I had some familiarity with Hansard, but not much. I saw the film he made with Marketa Irglova, Once, and have always loved the gorgeous song from the film, “Falling Slowly.” Otherwise, all I knew about him was that he was a huge Bruce Springsteen fan and covered some of his songs.

Many fans are heartbroken by his death. I had no idea he was so well-loved. So while I am not mourning his loss per se, I was fascinated by the outpouring of grief and appreciation by the music community in these last weeks.

You’ve probably seen this kind of thing - a famous person dies, and especially when it’s a musician, fans spontaneously gather to sing, and mourn, and celebrate their life.

Hansard was known for busking on the streets of Dublin, so a large crowd came together in one of his usual spots and sang “Falling Slowly.” I watched way more of these tributes than I had any right to see, given my lack of fandom for him (honestly, I never loved his Bruce covers).

I’m always mesmerized by the collective sadness of these losses. When David Bowie died, I likewise ate up coverage of his memorials, even though I’m not particularly a fan. I had never given much thought to this, but with Hansard’s death, I wondered why?

Why does it feel important, even gratifying, to witness these gatherings of grief?

I realized that what draws me to these events - expressions of communal grief - is just that: people coming together to feel something.

Keening Women

These impromptu, informal gatherings are the opposite of any funeral I’ve been to. While not all funerals are the same, and are very dependent on culture and religion, most of the funerals that I’ve been to are nearly devoid of feeling. They are quiet, reserved, and cold. As I think back to the various ones I’ve attended over the years (most of them white and Christian), including for people who died tragically, they’ve all been very buttoned up, and certainly not emotionally gratifying.

My own father’s funeral was traditional, by which I mean I hated it. I knew many of the people in that church were broken by his death, myself included. But there were few tears. The church itself was dark and cold and creepy. Everyone quietly went through the motions, numb and stunned by loss.

I’ve been reading about the Celtic tradition of keening. For a thousand years in Ireland and Scotland, professional mourners were hired to chant, sing, cry, and wail for the dead. The singers were usually women because women have always been keepers of the dead.

Keening women would express some of the pain people felt as they laid their husbands, children, mothers, friends, and other loves to rest. No matter their own personal expressions of grief, whether they were stunned into silence or sobbing, there was energetic and emotional release provided by the professionals, and it was done through sound.

Messy, unruly, relieving sound.

There are parallels to keening in various cultures around the world, because releasing grief with our voices is primal, instinctual, and necessary. It’s vibrational and it moves the energy so it doesn’t get stuck in our bodies.

There were no keening women at my dad’s funeral. When I was told that he was going to die, though, involuntary, guttural moans came out of me. I didn’t release tears, at least not yet. My body intuitively responded to this crushing, crashing news with sounds like the ones I made when I birthed my daughter.

That makes so much sense to me, because these are two sides of the same coin, birth and death. Tending to my dying grandmother showed me that. In fact, many birth doulas shift to death care because they are working the same portals.

When grief is transgressive

We have all but lost the right - and the cultural space - to make the true sounds of grief.

In fact, keening was targeted by the Catholic church in the 18th century, condemning the practice as too loud, emotional, and pagan.

The reality was that keening was transgressive, because it kept the wild power of heartbreak in the hands of ordinary people, especially women.

The male clergy who led Catholic funerals wanted that power for themselves. Controlling grief meant controlling their congregations.

When we are cut off from grief, we are cut off from all emotion. We lose contact with ourselves, our bodies - and thus our intuition, and each other.

So keening was rebranded as uncivilized, and it disappeared completely in the 20th century.

Consider that: Women’s unbound expression of grief was so subversive it was banned by one of the most powerful institutions in the world.

What happens when we cannot cry out?

What happens when we reclaim the power to cry out?

Empowered emotion, especially for women, is an existential threat to patriarchy.

[No wonder women are silenced with claims of being “too emotional.”]

Those men won control over our grieving, like they control so much of this dying world. Now many of us come from cultures that make very little space for our bodies to move the energy of grief.

We are forced to hold it in, squash it, like zombies going through the motions, disempowered and isolated.

Celebration of life

That’s what is so enlivening about public, communal mourning for people like Glen Hansard.

Without the patriarchal, emotional control that accompanies many funerals, gatherings of fans are free to do what humans have always done when faced with grief: they sing. Like the keening women, they use their voices to transform their sadness into sound.

Maybe, though, the human instinct to sound out grief survived in Ireland, in spite of the Catholic Church.

Hansard’s funeral was actually held in an Irish church, and was a glorious expression of pain, love, and celebration of a life apparently well-lived.

I found myself watching clips of his funeral over and over. I even screen-recorded one, because I felt I needed to own it, to be able to refer back to it when inspired.

Given Hansard’s life as a musician, the ceremony was filled with music and singing by people like Bono, Eddie Vedder, and Marketa Irglova. That part was beautiful.

What took my breath away, though, were the cheers that erupted amidst the music as the pallbearers carried Hansard’s casket out of the church.

Friends and family clapped while they cried, and let out loud shrieks of celebration and sadness for the culmination of this life. It was one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen.

It seemed so wildly right.

Here was a man clearly loved by a church full of people. People who believed that he lived a good and generous life.

Tears were more than called for - tears for the decades Hansard could have yet lived, for the music he will not make, and certainly for his small child who will grow up without a father.

But also, yes, sounds of celebration, as if to say, “Our hearts are broken, but look with joy and gratitude at all you did in this life. Congratulations!”

Is this a common part of Irish funerals? I wouldn’t know. But I would love that to be part of my funeral when the day comes. In fact, I shared the clip with some close friends and family and said, “When I die, if you feel I’ve accomplished anything in this life, please let my funeral be like this.”

When is it ok to die?

Since then, I’ve tried to embrace a stance of celebration for the completion of my dad’s life.

He absolutely wanted that.

With his first diagnosis of cancer at 52, he said that no one could claim that he died young if he were to go then. He contrasted himself with the pediatric patients he saw and insisted that any outcome was acceptable to him.

Not long before he died almost twenty years later, he told me that his life was full and that I should not get too caught up in his loss (I can’t say that I’ve fulfilled that wish).

I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but I’d adopted a similar attitude toward my own mortality.

As my daughter has grown, I’m adamant that I should live long enough to see her to independent adulthood. That’s all I ask for. Anything more will just be icing on the cake. (I’m still waiting for the universe to officially sign off on this agreement.)

Thinking about this one day, years after my dad died, I was stunned to realize that this was exactly what he had been trying to tell me about his own mortality: it’s ok to go. When he was first diagnosed, he told me that he lived long enough to see his children grown. And then he lived further still to meet his grandchildren. The rest was extra.

For a long time, I was angry and jealous that he didn’t live longer. When I would hear of someone’s father dying, I would do the math in my head. “How many more years did she get with him than I got with my dad?”

But when I realized that he accomplished what I pray to accomplish - seeing my child to adulthood - I was stunned by the goodness of it, and my resentment over his death evaporated.

He actually got what I desperately want and still hope to achieve. He was living on extra. What could be better than that?

I will never not feel sad that he is gone from his body. Now, though, I see the value and truth of both tears and praise for a good life when it is complete.

Living is an accomplishment.

And it will end.

What would change if we allowed ourselves to face this reality and its accompanying range of emotional expression?

To realize a life is complete in its accomplishment, even if we want more, means we embrace death as a natural part of life, rather than something to be avoided at all costs. It means we open ourselves to really feel, the whole spectrum from grief to gratitude.

It means we take back the visceral and subversive power of keening, of emotional release.

Feeling together

Last month, I had the privilege of attending a communal grief event in memory and celebration of the poet, Andrea Gibson (they/them), who left their body one year ago.

This time, I got to feel in community, not just watch it on the internet.

The event was held at Red Rocks, and included a broadcast of Andrea’s last live performance, set to the Colorado Symphony. Megan Falley, Andrea’s wife and fellow poet, performed, along with Sara Bareilles and musician, Chris Pureka.

I can’t really describe what it was like, but it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever witnessed. Andrea was, and remains in spirit, pure magic.

Their poetry means the world to many people, and their death was gutting. The performance brought together thousands of people simultaneously grieving and celebrating this prophet. It was so sad. I was actually embarrassed by how hard I was crying by the end of it (even in this welcoming space, we have had the keening socialized out of us).

But it felt so fucking good. This is what Andrea and their poetry have brought me since I discovered them, only months before their death - access to free-flowing feeling.

It felt so good to experience the flood of emotion. To be in community with others who were crying, laughing, and feeling so strongly, too.

To mourn and to celebrate a good, complete life, even though we wish there was more.

Communal grieving is as old as humanity. It’s a healing that can only happen together. We’ve lost so much of the knowledge of how to do it, but we can get it back. We just need to give ourselves - and each other - the space and permission to do so.

Apparently, the first thing Megan Falley said to Andrea after they left their body was, “Congratulations. You did it.”

Andrea Gibson’s memorial performance, Love Letter from the Afterlife, is going on tour. I highly recommend you go, if you can.

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Thank you for helping to make this space possible. As a token of appreciation, I’ve created a printable altar page inspired by this month’s reflection on grounding amidst chaos.

In the thick of summer, grounding - centering ourselves, calming our nervous systems, connecting to the earth - should be easy.

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It was not scary, even though the intuitions eventually included an understanding that someone was going to actually die. Rather than worrisome or fearful, it all felt curious.

Part of it was sensing that I would one day be called to death work, like a death doula. For instance, I read a novel with a scene of a woman tending to her dying friend, and I was hit with an odd recognition. Reading those pages, I felt the tugging of a subtle, but clear, “Yes. This.”

I had never sat next to a deathbed at that point, so I was not reliving a memory (at least not one from this lifetime). It felt familiar, nonetheless.

In another example, my toddler began asking me to “play dead.” I would close my eyes, sometimes still standing, and she would call on Doc McStuffins to “fix” me, after which I was allowed to open my eyes and come back to life.

My algorithms showed me videos and articles about grief. I saw news segments about American funeral culture and the (mostly) women who are trying to reform it to be more humane, authentic, and sustainable.

I was not searching for these topics. But they kept appearing in my awareness. I recall talking with friends and wondering what it was all about. Really, though, I knew. I knew that death was coming, and it would bring with it a new version of me.

Because that old version of me would have never considered death work.

Like many people, I was highly death-avoidant. Particularly after my daughter was born, I couldn’t stand to approach anything related to grief or dying. If I did, I would often spiral out in anxiety.

Once, after hearing of another child’s life threatening condition - a child I didn’t even know - I hid in the cereal aisle of the grocery store because I was crying and in near panic at the thought (he turned out to be ok).

Eventually, these premonitions - both that someone close would die, and that I would embrace some kind of death work - manifested.

That someone was not, however, just one person.

By late 2017, a family member did die, but she was followed by a string of losses over the next three years. Elderly friends, all of my animals, and other family members, until finally, my father left his body in early 2020.

I did become a death doula, in a sense, as I supported my gram, my dad, and two of my animals as they transitioned.

My life was changed.

I was changed.

Now, I’m often the person friends call when they are struck with grief. Some have referred to me as their informal grief counselor.

I write about death and grief - the very things I couldn’t stand to think about a few years ago.

Grief as a portal

After avoiding the very idea of death for so long, I’m now drawn to the continuity of life and death, especially in this time when so much is dying.

All this was brought in stark relief for me as I watched Anderson Cooper’s interview with Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of a young man who was killed by Hamas on October 7. AC spoke to Goldberg-Polin on his wonderful podcast, All There Is, where he and his guests explore grief and loss.

AC lost his father when he was ten, and his older brother committed suicide a decade later. He says that his entire life was spent running from his grief, but he pursued a career as a journalist to confront other peoples’ grief and suffering as a proxy for his own. All There Is has been AC’s way of finally processing his profound losses.

Watching his conversation with Rachel Goldberg-Polin, actually seeing her physicality, was mesmerizing. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Back in 2016, before my people and animals died, I would have run like hell from this interview. I would not have been able to face a mother so battered with grief. Certainly, I still cannot go near the thought of that possibility for myself.

But as I’ve evolved into a grief walker, I’m irresistibly drawn to others who also walk that fine line between life and death, here and there.

Watching Goldberg-Polin on AC’s podcast, and in other interviews as well, I struggled to understand why I was so fascinated by her. It wasn’t just what she was saying. It was something about her entire presence.

I came to realize it’s the very rawness of her barely-contained grief. Our culture doesn’t usually allow us to see people in such pain. We hide it, deny it, and distract ourselves away from such realities.

Goldberg-Polin has suffered the unimaginable, and while she carries it with incredible grace, she does not hide it.

I’ll leave the details to her telling, but will say that she clearly and understandably exists on the border of madness after the violent kidnapping, imprisonment, and murder of her son, Hersh.

I don’t use the word madness here in any negative sense, because I feel nothing but compassion and awe for her.

I mean it in the way she seems scarcely held together, as if at any moment she may burst back into stardust with the herculean effort of remaining human and alive in the face of such horror.

Her mothering, her insistence on vast, infinite love - even amidst unthinkable hate - is staggeringly heroic.

We don’t create myths about this kind of feminine heroism, but we should.

Goldberg-Polin’s energy is that of a gaping wound. Of having zero time for bullshit in any way, shape, or form. No energy for lies or superficiality. No ability to pretend or fake anything.

She exudes a sharp, crystalline pain and a pure, overflowing love, as she talks openly about remaining in relationship with her son, who she feels near her left shoulder, always.

That’s it. She has room for nothing else, only pain and love. How could she hold anything else when she is forced to live with such monumental suffering?

She is utterly, and purely, real. She is a portal to what is true.

That is what holds my attention when I look at her.

We need grief walkers to step forward

I ran from women like Rachel Goldberg-Polin for years after my daughter was born, refusing to acknowledge that such losses are possible for mothers.

Now, as I stand still and actually stop to look at her - to look at such loss - I see the universe.

She is the living liminal, her broken heart holding all of life and death in one devastated human spirit.

After my father died, I recognized that I would henceforth live with one foot on the other side, where he is.

Part of me is always over there, with him. (Although, as I write this, I can sense him being very annoyed by this. He never liked attention, and wants me to get on with it.)

Often, it’s easier to allow my energy to float off in his direction. Sometimes I have to remind myself to be here in the aliveness, with my own and other human bodies still breathing.

So while I can’t comprehend surviving such violent loss, I recognize the liminality in Goldberg-Polin’s very being.

Most of the interviews I’ve seen are with only her. But in the All There Is podcast, her husband, Jon, is there, too.

Their heartbreak could not have physically manifested more differently.

She sits straight and upright, and looks AC directly in the eye as she speaks with utter clarity about her devastation and continued, evolving love for her child.

Jon carries an opposite physical presence. He is slouched, hardly speaks, and rarely lifts his head to look at AC. It’s like he can hardly hold himself up under the weight of his massive loss.

Jon broadcasts his broken heart with his body (a brokenness that Rachel proudly embraces for herself); while her physicality signals an unflinching confrontation with grief.

We will all face loss. Most of us will not face the torture of such violent loss, as the Goldberg-Polins.

Make no mistake, though, this threshold of life and death, the liminal space in between, is where we will all find ourselves as the world around us collapses, environmentally, socially, politically, and otherwise - if we don’t live there, already.

Rachel Goldberg-Polin is a living portal to the universe. All grief walkers are. They collapse something, too - the perceived distance between the living and dead.

Grief tears us open and allows the side of spirit to draw closer, to infiltrate and dismantle our adolescent notions of what is real and human and alive.

In order to move through this age of collapse, collectively and personally, we need to become portals. We can choose to open to the universe and to our dead, even when - especially when - we are not forced to. That is the only way forward. Because by opening to the reality of loss, we open to life - and to each other and ourselves.

We step out of the endless numbing and disconnection that defines our modern world and all the things that are destroying it.

We have no choice but to live in the liminal, and for who knows how long, as the old world dies, and the new struggles to be born.

We should learn how to get comfortable here.

Like Anderson Cooper, it’s time to face our losses.

Let’s not forget, though, that it is in the liminal - the threshold between earth and cosmos, life and death - where we can find magic, too.

Singer Sara Bareilles was inspired by an early episode of All There Is, when AC spoke to Stephen Colbert, to write her new song, “Home.”

It’s a fantastic conversation and a beautiful song, so you might check them out.

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There is a lot that can be said about this trend, in terms of feminism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and more.

But I’ve been thinking about how inhuman these people look.

The extreme anti-aging, conformity, and rejection of anything that might make their fuller or older faces unique or interesting, diminishes the very notion of humanity. The severe, surgical angles of their cheeks, frailty of their thinness, and intense control over their physical selves suggest nothing of joy, learning, heartbreak, or the inevitable confrontations with life itself.

Instead, their faces seem to convey a sense of panic or terror at the thought of anything real being reflected in their bodies. As if the only thing that matters is acting like they aren’t aging or don’t ever savor delicious food.

Really, though, they are pretending that they will never die.

By rejecting their most basic physicality, aging, pleasure, and mortality, the elite deny their own humanity. Because without those things, what’s left of being human?

Immortality is anti-human

The extreme manipulation of their bodies (particularly among women) is not the only way the aristocracy eschews their very humanity.

As I’ve written previously, the culture of tech billionaires includes not only forcing artificial intelligence down our throats, but also an obsession with anti-aging and longevity. Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and entrepreneur Bryan Johnson are investing piles of money into cryogenics, supplements and medications, research, and various therapies they believe will extend life - even indefinitely.

Johnson embraces what he calls a “Don’t Die” philosophy, which includes, “[devoting] hours of his day to working out, eating a strict vegan diet, perfecting his sleep, getting red-light and oxygen therapy, and religiously monitoring a copious number of health metrics—from the ‘biological age’ of his heart to the quality of his stool and the number of his nighttime erections.”

Where is the living if all you do is avoid death?

It’s not just him, either. His start-up has received backing from celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. PayPal founder Peter Thiel has questioned whether or not death is natural (he doesn’t think it is), while Johnson asks, “Are we the first generation that won’t die?”

By some unknown logic, Johnson argues that “Don’t Die” is the key to living with humility in a future dominated by AI intelligence, which is “an emergency situation…it’s not clear whether we humans have a future or not.”

Sam Altman, of OpenAI, believes that the “best case scenario” is for humans and artificial intelligence is to merge. Otherwise, we will soon have “two different species” on the planet - human and robot - and that’s bad, according to him, because humans will lose that inevitable fight.

Elon Musk has said that humans will become manual labor for a “digital superintelligence,” while Google co-founder Larry Page thinks humans will evolve into a “digital form to spread throughout the galaxy.”

According to journalist Eduardo Porter, “In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a ‘transhuman’ future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy. Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves.”

In other words, the techno-fascist psychopaths believe they are gods, and are driven by a “conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans” (which means the rest of us).

So they create the robots that they believe will destroy humanity, while hoping to become robotic themselves in a mad pursuit of immortality.

Life, death, and consciousness - that’s what the elite fear most because it’s what people like Thiel and Johnson cannot control, or even grasp, in their inhumanity. They hope to upload these things into robots, but will never succeed because they are not, after all, God. They are just people with too much money.

Unfortunately, we mere mortals have no choice - for now - but to live in a rapidly changing world driven by these maniacs.

We don’t have to give in to this inhumanity as easily as some are, though, like the Buddhist monks in South Korea who have embraced a robot monk named Gabby.

Far from a gimmick, the leader of this temple, Venerable Jungnyum, said of the AI monk, “At this civilizational turning point where artificial intelligence is coming like a tsunami, there is widespread concern and hope that Buddhism should also move toward a new direction of hope.”

Pinning the hope for human civilization on a Buddhist robot.

We don’t have to do it this way.

What makes us human?

This is the most fundamental question confronting us and our survival: Will we choose our own humanity in the face of so many forces that are fundamentally anti-human?

Artificial intelligence, extreme anti-aging, transhumanism, avoiding death at all costs, disconnect from nature, out of control materialism. These are the things that will destroy what makes us preciously human (and already are).

This is why coming into healthy relationship with mortality is the thing that will save us.

What could be more human than living and dying?

Death connects us to our bodies and the bodies of our loved ones. Anyone who has sat next to a deathbed and held a hand knows this.

Death is beyond intellect and centers emotion and intuition. It reminds us that we are part of nature and earth.

Death - not Bryan Johnson’s immortality - humbles us. Accepting that we are temporary urges us to sacred surrender. It brings us into reciprocity with everyone and everything, and opens our awareness to the divine.

Embracing what makes us human, like growing old, good food, softening - even the end of our humanness - not only makes every moment and relationship precious, it makes everything real.

In rebelling against anti-humanism, we expand our welcome not only to other people, but to the whole of nature - plants, trees, animals and everything else. All of these beings that are living and dying, just like us, as fellows in consciousness.

We recall that we can see ourselves in them. That all of life is living in mutual dependence. That we are all alive, here, together.

Animals tells us what it means to be human

It’s not a coincidence that the world recently fell in love with two animals - two very humanized animals - Aloka the Peace Dog and Punch the Monkey.

Aloka is a street dog who joined a Buddhist walk for peace in India a few years ago. He was so loyal to the monks on that walk that leader Bhikkhu Pannakarra saved Aloka’s life on that mission and brought him back to the U.S. with him.

In late 2025-early 2026, Aloka and the monks walked for peace again, from Ft. Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., this time capturing the attention of millions. The heart in the fur pattern on Aloka’s head and his steadfast commitment to the monks have won him fans around the world. Social media posts humanize Aloka by talking about his patience, gratitude, and devotion to spreading the message of peace. Bhikkhu Pannakarra has said he is convinced that Aloka is a reincarnated Buddhist monk.

Likewise, earlier this year, Punch the Monkey garnered the love of people globally from a zoo in Japan. When he was born, Punch was abandoned by his mother. So zookeepers gave him a stuffed monkey to cuddle. Pictures of Punch carrying his pretend mama with him everywhere made him a viral sensation. Images show the monkey hugging the doll and clearly having a strong attachment to it - as any human child would. People have lined up by the thousands to catch a glimpse of Punch (fortunately, he was eventually embraced by another adult in the monkey community).

These animals resonate so strongly because they remind us of what we once knew: We are not so different from them, and them from us. We are made of the same living stuff, interdependent in ways that all of humanity used to recognize.

The memory that Aloka and Punch hint at is resurfacing in our collective consciousness. It will be the way of the new world that is emerging: a world of connection, life and death, humanity and interbeing.

This is the memory that the techno-fascists and authoritarians are fighting to squash: the knowledge that we are one in the same.

We will all live and die - people, dogs, monkeys. None of us any better than the other. None of us gods.

We can remember, if we try - and even if the robots and their creators never understand - that we do live forever.

Infinity is ours, just not in these bodies. That is what makes us so preciously human and animal and alive.

What connects you to your humanity?

I know this is ridiculous, but…

I’m going to admit something that sounds wackadoodle. It is wackadoodle, even for me. I’ve been trying to make sense of this insane idea for years. Truly, I haven’t shared this with many people.

These days, though, everything is crazy, right? So, why not?

Here it is…

I’m a tarot reader and have been reading for 20+ years, including professionally (no, that’s not the crazy part). There are myriad ways to read the cards - different layouts, ways of asking questions, etc.

Often in January, I’ll do a spread for the year ahead, with one card representing each month. The goal is to get a sense of the predominant energies that will be at play. Nothing is set in stone, however. The future is yet unwritten. As I describe it to my clients, the cards can let you know what energetic direction you are heading if nothing changes (and things often change).

Honestly, I don’t put much stock in a year’s forecast for that very reason - energy is very malleable. It’s interesting to consider, though.

In January, 2022, I did a reading on my upcoming year. When I do a reading for myself, it’s just that - for me. Some readers tap into collective energies, such as what an upcoming election will bring, or what might happen with the war in Iran. Social media seems to be driving this.

I don’t do collective readings. Mine are personal, whether I’m reading for myself or someone else.

But in early 2022, when I read the card for May of that year, I got a very strange, ominous feeling. It didn’t feel like the energy was about me or my life, though. It felt like it was about all of us. The energy felt big, and not good. It was the Emperor card, which is not at all inherently scary or negative, although it is a significant masculine archetype.

Yet, I still had the sense of something imposing and dark, and a sense of emergence with it. As if the bad thing was rising - beyond us all.

Here’s where we get wackadoodle: The only way I can describe the energy was that it was like the anti-Christ.

Trust me, I know that is insane. I’m not Christian, and I’ve never read the Bible.

But I do read Stephen King.

The Stand

If you are familiar with his post-apocalyptic novel, The Stand, you’ll know what I mean when I say that the image that came to me was of Randall Flagg, the anti-Christ figure of that story.

Like some of Stephen King’s other books, The Stand has stayed with me decades after reading it.

In King’s telling, the world is trying to remake itself after a pandemic wiped out most of the population. Without knowing exactly why, surviving people of goodness are drawn to Boulder, Colorado. The bad people are pulled to Las Vegas, where they come under the influence of the demonic Randall Flagg.

In that sense, you could interpret the Emperor card I got in that tarot spread as a dark leader, like Flagg.

While I didn’t fully understand the energy, I knew if it called to mind King’s anti-Christ, it wasn’t good.

So I spent the first half of 2022 dreading May. I think we can agree, though, that the anti-Christ didn’t appear that year. You probably don’t even remember anything particular about that month, right?

Here’s one thing that did happen: the Uvalde school shooting in Texas.

I won’t go into details about that, other than to point out that it was the one where the police stood outside the building and did nothing. There were high casualties. I was devastated.

It was horrific, as they all are. But that shooting didn’t seem to indicate something as mythic and massive as the rise of the anti-Christ, especially in America, where we make a hobby of violence.

However, that very night - only hours after many children were senselessly killed - I watched Senator Ted Cruz on the news. He was at the school, the very place it happened, ranting about Democrats and their supposed politicization of mass murder.

There was not a moment’s pause for heartbreak or compassion. There was no sense of urgency to stop such avoidable tragedy.

No humanity.

Cruz merely repeated the GOP party line about the Second Amendment and condemned calls for gun control.

A collective evil

There are lots of things we can point to, in terms of non-wackadoodle explanations for the Right’s obsession with the Second Amendment, including truly evil things like white supremacy. We refer to 18th century militias, and what the framers might have intended. We talk about the influence of the NRA and money on politics.

I’ve spent so many years trying to wrap my mind around their insanity. To make it logical, as if it’s a valid expression of Americanness or constitutionality. Like I just need to work harder to see it from their point of view and then I’ll understand.

Yet that night in May, when the land itself must have wailed in grief for those babies, Ted Cruz remained utterly unmoved.

That’s when I realized: there is no anti-Christ, not in the biblical sense of an individual rising to lead us all into darkness. There is no evil emperor. Not even Trump, or Epstein, or Randall Flagg. They surely embody evil, but they are enabled and emboldened by so many other people.

That is what became clear to me, and what I think my tarot reading was hinting at.

The anti-Christ energy is all of them.

A darkness has descended, but it is collective, embodied by an entire population of people like Ted Cruz.

That’s why others like him, unbelievably and inconceivably, have no desire whatsoever to protect children from horrific and avoidable violence.

It is the energy of Randall Flagg, or what Christians might call the anti-Christ, dispersed through many, many people who collectively and literally personify true darkness. That’s why they can so easily dismiss the slaughter of children in their classrooms. It’s terrifying, but actually quite simple when you look at it that way. No mental gymnastics are needed to try to make sense of their madness.

It’s just evil.

Yet…I still wondered if that realization was enough to justify the magnitude of energy that I perceived in that tarot card.

Only a few days later, I got a sign of affirmation.

I was listening to a sermon by my favorite mystic, New Thought minister, Michael B. Beckwith, when he said exactly what I was thinking, only in reverse - from the perspective of love, not evil.

He talked about how many people are waiting for Jesus to return to earth, in the Second Coming.

Christ vs. anti-Christ.

But Rev. Michael insisted that this time Christ would not return in the form of a single, individual figure to lead us. Rather, it would be - it is - a collective awakening amongst many.

We can all embody this energy.

We don’t have to wait for anyone. We are our own leaders of light.

Christ consciousness - which is not Christian, and not a person, but a state of love, compassion, and peace embodied by the person known as Jesus, among others - is returning to humanity through the many, many people who embrace it.

Reverend Michael says that divine light is rising in humanity, and it is dispersed through us as a collective, just as I intuited that the energy of darkness was dispersed through many people - like Ted Cruz - who are fighting the expansion of love on earth.

The evolution of love

Wackadoodle or not, I’m convinced that we are, in fact, witnessing a battle of light and dark play out in real time. That’s why there is so much chaos and horror, revealing of the worst of humanity.

Calling it “battle of light and dark,” isn’t quite right, though.

While I do believe these energies are alive in some sense, if not exactly conscious, I don’t think Ted Cruz worships Satan (but really, would anyone be surprised if he did?). I think it’s more subtle than that, if just as powerful.

On a cosmic level, the earth (including us) is evolving into greater light and love.

Maybe that’s the most wackadoodle thing I’ve said, given all of the suffering and cruelty in the world these days. It certainly doesn’t look like love on the surface.

Yet, the violence and backlash that we see is in reaction to the light that is growing.

The darkness is more evident because the light is chasing it out of the corners, out from under the rocks. The evil isn’t new or getting stronger.

We are just more aware of it.

That’s the important part: the only way we can eradicate evil is by seeing it. By knowing that it exists. By facing the horror of its reality and straightening our spines to look it directly in the eye.

We can’t vanquish white supremacy once and for all if we don’t know the full extent of it.

We can’t truly protect children if we don’t even know how sexually depraved are the cultural elite.

We can’t foment a revolution to overcome capitalist exploitation if we don’t face how damaging over-consumption actually is.

As we shine a light on the cockroaches, they will scatter. It will be disgusting. They might even run over our feet. We’ll be horrified by how many there are, not because they just arrived, but because we only now realized our home is infested.

Demon days

The memory of that tarot card came back to me because I’ve noticed something strange lately: References to demons and the idea that our society is run by them.

Trust me when I say that my algorithms are trained to show me some very weird shit (some might say wackadoodle). Those are the circles I run in.

But I don’t mean the astrologers, tarot readers, and paranormal investigators that I interact with, online and off.

I’m thinking of people who are secular, and certainly not woo-woo, who are casually dropping the word “demon.” For instance, I recently had a conversation about politics with a like-minded colleague. He said, “I’m not spiritual, but if I was I would say these people are demons. Because demons would do the same things. It would be no different.”

These references are coming from political commentators, activists, and various people who are not speaking in a spiritual, religious, or metaphysical context.

Many people don’t believe in the idea of an anti-Christ, or even a Christ, let alone demons.

But clearly, there is an understanding, if not fully conscious, moving through the collective that, even in a world that has always been marked by violence and suffering, there is something different happening now.

People can feel it. Their intuition knows that something more, something deeper, is going on. It’s not just terrible politics. It’s not just history playing out. It’s not just one horrific president.

The veil is thinning. And maybe, just maybe, energy perceived as demonic is slipping through. The fabric of our reality is shifting. Our understanding of humanity - or lack thereof - is changing. I think this is what people are intuiting, and what I sensed in that tarot reading in 2022.

Where do you stand?

If my story about Randall Flagg and the tarot card doesn’t resonate with you, we can still make the same point, in earthly terms.

We all agree that things are falling apart. Fascism is here. White supremacy and patriarchy are fully unmasked and clinging to power. The environment is collapsing.

And these things are also true:

Authoritarianism was defeated in Hungary.

Sexual assault survivors are saying, “NO MORE,” and outing their abusers online - with names, photos, and places of residence.

Movements are rising around the world to demand freedom, and all on the same terms - of basic human decency, community, and love.

We have all the technology we need for sustainable energy, we just have to use it.

The light - goodness - is growing. More and more people are demanding it. In reaction, darkness - evil - is fighting back, because it will not willingly give up power.

Nothing can stop this tide, though. For every Ted Cruz, there are hundreds of decent people, whether in Tennessee or Iran or anywhere else - who are feeling a call to gather together and do something, demand something, build something better.

Like the protagonists in The Stand, who lived in the midst of catastrophe, yet felt something inexplicable drawing them to each other in the Rocky Mountains, to prepare for battle with Randall Flagg and his minions.

The work is in shining our light so that we may find each other on the way. To know we are not alone. To trust that we are all heading in the same direction, and will, inevitably, get there (even if it’s not Boulder, Colorado).

As The Prophet, a character in Stephen King’s book, says, “It’s time to make your stand.”

As the flames grew closer one night, I packed go bags while my family slept. We were not in an evacuation zone, but I wanted to prepare just in case. My sister was communicating with a local wildfire expert on Twitter and had shared my location. The expert said that we’d probably be okay, but if it were her, she’d be ready to go.

As I mentally scanned every room of my home for what I felt we absolutely could not live without, I realized there were so few objects that were precious enough to save.

Certainly, I thought, some things that belonged to my daughter and her childhood mementos. Porcelain pioneer dolls that my grandmother made. My father’s wallet from the 1960s with photos, addresses, and a tiny diary. That’s about it.

There was relief in the realization that most of the stuff I held dear wouldn’t really matter in a sudden evacuation.

Fear of Fire

As a child, I worried about my parents dying in every way my young mind could conceive. At night I prayed for God to spare them from a plane crash, heart attack, or car accident; disease, murder, or anything else I could imagine. It was a long list and an exhausting bedtime routine. It’s probably no wonder I had insomnia.

I was especially worried about the house burning.

Maybe I can blame this on my father. He made my younger sister and me practice escaping our home in the event of fire. He said there would be no electricity or light if it broke out in the middle of the night, and that it was possible that he and my mother would not be able to get to us. So we would have to save ourselves. There may not have been a direct route out of the bedroom, depending on the location of the fire. So he made us close our eyes and feel our way to a second-floor window, unlock it, and imagine jumping. He also pointed out which window to leap from because only one had a first-floor roof underneath to break our fall. My dad explained that as the contractor who designed and built our home, he made sure every bedroom had at least one window with a roof below for just this reason.

Maybe it’s no wonder that today, I’m still fixated on fire.

If I’m in a hotel, I note the escape route posted on the back of the room door. At home, I make sure the batteries in the smoke detectors are replaced every time we change the clocks, as recommended. Sometimes, it’s hard for me to walk away from my kitchen before I go to bed, as I compulsively check the oven, stove, toaster, and coffeemaker, making sure all heat-producing appliances are turned off.

A Strange Longing

Out-of-control wildfires nearby should have been something that simply terrified me that autumn after my father died. And sometimes they did.

One afternoon, as I homeschooled my daughter, a thick cloud of smoke passed overhead. The room suddenly darkened and she looked at me with questioning eyes. Trying to manage her reaction to the burning world around us, I played it cool and casually said, “Woah, isn’t that weird?”

I didn’t want her to know how afraid I really was. She had already experienced several losses in her little life. I didn’t want this dread to capture her, too.

Repeatedly during those months, streetlights came on in the middle of the day. The sky turned orange. Enough ash fell on my car that I could scoop it from the windshield with a spoon—and I did. I gathered a small pile and closed it up in a jar. Without knowing why, I felt the need to save it. To keep it with me.

As the fire grew, and drew closer, something in me was pulled toward it.

Eventually, the flames themselves became visible as a massive column of smoke hovered nearby. Depending on the winds, the funnel-shaped plume often stretched across our neighborhood.

Each day, I found myself looking for it. Somehow, when the smoke wasn’t there, I felt an odd yearning, or sadness. It took me a while to name it, but it came to feel like grief. I wondered where the smoke had gone and when it would return.

This strange desire left me feeling guilty and confused. There were people whose lives were being upended, if not actually ended, by those flames. Firefighters were at risk, towns devastated, and animals lost. I was so afraid of the fire that had haunted me since childhood, but somehow, I craved this thing wreaking havoc not so far away.

But what was I craving?

The fires burned for months across the front range of the Rocky Mountains, parallel to a busy street that ran through my neighborhood.

I was struck by the odd juxtaposition of this unfolding catastrophe and the business-as-usual of that street. There was the fire itself, right there, as well as its indication of crisis on a larger, global level, as climate change intensifies.

And also right there was the typical traffic of thousands of cars driving along that road so near to the burning hills. People passing the flames and smoke, going about their day.

I wondered what they were thinking as they drove. The fire lasted so long: Did they grow accustomed to it on their daily commute? Were they afraid? Did they notice if the plume had shifted direction with the wind like I did?

Life stopped, or slowed down, for so many during that time of pandemic lockdown. But in the face of this environmental catastrophe, life continued against an apocalyptic backdrop.

I traveled up and down that corridor as the flames grew, too. I couldn’t guess what others thought as they drove by, but I was puzzled by my own reaction.

The strange longing inside me piqued whenever my attention turned to the fire. It was the same yearning that made me collect the ash from my car, and to search for the plume each morning. It was a stirring, a pull, but to what I had no idea.

This unidentified longing in my belly—that’s where it was, I could physically feel it there—made me uncomfortable. Why would I feel drawn to this overwhelming, destructive presence?

I knew I needed something, badly. My body was trying to tell me what it was. But I couldn’t yet decipher its message.

Goddess of Destruction

One evening the flames intensified. They grew up and over the last ridge of the hills that bordered town, though, thankfully, we were still safe and not being evacuated.

People wandered to the edge of that road to watch in awe. After I put my daughter to bed, I, too, went to the outer corner of the neighborhood to see the glowing orange in the darkness.

I needed to see.

There was that strange feeling in my gut. But this time it was different.

I finally understood. In a flash, my mind caught up to what my body had known all along.

Staring at the burning hillside, I suddenly recognized what I was looking at.

It was her—the dark goddess, the one of death and destruction, recognized by religion, art, and spirit for thousands of years.

Kali. Hecate. Lilith. The Morrigan.

Goddesses that have been central to the human understanding of the world since our earliest days. These are not the soft and cuddly energies that we often imagine as the divine feminine (although, I’m sure those aspects exist, as well). These are the ones who wreak havoc and destruction, leaving trails of blood and tears in their wake.

Significantly, many dark goddesses are not just bringers of death, though.

They are also worshiped as deities of fertility and rebirth, because their paths of destruction are the necessary forerunner to new life.

They are like the fire that refreshes the landscape by providing the nutrients of ash and allowing tiny sprouts the sunlight they would not have received without a diminished canopy.

That was what I recognized in the fire - the living goddess of both life and death.

I do not mean that I symbolically imagined her as some kind of metaphor for the destruction I witnessed. I mean it was her, there in the fire. She was the fire. I was literally looking at her, and my body knew it all along.

That’s why I felt the strange longing when the smoke went elsewhere. It was the ache of something significant leaving, like my loved ones who recently died away.

I certainly did not want to burn, and I had no desire to don a firefighter’s uniform and enter the fire. It was nothing like that. Rather, it was a need to energetically connect with the wild cosmos that I sensed in those flames.

Since embarking on my spiritual journey many years ago, I sought to know the universe, often by relating to it as the goddess. While I understood that her many forms included death and destruction, I never truly experienced her in that way until now.

In my time of grieving, this was the version of her that my body and spirit needed.

And because of that resonance, I was able to recognize her, as if we had always been acquainted, but I had forgotten.

She is the primal force of chaos and grief that is greater than our own human pain.

There was relief in my smallness, to be unequivocally reminded that there is so much more than my own loss.

The ache I had been feeling was the ancient awareness inside me of what it has always known but lost the language to name. It was grief for the inherent connection to earth and cosmos that was central to human evolution, but has been betrayed and denied for too long.

In spite of the fear I always had about fire - that my own father instilled in me with childhood fire drills - I wasn’t afraid as I stood in the orange night.

But what I happened upon wasn’t courage, or an overcoming of my lifelong worry about fire.

It was an understanding that leapt up and over that reasonable concern to touch something more. It was like suddenly awakening into a larger reality - a reality of terrifying, yet vast and infinite, consequence. Spiritually connecting with the wild death in the flames was enlivening.

There is a knowing in our bodies that is separate from our conscious thought. It is the part of us that is older and deeper, the wisdom of feeling, energy, and intuition. This thing in us remains. But we’ve lost the ability to recognize it, let alone honor and nurture it.

The disconnect from our own darkness is the reason so many of us feel abandoned, alone, or afraid. We lack the tools to embrace what is real and whole, all the parts of ourselves and the world around us, including the necessary and unavoidable relationship with nature and the life and death that feeds us all.

She was the one eating up the hillside, acre after acre, taking back what was hers. It was HER, the goddess that consumes and births it all from within.

This illumination was not comforting, because she is not concerned with our comfort. It felt urgent and craving, and it brought on a wave of nausea. My legs grew weak, and it became hard to stand. Pain suddenly stabbed in my head. I bent forward there on the side of the road with my hands on my knees, trying to steady myself and breathe.

Now that my conscious awareness could shoulder some of the weight, my body let go of the secret it had been carrying with a swell of relief and release.

This was the truth of the dark goddess in front of me: terrible awe and recognition.

It was beyond any intellectual, or even emotional, comprehension. It was spirit, primal. It was the nature, earth, and cosmos deep within that recognized the energy that was lashing out against the human degradation of her earthly body. She was taking it back, and screaming, “Enough!”

As I did in the previous weeks when I looked for the plume of smoke each day, I felt compelled to commune with her, only now the need had become almost frantic. I had to do it. But I had little understanding of what that meant. Do what, exactly?

It was a desire that my mind couldn’t comprehend, because why would it? Why would I be drawn to the fire I had always feared—a rational, logical terror of one of the planet’s most destructive forces?

All I could think to do was drive to a place in town where I could get a broad vista of the flames burning in the distance. The fire at its peak was attracting a crowd, resembling those that gather in the same spot for summer fireworks. Others had the same idea, if not for the same reason. The parking lot was full of people gawking and taking photos. It was like half the town had stopped to witness nature.

To pause for a moment to remember that yes, it - she (nature/death, because they are one in the same) - still exists.

Befriending Death and Destruction

Modern life is arranged around the avoidance of death, and I think this is one of the most fundamental problems of our society.

It’s leading us - ironically - straight into destruction.

Our refusal to accept mortality sends us spiraling in pursuit of youth, distraction, materialist extraction, and disconnection from ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

If we stopped running from death, we would soften in gratitude for our mortal bodies, aware of their fleeting nature.

Community and ritual would be centered, as it was inevitably for our ancestors, because that is the only way to ground ourselves in honesty about what this life really is.

The cycles of nature would be celebrated as sacred reflections of our own phases of birth, death, and rebirth. We would see ourselves in the trees, animals, and dirt.

We avoid all of this because these experiences cannot help but remind us that we are only temporary.

So we distance ourselves from embodiment, meaning making, and the perpetual letting go demonstrated by the natural world.

This is what the ancient goddess traditions taught: That life and death are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other.

The Insanity of Immortality

Our culture views death and decay as the ultimate defeat.

I think this is what drives the sociopathic elite, men like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg.

They have unimaginable wealth and power, and instead of using it to solve the metacrises facing humanity - authoritarianism, war, technological overwhelm, hunger, lack of healthcare, environmental collapse - they invest in colonizing space, longevity research, and even freezing themselves to avoid death. They build doomsday bunkers, what LinkedIn co-founder, Reid Hoffman, calls “apocalypse insurance.”

(Their insanity begs the question: Why do they want to live forever if they are convinced that the future is apocalyptic?)

Techno-fascist, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and mentor to JD Vance, has said, “There are all these people who say that death is natural, it’s just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth.”

These men translate their vast wealth into a belief that they can outwit the one thing that comes for us all - death. In reality, immortality is the one thing they cannot buy. And they can’t stand that, because they cannot imagine that there is something greater than their own self-importance. Rather than cultivate humility, compassion, and connection as paths to an infinite life of spirit, they pursue physical preservation into insanity.

They have no understanding of the fleeting preciousness of nature, bodies, each other. The only thing that matters to them is their own power and wealth, and so they speed us toward apocalypse because they assume they can survive it, even if the rest of us cannot - especially if the rest of us cannot.

Contrast this with the natural death care movement, led primarily by women like mortician, Caitlin Doughty.

Doughty and others are re-centering death, and providing opportunities for more tender, sustainable options when faced with dying. For death care activists, mortality is not something to be feared and avoided. Rather, it is a profound passage that can be met with softness and space for grief in a loving community.

This is the key: By befriending our own mortality, we actually open to greater compassion and understanding. We accept that we are only temporary. This reality guides us to gratitude for what is, because we know it will not always be.

It brings us to our very humanity.

The fires on the hillside near my home taught me this fundamental truth: We cannot truly live without facing death, because it is she who brings us life itself - primal, heartbreaking, precious life.

That’s why my body responded as it did to the smoke and flame - with longing and ache - because it recognized her there, the goddess of destruction, the other half of our living that we have, for so long, tried to live without. Like attempting to survive on only half breaths.

She taught me that our cultural amnesia will not save us, it will only diminish our aliveness.

We don’t have to like the fire of destruction, and most of us will never truly welcome death, but if we want any chance of surviving, we have to befriend it.

Most of us would agree that these are hard days. Horrifying, even. Collectively, we are experiencing things most of us never imagined we would face. Fascism. Social breakdown. Possible nuclear war. Environmental collapse.

That’s not what I’m asking, though.

A more precise question might be: what meaning do you ascribe to this era?

Making meaning is part of what it means to be human. If we can make meaning, we have something to hold onto, to ground us in the tumble and chaos of change.

For instance, do you believe this is merely the cycle of history playing out once again? Is it a generational been there, done that, kind of thing? If so, that meaning can suggest that just have others have survived the traumas of history, we can, too.

Do you believe this is the awful consequence of years of terrible political decisions (or maybe a culture too lazy to decide)? That could suggest that there is a clear solution - political activism.

Or is this the inevitable consequence of late-stage capitalism? Are we so numbed by over-consumption that we can’t adequately respond to attacks on our rights and freedoms anymore? In that case, maybe the way out of this crisis is to reconnect to community and deprioritize materialism in your life.

It’s easy to argue that all of these things are playing out (and more).

I’m trained as a historian, so I clearly see a through line from the founding of America to today. The United States was built on authoritarianism, abuse, and theft. The only difference now is that more white Americans are waking up to this reality.

We have allowed our political culture to devolve into madness in recent years. But that’s not only since 2016. MAGA is a symptom of what has always been there. It’s just the worst expression of it. For too long, too many people have been complacent, if not apathetic, about this slide.

We can certainly attach practical, earthly factors to explain the various nightmares we are experiencing.

In any case, making meaning of our experiences offers a roadmap through them.

I believe that, in addition to these mundane explanations, there is another, deeper, more vast layer of meaning that brings us here. Actually, I’m quite sure of it.

And it seems that other people - even ones who aren’t particularly woo or spiritual - are increasingly sure of it, too.

They are saying things like, “Reality just seems…off.” “What is going on with time? Nothing seems normal anymore.” Or, “Something is changing. I can’t explain it.”

More and more people are sensing, on an intuitive level, that a significant shift is taking place. The mechanics of it are unseen, but that’s the point. This is a transformation that can only be felt.

It’s a shift that is much bigger than history or politics. We are experiencing an ascension of human consciousness that is reflected through the cosmos.

It’s precisely why so much filth is bubbling to the surface. The rot must come to light in order to be washed away, to make space for a truer, kinder, more just future.

Astrologers, tarot readers, and other mystics are all pointing to huge, utterly transformative forces that are leading to a new way of being on earth. These interpretations align with spiritual and religious understandings that also predict a new era of human existence, such as some indigenous prophecies.

This cosmic understanding gives me strength to face these times with some measure of hope and stability.

This shitstorm is not random. It has meaning.

Regardless of your spiritual worldview, if you sense that something more is at play, you are not alone.

Many people seem to be adopting this perspective, but they feel isolated and frustrated in their understanding.

They feel all-to-aware of something that others do not notice, and it’s exasperating, or even scary. They see signs that things are falling apart, but those around them seem blissfully ignorant.

“How are other people just going about their lives as if none of this is happening? I feel crazy!”

Of course, if more people recognized the severity of the crises we are facing, we would not be in this situation. Since we do find ourselves here, though, I’d like to offer another way of looking at this divide.

Instead of alienation in the face of others’ sleepwalking, reframe your awakeness as a superpower.

Take it as a sign that you can see through the bullshit - an indication that you are empowered to be one of the leaders of the way through, even if that’s not big, public leadership in the way we think of it.

If you can see, you are meant to hold space in this time of transition, space for grief, raw truth, and compassion.

If your eyes and heart and mind are open to the horrors, then you are one of the architects of what comes after this, even if you plant just a few seeds of change (seeds that may not bloom in your lifetime).

The only thing required of these space holders, the architects of a new world, is the will to see past the horrors, to look farther down the road to what is possible on the other side of all this.

To ask: What additional truths have yet to be revealed?

Hold space for more.

Don’t get bogged down by the slumber of those who are not burdened by the harshness of this era.

Don’t get caught in the despair of now.

Instead, use your super-vision to see beyond what some don’t even notice, and remember that this is not the end of everything. It’s only the end of what was. And so much of that needed to burn, anyway.

Refuse to see the present as the concluding chapter.

When you are in despair, remind yourself, and anyone willing to listen (because you are a space holder), that one of the problems with despair is that we forget it is not the last thing.

Resist the urge to imagine that this is all that will ever be, ever again. Don’t give into the notion that nothing comes after this.

Such defeatism is selfish and narcissistic.

It assumes we know everything, including how this will play out. We do not.

It dishonors the many previous generations who have been through times like this and worse - and yet continued to hold a candle of hope for the future.

It abandons those who will come after us and have no choice but to live in the future, whatever it will be.

You don’t have to believe in astrology, or prophecy, or ascending consciousness to believe that we who see have the obligation to be good ancestors. We cannot give up on holding space for a much better future.

In the thick of night, it can be hard to remember that lighter, more loving, days are possible.

But we desperately need people who can see in the dark.

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