08/26/2026
I realized recently that I might be a collapse doula.
Which is a fu***ng weird job title, but hear me out.
A doula holds the door for people moving through a massive transition: birth, postpartum, death, divorce. They donāt cause the transition, control it, or pretend it wonāt hurt. They help people prepare. They stay when things get messy. They remind people what they already know. They hold people through the parts that feel impossible.
And I think thatās what Iām doing through collapse.
I donāt mean that I know exactly how or when everything is going to fall apart. I donāt have a bunker. Iām not stockpiling 400 cans of beans and making bullets so my family can emerge victorious from the apocalypse while everyone else fights over toilet paper.
Honestly, that sounds miserable.
What I am doing is looking around at systems that are already very obviously not working and asking: How do we help each other through this?
Because collapse isnāt necessarily one dramatic moment where the lights go out and suddenly weāre all living in Mad Max.
Sometimes collapse looks like lettuce that costs too much and somehow still sucks.It looks like people working full time and not being able to afford housing. It looks like parents trying to do jobs that used to be spread across an entire extended family and community, then wondering why theyāre exhausted. It looks like food traveling thousands of miles while the farm down the road canāt stay afloat. It looks like people desperately needing each other while barely knowing their neighbors. It looks like being surrounded by incredible skills, materials, land, food, creativity and human beings, while somehow everyone is individually struggling to get their needs met.
And I donāt think the answer is becoming even MORE individually self-sufficient. I think thatās another version of the same trap.
I donāt want to be self-sufficient.
I want to know the person who grows the potatoes. I want someone else to know how to fix the thing I donāt know how to fix. I want kids growing up knowing that there are twenty adults they can learn something from. I want somebody to bring too many tomatoes and somebody else to know how to turn them into sauce. I want people trading skills and food and childcare and tools and rides and weird s**t they happen to be really good at. I want technology where itās useful and old skills where theyāre useful and absolutely no purity test about which one makes us sufficiently crunchy.
I want us practicing this stuff before we desperately need it.
Thatās the doula part.
A doula holds the door for people going through a transition. She helps people prepare. She teaches skills. She reminds people what they already know. She stays when things get messy. She sits with people when theyāre depressed. She does the dishes. She helps kids move through dysregulation without treating them like problems to be solved. She feeds the hordes.
She brings people together.
She helps create the conditions where people can move through something enormous without having to do it alone.
And increasingly, I think thatās a lot of what Iām doing with my life.
Learning how to grow and preserve food. Learning plants. Teaching people what I know. Learning from people who know s**t I donāt. Building community. Throwing events where we practice working together. Figuring out barter and work trade and local economies. Raising kids around people with wildly different skills. Helping build a place where people can show up imperfectly and still be useful.
Not because I think Soul Fire Forest is going to save everybody.
It wonāt.
And not because weāve figured it out.
Jesus Christ, we have not figured it out. š
Weāre practicing.
Thatās kind of the whole point.
I donāt know exactly whatās coming. Nobody does.
But I know I would rather meet whatever comes next surrounded by people who have already practiced feeding each other, building things together, disagreeing with each other, caring for kids together, sharing skills, making mistakes, solving problems and showing the f**k up.
So yeah.
Collapse doula.
Apparently thatās a thing I am now.
