#GAIARISING

Yes, More Wildfires areComing

It’s inevitable — but this isn’t the end

Future history is burning. Can’t you smell the acrid smoke of collapsing systems? The dry crackle of brittle ideologies igniting? The howls of the people who built their self-image on the illusion of control.

We are watching this polarized and fearful world turn to ash. It’s more than just “climate change” — though that’s the most obvious signal of the fires to come. It goes deeper than the climate however. This polycrisis of conflagrations is death for rebirth. It is not the end.

And we do not have to be afraid. We will, however, need to be brave.

Sure, we could have voted differently

That would have been the feel good thing to do. Pretty words of kindness certainly feel more appealing than the apocalypse. But those pretty words were only a bandaid on a deep and festering underlying wound.

So maybe it’s OK that things are turning out the way they are.

I don’t say this to diminish the potential suffering of the wildfire, but to place it in a larger context of this transformation that’s currently underway.

The dominator mindset taught men that love is power, and women that love is submission

A vote for the facade of equality and justice would not have stopped this inevitable cultural fire. We might have just repressed the risk for another term, while the danger continued to grow, unseen. But it would not have saved us.

This fire has been a looooong time in the making. The abundant tinder that caught fire was there waiting regardless of the result of this election cycle.

At least now we can see what’s going on.

The MAGA movement, and its far-right nationalist siblings

Greed-drenched billionaires clutching their cash like a ward against this coming storm. Gun-clutching members of the working class who’ve been throughly convinced to vote against their own best self-interest. The “Broligarchy? None of these things are new. In fact, they are very, very old views on the world.

The movements we see right now are simply the modern cousins of famous and fabulously terrible ideas like colonialism, manifest destiny, and the Crusades. It goes all the way back to the violence of the Mongol and Kurgan invasions of Europe round about 4400 BC.

It goes back before the science of the written word lifted humans up out of our hips and into our heads. To the time of the mind that we find ourselves matrixing through in this present moment.

But matrix means mother. And now, our mother is calling us. Maybe this icky, flammable feeling is merely a reflection of our own disconnection, writ large — so that we can see it and begin to heal it.

The repression of the dominator mindset have been here for thousands of years — hiding beneath the systems of the patriarchy and building slowly over time. Since humans started spreading and using violence to try to control life itself.

Since we exchanged as our symbol of the divine mysteries the figure of a bountiful pregnant woman for a slender man crucified on a cross.

(I don’t think Jesus told the story of domination, btw. But the Romans co-opted his story with the systemic violence of empire laid over his original message. I believe Jesus’s teachings were much more about the death for rebirth stories of the fungal and vegetative divine masculine that have proliferated since humans started telling stories to make meaning of things. But Constantine warped those teachings and turned them into story of hellfire and brimstone for the ones who did not comply with the rules. My 2 cents.)

These ideas are not the fire itself.

They are just the fuel. They are the logs in the great wave of revolutionary change we are just now beginning to see clearly.

Let’s not fool ourselves

The kindling for this blaze has been smoldering now for millennia. But periodically over time, the flames have popped up and the fire has started to really get going.

This time, during the era of the sixth mass extinction and pending biospheric collapse, it feels like the whole thing is finally ready to go up in flames and rage til the logs all burn down to ash.

The dominator culture of control and rigid hierarchical violence, as Dr. Riane Eisler calls it, has wounded all of us.

It has taught men that love is power, and women that love is submission.

It has attempted to silence the wisdom of the earth, turn birth into a battlefield and death into a profit scheme.

It has scraped the world raw, clear-cut forests, poisoned rivers, and smothered the sky in the name of progress. It is at the root of genocide. It has used fear and judgment in a foolish attempt to block the eternal flow of life. And it tricks us by promising life will be better AFTER we die.

And now, all our collective unprocessed trauma, unfelt grief, and unacknowledged pain has built up like dry tinder. Mountains of tinder.

Someone finally just lit the match.

So here we are

Watching it burn.

It’s scary AF.

The question ask myself often these days is — who will still be here to tend this inevitably sprouting world?

The question now, is what comes next?

Will we go full Mad Max, apocalypse style?

Will we find ourselves ripping through a shattered wasteland in search of water and vengeance? Hoarding bullets, gasoline, and broken dreams? A world where only the most violent and heartless can survive?

Will we fall for the idea that we should all just pack up ship and head for Mars?

Or can we maybe … remember our way back? Back to a world where power is not about the ability to dominate, but the ability to nourish?

The truth here is that this fire is not the end

It is a transformation. Remember? Fire is always transformation. As it has been since the beginning of time.

In the blackened soil that follows a wildfire, quickened seeds stir. Some trees need fire to open their cones, to release the next generation into the ash-covered earth.

Maybe humans are just that kind of tree?

Who will live to tell the tale?

I look at my children and wonder about the world they chose to be born into. Who will survive and live to tell the tale after this global rampage cools and stills?

The question I ask myself often these days is — who will still be here to tend this inevitably sprouting world?

Most likely it will be the ones who have always tended it. The ones this unbalanced patriarchal system has tried to erase, silence, exploit, disenfranchise and discard.

They are the indigenous, the sensitive empathic misfits, and the exiles. The poor, the forgotten grandmothers, the mothers and the midwives. The gentle-men who know how be to strong in service to life. The artists, the singers, the dancers and the community builders. The bow-hunters, the seed-savers and the mushroom foragers. The wild ones who have never stopped listening to the land.

The hippies who learned again from the elders, the plant teachers, the vigils, and the vision quests.

The old ways have not died. They’ve just gone underground. And now they are resurfacing.

We are the ones who have YouTubed the shit out of our curiosity, turned our fears into learning, and are figuring out how to plant seeds again. How to harvest sustainable foods from the land. How to re-village and homestead.

Our priorities may have seemed strange two decades ago, but now you’re going to want to tap into what we’ve been doing.

We will not just survive this fire. We were born for these times, and we are finding ways to thrive, despite the chaos.

Birth, life, death, rebirth

Solstice to equinox to solstice to equinox again.

The harvest cycle. The wheel of the year. The old patterns that guided humans for so long. Before electricity and technology and smartphones made us think we were in charge.

The cycle is the great, underlying pattern of truth. It’s what all of this existence thing is actually built upon.

So yes, the world as we knew it is ending

Perhaps it needs to.

The way we have been heading is not sustainable. And degrowth in the age of consumerism just has not caught on.

But what rises from the ashes is still up to us.

In this time of great change, we can either let the false gods of fear, greed and conquest try to claw their way back to centrality.

Or … we can kneel in these burned fields, press our hands into the dirt, and try our best to write a new future. We can choose to follow the challenging path. We can attempt, once again, to center our experiences of love, pleasure and awe at the gift of being alive.

Not as another empire.

Not in more war.

But in a garden.

© Copyright February 2025, Kaia Maeve Tingley. All Rights Reserved.

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