Our World is Changing - by Venus and Indy

Our world is changing in unprecedented ways.


We are in the midst of a pandemic, and are being forced to review the ways in which we live our lives, in which we grieve, in which we love and connect. We are flooded with sensational news, hysteria and images of crises whilst vital resources and knowledge that would help us better understand the situation are withheld.

We pause at this juncture. Society is melting as we know it and the poison is being exposed at the surface for everyone to experience. Capitalism is the real virus at play and we are witnessing the effects of its grip. Issues that have been endemic and obvious to those experiencing them are now on display for everybody to see. Racism, classism, ableism - the lives given value and those given none. There is no way for society to close its ears any longer, to silence or dismiss voices of resistance, because the messages are coming through plain and clear. A new perspective endorsed by reality.

As communities, we are collectively collating useful information, updating each other on the sudden changes in law that will drastically affect the most vulnerable of us in society. Politicians are making snap decisions that will change the course of our lives and the landscape of our wellbeing.

The vast majority of us are banding together and sharing resources and information to benefit our families, friends and wider communities. Through these new and sometimes confusing interactions, we are made to look at the parts of human nature that are innate within us all, and at the same time observing the variety of human experiences that must all be nurtured and cared for.

It is our duty to digest all of this in this moment - to simultaneously care for our collective immediate needs and also to stay on point, vocalise and make visible the cracks and the changes. To be visible. To hold space together through this melting, and carefully construct the society we dream of out of the rubble. Going back to normal is not an option because normal is crisis. Coronavirus is not a crisis that has appeared out of nowhere, this is due medicine from the earth, in a healthy dose, to the societies that need to experience it most - to the west - shaking the core of capitalism, imperialism, consumerism.

We are seeing how much can happen when space becomes more confined. Almost embarrassingly, we digest the privilege of freedom and how easily it can be taken away. Those of us who see this pandemic as one of the most devastating collective crises in living memory, should feel something towards individuals and groups for whom infringement of their freedom, through violence, is normal.

Within our individual and social contexts, finding space to not only breathe and grow, but to serve and be useful, becomes a creative challenge to which we are constantly learning and adapting.

Society is being forced to acknowledge the importance of the caring arts – the livelihoods with humanity at their core – that are given least importance in the hierarchy of things. Nurses, who tend to the sick. Supermarket workers and delivery drivers who enable us to access food and supplies. Bus drivers who move us around, Waste collectors who deal with our rubbish, Artists, who soothe and inspire us, to galvanise and laugh and satirise. The surge in online porn and camming also makes visible the importance of sexual expression outside of intimate partnerships, and of course the importance of sex workers.

This is a time for personal and collective growth. We see positivity and negativity as being part of the same cycle of human experience. What is Karma but forcing ourselves to look within? Within the microcosms of our souls, our identities, within the parameters of our communities.

Through this we must remember, seeking pleasure is what enables us to thrive. All sentient beings on this planet are surviving. But health and wellbeing is more than that – it is thriving.

Through the virtue of our own divine, platonic and romantic loves, we seek to learn, experience, feel and be alive. In our very quest to know pleasure we sense a reaching out, a journey to divine love and harmony, It is through this quest that we sense an energy far greater than we could ever experience in this life, in our vulnerable material bodies. Yet it is through the sensory vessels that we experience the parts of this universe that stimulate and feed us.


What is freedom? What is liberty? When movement is limited and normal forms of action and the ability to take up space is heavily impeded… how do we survive and thrive?

We are seeing the lives that matter to our governments and those that don’t, the time taken to provide aid, and to who, and with what urgency. And then who is left in the cracks. Those that they ‘just can’t help’, because they are undocumented or incarcerated or in transition. Those who cannot document, or jump through the bureaucratic hoops, in insecure employment, in workspaces that never were legitimised enough to be secure, and are now illegitimate completely. Those who don’t have the privilege of a safe home environment to retreat to, who experience domestic abuse and are now trapped in violence. We see heightened police powers to arrest people on the streets, leaving those most vulnerable to arrest even more unsafe in moving around for daily tasks without the solidarity of onlookers resisting and recording police brutality.

Our economic models are soaked in blood. Built off the blood of slavery, of genocide, of oppression. None of the issues we are facing are new. The scale and location of the sacrifice is new, and while this virus does discriminate in terms of the care people will receive should they get ill, it is not discriminating who can get ill. Rich white people are at risk. So the governments are kicking into gear.

This is a time of radical change. We cannot stop it. Whether we like it or not, the mythical flames of regeneration are consuming this broken empire, spitting out the bones of all that is broken.

This is a time of radical change. We cannot stop it. Whether we like it or not, the mythical flames of regeneration are consuming this broken empire, spitting out the bones of all that is broken.