This line really struck me, "...Oppression produces a quiet that sounds like peace from a distance." I am going to reflect on this for awhile. Sobering.
Oh, thank you so much for thinking that line through with me. Honestly when I wrote it, I thought OH! That is true! And now I am spending a lot of time reflecting on it too!
I have been thinking a lot about the end of the world too recently. I've got a heavy dose of existential anxiety going on with no great answers for it. Thanks for bringing *my* potential end of the world into perspective - love your lines like "The end of the world is what people call the collapse of a civilization when it’s their civilization that is collapsing." Yup. So good. And also: "It is not nothing to hold the world as you rage, without success, against destiny." Oof. Wow.
I'm writing an article about my thoughts on this topic this week (not nearly so well-researched as yours, though!) and plan on linking to your lovely article! Thank you so much for your words.
I am so sorry for the anxiety. I just seem to be soaking in it myself. Thank you so much for reading. I am also so honored you are linking to me, thank you! Please share your article here when it is published!
Thank you, Meg! I'm back - here's the link to the article! I don't know if you get notified when you get linked to?? (Much I'm still learning about Substack).
I'm considering becoming a mom. Well, at this point, I'm trying to become a mom. And utterly conflicted as it feels I'm choosing to have a child at a time my civilization is collapsing. I'm not sure I'm strong enough for this challenge, but this gave me a little more hope I will be.
I think about this loss all the time, and will probably write about it. I was recently reading (well, listening to) a book that kept going back to these thousand-year-old philosophies from the Sufis and the Buddhists, etc. Which are great. But MY culture had thousand-year-old views of the world and how to live in it too, in THIS place, in THIS landscape, and what remains are profound. But little remains, because we weren't a culture who did a lot of writing, and, well, genocide. Ongoing genocide. There are times the despair is so great I don't even want to think about it, especially when I find myself finding peace with some of these other writings and the way that feels like a kind of betrayal and I just get so angry. I don't know. I probably think about it too much. Maybe it's just because I am hurtling toward the end of my life and realize there is still so much work to be done, and what feels like so few people doing it. "Oppression produces a quiet that sounds like peace from a distance" indeed. Oof.
Chris, thank you so much for reading it. And I am so sorry. What was lost - what was taken - can't really be met adequately with words. I am sitting with you, from here.
Thank you for this beautiful and raw writing. I keep thinking about this over and over-living through the collapse of this society.
I think regularly about the fact that my children do not have access to our ancestral language (among the many minutiae of what constituted the daily rhythms of the lives of our ancestors) because entire communities and worlds were murdered 80 years ago in Europe.
The question of holding your children as invaders come over the horizon is too traumatizing for me to think about. I can picture what my great-grandmothers’ siblings would have done (for one of whom my oldest is named) all too clearly as the Nazis closed in and took them away.
You wrote that “oppression produces a quiet that sounds like peace from a distance.” It is dawning on me, in a way it never quite has before, that the relative stability I experience in my own day to day life is so fundamentally predicated on the exploitation of others and on historic and ongoing acts of such colossal violence and brutality.
What can the dawn of a new world look like for our children? I think often of Clint Smith III’s poem ‘When people say, “we have made it through worse before.”’ I know we won’t all live to see it. I’m haunted by our government’s apathy towards who hasn’t made it. I hope that we do. I hope the children do. I hope that there isn’t quiet, but that there is peace.
This is wonderful, Meg. Imagining Thetis holding her baby is a scene I didn’t know I needed. Brilliant.
This captures so much of the grief and tenderness of this time—our time—that so many of us didn’t fully grasp or see coming and are now gazing at on the horizon with our children clasped against our chests.
“What if nine concentric circles hung on my classroom wall instead of a line?”
Your question and the weaving of your essay is brilliant. And a perspective much missed in this time of transition, chaos, perturbation. The voices of doomers are urgent trying to wake us from denial and stuckness of the illusion of a comfortable status quo.
Yet you quietly and persistently remind us, “What prayer will I pray for each child in the morning when, despite everything, each day has a beginning? You will die, but not like this. What hope will I whisper to my children before I have to leave them at the end of the world?”
And answer with the deep and only answer for a mother facing the end of another world, “Maybe one day, against destiny we’ll live when we were made to die.”
Your homeculture voice is a welcome voice in this howling chaos.
Mansplaining our doom with top down systemic change models, tools of our enlightenment patriarchy planet killing mindset is not enough. We need a new world view to build the next world. That view if it is based in homeculture first, at the root of everything else, might give us a new imaginary of an interconnected world of concentric reality instead of one which is condemned linear ending.
Thank you for your work of conjuring new ways of seeing, thinking, but most of all feeling a new imaginary of possibilities.
Still thinking about this 7 months later. I'm an artist mother grappling with existential dread daily. I quoted you (with credit) in the statement for an art exhibition I created (opening in a couple days.)
"I’ve never heard a scholar ask what it was like to be a mother during the collapse of the Bronze Age. But the question won’t leave me. Neither will the questions that follow it. How many mothers saw the cracks in the sky before everything fell down around them? What song did a mother sing as she rocked her baby to sleep while the sea peoples appeared over the horizon? What prayer did she pray in the morning when, despite everything, each day had a beginning? What hope did she whisper to her children before she had to leave them at the end of the world?"
This line really struck me, "...Oppression produces a quiet that sounds like peace from a distance." I am going to reflect on this for awhile. Sobering.
Oh, thank you so much for thinking that line through with me. Honestly when I wrote it, I thought OH! That is true! And now I am spending a lot of time reflecting on it too!
I have been thinking a lot about the end of the world too recently. I've got a heavy dose of existential anxiety going on with no great answers for it. Thanks for bringing *my* potential end of the world into perspective - love your lines like "The end of the world is what people call the collapse of a civilization when it’s their civilization that is collapsing." Yup. So good. And also: "It is not nothing to hold the world as you rage, without success, against destiny." Oof. Wow.
I'm writing an article about my thoughts on this topic this week (not nearly so well-researched as yours, though!) and plan on linking to your lovely article! Thank you so much for your words.
I am so sorry for the anxiety. I just seem to be soaking in it myself. Thank you so much for reading. I am also so honored you are linking to me, thank you! Please share your article here when it is published!
Thank you, Meg! I'm back - here's the link to the article! I don't know if you get notified when you get linked to?? (Much I'm still learning about Substack).
https://christinegreenwald.substack.com/p/holding-my-child-at-the-end-of-the
I'm considering becoming a mom. Well, at this point, I'm trying to become a mom. And utterly conflicted as it feels I'm choosing to have a child at a time my civilization is collapsing. I'm not sure I'm strong enough for this challenge, but this gave me a little more hope I will be.
love makes us so strong, you know?
This is so good, Meg. Thank you.
I think about this loss all the time, and will probably write about it. I was recently reading (well, listening to) a book that kept going back to these thousand-year-old philosophies from the Sufis and the Buddhists, etc. Which are great. But MY culture had thousand-year-old views of the world and how to live in it too, in THIS place, in THIS landscape, and what remains are profound. But little remains, because we weren't a culture who did a lot of writing, and, well, genocide. Ongoing genocide. There are times the despair is so great I don't even want to think about it, especially when I find myself finding peace with some of these other writings and the way that feels like a kind of betrayal and I just get so angry. I don't know. I probably think about it too much. Maybe it's just because I am hurtling toward the end of my life and realize there is still so much work to be done, and what feels like so few people doing it. "Oppression produces a quiet that sounds like peace from a distance" indeed. Oof.
Chris, thank you so much for reading it. And I am so sorry. What was lost - what was taken - can't really be met adequately with words. I am sitting with you, from here.
🙏🏽
I love reading you thinking with the Iliad. I’m teaching it again in the fall, and I expect that I’ll have your voice in my head as I do.
Thank you for this beautiful and raw writing. I keep thinking about this over and over-living through the collapse of this society.
I think regularly about the fact that my children do not have access to our ancestral language (among the many minutiae of what constituted the daily rhythms of the lives of our ancestors) because entire communities and worlds were murdered 80 years ago in Europe.
The question of holding your children as invaders come over the horizon is too traumatizing for me to think about. I can picture what my great-grandmothers’ siblings would have done (for one of whom my oldest is named) all too clearly as the Nazis closed in and took them away.
You wrote that “oppression produces a quiet that sounds like peace from a distance.” It is dawning on me, in a way it never quite has before, that the relative stability I experience in my own day to day life is so fundamentally predicated on the exploitation of others and on historic and ongoing acts of such colossal violence and brutality.
What can the dawn of a new world look like for our children? I think often of Clint Smith III’s poem ‘When people say, “we have made it through worse before.”’ I know we won’t all live to see it. I’m haunted by our government’s apathy towards who hasn’t made it. I hope that we do. I hope the children do. I hope that there isn’t quiet, but that there is peace.
This is wonderful, Meg. Imagining Thetis holding her baby is a scene I didn’t know I needed. Brilliant.
This captures so much of the grief and tenderness of this time—our time—that so many of us didn’t fully grasp or see coming and are now gazing at on the horizon with our children clasped against our chests.
Lovely. Thank you.
“What if nine concentric circles hung on my classroom wall instead of a line?”
Your question and the weaving of your essay is brilliant. And a perspective much missed in this time of transition, chaos, perturbation. The voices of doomers are urgent trying to wake us from denial and stuckness of the illusion of a comfortable status quo.
Yet you quietly and persistently remind us, “What prayer will I pray for each child in the morning when, despite everything, each day has a beginning? You will die, but not like this. What hope will I whisper to my children before I have to leave them at the end of the world?”
And answer with the deep and only answer for a mother facing the end of another world, “Maybe one day, against destiny we’ll live when we were made to die.”
Your homeculture voice is a welcome voice in this howling chaos.
Mansplaining our doom with top down systemic change models, tools of our enlightenment patriarchy planet killing mindset is not enough. We need a new world view to build the next world. That view if it is based in homeculture first, at the root of everything else, might give us a new imaginary of an interconnected world of concentric reality instead of one which is condemned linear ending.
Thank you for your work of conjuring new ways of seeing, thinking, but most of all feeling a new imaginary of possibilities.
Ric Winstead
Still thinking about this 7 months later. I'm an artist mother grappling with existential dread daily. I quoted you (with credit) in the statement for an art exhibition I created (opening in a couple days.)
"I’ve never heard a scholar ask what it was like to be a mother during the collapse of the Bronze Age. But the question won’t leave me. Neither will the questions that follow it. How many mothers saw the cracks in the sky before everything fell down around them? What song did a mother sing as she rocked her baby to sleep while the sea peoples appeared over the horizon? What prayer did she pray in the morning when, despite everything, each day had a beginning? What hope did she whisper to her children before she had to leave them at the end of the world?"
If you see this and are interested you can check out the details here: https://davinciartalliance.org/ill-carry-it-for-you
Thanks for your beautiful, important writing!