Co-Creating the Apocalypse

Astrologers knew that 2020 was imminent. Typically not with much precision, mind you—although there were some predictions of a viral pandemic, and plenty of vague notions of accelerating social unrest. As an astrologer by birth and by training, I was raised to trust the stars. I have lived countless hours of my life in service to their study, collating their patterns and teasing apart their archetypes.

As my mother labored at the unfathomable age of nineteen to bring her first child into the world, her highschool best friend consulted an ephemeris—a thick tome cataloging the daily position of every celestial object—and drew a series of potential natal charts by hand. My mother tried to time my delivery to avoid certain placements, clenching down and extending her already long, late-term labor so that I might arrive with signatures that were more preferable, in her estimation. I arrived when I arrived as I arrived, despite her best efforts. As I see it now, though, I think it was because of her best efforts.

She later birthed two more babies with those ostensibly undesirable placements. As they say, what you resist, persists. (That's a theme, here. Take note.)

While I was raised on astrology and witchcraft, my husband, in his own journey of becoming, began obsessing over the knowledge and predictions of ancient civilizations at a very young age. So, from the time we met in 2015, we launched into a frenzied joint venture of forecasting apocalyptic timing. He would cross-reference the Mayan calendar with the Gnostic gospels and the Kali Yuga, and I would jam my finger at my laptop screen to show the place where Pluto and Saturn would meet on their own planetary nodes in January of 2020, and we would say "Here! No here—or perhaps here? This is when it will all come to an end."

It was pretty crazy. But weren't we all living out our apocalypse fantasies, back then? While my husband and I were refining them down to mystical technicalities, The Walking Dead was the most watched show on television. The 2010's was an era of Dystopian obsession. The decade's young adult fiction zeitgeist was The Hunger Games, for fuck's sake. And look at where we are now.

That's the fractal holographic nature of reality though, right? I mean, it's the crux of why astrology "works," in my view. Not because some outside gravitational forces exert their pull on this separate, distinct realm of human experience, but because life and the universe are really just one giant self-fulfilling prophecy. On the individual microcosm, and the collective macrocosm. So maybe, like the astrologers, we all knew 2020 was coming.

On some level, we created it.

But let's go back to the microcosm, for a moment. My growing unease about 2020, before 2020, manifested in the sense that an escape from city-dwelling would be wise. So in the summer of 2018, my husband and I fled from Denver, Colorado to the Sierra foothills.

We nearly signed a lease for a cliffside house in Paradise, CA, just four months before the devastating Camp Fire ravaged the town to dust. It was the deadliest United States wildfire in a century.

Having narrowly escaped the center of that particular apocalypse, we instead watched from our window in a neighboring town as white ash floated like snowfall amongst the red fir giants. Unceasingly, for days. We wore masks outside. Everyone did.

We would endure burning eyes and haunting red skies several more times, in the same and the subsequent fire season, for smaller, lesser known fires that were mere twenty, thirty, fifty miles from our home.

Since California utility giant PG&E's faulty, ancient equipment was responsible for sparking most of these fires, they instituted a policy of shutting off their lines when it was windy outside in vulnerable communities like ours. We drove to Reno as evacuees once, when we were without power for weeks. That's not to count the number of times we stuck it out for days, without internet to do our remote jobs, or electricity to refrigerate and cook our food. The nights reading books and playing board games by candlelight were romantic, but terrifying. An eerie irony loomed when, in an effort to prevent fires, PG&E drove thousands of bereft residents to live at night by the light of open flames.

For us, the apocalypse hit early. I learned that an obsessive impulse to escape calamity will lead you to calamity. Fear-based action is a magnet for fear. By now, you should be thinking: Oh, yeah, self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the summer of 2020, we moved back to a city.

In the years since, we've all witnessed society and politics and media shift in bizarre, unprecedented fashion. I don't need to list the ways in which the world we live in now isn't the world we lived in before. For many of us, we still carry the sense that things will get worse before they get better. But delving into the depths of my own darkness during all of those powerless nights taught me to stop running from shadows, because that is the surest way to run towards them.

It's the ultimate paradox, and one that's at the forefront of driving the world we inhabit. And I've asked myself this a lot, recently: As the loudest voices dig their heels into their divisive opinions, lynching and lambasting and cancelling anyone with opposing convictions, I wonder if they're aware that by feeding all of their focus on the things they most vehemently resist, they're breeding, with ironic inevitability, a perpetuation of the very forces they purport to fight against? Via their righteous disagreements, they are, in fact, co-creating their own apocalypse.

I suspect there's a quiet sea of us in the middle, now, who are trying our best to feel through the cognitive dissonance. Seeking to understand, instead of fighting to be right. Because what is righteousness, really? Where does the feeling come from? Does it come from the heart? That's not a rhetorical question. Personally, though, I don't think it does.

I don't have a final rally cry. I don't have a call-to-action to leave you with. I'm just masticating here. Food for thought, you know? I'm squinting through all of the smoke, to the fire that's burning, and imagining what it would feel like to love the flames. What would our apocalypse look like, then?