One planet, one health. Humanity as one planetary citizen among millions, all equally deserving to be here and to thrive. We can choose to re-create ourselves as a modest, economically and demographically downscaled component of a biodiverse and rewilded Earth. An ecological civilization will accomplish far more… 

Eileen Crist

Descent

Tuesday afternoon, day 11, and a wave of dizziness hits me, steamrollers up behind me, wallops me over the back of my head repeatedly and I’m taking myself down to the floor again. Wow. I had managed a small conversation with a friend in the morning, cut it short after 20 minutes, and spent two hours taking it easy in recovery. Or so I thought. There was no recovery to speak of and by one or two in the afternoon I’m stretched out flat, on my back or front, staring at the carpet or ceiling, doing nothing more. 

With this, pretty much from the start of these symptoms on day 1 after the vax, comes an adrenaline-endorphin rush through my body. If you’ve ever run down a steep hill on a rock trail or, psyched yourself into a plunging ski-line drop down a deeply-powdered snowy couloir, you’ll know the feeling as you get to the bottom and stop. It’s like my-your-our bodies are still catching up with us. We’ve run and plunged ahead of our skin and blood which rushes back into our bodies, flowing through us in waves. It is quite delightful in those outdoor contexts. 

Delight is not really associated with this feeling after eleven days. The rush moves through me on the floor and standing. It accentuates my loss of balance and dizziness. It retards my already very limited ability to concentrate and I can feel it taking over after even a short period of reading or talking. I reduce what I am doing even more to try and manage it down, hoping this limits the cycle of feeling feverish, to chills and head-stomach-ache too. In some clearer minutes I have on the floor, I haul my computer down to and email Alex, my doctor. My list of symptoms and severity runs across multiple short-paragraph dot points.

I am not going to write such a list for our world, humanity, all sentient species and planetary meta-crises. Such lists are easy to find. Just like my list of personal physical impacts, when written these are a little abstract. In part they have to be. We are summarising a significant amount of interconnected complexity even if that list is just focused on one aspect of it—say, a human body, global warming or racism. 

Extenuating situations

However, our bodies, planetary-weirding, bigotry and more are deeply interconnected. As my beloved gently puts it to me—as I’m lying here we’re texting and talking when we can, separated by pandemic rules on different continents—so many people are experiencing strange and inexplicable ailments. She and I don’t believe these are disconnected. Our extenuating circumstances are, if you like, the very conditions we’re able to correct—fossil fuel consumption, biodiversity destruction, income and race radical-inequity and more.

My doctor emails back. It is time to visit his surgery for the first time.

As Ken Wilber put it in his beautiful and heart-wrenching book, Grace and grit, when you or a loved one is sick start with the physical, the concrete. If there’s a diagnosable physical cause for our ailments—global or personal—let’s fix it. Personal, do I have some strange and pretty unlikely coincidental infection? Global, in addressing inequity let’s start with at least some accountability. The guilty verdict for murderer Derek Chauvin is a step towards justice (see part 1>).

Pursuing, respectively, a western medical diagnosis or criminal trial, is not an act of denial. However, the more subtle and very-subtle-entangled influences are important too. Let’s hold them in our minds while we are excluding or treating the diagnosable physical stuff.

Drive to another world

It is the next morning and I’m feeling quite fragile. I drive over to the doctor’s surgery. That’s unusual for me, I would usually far rather cycle the eight miles/thirteen kilometres and something of a measure of how unwell I’m feeling. 

Alex ushers me in—I meet his medical students too on placement, Fianna and Moireach—and  we set off into checks. Yes, my balance is off. No, my temperature  is normal at the moment. Ouch, my blood pressure is some 50% higher than what I’d usually get. Etc. And then I am somewhere else.

This group of people are exciting, wonderfully interesting, I’m deeply engaged with them and them with me. We’re reaching for something important, co-creating something wonderful and… I shift. I don’t come ‘back’. Experiences like these for me—full technicolour alternative realities—take me to a somewhat new track. It’s like I was following a different set of railway lines on a parallel course to our normal world and my life. Then, stepping out of that place I’m never fully ‘back’ and instead on a merged course, one part of me always in that new and different world.

Hold steady

Alex has his hand on my shoulder supporting me. I’ve been out, passed out, for 15 seconds. My alternative world feels far longer than that.

Then I do it again, pass out. This time for around a minute they say. This time the full technicolor alternative world is present again but my recollection of it is less nuanced, less available to me when I come around again. 

Fianna, Alex and Moireach are all holding me steady. They help me to the medical bed in the next room and I stay there for the next 3 hours with Fianna and Moireach spelling each other to keep an eye on me. We chat, a little. It is quite draining and my words come slowly. While I feel like we’ve been talking the whole time I realise later that two small topics have covered nothing like the hours—time slips again.

Paradoxical sat navs

All around me I see humanity doing this. We are co-creating thriving alternatives, our next economies and contributing to the large-scale systems-change which answers our meta crises. At the same time, these activities can feel like a disconnected and connected bubble—I feel vitally and deeply in collaboration with people all around the world and in my communities while it seems like I am wading through sinking-sands, molasses and treacle all at the same time.

If that sounds paradoxical and difficult it certainly is. Yet, as Martin Shaw recently put it, “paradox and uncertainty can’t be dismissed out of hand. They are the identifying brands of now, our hashtags, our tweets, our sat navs into the murk of consequence.” At the same time there is much we can do to transcend those inherent limitations especially through what we see, how we make sense of it and our connections. For example see Shamanic sensemaking http://be-benevolution.com/2020/08/31/shamanic-sensemaking/

However, this murk is inherent with what we do. Our step, our paradigm shift if you like is to embrace it all while continuing to act. That’s a both-and just as my parallel worlds are now. I’ve stepped, in my conscious-unconscious dreamstates into another place. On ‘returning’ I remain, at least partly, in both places.

It is late afternoon. By the time the ambulance arrives, to take me to the hospital an hour and a half away, I can walk myself up its steps.

Read on for part 4> Boom, crash, bounce?? Here>