From Collapse to Calling

On descent, dissolution and the call to soul

“In times of crisis, there is an acceleration of callings.” — Michael Meade

On the morning of the most recent lunar eclipse, I stepped into the crisp Tasmanian air and felt the sky tilt. The moon darkened, the air thickened, and something in me knew everything was about to be turned upside down. The eclipse portal fell along my own nodal line, Virgo to Pisces, which suggests a traversing of themes from structure and discipline to surrender and mystery. It felt like a long-awaited summons.

For years I have circled eco-anxiety through the lens of psychology, trying to soothe it, measure it and manage it through familiar frameworks. My PhD required me to put the question in terms the discipline could accept: how can eco-anxiety be managed therapeutically? This has been important work that has provided a strong foundation. Yet what I know, as I'm sure you do too, is that the profound assault we feel when truly facing collapse, ecocide, and cultural breakdown is not something to be treated away. It is a threshold, a crack that runs through our civilisation and through our own hearts.

Writing has always been my way of navigating thresholds. But after the birth of my first child in 2021, I watched the words recede like a tide. Other than the bare necessities of academic output, I had nothing to say, not even in my journals. This Substack became the beginning of finding them again. At first I wrote in the paradigm of my research, offering guidance, maps, and how-to’s. Over time, though, another pattern emerged. My essays shifted from instruction to testimony, small lanterns cast back along a collapsing path.

And in that shift, something unexpected happened: the words began to carry me on a journey of their own. After years of solitary study, it has been cathartic to face collapse together in this space. We have mapped how it might play out, how to speak of it with our children, and how to reconcile even having children in such a time. We have explored nervous system literacy, how collapse shows up in our bodies, the inner capacities we might cultivate, the role of purpose in an uncertain world, and, finally, the inevitable surrender and letting go that collapse demands of us.

For a short time I thought that surrender might be the end of the story, that the only task was to fall into unknowing and remain there. But in every myth the descent is never the final chapter. The underworld strips away what no longer serves, yet even in the depths something begins to gather in the dark. If we can endure the dissolution, if we can stay long enough with the silence, what eventually rises to meet us is calling.

Bill Plotkin, eco-depth psychologist and wilderness guide, names this liminal space the cocoon. The long passage between late adolescence and true adulthood (not age-based but developmental), when the previously constructed self is unmade and a deeper orientation beckons. In the language of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy this resembles creative hopelessness, when old control strategies fail and something more enduring must be found. Most people in our contemporary culture never arrive at this passage. We remain arrested in earlier phases, unrealised and uninitiated.

This is not only a private struggle but a collective one. We are living in a civilisation run largely by adolescents, unable to temper power with humility, restrain appetite, or listen to the more-than-human world. Collapse, in this light, is not only breakdown. It is the inevitable consequence of a culture that has forgotten how to grow its people up. Or, as Plotkin suggests, perhaps we ourselves have conspired to create the very conditions that now demand our collective evolution.

For me, the call arrived as longing. A yearning for something I could not name, like a lover without an object of affection. I glimpsed it in words that startled me on the page, in whispers licking the corners of my psyche like smoke from some hidden fire. I kept turning this way and that, trying to locate what it was that beckoned. Until one morning, on a walk, I stopped at a familiar resting place, knelt with my hands pressed to the earth, and asked the wild unseen forces: What is this? What am I longing for? The whisper that came back was a single word: annihilation.

At first, it rattled me. I adore my life, my family and the small domestic ordinances that hold us. But I came to understand it as a summons to be stripped bare: to dissolve the brittle scaffolding of selfhood, the habits of smallness and low self-worth that have been thrown together in tenuous persona, the roles and protections that have kept me contained and safe at the cost of truth. The longing was for those worn defences to fall away so something larger and truer might grow in the emptied space.

Looking back, I can see my life as a series of attempts to answer this call. Each disillusionment serving as a moulting of identity. For a long time, I have carried shame about how non-linear and wayward my “adult” years have appeared — all the moves I’ve made, the jobs I didn’t keep, the communities I left behind. But in reading Plotkin’s book “The Journey of Soul Initiation”, what once looked like failure now feels like apprenticeship, each shedding enacting a deeper level of individuation, preparing me for the threshold I now face.

And yet: I am a mother now. I have small children. I have a life I love and cannot abandon. I can no longer embark on the endless wanderings of my twenties. I need a container, something that will allow me to step out of my roles and responsibilities for a short time, so I can let go fully and return to them whole. That is why I am preparing to undertake a vision quest with Soulcraft ANZ, the Australian branch of Bill Plotkin’s Animas Valley Institute. A leap I might never have dared to take without the gentle nudge of permission from Medicine Woman and Initiatory Guide,

Ama Verdery

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In cultures past that honoured initiation, the purpose of such a quest was never private. The initiate was sent out not only for their own transformation but to return with gifts for the village in the form of new visions, new songs, new stories. The people prepared the seeker, held them through the liminal passage, and received them back with ceremony, recognising that whatever they brought home would serve the whole. Without such holding, the descent risks becoming self-absorbed or fragmentary. With it, the initiate can re-enter life integrated and oriented toward offering back.

In the absence of such a village, I turn to you, dear readers. My own quest is still months away, and part of preparing is finding ways to be resourced, both practically and spiritually. I know I cannot simply disappear into waiting; I need to stay in conversation, to keep the thread alive with others who are walking these questions too.

Over recent months I have been running focus groups for my PhD research. What surprised me most was not only the richness of the data but the tenderness of the spaces themselves. When people spoke openly of collapse, their grief, their fear, their longing, something shifted. The heaviness eased. Simply sharing it made it possible to bear.

That experience clarified what I can offer from a place of integrity right now: something simple and honest. A space to be together in the questions, to companion one another while so much feels uncertain.

So I am very excited to announce the opening of Holding Both’s first online Collapse Companioning Circle — six weekly 90-minute gatherings beginning Tuesday, October 7th at 12pm AEDT (Tasmania/Melbourne/Sydney). For those in North America, this will be Monday evenings.

Each call will begin with a brief grounding, before I open the space with prompts for conversation and witness. We will move through a gentle thematic arc, with light facilitation and plenty of room for participation.

Replays will be available, but there will be medicine in being there live, sharing and hearing your truth echoed in the voices of others, remembering that you are not alone in this.

If you are in the UK or Europe, I know this time may not suit you. If enough people express interest, I may add an alternate slot (likely Sunday mornings). If this would serve you, please do let me know.

~ Learn more about the Collapse Companioning Circle here

And if an online container is not right for you just now but you feel inspired to support, you can become a paid subscriber, or join as a founding member at a level of your choosing. Every contribution means the world and will be funneled back into this work in one way or another.

As ever, thank you for your witnessing, encouragement and patronage as I travel this winding path in real time with you.

— Gabrielle

With gratitude for the many companions along this path, here are some that have been instrumental lately:

• Ama Verdery
  , Initiatory Guide, author of Wild Becoming Substack, and founder of the Wild Becoming Sanctuary, a mystery school for women, with a new cycle of membership opening in October.

• Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation (2021). Founder of Animas Valley Institute.

• Joshua Schrei, The Emerald podcast, episode: I Think I Hear the Coming of a Planetary Roar. (2025)

• Michael Meade, Living Myth podcast, episode 451: The Path of Genius and Calling.

I also did my first podcast!

Jason S.C Fung

is a great interviewer and I had a lot of fun. You can find it across all your usual podcast platforms.