Sometimes I wish I didn’t know the thoughtless things people do during this time of global climate collapse, poverty, and plague, a time when forests, crops, and cities burn and the absolute worst humans on Earth can bug out of any situation with ease1 while the rest of us see everything burn, flood, crumble, die, and fall around us and we’re like …

“wait … what?”

Maybe we hoped that clearer heads would prevail, that there would be mercy, that recycling and writing to companies about using less packaging and screwing in more efficient light bulbs and planting flowers and meatless Mondays and permaculture and kombucha and bike commuting and sharing stuff and right livelihood and good vibes and thrifting and electric cars would reverse the avalanche of catastrophe and that surely our shared imperilment would spur the captains of industry and owners of the world’s resources, weapons, medicines, and patented seeds into doing something to, you know, help.

I mean really help, not help shine corporate images by wearing green shirts, selling oatmeal colored furniture or lavender dryer sheets, or putting windmills and solar panels in petroleum ads, but by steering vast resources into caring for and restoring ecosystems and funding organizations, community groups, and educational programs so that more of us can get involved, because the rest of us are learning that even some of our best efforts have been illusory. Blowing thoughts and prayers into a tissue and tossing it over their shoulders as they walk away from problems hasn’t helped. I hoped when the people with control of all the resources were faced with an end of life on Earth situation that they would take things seriously but instead they look for expensive ways to escape. Maybe they’ll upload their consciousness into a robot or whatever “couldn’t possibly go wrong”2 or live in a high-tech bunker eating reconstituted meals, or blast off to die on Mars. Anyway, y’all know about Danse Macabre, right?

… just as death didn’t care who anyone was during the plague, it still doesn’t care who any of us are, or what is in our accounts. Death comes for us all eventually, my friend. While editing this ever inflating mess of tangents and loose threads (despairing because my writing feels incoherent lately), I took a coffee break to weed through piles of Substack email.3 posted 25 quotes from Edward Abbey,4 and one was, “Show me one man who deserves to live forever.” I would imagine that the person who is so deserving isn’t building apocalypse bunkers or trying to upload their consciousness into a server. One can’t escape death in a rickety submarine, on the highest mountain, or in a high tech cave lair5. The flower of immortality is in the belly of the most ancient snake, my friend. “You get a lifetime, no more.”6

the center is a stick in the water

Sometimes I prefer being grouchy and impossible to being centered just because I’m contrary. My stages of climate grief are all out of order, every hope is dashed, people never acted on knowing better, preferring to construct narratives to justify calling down apocalyptic riders, and here we are. To experience every stage of grief with a hint of anger simmering in the background is like breathing. It is worth the time to step out of it, float in a bubble of peace and reset. The challenges aren’t going away and require clear heads and good sense.

So, while on the back steps watching paper wasps dive into a shallow washtub, a wasp darts and zig-zags frantically over the water. One of its family flew too close, became waterlogged, and is now struggling not to drown. I offer a stick for it to grab. I feel the stick being pulled into the water by the wasp as it pulls itself out. It is startling, the strength of insects. I put the stick with the half-drowned wasp on a stone slab, and turn to add rocks to the tub to provide a way out for next time. Looking back at the stick when I’m done, the frantic wasp is now calm, walking around their soggy friend, waiting to leave when their wings are dry. I fished too many of their comrades from their pool parties this summer, but this was the first that was alive. I don’t think they will sting me, they don’t seem bothered by people. The only time I’ve been stung was while pruning a tree, and that was on me for not paying attention to the little nest they started. Anyway, my long covid treatment protocol involves a lot of antihistamines. All they can do is make me cry a little, I can at least handle that.

the center is on the inside and on the outside and all around and it looks like a giant amoeba

A few weeks ago I ordered a box of chocolate hazelnut seashell-shaped candy for my daughter’s birthday. It arrived late, to my address instead of hers, because I ordered at the last minute in addition to her birthday present, and it was on the way from London before I could cancel. I was supposed to sign for it but the mail carrier left it next to the mailbox out by the sidewalk in the sun. It was packed alone diagonally in a shipping box that was too small, without a cold pack. Chocolate seeped through the candy box into the cellophane wrapper, so I stuck it in the fridge to remold it to the shape of the little tray, and later we broke off swirled blobs of hazelnut and chocolate — it’s messy but not bad. Still, a refund is pending because of the dumb way it was shipped. I’ll send her something more local when that drops.

the center is tossing a portable hole on the ground to escape

When my older son saw my dusty tarot deck on a pile of books I was sorting, he asked if I would read for him, and I told him to sit and reflect, clear his head, you know, get centered. I cautioned him not to get too woo woo about the cards themselves or how many times to shuffle, cut, and tap the deck— a lot of that is fun razzle dazzle, but nothing to get hung up on. He has a friend who did a reading for him and this person Really Takes it Seriously like the cards themselves are ✨magic✨, and I think it made an impression on him in that he was looking at the cards and the reader for specific answers instead of insight (does that make sense?), and the reader was so confident in giving answers. Like, slow down Madame Blavatsky, those cards weren’t left on your doorstep by judgemental gods, you ordered them from Amazon, they were mass produced on a fancy printer just like mine.

Anyway I try to make clear that cards are visual triggers that challenge a person to address existing concerns and worries, and tell him to take notice of where his head is, what does he want to know, what blocks him from answering these questions? The cards pose questions, the answers will mostly come from inside. “If you ask what I think, I ask what you think. Feel free to pull another card ...”

Every card is spookily relevant to his life so he runs with it, ignoring everything I say, and takes it like signs, omens, portents because the descriptions in the book for the deck I used are a bit much. I’d prefer it to tell him to enroll at the community college or get together with friends and write some music but no instead he relates it all to a really toxic relationship situation and it appears he is leaning into the torture and … oh nevermind, I just don’t even want to think about this now. Sometimes the wheel of fortune stops on total devastation, sometimes on fainting couches.