Video (Photos with Music): Tribute to Michael Dowd (1958 – 2023)

(See message from Connie Barlow, Michael Dowd’s wife, below.)

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This is a 5-minute artistic reflection of photos and music created by Michael’s wife and mission partner, Connie Barlow. She started and finished the video just 5 days after Michael’s death — motivated to have it included in the first zoom gathering of folks in the postdoom community trying to come to terms with their loss. It took Connie a few more days to write a caption that answers questions about Michael’s sudden death, gives an overview of his lifetime contributions, and that models a postdoom way of being during an unwelcome life transition. The video is posted on youtube: https://youtu.be/nJfTGijhi0k?si=yB6cGaUrcGR8jsHa (Make sure you click the “more” button in the caption to see the full essay that Connie posted there.)
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If you are curious about Connie’s long grounding in an appreciative, “deep-time” view of death, you can find that in a 2005 presentation she made, and later posted on youtube, titled “Death through Deep-Time Eyes”: https://youtu.be/zGnU1xZCWOY?si=Q365MRM7IYPXIcho  There are similar contributions of hers on youtube, but she prefers the one that is so old that she uses charts instead of a projected powerpoint, and where she delivers a science education partly by way of a song she wrote for the task. Connie and Michael’s set of video and text contributions on the death theme that are available online is aggregated on this page: https://thegreatstory.org/death-programs.html
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Message from Connie Barlow, Michael Dowd’s wife
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I am Michael’s wife of 22 years. Michael died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack the night of October 7. On October 12, I found solace and deep gratitude while creating this video tribute. I was motivated to get it onto youtube in time for the zoom gathering of Michael’s colleagues. I succeeded.
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I didn’t attend the zoom event, but I watched this video almost continuously that night and again the next day during the time I knew he was being cremated in Poughkeepsie, New York. I was (and still am) at our home in Ypsilanti, Michigan. It was a shock to all that Michael died in his sleep just 3 days after having attended his father’s death under hospice care in Poughkeepsie.
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PHOTOS THAT REPRESENT MICHAEL’S SHIFTS IN WORLDVIEW: This video entails a collection of photos, largely chronological, that colleagues will recognize. It begins with Michael’s early experience of the work of Thomas Berry, in what came to be known as the “epic of evolution.” Michael blended those learnings with his previous career as a Christian pastor, and thus was born his writing and speaking focus on what came to be called “evolutionary Christianity.” In December 2012, he woke up with horror to the speed and scale of the climate crisis. A philosophy major in college, but autodidact ever since, Michael devoured books and blogs on the science of climate change and what lay ahead. This rapidly shifted his attention from evolution as foreground to “ecology as the new theology.” (Thomas Berry, who had died in 2009, had emphasized both.) It was then that Michael donned a green clergy shirt and became “Reverend Reality” in his guest speaking around the country.
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Michael’s emphasis shifted again when he encountered in 2015 a book written by William R. Catton in 1980. Now he understood that the climate crisis was a new, global manifestation of the human tendency to overshoot ecological limits whenever forms of society complexified such that Indigenous values were lost. By the spring of 2019, he had a name for this new understanding: postdoom.
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Beyond the worldview shifts through time, there is something that has never changed. This is Michael’s sense of divinity within nature. Thus a sprinkling of photos of his joy in and worshipful responses to a stunning range of regional landscapes we were privileged to experience during our 18 years of living on the road.
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BACK TO THE PRESENT: On hearing the news of Michael’s death, one of the leaders taking charge of the postdoom website and its online community expressed a beautiful interpretation of how Michael died. Karen Perry wrote, “I can’t think of a more fitting way to go out, for someone whose heart was filled with so much love for life, the earth, and all beings…it finally just burst.” Learn more about Karen’s contributions to the postdoom community by watching her conversation with Michael titled, “Post-doom BENEFITS of Collapse Acceptance.” You’ll find that video in the top row of some 90 recorded conversations that Michael had with others, accessible through the postdoom website. Or go directly here:    • Karen Perry: Post-doom BENEFITS of Co…  
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Michael delivered his final guest sermon less than two months before he he died. I (and others) thought it his best. It is eerie how much that sermon focused on the importance of keeping a grateful understanding of death in the foreground. You can find it on Michael’s youtube channel in two parts:    • Being the Calm in the Storm (30-min) …      • Q&A after “Being the Calm in the Stor…  
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Vicki Robin featured that sermon in her “An Elegy in Prose for Michael Dowd” posted October 13 on the Resilience website. Her writing skills shine not only in conveying emotion. She briefly provides the context of her own recent learnings that opened the door of acceptance. She too has emerged into a sense of calm gratitude and service that she has long been known for. Find that essay here:. https://www.resilience.org/stories/20…
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TO ALL OF MICHAEL’S COLLEAGUES, past and present: I give you my thanks for helping my husband shine in serving the human and the more-than-human world. I can speak for Michael in saying that his life was complete at age 64. If he had any inkling of dying, I know he agrees that it was indeed a good day to die. And for me today, October 14, it is a good day to live.