How to Survive Apocalypse [now free]

Practicing Public Mysticism in the Face of Despair and Catastrophe

Last summer, as a few of us in DDS were checking into Studio Time (aka body doubling), one of our members who lives in Europe shared her sense of despair over the recent European Parliament elections, in which the far right surged to victory. She wondered how the rest of us cope with that sort of devastating news in the day-to-day, how we keep putting one foot in front of the other when things look so bleak. Many of us here in the US are now similarly reeling from this week’s inauguration—for me personally, the day felt more upsetting and immobilizing than I had expected—so I thought it made sense to revisit this essay, the first in a series of three, and take it out from behind its paywall.¹

I don’t think “apocalypse” is too strong a word for the age we are now experiencing, a terrifying time of rampant state violence, drastic redistribution of resources to the uber wealthy, escalating climate catastrophe, and bleak prospects for political solutions any time soon. I trace my understanding of the word “apocalypse” from So Sinopoulos-Lloyd (they/them), a white queer & trans Greek-American nature geek and in(ter)dependent scholar and writer, as well as from Steven Charleston, a Native American elder, retired Episcopal bishop of Alaska, and author of We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope. Both point to the Greek origins of the word meaning to “uncover” or “reveal.”

Charleston explains, “While many of us equate apocalypse with catastrophe or even with the end of the world, that is actually only half of the meaning…. Originally the word meant a vision of the future, a revelation about what was to come.”² Borrowing from the Greek spelling, So Sinopoulos-Lloyd titles their website “Apokalyptic Ecology,” explaining that “This new/old spelling intends to remind us of the emergence of other worlds/next worlds as opposed to the ‘end of “the” world.’”³

Thus, apocalypse can be both a vision and an event. It can also be about both destruction and hope, catastrophe and liberation. As Sinopoulos-Lloyd explains:

Apokalyptic Ecology is certainly about the ecological and cybernetic relationships and kinship networks that emerge in times of eco-social fracture (both contemporary and historical), but perhaps more emphatically … it is about reclaiming mythic imagination & visionary / oracular consciousness ….The apocalyptic … is part of the fugitive imagination, and to that it should return. The apocalyptic is also not necessarily “bad,” but has developed a negative valence due to its association with suffering, destruction, & collapse. Apocalypses can be liberatory just as they can be catastrophic, or they can be both.

I didn’t have a a very articulate answer for my European friend about how to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of despair, but the question she posed is one that consumes me. How do we survive this apocalypse of environmental catastrophe, state/structural violence, and economic ruin that we are already living through? These catastrophes all stem from a history of colonization and diaspora, white supremacy and capitalism that seem to have a life of their own in the face of which we, individually, often feel we have little agency.

I think it’s important, especially for white people of European ancestry like me, to acknowledge that the apocalypse we are in the midst of, and our genuine and entirely reasonable fear and anxiety in the face of it, is not new, and is verifiably survivable. As the science fiction writer William Gibson has noted, “The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.” Nowhere is this more true than with regard to the so-called “end of the world.”

As Steven Charleston argues, “If you wanted to find an experiential example of an apocalypse, you would be hard pressed to find one more total than what North America’s Indigenous civilization confronted for more than four hundred years. If apocalypse means cataclysmic destruction—in essence, an end of the world—my ancestors went through it.” Significantly, though, as Charleston goes on to note: “But they did not all die. They did not disappear. They survived. Even if only as a remnant of what once had been, they came through the nightmare to live another day.”⁴ He goes on to ask, “How?” and offers the stories of several Native American prophets who offered hope to their people in the face of utter catastrophe and despair. If apocalypse is both an event and a vision, then our vision for the future can be—indeed must be—informed by the wisdom and visions of those who have already survived.

In his essay How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse, Julian Brave NoiseCat begins by sharing, first in his native language Secwepemctsín and then in English, “who I am in relation to my kin, to my community, and to the places I come from, because those things matter—not just to Indians, but to all people.” In the midst of the apocalypse of pandemic and climate catastrophe, he exhorts us with a simple message that can help us to at least begin to frame a response to our fears about how to survive these times:

So my message to you is simple: Remember who you are. Remember that you have many relatives, human and nonhuman. And remember that we all come from somewhere, and that those places, and the place called Earth, need us to fight for them.⁵

In this series of essays here on The Spiral Lab, I am making an attempt to accept NoiseCat’s invitation to remember these things, and to connect my own remembrances to the wisdom of three Native American prophets as described by Steven Charleston: Gandiodaiio, Tenskwatawa, and Smohalla. I will also connect them with my own understanding and practices of enchantment and public mysticism. My conclusion will be more humble than earth-shattering, a modest insight that helps me, in the words of So Sinopolous-Lloyd and their spouse Pinar Sinopolous-Lloyd, “reclaim mythic imagination … transform despair into creativity and hope … [and] live into the unknown in an era of ecocide.”⁶

“Remember Who You Are”⁷

Now here I go again / I see the crystal visions / I keep my visions to myself.

~Fleetwood Mac

I am Marta Eileen Rose, and I am named for both of my grandmothers and for my father’s ancestors.

My name Marta is for my maternal grandmother, Marta Cecilia Hagar Bloem, who traveled as a young woman from her native Sweden to become a chamber maid in Lake Placid New York, where she met a Dutchman, Hendrik Bloem an orphan with a 6th grade education who had been working in bars and restaurants since early adolescence. They married and eventually moved back to Amsterdam where they had three children, the youngest of which was my mother, Beatrix Astrid Bloem Rose, born on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Holland and named after the new baby princess.

During the war, my grandfather was part of the Dutch Merchant Marine in the Pacific, and his ship was captured by the Japanese. He spent the war in a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia. When the war ended, my grandmother and the children met him there until Indonesia gained their independence from colonial rule and kicked the Dutch out. From there, my family moved back to Amsterdam, where they could not find work, and then to my grandmother’s native Sweden, and finally to Flint Michigan, where they had relatives, but were, for a period of time, undocumented immigrants. My grandmother and first namesake died of breast cancer before I was born.

My mother was in her early teens when she arrived in Flint and learned English, her 5th language (along with Dutch, two Indonesian dialects, and Swedish)—none of which she spoke without an accent. (I did not inherit her facility with languages, but I have often identified with her sense of being nowhere a native speaker.) At the Flint Junior College, where my mother began an academic career that would end, in my sophomore year of college, with a PhD in comparative literature (through which she would acquire two more languages, German and French), she met and married my father, James Hosford Rose, a linguist and pioneer of the organic Community Supported Agriculture movement in the early 90’s (we will pick up more of his story later in this series of essays). His mother, Eileen, my second namesake, is mostly a mystery to me; though I knew her as a child, we were never close. The Roses, as my genealogy-obsessed uncle has discovered, came many generations ago from the Scottish Highlands and settled in Michigan, the land of the People of the Three Fires (Odawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe).

My people have lived through nazi occupation, they have been war refugees, POW camp survivors, illegal immigrants, and colonial settlers. Many of them, as far as I can piece together, have been (like me) neurodivergent, queer, and disabled in various flavors on both sides. My kin have shaped the story of Who I Am in ways that defy simple binaries such as oppressor/oppressed, occupier/occupied, sane/mad.

My mother, Beatrix “Trixie” Bloem Rose

Charleston asks, “How many times have you survived the end of the world? If you are like most people, the answer is quite a few. And not just the big-ticket apocalypses of social unrest, natural disaster, or pandemic, but the personal apocalypse of loss, betrayal, or a broken heart.”⁸ As Charleston suggests, the story of Who I Am is also deeply inflected by a personal apocalypse involving a brutal divorce and a period of extreme economic insecurity in its aftermath, during which, at the age of 50, I began a great unmasking from Who I Was to Who I Am. Among the things I have learned about myself is that I am a seer of visions—not so much in the sense of extraordinary insight and/or supernatural encounters, but more in the sense of an epistemological neuro-difference, as described by Vine Deloria, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights:

An old Indian saying captures the radical difference between Indians and Western people quite adequately. The white man, the Indians maintain, has ideas; Indians have visions. Ideas have a single dimension and require a chain of connected ideas to make sense…. The vision, on the other hand, presents a whole picture of experience and has a central meaning that stands on its own feet as an independent revelation. It is said that Albert Einstein could not conceive of his problems in physics in conceptual terms but instead had visions of a whole event. He then spent his time attempting to translate elements of that event that could be separated into mathematical and verbal descriptions that could be communicated to others.⁹

I think this is a trait shared by many neurodivergent people, one that often makes linearity, beginnings, and transitions difficult for us. It’s not that I didn’t see in visions before, in the masked before time of Who I Was, but the true revelation of myself, of my Self, in the unmasked now time is that I no longer need to keep my visions to myself, and I am no longer ashamed of my difficulty in translating them to those who understand the world differently. This “unmasking” (in the words of Dr. Devon Price in his book Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity) has been central to the ongoing becoming of my Self, and part of my growing understanding of myself as an “autistic mystic.”

I have also come to understand that I am often enchanted, filled with wonder and awe at, in the words of Kathleen Norris, the “quotidian mysteries”¹⁰—the smell of laundry hung on the line, the sight of light dancing on water, the miracle of seeds germinating, the magic of yeast making bread to rise. Again, it is not that these experiences of wonder are new, but my understanding of them as enchantment/mysticism and therefore powerful—as opposed to simply being weird—is new.

In the wake of the personal apocalypse of my divorce, a Self, a Who I Am, has emerged, one capable of visions and the practice of public mysticism, a term coined by So and Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, inspired by Krista Tippet’s notion of reimagining public theology, which she describes as “connecting grand religious ideas with messy human reality.”¹¹ So and Pinar explain that in their educational and philosophical work through their project Queer Nature they “seek to be more public about the ways in which we are enchanted, entranced, and spellbound by the more-than-human world.” They understand mysticism as “an age-old psycho-spiritual process that can transform despair into creativity and hope” and that is

characterized by transpersonal or interspecies love, longing, and devotion. This deeply charged emotional stance has the power to bridge our experiences of ecological grief and despair with our experiences of awe, love, and enchantment with the beyond human world. Enchantment and awe can be entry points into reconfigured relationships with kin in a post-apocalyptic ‘life after despair.’ Because mysticism makes mystery a space where the sacred can emerge, we believe that a reimagining of mysticism can help us live into the unknown in an era of ecocide.¹²

I have begun to reimagine myself, my Self, in similar ways—what I used to call the unbearable toomuchness of being me gets transformed into autistic mystic, housewife and homemaker becomes hearth witch, madness becomes vision.

This post-personal-apocalyptic Self that has emerged, this Who I Am, is more healed and more whole that I could ever have imagined. I feel capable of enchantment, awe, and visions, capable of gathering communities of “reconfigured relationships with kin in a post-apocalyptic ‘life after despair,’” where that despair can be transformed into “creativity and hope.” In this way, I find my story responds to and resonates with the wisdom of the Native American prophet Gandiodaiio, as told by Steven Charleston.

Born in 1735 into the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, and specifically the Seneca Nation whose ancestral lands can be found throughout the Finger Lakes and Genesee Valley regions of what is now central and western New York state, Gandiodaiio shared a new teaching, received in a vision called the Gaiwiio, the “Good Message” (also Good Way or Word). He was what we would now call a recovering alcoholic.

According to Charleston, the apocalypse experienced by the Haudenosaunee peoples began with the American Revolution, during which “American armies in 1779 systematically burned villages, destroyed crops, massacred men, women, and children, and mutilated corpses to sow a sense of Terror.”¹³ In this context, a “sense of political, economic, and spiritual collapse overwhelmed what had once been a model community.”¹⁴ Many Haudenosaunee fell into self-destructive practices such as alcohol abuse, the practice of “dark magic,” and “bad medicine.” Their traditional communal sense of selfhood had been fractured, and in the face of such apocalyptic trauma, they had little sense of how to be individual Selves capable of autonomy and agency. Gandiodaiio, who himself had a history of severe alcoholism, returned from a death-like trance with a prophetic vision, including a new spiritual practice for his people: confession. He saw that his people, in the specific context of apocalypse and communal collapse, needed to turn “their gaze from the breakdown of the many to the redemption of the individual,” to replace “their internal grief with hope for positive change.”

Through confession, either public or private, he gave them a path back to wholeness. It may be argued that is how struggles with alcoholism informed his wisdom. He understood that the Haudenosaunee needed a recovery model that worked on the personal level, since they had hit bottom in their apocalyptic fall. As jarring as it was, this insistence on individual confession released the guilt, shame, and sorrow of his people. He gave them a way out of despair and a path to recovery.¹⁵

Charleston generalizes this prophetic insight as the need for “an adjustment of the culture … If there is a lesson to be learned from the Gaiwiio, a revelation that can offer us hope for the future, it is in this exact apocalyptic process: to turn our own culture upside down.” He notes that “Contemporary American society is the reverse of traditional Native American culture. Whereas Native communities value the group, the dominant society values the individual,” and he argues that today a sort of mirror-image balancing of the communal with the individual is necessary in order for us to “release a healing power among [the] people.”¹⁶

Initially I was startled by the way Charleston lauds Gandiodaiio for teaching his people to “shift from thinking in the ‘we’ to thinking in the ‘me.’”¹⁷ I thought, isn’t that exactly the problem in contemporary society? I understood better when I realized that Charlston was not holding up Gandiodaiio for the proposition that we need more individualism in our culture today, but rather that we can and must disrupt our current culture, so skewed as it is toward rugged, toxic individualism, in order to create a healthier balance between the individual and the communal. But upon even further examination, I came to realize that for many of us, especially those of us who are marginalized and deemed “dysfunctional” and “pathological” and “abnormal,” we actually do need to turn to our Selves as autonomous beings with agency, even as we simultaneously seek connection and community. The two go hand-in-hand in a nonlinear spiral of enchantment and awe—not first one, then the other, but together, simultaneously, we emerge as our Selves and we conjure community.

Next up in this series:

“Remember that you have many relatives, human and nonhuman”

Being dehumanized naturally pushed us to identify with the realms of existence that Western culture (especially according to Christianity) has mythologized as subordinate to humans—or even as monstrous.

~ So and Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd

1. Last year I wrote a paper in a totally different context and started to publish it here on The Spiral Lab, with the intention of making it a three part series. The first part I published, but behind a paywall (I think I was feeling shy); then the second part I published for free (but of course it didn’t make much sense if you hadn’t read the first paywalled part); and then, in true neurodivergent fashion, I totally forgot to publish the third part.

I’m feeling less shy now, and also, this series seems more relevant than ever. So I’m republishing the first part here, again, but without a paywall, and at the end of this post I will link to the second part in the series. Next week, I really will remember to publish the final part, with a few new concluding thoughts.

2. Charleston, Steven. We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope. Broadleaf Books, 2023, p. 3.

3. Sinopoulos-Lloyd, So. Apokalyptic Ecology

4. Charleston, p. 7

5. Noisecat, Julian Brave. How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse. Emergence Magazine, November 23, 2021. https://emergencemagazine.org/op_ed/how-indigenous-peoples-are-fighting-the-apocalypse/

6. So and Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, Eco-Mysticism for Apocalyptic Times.

7. Much of the story that follows is based on family lore told to me decades ago by my mother, and I can’t actually vouch for its absolute accuracy, but this is the way of stories about our ancestors—memory and interpretation are often as much a part of these family stories as verifiable “facts.”

8. Charleston pp. 166-67

9. Deloria, Vine. A Native American Perspective on Liberation. Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research, 1(3), 15-17, 1977. I find it interesting that the example he offers is of a white man, Albert Einstein, but significantly an almost-certainly neurodivergent (and probably autistic) white man.

10. Norris, Kathleen. The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work." Paulist Press, 1998.

11. Krista Tippett, Public Theology Reimagined, On Being.

12. So and Pinar Sinopoulos-Lloyd, Eco-Mysticism for Apocalyptic Times

13. Charleston p. 23

14. Charleston p. 24

15. Charleston p. 41

16. Charleston p. 42

17. Charleston p. 39