These are tenderizing times. We are creatures being slowly but surely softened by uncertainty, as our rigid visions of a gleaming modern future are eroded by the floodwaters, by the wildfires, by the storms of reckoning. If we chose to be here for this moment, what purpose might our poetry, our Witchcraft, our voice, and our art serve?
The remedy for apathy is awe. We will not reason our way to redemption. We are holding the tension of the times in our bodies, and the most vital medicine we have is to become a living altar to grief and gratitude, to do what ancestral healing we can, to weep at the beauty of the wild dawn and build small temples from broken fence posts and stone.
We must be wary of over-romanticizing this apocalypse, yes, but neither can we be stunned into fear by the coming shifts. We must grant ourselves and one another immense care, the same care we might offer to a frightened child. I hear you, and I see you. You are loved.
We are travelers lost in a wilderness, holding outdated maps. No one will do this well. None of our old, reactive measures will make sense. Our best policies may fail, in part because we have not arrived at the language we need. Laws are not sculpted or painted, after all. We organize around shared meaning, but what if that shared meaning is, for now, some unnameable thing we can only dance around, never grasping and only glimpsing? What if we, quite literally, have no words for this?
As our communicative forms shift, as our words become ash in the wind, it will be our dualities that die first, having no voice to shelter them any longer. Our comfort can then come only from being fiercely present to the moment. Our solace no longer exists out there, somewhere in the distant yet-to-come, some brightly lit heaven awaiting us after the here and now becomes a corpse. That thing called hope has always sent us away from the present moment, luring us into the linear, keeping our eyes fixed forward. Hope is not a solution, but neither is sorrow.
From The Holy Wild Grimoire: A Heathen Handbook of Magick, Spells, and Verses