I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
- T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
So closes the epic of T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with the inevitable return from whence we all came, nature. It is a poem that Veteran Rites Co-Founder Larry Hobbs, myself, and elder guide Trebbe Johnson hold close to the chest. Larry once wrote his master’s thesis on it in an attempt to “diagnose” ole Alfred, and in another life I had “we have lingered in chambers by the sea” spray painted on my dorm room ceiling as a knuckleheaded wannabe undergraduate poet at Marquette before I enlisted and headed to Iraq. I asked him what the thesis concluded, and in that Larry laugh, he said, “he’s screwed, and we all are to unless we shift to a new paradigm in our thinking.”
As a wildlife bioligist, explorer, recovering therapist, photographer, storyteller, and seasoned example of day to day sobriety, he had lived many lifetimes and could have written many books on humanity. At his initiation into modern day rites of passage with Stephen Foster and Meredith Little at The School of Lost Borders, he dove into direct experience into the “Big Lie” that we are anything but nature, and has since guided and mentored hundreds of souls across the threshold into their direct experience with that truth, with the prayer that when we meet our true self and each other from the deepest parts of our being, as nature, we might actually begin to return to right relationship with the earth, with each other, and all species.
At the core of the Rite of Return for Veterans is this initiatory return to our True Self, Purpose, and Belonging with all our imperfect, wounded, wild, vulnerable, paradoxical, and sticky parts included.
As we say, “you’re not broke when you come and you’re not fixed when you leave.”
You are whole, living into the eternal dance of bringing the undernourished parts of yourself into balance, just like earth.
But in order to step into who you’ve always been but are not yet, you have to claim that wholeness and face the old stories, ways of being, and ungrieved grief that no longer serve.
When you do courageously show up for the death and rebirth of your true self, magic happens.
We can’t explain it.
You are shifted into a new paradigm you never thought possible.
Co-Founder Larry Hobbs and VR Rite of Passage Guide Susan Hobbs.
Now, after decades of study and sweat, Larry and his “Wizards of Climate Change,” Charles Fowler, and Megan Rodden, have published a work that calls on us into a new paradigm shift of how to show up for earth, The Wizards of Climate Change: How Can Technology Serve Hope and Justice? Holism in Dealing with Global Problems.
To the extent that we humans believe that we can solve our species-level problems with technology, we remain on the path to self-destruction. But there is an alternative; we can see other species like ours as empirical examples of how to be a species—how to participate in ultimate reality. This article exemplifies how holistic information provided systemically by other species can be used. Such information reveals the magnitude of humanity’s challenges and what is needed to address the myriad interrelated global problems, including climate change. Such systemic thinking involves a shift from conceptually extracting things from their context to seeing everything embedded in its context.
This scientific and spiritual work was too controversial for mainstream scientific publications, as it calls us to to see the world and other species in ways that stretch our understanding of ourselves beyond our comfort zone. So thank you Zygon, for your courage to show up for the new paradigm of hope.
So let us go then, you and I, and listen to Larry’s Love Song to Wholeness and Nature.
And as he would say, “Don’t Forget to Have a Good Time!”
