Withering and Burned Out

On Labor Day, we drove from Southern California to Central Oregon. We rolled through 868 miles of parched land groaning for relief. It was 115 degrees just north of Sacramento. We made it to the small town of Weed where wildfire had just decimated an entire neighborhood. The rubble was still smoldering. The people out West are parched too. Souls are withering and burned out. There is a thirst for depth and meaning. Like Shasta Lake itself - whose Native people were poisoned and enslaved during the Gold Rush – there is a lowered capacity to pour out life. 

The American project – 5% of the globe’s population consuming 30% of the globe’s resources - is past the point of no return. The impending death of the unsustainable should not lead to despair. In these end times, we can drink in depth, beauty, wisdom and wonder by listening to our ancestors, to our bodies, to Black authors and activists, to Native people whispering the old ways, to secrets smuggled up from the Global South, to the feminine and queer, to everything that breaks through the soil, to winged-beings like bats, bees and hummingbirds. Our guides are not those perpetuating the grand old project, but those intimate with its apocalypse.