Francis describes the coming years as the "Long Dark," a period when grief will dominate and most people will shut down trying to face the crisis alone. Survival requires cultivating soul-life qualities: silence, deep listening, humility, vulnerability, and accepting grief and uncertainty. Without shared language for these experiences, people feel overwhelmed.
It seems, Francis, that we are living through a kind of culture collapse. I'm curious if you agree with that general assessment. If you can sort of outline some of the symptoms that you see or the impact that it has on the individual.
Grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future. So we are in this process of descent. So what does this do to the individual? Well, if we have the fiction that we can face it alone, it causes the individual to basically contract and close down. It's an impossibility to try to face what's happening right now. One of the things that's happening in the Long Dark is that we are being invited to cultivate different qualities of Soul life: silence, deep listening, humility, restraint. Now, this is inviting a very different response. That means we're going into the territory of Soul: vulnerability, grief, death, uncertainty, fear. This is a territory that's very familiar to Soul.
But if we don't have a framework for that or a language for that, it can feel very overwhelming.
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