Living in the Shadowtime
Intergenerationality and embracing unbelonging in the Anthropocene
Beginnings, and the now
I am about to embark on my journey as a Substacker! The move away from algorithms and ads appeals, and I already follow some talented and insightful writers here. While this is a ‘beginning’ of sorts, so much of my writing focuses on living in the midst of the mess we are in. Therefore in this ‘beginning’ of a Substack newsletter, I shall just dive straight into the middle! A warm welcome to those who come to read. If you like my voice, and if the subject matter ignites your interest as much as it does mine, please do subscribe, comment and engage. I truly believe in building communities of grace, courage and joy and hope this space can foster conversations that expand our horizons and nourish our curiosity!
What does living in the midst of the mess look like (to me)?
Interdisciplinary artist Priya Subberwal crafted a Manifesto For Sacred Activism, a manifesto I have adopted as my own. At its core the following lines sum up well what I believe it means to live in the midst of the mess:
“We will not see how this turns out
We know there is no out, only turning
We know we may fail.
We are trying, anyway.”
The Shadowtime
This week I went to see Richard Mosse’s ‘Broken Spectre’ at 180 The Strand in London. He spent years filming in the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon, resulting in an arresting array of imagery. It was not his film that affected me as much as the photography. Huge pigmented images hung from white gallery walls, beautiful canvases of cherry reds, fuchsias, greens and bronzes. However, as you lean in - both literally and metaphorically - what at first appears beautiful fractures and warps. With every image I looked at came a sickening realisation that the crimson washes of colour depicted trees burnt down to stumps, land ground down by cattle grazing, mining and destruction. These rich and colourful photographs from Mosse are not the forestscapes they should be, they are topographies of terror and loss.
The same splintering of realities exists everywhere around us. I am both the little girl who curiously tracked the umpteen fluffy black caterpillars that slowly stalked the pavements in the 1980s and I am the 41-year-old who celebrates seeing a butterfly as if it were a mythical unicorn. I look out to the ocean and am stuck by the endless allure of the waves, at the same time plastic waste hides in a sinister mass just below the surf. Our world is on fire and every day the temperature rises and at the same time we throw galas and dance and drink champagne. We are living in a constant contradiction, a fissured future.
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality define the ‘Shadowtimes’ as “a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously, or acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present.’ This is one of the best descriptions I have ever found of what it feels like living in these times. As soon as you really understand the existential threat the climate crisis poses you find yourself simultaneously carrying on ‘as normal’ while all the time knowing in a matter of decades we could be inhabiting a near unliveable world.
The threat of the future while living in the now
We spend a lot of time picking apart the differences between Gen Z, Boomers, Millennials, Gen X, and now the Alpha Generation, but in reality we are all united in the Shadowtime. We are all living in a time of disorientation and dislocation. We are all living under the threat of a future that is no longer a science fiction film but a science fact reality. We are all able to sense the exhaustion and grief of a planet on the edge, many of us feel it in our own bodies. We, the humans who have had so much control, live with the unsettling knowledge that we have so badly come undone. As we built our towers we simultaneously tore our own house down. Just like Mosse’s Amazon imagery, from a distance we still look beautiful and magnificent in our endeavours, but as you lean in the truth seeps through the cracks - we are in desperate trouble.
From a distance we still look beautiful and magnificent in our endeavours, but as you lean in the truth seeps through the cracks - we are in desperate trouble.
In this Shadowtime, this wobbling thin space where we suddenly feel like fugitives in our own home, how do we learn to live and dream anew? How do we cope with constant unbelonging as creatures designed to nest and build dens? Perhaps we need to accept the fissures and the fractures and rather than fight battles already lost. We need to learn to live differently in the cracks. Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe speaks of living in the “mean-time” rather than in a constant state of assessing the “end time.” I took part in his course ‘We will Dance With Mountains’ during a COVID-19 lockdown a couple of years ago. Our merry cohort spent weeks asking question after question while trying to find our comfort in the messiness of this era. It was both disruptive and restorative to recognise the cracks for what they are.
It can feel as though living in the Shadowtime only offers despair and gloom, but it can also offer new understandings of what has always been, but that many of us failed to recognise. For example, we humans have often dislocated ourselves from the land and nature and now we are being jarringly reminded that we are not in dominion over it at all. The wild isn’t something to be owned, managed, or even restored, by us - rather we are the wild. Any restoration of the wild must be a restoration of ourselves and our relationship with nature. Many Indigenous Peoples have known this for centuries, but the rest of us abandoned this deep knowing and in the process lost ourselves. The truth is, we drove the cracks into the land that sustains us. We created the Shadowtime we now fear.
“We are learning that we are not only fully in Nature, but that Nature is fully in us; we are learning to see that humans are not discrete or solitary actors in the world, but immersed in, instigated by, and in touch with the environment.”
Broken but not yet destroyed
What offered hope in Mosse’s videography and photography was that alongside what had been butchered and burnt there was also nature thriving. In the Amazon trees still grow, in the oceans fish still swim, in the mountains ice still coats the tips of the tallest peaks. We are broken but we are not yet destroyed. And we only see the shadows when there is still light. There is still light. The shadows stalk our waking days and our dreams too, but so does hope. Not the kind of greeting-card hope we are sold in shops, no. If we choose to accept the unbelonging of this era then there is a chance we might also embrace the opportunity to live differently with the Earth and allow the fissures to heal. It is unsettling, but perhaps it is being aware of the darkness that will force us to wake up to our better nature. I hope so anyway.
Looking forward to reading more of your newsletter and thank you for sharing the Shadowtime concept - I completely feel this disconnect between 'now' and the 'near future' especially now I am envisioning them through the lens of my own children's lifetimes across the next few decades.