The feeling I get when I listen to the news, talk to the person on the street, sit with the patient in the hospital, or scan my Facebook feed is that the world (and especially) our country is unraveling. Things seem to be falling apart. The innocent are being abused or killed, the rich are gaining power, politicians are lying, bullying, and acting like adolescents. I hear people angry, afraid, confused as to what can even be done, and lines being drawn that divide and finger-point. Injustice! Outrage! How dare they! Look at what they’ve done now! Unbelievable! Give them a voice! Don’t stand for this! Encapsulated in a meme, an Instagram photo, or a short (or long…) Facebook post people express their immediate emotions and offer seeming solutions to the “twitter-sphere.”

But what good does it do? What last difference will be made? How does this make us better people or better communities or a more conscious humanity?

Somewhat sychronistically, I started a book by Michael Meade this weekend, The World Behind the World: Living at the Ends of Time, in which he writes of a more soulful and lasting vision for change and becoming in the midst of what seems like the ends of time. The book feels almost like scripture for our current time of turmoil, perhaps even more relevant now than when he wrote it in 2008.

Meade notes that when things get crazy and it seems the world is coming down around us, rather than getting linear, logical, uproarious, and panicked, we ought to slow down. It does us well to connect to the Old Soul and the Eternal Child within ourselves, finding groundedness, connecting to the vision and creativity that is as ancient as the world upon which we live. In the truthfulness of the old stories, we develop a character that is “mythological, psychological, and ultimately cosmological.” (Meade, 12)

I believe wholeheartedly that this is the way forward. The earth has always been ending… and beginning… and ending and beginning.“Create, maintain, and destroy goes the song of life as it takes three to do the tango of existence. Nature and culture both dance to those steps and share in those eternal motions.” (Meade, 22) For me, it is not all the internal emotional and psychological energy devoted to reading, posting, reposting, and rebuking each other in the news or on Facebook all day that is going to make a difference in the world. The things that are lasting are the ancient ways of the earth: connecting to the life around us (both human and more-than-human), mentoring and eldering the younger generations, living our purpose and calling fully, and re-imagining the present and empathic art of face-to-face conversation. All of Life is spirituality. We exist in the present within the arc of the past and the future, and it is only as we see our work and our connections in the midst of this “great cloud” that is generations before and generations afterwards, that we will live into and create a more conscious and evolved society.

So get to work, people. Find younger generations beyond your own children and join with their parents to teach them about the earth and about value, about life and death, about intention and purpose. Show them lives lived fulfilling calling. Enough wasting time griping, blaming, and fearing. These things are not new. Nothing is new and neither will be the solution.