This excerpt is from the article written by Mary on October, 2024, The Flight from Left To Right & the Fight for Charles Eisenstein’s “beautiful world”.

“Looking past has become an art, an ability embedded into our social media-soaked culture. We look past Trump’s environmental record, we look past Biden’s serial vetoing of a UN ceasefire, we look past the inconvenient truths and inequities our modern lives are built and sustained on. We fear guilt, we fear responsibility, we fear knowing too much. We fear facing into reality, disrupting our own fragile equilibrium…We fear overwhelm.

The challenges we face today are unprecedented, deeply entangled. But fears, if ignored, tend to dull us intellectually, spiritually. They dull our emotional intelligence, our conscience and capacity for empathy and intuition. Engulfed by powerful forces of ‘normalisation’, we are in a fight, not one confined to the values or political views of the left or right, but for our souls and that of our culture. What one day is morally repugnant, the next becomes normal. “Sane-washing” is just the latest iteration of evidence that we are losing our ability to make distinctions, let alone nuanced distinctions”.

From conversations I (Mary) have had, it seems we all struggle to some degree to balance facing reality, allowing the truth to touch us, and yet not become overwhelmed and lose touch with an inner optimism/love of Life, and the potential that humanity holds. For myself, it’s been deep relationships and engagement, refuge in Nature, and a long-time meditation practice, that are my go-to sources of nourishment in the face of overwhelm or despair. I am curious how others see and are responding to this predicament?