There is always a glimmer of hope on the horizon
Wormwood Saga Aiōn III Chapters 19 & 20
When I’m trying to fall back to sleep at night my brain is overrun with thoughts that would be perfect for my substack… Then inevitably in the morning I awake and those thoughts have vacated my brain with seemingly no way for me to resurrect them. So, I sit here at the world’s best coffee shop (I’m not telling you where it is because it’s small and I don’t want it becoming popular - you know from all my substack followers 😏😭) staring at a blank screen and I look out the coffee shop’s windows and gaze at the Salish Sea (okay fine that’s the only hint you’re going to get). The bay is always dotted with sailboats.
One of my earliest memories was sailing with my grandparents on their boat in Chesapeake Bay. My grandpa is dead now. He died of brain cancer twelve years ago. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery - Colonel Winarski. He was a great man. A force of nature. Oftentimes I wonder what he would think about the shit show that is gripping our country these days. I hope that he would be appalled and disgusted by the religious right and what our Cheeto-In-Chief has done to our country. He was Episcopalian (something that I was told nearly guaranteed him a spot in hell) so I am pretty sure he would be pissed. I can’t know for sure though - so much of my family has surprised me with their abject devotion to the cult of Pumpkin Spice Palpatine.
In my thirties my family (and by default me) began to pedal this idea of the righteous mission of the Tea Party, the NRA will save our country, vaccines are bad, feminism is to blame for the rise of the immorality of LGBTQ+ ideology, blah blah blah 🤮. Then COVID happened and I began to wake up and realize that the notion that God only loves christian nationalist white evangelicals was a crock of shit. Sadly not many in my family followed suit.
As my deconstruction became de-conversion I came to realize that I didn’t believe in the xtain god anymore, at least not the version of a supreme deity that I had always thought existed. I tried on atheism for a few months but I felt that saying there was no god was just as arrogant as saying there was. So I took the middle ground and became agnostic. According to my old belief system if being Episcopalian all but guaranteed one a spot in hell then being who I was meant I was definitely was too. It took months to become okay with the possibility that if my calvinist friends and family were right then god did hate me and had created me solely for the purpose of casting into eternal conscious torment. IF that is the case though then at least now I’m not relegated to a lifetime (however much time I have left) worshiping something that hates me enough to torture me forever while being tormented endlessly on this earth by feelings of shame, guilt, self-loathing, and anxiety.
Meditation and exploring Buddhism has given me a joy, peace, and satisfaction with life though that cannot be a conjurers trick (I’ll unpack Buddhism and what it means to me in future posts…). There is always a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
So, what does this have to do with my novel? Well I published chapters nineteen and twenty and we are getting into the thick of the adventure as Lilli and Andor are beginning to come to terms with the gravity of the situation facing them as they seek to survive. Simultaneously they are beginning to explore spirituality and are coming to grips with the possibility that something dark and terrible is looming just over the horizon. As this saga unfolds I hope its overarching theme of compassion, self-sacrifice, and love on a cosmic scale will begin to inspire and sow the seeds of hope in its readers.