There Are Always Multiple Stories

Holding them in parallel requires giving yourself some mental breathing room

Hello friends.

This painting, made about 1560, was long attributed to Peter Breughel the Elder, part of the Dutch Renaissance (although that attribution has been questioned).

A peasant is behind the plow in the foreground, and in the background on the right you can see one tiny leg and a splash, which is all that is left of Icarus after flying too close to the sun.

You might also have read the poem about this painting by W. H. Auden, which begins:

Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;

This is some of us these days, eating, opening windows, lingering over coffee on the patio, putting on sunscreen… and sometimes stopping to scream at each other CAN’T YOU SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING!

This painting is secretly surrealist; the peasant and the ships are in contemporary style, but Icarus, of course, is thousands of years older. Time, space and context are collapsed, just as they are in the online age, which puts us in splashing distance of so many horrors and miracles at every moment, in a way that can be crazy-making.

Speaking of escaping time and space, Joanna Macy is now everywhere. The Times, in its obituary, called her “a pioneer in facing the emotional stress caused by climate change, who wrote books and led workshops on what became known as eco-despair or eco-anxiety.”

She is in the hearts of the thousands of people around the world who have been moved by her wisdom.

Of all her teachings that have shaken and rebuilt my world, and brought me through—not past, but into and then out of—the darkest depths of despair, one of the most profound and useful to me has been the story of the three stories.

As she put it in our podcast last year:

There are three stories that we can choose from because they are actually happening now in our world.

The big drama that we're in consists of these three stories and how we respond to them, how we choose to recognize them.

These are the three stories.

Business As Usual. What Joanna calls the industrial growth society. The stock market. Bottles of Coca-Cola at the gas station. Amazon Prime. Jobs numbers. Pay your taxes. Billionaires in space. Be realistic. What’s the bottom line?

The Great Unraveling. Polycrisis. Extinctions, authoritarianism, fascism, heat waves, fires, floods, refugee crises, pandemics, racial violence, famine and war. Ecological and social unraveling exacerbating one another.

The Great Turning The global movement of people responding to, mitigating, adapting, building and envisioning a more just and life-sustaining way of living together. Solar power. Mutual aid. Restorative justice. Regenerative agriculture. AIDS vaccines. Direct action. Affordable housing. Music. Art. Watching the sunset while you eat a popsicle.

When we lay these stories out, I know where my mind goes: What will win? Is it enough?

I will be safer, says anxiety brain, if I keep my eye on the unraveling and understand, every minute on the minute, just exactly what is crumbling.

I will feel safer, says exhausted brain, if I shut everything out, put a podcast in my ears, get in an Uber, open a can of Pringles.

Sometimes when I browse social media it feels like 70% of the “dialogue” is just people arguing “It’s Story #2!” “No, you fool, it’s Story #1!”

But Macy, Auden, and Breughel remind us of two things.

This genre of painting, an elevated perspective landscape, is called a “world landscape,” Weltlandschaft. The landscape is vast. It contains all of it. All at once. All are actually happening now. No story is more real than any other.

So I don’t have to waste energy predicting what will win. Much less attacking people who happen to be looking at a different part of the landscape than me.

Or worse, actively trashing my own little moments of joy because somewhere else people are suffering.

What is my energy for? It’s for recognizing and for choosing.

We choose what story we want to be a part of. We choose our response. We choose how we respond to the unraveling, how we resist business as usual, and how to recognize the Great Turning, to feed it and give it our energy.

the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I seek calm in following my charted course, even as I take in the world-landscape view.

Some links
My friend Mushon Zer-Aviv of A Land For All had a sad, gorgeous essay in the New York Times. (gift link)

Satyam, the peace house on the West Bank I visited in March, is holding a hunger strike for Gaza.

Vote for Climate Mental Health Network’s panels at SXSW Edu! Voting is open now.