Small Is Big

The Summer Solstice was last week, the tide of the year turning. I finished my book, sent it out to beta readers, and sent query letters to a few agents.

I woke up this morning with the question: What’s next? (Besides cleaning my house and catching up on everything that didn’t get done as I finished my book.) Watching the windy, rainy day outside, I accept not having an answer to that question. 

I watch for an impulse, any hint of what I want to focus on next. I think of one of my favorite aphorisms: Small Is Big… Is there even a tiny nudge to move me somewhere interesting? Nope. So I do what I always do each morning when I tuck up on my little blue couch with my cup of tea: I open my laptop. 

The webpage that’s open has Rick Lewis’s comment on Chao Lam’s essay called Urban Safari from his newsletter called Next Small Things. So I read the essay. It’s one of those micro-synchronicities that happen all the time if you notice them. 

I read the essay, and Chao’s text is lighting up my own associative web, that virtual network of memory and imagination each of us carries in our extraconscious minds. Chao was participating in “a month-long “pop-up village” called Edge Esmeralda for people who believe the future can be better and are actively working to make it happen.”

Fifty years ago, I read a book about how the ‘Apocalypse’ was coming (as predicted by non-physical beings and the Mayan calendar, due on May 5th, 2000).  The book described a community that was forming to develop a new civilization that would be a ‘peace corp’ after the apocalypse when only 20 percent of humanity remained. The community had been started in the early 1960’s. I decided I wanted to move there, and did a few years later, which turned out to be quite an adventure, a story for another time. 

Living with that suggestion that the world as we know it could be mostly destroyed in the space of a few weeks, I committed myself to being part of the recovery process. I had no idea at the time that years later I would become a mental health counselor, specializing for the first decade in working with people who were chronically suicidal and self-harming, and then working with all kinds of trauma. 

The Apocalypse described in that book didn’t happen, of course, though there was quite a global scramble around Y2K. In 1998, the FBI was going around to banks to instruct them on how to repair their computer systems. I heard from a friend’s sister’s husband who managed a bank that the two FBI agents he talked to told him to “Buy gold (coins not bars) and guns, stockpile food, and get a hand-pump for your well.” On New Years Eve, 2000, we watched nation after nation celebrate as their clocks and computers sailed accurately through the date change. 

In this century, we’ve seen an uptick in the number of wars; we’ve had several significant crises economically and politically around the globe, and a pandemic causing untold loss and suffering. These challenges also generate phenomenal creative activity in every sector of human life that will unfold over many decades. I sense that versions of ‘apocalypse’ are now more of a local phenomenon on the planet. But on every scale imaginable, each of us lives through destruction and recovery throughout our lives, whether bombs and tanks are involved or not. And each of us can grow wiser and more capable in the process, learning to love and enjoy our lives. Otherwise, what’s the point?

My commitment to community is firm, in the town where I live and virtually through Write Hearted and Substack. I love the Edge Esmerelda vision organized by people who want to create temporary urban communities that serve creative community development. Their plans are seeded with AI and tech visions, health and longevity views, and a bunch of stuff I can barely imagine. They’re starting small, waiting to see what happens next. 

Me too. My book is finished, and I’m writing here on Substack to claim this as my community. I’m loving each day wandering around and reading the postings and notes my neighbors contribute, inspiring me with their stories, their musings, their insights and outsights. My impulse is to participate, to comment and applaud, to write my own offerings, to hold space for all of us to grow and shape our culture. A little bit at a time. Small is big. 

Thanks to Linda Kaun, Kathy Ayers and Rick Lewis for their encouragement!