midwifing change

hospicing, which recognizes the eventual inevitable end of modernity’s fundamentally unethical and unsustainable institutions, but sees the necessity of enabling a “good” death through which important lessons are processed.

I think a lot of people my age and older have--consciously or not--imagined Trump’s success in 2016 as the commencement of a kind of brief chaotic period through which we merely need to survive, until a new period of stability can commence. This is the logic behind billing every election as “the most important of our lives”: We just need to beat

Death and grief are great forcing functions that collapse all of your false narratives. It’s a vacuum cleaner for a messy mind, especially in a culture where we let nothing die, which means nothing can be reborn. It is a gift for the living in that way.

The process of crossing the threshold is demanding for each and every one of us. When the cracks appear in a long-held belief, it causes anxiety and pain. As the certain world is replaced by great uncertainty, the risk is that we cling to what we know more than ever. The gravitational pull of the familiar exerts itself, no matter how dysfunctional

There’s a lot of alienation; a lot of disaster porn. We need grieving rituals so we can go through our despair together, so we can face the losses we know are coming.