Grianstad an tSamhraidh: Lessons from the Light and Darkness

On ancient megaliths, disconnection from Nature, activism and the lessons from the light in dark times.

Hello friends, old and new. Today is the summer solstice or in Irish, Grianstad an tSamhraidh.

Photo by Ankit Sood on Unsplash

Due to sickness, I took an unplanned break from posting that lasted far longer than I expected, but not from writing itself - I'll tell you all about it soon. I'm slowly trying to catch up with everyone and everything, read newsletters from other authors that I missed, reply to your comments that weren't acknowledged. I will need some time to fully emerge from this sickness, and there is a lot on my mind. For now, I want to share with you a few thoughts prompted by the action the alleged environmental activist group Just Stop Oil performed on the 19th June. I've initially commented on it in a note and I hope you will read it.

The whole situation felt like a nail in the coffin and deepened some thoughts on human disconnection from Nature that I’ve been brewing for years. I wonder would anyone chop down a number of trees in a forest to bring attention to how urgently we have to act on deforestation and the lungs of our planet disappearing? Would anyone try choking a goat in a protest aiming to address the horrors of modern animal farming? The answer is a resounding no. Yet a sacred landscape, an integral part of the environment some are trying to save, is flippantly reduced to dead stones here to be used as a display. Any conversation I tried starting with people who think this was a great and productive action (?) resulted in being accused that I just don't care about the environment, don't think about climate change and don't give the planet the energy I give to stones sprayed with paint (I'm sure this will give you a good laugh if you're even remotely familiar with my writing). In one particularly unsavoury example, a person who used these “arguments” turned out to have an affiliate link to Temu on their profile. Ahem. You’re welcome to research Temu, fast fashion and its environmental impact and put the “environmental activism” of this person in the context of unbridled consumerism that is ravaging the planet.

“If we have no future, we have no past” and “we won't have places like Stonehenge if we don't stop fossil fuels” is the position some of the defenders of Just Stop Oil hold in a short-sighted attempt to justify what was deemed “a temporary defacement of a landmark” while it's really an attack on the environment. For me, now speaking not as an archaeologist, but entirely as an animist whose very soul is tied to the tree, the stone and the oxygen molecules in the pond, this is a one-sided approach reeking of a (white) saviour complex that completely erases the reality of human experience as a part of the natural world. There is a profound inability in many activist circles to put their cause in a wider picture and see the interconnectedness of causes and issues around the planet. By desperately pushing a single agenda to the point where everything else is disrespected and protest actions become contradictory, their work becomes similar to saving the “poor, hungry Africans” by donating to charities and doing missionary work, completely tone-deaf and oblivious to the whole picture and the entirety of the colonial history that actually led to Africa’s poverty. Another up-to-date example of saviourism is of course Palestine, approached by many as a standalone tragedy to give charity donations to and then consider your job in helping “that terrible situation” done; no effort is given to examine the systemic injustice and issues that led to Palestine's fate. There is little to no understanding that this one-off, simplistic “help” does nothing to achieve systemic change and in fact perpetuates and emboldens the status quo and people's shallow, tone-deaf understanding of the issue at hand.

I'm afraid that in our collective, carefully fostered disconnection from Nature, we ended up so far detached that we have reduced our planet to a nameless, faceless third party that must be saved, instead of a living, breathing entity we're intrinsically intertwined with. Our past is our present is our future. The three don't and can't exist without each other, we don't get to separate them at will. The unnatural ways in which we now live and relate to the world around us are so far gone even our activism is purely anthropocentric and pursued for the self-gratification of saviourism. If it wasn't the case and Just Stop Oil actually cared for and understood the natural world they claim they fight for, attention would have been paid to how ancient megaliths are an integral part of Nature, the birds nesting under lintels and the complex, old and incredibly fragile lichen ecosystem; in no way would it be reduced to a “landmark.” A “landmark” that is now abused in asinine, reductive and fallacious squabble on how “people who are upset about dyed stones are not upset about the destruction of the planet.”

This disconnection, obfuscation and fragmentation play right into the hands of the powers that be that never had any plans to respect their “green targets” introduced to give the electorate an impression that something is being done. Right now, no one is concentrating on stopping fossil fuels, but on the incredibly misguided and misjudged target Just Stop Oil has chosen. Not all attention is good attention. Thousands of people in various pagan communities, who are typically environmentalists themselves involved in this cause for years or even decades, and therefore the most natural allies, have been alienated and disillusioned by shortsightedness and arrogance of a colonial wound that erased our sense of land stewardship. To put it bluntly: if you're cheering for what Just Stop Oil did to a sacred landscape, you're so far removed from indigenous land stewardship you don't get to call your practice decolonial. You need to sit with your arrogance for a while. I grieve an action that has set environmental activism ten steps back and delayed people's urgently needed involvement in it. All the while, governments and unethical corporations rub their hands in glee as they couldn't have been served a better gift than this massive distraction to continue with their exploitation and destruction, unnoticed and unchallenged. I'm completely aware all of what I've written here will make some people angry — all the more reason to sit with their feelings. I'd implore them to ask the indigenous people of Turtle Island who have been camping at the sites and chaining themselves to the machinery and infrastructure used to extract oil from their sacred land if they would throw paint at the stones, trees or anything else on their land to bring awareness to the ongoing destruction. No? Sounds completely outrageous and impossible? Yeah, I wonder why.

Among this chaos I fell in love with this piece of solstice art by the thought provoking, contemporary Irish visual artist Emmett Walsh, better known by his artistic alias Diabhal. The tomb as a womb. Something I’ve been long pondering about. Life and death intrinsically interlocked, forever giving way to each other, even when we despair that death has prevailed.

Newgrange as a tomb and womb. Shared from Diabhal's Instagram profile.

We live in a time of death. I'd like to say it's unprecedented, but it really isn't — it has always been the way of the world; it can't possibly be any other way in a world built on colonial hierarchy, conquest and exploitation. Only we now en masse see and acknowledge what we were made not to see and/or chose not to see for the longest time. Painfully emerging from that which was taught and ingrained, but doesn't serve our humanity and hinders our discernment as we're battling multiple genocides and ecocides ravaging this Earth and all her children. For that, I want to offer you this prayer.

Midsummer is the peak of the light that will now slowly start retreating towards darkness. May it be a reminder for us all that we must keep our flame bright and strong, tend to our fires to keep them burning tall and our hearts filled with the warmth of resolve in face of the darker days. Darkness is always just a temporary absence of light. The light always returns. The seeds and roots in the ground need the darkness to be able to shoot upwards into their light. The darkness and the light are a circle. Such is the way of Nature.

May the megalithic alignments lit by the rising solstice sun, older than our collective memory, but not older than that which binds us all, remind us of the common ecological consciousness and oneness that our species once deemed natural, yet we lost it pursuing the death cult sold to us as civilisation and progress.

Ancient stones scattered all over the planet have borne silent witness to countless lives and deaths and they will bear witness long after we're gone. May they inspire steadfastness and perseverance. May their whispers guide us back to our primordial ways. The ways that some distant ancestors — likely not related to us by blood, yet forever bound to us in how we dedicated ourselves to steward the land we walked on — marked and celebrated by raising these stones to watch the flow of time. May we recognise lessons and welcoming arms of our Mother in every old lichen on a stone, every bird nesting in an abandoned rabbit hole and every moth fluttering by the lamplight at dusk. May we listen to the voice of that which overrides all man-made structures of power and control, reaffirming that our only allegiance is to the Earth herself. May we come as one as we were always meant to, to heal our wounds together in the bittersweet dance and the saltiest tears of collective liberation. May our mutual love and respect grow like the mycorrhizal network beneath our feet that nourishes every root we ingest with gratitude. As above, so below.

May we remember we come from the Earth and to her we will return, through the womb and the tomb.

May we remember the sacred.

May we remember.

“Summer Solstice at Avalon” by Angie Livingstone.