peaknix

I have found that being a peaknik can cause substantial stress and angst. Some describe the process of transitioning into a post-carbon worldview as being similar to grieving.

Imagine grieving the death of one’s self.

I think its nothing less than this because it is grief of lost expectations around what one was supposed to become. It is also like grieving the death of loved ones and friends and pets.

If you let it, you can let it become like all that and who could possibly be prepared for that?

I went through that, sometimes several times a day. For me, it got tedious and patently unproductive.

But, since we are talking about emotions here, these cycles can start up again and again even though we know on the rational level that it is not productive.

Darn emotions, hate their primitive nature sometimes.

I have been helped tremendously though by the thoughts and wisdom from millennia of honest and simple ideas, descending from that wise dude, Buddha.

As I study Zen and practice zazen in my own imperfect way, I had an ephiphanous moment with respect to the angst cycle.

One of the core teachings of Buddhism (especially zen) is that attachment is what gives rise to suffering.

I learned a direct object lesson from these cycles of angst.

It is clearly all about attachment to energy, to a consumptive way of life into which I was born and had no choice but to live in, to a supposed unbroken future of limitless opportunity (the American Dream [sic]), to just about anything in my immediate environment.

While not a fundamental enlightenment, my recognition that my pain and suffering was a direct result of attachment (and growing attachment to the attachment, discursively spiraling away) I felt thunderheads clear from my brow.

I felt calm.

I felt like I could step outside the panic, away from the attachment, if only for a moment. As Michael Mc Alister of the zen group Infinite Smile says “create some space”.

I, again, accepted that this process (of mindful transitioning) is absolutely only redeemed if I am able to live in the moment and not in a recursive fear of the future and pinning for the past.

After this experience, I have been thinking about how this message, that attachment to consumption is at the core of our delusion and illusion, could be brought to others in an experiential way.

Buddha’s message has been out there for 2,600 years but it is foreign and perhaps closed off to so many in the developed world.

I looked into the concept of eco-buddhism and found a lot of semantic dithering that didn’t do any justice at all to another core concept in buddhism – talk and words are all just abstract distractions.
Its a mystery to me really, how this may help others. I will start with my family and help them understand the whole attachment-suffering dynamic.

I read blogs from christians who are doing their own survival transition things and I feel so very sorry for them. They are choosing to descend into a dogmatic genuflective and obsessive theocracy that re-asserts man’s primacy through the christian god who gave man dominion.

Just so much more strip mall church rationalizations and a whole lot of destructive attachment.

They are locked into it and not likely to see the dangers.

We will all find our own ways.

I prefer to move forward, grow my food, build my earthen oven, build my root cellar, all absolutely in the moment, enjoying the building and using in the now instead of losing myself into the worries about the future.

Needless to say, that will not be easy!

Writing here is one way to get it out, purge it in a way, process, and perhaps then to leave it at the door, if for a while.