A quote from Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons that I cannot get out of my mind. For me, it is relevant in the context of continuing to be optimistic that we can construct a sustainable civilization, even though the current Plan of Record is clearly to burn it all:
I decided that many of Bear’s stories and comments shared a general drift. They advised against fearing all of creation. But not because it is always benign, for it is not. It will, with certainty, consume us all. We are made to be destroyed. We are kindling for the fire, and our lives will stand as naught against the onrush of time. Bear’s position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance.
Bear is a Cherokee chief that adopts Will, a bound boy working in a frontier trading post. They spend winters alone together in a kind of meditative semi-hibernation with a small crackling fire in a tiny snow-covered lodge.