🌑 Grieving for End Times

Reflections on lives lost, mugs broken and repaired, and an invitation to give love one more chance before we collectively break under pressure beyond repair.

This past moon, Mat had to say goodbye to Ivka, his grandmother (Baba) that lived to 90 Earthian years. Instead of taking time off to grieve, he felt pressured to continue working, to keep engaging with the various forms the Ministry of Futility takes on in our daily lives. After all, who has time to grieve in these End Times when we’re too busy staying informed, staying enraged, and just figuring out how the f*ck are we going to afford to live in this brave new world of AI-powered abundance!

Even though reading about death probably makes all of us a bit uncomfortable by reminding us of our own mortality and the losses we had already experienced and those that are yet to come, grieving and remembering is important for healing.

And so we wanted to take just a moment of your time to honour the memory and story of Ivka, a strong and loving woman and Earthian who was born in Yugoslavia – in the part of the land we now call Croatia – in 1934. A strong, wise, deeply caring woman. She migrated to Australia in 1963 with mostly nothing more than hope, grit, and a deeply Earthian intelligence and wisdom. She endured war, upheaval, and the challenges of raising a family in an unfamiliar land. She gave enormously, humbly, from the heart. And she endured. Including the slow, cruel dance with Parkinson’s, and the natural softening of body and mind that comes with age.

She finally let go on the 19th of March 2025. And while her suffering is over, she will be sorely missed. With the stories of her strength and love for life living on through her 18 great-grandchildren, large extended family and the many plants she loved and tended.

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On the other side of the world, in what was also once Yugoslavia, Alja received a gift from a friend she serendipitously made due to the US TikTok ban that didn’t yet stick. The gift was a mug, which arrived in Slovenia from Poland as a puzzle. Which is a nicer way of saying that the mug broke to pieces at some point in its thousand kilometre long journey across Europe.

Instead of throwing the broken pieces away, Alja decided to glue them together. Not quite kintsugi level of craftsmanship here – gold paint is still coming! –, but it felt darn good to see the mug stand up tall again and get a new life as a decoration with a backstory. A reminder of our collective resilience and our ability to rebuild things that are important to us.

During these End Times, many things in our lives are or will be broken by forces that feel beyond our control. When we hold the broken pieces of what we once held dear or sacred in our hands, we face a choice. What to do with the shards and fragments we are able to recover?

Some should rightly be composted, as they can never be put back together. But some – probably more than we realise – are worth mending, even though what we end up putting back together might end up serving a different purpose.

The tech oligarchs who are shaping our lives would like us to keep throwing anything and anyone that breaks apart away, to keep working through loss and grief, to keep obeying even when we know our compliance is causing harm, to keep our heads buried in the silica sand from which our electronics are made at a great cost to human and more than human life.

They don’t want us to grieve for the loss of life in our own lives, let alone the loss of life in Gaza, Congo, and many othered places they don’t want us paying attention to. They want us angry, afraid, divided, they want us indifferent to loss and suffering, including our own. They want us to keep buying poorly made stuff designed to become obsolete to ease any discomfort that might be oozing through the broken facades of the masks we feel we must present to the outer world.

🦆 all of that. You probably feel it in your heart and bones how broken things are right now. Moving fast is just going to break more things, and not necessarily move any of us in the direction we want to move towards.

So instead, we invite you to grieve. To feel the grief over the loss of things and bodies breaking apart.

But also to dance and sing with your emotions. To give love one more chance, even when you feel like you are being enveloped by darkness and despair from all sides.

Regardless of whether you took our suggestion from the previous Newmoonsletter to release some pressure by singing and dancing to David Bowie and Queen (the band, not the monarch), we invite you to feel the lyrics of their legendary song Under Pressure:

(...)
Chipping around, kick my brains 'round the floor
These are the days, it never rains, but it pours

(...)

It's the terror of knowing what this world is about
Watching some good friends screaming, "Let me out"
Pray tomorrow gets me higher, higher, high
Pressure on people, people on streets

Turned away from it all like a blind man
Sat on a fence, but it don't work
Keep coming up with love, but it's so slashed and torn
Why, why, why?
Love, love, love, love, love
Insanity laughs under pressure we're breaking

Can't we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can't we give love that one more chance?
Why can't we give love, give love, give love, give love
Give love, give love, give love, give love, give love?

'Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure
Under pressure
Pressure

Giving love a chance also means standing up for what’s good and right. Giving love a chance means practicing love by putting things that are worth preserving back together instead of breaking them and discarding them in the name of progress. Giving love a chance means grieving the loss of things, people, certainties we took for granted.

And remembering that grieving takes time and looks different for each of us and cannot be forced. We also invite you to have compassion for your grieving and the grieving of those around you, whatever stage or shape the grief might currently be in.

Whether you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, the loss of certainty, the loss of a future you thought you or your children would have, the loss of meaning, the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship, or something else entirely, know that you are not alone. Loss and death are necessary to make space for rebirth and new beginnings.

And the End Times inevitably come with more grief than we ever thought we’d have to face. The choice of what to do with all this grief, is up to you, Pathfinder. Whether you decide to honour your memories in a special way, channel your grief into action, mend what can be mended, or something else entirely.

We just hope that you remember that you don’t have to grieve on your own. Find community, take off the broken masks you’ve outgrown, and give love one final chance in these End Times before you yourself break under pressure beyond repair.

With 💜 & 🙂 from the Tethix campfire,
Alja and Mat

Additional pathfinding suggestions

This New Moon, we invite you to …

• 🚘 … reflect on how to resist those who don’t understand what glue should be used for.

• 🧱 … explore the visual story of the living and the built.

• 🐦 … learn some lessons from ostriches that aren’t about burying heads in the sand.

• 💬 … ponder about a chat platform developed by philosophers to support constructive disagreement.

• 🏛️ … be mindful of the myths and prophecies of techno-theology Mat recently wondered about.

• 🌱 … reflect on what it means to grow around grief.

• 💜 … listen to the latest episode of Pathfinders Podcast How do we compost our sh*t to create the soil for thriving? (or snack on short clips on TikTok).

• 🔥 … join us for the next Full Moon Gathering to yarn about the question: “Is it time to wean ourselves off role-playing as machines?”

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