Weaving the WYRD While Empires White-Knuckle Death

While we midwife what's being born through every story we love

While empires white-knuckle their death, something else is happening in the story-spaces they can’t patrol.

I recorded this episode holding two selves: my four-year-old clutching her Ugly Duckling book under Brazilian dictatorship, and my middle-aged self who fantasizes about going full Jason Bourne on corrupt systems. Both of us learning that imagination isn’t escape—it’s the battleground where worlds get born.

What started as a meditation on my parents’ deaths became something else entirely. Watching my mother white-knuckle against death while my father surrendered with grace taught me we’re living through systems doing the same dance—some gripping their dying world so tight they’ll destroy everything rather than transform. Others of us learning to hold what’s shapeshifting, even when we can’t breathe underwater.

The ancient story of Proteus saved me during grief, and might save us now. When you can’t move forward, sometimes you need to wrestle with what keeps changing form—lion to serpent to fire to tree—until it finally tells you what needs honoring. We’ve been told we’re “back to normal” post-everything, but our sails hang limp because we haven’t honored what’s dying, what’s being born, what needs tending in the rubble.

Here’s what I’ve discovered: while they surveil our bodies and track our purchases, they can’t follow where stories take us. That romance novel teaching you about grief? That show that finds you at exactly the right moment? You’re not consuming entertainment—you’re in conversation with allies who speak through our imagination. Every story that changes you adds another thread to an underground mycelial network too complex for their algorithms to map.

This is the WYRD network—not an organization but everyone who’s ever let a story rearrange their molecules. We’re becoming ungovernable not through rebellion but through practicing transformation so often it’s just who we are. They need us solid, predictable. But we’ve spent lifetimes becoming other things entirely.

Some days stories are just how I regulate my nervous system when the fear gets too loud. That’s medicine too. But even then, they shift me out of fear’s possession, remind me other possibilities exist. Not because this practice will definitely save us, but because it’s what we have. What we’ve always had. What keeps us human while they try to make us into machines.