Hello, and welcome to spring! A little more time has passed since my last newsletter than I wanted, but March has been busy and on top of that I got sick. But, at least here where I am, the snow has been melting and the streams are running high. The first snowdrop and crocus flowers have started to appear, and while we haven’t seen robins return near the house yet, just a short drive south of here there are tons of them. And many other birds have returned, filling the woods with sounds of spring.

But while we have had a few days of warm sunshine that really felt like winter was over, these were followed by a return of cold, wind, and even some more ice and snow. This is March in the northeast, and it’s also a reminder that change—even big seasonal change that seems inevitable—does not always move in a straight line.

This all got me thinking about the nature of change in general, especially on the human level, including both personal and societal change. And I promise that this will connect with my thoughts on observation and self-observation, as promised in my earlier writings! This whole topic came out of contemplation about the importance of learning to notice those things in our world—in our social world especially—that are presented to us as simply “the way things are,” and how noticing those taken-for-granted things is a necessary first step in changing them. But, as you'll probably notice as you continue reading, both this essay and this newsletter in general, my autistic (and otherwise neurodivergent) brain loves to connect more and more dots, to see bigger and bigger patterns. But then as I write about those patterns I’m seeing, things will often start to get unwieldy, and I'll simplify by pulling back on some of those connections. BUT, often what happens with that is I'll forget to include the necessary connective threads to keep those remaining dots connected, and next thing you know I'm halfway across the woods without leaving you any breadcrumbs to follow. So I'll do my best to make the trail of my thoughts coherent, but that is how my particular combination of neurodivergences tends to work!

Also, I want to reiterate that I try not to make too many assumptions about who might be reading this, and what we may or may not have in common. But since you’re reading a newsletter grounded in ecospirituality, I’m going to guess that you, like me, are interested in finding ways to live that are more ecologically-conscious than the dominant culture usually promotes. Ways that respect and honor the Earth, based in an understanding that holds the human as interconnected with, not superior to, the non-human. Perhaps you, like me, also see this world as inspirited and alive in ways that go beyond what most of the dominant culture views as life. You may be reaching back to mythic and ancestral ways of viewing spirit as pervasive and deeply present in this world—animistic, polytheistic, maybe magical ways of engaging with the world. In other words, spiritual practices that are also not aligned with the dominant culture, and may require some extensive “rethinking” of learned attitudes. So I’m guessing that you, like me, are interested in changing some of the ways of thinking, feeling, and living that we learned from the dominant culture (and maybe our family’s culture as well).

But making change is hard! I don’t know about you, but sometimes I think I’ve moved in a new direction, that I’ve broken a habit for good, but then I find myself falling back into old patterns that I had wanted to leave behind. It’s just…easier, sometimes, to follow that familiar path. I mean, there’s a reason it’s familiar, right? Whether it started out as a habit of convenience or became one over time, it’s usually easier to keep doing what we’ve been doing than to break away and do something new. Even when we’ve come to recognize that an old habit is harmful—personally, environmentally, and/or socially—it can still be hard to change it.

When that return to old habits happens, it might be tempting to call it “backsliding,” or something similar, but that kind of implies that change should be linear and that it's a form of failure if it's not. But the kind of change that requires a choice to change usually isn’t a one-and-done kind of deal; instead, it’s a series of choices that have to be made over and over. Some of those choices are actions—to do the new thing you’ve chosen—while some are non-actions—to not do the old thing you don’t want to do anymore. Both can be difficult, and both can be subject to pressures (both internal and external) not to change, and instead to go back to the status quo.

Also, and this may be my sociology showing, I am wary of arguments that focus only on the individual when it comes to the need to change something when it is actually a larger systemic issue, or when it comes to the feasibility of actually making that change. Particularly within the dominant U.S. culture, we are encouraged to see everything as a matter of personal choice and personal responsibility. Let’s take the example of changing one’s purchasing habits, in a dominant society steeped in consumer capitalism and disposability. Maybe you’re trying to buy more local produce, or clothes made from sustainable fabrics, or just buy less in general. The culture of consumerism makes it very easy and convenient to buy things without considering the exploitation and extraction that so often underlie both the products and the whole system that gets them to us. Particularly when buying is made so convenient, it’s very easy to do this without thinking; I would even argue that’s one of the purposes of convenience—to turn that momentary thought into a purchase as quickly as possible, so there isn’t time for contemplation.

This is where I think self-observation can come in! And observation isn’t a one-time event, either; it takes repeated acts of attention. It’s like, if you’ve ever tried sitting meditation, the kind where you simply breathe and observe when thoughts arise and then let them go…but then you find it’s not simple at all, because you end up following those thoughts and losing track of what you’re doing, and you have to keep coming back to your breath and simply observing how thoughts arise…but then next thing you know, you’ve followed another one without realizing it, and you have to let it go and return to your breath. Honestly, I think anyone who’s ever tried to meditate knows what I’m talking about—but while it might feel like that means you’re “not doing it right,” that’s exactly the point of that kind of meditation. To encourage the mind to keep noticing and not let itself get caught up. Or so I’ve been taught by both Buddhist and Taoist teachers.

Hard as that repeated return to observation can be in sitting meditation, I think it’s even harder to do when it comes to everyday life. At least when you are sitting on a cushion, a part of you knows that’s what you’re there for; but when you’re at the store or shopping online, it’s easy to fall into familiar patterns of consumption even when you’ve made a decision to do things differently. But the same practice of slowing down, and maybe adding a little friction to the process instead of going with the most convenient option, can help give a little more time for observation. For noticing that something isn’t right, and that maybe there’s a different choice to be made.

But again my sociology brain rears up to say, Hey! It’s not just about personal choice! Here’s where I think it’s important to recognize that there are major social forces that have been arranged to direct us toward consumerism, to hide the personal, social and ecological cost of consumer capitalism, and to close off other choices or at least make them more costly. Choosing to avoid shopping at big-box stores, for example, assumes that you have other options that haven’t already been put out of business by big-box stores, and that you have the time, money—and, frankly, executive functioning because that can be a limited resource, too—to go the less convenient and often more expensive route. Or, for another example, deciding to spend more time outdoors to connect with the natural world assumes that you have access to clean and safe spaces in which to do that on a regular basis, and that things like poor air quality don’t threaten your health if you even want to just open a window.

In other words, systemic and institutional failures to rein in excesses like monopoly consolidation or rampant pollution have created an environment that puts all the onus on the individual to “do the right thing” as they see it, and then feel guilty if and when they run into barriers or just run out of energy to navigate those barriers. But, ultimately, the personal is never really separate from the social and environmental.

A foundational tension in the field of sociology, which has been debated and discussed in different ways for decades, is the interaction between structure and agency. Social structures are enduring patterns in social life, often solidified into institutions that essentially take on a life of their own beyond the individual people involved in them. As an example to make this more concrete, think of a school as an example of a social institution. Within the structure of a school, people take on roles such as student, teacher, principal, or guidance counselor. Each role has certain rules and expectations for behavior, which create the dynamics of interaction that are and aren’t allowed at school. These roles are then filled by different people over time. So even after all the students have graduated and all the teachers have retired, and there isn’t one single person who has stayed the same, the school is still recognizably a school.

Structures like this constrain the actions of the people within them, not only through those rules and expectations, but also by producing the general idea that “school” is what education looks like. This is the element of social structure that has most been coming to mind for me as I’ve been thinking about observation and self-observation: the ways that these patterns in social life come to be seen as normal, natural, and “just the way things are.” But individuals still have agency, which is the flip side of structure; this is the power of the individual to exercise choice. And, after all, social structures were all originally created through the action of agency, so there is always the potential to change them as well. They just have a lot of inertia to be overcome, especially the longer they’ve been around. And, of course, there are always some people who benefit from the existing structures and actively resist any changes to them. On top of that, individuals’ ideas about what choices are available to them are shaped by the structures around them, so agency is still influenced by the options being offered.

Some people in sociology have emphasized the influence of structure on creating the social world, while others have focused on the power of agency. I tend to agree with those who look at the interaction and interrelationship of the two. But given that US culture, at least, tends to emphasize the individual as if social structures didn’t exist, I find myself emphasizing the role of structure a little more often (and I suspect many other sociologists do as well, and for similar reasons). Because the fact remains that our individual choices are influenced by the options available to us, unless and until we insist on having new options. And it takes imagination and vision to come up with new options and push for them.

By the way, this is why I think it’s so important to learn about history, sociology, anthropology, and anything else that shows you other ways that people live and have lived. It’s a great way to break out of the taken-for-granted ways of thinking that make our current social structures seem not only natural but inevitable. One fairly recent book I enjoyed reading that might be of interest in this area is The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The authors are an anthropologist and an archaeologist, and the aim of the book is to give a more up-to-date picture of the development of human societies, a picture that also challenges the idea that societies inevitably follow a linear path through the development of agriculture right up to the creation of centralized nation-states involving hierarchy, conquest, and eventually capitalism. As one of the authors, David Graeber, said in a different book (again speaking about the human social world), “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

I think we might fairly quibble a little with the “just as easily” part, but the important message here is that things can be different. And this is the heart of what I’m getting at here, too: it takes a lot of effort to change entrenched patterns, and especially to challenge the prevailing status quo. It's not a mark of failure for that change to take time, even to take a winding path; it's a mark of how many obstacles you have to overcome. And while structural forces are bigger than any one person, people do collectively decide which ones will stand. Just as one person didn’t create them, one person can’t dismantle them—but each person who refuses to uphold the exploitative ones and works to build egalitarian ones makes a difference, even if they never see the end result of that change. So keep going.

And those are my thoughts for today; I hope I managed to connect enough dots for you to follow my thoughts on all this! I did go on for a while. I’ll be back soon, and in the meantime I hope you are able to take some time to observe the world where you are, whether that involves a change of seasons or not, and to observe your own place in it. I appreciate you going on this journey with me.