"Collapse," Apocalypse, Suicide Notes, Pain, Meaning

I got caught in a rabbit hole of inspiration, depression, truth, and death on Friday.

It started during the day at work when my co-worker suggested I watch the documentary, "Collapse." I watched it Friday night and then started tweeting about Michael C. Ruppert, the activist/whistle-blower/author, speaking throughout the movie.

The Twitter world told me he was dead. I searched how Michael C. Ruppert died.

The interwebs told me he shot himself only a few weeks ago (13 April 2014). He left two suicide notes. Ruppert's attorney left a comment: "He absorbed the pain of the world on a daily basis until he could not take it any longer."

I also found out Vice Media, Inc made a special series about him, "Apocalypse, Man." The first two minutes highlight the tension and the pain that Ruppert was living with. "I'm tired. I'm ready to die," said Ruppert. Right after that comment, a teary-eyed Ruppert expressed his love for this broken, dying world. Tension. Pain. Grief.

Finally, I listened to the radio show that Michael C. Ruppert recorded shortly before killing himself. Twenty-two minutes into his show, after giving shout outs to those who have been "doing the work," fighting for the world and acknowledging climate change and social collapse, Ruppert shared the song, "Calling All Angels," by Jane Siberry and KD Lang. (Listen to it, you won't be disappointed.) Such weight in the lyrics and sounds.

What hits me hardest is how worn down Ruppert must have been. I caught glimpses of his despair throughout his videos/radio show. There were scenes of him breaking down, of his hopelessness coming through. Ruppert also said that he moved to Colorado "to die or to commit suicide."

I try to imagine 35 years as an activist, whistle-blower, author and truth-seeker. I'm not even 30 yet and feel isolated and tired. In the "Apocalypse, Man" series, Ruppert commented on how he found a community of support. "I'm so not alone anymore," he said. However, we're all ultimately alone. As much as we can grieve for the state of the world in community, we wake up and fall asleep in our heads. If we can't work through our own feelings, a community won't be much help. We have to do our individual grief work to be able to process such heavy, overwhelming feelings.

Ruppert's friend, Carolyn Baker, speaks of the importance of inner work and of finding peace and love. There's no doubt in my mind that Ruppert had to have done serious inner work over his years of activism. What is heart-breaking is that it wasn't enough. Grief and despair wear you down, break you down. How can we learn to sustain ourselves in a world that is constantly compounding bad news?

How can I find meaning in my present life knowing that we're committed to global climate change, to social change, to suffering? This is the question I'm researching and writing about for my thesis. Seems so important, but it requires sitting with tremendous tension and few answers.

My thesis chair tells me to sit with the tension, to find answers in the process.

Wish me luck.

Final thought: "An entirely new level of human consciousness is needed right now, or we're all dead." Michael C. Ruppert

Hate and Death.

"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." 

Why would we rejoice that someone is dead? Did that man not have a mother or a father? Sisters or brothers? Nieces and nephews? Did he not feel pain or happiness or love? Was he not human? Was he not alive?

I understand that he did terrible things to our people. I understand that he took the lives of others. Is it our place to kill him because he killed citizens of our country? How is it right that the punishment for murder is death? Who are we to rejoice that one more life is gone? Why don't we understand, yet, that hate breeds hate. As MLK Jr. says, "Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." So many people are "promoting" world peace, but when it comes down to it, they're happy that our enemy is dead. Where's the world peace if we just continually perpetuate the cycle of hate?

It's okay to be angry, outraged, livid because of his ruthless choices. I disagree with our actions when we decide who can live and who will die. That's not "justice" as it's written in the laws. In the end, as Gandhi said, "an eye for an eye leaves us all blind."

Note: So the quote ISNT entirely by MLK Jr. If you're focusing on WHO said those words and not what the words MEAN, you've missed the entire point. But check out this link:

www.good.is/post/that-martin-luther-king-quote-is-fake-use-these-instead/?utm_source=supr

Loss: As Viewed by Gail Caldwell (And Me)

Shortly after Christmas, I read Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell. A few months earlier, I had come across the book in a small book store in the outer banks of North Carolina. It was too expensive for me to buy at the time, but I sat down and read about 30 pages, instantly falling in love. I'm drawn to anything that attempts to express grief and/or loss as I experienced, but couldn't articulate, it/them.

You can't imagine the incomparable pain, the hopelessness, the relentless longing for what's lost, unless you've personally had someone very close pass away. You want the world to stop, because your world has stopped. But it doesn't, it keeps going, and it expects you to keep moving forward too.

Gail Caldwell expresses this really well:

"Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead."

I could easily relate to the next two quotes:

"Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

"The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it."
 — Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

Not only do you want your entire world to stop, but you don't want it to ever start up again. If you feel how I felt (and I'm assuming Caldwell felt), it seems almost like a betrayal to move on and continue your life. As long as you're feeling that excruciating pain, the loved one is still an active part of who you are, a part of your life. The pain serves as a constant, stinging reminder that you haven't forgotten about them, you haven't started moving forward. But, recovery manages to sneak in no matter how hard you fight it. Hope slips in and at first it feels like you're violating your lost loved one. Just the thought of moving forward while loved one can't is an amazingly difficult concept to fathom. Nonetheless, hope exists so your world continues forward, even if it seems like that's the last thing you want. You'd otherwise stay stagnant, overwhelmed, and overcome....(which is tempting but unrealistic).

"Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

So, while we can never stop or really even prevent death (because inevitably everyone will die), we can find some comfort in who our loved one was to us. We can share how that person helped us become who we are and how beautiful that person was. "Memory was all that eternal life really meant"... and that person lives on through our memories of them and our outward expression of said memories. In the end, that's all we really can hold on to.

"I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)

"It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection."
— Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)  

Effects and Dolphins.

We are still feeling the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill and that happened in 1989..... How long are we going to feel the effects from the BP oil disaster?


And, it kills me that baby dolphins are washing up on shore, dead. 24 dead babies..... and they said more are likely to appear.... Uggghhh.

What are we doing to this planet? When will we realize that money does not buy life, health, or happiness?

Religion

“Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.”

Forrest Church

One of the saddest things I've ever seen.

Please take five minutes to watch this video. Hopefully, we'll start to think about what we're doing to the natural world.


.http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/mammals/polar_bear/starving_bears_video.html