On surviving the collapse, persistent inner craftsmanship, and turning the mortar of survival into a sanctuary.

A reflection from the archives, bridging a moment of heavy collective grief under smoke-filled Vermont skies with the grounded clarity of the present day.

The sliver of the moon hovers heavily over my shoulder. Years ago, I sat under a Vermont sky kissed by the ash of burning western forests, feeling the crushing weight of global wind, a pandemic, and a world fracturing along its oldest fault lines.

Back then, the swirl of systemic questions made me brittle. How do I become a perfect ally? How do you hold the tension of attraction and repellence? Since when did awareness become such a heavy, devastatingly lonely burden?

Without space for reflection, I was constantly second-guessing my own mind.

I knew enough, even then, to stop and look. To look deeply at the reddening maple leaves littering the lawn, waiting for a pinprick of starlight to shatter the illusion of my isolation.

“I love you,” my small child told me delightedly, breaking the spell. The brittle exterior crumbled like dust. My tears mixed with the charred flakes of mourned trees and the collective grief of too many lives lost too soon.

In that heavy season, I wrote:

“The self-as-lighthouse metaphor still holds true, I guess. Only, I do not feel that I am, as yet, shining. I feel, rather, that I am very much embedded in the crafting of the stones with which the tower shall be built, someday. I grasp chisel and hammer to hack away at the edges of the rough stones... tasting the stone dust.”

I have studied heartbreak and death for decades. I know the pinnacle edge of pain that comes close to bliss. My own fingers—ripped apart by the frozen dirt of a frosted garden, roughened by hours of pot-scrubbing, vegetable cutting, instrument playing, and child-minding—always knew how to return to the familiar, delicious journey of the writing game to find satisfaction.

When that world ended under a reddish, apocalyptic gauze, I left myself with a burning question: Do we have the capacity to navigate this with our minds intact? Will awareness be our guiding light to the other side of this?

Standing here now, looking back at that frozen, hyper-vigilant grief, I finally have the perspective to answer.

The apocalypse arrived, yes. But the world ending was just the clearing of the ground. The tiresome, heavy awareness that used to isolate me has transformed. By persistently hacking away at those rough, heavy stones, a tower has begun to rise.

The fingers that were once raw from survival are now building a threshold. The garden archway stands. The paths in the forest are being cleared.

We do have the capacity to navigate the smoke with our minds intact, but only if we allow the brittle exterior to crumble, only if we allow our children’s delight to shatter our self-imposed lighthouses, and only if we trust that the stone dust we are tasting today is the very mortar of the sanctuary we are building for tomorrow.

I am still vividly curious about how the tapestry weaves itself. Are you?

Enjoyed this reflection?

If this piece resonated with you today, consider sharing it with someone working through their own heavy season, or subscribe to receive weekly essays on somatic practice, presence, and creative sovereignty.