The disconnection in time is easy – I haven’t recorded any thoughts for a long time, mainly because I’ve been working on my latest – and last – deck, the Oracle of the Future.
I’ve already explained a couple of times why it’s my last deck, but the easiest explanation is that I have said everything I want to say, at least in deck form. Now I’ll return to my original art, one-off oils that will say what *they* want to say, and from which I can learn.
So what about the disconnection in space?
I wondered about this, towards the end of the creation of Oracle of the Future. Things seem pretty bad on earth at the moment – wildfires, extreme weather (particularly heat), the rising of the oceans, refugees, future pandemics, the enormous loss of species which is probably the 6th mass extinction, artificial intelligence being peddled by the corporates as the latest best thing that will save us from ourselves (yeah, right). And of course, the corporates themselves, who have caused most of these disastrous global effects.
The more I read, the more concerned I became about the future. But one thing I read stuck with me – that, by concentrating on pessimism, we lose the possibility of a more optimistic future. I then realised that sometimes, when things look really awful, something I might call Grace appears to change things. It can’t be depended upon, any more than the numinous, or the miraculous, or love. Personally I don’t think humanity deserves to be saved, but the Earth is different. Think about the beauty of dawn, the new spring leaves, or the still waters of a lake. The ocean. A newborn’s eyes… I could go on forever. But what we need to do is change our emphasis on doom, and change it to gratitude for what we have had in the past. The baby-boomers (including myself, of course) have had the best of times – prosperity, good medical care, comfort, the ability to steer our own lives – more or less. The generations that follow – Gen-Z and younger – will struggle to find new ways of surviving, though (given their observed abilities), they’ll have a very different approach than the old patriarchal ‘let’s exploit and let Earth be damned’.
Science talks about a time-space shift being the result of spinning black holes or other strange phenomena, but this is very different to the idea of Grace which is, of course, totally woo-woo and worthy of being ignored by all the logical thinking (men) in the universe. I have no proof, no logic that could try to explain this, nothing at all except, perhaps, Love. Nor do I care if you believe me – in fact, you probably won’t, but that’s not my problem.