You can tell how anxious I am about society by my canned good storage.
I got into prepping as an intellectual exercise in high school, as a side effect of being into radical outdoor survival, underground secret lairs, anarchism and eschatology. I mean, what other hobby is going to bring all of those interests together? I discovered the Loompanics Unlimited and Paladin Press catalogs back when they still sent out catalogs, and it was a short leap from there into the wild and wooly world of prepping.
The thing about prepping, as any good episode of Doomsday Preppers could tell you, is that basic, reasonable levels of prepping make a lot of fucking sense. Why wouldn't you want to have some bottled water on hand in case of an emergency? Of course you want to know where your essentials are if you need to evacuate. I live a mile from a major river, in an area that's allegedly going to get The Big One any minute now.
And hell , my stash of canned goods came in handy when I wasn't working and we had my medical expenses to worry about. At its most basic level, prepping comes from doing a little bit extra just in case.
Of course, then it gets a lot of uncomfortable baggage and automatic weapons and its all downhill from there.
In general, though, I can gauge my comfort with society by my stacks of canned goods and my friends... I have a lot of green beans, is what I'm saying, and not just because the dented tin store had a great deal. I like feeling like I have some measure of control over my well-being even when almost everything is out of control. If society collapses, or a train explodes, or we get a hundred year flood, I can't stop it. But I can be ready to get my kid out safe, and to make sure we can manage in the meantime.
Devotionally, the equivalent of prepping is probably research. There's no such thing as too much research, is there? But there totally is.
I don't have much of anywhere to start with Tzymir and Redbird. Tzymir is kind of like his namesake and kind of like Hades and kind of like King Yama... Redbird is kind of like Persephone and kind of like Freya and kind of like her mother.
What does that actually mean? Not much. More red herrings than red birds. So I keep forcing myself to look up from my books at what is actually in front of me, to draw from nature instead of from a tutorial. It's hard. It's slow. It's not as simple as green beans.
It'll be worth it if I can break through. But first I have to keep going, no matter what tomorrow brings.