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The Christians are not OK, and the latest evidence of this is a Rapture that was supposed to arrive by September 23 or 24, 2025. A man in South Africa had a vision that the Rapture would arrive with this year’s Feast of Trumpets (whatever that is) and Rosh Hashanah. More than a few American Christians took this prediction as a new gospel, walking away from their jobs, selling their cars, (allegedly) giving their children to DCFS, attempting to arrange permanent caretakers for their pets, and generally flocking to social media with the good news that they were going away.

The internet could not resist such delectable cringe, and naturally there were at least five parodies for every two-cent Rapturetok influencer who assailed the general public with smug, fake tears about the glorious future that only applied to them and a few other saved souls. Predictably, Kingdom Come failed to arrive on schedule, the loudest of the crows deleted their TikToks in shame, and many more kicked the Rapture can down the road, re-setting the date for another arbitrary goalpost.

For me, September 23 was just another equinox marked by my usual solitary, occult hygiene practices and unusually lovely weather. I worked that day. I made lunch. My husband made dinner. I swept the floor and washed dishes. I did yard work. Mainstream media exploited September 23 for its various psyops and mass hypnosis attempts. I ignored all of it.

Tomorrow never comes

The term provisional living was the Jungian analyst H.G. Baynes, who used it to describe a special sort of immaturity in an adult person. Jung thought of provisional living as an aspect of Puer aeternus, the inner child who, like Peter Pan, refuses to grow up. Jung described provisional living as “the modern European disease of the merely imaginary life” and considered it a form of neurosis. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Jung about provisional living being a form of immaturity, it is also contains a misguided form of discipline which has more to do with Senex than Puer. I also think it is a dire mistake to think of provisional living as confined to the West.

The essence of a provisional life is to wait. Those who live provisionally cannot truly enjoy the now. The current moment is always a bridge (a broken, precarious structure at that) between yesterday and a far more exciting future.

In order to talk about the latest Rapture misfire, it is useful to understand that it is one in a long series that neither began nor ended with William Miller, the 19th century Protestant preacher who had his own vision of the world ending on October 22, 1844. Biblical-literalist Miller crowed about the Second Coming from 1831 onward, garnering a crowd of approximately 100,000 believers who sold their belongings, walked away from prosperous farms, and threw their lives under the bus in order to join his doomsday cult. Newspapers and the penny press (yesteryear’s equivalent of tabloids) had a field day satirizing Miller and his movement, calling him out for personally profiting from his lectures and lambasting his devotees as future insane asylum patients.

I wish the Rapturetok people had done a tiny bit of digging on Google to discover the story of the Millerites. The aftermath of Miller’s failed prophecies was called the Great Disappointment. The Great Disappointment gathered too much steam to go out with a whimper, and the massive egregore it grew ended up birthing both the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Adventists and the Witnesses are proselytizing doomsday cults that are remarkable among mainstream religions (this is a real achievement considering their competition) for their prolific abuse of children and the rampant, barely-contained psychoses of their congregants. I have yet to meet an Adventist or a JW who is not deeply unwell, and more often than not, they are plagued with provisional living that comes from their religion’s fetishization of a golden city that is always a few weeks, months, or years in the future.

Coronapocalypse: when faith fails, make your own Rapture

The Left cannot help to imitate what it hates. The Left, headed by a bunch of psychopathic gay luxury communists, fomented its own Rapture in the form of overreaction to a manufactured virus that was said to have “escaped” LOL from a lab into a nearby Wuhan wet market. The crazy thing about the Coronapocalypse is it almost worked, mainly because it delivered Rapture to a small set of lucky, upper-middle class people in the form of home confinement and telecommuting.

In lieu of a New Jerusalem, the Bathroom Class got to stay home while the masked, lumpen proletariat delivered their pad thai to them by car. Unlike those gullible Christians, the Bathroom Class got their Paradise immediately, paid for by the suffering and disenfranchisement of regular people who lost their businesses, those who stroked out from the mandatory vaccine and lost their jobs anyway, and those who were not allowed to enter the hospital to hold grandfather’s hand one last time as he passed out of this world into the next. Their City of God was the living room, binge watching Netflix on the flat screen as the world burned. Their baptism rite was the Covid vaccine. Their altars were any screen with an internet connection.

Coronapocalypse actually delivered, and that is why it had to be stretched out. At first it was three weeks to flatten the curve; this quickly morphed into three years. They pretended the apocalypse had not yet truly happened while it was ongoing. Situations were always being depicted as worsening even while nurses and doctors had ample time to choreograph elaborate dance routines in empty hospitals. Even while they luxuriated in stimulus money that for them was not exactly the difference between living and dying, they lived provisionally, anxiously awaiting the real luxury communism revolution when Covid rules went permanent, everybody had Universal Basic Income, and all of life’s necessities were delivered mysteriously and magically to one’s door by drone. They remained an anxious lot, quaffing copious Zoom-doctor-prescribed antidepressants (among other substances) and trying to squelch/outrun that nagging feeling that something was very, very wrong.

The moral of the story is that some people will never be happy in the moment no matter how many goodies they acquire.

Not just for kids

Like I said earlier in this essay, it is a mistake to think of living provisionally as a hundred percent childish. It’s not all Puer all the time. There is quite a bit of Senex in provisional living, because it involves imposing strict limits upon oneself to satisfy the requirements of the future. Jung attributes provisional living to Puer and the element of air because of its rootlessness and Puer’s dislike of commitment, but I would argue provisional living is all about commitment. The commitment of living provisionally is not to the world around them, nor is it to live in the moment, no matter how hedonistic some of them may be. The focus of someone who lives provisionally is laser-accurate — it’s on the future. The future is what drives them above and beyond normal limits. The future is what causes them to abuse and neglect their children. It is why they are terrible to all of the people around them and why they do not appreciate anything or anyone they have. It is why they are all signal and no virtue. They are always putting the current moment on layaway for the future, and 99.9 percent of the time, they die paying for a product they never get to put their hands on and enjoy.

I knew a religious woman for whom the disease of provisional living was incurable and acute. She lusted for an Apocalypse that never arrived, goaded on by the Protestant Christian cult that told her it was on a nearby horizon. She had loved ones, half of whom she alienated with provisional living behavioral tics such as conning relatives into buying her large ticket items and then selling those items to people who lived in her apartment complex. She was always on the make with such schemes, and when she was not preoccupied with interfamily con jobs, she was complaining about her aches, pains, and other horrors of age. She did not complain about the Rapture. For one day, she was confident she would be scooped up to the clouds with the other chosen ones to sit at the right hand of Jesus. She would be without pain and made perfect as she sat next to her Creator.

Strangely, when she got old, she was afraid to die. Though she had fantasized about rejoining the other side since girlhood, when the time finally came, she was absolutely terrified.

Putting the mori into hikikomori

The provisional life is full of fantasy, and it is not of a sort that winds up being productive. The future can never be real because it is always out of reach, and the provisional life takes place in the future, whether that is the Golden City of the Rapture or some other place. I am not a fan of video games (a.k.a. games) because they take Puer’s infantile fantasy of a perfect, idyllic world and make it real enough and full of dopamine triggers that keep him or her trapped and useless until he or she is a hikikomori — still technically alive but otherwise dead in almost every meaningful sense of the term.

The provisional life is full of excuses. When those truly affected with provisional living syndrome have jobs, it is either by some nepotistic/convenient miracle or it is an extremely temporary condition. They cannot stand to work because work takes them away from their intoxicating fantasy worlds. We cannot claim that the provisional life is for the lazy; actually it takes more work to live under threat of homelessness because of dedication to an absurd dream than to stay on the straight and narrow and collect a reliable paycheck. I saw one provisional Puella Aeternis bounce through several homes (one paid for in cash by her father) until she died homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. She never gave up hanging out at the goth clubs though, no matter how sick or immobile she became.

Jung suggests Puers get a job — any job — and to stick with it no matter how bad or unsuitable, in order to break the cycle. I wonder if he ever got any of his patients to do this, and if so, how did it work out?

The Rapture, or whatever ideal lies just down the line, in the afterworld, or next life, keeps its victim saying “not yet, not now”. There is no point in getting anything done or investing any part of one’s real self in a human relationship because it is all an illusion and it is all temporary. I have no idea what ancient Gnostics were like nor do I have any way of speculating, but if they were like the modern day black-pilled crew who think the world is run by evil Archons, they are annoying gits. It’s not worthy of them being genocided of course, but I can at understand the impulse. There is an element of holier-than-thou about provisional living — if only we denizens of the “real” world could measure up to the lowliest NPCs of the fantasy, the gameworld, or the Golden City, then the hikikomori would come back down to Earth and join the living again.

The Great Awakening

I barf a little in my mouth when I see the term "Great Awakening" in print, and I truly do not like to vomit. Humans are never going to collectively ascend because humans are not that bright of a species. We are somewhere in the lower middle between plankton and angels, and with the huge influx of animal souls into our teeming, nearly 10 billion large population, we are not getting smarter anytime soon. Humans have been engaging in the same stupid foibles since our beginnings in trees and grasslands as recent ex-chimpanzees. We have always formed groups and violently raided other groups for resources just as our chimp cousins like to do; we are actually more stupid about it now because we have nuclear weapons. Everyone from dippy-hippie-trippy New Agers to New Right podcasters thinks we are on the precipice of mass enlightenment, and this merely proves that spiritual retardation is at its all-time worst.

This is the most materialistic age the Earth has ever seen. There is only one thing special about our era, and that is how decidedly obtuse most people have become to the subtle planes. We live in an age of spiritual leprosy where almost everyone, including myself, is born with a set of spiritual impediments that shut us out of the kind of self-development past mystics were able to take for granted.

The Native Americans found this out quite horribly when white men marched on them, took their land, and were able to wipe out their civilizations with betrayal and smallpox. Their magic failed them and not for lack of trying. The strength of materialism and capitalist greed proved to be stronger magic, at least for the time being. Materialist enchantments still hold the land and will not let go until the last plane falls from the sky and the last car sputters to a halt on the last intact asphalt road. That time is coming and with it, the old ways will re-establish themselves. They are not coming in great proliferation anytime soon; this is not the cycle for them. Living for that era is not a good idea because it is a long way off.

People who live provisionally are jerks

Living provisionally is expensive, both literally and figuratively. When a person does not consider pulling their own weight as important as say, going to the club, playing the latest Roblox game, or being at home during the scheduled time allotted to this year's Rapture, everyone around her is going to have to work double time in order to keep her afloat. I wrinkle my nose in disgust whenever I pass a certain recently rebuilt McMansion in my old hometown. I know the McMansion’s owner: she is the mother of a drunk/drug addict. I am pretty certain she had an attached guest house built for her ne’er-do-well child so that child can pretend to live an adult life while staying regularly inebriated and sleeping until 3:38pm. There is a young mother on TikTok who ought to be more concerned that she was fired from her job after fervently praying to be home on September 23 and trying to take time off that her boss would not allow. My friend who died homeless in LA often acted like a deranged stalker if a band she liked came to town. 

There are many Rapturetok believers who clearly were not about to take their pets or children with them when they were to be swept away by Jesus. That sort of perversion takes both an unwillingness to commit to children and pets and an extreme commitment to some random South African dude’s vision. Being a jerk takes commitment, and let's not even go into what Coronapocalypse believers were willing to do in order to extend stay-at-home mandates.

Guilty!

You don’t have to be a Rapturetok, Millerite, or a Covidiot cultist to live provisionally; not by a long shot. If you’ve ever fantasized about gaining a windfall, winning the lottery, or “making it”, you've probably been a victim of the provisional lifestyle. If you have ever held on to a piece of clothing that does not fit because you have delusions of losing weight, you have lived provisionally. If you have ever stayed with someone you hate because he or she was "good enough" until you got someone better, you have lived provisionally. Living provisionally is miserable. I know this from personal experience.

To my own chagrin, it has taken me over a half century to understand that I too make the mistake of living provisionally, and to add insult to injury, I still do it. My entire youth was misspent in princess/girlboss fantasies egged on by my own milieu’s demented secular religion of Disney movies (this is back when they were good), sitcoms, magazines, pop music, public schools, and other forms of upper-middle class conditioning. I was taught that going to college would fulfill all my dreams, and though I survived intact, it did not deliver anything near what it promised.
I have credit card debt that is the direct result of taking on expenses I had faith I would one day easily pay off. The day has come for me to pay off my debts and it has not been easy. I have had to train myself to go to the bathroom when nature calls, because I am the sort of dumbass who ignores her own biological signals in order to stay in whatever zone I am in, whether that is work or play. To ignore the need to pee because a task “needs to get done” or because some important person cannot be interrupted is profoundly stupid and a form of living provisionally — “I will listen to my body’s needs someday when I am not so beholden to others”. Ugh...It’s garbage. Listen to your body now, not someday.

I wish these were the only examples of times I have lived provisionally… No, they are not, and I have many that are much, much worse. In order to stop living provisionally, we must first catch ourselves doing it and recognize it as a defense mechanism.

Provisional living is a defense. To live provisionally is an attempt to protect oneself from the “real” world that is perceived as hostile, horrible, and disappointing. The Great Disappointment was a fascinating and apt term because the truth of living provisionally is disappointment. The woman I mentioned who lived for a Rapture that never came, yet was afraid of death, is someone who lived in constant disappointment. Nothing on this planet was good enough for the likes of her, and the second it was, she tried to sell it or whined about how long it would take to get more. People who live in disappointment die in disappointment: the goofy idea among provisional livers that the state of death changes consciousness that is simply untrue. The karma of being constantly disappointed is to continue being disappointed until you learn not to be disappointed.

Once again, the solution is simple but not easy: gratitude. There is only one way to extricate oneself from aspects of Meatworld life being so consistently disappointing and that is to take yourself out of the Roblox game, to exit the Society for Creative Anachronism LARPs, to rip yourself out of the visions of your sandaled feet on streets paved with precious gemstones with that entity pretending to be Jesus, and to start appreciating what you have, exactly where you have it.

That means staying with your job as long as they will tolerate you, reframing the relationship with your children and mate as permanent and not just a stop on a way station going somewhere better, and thanking the bed you sleep upon. It means being thankful for the strip mall being open when you need a quick snack instead of being full of anger that it is ugly and used to be a lovely field of wildflowers before it was paved over. It means sweeping your floor in the morning and washing your own dishes. It means replacing the urge to escape with the determination of making the best out of what is here and now. It means seeing the good in what is all around you and being thankful for what you have. It means being humble and not feeling that the world owes you a living. It means you have to stop asking God for favors and then pretending the small signs you are being given are meant to fulfill your wishes. It means understanding that the will of God is not going to be what you want exactly when you want it.

Being grateful is extremely hard work and it takes great determination. It is worth it. Life begins when you stop living provisionally. Life begins when you get rid of the old stuff you no longer use. Life begins when you go to the bathroom when you need to go. Life begins when you hang the ugly wallpaper merely because it makes you happy. Life begins when you stop waiting for someone else to clean your room and make your bed and do it your damn self. Life begins when you say “thank you” instead of planning your escape.

Aside from the usual trade of oxygen for carbon dioxide, trees have saved my life on more than one occasion. When I was sixteen years old and ready to kill myself, the oak trees around my parents’ house told me not to do it because I had important work to do in the future. At that time, I had no idea how to properly talk to trees and any time I did, I was winging it. I also had no inclination to believe the experiences were real, which was a product of my casually Christian upbringing. At least I did not think of talking to trees as demonic — my friends at the time with overbearing Christian parents would have probably had to deal with that sort of attitude.

My parents bought a cottage in Michigan in the 1980s. The cottage was on the shore of a small lake. Though the property was the size of a small, ranch house with a detached garage, we still called it the cottage. The cottage was considerably larger than the house I live in now, where I wrote Sacred Homemaking.

I had a love/hate relationship with the cottage. Though it was a restful, tranquil place, it isolated me from the few friends I had at that age. At the exact time my few female friends were going on group dates and getting boyfriends, I was stuck in a remote-yet-luxurious cabin in the north woods. They kissed under the bleachers while I read Jane Eyre.

The cottage and lake were adjacent to a managed forest of white pines. The pines were planted in rows so they could be easily harvested. The rows were organized in grids separated by fire breaks. I spent a great deal of my lonesome adolescence walking those fire breaks. In the middle of the forest, behind the ring of cottages and houses around the lake, there was a patch of meadow that had been left gloriously alone for at least a hundred years. In it were the remnants of an apple orchard and a few huge maple trees, giants from an earlier era with trunks that dwarfed the largest oaks of the posh neighborhood in which I grew up. The best memories I have of the cottage involve time spent under the great maple tree. There was a huge bed of creeping periwinkle underneath it which was likely planted sometime between the World Wars. I often talked to the maple. I named it the Wishing Tree. At the time, I thought of myself as somewhat crazy for talking to the Wishing Tree, not understanding that talking trees would one day become my normal.

My teenage torment over the plight of trees was a large part of the reason I became vegetarian in my teens. Sting and Peter Gabriel did a world tour for Amnesty International, and though I neither attended the concerts nor knew of the tour while it happened, I became obsessed with a documentary made about the concert series and the liberal causes it championed. One of these was the Save the Rainforest campaign, and since the British rock stars were plonking themselves down in South America to sing and strum, I became upset that the Amazon rainforest was being devastated for cattle farming. My bleeding teenage heart broke for the trees of the Amazon being mowed down for McDonalds hamburgers. I stopped eating meat despite neither Sting nor anyone else on the Amnesty tour being vegetarian (nowadays Sting eats meat and Peter Gabriel eats fish, back then I have no idea what they ate) I took up vegetarianism and tepidly convinced myself I was doing my part for the trees.

College arrived and I had no more time to go to the cottage or to hang out with trees. I spent the majority of the time either commuting on the bus and train or indoors. Predictably, college was a miserable time in my life, marred by insomnia and various forms of blind groping. I would mostly forget about trees until my forties, when I took up the practices of revival Druidry around the year 2015.

Must love trees

Druids come in all sizes and shapes. There are Christian Druids, atheist Druids, and Hawaiian Druids. There are the original Druids whom we know very little about because they refused to write anything down. Perhaps the only thing all Druids have in common is we all must love trees.

My college experience was crap because I did not spend enough time wandering outside looking for trees to hug. I was too preoccupied with the busywork of life, not realizing most of my sorrows could be ameliorated by touching a tree. The three daily practices of Revival Druidry, discursive meditation, the Sphere of Protection banishing ritual, and divination had the weird effect of drawing me back into the forest preserve. As a post-college atheist, the few walks I took in the forest preserve felt odd and a little bit frightening, like a botched attempt to recapture the enchantment of the Wishing Tree in Michigan. I felt good after I walked in the forest preserve, but it took me a great deal of planning and motivation to get there. It felt like exercise — an activity that I knew I should do because it was “good for you” yet I did not feel I truly needed. It was easy enough to put it off or not do it at all. When I walked in a forest preserve, I was encapsulated in my own bubble world of self-concern, worry, petty irritation, and anxiety. In short, I was more like the majority of humans who sped on bikes or jogged by me as fast as they could go with helmets, ear buds, and expensive arrays of specialty gear. An alien who landed in any of the preserves would have thought the forest preserve district instituted a yuppie dress code.

(Though a stained T shirt and jeans would be more than adequate on the forest preserve path, the affluent and wannabe affluent wish to be both protected and seen. For them, nature is an outdoor gym where the goal is to take selfies to prove they got their steps in. This is how they attempt to win the perceived game of life, by being well-equipped, driven, determined, and fabulous. They exert Herculean, grueling effort in order to stay fit, never slowing down or turning off the techno beats long enough to hear the sound of sandhill cranes or to see the rare hummingbird moth land on an open mallow bloom. They might as well ride a stationary bike in an air conditioned basement somewhere, with a virtual reality headset providing an AI simulation of the world outside. This would certainly be safer than spinning down actual Meatworld paths where trees fall and create surprise death traps for speeding bikes, but I digress…)

Discursive meditation led to deeper thoughts about my own experiences with trees and helped me to rediscover my childhood memories of the great oaks around my parents’ house. The deciduous oak groves of the upper Midwest are the providers of the web of life in any lands where prairie does not rule. They are what mangroves are to swamps and what grasses are to grassland. Though imported white oaks came to supplant the native red oaks, the relative newcomers absorbed the spirit of the land just as the Wishing Tree embodied the Michigan lakeland.

I was the luckiest girl on earth when I was adopted at a week old to live among the trees in the white oak grove. Instead of being marooned with my mother by birth who hated me from the moment I was conceived, I was spirited away to a paradise of generosity where I could walk among pussy willows in Spring and fly in my nightly dreams through the canopy of sheltering oak giants.

For even as an atheist, the trees reached out to me. In the deepest cloak of godlessless, I had recurring dreams where my feet lifted off the ground and I flew up to the branches of the huge oak trees of my hometown. Between each gap of oak branches yawned a dimension door to a new dream world. This was not unlike Dr. Strange comics and movies where Dr. Strange and his mystical brethren conjure escape portals to other worlds. The main difference was that I did not conjure the dimension doors — the oaks did. I had the dreams for long enough that when I was truly suicidal, the oaks intervened, asking “If you go, who will talk to us from your plane? Who will see us?”

I am a slow learner and an even slower worker. It took me over ten years to write and (badly) produce an album of songs called the Dream of Flight, which centers around a leitmotif I had during one of my tree portal flying dreams. Nevertheless, the oaks got their album. I hope to rework and re-produce all the songs again someday.

Druidry reoriented my focus from trees as dream portals to the trees themselves as personalities and collectives. Trees are individuals as distinct as you and me. They have preferences, love, hatred, and intention. Most are friendly towards us humans and most of them want to talk. Some do not.

As you can probably guess, I found this out by spending plenty of time with trees. Like a former recluse who decides to start introducing himself at gatherings with low expectations, I found myself outside a great deal more after picking up Druidry. I went on walks, often forcing myself despite feeling rather stupid. If I found a tree of interest, I stopped at it and stared at it for a moment, opening myself to any impressions that came up. I went home and studied my observations. I meditated on various trees, often meditating on the same species of tree over and over again for its features, its history, it uses by mankind, and its lore. I wondered what the tree would say if it spoke human language. I began doing Druid tree rituals, which sound fancy but are nothing more than sitting with one’s back to a tree for a few minutes.

Cedric, the tree who changed my life

I was fewer than five years into my daily Druid practices when I met Cedric the Eastern cedar. At the time, I was still teaching music out of a rented commercial space in a small storefront in Naperville, a busy suburb of Chicago. I often hung out on the rickety back porch of my bit of commercial rental. The porch, which was little more than a catwalk, faced a scraggly out lot and the backs and dumpster areas of other nearby buildings. Near my building, there was an Eastern cedar that was growing so close to the building that a large chunk had been shaved off. I began talking to this tree when I went out there. I called her Mama. One cold and slightly rainy day in late winter/early spring, I spied a tiny green growth sticking out of the base of the building near a power box and a mess of incoming tubes with cables in them. As I drew closer, I could nearly hear Mama shouting at me, “SAVE MY BABY!” Against my own better judgement, I went inside where I just so happened to have a small, orange plastic garden shovel. I spent the better part of twenty minutes slowly digging around the Eastern cedar seedling, knowing that one false move could get me electrocuted. As I dug, I could see the visions of horror Mama was trying to put in my head of the seedling being uprooted and thrown in the dumpster, poisoned, or chopped. He was destined for death and the bigger he got, the worse his fate.

I mentally yelled in my head “I GOT HIM!” once I had extracted the seedling, scooping him into a cracked plastic bowl because I did not have a plant pot. I took him home that day and planted him in front of my little house in the light rain. I named him Cedric because he is an Eastern cedar. Get it? Ced-ar. Ced-ric.

After Cedric was safe in my yard, I asked Mama if she missed her baby and I assured her he was doing well. She said she knew he was doing fine because the network of trees would always connect her to him even beyond their deaths. Years later, Cedric is a big boy. He is thriving. He still converses with his mother and other trees in the tree network, which works better than any human communication system in existence.

Going native

Talking to trees and Cedric especially broadened my perspective. If I could receive primary, specific directives from individual trees, perhaps I could do the same with other objects, including objects that most people do not consider to be alive. Perhaps I could do the same thing with spaces. Cedric and his mother showed me that it wasn’t the world that had always been dull, it was me who had been dull all along. The trees, places, and even my toaster were sentient this whole time. All of the things and beings are infused with what Native Americans called the manitou or Great Spirit. When I opened my eyes to the concept of non-human beings having intention and will just as I have them, I became part of the great whole instead of a squeaky cog presuming it was the entire universe. A productive member of an ecosystem is one who does not try to dominate that ecosystem, but instead assumes her tiny part in making that ecosystem a better place.




Cedric in 2020



Cedric in 2025