One morning recently I was walking up to my studio, eyes trained on the garden situation with that particular flavor of tunnel vision that isn't general anxiety but something more specific and more embarrassing: pure jealousy of people who had been growing their own food for years while I was busy declaring myself not a food grower. I wasn't falling apart. I was just completely blind in one direction, measuring my empty beds against everyone else's abundance and finding myself behind in a race I had invented.
Then a small red dot on the ground stopped me.
I crouched down. Wild cherry. I picked it and ate it and something in my body woke up -- the life force tasting life force, suddenly hungry for more. I stood up and started looking, really looking, at the land I actually live on. And in the next hour I found two flourishing persimmon trees, a chickasaw plum grove, four thousand thorny blackberry bushes in heavy production, serviceberries, a wild apple tree, two raspberry bushes, and the wild cherry that had called me back into reality with one small red dot.
I had been walking through paradise, eyes fixed on what wasn't there.
This is what the falling reveals, if you let it. Not just the personal collapses -- the lost job, the ended relationship, the dream that didn't survive contact with reality -- but the big civilizational unraveling too, the one we are all living inside whether we've named it yet or not. It strips the noise away. It makes the not-enough story untenable because the things you were measuring yourself against are composting anyway, and what remains when they're gone is what was actually always there, waiting patiently under all the grasping and comparing and not-yet.
The nurse log teaches this. In old growth forest, a fallen tree doesn't decompose into nothing -- it becomes the most fertile ground in the ecosystem. Hemlock and cedar seedlings take root along its length, fed by everything the old tree accumulated over its lifetime, protected by its slowly softening body. The falling wasn't the end of the story. It was the condition for the next one. The old tree had to come down for the light to reach the forest floor.
I was seventeen years old when I first heard the myth of Persephone. Goddess of spring, of new life pushing up through frozen ground -- but also goddess of descent, of death, of the underworld journey that makes the return possible. I was pregnant, seventeen, terrified and cracked open in the way that only the very young and the very surprised can be cracked open, and something about that story landed in me like a seed finding soil. I named my daughter Persephone before I understood why. I just knew the name was hers.
What I didn't know yet was that she would become my first real teacher.
She arrived ferocious. Raw power from the beginning, the kind that could go either way -- toward destruction or toward something extraordinary -- and for years it wasn't clear which direction it was headed. She was sometimes frightening in her intensity. I worried about who she would become. And underneath all of it, before I had language for what was happening, she was anchoring me to something I had never been anchored to before: unconditional love. Not the performed kind. The real kind, the kind that has no exit clause, the kind that teaches you what you are actually made of because it requires all of it. She greened me before I knew what greening was. She was the original island of coherence in my life, the first place where I had to become more than my own wounds in order to show up for something that needed me whole.
She grew up and had her own descents. Fears that ran hot and fast and sideways, the way unloved fear always does -- not because it wants to destroy but because it has never been shown another way. Every fear that goes unmet becomes a place where life force leaks out, and leaked life force goes looking for a match. She had her fires. She had her underworld seasons. And instead of those seasons destroying her, she let them initiate her.
One by one she turned toward the fears instead of away from them. She started a women's circle where people come specifically to have their fears met with love rather than more fear. She became a mother who can sit with her children's terror without adding her own unconscious fuel to it -- which sounds simple until you try it and discover it requires you to have met your own terror first. She stopped the ancestral pattern of passing shame forward and started transmuting it instead, which is the hardest and most quietly revolutionary thing a human being can do. She built a homestead on a creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains, growing food, tending land, making something real with her hands in the place where she actually lives.
And she became, to this day, the one person in the universe who can stop me. I don't say this lightly. Many people have tried. But it is only this quality in her -- this warrior capacity built from genuine descent and genuine return -- that can hold a wall for me to crash against when I am confused or trying to force an outer fix I haven't yet earned on the inner realms. Time and time again she has kept me from bringing the violence of my own unprocessed shadows into the world.
I named her after the goddess of spring and death before I knew who she would become. She grew into both. And then she transmuted both into something that serves life.
That's initiation. That's what the falling is for.
The metacrisis unfolding around us right now is doing the same thing at civilizational scale that Persephone's descents did for her and that the wild cherry did for me on that particular morning. It is removing what was never really there to begin with. It is composting the scaffolding of a culture that ran on extraction and performance and the relentless measurement of what isn't here yet. It is making the not-enough story untenable so that something older and truer can push up through the ground into the available light.
You have persimmon trees on your land. You have been walking past them. The collapse is not taking your abundance -- it is burning away the lens that made it invisible.
The question is not whether the old tree is falling. It is. The question is whether you're going to spend the whole descent mourning the canopy, or whether you're going to taste the wild cherry, let the life force wake the hunger in you, and go find out what has been flourishing on your land this whole time. The abundance was never taken. It was just waiting for you to stop measuring the empty beds long enough to look.
The not-enough lens isn't a personality flaw. It's a trained attentional pattern with a measurable biology. And it can be retrained.