For the Ones Who Feel Everything

There was a giant in Libya, on the old road west, and no one could throw him.

His name was Antaeus, son of the sea and the Earth, and he met every traveler who crossed his country and made them wrestle, and he won every time, always, and he roofed his father’s temple with the skulls of the ones who lost. Not because he was the strongest. He was strong, sure. But that was not the secret.

The secret was underneath him. Every time a stronger man knocked him down, the moment his back hit the dirt, his Mother, the Earth Herself, poured him full again. Fresh. Unspent. Wear him out and he would touch the ground and come back new. Break him and he would kneel and stand up whole. Unbeatable, as long as one part of him was still touching Her.

Then Heracles came through, on his way to steal the golden apples at the far edge of the world, and Heracles was wise enough to notice something. Every time he slammed the giant into the dirt, the giant got up stronger. So he stopped. He stood there, breathing. And Athena, or the old cunning part of his own mind, whichever you like, whispered the only thing that could ever win this fight.

Lift him up.

Get his feet off the ground.

So Heracles caught the giant in both arms and hauled him into the air and held him there, kicking, reaching down with his toes for soil that was no longer under them, and the invincible son of the Earth became, in about a minute, a very heavy man dying in a stranger’s arms a few feet above the only thing that had ever loved him.

(Hold onto those golden apples he was marching off to steal. I will come back to them. The old stories leave things lying around like that, and we find out later they were never a detail. Especially if there are apples lying around…)

I keep coming back to this story of Antaeus and Heracles, and I am not sure I have the whole of it yet. Sit with it a while.

That is the only move the Empire has ever needed. It does not have to defeat us. It has never once had to defeat us. It only has to lift us, just a little, just enough that our feet lose the soil and the borrowed strength starts leaking out into the air and we cannot feel why we are suddenly so tired all the time.

And it is so good at this now. The scroll lifts us. The feed lifts us. The online shopping lift us. The travel to exotic countries that run on semi-slave labor lift us. The permanent low-grade emergency lifts us. The whole collapse arrives as our feed/news content, forty tragedies before breakfast, each one real, each one deserving of our grief, and not one of them anywhere our two hands can reach, so we hang there in the air, full of feeling, with nothing to touch, and we call it being informed, and Empire calls it another Tuesday.

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And I want to name something, because I know a lot of us reading this are not okay. We are good people. We are the ones who actually feel it, who cannot scroll past the drowned town or the burning hillside or the child in the rubble and just go make lunch like nothing happened, and that tenderness, that refusal to go numb, is the most precious thing about us.

It is also quietly wrecking us, because we are carrying the weight of a whole unraveling world in a body built for one valley and one village.

I wrote a while back that the polycrisis is testing our hearts, and it is, it presses on the soul until whatever we are made of shows. And under that pressure I watch good people, myself some weeks included, reach for the only thing that seems to help. We lift off. We go numb, or abstract, or we float up into love and light, or down into the scroll until we are just a pair of tired eyes hanging a few feet above our own life. Feet off the ground. Every time.

And here is the part almost none of us can say out loud. Maybe the reason we let ourselves be lifted is that we are afraid. But a very specific kind of afraid. Afraid that if we put our feet all the way down into this, if we let ourselves feel the true size of what is happening, it will crush us. That we will not survive the weight of staying. So we hover. We manage. We keep a little air between us and the real.

I understand it in my bones, I have done it, some weeks I still do and sometimes it can be life saving. But maybe it runs backwards. The ground was never what crushed anyone. It is the air that does that. Antaeus does not die when he touches the Earth. He dies the moment he cannot. The weight only turns unbearable when we try to hold it alone and up off the ground. Put our feet down and She takes most of it. This is almost mechanical. It might be the oldest physics there is.

We are, most of us, most days, wrestling well and slowly dying a few feet off the ground.

And here is where I have to catch myself, because I can feel the easy version of this coming, the one where I tell us the question is how to reconnect to the Earth. For most of us reading this, that is not the question at all. We are already connected. We already love Her, already feel Her, feel everything, and that feeling is half of what is drowning us. Being connected was never the missing piece.

Antaeus was not admiring the Earth from the air. He was standing on Her, being poured full by Her, and that is a different thing entirely. Feeling Her grief is not the same as being fed by Her strength. We can be as awake and tender and in love with the world as anyone alive, and still be dangling in Empire’s air, overwhelmed, frozen, with no idea what to do next.

So the real question, the quiet and more desperate one under present and resourced and grounded and joyful, is not how to touch Her again. It is this. What do we do now? How do we carry all of it without going under? How do we keep standing and moving when we cannot see the next step, and how do we know what is even ours to carry, when we are this awake and the world is this much?

I do not have a clean answer, as you know I never have. I am not sure there is one. Empire and new-cage Spirituality would love to sell us one, a five-step plan, a cause to pour the whole flood into. But the old ones left something stranger in the stories, in more than one place, buried on opposite sides of the world, and it is not the answer the hero would give. Heracles solves everything by lifting. Force is his whole vocabulary. And force, in these old tales, is always the villain’s move. So watch what actually brings the life back, when it comes back at all. It comes low, every time. It comes close. Down, and near.

Let me try to show you what I mean. I keep circling it and I am not sure the words go all the way around.

If you are one of the ones who feels everything, who cannot take in the news without it landing in your body, who loves this world so much that lately it is breaking you a little, then the rest of this was written for you. It is the medicine I would put in your hands if we were sitting at the same fire, close enough that I could see your face.

Below the line, we go down into it together. Here is what waits:

• A God who hears the grass grow and the end of the world in the same breath, and what he knows about staying awake to all of it without being torn in half.

• Why the mightiest gods in the cosmos withered to almost nothing in a matter of days, the stolen orchard hidden inside every burnout, and the almost embarrassingly simple thing that feeds good people back to life.

• Two women, oceans and centuries apart, who ended a frozen, dying world with the very same outrageous gesture, and what they knew about where the light actually comes from when it finally comes back.

• A small, slightly ridiculous practice for your kitchen tonight, older and more radical than it looks, and a PDF companion field guide with all four practices, one drawn from each myth, yours to keep and to carry to your own people.

This is the deep part. This is where the magic lives, and where we stop naming the ache and start learning how to carry it. Come sit closer to the fire.