The Gathering Storm
The first part of Winter is the gathering storm, when it begins to become clear that an era of crisis is coming. At first, most people deny the signs of winter. It’s just a chilly day. It’s just a little bad weather. But eventually, the signs that nature gives us are unmistakable—the leaves have fallen from the trees, the nights are long and the dark gathers round, and even the days are no longer warm and pleasant. We must accept that winter is upon us and plan accordingly. Remember, the only way to spring from Samhain is through winter. The wheel does not turn backward.
As the storms gather, problems may begin to seem insurmountable. Rather than pretending that Winter isn’t really here or denying that the problems exist, people become hopeless. How can anyone get through this? How can we live in a time that is so barren, so dark?
Of course we can live through it, as generation after generation has before us. We can get through Winter the same way our ancestors did: with planning, community, and faith. The time will come when we must live day-to-day as the storm rages around us; however, before the storm breaks, we must do our best to plan for the challenges ahead. The following three chapters will help us prepare before the storm breaks.
The first calls upon Athena Strategos to help us prepare physically—on a mundane as well as a spiritual level—for what lies ahead. The second removes the barriers that discord creates in our lives that prevent us from taking constructive action. The third calls upon Hermes to help us prepare mentally by cutting out the cluttered communications in our lives and leaving clear channels open so that we are aware, informed, kind, and cautious while both receiving and giving correct information. Remember, we cannot make good decisions about the events to come if we don’t both realistically understand our own situation with its vulnerabilities and strengths and receive truthful information about events as they happen.
Now, at this point I am making assumptions about you. I am presuming that you want to preserve democratic institutions. I’m presuming that you don’t want a humanitarian crisis and floods of American refugees. I’m presuming that you want a future built on citizens who consent to fair laws rather than a dictatorship, a theocracy, or a corporate oligarchy. I’m not assuming that you don’t want systemic change, or that you don’t identify major issues in the United States today that need to be reformed, or that you necessarily want the product of the Crisis era to produce a single unified nation where the United States is today—just that you want changes, whether large or small, to take place without incredible bloodshed and destruction. I’m also assuming that you personally wish to survive the crisis, and that you want your friends and loved ones to do so as well. This is the framework for the strategic planning that follows. These rituals and meditations are intended to move toward these goals. If these are not your goals, these rituals are not for you.
Athena Strategos—Strategic Planning
Athena Strategos is the aspect of the goddess Athena who is the companion of heroes. She is the goddess who whispers in Odysseus’s ear, advising him on his battles in the Trojan War and in his long wanderings.
Athena is a warrior goddess, but she is also the goddess of wisdom. She is not the patron of the scream-and-leap type of hero. She prefers calm, sensible, wily, and clever champions, those who make a great plan and carry it through. In the Iliad, she is the patron of Odysseus, who comes up with a way to take the impenetrable city of Troy through a ruse. In the story, the Greeks have besieged the city for years without being able to capture it and things have reached a stalemate. Athena counsels Odysseus to use his head rather than his strength, and he comes up with the plan for the Trojan horse. The Greeks build a big wooden horse and then leave it before the gates of Troy as they apparently give up and sail away, while actually just going around the headland a few miles. Hidden in the horse are Odysseus and a few men. They wait. Thinking that the Greeks have given up, the Trojans celebrate and bring the horse into the city as a symbol of victory. Later, in the wee hours of the morning after everyone has gone to bed, Odysseus and his men sneak out of the horse and open the gates of the city to let in the Greek army. The city falls in flames, the Greeks finally winning. Thus, Athena is the goddess of strategy. It’s not just about fighting—it’s about fighting smarter.
In historic times, Athena was the patron of the Athenian navy, the advisor of those who protected fragile democracy. She was likewise the patron of the Delian League, a NATO-like association of city-states that joined together to fight against the Persian Empire’s expansion in the Aegean. It is completely appropriate to invoke her assistance to make good plans for the future, and to ask for her help in preserving democratic institutions.
Asking the Help of Athena Strategos
There are three main steps in this rite in making strategic plans: identifying the potential problems, identifying resources, and creating a plan to use those resources to address the problems. It is tempting to skip one or both of the first steps, but doing so will leave out important things that contribute to the last step. In the planning phase, while there is still time, it’s critical to think through all the steps. You may do all the steps at the same time, or you may split up this rite as appropriate. The first part is a journaling exercise that consists of asking Athena to help you think strategically.
You will need:
a light blue candle (it does not matter what size)
an image of an owl (This could be a small statuette, a postcard, or a picture printed off the internet. Owls are Athena’s animal; they belong to Athena, and therefore symbolize her wisdom and counsel.)
writing materials (a notebook, a journal, or a computer if you prefer to record your thoughts that way)
Optional extras:
Incense, preferably myrrh, and a burner
Assemble these items before you in a quiet place and light the candle and/or incense. Say, “Athena Strategos, companion of heroes, please help me to plan for the coming season of crisis so that I may act wisely, kindly, bravely, and in a timely fashion.”
Now comes the hard part. With clear eyes and logical thought, write down the potential problems that you can identify relating to where you live. For example, climate change is causing many different weather-related issues and can be anticipated to cause many more in the next ten years. However, which conditions are likely to affect you depends on where you live. If you live in Northern California, you are extremely unlikely to experience a hurricane, but wildfires are almost certain to be a concern. Conversely, if you live in Miami or Savannah or Houston, it is quite likely that you will experience a hurricane and much less likely a wildfire. If you live in Nebraska, neither are likely, but tornado season is growing increasingly lengthy and perilous. Identify the climate-change-related challenges that are most likely where you live.
Next, consider the political situation. While new problems seem to erupt almost daily in the news, it is possible to imagine a number of different scenarios that lead to major civil disruption. Consider the following questions.
Where do you live?
• Do you live near centers of national political importance, such as Washington DC or New York? (Control of these centers is critical, making them targets for any disruption.)
• Do you live near locations of military importance, near major bases like Norfolk or San Diego, or near nuclear missile silos or command centers? (Again, control of these centers is critical.)
• Do you live near locations of strategic importance—major oil and gas pipelines, refineries and storage facilities, major shipping ports, crossings on our northern and southern borders, major dams or nuclear power plants? Do you live near bridges or mountain passes that are choke points for transportation? (Because control of these locations is important, they are the most likely to be fought over by any actors involved.)
• How dependent is your community on climate control to preserve livable conditions? (For example, if you live in Minnesota and there is no electrical power for an extended period in the winter, people will die from the cold. If you live in Phoenix and there is no electrical power for an extended period in the summer, people will die from the heat. People cannot survive temperatures below zero or above 100°F without some means of heating and cooling.)
What do you depend on?
• How far away is your electrical power generator? How dependent is your community on power lines bringing in electricity from more than fifty miles away?
• How much of your food is grown locally as compared to shipped a long distance? (Many places have some food grown locally, but consider if that was everything that everyone in your community could access for several weeks. How soon would there be a humanitarian crisis? For example, after Superstorm Sandy, an infrastructure study by the city of New York determined that the city has a four- to five-day supply of food within the five boroughs. Any longer disruption would mean that food would become unavailable. It would functionally become unavailable to many people sooner because the food is not evenly distributed at all locations, but clustered around certain hubs.)41
• How much of your community’s infrastructure is dependent on oil and gas brought in from a long distance? How would a gasoline shortage impact your community? (If, for example, you have buses that run on natural gas that is produced reasonably locally, you will be less dependent on pipelines that run thousands of miles.)
• Do you need medications that might be in short supply in the event of a civil disruption?
• Are you responsible for vulnerable people—children, people with disabilities, elderly people—who would need help in the event of a crisis? Are you, yourself, vulnerable?
Where is your money?
• Are you financially dependent on checks that may be disrupted by governmental problems or extended shutdowns? For example, do you receive Social Security or federal retirement, or are you an active-duty military or federal employee?
• Do you have your money or retirement savings in the stock market? Are you prepared for a disruption of the stock market or a major loss in value?
These and other questions are not easy to think about, but you must think about them in a logical and clear-eyed way in order to prepare for the challenges ahead.
Once you have identified the major risk factors in your personal situation, move on to the next part. Do not leave the exercise at this point.
Consider the image of the owl and focus your thoughts. You are going to ask Athena to help you formulate answers to the problems you have identified.
Say, “Athena Strategos, help me to plan wisely and well, so that I and those I love may weather this storm as best we can. Help me to find the best-case scenarios.”
There are best-case scenarios. Even if you are an elderly person on Social Security who lives in the Washington DC metro area in a low-lying house in the flood plain near major air bases and in an area that is essentially inaccessible except by bridges and are dependent on power and food traveling hundreds of miles, there is still a best-case scenario. There are still the best possible outcomes for you.
First, if you have many risk factors that are related to where you live, consider what you can change and what you can’t. Remember, all these preparations need to be completed by late 2020 to early 2021, so ameliorations which involve changing jobs or moving may not be possible. But they may be. If you are living in a very vulnerable area and you are able to move elsewhere, it is certainly worth considering. You will not be able to change many of the risk factors if you stay. For example, a community may be accessible only by going through a choke point. In the recent California wildfires, one key vulnerability was that in some locations there was a single road leading in and out of the community. As all the residents tried to evacuate at once, that road became gridlocked and impassable. As Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said about not ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city as Hurricane Harvey approached, “You literally cannot put 6.5 million people on the road.” 42 At a certain point, the infrastructure is incapable of handling the evacuation.
On a smaller scale, it may be possible to improve things by relocation within the same community. For example, if you live in a community prone to wildfires or vulnerable to hurricanes, there are safer and less safe parts of the area. You are more likely to flood if you are on low ground near water than if you are on high ground. Even if you remain in the same community, you may be able to move to a different dwelling in a safer location. Likewise, some of the strategic targets in an armed conflict are specific places like airports, power plants, and oil and gas storage facilities. If you live next to the airport, you are more likely to be involved than if you live across town.
If you are able to change your dwelling even within the same general area in order to minimize these risks, you should consider it. However, moving may not be an option, or you may already be in a fairly low-risk location. In that case, your preparation may revolve around more typical disaster planning—having adequate supplies of medication, water, nonperishable food, emergency radios, and so on. There are many fine lists of disaster supplies maintained by the Red Cross, emergency management agencies, and various nonprofits, so it’s not necessary to go into all of that here.
For example, the Red Cross website offers disaster planning guidelines beginning with identifying the most likely natural disasters where you live and working through to the recommended supplies to put in your emergency kit. Ready.gov, a website maintained by FEMA, also has excellent examples of building emergency supplies as well as evacuation instructions. The National Hurricane Center has a great compilation of links for everything hurricane-related, though many also pertain to other disasters. In terms of emergency supplies, many retailers offer preprepared kits as well as solar-powered chargers for electronic devices, dehydrated foods that require little preparation, crank-powered radios, and other supplies. Many of these things are useful to have under normal circumstances to deal with severe weather, whether winter or tropical storms, and can be kept for an extended period of time if they are not needed right away.
Let’s simply add a few things that point to a broader crisis than a weather event that affects only a part of the country:
• Paper road maps: If the Global Positioning System satellites were damaged or inaccessible, it would be months if not years before they were replaced. If you had no GPS for months, you would need paper maps.
• Alternate means of communicating with friends and family members if you could not use major social networks or the internet in general: From physical destruction of servers to seizure of these assets, control of communications is a strategic imperative in war. You need a way to reach people that doesn’t depend on these assets.
• Access to funds that are kept locally: In this age of national banking, many people have their money or their mortgages or their retirement funds in institutions that are thousands of miles away from where they live. If your money were suddenly in a different country or on the other side of a war zone, what would happen? Would you be able to get to your money, use your accounts, and bank normally? If possible, consider moving your money into a local credit union that is managed within the same state where you live.
Check in with yourself. At this point in your strategic planning session, you may be feeling overwhelmed, frightened, or that this is too much. “This is crazy prepper stuff! Nothing is going to happen! Everything is going to be okay. There can’t be a war here. There can’t be some big disaster. This is nutty.”
As nutty as things that have already happened in the last few years?
Not all of these things will happen. But some will. We cannot know which ones—war, civil unrest, natural disaster—but we know that in the season of Winter, there will be storms. Last Winter we had World War II. The Winter before that we had the Civil War. The Winter before that we had the American Revolution. In each of those times, people hoped and prayed and believed that nothing would happen right up until the moment it did.
But some got ahead of the curve. Some protected their own treasures, the people they loved, their life’s work, so that they and the things they cared about survived. Some took the steps beforehand so that they were ready to participate in the crisis to the best of their ability, to bring these crises to the best resolution they could. That’s you. That’s your job right now. If you prepare for a hurricane and you’re lucky—it hits another city instead of yours—you were fortunate this time, but it’s certainly not nutty to prepare. It’s wise.
We are now ready for the end of the rite, this journaling exercise in which you have asked the goddess to help you plan. When you have reached a point in your planning where you feel comfortable and in control, thank Athena Strategos. Say, “Lady of Owls, Preserver of Democracy, Companion of Heroes, thank you for being my companion. Help me to be clear-eyed and worthy of Your regard.” Blow out the candle and extinguish the incense if you have used it. You may wish to light it again as you continue your preparations and call on Athena Strategos again for her assistance.
In the next chapter we will work on removing the barriers that discord creates in our lives that prevent us from taking the constructive actions we have planned.
41. “Five Borough Food Flow: 2016 New York City Food Distribution and Resiliency Study Results,” New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, 2016, https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/foodpolicy/downloads/pdf/2016_food_supply_resiliency_study_results.pdf.
42. Camila Domonoske, “Why Didn’t Officials Order the Evacuation of Houston?” NPR, August 28, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/why-didn-t-officials-order-the-evacuation-of-houston.