Imagine waking up in a world where everything is the same, but everything is different. A world where you can’t unsee things you’ve seen. Unhear things you’ve heard. Unlearn things you’ve learned. The last time I felt like this I had just returned to society after wandering the corridors of Mother Earth’s finest hallways via the Appalachian Trail in 2015. My parents insisted on picking me up in Portland, Maine, a bit out of character for our relationship, (we live two hours from each other, I can count on my left hand how many times they’ve been to The Museum) but they offered so I accepted. 

Emily and I spent our last night on the AT in Baxter State Park with Cakes and his mom, who had also coincidentally driven from the midwest to escort her son home after his big adventure. She offered to reserve a site for us at the Abol Campground, brought some real food for our last supper, even hiked part of the way up Mount Katahdin the next morning. Such a treat getting to know her.

Later in the lounge of the Marriott in Portland, Maine I walked up on my dad lecturing Cakes’ mom on the new car she recently bought. Well that was your first mistake. Now here’s what you should’ve done instead. Shoot. Forgot to warn her. But she was unbothered. Politely laughed, deflected, moved it along. After my folks retired for the evening, instead of apologizing for the Art of the Deal lesson, I was like holy shit you handled that well, teach me your ways. I think about her reply often.

Oh honey. I’ve been a woman my whole life. I’ve met a lot of Gerards. 

But of course. Maybe for the first time, I saw my dad through the eyes of a stranger instead of whatever skews your vision when you’re somebody’s kid. Dad to me, just another dude to everyone else. Something shifted.

I had spent the last four months hitching rides into trail towns from Georgia to Maine for resupply, and one common thread I noticed in folks who stopped to pick us up is they often did it for themselves. A chance to interact with strangers in a small town where everyone knows everyone. A captive audience. The trail wasn’t a novelty to them, they knew what we were doing, had no further questions. Didn’t make a difference to us, we were grateful. Everyone got what they needed from the arrangement.

The whole ride back to Wisconsin, my dad filled me in on something or other while my mom read from her separate phone she keeps just for reading scripture because staring at words on a tiny computer wastes a lot of battery. Neither one asked me a single question about the four month and twenty day life-shattering eye-opening journey I just successfully completed, a feat like 1 in 4 who set out to accomplish, actually accomplish, no big deal. But that felt right. The profoundness of the experience would be lost in translation anyway. I stared out the window of the backseat of my dad’s Toyota, grateful not to have to explain a thing. My final hitch.

How does one describe a shared awakening with people who only met because something compelled them to also walk from Georgia to Maine on a narrow footpath in roughly the same timeframe? All of us giving up (or escaping from) summer traditions, troubles or livelihoods, putting business as usual on pause to live out of doors for an extended period of time in Earth’s elements with all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small. Exploring the boundaries of our bodies, testing our limits, pushing through pain. Chosen suffering. A pilgrimage of sorts, exchanges with inhabitants of forgotten rural towns restoring our faith in humanity, one act of kindness after another. Witnessing the trail provide again and again, because we believed it would. So it did.

I knew life would never be the same. And it wasn’t. That’s how I feel now.

How does one go on with business as usual knowing the world is run by a gaggle of powerfully rich monsters capable of the most inhumane acts imaginable? Like, oh shit, The Hunger Games are real, Black Mirror is on TV, but we are the movie. Marionettes, operated by sadists at the top, yanking our strings to manipulate our heads and bodies, mimicking life, playing god. Knowing that every missing kid on a milk carton, every unsolved mystery, every strange disappearance has an unusually high chance of ending on an island used for blackmail, extortion and acting out disturbing fantasies, sick fetishes and demonic ceremonies, making mainstream porn look like the Disney Channel.

Like a horrifying park theme in West World, only you don’t have to take a train to the Real World because the future is here and the characters are’t machines, they’re human beings, indigenous and immigrant, black + brown, white children of the world, little boys and girls. The most vulnerable targets. No wonder they want to force women to have babies even if it kills them, but refuse to take care of a soul once born. They need to feed the system. Those signs exist on the back door of the stalls in women’s restrooms because sex-trafficking, pedophilia and abuse are as American as apple pie, baked into the fabric of our lives since the beginning of everything everywhere all at once. We’re already living in a hellscape, it’s just a matter of when each of us realizes it.

I’ve always considered politics a game, one I had no interest in playing, hating how the rules kept changing and nothing seemed to get done. Or if it did, the next man elected could just undo it all, like how the sitting president ordered the removal of historical exhibits, signs, and educational materials from several National Park Service sites, including slavery-focused displays at Philadelphia’s President’s House site and Muir Woods National Monument. These actions, targeting content on slavery, Native American history, and climate change, were part of a “restoring truth and sanity to American history”directive. Whoa, what? I’m going to need you to define truth. And sanity. And history.

Over the years and throughout time I’ve been told I should care about politics, that I had to care, but I’m not sure anyone ever really explained why. I’m slow at connecting dots. I don’t think I ever fully understood what was at stake. Everyone points fingers at the other side, one side leans in hard with uncreative name-calling, one side battles itself constantly. Politics has reached the level of tribalism I’ve been fearing for over a decade and their evil plan is working. They want us to believe it’s about left and right, donkeys and elephants. But it’s not. It’s about who holds the power and what they get to do with it. It’s about decency, integrity, morality. Intrinsic values. Basic humanity. Whether or not you think any one should be able to buy and sell human beings. Be allowed to treat people as property, things to do with whatever one chooses, with absolutely zero consequence.

Politics is a game. The Most Dangerous Game. ^{_{(1924 short story by Richard Connell. Read it.)}} And we’re all playing. Do you know which piece you are on the board? (Hint: It’s a pawn. You’re a pawn.)

Last Friday I went to dinner with my friend Lee at an old favorite establishment I’ve been frequenting for over 20 years. The kind of place with no phone, no TVs, no neon, not even a sign out front. An escape, usually. After overhearing one too many basic conversations, it took everything I had NOT to stand on top of the table and be that dude in the Atlanta airport earlier this month, reacting to the Epstein files just released with critical redactions protecting power, exposing victims and lumping in people mentioned in passing (Janis Joplin) with co-conspirators (Abercrombie douchebag). He appeared to be having a difficult time coming to terms with people who just continue to go about their day like everything is normal (see here). Me too dude, me too.

I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a dick, but the second biggest struggle returning home from a thru-hike (the first being having to retrain my body to hold its functions until an appropriate time+place), was realizing all the asinine shit people actually cared about. Uncreative replicated moments, followers, heavy focus on things, having them, wearing them, trends and fitting in, staying relevant, looking relevant, all the materialistic rinse and repeat bubblegum garbage. Either I never did or no longer could even pretend to care. It all felt so…foolish. The Game of Life. Monopoly. Chutes & Ladders. A facade.

You see the world a bit different after walking a few thousand miles through it, time feels more tangible, how you choose to spend it, and with whom, it all matters. I was different, but everyone else was the same. The beginning of the end for relationships naturally exposing themselves through unshared values, ethics and morals.

Like a gouged out ancient bouncy ball, I’m wildly ricocheting between screaming WAKE UP to the muggles, YOU’RE NOT MAD ENOUGH, and being hit in the face by warriors who’ve been fighting madness their entire lives, because the truth is, it’s me who just started paying attention. If you are not enraged, you are disconnected. But rage can’t be all there is. Because rage without wisdom fizzles.

I’m finally upright after being blasted with the exploding force of all the dots connecting at once, exhausted from the pendulum swing of the cycle, the grief of accepting we live in a world controlled by a bunch of Scars strategically offing all the Mufasas. Me and you? We’re Simba now. Time to face our past, stand up to our fears, live our truth. Show everyone weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. I have to keep reminding myself this didn’t all start in January. Not ten years ago, nor twenty. Before I was born. Like way before. Everything feels so urgent, so immediate because Time is coming at me all at once.

I keep reading the greatest form of resistance is living. They want us to feel helpless, hopelessly overwhelmed, to feel like there’s nothing we can do. But there is, and a lot of us are already doing it. Stay disturbed, stay aware, stay awake. But get off the rollercoaster. Be present. Tap into that pride, our Nala energy, our Sarabi roots, Rafiki wisdom. Remember who you are. And be that person. Spread joy, celebrate art, exercise freedom. Find the good. Love hard. Love harder. Share kindness. Smile at strangers. Help who you can, whenever you can. Laugh out loud. Being present in your life is not the same as denying the evil slithering in the darkness, it’s taking responsibility, ownership of your own path.

What’s worse, do you think? I questioned Lee at dinner, glancing at the other diners. Going about business as usual and not knowing? Or knowing and watching people go about their business, wondering if they know? Not knowing. We agreed. Not knowing is much, much worse. Because THIS IS NOT NEW. It’s older than time. And it needed to come into the light. Not knowing doesn’t make it go away. To fight the demon you need to name the demon. So yeah, is it strange listening to people rattle on as if the Olympics are the most important thing going on at the moment? You betcha.

But we are not powerless. Not in our neighborhoods, not in our local communities, not in our neighborhoods, not in our daily choices. Stop actively paying the devil. Money talks. Unsubscribe. Make conscious purchases. Sign up for a CSA, go to farmers markets. Get to know your butcher, your fishmonger. Support local journalism, independent journalism. Remain human. Don’t carry the darkness alone – find your people, dance to everything, every day. Don’t let the music die. Refuse to operate out of fear. We are not the problem. And no one is coming to save us. I am the resistance because I live the resistance. And now? Forward is the pace. Because what’s the alternative.

One foot in front of the other. I’ll let Emilie Autumn show you into the energy of the Fire Horse.