What it means to be ready now

How you can prepare for collapse (without becoming a prepper)

The stories we were raised on promised endless progress. More technology, more comfort, more growth.

But the soil beneath those stories is eroding. We can feel it, the tremor of endings beneath our feet. Collapse isn’t a headline anymore; it’s an extreme weather pattern becoming baseline, a government shutdown that stops paying for your neighbor’s family’s food, political polarization so intense that reality becomes questioned. It’s failed harvests, the closing of your regional hospital, a rise in escapism and nostalgia.

And yet: this isn’t the first time things feel like they’re falling apart. Every ancestor we have lived through collapse (plague, famine, empire, war) and somehow found a way to keep singing. We can too. But it will require a different kind of preparation.

I’m not the most popular person in the group chat or at a dinner party when I bring up collapse. Most people don’t want to talk about it. I certainly didn’t for many years. It sounds too heavy, too hopeless, too far gone. But what if preparing for collapse isn’t about panic or doom at all? What if it’s about remembering how to live closer to the ground, together, with enough?

The Problem with Prepping as We Know It

Popular prepper culture is built on the fantasy of isolation: stockpiling goods, building bunkers, surviving the apocalypse alone with bullets and high fences. But no one survives alone. Not really. Every story of collapse that ends in hope (whether it’s from the Great Depression or a hurricane) includes people who shared. Those who grew food together, pooled resources, offered each other care. What we need most now isn’t an arsenal of supplies. It’s an ecology of relationships.

What if, instead of preparing for collapse like an individual hero, we prepared as a neighbor, a mother, a member of a living web? What if we saw preparedness as a love language for the places and people we call home?

Below is a list of ways (both outer and inner) to ready ourselves for what’s here and what’s coming.

Ways to Prepare for Collapse

1. Relearn how to listen.
Collapse will sound like noise to those who can’t hear the language of land. Learn to listen again - to birds, to silence, to your body. These are early-warning systems older than civilization.

2. Reorient toward your bioregion.
Know your watershed, your foodshed, your growing season, your pollinators. Know who grows your food, and what happens to your waste. Collapse isn’t global, it’s actually profoundly local.

3. Practice sufficiency, not scarcity.
Every ad and algorithm will try to convince you that there isn’t enough. Refuse that lie. Start living by the quiet metric of enoughness: enough warmth, enough nourishment, enough connection.

4. Learn a sustaining skill and a sharing skill.
Something that keeps bodies alive (gardening, preserving, mending) and something that keeps souls alive (storytelling, singing, circle facilitation). Communities survive when both are practiced.

5. Build a neighborhood web.
Not a group chat, a web: people within walking distance who know each other’s gifts, vulnerabilities, and needs. Who can share food, childcare, tools, grief. Mutual reliance is the true infrastructure of survival.

6. Tend your nervous system like a sacred garden.
In an unraveling world, calm is a revolutionary act. Learn practices that bring your body back from panic (breath, touch, song, soil) and teach them to others.

7. Learn to metabolize grief.
Let yourself mourn what’s being lost: species, stability, illusions. Grief composts denial into devotion. A culture that can grieve can regenerate.

8. Practice radical hospitality.
There may come a day when a stranger knocks on your door in need. Prepare your heart now for that moment. Practice giving without calculation.

9. Unlearn speed.
Collapse exposes what cannot endure acceleration. Walk more slowly. Speak more slowly. Cook from scratch. Grow a tolerance for the unoptimized life.

10. Keep a small ritual of beauty.
Light a candle. Sing to your seeds. Write a letter to the river. Beauty doesn’t fix what’s broken, but it keeps the spirit from calcifying. Beauty is what reminds us why we endure.

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I think often about how my great-grandparents lived through their own forms of collapse - wars, depressions, migrations - and still found ways to sing, to plant, to gather. When I walk by the river, I imagine them looking out over different waters, holding the same human ache to keep each other alive. We are not the first to face uncertainty. We are simply the next in line to remember how to meet it.

Preparing for collapse doesn’t mean giving up on the world. It means giving up on the illusion that someone else will fix it for us. It means becoming humble enough to live within the ecology of what’s already here.

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My Suggested Reading on Collapse:

Spells for the Apocalypse — Carmen Spagnola
A spellbook for steadiness. Spagnola’s teaching on satisfiability—the sacred art of knowing enough—anchors the emotional “go-bag” we all need to carry.

Active Hope — Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone
A practice for transforming eco-grief into service. Joanna Macy (who recently passed away) teaches that hope is not optimism—it’s participation in the Great Turning toward life.

A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety — Sarah Jaquette Ray
Gentle counsel for those whose nervous systems are tired of apocalypse. Ray reminds us that calm is a form of activism.

Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer
A love letter to reciprocity. Kimmerer shows that the antidote to collapse is relationship—with land, with language, with gratitude.

Goliath’s Curse — Luke Kemp (I’m currently reading this!)
An examination of why large, complex systems fail—and why small, adaptive communities endure. Kemp argues that collapse isn’t a glitch but a pattern, offering insight into how we might survive by becoming more flexible, local, and deeply human.

The Chalice and the Blade — Riane Eisler
Eisler traces humanity’s ancient shift from partnership to domination and points toward a return to cooperative, life-honoring cultures—the very medicine collapse demands.

Parable of the Sower — Octavia E. Butler
A prophetic novel that reads like scripture for our times. Butler’s heroine survives through adaptability, empathy, and community—exactly the qualities we’ll need to rebuild the world.

Inspired by Sophie Strand’s recently published Collapsollogy reading list.

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Curious about leading your own women’s circle in your community? Circle Craft is a winter apprenticeship for women who feel called to gather and lead circles in their communities. You’ll learn the practical skills of facilitation — structure, boundaries, group dynamics, and ritual — while growing the confidence and presence needed to hold a steady, meaningful space. By spring, you’ll be ready to gather your people. We begin January 15th.