Endings, Villages, and Choosing What to Fight

Endings have been on my mind lately. Maybe it’s because I’m watching one play out on a national stage — our own Tower (Country) collapsing in real time. Maybe it’s because I’m also aware that I’m in my own final life chapters, whether that ending is ten years away, twenty, or five. Either way, the horizon looks different now.

The first time Trump was elected (2016), after the shock and nausea wore off, I realized — as many of us did — that what we were seeing wasn’t an anomaly. It was a mirror held up to America, showing us how many of our neighbors believed cruelty was strength, authoritarianism was leadership, and grievance was something to scream rather than find ways to heal. The rot isn’t new. The second time around……It is just suddenly undeniable.

And that begs the deeper questions: how many human beings can truly live together in a system that believes in care for one another before it collapses under its own weight? What’s the tipping point between shared responsibility and every-person-for-themselves? At what scale does “we the people” collapse into “me and mine” — or worse, the few lording over the many?

Because the truth is — even microcosms are mirrors.

Take my time here in this park. What’s happening in this little patch of earth reflects what’s happening in the nation. There’s a core group of not-very-nice people who act from entitlement, as though the rest of the world is here to serve their whims. Fuck the rest. If you were to use the current political script, you could say this: the entitled crew here would be the MAGA right — loud, obstinate, self-satisfied, allergic to the concept of shared responsibility. The others, the few who quietly do their own thing, are the left. They may not be staging revolutions, but they’re also not making a scene. They’ll compost their leaves, mind their gardens, extend kindness in small ways. But they don’t set the rules. The ones who scream loudest do. The ones who insist the park belongs to them — even when it doesn’t — are the ones who dictate how broken it all feels. And so the park stays broken, stupidly and needlessly, because entitlement corrodes everything it touches.

Sound familiar?

Some days, I find myself asking: maybe the only solution is a split. Let the red states go and build their own country — for those who thrive on grievance, let them stew in it like soup left too long on the stove. The blue states join together — for those of us who believe in compassion, who welcome immigrants, who understand that societies thrive when everyone contributes and belongs. Two countries, side by side, like neighbors with a very tall fence between them. Because honestly at this point, I’m not sure the MAGA right even knows what it believes in anymore — other than blaming and terrorizing the rest of us.

But history has a way of humbling us. We read in textbooks: The Roman Empire fell. The Greek Empire collapsed. The Ottoman Empire dissolved. Full stop. But those neat little phrases erase what actually happened to the people living through it. They didn’t vanish in a puff of smoke. They didn’t fall off the edge of the earth. They stayed.

When Rome “fell” in 476, the marble crumbled, the aqueducts cracked, the Senate stopped convening — but everyday Romans kept farming, building, raising children. Some cities shrank to a fraction of their size, but they didn’t disappear. Monasteries preserved texts, roads still carried feet and carts, even if weeds pushed up through the cracks. The so-called “barbarians” didn’t erase Roman life; many adopted it, reshaped it. Civilization shifted, but it didn’t vanish.

When the Ottoman Empire dissolved after World War I, the sultans lost their power, borders were redrawn, flags replaced — but the bakers kept baking, the mothers kept tending children, the muezzins still called the faithful to prayer. Cultures hybridized, adapted, survived. Collapse always has a quieter twin — continuity.

And maybe that’s what really happens. The compassionate ones, the artisans, the writers, the creatives, the people who understand what a village is … they don’t rush to save the empire. They let it fall. And then, in the rubble, they plant.

Like flowers and trees pushing through sidewalk cracks, life insists on returning. The wild reclaiming of stone is both literal and metaphorical, empires may crumble, but roots find their way in. And so do we.

When I zoom back in from the grand chessboard of politics to my own small life, I see another path emerging. A waking group has realized that in order to survive this tower falling, we’ll have to build micro-communities. Villages. Whether it’s immediate families, groups of friends, co-housing, or buying land together.

It’s already happening. The internet is full of stories: one woman buys five acres and starts a women-only tiny home community. Four friends establish a co-housing unit. These aren’t just lifestyle choices, they’re survival plans. If you ask me, they — we — are going to be the real stories that endure.

And here’s the thing: it’s not just about survival in the bleak, bunker sense. It’s about something gentler, something tender. It’s about creating spaces where belonging still matters. Where people share food, chores, joys, and grief. Where you can still trust your neighbor to watch your dog, water your plants, or show up when you’re sick. That’s the village my soul is hungry for.

Affordability is part of the puzzle, of course. Land prices, zoning laws, and predatory housing markets all conspire to make intentional living feel like a luxury. But it doesn’t have to be. If anything, we should be bending our creativity and will toward making this possible — that groups of people can pool resources and build it together. Because the truth is: we may not survive without it.

Which brings me back to now. Because as much as I want to shake my fist at the entitled and demand they stop breaking what they touch, I also know I can’t win every battle. And this is where the question comes in: do you want to win the battle, or do you want to win the war?

In the case of the park, I chose the war. I turned in my resignation. I decided I’d rather walk away than keep bleeding energy into a battle not worth winning.

You let the petty nonsense go. You stop trying to win arguments with people who never cared about the truth in the first place. You conserve your energy. You keep your eyes on what matters: winning the war. And maybe that’s the best argument yet for matriarchy over patriarchy.

Because maybe this final chapter isn’t about desperately trying to fix what’s already broken beyond repair. Maybe it’s about the deliberate choice to plant what can still grow. To gather the people who are willing and let go of those who aren’t. To trade the fantasy of fixing “everyone” for the reality of nurturing the few who are aligned, awake and ready.

This is really what endings demand. They strip things down to the studs. They force you to ask: what still matters? What’s worth carrying into the beginning that follows?

Here’s where I land: at an ending, yes, but also at a beginning. Watching the tower fall. Watching the rot reveal itself. Watching a nation spin in circles of entitlement and cruelty. And I’m becoming pretty convinced we can’t patch it all back together… and maybe we shouldn’t.

So my resistance is now becoming this as well as writing and creativity (art)… I’m walking away from the war and choosing the village. And if enough of us do that, if enough of us gather our micro-villages, tend our circles, defend what is worth defending then the war collapses on itself. Bullies eventually run out of victims and turn on each other.

And maybe that’s how matriarchal living begins: not with a grand revolution, but with a quiet refusal. By walking away from the collapse of patriarchy, watching its last, loud burst before extinction.

Not a perfect ending. But a beginning worth living.

Miriam

Shameless Plug — Every paid subscriber makes the newsletter a little more sustainable…but I’ve just released a book — On Becoming: Essays on Embracing Life’s Later Chapters — available as both an e-book on Google Play and in print

AI Image of a Tree growing in a Book in the Forest