WORLD WITHOUT END

Chapter 1. The Path Back to Peace

Birth At The End Of The Earth is a memoir I wrote a few years ago as I coped with becoming a mother amid ecological collapse. The anxiety was harrowing and ate at all aspects of my life. As I heaved myself out of the depths of despair, I thought… I have a story worth telling, one that might help people. And, hey, even if it doesn’t, I must write this out so I don’t spiral down…again.

I’m an obsessive type of personality. I vividly remember being sixteen years old and counting calories. I had a Weight Watchers booklet that my mother was using. It was suggested that an obese person have 8 points. With my ferocious sense of competition, I wanted to beat an imaginary obese person. Talk about sick. 6 points for me would be fine.

Every day was lived around not going over the 6 points. It was mentally excruciating. I eventually gave the counting up when I came to the soggy conclusion that sticking to six points would NOT turn me into Jennifer Aniston.

I was free, or so I thought.

In 2018, when scientists sounded the alarm, “We cannot go over 1.5 degrees,”… I became consumed with the task. In the decade leading up to this, I’d sat and watched as the world produced more of the very things we know we shouldn’t, and this… this was the moment we would finally start to clean up our act.

But of course, just as sticking to six points on the Weight Watchers chart won’t turn one into Jennifer Aniston… panicking and insisting people fly less, eat less meat, consume less, and care more… won’t inspire a collection of humans to change.

I spent a good five years racking my brain - how do we communicate this? How do we move people? My conclusion is…we can’t. Only one force can make anyone do anything at all. But I’ll come to that later.

It became abundantly clear that the Left cares as much about healing our home as the Right does. My team was terrified of transphobia and the-best-person-for-the-job-despite-race-and-sex-and sexual preference. My team was no longer my team.

It was something else entirely.

Maybe there weren’t any teams, I thought to myself as I watched a woman on Queer Eye suffering from eco-anxiety the same way I was.

“We’ll fix you, QUEEN!” the spangly gays said. “Oh please,” I thought. “Fix us.” They spent the entire episode thrift-shopping and riding bikes and then the next week they jumped straight back into their massive cars and designer brands.

All of this is a show, I thought, watching a show. Like I’d lost the line between real life and entertainment and suddenly found it.

Everywhere I looked…reality TV, community, and politics, it was clear that no one was bold or brave enough to stand up for real change that didn’t sound like Extinction Rebellion’s “We’re all gonna die - come join us!”

I understood that I was a weird one, that not everyone panicked the way I did about microplastics and “Where the hell does our rubbish go?” I knew I needed some deep healing. I was lost, even though I was a white middle-class woman, I was a minority with my concerns. I would need to find a way to “Go with the flow” of this world.

Going with the flow, surrendering, and accepting things as they are… was revolutionary. I was not raised to go with the flow. I was raised to fight the flow at all costs, to slash it even if nothing was achieved, boxing away ferociously into thin air and then getting back up for more.

One exhausting Sunday, after the terrible thought that Taylor Swift might be the Golden Calf of our time, I walked myself to church. And my icy spirit defrosted almost instantaneously with that slight sting when your red-cold hands hit the warmth of a roaring fireplace.

Home.

The Church.

The same place my grandmother would come after her husband had beaten her. The same place she came to when she concluded that she would have to get a job to pay for her seven children that her sauced spouse couldn’t provide for. The same place she came when she found her twenty-something-year-old son overdosed on heroin - dead cold on her bathroom toilet.

This is what had allowed my grandmother to move forward, and this would be my medicine.

I am not more advanced, more interesting, or possibly even better educated than my gritty grandmother. We both have lived with the same broken human heart pumping blood through our veins. Some modern-day psychologists might even suggest that all of her pain permeates through me.

We both need hope.

And I find it truly astonishing now, after being an atheist and agnostic, that we in the West have let go of the concept of God as though we are better than it.

As though we know for sure that we don’t need anything outside of the material world to nest and rest well in. As if everything is going in the right direction. As if for hundreds and hundreds of years…all of those humans were wrong.

Throughout this World Without End series, I’m going to address what I believe are the blocks to our Story and hopefully shed new light on ideas we think we understand.

For me, in middle age, this journey is by far the most fascinating one I’ve been on. I would like to document it the way I would other aspects of my life experience—without shame, with the hope that people will be open to understanding and listening without assuming that she’s lost her mind.

I don’t believe I have lost anything.

I believe I had lost something fundamental to human strength - God.

If there are any specific areas of interest in this topic please feel free to comment them below.