Pulling the Moon

A short essay on existential fear

Pulling the Moon

The place I went to for an open mic last night used to be a house. Someone converted it into something harder to name; part apothecary, part community room, part sanctuary for people trying to find each other without alcohol as the excuse. There’s a small counter with a few menus and an interesting collection of bottles and concoctions, a menu of drinks designed to move the nervous system one direction or another. I ordered something with mugwort in it, something from a tree I can’t remember the name of now, it was meant to be good for the heart. It was slightly sweet. I chatted with the proprietor as his drink chilled me out.

The man behind the counter knew his herbs. We got into a conversation about religion, spirituality, different pathways of herbalism and we landed on Wicca. He had some thoughts about its limitations as a tradition, the kind of offhand but precise opinion you only get from someone who is actually familiar with a tradition. In other words, not argued out of ignorance. Then I took my drink and sat down to be with myself for a while.

I had my Thoth deck with me. Worn from use. I was planning out what I wanted to write for Gemini Season, checking the transits in my We’Moon calendar and writing them down and thinking about the shape of the transit. After that, I started thinking about what to write tomorrow for the Pisces Moon. Turning that question over in my head, I pulled one card from the deck in front of me after a quick shuffle.

The Moon.

I knew immediately what it wanted from me.

I have been avoiding politics deliberately for the last few weeks. The information field feels too polluted right now, misinformation, disinformation, narratives weaponized in every direction. It has become extremely difficult to know what you’re actually seeing versus what someone wants you to see. So I had mostly stopped looking because it wasn’t helping me stay calm and focused. It was hard to engage with because of the amount of propaganda and narrative enforcement.

But the Moon doesn’t let you stay away from what’s living in you. That’s its nature. It pulled something up that I had been keeping at a careful distance.

Fear.

Specific fear. Not the ambient dread that seemingly hums under everything right now, but a focused, physical anxiety about what might be coming. About what I think I can see taking shape, even through the noise. Ultimately about how to act on my intuition of the future instead of just reacting to it when it became the present.

The deeper anxiety I have is about systems. We have built a globalized world on just-in-time logistics. It’s a vast, intricate machine that moves food and fuel and medicine and components across oceans and through narrow passages, arriving exactly when needed, no buffer, very little slack. It is a system that requires enormous continuous energy investment just to hold its shape. It has made abundance possible for a large portion of humanity. It has also made us extraordinarily brittle.

That brittleness is being tested right now. Not in one place. In several places simultaneously. This system was not designed with the current stresses in mind.

The image that keeps coming back to me is the Strait of Hormuz.

Look at it on a map. Twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. Through that critical passage, ships move somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the world’s oil, along with a significant portion of its liquefied natural gas. Qatar, the world’s largest LNG exporter, can only reach global markets through that strait. A huge share of the fertilizer that feeds the world moves through it.

Twenty-one miles.

The entire architecture of modern food and energy security balances on a geographical needle. Unfortunately, that needle is currently sitting inside one of the most volatile regions on earth, adjacent to a conflict that our leadership seems either unable or unwilling to de-escalate.

I am not a military strategist. I have no inside information. What I have is pattern recognition and a body that tightens up when I look at this or think about it for too long.

Higher fuel prices ripple into everything, food, medicine, manufacturing, transport. Damage to production facilities and refineries doesn’t repair itself. It requires peace, capital, time. None of those are guaranteed right now. The cascading effects of even a partial closure, even a temporary disruption, would move through the just-in-time system like a shock wave.

Then there is the fear beneath the fear.

What if this is intentional?

I want to be careful here. I am not telling you what to believe. I am telling you what lives in my racing mind at three in the morning when the Moon is doing its work. The question that won’t stay buried.

What if the goal is not stability? What if the chaos is the point?

There are people, people that are organized, funded, operating across decades and institutions and these people have been explicit about wanting a different kind of world. More managed. More surveilled. Less ungoverned. The language has been polite, even aspirational.

Resilience. Safety. The Great Reset. But underneath the language is a vision of control that requires, as its precondition, a population frightened enough to accept it.

Resource scarcity does that. It concentrates power upward. It makes people desperate enough to trade freedoms they would never have surrendered in comfort. It creates the conditions where emergency measures become permanent infrastructure.

I am not saying this is what is happening. I am saying this is what I fear might be happening. There is a difference, and I want to hold that difference honestly and humbly.

The Moon does not give you certainty. It gives you what is moving beneath the surface. It gives you the shape of the thing in the dark, and asks you to sit with it without either dismissing it or fully surrendering to it.

So I am sitting with it, uncomfortably, and I want to know if you are too.

So I am bringing this to you directly.

What are you seeing? Not what the headlines are telling you to see. That’s too often lies piled on lies. What are you actually noticing? In prices, in your community, in the behavior of people around you? In your own body when you let yourself look at this without flinching?

How are you holding it together?

That is not a rhetorical question. I genuinely want to know what people are doing internally with this level of uncertainty. What practices, what frameworks, what communities, what acts of deliberate presence are keeping you functional and human in the face of something that can feel this large and this far beyond individual reach?

Are you looking away on purpose, the way I was for a short time? Is that working?

Are you watching closely, and if so, what are you doing with what you see?

Do you think this is accident or architecture?

I am not sure. I am not SURE I know. But I think it matters which one it is, and I think a lot of us are quietly asking the question and not saying it out loud.

Say it here.

The Moon pulls things up from the dark and holds them in uncertain light. That is not comfortable. But it might just be necessary. It is certainly better done together than alone.

I pulled one card with a question forming in my mind, in a room that smelled like herbs and chocolate, in a city that is trying to figure out what comes next, on a planet that is doing the same.

The Moon.

Here we are.