This is a long essay. It will probably take you about a half-hour to read. In it I share what I’ve discovered about myself after writing a weekly blog for a year (and then integrating that for the last year and a half), and how this has deepened my ability to see and speak to the dynamics in current events from a new place.

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For someone who has lived her life with an active “don’t look at me gene” I now find myself between a rock and a hard place. I see a different reality than the one being fed to us through media outlets, government officials, and public health officers and now I feel obliged to speak up.

I know I’m not alone; that there are lots of us who question the mainstream narrative and more all the time who are starting to get an inkling that not everything being promoted is legit. Yet even suggesting there is more to the story labels me a conspiracy theorist, a narcissist, or a flake.

My objective in writing this piece is to provide a window into my reality and to offer an invitation to join me in an inquiry. Perhaps you’ll be the person who shoots a logical hole in my worldview. And maybe you’ll meet some interesting people along the way and we’ll all learn a little in the bargain. Because, first and foremost, we are all one human family on this planet and I believe our task is to learn how to get along.

THE PANDEMIC TRAJECTORY

Remember how excited we were (in a quiet, locked down kind of way) about the positive effects the initial pandemic restrictions were having on our global environment? Clear skies, quiet streets, waterways coming back to life… We were disturbed by what was happening but it had never been quite so clear that we were, indeed, all in it together.  That governments worldwide could (or would!) align on the measures deemed necessary to contain the SARS COV2 virus was equally as staggering. We are united after all!

Now, just a year and a half later, a level of divisiveness has emerged that seems almost impossible to navigate. Have you taken the jab yet? Yes! Doors open. No? Frowns and rhetoric. Family members, friends, co-workers and whole segments of the population find themselves at odds with one another and it doesn’t look like it’s going to die down anytime soon. How is it that we ended up in such a quagmire? Is the situation around Covid-19 really as black and white as the mainstream narrative proposes?

Determining where we stand in any situation can take time. That’s certainly been my experience, with COVID and pretty much everything else in my life. My year of weekly blogging helped with some of that and I actually used the words “I am finally starting to know where I stand on things” in my final post in January 2020. Within hours of writing those words, I missed the last step on our basement stairs and severely injured my already fragile ankle. The irony wasn’t lost on me and the long slow healing period, combined with pandemic restrictions, has given me plenty of time to contemplate all that was revealed to me through my Year of the Child blog writing experiment.

WHY NOT GET THE JAB?

Fast forward to now (November 2021) and everything is about the vaccine. The two top reasons I’ve heard from people who decided to get the jab but weren’t completely sold on the viability of it were a) to travel and b) my kids wanted me to. These people aren’t judging my decision to decline it and our friendship is weathering this difference of opinion just fine—at least so far. But I feel a growing distance from some others. They are frustrated with me and feel it’s my civic duty to comply. What’s your problem, Amy? Get with the program!

There are many reasons why we (the unvaccinated) have decided to rely on our own immune systems.  This open letter to British Columbia’s health authorities from concerned health professionals offers a comprehensive overview of the concerns many of us share. It covers, with supporting documentation, issues such as low mortality rates from the virus (especially in children), the suppression of available treatments, censoring of information, and the lack of transparency in reporting vaccine-induced adverse reactions, to name just a few.

Along with this extensive list of concerns, there are other reasons an individual may choose not to get the injection. Perhaps they’ve already had the virus and, as multiple studies show, natural immunity is more robust and longer-lasting than the vaccines. Or maybe they are balancing complex autoimmune issues and are unwilling to upset a precarious balance achieved through painstaking effort. Maybe it goes against their religious beliefs previously considered sacrosanct, or suffered an adverse reaction to the first dose. We will never know unless we ask.

MY PERSONAL STORY OF HEALTH

I’ve been on a mission to bolster my health for many years since both my parents died young and in hospital. My father was the first to go. I was sixteen and he was sixty-two. Dad was not a fan of mainstream medicine and he clearly left attending to his deteriorating kidney function far too long. He was admitted to the ICU, operated on shortly thereafter, and lived for a few months. Just prior to a scheduled check-up a violent headache overtook him and he died in a coma at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, BC.

My mother died at sixty-five. She had also let a disease, this time cardiovascular, languish far too long. We turned first to natural remedies but in the end, it was a cardiovascular surgeon we entrusted her healthcare to. She survived the operation but died a week later, just a day before she would have been released from the hospital. I was thirty years old.

For some reason, being secretive about medical conditions was the norm in our family and it wasn’t until I had a tarot card reading that surprisingly turned out to be all about Mum and the health condition she was hiding, that it came to light.

Mum’s death reinforced my skepticism of allopathic medicine. The treatment she received in the hospital was subpar, with incorrect dietary requirements for her condition delivered on her meal tray and an overall lack of coordinated care. I also realized that, with the kind of family history I had, I had better get on board with managing my own healthcare.

My health is not a slam-dunk by any stretch of the imagination. My body manages the cytomegalovirus that I’ve been living with since my 20s. I also tested positive for Borrelia, one of the markers for Lyme Disease, so my immune system definitely works overtime. To say that I am reluctant to avail myself of the COVID-19 injection is an understatement.

LIFE-THREATENING PROBLEMS EXISTED BEFORE THE PANDEMIC

One good thing in all of this is that it’s pushing us, as individuals, to take a stand for what we believe in. I don’t consider myself particularly savvy about the systems and institutions that govern the world but I have definitely been aware for many years that the way we are living on this planet is simply unsustainable.

Otto Scharmer, a senior lecturer at MIT and co-founder of the Presencing Institute, identifies what he calls the three divides that exist in our society. Here’s how he describes them in his 2018 book The Essentials of Theory U.

The ecological divide can be summed up by a single number: 1.5. Currently our economy consumes the resources of 1.5 planets. We use 1.5 times the regeneration capacity of planet earth. And that is just the average. In the United States, for example, the current consumption rate has surpassed five planets.

The social divide can be summed up by another number: 8. Eight billionaires own as much as half of mankind combined. Yes, it is true. A small group of people that you can fit into a minivan owns more than the “bottom half” of the world’s population: 3.8 billion people.*

The spiritual divide can be summed up by another number: 800,000. More than 800K people per year commit suicide — a number that is greater than the sum of people who are killed by war, murder, and natural disasters combined. Every forty seconds there is one suicide.

In essence, we are collectively creating results that (almost) nobody wants. These results include the loss of nature, the loss of society, and the loss of Self.

Otto’s hope in articulating this stark reality is that more and more people will recognize these are not distinct problems but rather three faces of the same root problem—what he calls OUR BLIND SPOT. The blind spot is the inner place—or source—from which we operate when we act, communicate, perceive, or think.

* Between March 18, 2020, and March 18, 2021, the wealth held by the world’s billionaires jumped from $8.04 trillion to $12.39 trillion, according to the IPS’ analysis of data from Forbes, Bloomberg and Wealth-X.

THE HIDDEN ROLE OF TRAUMA

We all have blind spots. My year of blogging surfaced many of my own that have taken until now to understand and articulate. I wrote a lot about unseen forces that seem to hold me captive. I likened it to the plight of domesticated elephants that are tethered to a post at a very young age. They might struggle to get free but they are too little and the tether is too strong. As they grow to adolescence they might keep trying, but eventually, they give up. By the time they are adults, they are so used to the constraint that they don’t realize they could easily break free.

I was perplexed about this dilemma when I wrote about it but I’ve since done a deep dive into the world of trauma. Trauma is kind of a loaded word that many people (including me) haven’t really understood.

Bestselling author and trauma expert Gabor Mate offers this simple definition: “Trauma is the disconnect from ourselves, from other people and the world. It is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you.”  This dovetails with Otto’s theory that our blind spot is based on how we see the world—our inner source. There is no debate that traumas such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), birth trauma, intergenerational trauma, collective trauma, PTSD and more, have a significant effect on how we view and interact with the world.

My particular experience of trauma has shown up in the form of an unwelcome theme. My mother, bless her heart, was not prepared to have another child when I came along and her ambivalence affected how the rest of my family viewed my arrival. I learned early that I better make myself either helpful or inconspicuous—and ideally both.

A year ago there was a family gathering to which I wasn’t invited. It wasn’t the first time and it certainly wouldn’t have been the last. There’s been a schism in my family that no amount of effort on my part has been able to heal. Mostly I felt okay about it. I have, after all, had a lifetime to learn my place. Then I heard that the impetus to gather was to go through Mum’s old papers and pictures that had been stored in my brother’s basement for the past thirty-five years. That got my attention.

It was painful, that much I knew, but friends had to clearly point out to me that this was unkind and unacceptable behaviour. A trusted therapist encouraged me to use my willpower to refrain from a long-standing pattern of retreating, normalizing the rejection, getting lonely for them, and then going back for more. The timing also coincided with me reaching the exact same age my mother was when she died—sixty-five years, eight months, and seven days. I knew that she would never have condoned this gathering without me. Rather, she would have held up her hand long ago and said (in the immortal words of comedian Bob Newhart, a staple of our childhood):

 “Stop it!  Stop doing that, all of you. It’s not okay to teach the next generation that shunning people is the right thing to do.”

Months later friends shared about a TED talk they’d watched entitled Embracing Hopelessness. The presenter described the feeling of hopelessness as the older sibling to hope and spoke about how hopelessness can provide us with “the serene clarity and guidance needed to face ourselves and humanity’s greatest challenges occurring this century.”  I found myself looking at the words hope and hopelessness through my own experience of trauma.

I think I’ve always lived in hope that my family would one day see something in me that was truly worth believing in; that the “now you’re welcome/now you’re not” dynamic that I’d become so accustomed to might shift if I could just figure out the magic combination of how I should act and be. That ‘hope’ kept me locked in a cycle of never quite growing up and becoming an adult.  It kept me off-balance just enough that I never knew where I stood. My hope is what kept me stuck in an endless loop that had no possibility of fulfillment.

But once hope is abandoned and hopelessness is met square in the face, another player emerges: there’s nothing left to lose. Once there’s nothing left to lose one has everything to gain.

Waking up to the reality of where I stand in my family has been painful. It’s also been liberating. I’ve never understood the deep well of sadness that would overtake me from time to time. It was like a kind of homesickness that no amount of homecoming could satiate. But by writing my stories and sharing them with you, dear reader, what was previously invisible—at least to me—became visible. And once something is visible we can address it head-on.

WE HAVE SEPARATED OURSELVES FROM NATURE

Current projections estimate we have sixty years of topsoil left—essentially sixty harvests—before our depleted soils can no longer grow food. We are facing the sixth mass extinction event and it is easy, oh so easy, to feel overwhelmed by the inevitability of it. But it IS happening, all around us, and pushing it into the deep recesses of our minds is not going to solve our collective dilemma, any more than denial of my family dynamics helped me. We have taken too much from this beautiful planet and not given enough back. We have separated ourselves from nature.

Zach Bush, a multidisciplinary physician with doctorates in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care, helped alleviate much of my anxiety about the virus when he was interviewed by Del Bigtree on The Highwire in May of 2020. Zach explained, among many other things, the distinction between Germ Theory and Terrain Theory.

Germ Theory is the scientific belief that certain diseases occur when microorganisms invade our bodies. Terrain theory is the scientific belief that if someone is healthy, germs, which are a natural part of life and the environment, will be managed without causing undue harm. Zach went on to say that viruses emerge when we actually need viral updates. They are vital to our survival on a planet that is becoming increasingly toxic. The current COVID vaccine in particular, makes us forever dependent on a system that puts us in a battle against nature.

To this day the Oxford dictionary defines Nature as not including humans:

The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.

WHY ARE WE COMPLACENT?

If we know that our life on earth is in danger, why don’t we take action? This BBC documentary from 2002 entitled “The Century of The Self” answered some of my questions. The narrator of the film starts us off with this overview:

A new theory about human nature was put forward by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered, he said, primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings. Forces which, if not controlled, led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction. This series is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. At the heart of the story is not just Sigmund Freud but other members of the Freud family.

The first episode is about Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays.

Bernays is almost completely unknown today but his influence on the 20th century was nearly as great as his uncles. Because Bernays was the first person to take Freud’s ideas about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations for the first time how they could make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Out of this would come a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying people’s inner selfish desires one made them happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming Self that has come to dominate our world today.

Here’s a quote of Bernays, from his book Propaganda:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

One of Bernay’s most celebrated publicity stunts was at New York’s Easter Parade on March 31st, 1929. At the time, smoking cigarettes in public was taboo for women but by exploiting their desire for equality with men he came up with the brilliant marketing scheme of hiring rich debutantes to march in the parade, smoking cigarettes, and calling them “torches of freedom.” Smoking then became a symbol of power and independence for women.

Is smoking good for people? No. Does our government care? Apparently not. The Government of Canada website states: EACH DAY 100 Canadians die from smoking-related illnesses.

Is it possible that we are being manipulated when it comes to Covid-19? I think we are but this is something that each person needs to discover for themselves.

HONOURING OUR ANCESTORS

I think it’s important to once again look at trauma, especially the intergenerational traumas that happened long before our time but affect us just as surely as events during our lifetimes. It’s like a gigantic iceberg of frozen pain that has had no avenue for healing. We can do it now though. We can bear witness to the hardships and sorrows our ancestors faced and help lighten the load from our collective fields. I honestly believe that by healing our trauma we can heal the world.

When I was sixteen and gratefully quitting high school, I remember thinking what a botched-up job grownups had done with education. The most tangible tool I left with was typing (still happy about that) but I was frustrated that we weren’t taught about money and how to manage it, or communication skills so we had half a hope of maneuvering some of the hot topics that were always out of bounds with our parents. I also swore I would never let a generation gap grow between me and those that came after me.

Families are complex entities. Our father, Geoffrey Herman Phillips, took his final breath on November 4, 1971, and this essay is part of my honouring the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It was a confusing time for all of us and regretfully, none of us were with him at the end. When I wrote a post about him two years ago I was just starting to question my inner narrative that he didn’t love me. Now I know that’s not true. Dad was as traumatized as the rest of us after being banished to boarding school at the age of nine and then graduating at fifteen, the same year his mother died of TB. Audrey, his youngest sister, was sent to live with an aunt, and Barbara, just two years younger than him, died of TB the day after his twenty-second birthday. His father, an alcoholic ex-navy man (“The Commander”) eventually joined him in Bamfield. By then Dad was a fisherman with a wife and family of his own.

Our mother, Cecile Albertine Vanden-Wouwer, was the youngest of three. Conceived just prior to a long voyage back to Belgium at the end of the First World War, I am quite sure she was neither planned nor particularly welcome. Ebba Jennings, a long-time Bamfield friend and neighbour, wrote a piece about Mum after her death. I found this excerpt quite insightful: “Although she [Cecile] was a person who could become very excited, she was blessed with the gift of patience and understanding for the elderly that she took under her wing. As a mother, she was like a knitter when stitches are dropped, picking them up and gathering the threads together once again.”

My siblings and I were all born into the same soup. We arrived over a range of fourteen years, and in that regard had different families in a way, but with the particular alchemy that existed in our little microcosm, the die was cast for us to become exactly who we became. The sorrows our ancestors endured became our sorrows but they lived in a shadow that couldn’t be seen or addressed.

In my quest for approval from my family, however inconsistent, my gaze was focused only in their direction. Now, with awareness of how my own actions perpetuated the painful dynamic, plus (non)action to interrupt it, my worldview has expanded to see a broader narrative. I believe this is what allows me to finally begin to see the depth of destruction that is occurring on our planet today, environmentally, and regarding Covid-19, at least to the degree I am able.

WHAT IS THE BROADER NARRATIVE?

I found this interview with Mattias Desmet fascinating. He’s a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium and also holds a doctorate in Statistics. Very early in the pandemic he noticed that the modelling used to justify the declaration for a global public health emergency was grossly inaccurate. In Sweden, for example, the predictions of death were off by a factor of fifteen. Instead of the 80,000 deaths they predicted, there were 6,000. Yet the World Health Organization didn’t deviate from their messaging.

Even when the United Nations warned that more people in developing countries would likely die from starvation due to lockdowns, nothing changed. It was like we all went into a collective trance when the virus out of Wuhan became public enemy number one. But some people do see through the narrative and have since the very beginning. My long-time friend and housemate, John, started sharing discrepancies he discovered around that same time. I listened and nodded as appropriate but I honestly couldn’t take much in. It seemed impossible to imagine that the World Health Organization and leaders from around the globe were somehow in collusion about the mainstream pandemic narrative.

There’s no demographic Mattias can identify that explains why people fall where they do on the spectrum of belief, but the phenomenon does have a name: Mass Formation.

For Mass Formation to take hold, four elements need to be present in a society:

• Lack of social bonds
• Lack of meaning
• Free-floating anxiety
• Free-floating frustration and aggression.

Add to this a steady diet of fear (as has been the case since the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic) and voila! New social bonds are formed in solidarity with the mainstream narrative and a sense of purpose takes hold. The free-floating anxiety, frustration and aggression that was already present in our society before the pandemic now has a target—the virus. Then, with the roll-out of vaccines touted as the solution, the target deftly shifted to those withholding its thorough implementation—the unvaccinated. If they would just go along with the rest of us we would be out of this mess!

Now vaccine passports are being implemented and I don’t believe the push for them is truly about public health. Stats show that this virus is no more life-threatening than others that have come and gone, although the gross mismanagement of it, including the suppression of proven treatments, HAS resulted in untold deaths, as well as those resulting from drug overdoses, suicides, and other undiagnosed and untreated illnesses.

The real virus (and I’m echoing many other voices here) is the agenda of FEAR that is gripping society. We humans are not designed to be on full alert like this day after day, month after month. It’s taking an unprecedented toll on our health and wellbeing and on the health and wellbeing of our children. But why? What’s really going on? Could it be about the money?

This Forbes article reports that Pfizer’s 2nd quarter earnings alone generated $9.2 Billion in vaccine sales, up from $1.2 Billion during the same period last year. With this kind of revenue, projected to be tens of billions of dollars in 2022, fines such as the one levied against them in 2009 for fraudulent marketing are small potatoes. A press release issued by the United States Department of Justice announced the “Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History—Pfizer to Pay $2.3 Billion for Fraudulent Marketing.”

Power and money are a recipe for corruption and pharmaceutical companies gained a gigantic win when the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act was signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1986. This law created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which protects pharmaceutical companies from any liability related to vaccines. If someone suffers from a vaccine injury their only option is to make a claim to the government. They may receive some compensation, which is essentially paid for by taxpayers, but the pharmaceutical company is exempt from any liability.

WORLD-RENOWNED MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS SPEAK OUT

On October 4, 2020 a group of infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists made their concerns about the current Covid-19 strategies public with The Great Barrington Declaration. To date, there are in excess of 860,000 signatures including 14,981 medical and public health scientists, 44,167 medical practitioners and 805,155 concerned citizens.

The Declaration outlines concerns about how the Covid-19 strategies (specifically lockdowns, contact tracing and enforced isolation) impose enormous and unnecessary health costs on people and how our children, the working class and the poor are carrying the heaviest burden. They recommend instead a more focused approach that protects the most vulnerable while the rest of the population carries on.

Recently, doctors and scientists met again and drafted the Rome Declaration, outlining continued concerns and calling for the integrity of the “art and science of medicine to be restored.” Over 12,000 professionals have signed it so far.  Why would ANY respected physician or scientist risk their hard-earned reputation, career, and livelihood to espouse erroneous warnings? They wouldn’t. They speak up because they care and they see something dangerous happening.

They are concerned that people aren’t hearing the full story because of censorship. Anything that challenges the vaccine narrative is scrubbed from the internet and those promoting it are discredited. The public doesn’t see, among many things, the suppression of readily available treatments that truly are safe and effective.

        “This is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.”          Rome Declaration

BIRTH AND DEATH ARE PART OF LIFE

I think a lot of what is occurring, and why the authorities are able to keep us in check by using fear of the virus as such a giant club, is because we’ve forgotten that death is a natural part of life. Atul Gawande’s bestselling book Being Mortal highlights the dilemma many physicians find themselves in, immersed in a medical model that is focused more on living longer than living better. They are not taught how to speak with patients when they have a terminal diagnosis. Without treatment options, death is actually seen as a failure. But, as Michael Mead offers in this quote, “Death is not the opposite of life, it is the opposite of birth. Both are aspects of life.”

Author and public speaker Charles Eisenstein explores what a new kind of “normal” could mean in his insightful essay Beyond Industrial Medicine. In it he suggests that our current reality is The Story of Separation—one that has us believe we are discreet, separate individuals living amongst other individuals in a universe that is separate from us. He proposes an alternative story, one of Interbeing, a phrase also used by spiritual leader, poet, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. We got a taste of Interbeing at the beginning of the lockdown.

Years ago, when the plant medicine Ayahuasca was first making its debut on the quasi-mainstream world stage, there were conjectures about why it was “escaping the Amazon.” Wise elders hypothesized that it was happening because it was so desperately needed. A course correction for humanity was essential or we were all headed over the cliff into oblivion. Thanks to the tireless work of countless individuals, psychedelic medicines are slowly but surely finding their way back into the common collective for the therapeutic use of healing trauma.

During a psychedelic therapy session a couple of months ago I became present to the dynamics of my family with a new-to-me perspective. I recognized, without a shadow of a doubt, that I had chosen my parents. I knew before I came it would be a bumpy ride. They were traumatized, as we all are, but they had qualities I valued then and value still.

A love of freedom comes with the territory for people choosing to live in the wild parts of the world and my parents were no exception. In those days our hometown of Bamfield was accessible only by boat or floatplane. People relied on each other because they had to. Dad, a high-line fisherman, modelled a strong work ethic, a love of truth, and creative ingenuity that I can only marvel at today.  (He built a car!)  Mum was generosity personified (her meals, in particular, were legendary), she had a deep sense of loyalty to those she cared for, and endowed all her kids with an innate ability to create warm and welcoming environments.

Along with the deep and abiding realization that I chose my parents, I received another gift. For a while, after my guides left me safe and tucked up, a mother and her children were in the garden outside my window. In my open and receptive state, their murmurs and laughter entered my nervous system and soothed a sense of high alert I’ve lived with all my life. As the feeling of victimhood I’ve lived with fell away, the doors of appreciation for my parents and their parents and all our ancestors opened. I’ve written extensively about them in the intervening months and this meme has never felt more apt: “If intergenerational trauma is passed on, which it is, then so is intergenerational wisdom.”  

This beautiful essay by Tessa Lena, On Loving Our Elders, encompasses my sentiments. (If you look at only one link in this whole piece, please pick this one.) It speaks to the pain we all endured growing up, the pain our parents endured and those before them. How we were all born into the same machine. Even the elite 1% that are trying to control the world and bring The Great Reset into being, were born into traumatized families just like ours. I honestly believe, as she does, that it is only through loving and forgiving our elders that we can heal the world.

WHAT ABOUT OUR CHILDREN?

For the first time in modern history, life expectancy is starting to decline. Our children bear the heaviest burden. In 1975, autism affected one child in five thousand. Today, autism affects one child in forty. Projections for 2035 anticipate rates in the range of one to three or one to five. The coming generation will either have autism or be looking after someone who does.

In this article, “The Bizarre Refusal to Apply Cost-Benefit Analysis to COVID debates”, American author Glen Greenwald speaks about the devastating toll the pandemic has taken on children:

It is impossible to overstate the costs imposed on children of all ages from the sustained, enduring and severe disruptions to their lives justified in the name of COVID. Entire books could be written, and almost certainly will be, on the multiple levels of damage children are sustaining, some of which—particularly the longer-term ones—are unknowable (long-term harms from virtually every aspect of COVID policies—including COVID itself, the vaccines, and isolation measures, are, by definition, unknown). But what we know for certain is that the harms to children from anti-COVID measures are severe and multi-pronged. One of the best mainstream news accounts documenting those costs was a January, 2021 BBC article headlined “COVID: The devastating toll of the pandemic on children.”

As Greenwald states, we don’t know the long-term repercussions from the vaccine but we do know that the great poisoning has been going on for a long time. Rachel Carson raised the flag sixty years ago with the publication of her book Silent Spring.

It was 1962 and she was the lone voice speaking out against the use of chemical pesticides and their impact on nature (including us), specifically the widespread use of DDT for insect control. This quote from the book’s intro:

“Silent Spring, the product of her unrest, deliberately challenged the wisdom of a government that allowed toxic chemicals to be put into the environment before knowing the long-term consequences of their use.”

In Carson’s view, the postwar culture of science had arrogantly claimed dominion over nature and this was the philosophic root of the problem. Human beings, she insisted, were not in control of nature but simply one of its parts: the survival of one part depended upon the health of all.

                 “But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself”                  Rachel Carson

Have we paid heed? No, we haven’t. Environmental toxins, GMO food, synthetic food, spraying our crops—all these are commonplace and are leading to increased toxicity and immunosuppression in cultures across the globe.

Now the vaccine booster train is on its way, and with it comes a totalitarian agenda that will get increasingly more restrictive. Are you prepared to live in a world where your digital ID is what calls the shots—literally and figuratively? A world where, if you decline a shot, your pass turns red? A world where young children will soon be injected, despite serious safety concerns and a risk of dying from the virus essentially zero? A world where our collective destiny is in the hands of a minivan of billionaires?

Mattias wrapped up his interview by assuring us that totalitarianism never wins long-term. It is too unnatural to survive and without an enemy, it collapses. It will be a bumpy ride for a while though—until enough of us wake up and speak up. It is essential that we make our voices heard, no matter how hard it is.

EVERY CLOUD HAS A SILVER LINING

For me, that silver lining has been the voices that are speaking out and with whom I resonate. I’ve shared some of them in this essay and there are many more out there. We are not quacks. We see the world differently than many do (at least so far!) but it is not because we are uninformed. We are very well informed.

Those first few weeks to ‘flatten the curve’ provided a rare gift to many of us—the opportunity to STOP and disengage from the everyday rat race. Life got simple in some fundamental way. If we can do this—attend to the big scary virus on a global scale—then we really are capable of anything.

Even with the polarity we are now experiencing, there is still altruism. We ALL want each other to be safe. Proponents of the current mandates believe that the shot and the passport are the way to do it. Those concerned that mass vaccination during a pandemic is dangerous and relinquishing our freedom equally so, share the same concerns for our collective safety but also see a larger threat to our wellbeing than the virus. What is the truth?

I wobbled back and forth for almost a year until I couldn’t deny that some things weren’t adding up. It was only by doing my own research that the broader narrative started coming into focus. It’s all there—hidden in plain sight.

The situation on this planet keeps getting worse. The monolithic corporations that own the world (some call the invisible entity “Mr. Global”) are opportunistic and have long been overrun with greed and corruption. The World Economic Forum has a plan for managing our global crises and it’s called the Great Reset. One of their tag lines is: “You will own nothing and you will be happy.”

Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book. From my perspective, the people “in charge” don’t have a clue about the ramifications of what they’re doing and they don’t have anything under control. We are ALL caught in a dysfunctional system that has been around for thousands of years. It’s no one’s fault—not them and not ours. But it IS our responsibility to start making things right.

IT’S TIME TO UNLEASH OUR CREATIVITY

Psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar offered this advice to me on more than one occasion: “People will always try and take away your freedom. It’s not personal, it’s just built into the mix. You have to learn to LOVE to fight for your freedom.”

Most people don’t want to go back to the “old” normal, but what do we want? Charles Eisenstein offers this suggestion as a way to move forward:

“I’d like to imagine, then, a different normal. It departs from industry’s dream to remake the earth, life, and the human being in its image. It is the normality of the age of ecology, the age of relationship, the age of community, the age of reunion.”

As I write this essay I keep asking myself ‘what’s the most important thing?’ I believe this is a question we have to keep asking ourselves. For me, after being silent for the past year and a half, the most important thing is to finish this piece and send it out into the world. I can then bring this chapter of deep reflection with my family to a close and turn and face my future, rooted in the knowledge that I belong. 

In one of my early therapy sessions with Andrew, he equated families to organisms. Families have a soul, he said, and when one hurts, they all hurt. When one feels better, they all feel better.

November 4th, the fiftieth anniversary of Dad’s death, is a new moon. Fishermen are often superstitious and he was no exception. In our family, the first sighting of the new moon “out in the wild” (e.g. not seen through glass) granted us a wish. My wish, in honour of my parents, is that the healing I’ve experienced from writing this piece will reverberate through our lineage backwards and forward in time. That my family, who I care about dearly, will feel better.

I believe humanity also has a collective soul. That what we want IS what’s best for each other. With the realization that I chose my parents comes the realization that I also chose this particular time to be alive. I think you did too.

Let’s gather and find our common ground. Let’s shake off the tethers that hold us captive and face the future together. In upcoming blogs and vlogs I’ll share some resources, along with opportunities to gather for dialogue. Vaxxed or unvaxxed, in person or on Zoom, we can share perspectives, ask questions, discover our gifts and passions while we pause and take stock. We need to find our people, and then we need to get incredibly creative. The next generations are relying on us. United we stand.

There is another world, but it is in this one.
William Butler Yeats