You Are (doing) Enough
Installment 1 — The Empty Fields
We begin a short series: the fictional story of a man in the End Times. He is a last witness, recording what he has seen as the world is hollowed out by a teaching that spread like fungus — “You are enough.”
Not fallow — empty.
Once the fields bent heavy with grain, sweet with the smell of cut hay. Now they stretch in silence, brown scars across the hills. A few rusted machines sit where they died — tractors stalled mid-row, combines frozen with their teeth in the stalks. Nobody remembers how to wake them anymore. Sure we could have tried to repair, but nobody even tried.
It began with a teaching — the spores of a creed that drifted everywhere: “You are enough.”
It sounded kind, merciful, liberating. But it was yeast — puffing up pride, hollowing out labor. If you are enough, then you need not study the chemistry of soil, or sweat beneath the sun, or wrestle with the disciplines farmers once carried like scars. If you are enough, then exertion is bondage.
And so the people left the fields. Farmers laid down their plows. Students shut their books. Scholars locked their labs. Grain bins emptied, silos rotted — but the people sighed with relief. “We are enough.”
But we were not enough.
I once read an old book, Earth Abides. In it, a sickness swept away most of mankind. Here, it was not disease but delusion that finished us. We did not die all at once. We laid ourselves down, seduced by the spores’ easy words, and called our exemption from exertion a blessing. In Stewart’s book, the earth endured after death. In ours, it endured after surrender.
What was it about the spores? Why did they feel so familiar? They drifted through the air like something remembered — as if our pride had been waiting for them, ready to receive them, even eager to be fed by them.
The spores spread faster than seed. They settled into minds, softening them, hollowing them, hardening them against truth. We inhaled them gladly, thinking them freedom. Soon we despised those who still sowed and reaped and strived for improvement in themselves and in society, mocked them as “elitists,” scorned their exertions.
Now the fields stand bare. There are no farmers to till, no seeders to plant, no harvesters to reap. The few who once knew how were driven out, or consumed by spores themselves.
So I walk these fields alone, a dying witness. Hunger gnaws at my belly, but worse than hunger is my sedated spirit and loss of any feeling.
The priests said we were blessed and thus exempt from exertion. But exertion was never really the problem. In fact, it was actually the way of life and the way to life, at least it was after the Curse.
And now the earth abides — but the souls are hollow, brittle husks drifting on the wind.
Coming next: Installment 2