I AM A MYSTIC. HERE IS THE DATA.

by Mark A. Shryock

The response to the last piece has been overwhelming. Hundreds of thousands of readers. Comments I cannot keep up with. People sharing it across platforms. People writing about it. Podcasters responding to it. And a lot of you are pushing back.

Good.

Several of you asked questions that deserve honest answers. Stephen Dinan. Spencer James Smith. Bety Claire. Ann Loker. Stewart Fritchman. Sharon Astyk, who wrote a brilliant and thorough response that I recommend everyone read. Angela Renee, who told me Snopes says it is false. Others who wrote in privately. Your questions are valid. Every one of them.

But to answer them honestly, I need to tell you something about who I am and where I come from. Because without that, the answers will not make sense. And I am tired of pretending to be something I am not.

WHO I AM

I am a mystic.

In 1986, a room turned to white light around me. My kundalini rose. After that, I saw auras for the rest of my life. I did not choose this. I did not ask for it. It happened, and it changed everything about the way I see the world and the people in it.

In 1987, on the day of the Harmonic Convergence, I looked out a window and saw a ray of light. I followed it. When I arrived at where it led, thirty other people were already there. They had followed the same ray of light from different directions. We were all told the same thing. This was real. It was coming. Spend your life preparing people for it. Get ready.

I have done that.

Every single thing I have done across the board of my life has been calculated into that mandate. It was not random. It was not career planning. It was something moving me from school to school, from country to country, from discipline to discipline, preparing me for this hour.

When I went through treatment in 1986, within three years I was working in that same treatment center doing workshops for people coming through. Life skills. Boundaries. How to survive. When I started the prairie work, I became a tallgrass prairie expert and was the first person in the world to academically document the recreation of a tallgrass riparian prairie where one had been completely destroyed. I saved a lot of prairie in Kansas and Oklahoma because of that work. When I went overseas to teach, just teaching English in a hagwon, I became a professor within a year. Within four years, I was lecturing up and down Asia and working with world governments. My last job overseas was working directly with the Prime Minister and a major general who had liberated the country in Bangladesh. I wrote an article in South Korea where two men walked out of prison thirteen hours after the article went to print because the president read it and released them. All of this is documentable. All of it is there. You can look me up on Google and find me with world leaders, in major publications, in academic institutions around the world.

And every single time, just as I reached the top, just as things were about to take off in a way that would have made me successful in the way the world measures success, it collapsed.

Before COVID hit, my art was galleried up and down the entire East Coast. Not small shows. International major shows. My work got into the Bascom, which is one of the most significant arts centers in the Southern Appalachians. One year after I quit teaching and began to really paint, my work was hanging in the Bascom. Then COVID hit. We starved. We filed bankruptcy. My wife left me. Told me she was no longer proud of me. Everything collapsed.

It has been like that my entire life. Things would take off, and then I was never allowed to be successful in a three-dimensional vibration. Because that was not the assignment. The assignment was this. Right here. Right now. This hour.

On February the twentieth, on the Aries zero point, something shifted. Up until then, my posts on Facebook reached a few hundred people. On February the twenty-eighth, one post was read by seven million. I have gone from six thousand followers to close to twenty-five thousand, growing by a couple of thousand every week. I do not believe that is accidental.

I am not a messiah. I am not special. I am not anybody more than anyone else. But I believe my assignment is to try to get people to see what is coming and help them prepare. And to understand something so important that it changes everything about how you read what I write.

THE FRAMEWORK I OPERATE FROM

I am a mystic first. A systems analyst second.

My primary lens is spiritual and mystical. It speaks to me continuously. It has told me since 1986 that this is coming down. The systems training, the master’s degree in cosmology, ecology, consciousness, and evolutionary dynamics, the PhD fellowship in Indian spirituality at Pondicherry University, An honorary professor the School of Ancient Wisdom, the prairie restoration, the years of studying Prigogine and Laszlo and Tainter and Meadows, the decades of reading data and tracking convergence patterns across every discipline I could get my hands on, all of that is secondary to what I know intuitively and mystically.

That is the framework. Take it or leave it. If you cannot handle that, I understand completely. Stop reading me. I wish you the very best. I mean that with all my heart. But I am not going to apologize for who I am anymore. I am not willing to do that.

Now. Having said that, I understand that people want solid evidence. I have tried to give that to you to the best of my ability. And I will continue to do that. Because the institutional data now backs everything I have been tracking spiritually for forty years. The FAO is saying it. The IEA is saying it. The World Bank is saying it. The IMF is saying it. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is saying it. They just do not use the same words I use.

What follows is my honest attempt to address the questions you have raised. I owe you that.

THIS WAS NEVER WRITTEN JUST FOR THE UNITED STATES

Several readers assumed the original piece was written exclusively for an American audience. It was not. Over half of my readers are from countries all over the world. I write to a global audience. I always have.

And here is what I need American readers especially to understand.

When I talk about bare shelves and famine, I am not talking about the United States in sixty days. That is not what I have said. That is not what I have ever said. I think the idea that famine hits the United States in six to eight weeks is, frankly, kind of crazy. That is not what I see.

What I see, and what I have said consistently for over two years, going back long before Trump attacked the Strait, is that in the United States, by June and July, things will start getting hard to get. You will go to the store and you will not be able to find this or that. Supply chains will begin to visibly buckle. Not famine. Not total collapse. But friction. Intermittency. Things you normally get becoming intermittently unavailable. I have said this over and over. It is in my writings. It is verifiable. It is all there.

But the shelves being bare is something that is already occurring. Right now. In other countries. Not the United States. Not yet. People are already starving right now, all over the world, who were not starving before the strait closed. This is happening, and it will get worse.

The numbers are staggering and they are not mine. They come from the institutions themselves.

The World Food Programme’s 2026 Global Outlook puts 318 million people at crisis-level hunger or worse across 68 countries. That number has more than doubled since 2019. For the first time in the ten-year history of the Global Report on Food Crises, two simultaneous famines were confirmed in the same year, in parts of Gaza and Sudan. A risk of famine persists for Gaza, Sudan, and South Sudan into 2026. Six countries sit at the highest concern level where populations face imminent risk of famine: Sudan, Gaza, South Sudan, Yemen, Mali, and Haiti. Nigeria leads the world with 27.2 million people in crisis-level hunger. Globally, 673 million people, 8.2 percent of the world’s population, are living with chronic hunger. 1.4 million are at catastrophic food insecurity levels, what the classification system calls Phase 5. That is the worst it gets.

The WFP released a separate analysis in March 2026 modeling what happens if oil stays above $100 per barrel through mid-year. The conclusion: almost 45 million additional people fall into acute food insecurity. In East and Southern Africa alone, 17.7 million more people cross the hunger threshold. Across ten Asian countries, 9.1 million more face that risk. In Latin America and the Caribbean, an additional 2.2 million.

In the Philippines, diesel jumped 59.5 percent in a single month in March 2026. Rice reversed two years of price decline and began climbing again. The Philippines imports 90 percent of its oil and nearly all of its fertilizer. The country declared a state of national energy emergency on March 24, 2026. President Marcos said the Philippines had enough crude oil supply until June 30. The WFP warned that a prolonged Middle East conflict could disrupt the country’s food supply by affecting both crop production and the supply chain. If the Hormuz disruption lasts three to six months, rice prices in the Philippines are expected to rise 30 to 50 percent.

In Australia and New Zealand, grocery bills are up 11 percent over two years. Food bank queues in Australia have doubled. Across the Tasman, beef mince posted its largest annual price increase since records began in 2006, up to $24.46 a kilogram, with sirloin steak up 25 percent in a single year. A war in the Middle East that nobody in Canterbury or Wellington started is directly repricing what families in Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland pay for meat and bread.

The FAO has formally named India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, and Egypt among the countries most at risk from the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed. A third of the world’s fertilizer moves through the strait. Kenya already has over 3.5 million people in acute food insecurity before the harvest shortfall from this planting season hits markets in the third and fourth quarter. In South Africa, food inflation held at 4.4 percent for three consecutive months before easing slightly in early 2026.

The fertilizer supply passing through Hormuz has plummeted to what shipping traffic data suggests is somewhere between zero and ten percent of pre-war levels as of early April. Global fertilizer prices are spiking. Countries with agricultural economies like India, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Brazil are highly exposed. And these are the countries where the shelves are already emptying.

Even if the strait opened tomorrow, this famine would continue. The planting windows have already closed on a biological schedule that has no interest in diplomatic calendars. The fertilizer that needed to arrive in March and April did not arrive. The downstream agricultural consequences are locked in through 2027.

Within sixty days, this famine will begin to spread into regions that are not yet affected. That is not fear. That is the supply chain working exactly as it always has, only now the inputs are breaking down.

WHY TWENTY PERCENT MATTERS MORE THAN EIGHTY PERCENT

Several readers asked a version of the same question. Spencer James Smith put it most directly: “The US uses some of its own domestic oil, so doesn’t that mean there wouldn’t be a total shortage?”

It is the right question. And the answer requires understanding something that most people do not think about because they have never had to.

The United States does produce oil domestically. That is true. Nobody disputes that. But the issue is not whether oil exists in the system. The issue is how tightly coupled modern systems are, and what happens when you remove twenty percent of the inputs from a system that was built to run at full capacity with no margin.

Modern economies do not operate with buffers. They operate on just-in-time logistics. That means the system was designed to have exactly what it needs arriving exactly when it needs it, with almost nothing held in reserve. Warehouses are not full. They are transfer points. Grocery stores do not have weeks of inventory in the back. They have days. Sometimes hours. The whole system is built on the assumption that the next truck is always coming.

When you remove twenty percent of the energy inputs from a system designed that way, you do not get a twenty percent reduction in output. You get cascading failures. Because the system has minimum operating thresholds. Below those thresholds, things do not slow down proportionally. They break.

Here is how it works. Diesel is the system bottleneck fuel. Not gasoline. Diesel. Because diesel is structurally embedded in freight transport, agriculture, shipping, construction, logistics, and industrial supply chains. Everything you eat was grown with diesel, harvested with diesel, processed with diesel, transported with diesel, and refrigerated with diesel. When diesel tightens, the question becomes: who gets the fuel? Prioritization begins. Some goods move. Some do not. Prices diverge sharply. Reliability becomes regional and uneven rather than uniform.

Sharon Astyk, who literally wrote the book on this (A Nation of Farmers), made this point in her response better than I can. She noted that during COVID, when we shut almost everything down, we only achieved about eight to nine percent demand destruction. That was with massive buy-in from the public, massive government subsidies, expansion of social welfare benefits. And that only got us about halfway to the demand destruction we would need to offset a twenty percent supply disruption. Does anyone think this government is going to do those things?

So the answer to Spencer and Stewart and everyone else asking this question is: yes, the United States produces domestic oil. No, that does not insulate the system from a twenty percent global supply disruption. Those are not contradictory statements. They are layers of the same system. And anyone who tells you otherwise has not looked at how supply chains actually work when they are stressed.

Stephen Dinan raised a more specific and very smart point about California. He had Claude analyze California’s diesel systems and found that roughly 65 to 70 percent of California’s diesel is now renewable or biodiesel, produced in-state from feedstocks that do not transit Hormuz. The Phillips 66 Rodeo and Marathon Martinez plants would keep producing. California’s internal food system, Stephen argues, has real buffer that my article did not account for.

Stephen is right. California is unusually buffered compared to the rest of the country because of its renewable diesel infrastructure. I should have distinguished that. And this is exactly the kind of regional variation that matters. California has built something that most states have not.

But here is what that actually proves. It proves that the states without California’s renewable diesel infrastructure are exactly as exposed as I described. It proves that regional outcomes will be uneven. And it proves that the question is not whether disruption happens. It is where it happens first, and who absorbs the worst of it. For most of the United States, and for most of the world, Stephen’s California exception does not apply. And the states that California normally exports food to through long-haul trucking? Those states face the very scenario I described, because the trucks that carry California produce to the rest of the country run on diesel from the broader national supply.

Sharon Astyk also raised something that nobody else has talked about. Plastics and packaging. Remember when you could not get toilet paper during early COVID? That was not a shortage of toilet paper. It was a shortage of plastic packaging. How will your medications be delivered in child-safe containers without plastic? How will you get your liquids? How will grains be packaged? What compromises will emerge, and will they be safe and sanitary? These are the second-order effects that a twenty percent energy disruption produces. They are not obvious until they hit.

ON THE QUESTION OF PAYING YOUR DEBTS

Several of you pushed back on this, and you are right to.

Bety Claire said it directly: “Why tell folks to stop paying bills?” Stephen Dinan said to walk it back. Sharon Astyk said she does not agree that you should stop paying your mortgage or rent, and that you should stay housed at all costs.

I acknowledge this. I overstepped my bounds. I do not have the right to tell anybody what to do with their money. That is a personal choice, and stating it as directive was more than I should have done. I will not make that mistake again.

But I want to be honest about where that came from, and I want to be more vulnerable in this piece than I have ever been publicly. Because I think the vulnerability matters. I think it is part of what five-dimensional energy requires of us. We cannot survive what is coming by pretending. We survive by being real with each other.

I am sixty-seven years old. I am raising a fourteen-year-old daughter by myself. My only income is Social Security. I do not work a job right now because I have been putting this information out daily, working from sunup to sundown, often until three in the morning, because I think it is critical. I could make better money painting. My paintings sell for thousands of dollars. I showed one art show this past weekend to support some friends in my community, but I knew I would not sell anything there because my work does not sell at a folk art show, and I cannot even take my real work to a show right now because I am doing this.

I pulled my bestselling book off Amazon. Somebody said I was doing this to sell books. Well, there is no way you can get my books right now because I have been so busy writing every day that I have not even finished building the website to sell them on. I have people asking for the books and the art daily. I work on the website when I can. I worked on it last night until three in the morning. But getting this information out is more critical to me right now.

I put everything on Substack without a subscription wall. I do not charge for this. I am not writing for financial gain. I am not writing clickbait. I am not chasing engagement. Part of me wants to retreat from all this and just go make paintings and garden and do my thing. This work is hard. Every single day it is hard. And I am doing it anyway because I believe lives depend on it.

There is a part of me that just wants to go be quiet. But I cannot do that because I know what is coming.

Me and Tara, we struggle weekly. Things are getting so expensive that my very limited income hardly covers it. By the end of the month, we are eating canned beans. I am not making that up.

I want to be clear about something. This is not misfortune. It is a choice I keep making. There are days I want the safety of a salary back. But this work is incompatible with selling my hours elsewhere, and the assignment takes precedence. I am not asking for pity. I am telling you this so you understand that when I say the old system is ending, I am not theorizing. I have already stepped out of it.

I have stopped paying my debts. I have. Not my housing. Not anything secured. Unsecured credit card debt that was bleeding me dry while the world changed underneath me. And here is the reality of why. The system is designed to extract every penny out of you that it can get on its way out the door, and it will continue to do that until it completely crashes. If you do not believe that, look at Musk. Look at Trump trying to grab resources all over the world. There is a reason that is happening. They know something is occurring too.

If you are cash strapped and you have no money and you are living day to day and things are getting so expensive that you cannot stay afloat, and you are just paying off debt to stay current while not preparing at all, I am not sure that is the smartest choice. But I am not a financial advisor and I am not telling you what to do. Your situation is not my situation. Your debts are not my debts. Your state laws are not my state laws. Sharon Astyk is right: stay housed at all costs. Keep your mortgage paid. Keep your rent paid. Consider taking in others if housing costs are untenable. But beyond that, the decision about how you allocate your resources between servicing a system that is collapsing and preparing to survive what is coming, that is yours to make. I cannot make it for you. I have the gravest concern for people who are not preparing because financially they cannot. That concern is what drove me to say what I said. It was not irresponsible intent. It was desperation on behalf of people I see struggling.

This article is the most vulnerable I have ever been publicly. I know the narcissists will read this and chew me up. I know that. And I am doing it anyway. Because vulnerability is what this moment requires. We all need to begin to be more vulnerable with each other. To stop pretending to be something we are not. Because we all have to go through this together.

THE COCOON

There is a period coming, and we are moving toward it fast, that I have to explain clearly because it is the reason I write what I write.

Between the old world dying and the new world being built, there is a space where the old stops working and the new is not quite here yet. I have already gone through this personally. You can call it whatever you want. The name I know it as is the dark night of the soul. It is where everything you thought you were dissolves, and something entirely new has to be assembled from what remains.

Think of a caterpillar going into a cocoon. What happens inside a cocoon is not comfortable. The old structure dissolves. It turns to mush. Something entirely new is assembled. That is what is happening to civilization right now, and it will happen faster than most people believe is possible.

During that cocoon period is why community matters. Why gardening matters. Why preparation matters. Why knowing your neighbors matters. Why having food stored matters. Why having skills matters. Why being able to help the person next to you matters. Not from fear. From love. From the understanding that we are going through this together and nobody makes it alone.

The Hopi elders at Oraibi said it plainly:

“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate.”

That is the message. Those who hold on to the shore are the ones who will suffer the most. They are holding on to a system that is already gone. The people who push off into the middle, who find each other, who help each other, who build something new together while the old dissolves around them, those are the ones who make it through.

I wrote a four-part series on this called “Swimming in the Middle of the River” back in January 2026. The Hopi were not speaking in metaphor. They were describing exactly what a bifurcation looks like from the inside.

THIS IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

I need to say this as clearly as I can.

What is coming is not the end of the world in a bad way. It is a new world being born. The old way of extracting everything from everyone, of us being slaves to a system that has always taken from us, is over. It is dissolving right now.

If you do not believe me, look around. Since February the twentieth, everything that is extractive and narcissistic in this world has begun to dissolve like it is on steroids. How do you explain that if what I am saying is not real? Go ask Trump how his life is going right now. Go look at every institution built on extraction and tell me it is thriving.

The narcissistic masculine energy that built the three-dimensional world is not going to vanish. It is going to persist the same way empaths, healers, artists, the feminine, and indigenous peoples persisted in the three-dimensional world for centuries. Living in a world that did not have their back. That did not respond to their frequency. That treated their gifts as worthless.

The inversion is complete.

In the three-dimensional world, the narcissist was your president, your CEO, your doctor. The one who rose to the top because the system was structured to reward extraction. The empath was the starving artist, the burned-out caregiver, the healer who could not pay rent, the indigenous voice that was silenced, the feminine that was pushed back. The world had the narcissist’s back. It did not have the empath’s.

That was the old contract.

In five-dimensional energy, that contract dissolves. Not because anyone is punished. Not because the oppressed rise up. Because the field itself has shifted. The energy no longer responds to extraction. The narcissist’s moves suddenly stop working. Not through legislation. Not through revolution. Through the simple fact that five-dimensional energy does not allow abundance without joy, does not allow wealth without work, does not allow you to take without giving back.

The narcissist will still be here. They will still try their old moves. But they will find, increasingly, that the world no longer has their back. That the deals do not close. That the manipulation lands flat. That the extraction meets resistance not from people, but from the field itself. They will experience what the empath experienced in the three-dimensional world: the loneliness of operating in a world that does not recognize your currency.

Meanwhile, the empath, the one who was starving because the system could not value their gift, will begin to find that their energy is what the new world responds to. Not because the world finally got fair. Because five-dimensional energy is structured on gift, and the empath has been giving their gift all along without knowing it was the only architecture that would eventually hold.

THE EMPATH MUST LEARN TO RECEIVE

But there is something the empath must understand in this hour, and it is the hardest lesson they will ever learn.

The greatest gift you can give yourself right now is to learn to receive.

This has nothing to do with earning it. It has nothing to do with being perfect, or good enough, or having suffered enough to deserve rest. It has everything to do with frequency. An open heart is the only requirement. And the empath has always had this. They are home now, whether they know it or not. The world they were born for has finally arrived. But they cannot enter it still believing that their only value is in what they give away. That receiving makes them vulnerable. That they must exhaust themselves to be worthy of existing.

In the three-dimensional world, the empath gave until they were empty because the system demanded it. In five-dimensional energy, the empath must learn that their receiving is not selfish. It is structural. The prairie does not apologize for taking sunlight. The creek does not earn the right to flow. They receive because receiving is half of the gift cycle, and without it, the whole system stalls.

Love thy neighbor as thyself. As thyself. You have to love yourself first. Empaths have always given everything away. That is why the narcissist does what it does to them. The lesson for the empath is to learn to give to themselves. To set boundaries. And that still applies now, because if you do not do it, it falls apart.

I wrote this in May of 2022, and it says everything I am trying to say:

“You can go to the river with a cup or a washtub, and either way, it will get filled. Many go to the river with a thimble and feel bad they came at all. These are the over-givers of the world. Those who always give freely of themselves but do not know how to receive. But the river doesn’t care. Its nature is to flow to others. It holds the water of life and gives what you come to take. The river only knows something has been drawn from her and feels joy. She makes no judgment of what you draw from her. But the river also knows how to take and openly receives the water of the world. The river always whispers we must both give and receive. When we go to the river and then share what we have drawn with others, we become like her. This is the secret the river teaches.”

This is not about perfection. It is about an open heart. And the empath has always had this.

They are home now. Whether they know it or not.

IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE

If you think what I am describing cannot happen in the United States, I want you to look at something.

During the Dust Bowl, families left Oklahoma and began traveling across the United States with everything they owned. There are photographs in the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian showing these families on the road. Pushing carts. Pulling wagons. Children walking beside them. They had lost everything. Not to war. Not to invasion. To drought. To dust. To a system that had extracted everything from the soil until the soil had nothing left to give.

Millions of Americans took to the road during the 1930s. They were called Okies whether they came from Oklahoma or not. They left behind everything they had built. The photographs by Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein show what that looked like. A father and his two sons walking into a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. Families camped in fields pushing their belongings in carts. A woman with five children walking the highway out of Idabel, Oklahoma, bound for Krebs. Their father had farmed on thirds and fourths. He got pneumonia and lost the farm. The county refused them relief.

Those photographs are in the Smithsonian right now. They are real. This happened in the United States, within living memory. Not in theory. Not in some other country. Here. And the conditions that created the Dust Bowl, the extraction of everything from the soil until there was nothing left, are the conditions we are watching play out again across every system simultaneously.

THE TIMELINE

I have been consistent about this since 1986 when I was shown it.

By June and July of 2026, in the United States, supply chains will begin to visibly buckle. Things will start getting hard to get.

And I want to be clear about what buckling looks like. It does not start at your grocery store. It starts in the field. It starts when the fertilizer does not arrive and the farmer plants anyway with what he has or does not plant at all. It starts when diesel costs force a trucker to choose which routes are still worth running. It starts when a distributor cannot fill a full order and sends what he can. By the time you see it on the shelf, the system has already been failing for months. If you talk to farmers right now, they will tell you it is already happening. The supply chain is not going to buckle in June. It is buckling now. June is when you will start to feel it.

This does not go away.

By 2027, I believe we will begin to see the shelves bare. The life that we presently know will not exist. I know that sounds extreme. I know that sounds like fear mongering. But when you look at this across the board, all of these major converging points that I have written on extensively, the energy disruption, the fertilizer crisis, the food system stress, the financial instability, the institutional breakdown, the geopolitical fragmentation, they are converging. My interpretation of these converging systems is that we are entering the early stages of systemic global breakdown.

I also believe the dollar will crash. The original article did not address this deeply enough, and readers were right to note that. The issue is the debt ratio. The United States cannot overcome it. And when you combine the debt dynamics with a high-interest environment, with the energy disruption, with the loss of global confidence, with multiple forces occurring simultaneously, something has to give.

I know many in the world think I am crazy. That is my prediction. That is what I see happening based on the systems and what I am reading and what I have been shown. By 2027, complete global collapse begins in earnest. Famine will occur. Not just in the countries already suffering. Everywhere.

Some of you will say governments will intervene. They will try. They always try. But the most coordinated institutional response in modern history, during COVID, with massive public buy-in, trillions in spending, and expansion of every safety net available, only achieved about half the demand destruction that a twenty percent supply disruption requires. That was with a government that was at least willing to act. Does anyone believe the current leadership in the United States or anywhere else is prepared to mount that kind of response? I do not. And the biological clock of planting seasons does not wait for legislation.

This is the last summer to prepare. Not the last summer of your life. The last summer where preparation is still relatively easy.

And I do not write this to create fear. Fear is the three-dimensional response, and it is the least useful response available to you. I write this because I believe lives depend on it. Not for clickbait. Not for likes. Not for followers. I am writing this at three in the morning because I think it matters.

WHAT I AM ASKING OF YOU

I am not asking you to believe my mystical framework. I am not asking you to believe in three-dimensional or five-dimensional energy. I am not asking you to believe in auras or kundalini or the Hopi prophecy.

I am asking you to look at the institutional data. Look at the FAO. Look at the IEA. Look at the World Bank. Look at the IMF. Look at the WFP. Look at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. Look at 318 million people in crisis-level hunger across 68 countries. Look at fertilizer supply through Hormuz at what shipping data suggests is zero to ten percent of pre-war levels. Look at two simultaneous famines confirmed for the first time in a decade of tracking. Look at what is happening in the Philippines and Kenya and Sudan and Somalia and Bangladesh. Look at the grocery bills in Australia and New Zealand. Look at what 45 million additional people falling into acute food insecurity looks like when oil stays above $100.

You do not have to believe a single thing I believe about the spiritual nature of what is happening to conclude that preparation is the rational response to conditions that are now visible in plain sight.

Garden. Store food. Build community. Know your neighbors. Reduce dependency on a single system. Do not hoard. Prepare for the community you are in to survive together. Because this is not about individuals making it alone. Nobody makes it alone. The communities that survive will not be those who build the strongest walls but those who build the deepest connections.

Ann Loker raised a point that is important and real. She said this is difficult for urban and suburban people to implement. She is right. Not everyone has land. Not everyone has storage space. Not everyone has capital. Not everyone can garden. Bety Claire said the same thing. Those are valid concerns, and any guidance that assumes everyone can do the same things is incomplete.

What everyone can do is build relationships. Know who around you grows food. Support local farms if you can. Join a CSA. Talk to your neighbors. Figure out what skills you have that matter when systems get stressed. Even in an apartment, even with no yard, you are not helpless if you are connected. But you are extremely vulnerable if you are isolated.

WHEN THE EMPATH BLEEDS

I wrote this poem some years ago, and it says what I cannot say in prose. This is for every empath reading this who has given everything away and forgotten themselves.

She looked out across her garden Searching For the greatest beauty she had And finding there From seed and toil What God created through her hand

On bended knee She knelt to Earth Holding blade in hand Forgive me she whispered For all I am not and for all that I am

And then the surgery began Blade to root cut deep and bled to bone fell cold steel To give ... to offer to another the best she had

Light now dimmed where flower fell despair the old feeling she has always known but could never understand

and upward rise of silent howl shattered across her soul. She wrapped in love The dying flower Hoping they would know.

Handing to them The best she had In all she had to give she whispered, “Please is this good enough?” But neither flower nor love lived.

This time has passed.

CLOSING

I have been more vulnerable in this piece than I have ever been in public. I have told you who I am. I have told you what I see. I have told you what I believe is coming. I have told you about my financial situation, my struggles, my choices. I have acknowledged where I overstepped. I have tried to answer the questions you asked honestly and with as much verified data as I could provide.

The narcissists will read this and attack. I know that. I am doing it anyway. Because if I have learned anything from forty years of this, it is that the truth told vulnerably has more power than the truth told from behind a wall.

We are all going through this together. Every one of us, born to this hour for a reason. The smallest act of loving in this hour has enormous power. The understanding of what is occurring has enormous power. Each one of us sets ripples across the world field in ways we cannot imagine. So when we understand and are not so afraid, when we share that cup of tea and listen, when we sit around a fire with community and laugh, this all has a profound and sacred effect.

It is what we are doing here. And it matters deeply.

Copyright (c) Mark A. Shryock. May be shared with attribution.

SOURCES

World Food Programme. “2026 Global Outlook: Acute Food Insecurity.” 2026.

Global Network Against Food Crises. “Global Report on Food Crises 2026.” Launched April 24, 2026.

Philstar. “Prolonged War Threatens Philippine Food Supply.” March 23, 2026.

Manila Tribune. “Towards a Global Food Shortage.” April 17, 2026.

FAO. “FAO Food Price Index Rises in March as Near East Conflict Raises Energy Costs.” April 3, 2026.

FAO. “Global Emergency and Resilience Appeal 2026.” 2026.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Fertilizer and Food Crisis Analysis. April 2026.

Sharon Astyk. Response to “The Window Is 2026.” May 2026.

Arthur Rothstein. “Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma.” Farm Security Administration, April 1936. Library of Congress / Smithsonian Institution.

Dorothea Lange. Dust Bowl migration photographs. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress.

Russell Lee. Migrant worker photographs, Oklahoma. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress.

Hopi Elders. Statement from Oraibi, Arizona. June 8, 2000.

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