When I was young, I used to have this recurring dream of standing on a beach. A lurch has just gone through the ground beneath me. I never feel it, the deep, reverberating unhitching of the tectonic plates. I awaken into that other world only after the rupture, after the echoes of waves push their way through the land and water. When I realize where I am, the ocean is already curling back into itself by a fist, ready to strike.
I always know what’s coming next. The water pulls away like an invitation, and I watch a crowd of faceless people follow it further down the shoreline.
“No!” I cry out. “Get out of here! There’s going to be a tsunami.”
A few people, faceless people, shrug or turn and laugh, then they follow the receding ocean deeper, staring at all the shells stripped naked beneath their usual curtain of water.
“We have to go, now!” I scream.
It’s never a proper scream. My voice is always caught and hoarse, like my legs are always caught when I try to run.
But somehow, I manage to get myself to move. I scream and cry for everyone to follow me to higher ground, but no one does. I turn my back on the faceless crowd and wonder if anyone I love is among them, lost among the faceless. My legs, held by sleep paralysis, struggle up the hill, but I get there in the end. I get to the cliff overlooking the beach and then the wave comes. All the crowd of faceless people standing in its path. I watch the wave come, alone and scared, not sure if I’m high enough to be above it, but certain that whatever’s in its path will be swept away like dust from the face of the world.
That’s always when I wake up.
Maybe I’m thinking about this today because I’m sitting on a beach. I made a point to park out of the tsunami zone, higher where I can look out at the conifer forest, you know, just in case the Big One comes tonight. I came here because it’s a hundred degrees in the Willamette Valley today. The fire near my home was 60% contained when last I looked, moving East up towards the Cascades and away from us. But still.
There’s a pattern alive in my own temporary displacement. Here, for the night, I am a refugee, fleeing from excessive heat and wildfire smoke because I live in the back of a vehicle with no windows. Tonight, I am one microcosm of a much broader migratory pattern: humans turning landscapes inhospitable, then fleeing them. I can feel the current of this pattern moving through me, feel myself moving within it.
The fact that life is made of patterns presents the an interesting conundrum for the concept of free will: that a thing much larger and stronger than me is unfolding here, and yet, my actions are unfolding it.
When the second Trump regime began unfolding and the news hit a new register of Very Bad, I reached out to a friend of mine, who is a much better community organizer than I am. I don’t know what I expected, that perhaps she’d have some sage advice to lift my spirits and pluck my courage, but all she said was:
“I really thought that when things got to this point, we’d have a hell of a lot more built than this.”
We thought we’d have that community around and working with us, the land where we’re building our dream off-grid permaculture oases, the robust networks of mutual aid, the well-oiled social movements seamlessly rising to the occasion. At the very least, I didn’t think I’d still be sleeping alone.
But the days keeps getting darker and the headlines don’t get better and the sense of urgency has tightened to the point where it might snap, and the lamps we thought we’d have to guide us by now are yet to be lit. It’s not that there’s no hope. It’s not that nothing has been done. It’s just, I really thought than when things got to this point, we’d have a hell of a lot more built than this.
Instead, I feel like a child in my own dream, standing alone on the beach while the wave prepares itself to crash. I speak like there’s sand in my mouth. I walk like there’s sand in my bones. I’m not sure which way to move, I just know I need to move, but sleep paralysis keeps muting my ability to act.
I suppose there’s a power to standing alone on a beach, to having a one-on-one conversation directly with the waves before they crash.
In his book Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta writes about taking a group of students to an eroding beach and asking them to design a levee to help fortify the coastline and protect the houses on it. One of his students, adept in reading ecological patterns, realizes that the housing constructions and perpetual dredging of sand to add to the beaches and produce concrete have created an erosion pattern that can’t be stopped.
“You can build all the levies you like,” the student says, “but those fuckin’ buildings are gunna go back in into the sea where they came from.”
What I’m thinking now is not that the future is bleak, but rather, that an apocalypse is just another pattern to recognize and learn how to work with. The beaches will erode and the buildings will collapse into the sea. But collapse, far from being some totalizing, final endpoint to a linear stretch of time and progress, is just another step in the inevitable cycle of life. The dead have always fed the living. There are always beings that awaken in the night while the rest of us are sleeping. One face of the grand Illusion, the from which spiritual teachers the world over have spent millennia telling us to awaken from, is the illusion that there is a final point. An end time, an apocalypse, a final point of salvation.
I find it interesting that civilizations that believe in linear time and religion and progress cannot help but keep their own undoing built into their belief systems. All these fuckin’ buildings gunna go back into the sea where they came from.
It’s not as though apocalypses haven’t happened before. The land I sit on, writing this, has already known a few.
Just north of here, Amanda’s Trail winds up from Yachats to Cape Perpetua, leading from what was once the Coast Indian Reservation, where white settler militias (called “exterminators”) rounded up the Indigenous peoples of what is now southwestern Oregon and forced them into a concentration camp. Those who fled the abuse and starvation endemic to the reservation were often killed or forcibly returned. After 20 years, the reservation was dismantled so that white settlers could move in.
Amanda de-Cuys, for whom the trail is named, was a blind Coos woman who was forced to walk the trail until her feet were so bloody, the Indian Agents said they could track her by the trail it left. Across this continent and around the world, entire peoples, cultures, lifeways, species, ecosystems, civilizations, spiritualities, languages and federations were slaughtered and destroyed.
But the apocalypse was not an ending. The same sites of those apocalypses are now home to new lives, new cultures, new ways of organizing a society. I mean, I live here now. Where Amanda’s blood once ran over the rocky shores of Yachats, you can now buy crystals the size of large dogs and expensive oat milk lattes and tarot cards featuring pictures of cats and dogs in crowns. “Royal Animals,” the cover reads, perhaps in honor of human animals’ strange propensity for crowning ourselves royalty of one land or another.
We’ve staved off collapse for centuries by repeatedly outsourcing our sacrifice zones to other lands, other peoples. Now, we’re running out of land to sacrifice, and the people of far-flung places are becoming so aware of one another that we’re finding notions of sacrificing whole peoples harder and harder to stomach.
History is full of attempts at unsustainable ways of organizing human society. All across the world, cities sprung up where populations were corralled and categorized, some lording wealth and power over others, some crowning themselves royal animals while others had their humanity stripped. Again and again and again, these cities collapsed. Disease, war, famine, ecological destruction or natural disaster cracked the thrones like earthquakes from their roots. In most cases, the people of these cities simply left, returning to the hinterlands, home to the land, where abundance and freedom were easier to come by.
Collapse is just another pattern: crack, tumble, disperse, migrate, reintegrate somewhere else. All these fuckin’ buildings gunna go back in the sea.
Collapse, apocalypse, no — these are not a final ending. This is not a death as a concept, but death as an ecological process: a change in form, a sacred rite of transubstantiation where one body decays and feeds another. The stuff of one life breaks down and disperses, reintegrating somewhere else, becoming the reason another life begins.
The word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek, apokalupsis, meaning to uncover or reveal, as though from behind a curtain. There’s a fusion in the word of awareness and collapse, of gaining knowledge while losing ground, one form transmuting into another. The world collapsing becomes the fodder for a new awakening. Life has always fed on life.
And in the slow burn, will-they-won’t-they, endlessly-teasing rumble of this globalized apocalypse, I find myself remembering the feeling I always had in that dream. Standing alone on the beach — alone but for the crowd, but the crowd was always faceless — staring down the coming wave and knowing it would wipe out everything. Like the apocalyptic engravings on the pillars of St. John the Divine, there is something sacred about standing alone in the face of catastrophe. It’s like I can talk directly to the pattern. I can see it more clearly now, when it’s just me and it, without any curtain in the way.
I haven’t had that dream in years, you know. I think it had something to do with a workshop I once found myself at in New York, where a popular YouTube spiritual guru led us in an exercise about dreams. She told us to think of a dream we could remember (I chose the wave), and told us that everything in that dream was a reflection of ourselves. Any character, any force, any action that happened in the dream was simply us, so we could embody and understand any of it.
So I closed my eyes and sat there and tried to embody the wave. When I did, a curious taste came into my mouth. The taste was cold and clear, and I remembered being a child and drinking water from my cupped hands straight from the face of a glacier in Alaska. It was the clearest, purest water I’ve ever tasted. Thinking of it now, a quarter-century later, I can still taste it on my tongue.
If this is the water of the wave coming at us, the clarifying light of having no veil, of illusions falling back into the sea where they came from, perhaps I don’t need to scream and run for higher ground. If this the water I collapse into, erosion is nothing to fear.
I remind myself like a mantra: this, here, now, will always be who you were when the curtain came down. When I try to speak, it’s like a seagull crying, muted and awkward with sleep-paralyzed vocal cords, but still I’ll try to speak it: yes, this is where you are right now. This is where it finds you. You are alone on the beach and the tsunami is on the horizon, nothing is prepared, nobody is ready.
But there’s a clarity in me too I want to share, a certainty in my heart that this is exactly where we are meant to be. Now is the time to confront the wave directly, with no veil left in the way. Now is the time to let the wave wash over you and see how you swim. Now is our chance to drink it, let its pure, crystalline water merge into the water in your body. Drink it, drink it until you become it.
And then, like the rivers feeding life all through the land: reach out with every limb. Make love to every corner of your life. Grab hold of everyone around you and dig your heels in and don’t let go, because this is will always be where you were when another wave came and brought another world down. Love the living as best you can, but learn how to roll with a pattern, too. You cannot save life from death and regeneration. This process is your home. It’s time now to come back into its folds.
"And then, like the rivers feeding life all through the land: reach out with every limb. Make love to every corner of your life. Grab hold of everyone around you and dig your heels in and don’t let go, because this will always be where you were when another wave came and brought another world down."🌊♾️
Beautiful.
Bravo