So powerful, true, wise, and needed.
Deep bow of gratitude to Angell Deer.
🙏💗 Molly
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.
Let’s talk about the real apocalypse.
Not the one with the fire and brimstone (unless you count your Twitter feed).
But the one unfolding silently, devastatingly:
The collapse of empathy.
From an animist perspective, where all things are alive, ensouled, connected, it is empathy that holds the weave of existence together. The wind listens. The trees remember. The rivers feel grief when poisoned. The soil sings lullabies to seeds. In this way, the entire Earth is one trembling, tender body of care.
But we humans, oh, gods help us, we are forgetting.
Empathy isn’t trending. Rage is. Numbness is.
Hot takes are in. Heartache? Not so much.
Empathy requires presence.
It asks that we pause in our urgency.
That we dare to feel not just our own pain, but another's.
It requires a nervous system that isn’t constantly in survival mode, swiping left on suffering.
And that’s hard to come by when you're drowning in capitalism's to-do list, colonized in your own bones, and told that caring too much is “unprofessional.”
How do you grow empathy in a world where we’re rewarded for disassociating?
Where our food is grown by people we never see, under conditions we’d rather not know.
Where we consume trauma on the news like popcorn but never sit long enough to digest it.
Where our education teaches us to conquer knowledge but not to listen to wisdom.
Where people cry in public and we say, “Yikes,” and scroll on by.
This isn’t entirely our fault. We’ve been systemically trained to not feel.
Empathy is dangerous to empires.
Empathy disrupts business as usual.
Empathy makes soldiers lay down their weapons and start planting herbs.
Empathy gets in the way of profit margins.
Colonialism didn’t just steal land.
It stole relationship.
It replaced reverence with resource extraction.
It told us to name the plants but never talk to them.
To claim the land but never thank her.
To dominate each other in the name of "progress."
And somewhere in all of that, we lost our capacity to weep with a stranger, to wail with the whales, to sing for the salmon who never made it home.
But it’s not gone.
No matter how many layers of concrete we lay over our hearts, the mycelium of empathy waits underground.
And yes, it’s complicated.
Empathy asks us to feel pain that isn’t “ours,”
when we barely know how to hold our own.
It’s inconvenient.
It’s not scalable.
It’s not sexy.
(Unless you’re into people who cry during trees’ dying seasons and whisper prayers to compost.)
But I swear to you, it’s necessary.
Because no amount of intellectual wokeness, activism, spiritual bypassing, or performative allyship will save us if we don’t care deeply, heartbreakingly, hilariously care for one another and for all beings.
So maybe, today, just start small.
Cry with the wind.
Apologize to the spider you almost squished.
Ask your friend how they really are, and mean it.
Feel the pain of a people not your own, and let it crack your shell.
This is sacred work.
It’s messy.
It’s slow.
It’s deeply inconvenient to systems of control.
But it might just be the medicine that reanimates the soul of humanity.
And let’s be honest, if you’ve read this far,
your ancestors are already clapping.
See you on the Sacred Paths
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