How to Keep Going by Knowing the Apocalypse is Now: a Lesson From the Pig Farm
“Yet one thing I fight for, tooth and nail, all the time. And that is my bit of inward peace, where I am at one with myself.”
– D.H. Lawrence, “What Would You Fight For?”
“We’ve been hearing from shamanic healers for decades about “connecting to spirit,” but their message sidesteps industrial capitalism… and open, public, radical changes flowing from spiritual work.”
– Dave Hanson, Shamanism, Anarchy & the End of the World, Fifth Estate (2008)
…the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in…The lower classes smell.
– George Orwell, Wigan Pier
What D.H. Lawrence fought for, we should all fight for. Nothing is more wanting today, a time when strength is equated with “manly” might and militarism, than individuals who fiercely protect the inner flame of their genius, who by their example can imply to the rest of us that we should all be so unmanly as to have each his own deeply experienced truth deemed worth fighting for. D.H., unlike so many contemporary bourgeois practitioners of eastern and indigenous spiritual practices, knew that the equanimity necessary to develop character, integrity, individuality, vision and strength is not an entitlement, but a fight. Though many are the calls since the 60’s to achieve inner serenity and clarity of mind – which sound pretty attractive to the average stressed and fearful man or woman today, few and strange to the ear are calls to be here now in the catastrophic human reality – with its necessary political struggle – an act of human presencewe should be fighting for, not fleeing from.
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