We are all strangers in this strange land. We recognise so little. The sights the sounds the cultures the expectations all so alien. This is not the land of our ancestors. How can we sing The Lord's song in a strange land.
Where is the sacred? Where are the hallowed halls that hold the spirit of what is true? Where are the green fields, where are the forests and beautiful creatures of nature. Where is the culture, who are the people around me? My holy books speak of this, but only in their revelations of apocalypse.
Have I been sold down the river? As we pass threshold after threshold, ticking off the markers to a hell of rising seas, dead coral verses, heavy weather and the murmuration of landless strangers. How did I get here? How can I look to this television sky and find meaning in it all?
But perhaps it is I who am to blame? Perhaps I am the one who forsook my god(s)? If I cannot find meaning it is because meaning is not there to be found.
MEANING IS MADE.
And it is I who am the maker. I/You/We. Meaning was never there to be found in the first place.
Apocalypse. From ἀποκαλύπτω (apokalúptō, "to disclose, reveal") + -σις (-sis).
Let us cast aside the stories of the end of days. These are lazy. These are tales of abandonment, of giving up on life, of giving up on the earth, calls for surrender by those who traded their inner light for the blinding torch of the paternalist story.
I shall see your apocalypse, and I shall raise you. This revelation shall be my own. The revealing shall be my own life, the riders shall proclaim that I/we live here, that we shall open our eyes and see this world as it is, infused with the divine.
This concrete jungle is no less imbued with the essence of the creator than those lush tangles of vine that grew here before. I shall witness it. The gods do not abide in the perfect palaces constructed to reflect the greed and power of the priests. My gods live with me, now, in the chirp of the sparrow and in the fractal bloom that grows in the corner of the screen when the clouds disrupt the signal. My gods make their nest in the decaying rafters to better watch us dance. The holy spirits live in the lens flare caught on my camera they speak the mantra my pocket typed to an old friend as I walked to the bus.
I shall open my eyes. I shall sanctify this strange land. I shall deny the powers that sold me a future owned by the hierarchy, my meaning owned by the body corporate, my spirit domesticated, kept safe, outsourced.
I shall rewild my way through this world. The meaning shall be mine, I shall make this a world of magic and meaning once more. My sanctity shall be feral.
This is the boundary. The line in the sand on the shore of the rising seas. We cannot make great a time that never was. The call to return to an imaginary past is only a trap for our children. I live here. This land is full of meaning, I am enveloped in the transmission, wild and free.
THIS IS THE CALL OF FERAL SANCTITY.
THE FORGOTTEN GIFT
Since the first fire the thought has been with us: What distinguishes human from animal?
Intelligence? Now the machines think with us. Emotion? Shared with the beasts. Tools? Let the crows teach us. Language? The whalesong tells stories across the oceans. Consciousness? But we cannot find its origin, a difficult claim to make.
Perhaps the question is wrong.
What makes you human? What makes me human?
We each/together/alone participate in the transformation of the mundane into meaningful. Meaning is not found, it is made, and our role in this story is to be the maker. We bequeath significance. We make things sacred. We ourselves/together/alone say: "This matters."
This is not metaphor. This is actual human capacity.
Conscious meaning-bequeathal. Intentional sanctification. The alchemical operation of making significance.
If we have surrendered our light to grief, fear, resentment or a longing for the great times of yesteryear, we have abandoned our present. If we only seek to resist the future, we have surrendered to the past. The call is to be here now.
Open our eyes. See the spirit. Feel the love. See the world as it is, full of the divine.
That is how we make the meaning, that is how we find the light, that is how we live into the future before us.
THE GREAT FORGETTING
Once, we knew.
Once we knew that we were the ones who made the sacred. We knew that it was us who assigned significance. I/Me/We are the way and the light.
But, ever since that first flame, the power has been extracted.
The priests claimed at their connection with God defined the holy. The kings deemed their authority to assign value. The market shall determine what is worthy and shall state your price. Your footprint shall be analysed, your life bucketed by the algorithm that now controls relevance.
Each time we agreed, sold a fragment of soul, surrendered a spark of our light. Oh, we do not claim that this authority is wrong, but every step was a forgetting, a forgetting that it was us who created the authority.
We gave them power over meaning. And they used that power to shape us.
The Inversion
The alchemical Great Work is the transformation of lead into gold: The act of human consciousness transforming matter into meaning.
The inverted operation: External systems assign meaning to human consciousness.
We live in the upside-down: We don't make sacred, we are told what is holy. We don't sense the value - we are told what it costs. We don't assign significance, we watch the graph, believe the metrics. We fail to bequeath meaning, letting the weightings and the advertising spend, wrap an algorithm around us.
The desire for comfort and certainty, a better life through products, transforms our light into lead, leaves us owned.
THIS IS POSSESSION.
Not supernatural possession. Structural possession.
When you forget you're the meaning-maker, others make meaning OF you.
THE HIDDEN CHAINS
Our bondage is hidden from us.
We are bound by fear of death, chained by desire for comfort, held hostage by news cycles and the promise of social-media-compatible lives. We surrender to next-day delivery, infinite content tailored to our digital footprint.
We do not feel sun on skin. We rush between calls, hands bound by coffee mug and navigation instruction. Each action made with good intention coerces us deeper into extraction.
The systems that possess us through these captured choices now extract from the substrate itself.
They deny our children their future, creating for them a legacy of hurricanes, drought, crippled ecosystems. They deny our mother her capacity: to regulate, absorb, maintain the web that holds all life.
The org chart knew the consequences. They chose profit over planet. Perhaps they were not bad people, but it was just too complex, and they had a duty to the shareholders. (Didn't they?) They controlled the meaning, a Jedi mind trick, these are not the consequences you are looking for.
This is not metaphor. This is material.
The soil empties. The waters warm. The web tears.
Our bondage may be less brutal than chattel slavery - humanity's brutal inheritance can never be diminished or dismissed. Yet these self induced shackles leave a wound that cuts our planet deep to the core. The systems possessing us are hollowing the ground beneath all future possibility.
But I must recognize my complicity. I too fail to bite the hand that feeds me. I too seek to be the best in my cage. And as I spin on my wheel, seeking to do good, I power the great beast that devours my planet.
This is why we cannot wait. This is why the work must be collective, material, now.
THE LINE DRAWN
We cannot wait for another to save us.
No messiah is coming. No AI shall bring answers to all our questions. No enlightened leadership shall calm the waters, unite the factions, and take us to a land of green pasture where everything is OK again. Technology shall not save us.
because it is the surrendering of agency itself that binds us.
Waiting for salvation is remaining possessed.
It is certainty that binds us. Certainty that blinds us. We can only "know" when we surrender our light and allow another to own that part of us. The Way that can be spoken is not the Way.
The way of liberation is the way of not knowing. Of uncertainty. Of living at the boundary. Of remembering that you are the meaning-maker, and you shall never know truth. And you shall act anyway. Make the meaning that is yours. Sanctify your strange land.
Not tomorrow. Not when you understand. Not when you're ready.
NOW.
Because the work is: remembering what you already know.
You have always been the one who makes things sacred. You have always been the alchemist. You have always had the power to transform the mundane into gold.
You just forgot.
A SPARK TO THE BURNER
Stop. Look.
The act of making meaning starts small. It does not wait for grand portents. It is, here, now, in this moment.
The pavement crack where the tree root won. Where grass says "I live here too."
The plastic toy, hidden in a yellow case, born from a chocolate egg.
The interference patterns that emerge from the hum of the server fans.
THESE ARE LEAD.
Meaningless matter. Dead substrate.
Substrate = sub (under) + stratum (layer) The under-layer. The foundation that supports but often goes unseen.
...
Until you say otherwise.
THE CRUCIBLE
Until you say it. Until you believe it.
This is the power: conscious bequeathal.
Not finding meaning. Making it.
[EYES OPEN] [I AM HERE]
See the world as it is. Here and now. Sanctify it with your presence.
The crack? The earth refusing to be paved. Root remembering its nature.
The toy? A message from the spirits carried through random selection and silver foil.
The hum? The breath of the machine-that-holds-us. The om of the digital monastery.
YOU DID THIS.
You took lead and made gold.
Without any certainty. Without any Truth. Just humbly, with your own recognition of mysterious ways woven into the familiar, into the land, into the patterns within which you live.
And choosing to make it mean something.
The sacredness isn't in the crack. It's in your recognition of the crack.
The toy is just a plastic trinket. But through it we see beyond the veil.
The prayer isn't the hum. The prayer is you listening.
This is the great alchemical work.
This is what makes you.
This is what they tried to take.
TAKE IT BACK.
THIS IS FERAL SANCTITY
The rewilding of meaning. The sanctification of the synthetic. The refusal to wait for permission. The claim that here, now, this is sacred.
Not because it was always sacred. Because you make it sacred.
The boundary is drawn. The revelation is declared. The work begins.
Open your eyes. Sanctify this strange land. The meaning is yours to make.
For those who maintained meaning under bondage: the enslaved who transformed their oppressors' symbols, the colonized who preserved sacred relationship, the persecuted who kept tradition alive. You showed us the way. We continue your work.
For our mother Earth, whose substrate holds all life, whose capacity we have hollowed: we see you. We reckon with what we have done. We will not look away.
For those who come after: we are making a world of meaning. Join us or don't. But we will not wait.