Lamenting the End of Time: Living, Dying and Grief in the Shadow of the Sixth Extinction

Abstract

This creative research enquiry was framed as a response to my singular personal existential struggle, eco-anxiety and grief in the face of the Sixth Extinction. The enquiry produced a mindful performative offering firstly in the form of a zine (digital and printed) entitled ACT-i-ON: my random actions upon living, dying and grief in the 6th extinction, a collection of narrative writings, photos and sketches as a lament. The zine was then transformed into a gallery of posters, and used as a script and background for an embodied lectern-lamentation. I used the methodologies of performance as research with auto-ethnography. The content gained form via journaling and documenting lived experience in a creatively expressive mode, including but not limited to narrative, poetic language, embodied practice and photography. My reflections drew on past trauma and grief as well as present anxiety in relation to the current milieu. I then shaped this documented experience into a ‗ritual of lamentation‘ for the global suffering caused by humans to ourselves, and to all other sentient life on Earth, as well as my own personal grief. In this essay, I reflect on what this process meant. As a ‗creative thought randomiser‘ or an empathetic chameleon who dashes off on anecdotal tangents, was I able to synthesise my lived experiences of wandering and wonderings into a narrative form and structure which was able to be shared with an audience? Was I able to lift or shift my own sense of unease and ‗creative drought‘, to forge meaning while seeking my own place and significance in the world? The ‗random anecdotes‘, and representations of mindful actions, have been an antidote, or healing balm for the malaise of this possible end of time. These performative rituals are offered as my own coping mechanisms to calibrate and re-calibrate myself, manage my general life anxiety, my eco-anxiety and grief. By seeking peace through centering is it possible to find commonality – a conscious embodied-practice combined with mindful engagement and self-activism, which others may use to soothe themselves?