AFTER THE FIRE: A NEW YEAR’S FIELD REPORT

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I’m not enlightened. I’m just someone who’s walked through enough ruins to recognize a pattern when I see one.

And this past year felt familiar in a way that was hard to ignore. Fear rising everywhere. Belief systems cracking under their own weight. Corruption dragging itself into the light whether it wanted to or not. A collective nervous system stretched so tight you could almost hear it vibrating. This feels like a collective Shamanic Awakening.

It didn’t feel symbolic. It felt mechanical. Like we were watching the structure itself start to fail in real time.

People keep saying democracy is broken, but what I saw was something different. An old system taking hit after hit and still holding. For the first time in a long time, the corruption wasn’t hiding behind polite language or closed doors. It was out in the open, not as anything noble, but as the inverted version of the ideals this place was built on.

People forget America wasn’t just started. It was designed. Engineered. Every ancient civilization, every failed republic, every philosophical experiment folded into its bones. The founders weren’t saints, but they were pattern readers. They built something meant to survive moments like this.

What’s hard to feel through the noise is that the system is holding. The field is holding. The idea of freedom is growing.

Something old is surfacing, and it isn’t just politics. It’s the machinery underneath finally showing itself. The rot. The power games. The parts that were never meant to be visible.

The darkness isn’t new. The exposure is.

Every myth follows the same sequence. Revelation comes before renewal. The veil thins. Truth pushes through. Those who built their lives on manipulation get caught in their own traps. Shadow gets dragged into the sunlight and left there to dry.

From the inside, it feels like chaos. But that’s what it always feels like when a story is dying.

And now we’re standing inside a very old question. Do we actually believe in freedom for everyone, or only for a few. Because freedom for a few isn’t freedom at all.

A lot of what we’ve called normal is going to keep fading. Not because everything is collapsing, but because much of it was built on denial. I’ve lived through enough personal collapse to recognize the sensation. The tilt. The freefall. The grief. The confusion. The rage. The fog. The fear.

But collapse isn’t the right word. This is demolition. Demolition clears space. When the dust settles, what rises is always simpler and more human.

You can feel that shift happening now. Not just in governments, but in homes and bodies and quiet conversations people are finally willing to have.

People like to imagine awakening starts with bliss. It doesn’t. It starts with truth, the kind that strips everything, even the lies you didn’t realize you were living inside. That’s how it happened for me. No masks left. No illusions to hide behind. Just honesty.

And right now, the world is hitting that same wall.

Everywhere I go, I hear the same things. One emergency and I’m screwed. I’m always behind no matter how hard I work. It feels like the rules changed and nobody told us. I’m tired of pretending this is normal. I don’t trust what we’re being told anymore.

Those aren’t complaints. They’re signals.

Something else is happening too, and I want to say this gently. I know people are afraid. I am too, sometimes. But what’s coming online right now isn’t danger. It’s intuition.

Not the dramatic version. The simple, bodily kind. The quiet knowing that shows up as tension or relief. The sense that something doesn’t add up anymore. The inner signal that says this isn’t true, this isn’t for me, this isn’t how life is supposed to feel.

Most of us were trained to override that signal very early. We learned to trust authority over our own experience. We learned to explain away what our bodies were telling us. And now, whether we want it or not, that internal guidance system is waking back up.

That’s the fear.

It’s not that something bad is happening to you. What you are feeling is the death of the old system. It’s that something honest is stirring, and it doesn’t fit inside the old rules. Your tolerance for dishonesty is shrinking. Your nervous system is refusing to keep performing a life that doesn’t feel coherent anymore.

That can feel destabilizing if you were taught not to trust yourself.

But this isn’t a breakdown. It’s a recalibration.

You’re not being asked to believe anything new. You’re being asked to stop overriding what you already know. To notice what your body says before your mind rushes in. To trust that tightening and that softening. To let yourself pause instead of pushing through. To view events from the Between so that you can gain perspective.

This isn’t about rejecting the world. It’s about finally having an internal compass again.

And once that comes online, it doesn’t shut off.

A lot of people are scared because the things that used to motivate them don’t anymore. Work feels hollow. Achievement feels thin. Old goals don’t light anything up. Even pleasure doesn’t land the way it used to.

The story rushes in immediately with fixes. Get a new job. Go back to school. Reinvent yourself. Trust the same systems that burned you.

But I recognize this state from the inside. This isn’t depression. It’s withdrawal from a lie.

When a system is built on dishonesty about worth and purpose, the nervous system can only participate for so long. Eventually the rewards stop firing. The body quietly says it won’t pretend anymore.

That moment feels terrifying if you don’t know what it is. But it isn’t the end of meaning. It’s the end of false meaning.

It is not natural for people to struggle just to exist. It is not natural to fear illness because it might bankrupt you. It is not natural to work until your body breaks and call that virtue. It is not natural to strip humans of instinct and intuition and then ask them to trust the very structures that caused the damage.

The system has been lying to us for generations. What we’re living through now isn’t punishment. It’s rebound.

The karma of a world built on inversion doesn’t arrive as fire from the sky. It arrives as disengagement. As refusal. As a collective loss of interest in continuing a story that never told the truth in the first place.

That loss of interest isn’t emptiness. It’s an opening.

An invitation to stop outsourcing your knowing. An invitation to stop trying to fix your life inside a structure that was never designed for human coherence.

Before renewal comes revelation. The veil burns away. Truth steps forward. Shadow stands exposed.

From the inside, it feels like collapse. But it isn’t. It’s demolition, clearing the stage so something real can finally stand.

The new world isn’t arriving as fantasy or salvation. It begins quietly, the moment illusion loses its grip and people stop lying to themselves in order to survive.

That process is already underway.

Years from now, we’ll look back at this moment and say that was when the curtain dropped. That was when we finally saw the game. That was when the story stopped working.

So breathe.

I know this feels uncertain. I know it’s unsettling. But we’re not breaking. We’re remembering how to listen.

Everything is going to be okay, not because it will be painless, but because the old story cannot survive its own weight anymore.

A new world doesn’t appear fully formed. It’s built by people who walked through fire and learned how to build with ash.

I’m one of them.

And if you’re here with me, listening to this, odds are you are too.

Happy New Year.

Not the calendar one.

The real one.

The smoke is clearing.