We are constantly flooded
with news of disaster —
events so vast, so irreversible,
that we can only watch them unfold
as if from behind glass,
uninvited guests
at the theatre of the world's collapse.
And all the while,
we’re asked —
or ordered —
to make our small gestures,
to hold fast to big ideas:
recycling, resisting, reposting,
as though in the quiet privacy of good intentions
we might still secure
some moral high ground.
As though, together,
we could build
a kind of Earthly redemption —
or at least
slow the rising tide.
And so we soothe ourselves
with this peculiar belief:
that our time is different,
that history no longer holds us,
that we are somehow
the exception.
But inwardly, we’re face to face
with Trump, Musk,
the crisis of climate,
the threat of nuclear morning,
the rise of artificial godhood —
and we are no less powerless,
no less small
than Ulysses in the rage of Poseidon,
Cassandra in the silence of Apollo,
or Arjuna beneath the gaze of Krishna.
The truth is,
our predicament is bound
— in essence and in time —
to the old human condition.
This gap,
this helplessness,
our limits —
despair,
exhaustion,
rage,
dizziness —
they are not new.
They are the usual weather,
the ancient signatures
of what it means to be conscious,
to be an individual life
spinning inside the storm
of the world becoming itself.
Our ancestors,
to live with this immutable thing,
grew religions like gardens —
the same gardens we now
so easily dismiss.
What, then, is ours?
