I think we’ve flattened the meaning of the word gatekeeping so completely that we’ve lost the distinction between exclusion and discernment, domination and protection, elitism and stewardship.

This is the part I think we forgot. Not everything is supposed to be instantly accessible to everyone, all the time. Some things are sacred enough, powerful enough, complex enough, or consequential enough that they require preparation before being approached, taught, or transmitted.

That is not inherently impressive. Sometimes it is simply the most responsible thing to do.

I think part of the reason people are so spiritually fragile right now is because we’ve lost initiation almost completely as a culture. We’ve lost meaningful rites of passage. We’ve lost apprenticeship. We’ve lost the understanding that certain forms of knowledge require more than curiosity. They require readiness, integrity, discipline, sometimes years of study, humility, and the willingness to be irreversibly changed by what we’re approaching.

Instead, everyone is expected to have instant access to everything, all at once. Every ritual. Every tradition. Every indigenous medicine. Every esoteric teaching. Every identity. Every mystery. And the moment anyone questions whether someone is adequately prepared to hold that knowledge, or to lead with it, people call it oppression.

They call it gatekeeping, as if it’s a moral failing. But there’s a reason gates have guardians.

Ancient cultures understood this. Thresholds protect people. Initiation was never punitive, it was preparation. It made sure the person crossing had actually been affected by the process before being given access to what waited on the other side. It was never exclusion for its own sake.

I think of Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid: you wax on, wax off before you learn to fight. You apprentice before you guide. You study before you teach. You carry water before you carry wisdom. You live through a thing before you claim authority over it.

But algorithm culture has inverted the entire process. Now the language of a thing is acquired before the lived experience of it. The symbols of initiation arrive before the actual descent has done its work.

Someone can watch ten TikToks, learn the language of trauma, nervous system regulation, indigenous ceremony, somatics, archetypes, shadow work, tantra, and immediately position themselves as a guide. Often it’s sincere. But sincerity is not capacity.

This is where we need to get honest. A person can have a powerful experience with medicine and still not be prepared to serve that medicine. A person can have a breakthrough in therapy and still not be prepared to guide someone else through the underworld of their psyche. A person can give birth and still not be prepared to hold that threshold for another woman. A person can study mythology, astrology, psychology, spirituality, and still not have metabolized those teachings into something they can ethically transmit.

Proximity is not initiation. Information is not wisdom. Access does not grant enlightenment. Having an experience is not the same as being transformed by it.

This feels especially relevant right now, because astrologically, we’re living through a profound shift in power, knowledge, and authority.

Pluto in Aquarius is radically democratizing everything. Knowledge, technology, platforms, esoteric teachings, alternative education, social influence, even the structures through which people gather and organize. Aquarius decentralizes. It networks. It cracks open broken systems and says: everyone gets access. Everyone gets a voice. Everyone gets a platform. Everyone gets to participate.

There is something genuinely liberating in that. Many lineages, professions, and systems have become corrupt, more interested in preserving their power than transmitting wisdom. There’s good reason to be suspicious of authority. There’s a reason the old guard is collapsing.

But every archetype has a shadow, and one shadow of Pluto in Aquarius is disembodied intelligence. Information without embodiment. Hive mind without lived wisdom. Just because something can be accessed doesn’t mean it can be understood. Just because something can be distributed doesn’t mean it can be metabolized. Power has been decentralized. That does not mean everyone is mature enough to wield it.

This is what I mean when I say we’re mistaking decentralization for maturity. Decentralization is structural. Maturity is developmental. Information can spread instantly. Character and discernment do not. A person can go viral overnight. That doesn’t mean their nervous system, their ethics, or their lived experience can hold the weight of the influence they’ve just been handed.

There’s a real danger in a culture where the gates disappear before the inner capacities have caught up. When external authority dissolves, and it is dissolving, internal authority becomes everything. As the old structures collapse, discernment has to move inward. When everyone has access to everything, the real question becomes: Who has the maturity to understand what they’re touching?

A decentralized world without inner authority, discipline, discernment, embodiment, and lived ethics does not become liberated. It becomes chaotic. Narcissistic. Spiritually ungrounded. It looks like a thousand people proclaiming themselves leaders, while very few have actually been forged by the responsibility leadership requires.

This is why Saturn and Neptune moving through Aries matters so much right now. They’re raising the question of embodied leadership instead of self-appointed leadership. Not leadership as branding, but leadership forged by experience. They ask: Do you actually have the integrity to lead this way? Have you actually undergone the initiation?

Because we’re living in a culture that has become remarkably skilled at dressing the part, speaking the part, photographing the part, and turning it all into content. We know how to adopt the identity of a mystic, a healer, a trauma-informed leader, an entrepreneur. But the image of transformation is not transformation.

Real initiation has a real cost.

The price is your certainty. Your old identity. Your illusions. Your egoic self-image, the version of you that wanted the title without the burden, the authority without the apprenticeship.

Initiation is a crossing. After it, you are not the same. This is why the return of gatekeeping is really the return of thresholds: processes that ask something of a person before they’re handed responsibility over other people’s bodies, psyches, births, grief, sexuality, trauma, or rites of passage.

The point of a threshold is not to tell you that you’re unworthy. It’s not rigid hierarchy, arbitrary exclusion, or hoarded wisdom. It’s simply asking whether you’re ready. And if you’re not ready yet, the threshold doesn’t shame you.

It initiates you.

This is what we’re missing as a collective. Not fewer gates. Better guardians. Less authority based on status, more built on responsibility. More initiation.

Some things are powerful enough to require preparation. Some knowledge will ask something of us before it reveals itself. Some forms of power require us to become someone new before we can wield them responsibly.

That is the kind of gatekeeping we need to bring back.

If this essay landed somewhere in you, Wild Mother is the threshold itself.

This September, in San Miguel de Allende, a small group of women will gather for several days of ceremony, ritual, and embodiment work held in community.

This one is specifically for women who feel motherhood calling them in the near future, whether you’re trying to conceive, preparing your body and life for it, or just feeling the pull and want to meet it consciously before it meets you. Wild Mother is not birth prep in the clinical sense, it’s about claiming sovereign motherhood before you’re thust into it. The body, the instinct, the authority that gets handed back to you when you stop asking permission to lead your own life.

You’ll be held in circle. You’ll move through rituals designed to ask something real of you. Co-facilitated with Ash to Ashes, the container is built for women who are done circling the threshold and ready to walk through it in sisterhood.

This isn’t for the just curious. It’s for the ready.

→ Read the full details and apply here
→ Submit your application

A quick note before we begin.

I know it has been a little quiet here. I gave birth to my third daughter in April, and have been deep in the tender, liminal suspension of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum life.

I have still been thinking and writing, mostly in fragments, voice notes, and instagram posts made while holding a sleeping baby and typing one-handed.

This essay is the first piece that has asked to be gathering into something more whole, and it comes directly out of what I have been living: being held postpartum, watching women show up for one another, and thinking about what we really mean when we say we want the village back.

I am glad to be back. Let’s talk matriarchy.

Everyone says they want matriarchy.

But I’m far from convinced we understand what it would require of us?

Matriarchy is not a political framework we can vote into being. It’s not a top-down restructuring of institutions, a government policy, or even a cultural movement that gets handed down once enough women hold powerful positions. It’s not a female president or more girlboss culture in a flower crown. It’s certainly not a world where women are substituted in at the top of the hierarchy while everything below stays disconnected from life.

Real matriarchy, the kind that actually nourished life, is grassroots. It is created from the bottom up, in homes, in circles, in communities, in the way women show up for one another in the most ordinary and the most sacred of days. It is established one initiated woman at a time.

It becomes possible we stop expecting the culture to change and instead ask ourselves Am I actually living it?

I’ve been watching the astrology of this moment very closely and it is speaking with its usual precision to exactly this tension.

Pluto slowly moving through Aquarius for several years now, and its passage has been doing things in the background that we can all feel, even if we don’t have words for it yet. Trust in institutions eroded during Pluto’s passage through Capricorn. Now, in Aquarius we’ve been confronted with what happens when the authority we once placed in institutions leaves and moves into the collective, towards decentralized networks, communities, online spaces, and alternative structures.

This is so right and necessary. Pluto doesn’t take down what’s working, only what is no longer serving life, even when it once appeared to. Women are waking up and questioning birth culture, the medicial system as a whole, conventional education, the inherited model of who holds authority over female bodies. This is Pluto clearing the ground.

But Aquarius has its own shadow as decentralizing authority doesn’t automatically create wisdom, and movements can become just as dogmatic as the institutions they oppose. On social media we see how online communities can replicate coercion and mob mentalities with speed and efficiency. We can easily trade out the doctors authority for the social credibility of an influncer, inherited traditions for ideological purity, and embodied knowing for whatever the groupthink has decided is true this week.

Pluto does not allow us to stop at rebellion because he exposes where power has gone after the old authority has been rejected, and demands to know whether we are mature enough to hold that power differently. You can reject medical authority and still not know how to trust or understand your body. You can reject the patriarchal family model and still be left with no village. You can reject conventional motherhood and still feel the ache of wanting to be a mother. You can completely dismantle every inherited structure and still have no living social fabric capable of sustaining women, children, families, and communities.

The question Pluto in Aquarius is asking us is: what forms of power are we putting in place of what was? Are we becoming women who can hold power differently, who can create and sustain the human networks through which something genuinely new can thrive? Can we become matriarchs, not merely women who opposed the old world, but women capable of helping birth the new one?

And then, Jupiter has been traveling through Cancer for the past year and aside from making me terribly nostalgic for my childhood, its also amplifying everying the Cancer archetype holds: the Mother, the womb, home, the ancestral line, emotional body, the ache to belong, the need to be nourished, rather than just sufficiently fed.

Jupiter in Cancer has been asking women collectively to feel the weight of what has been lost. I am talking about the village. The intergenerational circle. Never mind the elder who sits at the family’s center and carries the memory forwared through story and song. What about the postpartum containment that existed before new moms were left alone at home with newborns to figure it out? We’ve lost the pre-modern birth culture that once treated the crossing into motherhood as one of the most sacred thresholds of human life.

Jupiter in Cancer has been making the grief of that loss hard to ignore, and as he prepares to leave the sign later this month, we are being asked to move beyond grief into sovereign reclaimation. We must stop waiting for the culture to restore what was lost, and instead become the women who restore it ourselves, within our own actual lives, with our actual choices, in our actual communities.

Which brings me to the transit I think is most dierectly confronting the gap between what we say we want and how we are actually living.

Saturn and Neptune have recently conjoined in Aries for the first time in 165 years.

Aries is the primal “I am”. It is instinct, body, will, survival, it’s the moment of emergence, and the part that takes action before asking permission. It’s where our selfhood originates. Saturn in Aries is asking us to do the hard, slow, unglamorous work of actually forging a self. Not inheriting one but genuinely building an identity through embodied action, discipline, and doing the thing rather than endlessly preparing to do it. It is the cosmic pressure to stop rehearsing sovereignty and actually live it.

Neptune in Aries is dreaming a new mythic feminine identity into the collective imagination: a woman who is older and wilder, something like the mystic warrior. The woman who acts from her vision and has dissolved enough of the false, conditioned self to access something more instinctual, primal, rooted in the body and in the earth.

Together these giants are exposing where we have substituted a facade for honest embodiment. Have we been calling something sovereignty when its just a more embellished version of survival? And in our longing for the restoration of the Feminine, are we still unconsciously perpetuating the very systems that oppressed it?

Initiation is exactly the process by whivh a mythic identity stops being a dream and becomes lived reality. Neptune reveals the vision and Saturn demands that we build a life capable of hold it, and Aries requires that it happen in the body, through our actions, and through the crossing of real thresholds.

Which is why the themes of matriarchy and initiation are so intertwined right now.

Modern culture has sold women a very distorted version of empowerment. It’s pushed us to be independant, productive, desirable, sexually liberated, financially self-sufficient, informed and in control. It’s told us to be free and not to be needy. Be embodied but not so much that your body would interrup your productivity. Be feminine but not dependent, because that would make you submissive. Be maternal but don’t let your kids inconvenience you or anyone else. Sure, be sovereign until you’re afraid, at which point you should outsource your knowing to the experts in the room or on TV.

You can’t really call that sovereignty. It looks much more like survival rebranded to sound empowering.

The deepest distortion of modern womanhood, and the one I see Saturn and Neptune in Aries as most directly confronting, is how completely we have fetishized maidenhood while rendering motherhood, elderhood, and the full arc of feminine life almost entirely invisible or undesirable.

To the point of pedophilia, this culture fetishizes youth. Glamorizes beauty. Glorifies total freedom and possibilty and the woman who is still open to every version of her life. We have built billion dollar economies around keeping women in their maidenhood as long as possible: perpetually available, desirable and unformed.

The wildness, curiosity, eroticism, vision, and unclaimedness of the maiden is sacred and we need her. However, a culture that only honors this facet of a woman while denigrating the mother, erasing the elder, and treating the children as inconveniences is not aligned with matriarchal values. It’s continuing the same severed and disfunctional society we already have.

We say we want matriarchy but we are deeply uncomfortable with actual mothers. How can we claim to want feminine wisdom while dissapearing the women who are done performing for sex appeal? We claim we want community, but children are seemingly unwelcome in many public spaces. And while few people are even talking about the place of elders, aging women are injecting their faces to seem younger or being sent to nursing homes to dissapear into obscurity.

We say we want sovereign women, but we don’t actually initiate women into sovereignty. Instead, we offer slogans, aesthetics, trauma-informed language, nervous system regulation exercises, and algorithms, and we call it empowerment.

One of the symptoms of our uninitiated culture is the growing number of women who have developed an active hostility toward children, mothers, the responsibilities of community, and any form of life that requires sustained devotion to something beyond the self. The lobbying for child-free spaces in places like Disneyland is an almost absurdly perfect example of this. Of course women should have spaces of rest and freedom, but the desire to move entirely through the world without encountering children or being inconvenienced by the needs of the next generation reveals something about where we are.

This is what an uninitiated culture produces: not only uninitiated mothers ,but disconnected women of all kinds who have been so thoroughly conditioned into perpetual maidenhood that the very presence of children, elders, or the demands of intergenerational life are seen as an imposition rather than a sacred responsibility.

This is not a judgment of women who choose not become biological mothers because that is a sovereign choice, and is really not the point. The point is that every woman, whether she births children or not, is eventually asked by life to cross from maiden into something larger. Into a symbolic mother of sorts. Into a woman who takes responsibility for the community around her and who shows up even when it's inconvenient. A woman who not only makes space for the children in her world and honors the elders, but also contributes to the living fabric of intergenerational life and the future.

Both the biological mother and the woman who mothers culture are being asked to cross the same fundamental threshold: from self-contained possibility into devoted, embodied responsibility. From maiden to matriarch. And when that initiation never happens and women are kept in perpetual maidenhood, the arc breaks and the lineage fractures.

Same problem, different angle: most people say they want the village, but they are not ready to be villagers.

Being a villager is not sexy. It doesn't trend or scale, and it means showing up even when it's inconvenient. It means being in real relationship with people who are needy or difficult and maybe not always reciprocating in the ways you would hope. It also means centering children, other mothers, and elders in your life, even when the culture tells you your time is yours. It means building trust over the years and being accountable to something beyond your own individual preferences and comfort.

Mariarchs are not made through ideology or positions of power. They are forged via relationship. Through the slow and very ordinary labor of community-building. By being the woman who shows up and crossing thresholds that cost something. Through initiation, we learn that our power is not built despite our responsibility to others, but through this very devotion.

Matriarchy requires the full arc of feminine life to be restored to itself.

The maiden has her role. She carries wildness, eroticism, curiosity, possibility, vision, and the unclaimed future. She is the part of us still close to the open field of becoming, still in conversation with every possible life. We need her deeply. But maidenhood cannot initiate itself into motherhood alone. At some point possibility must meet responsibility. Wildness must develop roots. Freedom must mature into devotion. And that crossing was never meant to happen without witnesses, without elders, without women who had already walked that path reaching back through to walk alongside her.

The mother has her role. She carries life, protection, creation, devotion, instinct, boundaries, sacrifice, and a particular kind of ferocity that only comes from having something precious worth protecting. A culture reveals its spiritual condition by how it treats its mothers. When mothers are invisible, isolated, pathologized, underpaid, and expected to disappear into private domestic struggle without support or acknowledgment, that tells us how much the culture actually values life at all. A mother cannot become a matriarch if she is abandoned inside motherhood. She cannot transmit grounded power if no one witnesses the death and rebirth she just moved through.

The elder has her role. She carries memory, story, birth wisdom, death wisdom, lineage, and the long view of what actually matters. She knows what cycles do because she has lived enough of them. She knows what it means to lose, endure, surrender, bury versions of herself, and become many women inside one lifetime. A culture obsessed with youth loses the elder. And when we lose the elder, we lose the map and the transmission.

Matriarchy requires all three of these archetypes to be in living relationship with one another. The maiden, should she choose motherhood, needs to be initiated by women who have already crossed. The mother needs to be witnessed, supported, and integrated. The elder needs to be brought back into the center of the circle. And women need real spaces, embodied, intergenerational, ceremonial spaces, where this transmission can actually happen. And where the knowledge is passed through story and presence and lived example.

I know this because I have spent years building it in my own life.

I am postpartum right now with my third homebirth baby. I am exhausted and emotional and undone in the most sacred way I know. And I am genuinely surrounded by women who know how to hold me in that. Not in a metaphorical way, but in an actual way.

The women in my local community show up at the door with food. They do not leave postpartum mothers alone. These women stay connected to the mothers in our circle who have miscarried, who are grieving, who are in the hard invisible middle of something that has no clear outcome yet. They were present at my births. Maybe they have had their own children present at theirs. Some have been sitting in ceremony since they were girls, as I have, since I was twelve years old and first learned what it felt like to be genuinely witnessed by a circle of women.

Children are woven into our communal life rather than treated as peripheral to it. Birth, loss, motherhood, and the changing phases of womanhood are not regarded as private inconveniences, but as experiences the community gathers around and helps hold.

I did not stumble into these communities. I went on a journey to find my people. That journey showed me that I had to become the kind of woman who could hold this way of life before I could find the women who were holding it too. I had to live it before I could call others toward it.

And that is exactly what I mean when I say matriarchy is grassroots.

It does not begin with a policy or an institution or enough women in positions of power. It begins with one woman deciding to actually live differently. To show up for the postpartum mom even when it is inconvenient. To center children in spaces not designed with them in mind. To sit in circle with women she did not choose. To trust her body in a culture that has spent generations teaching women not to. And to build something slowly, with her actual life, that the rest of the world doesn’t know how to validate yet.

You become one by being initiated into it. By crossing thresholds that require sacrifice. By being witnessed by women who have already walked where you are walking. By learning in your body what it actually means to carry life without abandoning yourself.

The village doesn’t rebuild itself from the top down.

It gets rebuild by women who stopped waiting and started living differently, on the ground, and in their actual communities, with real cost and real love.

That is how it begins, and how it has always begun.

If this essay found you at the right moment, Wild Mother was created for exactly this threshold from maiden to mother. Details below.

Wild Mother Initiation

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico · September 21–27, 2026

A six day rite-of-passage into sovereign motherhood for women who are consciously moving toward pregnancy, birth, and motherhood within the next one to two years, or for those who have already crossed the threshold and feel they missed the integration.

This is an embodied, ceremonial, psychological, and spiritual initiation into the full arc of becoming a mother.

Six days. Twelve women. Ancient land.

Temazcal with an Indigenous guide · Wachuma plant-medicine ceremony · The Threshold Walk, a full night initiation that mirrors the arc of labor · Sacred fire circles with a retired midwife who has been present for thousands of births · Sound healing and hypnosis work · Daily embodied movement · Sauna, steam, and mineral pools · Ritual, rest, and integration

Applications open. Early bird pricing ends June 30th.

APPLY HERE

Questions: sabrina@sabrinaourania.com

Activism, as it is commonly practiced, is built on the premise that somehow history has gone off course. That something fundamental is broken and must be urgently corrected through force of will, moral pressure, or a mass mobilization. I don’t share that premise. I don’t believe humanity is broken or that consciousness needs rescuing. I don’t believe that evolution requires my intervention or outrage at what is.

Part of why this stance provokes such a strong reaction is because activism seems to no longer be something people get to choose freely. Rather, it has become something people in our culture are expected to practice.

What we are “supposed to care about” has become so standardized. At any given moment, there is a correct set of causes, a dominant moral storyline, not to mention an implicit demand to publicly align with that narrative by changing your facebook profile pic. Not doing so is interpreted as indifference, ignorance, or moral failure.

We’ve lived through this repeatedly, watching waves of collective focus move from one crisis to the next, from one sanctioned outrage to another. Climate. George Floyd. COVID Vaccines. Ukraine. Palestine. Each one carrying an unspoken rule: you must care in this way, at this volume, right now…or something is wrong with you.

What has always unsettled me is not the existence of the causes themselves, but the loss of choice. The idea that conscience should be synchronized. That moral worth is measured by how closely we mirror the crowd.

I don’t believe care works that way. I don’t believe conscience can be mass-produced. And I certainly don’t believe we become more ethical by pressuring one another into identical concerns. It’s about as useful as forcing my daughter to say she is sorry when she most certainly isn’t.

People are allowed to care about what they care about, and not care about what they don’t.

If saving whales is your calling, go free willy.

If fighting child sex trafficking is what you care most about, do that fully.

If your life is oriented around protecting your own children, your land, your patients, your students, your local community, those forms of care are not lesser because they aren’t trending.

What breaks systems is not selective care, but coerced care; activism performed out of fear of judgment rather than genuine responsibility.

When someone steps outside a collectively enforced moral posture, it rarely registers as neutrality, but is taken more like a threat. No one is denying the harm, but even so, the shared certainty is being disrupted. If care becomes a social requirement, choosing differently destabilizes the moral order itself.

And so the response is seldom curiosity. It’s generally judgmental.

People rarely attempt to attack the alternate philosophies themselves, they straight up attack the person, when this moral conformity is challenged.

I am not an activist, unless we are recognizing that the most foundational advocacy is protecting the sovereignty of consciousness, our freedom to choose what we care about, and why.

I am also not an activist because I don’t believe anything has gone “wrong”, even here, in regards to this prescribed activism. Taking a stance does not require believing that something has ultimately gone wrong. Orientation is not the same as opposition, though in an either/or framework, most will expect it to be. I don’t see expression as an attempt to correct reality and I don’t share my perspective because I think anything is fundamentally flawed that must be fought against. Rather, I see conditions I am choosing to respond to from my own location within the system.

An intelligent, evolving reality does not require silence or neutrality; it includes differentiation, preference, and articulation as part of how it knows itself through time. This essay is not an argument against what is happening per se, but a declaration of where I stand inside it and and invitation to explore a new perspective.

Whether we find it comfortable to think about or not, we all know that civilizations rise and eventually fall. That power concentrates, fractures, and redistributes elsewhere. That forms exhaust themselves and compost into what must come next. However many times these transitions are framed as failures rather than organic processes inherent to life itself. Usually because these transitions involve suffering.

Does not being an activist and “fighting for what is right” mean we deny the suffering? No. If you know me personally you know I don’t minimize violence, injustice, destruction, grief. I’m human, in my nearly 40 years of life, I’ve experienced them all. But I also don’t interpret them as errors in existence. To understand reality as an intelligent system requires trusting that it moves through time with cyclicality, identifiable patterns, and ultimately in a self-correcting way. And sometimes that self-correcting way enlists the help of an activist, as an avatar.

In a culture where activism has become the default moral stance, non-activism is assumed to mean passivity. So the first pushback I get from others is based on the fact that I am clearly not a pacifist. You’re right, I’m not. Pacifism is itself a moral and political orientation, a form of activism, and as I prefaced, I am not an activist.

If there is imminent danger, I’m going to act. If my children are being threatened or harmed, I will kill a motherfucker. Self-preservation is not ideology and instinct does not require a belief system. There is a fundamental difference between situational action and living with an orientation of resistance to reality itself. I can engage with what happening in front of me while not simultaneously declaring war on what is.

I hold the position that what we call crisis is often a threshold, that collapse is compost, and that what we call evil is unintegrated power that is always moving towards consequence.

This is usually where the strongest objections appear…

People hear this stance and say it’s spiritual bypassing. Its detached, privileged even. That I’m ignoring the urgency of suffering, that it leads to doing nothing, sounds nihilistic or deterministic, and lets harm continue perpetuating unchecked.

I understand why these reactions arise, but all these objections share the same misunderstanding: they assume that meaning-making is the same as avoidance. It isn’t.

Bypassing avoids contact but I think we must begin with contact. To not look away from suffering but live with it, in the body, in loss, in illness, in motherhood. With fear that cannot be resolved by certainty.

I refuse to look away from suffering, but I also refuse the idea that suffering somehow proves reality has failed or that anything is “wrong” simply because pain exists.

Seeing reality as intelligent doesn’t make pain imaginary, but it does make it informative. The same way symptoms of the body are signals rather than enemies, social breakdowns are messages, information about limits, saturation, and transition. They are not proof that life has gone off the rails.

To be clear, care does not disappear when anxiety does. Love does not require catastrophic narratives to function, nor does protection require believing the world is broken. It is because of my acknowledgment of suffering that I am careful what stories I tell about it.

This perspective requires a deep trust in life, and I suspect this is where much of the resistance lives. Trusting life feels dangerous in a culture trained to believe control is the same as care. We are taught that people are suffering now, and therefore speed and intervention are the highest virtues. If we don’t act immediately, visibly, loudly, we are complicit.

This kind of of urgency isn’t neutral, and panic generally narrows our perception and reduces life’s complexity. It collapses time. Doing nothing and doing everything are not the only options.

I am orientated towards right action in right time, not perpetual reaction.

This is not philosophical abstraction for me. As a mother, I have lived it in the most intimate places. Anyone who has witnessed a physiological birth knows that interference, even when well-intentioned, can create the very emergency it seeks to prevent. Trusting a process does not mean passivity; it means learning when not to interrupt intelligence already at work. It’s a stance of humility.

I’ve learned the same lesson through illness. There is a difference between responding to symptoms and declaring war on our bodies. One creates more inflammation, more fear and fragmentation. The other is spiritual work and requires more listening, and trust in intelligence already present.

I consider myself a meaning-maker. My work happens upstream of action or protest, at the level of narrative, belief and perception. I work with how people understand what is happening, not how they “should” react to it.

Before people organize, they interpret. This part is so often inherited. Before resisting, they have decided, often unconsciously, what a moment means. Before any of us act, we have already adopted a story about who we are, what is possible, and what kind of future we’re moving towards.

Some stories will produce endless urgency and fear, while other stories can produce a more life-affirming orientation, endurance, and wiser action.

Activism cannot tell us what a moment actually means. Yes, it can mobilize people but it can’t orient them in time. It may be able to interrupt harm, but it cannot help us metabolize it. Applying more pressure doesn’t necessarily generate coherence.

Activism is reactive by design. It responds to what has already surfaced.

Meaning-making on the other hand, happens where choices are formed way before they become demonstrations. When meaning collapses, activism becomes frantic, and when our cosmologies are thin, urgency multiplies. As a culture, if we cannot locate ourselves within history, every problem feels unprecedented and every response feels insufficient.

Activism cannot teach people to live inside complexity or restore trust in time. It can’t help us grieve what is ending without any enemy to oppose.

None of this makes activism wrong, just incomplete. A system that only reacts with insistency will exhaust itself while a system that understands itself can adapt.

I repeat: This essay isn’t arguing against activism, it’s defending the sovereignty of conscience.

My calling has always been to help people locate themselves within reality, not organize against it.

This isn’t to say no one should be an activist. Every living system requires many roles. Some are here to agitate from the outside, some to interrupt directly, some are here to organize, protest, resist, and others to rebuild.

And some are here to hold long memory, to sense timing, interpret meaning, and orient others towards what is emerging. It’s not about somehow thinking one is above activism, but knowing that not everyone is assigned to that role.

Activism is but one organ in a body of collective change. And like any body, we need more than white blood cells. We also needs builders, midwives, archivists, elders.

I am not an activist because my work is in helping people understand where we are, so that action, when it does come, is sovereign and grounded in clarity rather than fear.

I will act when action is required and protect what is mine to protect but I refuse to live in a posture of permanent resistance to existence. I am not here to “fix” the world, it does not need fixing. I am here to participate consciously in its evolution. And that evolution does not need my panic. It asks only for my presence, and my willingness to stay with complexity long enough for something wiser to emerge.

That is the role I am here to play. You may play a different one. A living system needs all of them.

This way of seeing doesn’t stop with history or politics. It inevitably leads to a deeper question:

What if humanity is not acting on the Earth, but through it?

If reality is intelligent and cyclical, then our relationship to the planet itself may be misunderstood. This question, of ecology, belonging, and consciousness, is where I am going in the next essay in this series.

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