by William Skink

When I wrote  yesterday’s post about picking your battles, I was implying that there are bigger, more important battles to be waged.  But are those EXTERNAL battles?

For me, right now, the answer is a big NO, and I got some synchronistic confirmation of that as I listened to John Michael Greer on the Higherside Chat podcast, which you can listen to here.

The gist of the first fifteen minutes is an incredibly simple message:  instead of choosing to focus energy on the GREAT EVILS of the EVIL EMPIRE, choose instead to focus on the things you have the power to change in your own personal life.  If you do that, Greer says, you will empower yourself and that empowerment is a more effective strike against the EVIL EMPIRE than giving that great beast your undivided attention.

While the message may be simple, putting it into practice is not.

On September 5th I marked 60 days without a drink of alcohol.  After years of self-medicating with wine guzzling I decided I had had enough of my chemical dependency to booze.  

Physically, I’ve lost 40 pounds and have seen other positive impacts, health wise.  Emotionally, I’m a bit of a wreck.  So Greer’s words came at an opportune time for me to hear them.

When you think about Greer’s assertion that (I’m paraphrasing here) our greatest impact as individuals is within our small circles of friends and family in our local communities, the social devastation wrought by pandemic mitigation efforts, and the divisiveness of our toxic political duopoly, starts taking on larger, more sinister dimensions.

I don’t regret what it’s taken for me to get to this point of choosing to make changes in my personal life.  All the research I’ve done into the darker elements trying to control and direct our lives, and the personal cost I’ve endured trying to effect positive at the local level with my non-profit work, has gotten me to this point of realizing that the stakes are not just material survival for humans on a lonely planet, but the spiritual survival of the human project in an electric universe more alive than the dark forces would have us believe.

In order to push any life-affirming messages above the incessant mantra of powerlessness and hopelessness perpetrated by the death cult’s agents of empire, a messenger needs a healthy foundation from which to communicate. 

I’m working on mine one day at a time.

Stay tuned…