Moon & The Mole

And A Doomer Survival Kit

Mar 10, 2025

Dear Wonder-full ones,

If like me you endlessly ride up and down Doom Scroll Highway, I have a brand new feature for ME & YOU.

At the very-very-VERY bottom (accurate lead up amiright?), you will find a magical, exploratory, reverential, evolution-supporting, intentionally real-world-titering, and on really good days, mythical adventure called…

Wonder Scroll

I am absolutely NOT overplaying the potential of this feature. Full disclosure, yes, maybe I am, and also, who tf knows? It might blow up every dead thought on the planet and turn them into new universes of possibility. Energy transforms, which means doom scroll energy could become something else. Maybe a field of sunflowers in Ukraine. A field that has been restored with the healing power that exists on a timeline we have yet to achieve.

Wonder Scrolling is meant to offer—evolutionary possibility.

Go ahead Wonder-fulls, click your heels together and repeat… there’s no place like ending a doom scroll. Follow the wonder brick road through this week’s story about torching dead dreams to create something that never existed before.

Clearly Wicked has swallowed my metaphor channel.

At eighteen, I had my life planned out.

I knew exactly what it would look like.

After college, I would be a theater teacher in a class devoted to children with challenges. I’d marry my high school boyfriend and he’d be an actor. We would live in San Francisco and grow old and weird together. A series of setbacks including the boyfriend dumping me for my best friend, moving to the Midwest with a dangling carrot attached— a promise of paid tuition— and a year-long illness, left me alone and in the restaurant business and about as far from my dreams as I could be. What I learned was this:

Never trust the untrustworthy to drop dangling carrots in your hands.
Eighteen-year-old me whispers…that ought to be etched into voting booths all over the world.

As my life aged smaller, smaller, and ever smaller, dying dreams screeched and pushed against a life container built by my mind, culture, and circumstances. I was frenetic, irritable, irrational, and disappointed in my ability to make teenage yearnings morph into real.

Decades later, a therapist told me an easy death is rare and that most every life or dream screeches to hang on—even when the entirety of it is broken and irreparable.

Several years ago, my daughter and I had a discussion about generational dreams. In the meat of it, I’d have labeled it as a brawl about avoiding jagged rocks at the bottom of what I perceived as an upcoming cliff.

Daughter: Why are you so stuck on how it’s always been?
Me: What are you talking about? Democracy?
Daughter: Is that what you call what we have? A capitalistic, patriarchal, war mongering, rich white guy world? If that’s the case, then I don’t see why you’d want to keep it alive.
Me: There is no better alternative. History is littered with other approaches that led to mayhem.
Daughter: There’s no better alternative because you and people like you won’t let there be one.

“If we no longer like playing Monopoly, we can’t keep playing the same game and expect it to be different. We have to create a whole new game. We need to imagine new pieces and a new board. We have to let go of what was and create something entirely different. Otherwise, nothing changes. It will always be Monopoly.”
Thomas Hübl

The stench of long dead dreams is familiar to me. Through early adulthood and into my middle ages, I carefully curated a museum of dead dreams. Like a taxidermist for what can’t breathe again, I reverentially placed each dream on a shelf. I rarely visited my dead dream museum. It was too painful and some part of me must have known that if I visited too often, I wouldn’t be able to avoid the truth—those dreams were decayed relics that would never be realized.

Dead Dream Museums are built to avoid the truth and an impossible to know future.

It’s terrifying imagining the unknown. “What comes next” imaginings are what came to my mind and exited my mouth as my new-world believing daughter stood in front of my cranky and decayed thinking.

A 248-year-old dream’s death and whatever comes after is as unpredictable as geriatric life is to an eighteen-year-old.

Dear younger me…it’ll be better and worse than you can imagine.

We don’t know until we know.

I would have loved teaching theater. It likely wouldn’t have lessened the earlier devastation to have been foretold I’d feel fulfilled as a manual therapist and grow to respect the land I unwillingly had been brought to. At eighteen, I couldn’t possibly have foreseen that even with a series of setbacks, in an older universe, I’d work with people of all ages, including children with challenges.

On a snowy walk, my youngest dog Moon came upon a mole. It lay in the center of a path as though it had dropped mid-stride. Moon approached it carefully from the side, slowly perusing the length of the small body before allowing his nose to come close. He inspected every millimeter, ending nostrils to nostrils with the mole. It took longer than one might expect to assess the ending of the mole’s story. Moon looked up at me with eyes holding the most mysterious aspect of our short, and for the mole, extremely short lives.

I wonder if change—even dramatic endings to long coveted concepts—could come to be noted as cautiously, somberly, and dramatically as Moon acknowledging the end of a mole?

You Are Now Entering The Wonder Scroll Portal…

While it may seem our neanderthal period has as many sequels as the Godzilla series (30), that crude and cruel era is on life support. Someone put a stake through its heart and set the body on fire, already! The human brain evolves even when entrenched culture shrieks that it must regress.

Sorry “the Middle Ages were great” folks, that ain’t possible.

Which means what exactly? For me, it means conserving energy and adding to my reserves by spending less time lookie-lou scrolling the sinking of the Titanic. Instead, I’ll focus on helping those I can help and picturing a world that avoids war and harm, and grows sunflowers and people who care.

It’s easier to picture that kind of world after wonder scrolling. Here are a few wonders I found this week:

Big Bear Bald Eagle Live:

Keeping this on in the background through most of my day miraculously makes me feel calmer.

How Can We Stop Repeating Patterns From The Past?

When I feel hopeless, Thomas Hübl drags my brain out of Doomerville and inspires me to clean up my lane. If we want a different a different world…

And no I’m not a paid publicist…his unpaid one, maybe.

“It’s elemental, this need to ground myself in a place, to not just witness the shifts in light and form over time but to also let those changes in the land change me.”

And so begins Lyn Swett Miller’s four-part series on embodying the elements. I love the author’s photos and writing. They have beautiful concepts connecting compost to living. Consider subscribing to their work.