News from Jules | 08.16.2022 | This Deep Longing

Where I’m at right now—living at a retreat center in the woods—is the cumulative result of choices I made seven years ago at the beginning of the second cycle of my next Saturn Return. At 33, I was taking stock of my life.

I was three years into self-employment to give myself a flexible and lucrative day job to fund my calling to write. Alas, I was not making much progress on writing or financial freedom for that matter, such as paying off my undergraduate and graduate school loans. I needed a gamechanger. So, at the start of 2016, I committed to a year of Buy Nothing.

This commitment evolved into four years of buying nothing and deeply examining my relationships with money, stuff, resources and other humans—ultimately how I was relating to the world.

Or how I wasn’t.

Because I was transacting, not relating.

The more I examined our human-constructed world, the more I found myself gravitating back to nature. Cycling around town turned into more hiking on the weekends and camping in the summer and fall. I wanted even more time further in nature, so I started backpacking which led to an interest in mountaineering.

I understood Craig Foster’s fascination with the indigenous trackers in southern Africa he described in the documentary about his relationship with My Octopus Teacher: “They just were inside of the natural world and I could feel I was outside. I had this deep longing to be inside that world.”

At the same time, I became close friends with people working in sustainability and ecology, so I started really thinking and talking about our human impact on a regular basis.

Reading my favorite author Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Unsheltered in 2019 soon after it came out, I could deeply relate to the contemporary themes of housing and financial insecurity, political upheaval, and humanity’s discord with nature. It was confusingly real for fiction and struck a deep chord.

Moved more by stories than statistics, I started watching more documentaries and reading more books to understand the “climate change problem.” Some of my favorites are listed in the postscript.

By the end of 2019, I paid off all of my student loans—with the generous help of my family—and came into 2020 with a huge sense of relief and possibility.

And then the world shut down.

Like so many others, my main way of coping with the COVID-19 Pandemic was to get outside. I slept more nights under the open sky than ever before. It was there in the vast, everchanging, and thus impermanent, ecosystem that things still made sense.

I could feel drips of groundwater running through the cool, decomposing topsoil as I sat beneath the massive roots of a 600-year-old Giant Sequoia. I watched wave after wave crash into tidepools with crabs crawling over anemones and barnacles anchored to rocks. The longer I sat and watched the natural world simply existing, the one thing in the constantly rebalancing system that didn’t make sense was us, humans.

What was our purpose, our contribution? Why were we necessary? Couldn’t the planet exist without us? Could it exist with us?

The deeper I considered these questions and the longer the pandemic persisted, the harder it was to be in the city. I noticed that I couldn’t walk around with my feet on the earth unless I was in a yard or park. I noticed the excess of food and stuff in the grocery stores even as whole aisles were empty. I noticed more and more trash accumulating on the streets. It all felt so unnatural.

Before I even knew it was a thing, I was feeling “climate anxiety.”

The quiet and stillness of lockdown brought all of this understanding and experiences to a head for me. I learned “to stand in the clear light of day…unsheltered,” as Kingsolver wrote. The truth felt blunt but clear.

We don’t have a climate change “problem.” It is a crisis. It is the crisis.

“The climate provisions in the bill that the Senate passed this weekend…will lead to a sharp reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, experts say, and help address arguably the world’s most pressing crisis,” stated The New York Times’ The Morning email digest on Aug. 9, 2022.

The crisis of my lifetime.

Even though humans started paving this road with the Industrial Revolution in the 1820s, it’s our excessive driving on it since the 1980s that has accelerated our precarious reality today.

I feel embarrassed it’s taken so long for me to figure this out. But, I’m finally here now. Gratefully, I feel more aligned to our three missions in life—to live in harmony with nature*, with other humans, and with our own nature—than ever before.

Living at a retreat center in the woods I walk earthen paths, I consume little, I throw away less. I’m trying to pay off my spiritual debt to the planet one step at a time.

According to Wikipedia, with one’s first Saturn Return, a person leaves youth behind and enters adulthood whereas, with the second return one enters maturity throughout years 27-54 approximately.

I constantly find myself wondering how to put nature and other humans first—if I’m not first staying true to myself.

Which further begs the question that everyone has been asking: “Why are you here?”

May you take a step toward a deep longing this week.

Love,

Jules

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P.S. Here are enlightening and inspiring resources that I highly recommend:

Read or Listen: Flight Behavior, Unsheltered, Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change, The Overstory, Braiding Sweetgrass, Swell, The Sentence, Yes! Magazine

Watch: Tawai, Call of the Forest, A Life on Our Planet, My Octopus Teacher, Mile Mile & a Half, The Unruly Mystic, I am Greta

Listen: On Being podcast episode: A Wild Love for the World with Joanna Macy, How to Save a Planet podcast episode: Is Your Carbon Footprint BS?