My grandparents believed, as Revelations said, that the earth would be consumed with fire. They believed this would happen via nuclear weapons, because in the mid-80’s, this seemed a quite realistic scenario. Sure, the good folks would go to heaven and the bad folks would die and go to hell, but as a little kid, I was scared shitless. Personally, I liked life on earth, and I wanted to keep living.
After explaining all this to my daughter, I got back to my original point, that the words “apocalypse” and “revelations” are not scary to me anymore. Revelations means to reveal, and apocalypse means to uncover. I recently put together a collection of folktales, subtitled, “Paradise Apocalypse,” meaning “Paradise Uncovered,” because I believe we have the power to remember the garden that grows beneath our feet.
THESE NEW OLD TRADITIONS 