by rising to the relationship challenge. This is the vast open field of possibility that lies before us, the last frontier.