When Even the Facts Are On Fire

Doomscrolling, Lettuce, and What We're Really Choosing

I caught myself in a new habit last week. I called it doomscrolling triage which happens when the news cycle is overwhelming and I’m drawn to filter and address the topics that immediately affect me and my family.

Three headlines at once: A parasite outbreak traced to bagged salad greens had sickened thousands of people across several states. Oil prices had crossed one hundred dollars a barrel because of a war nobody asked for. And a wildfire in central Oregon had also grown large enough to threaten the dark sky park where I had planned to camp next weekend. My nervous system did not know which alarm to answer first.

I did what most of us do. I made small adjustments and moved on with my day.

I am deeply grateful for the lettuce already growing in my own garden, and now I make more time to harvest rather than rely on buying extra. When I fill my gas tank, I celebrate the discount that comes with my Costco membership. And my camping trip is cancelled for now. I packed away the disappointment with the gear.

What troubles me about these adjustments is not the inconvenience, but that I so smoothly moved into Plan B. As a population, we have become remarkably fluent at rerouting our behavior around an unstable world. We wash the greens again or skip them altogether. We budget for gas that keeps climbing. We reschedule the simple weekend we had been looking forward to for months. We do this so often that we rarely stop to ask what all that rerouting is doing to us, or what it reveals about the experience we are shaping in response.

The exhaustion runs deeper than any single headline. It is not only that the news is disturbing but that the ground beneath the news no longer feels solid.

This summer alone, rumors that a sitting United States senator had died or gone brain dead spread across social media for weeks, contradicted by his own office and then disputed all over again by people who trusted neither the senator nor the office speaking for him. Another senator died under what some are saying are suspicious circumstances.

Wildfire smoke drifted across two continents while evacuation orders displaced hundreds of thousands of people in France and Spain. Yet, our government is denying aid to some, rolling back environmental protections, and disputing climate change science.

A war that many analysts believed would stay contained kept widening instead, drawing in new fronts and new countries with each passing week. That situation is hurting consumers with high prices on many fronts, most obviously at the gas pump. Our current president was elected on the promise of lowering the cost of living, yet we experience just the opposite.

And, fresh salad greens, which are supposed to be healthy food, are sickening a good portion of our country because of a parasite that the agency entrusted with keeping us safe stopped monitoring. The extent of the problem is not fully known because the identified source is sold under many different brand names, complicating the full picture.

In a moment like this, the exhausting part is not simply keeping up with what is happening. It is not being able to agree, even at the most basic level, on what the facts are. In this moment, I will not surrender to confusion, spiritual bypassing, or the illusion that because it’s not in my backyard that I shouldn’t concern myself about it. The parasite in the lettuce is a true experience unfolding on this plane. The families evacuating their homes are living a true experience unfolding on this plane. The oil tankers rerouting through dangerous waters mark a true experience unfolding on this plane. Families choosing how to cut their bills in order to afford the gas required to get to work are having a true experience on this plane. Grief, disruption, and uncertainty are not illusions to be spiritually reasoned away, even though they belong to the world of appearance rather than to the one Reality that never changes. They are raw material for Sacred Repatterning.

Fear asks, “How can we protect ourselves from a world we no longer trust?” Fear tightens its grip around every headline and conspiracy, and tries to manage an outcome it cannot actually control. Love asks a different question entirely. Love asks what remains true regardless of what we cannot yet verify. How can we love and comfort those affected? And how we can align with the deeper Truth even while the surface of things keeps shifting.

Charles Fillmore named Wisdom as one of the Twelve Powers of man, the faculty within us that perceives what is sound and aligns our judgment with Divine Order. Discernment in this sense is not about winning an argument over whether a rumor is accurate. That's just Wisdom doing its job, not some special state I have to work myself into. It's already there, even on the most confusing days, if I bother to check. We should still ask good questions about our food, our leaders, and the wars being fought in our name. Discernment rooted in fear looks different from discernment rooted in Love, even when the two questions sound similar from the outside.

Sacred Repatterning stops being a nice idea in a week like this one. Either it holds up under pressure or it doesn't. We cannot undo the events or force agreement. What we can do is notice the pattern we are planting in response to the reports. Are we feeding cynicism, treating every institution and every headline as equally untrustworthy? Are we feeding blind credulity, accepting whatever confirms what we already feared? Or are we choosing something steadier, a discernment held gently in the hand of Love rather than gripped tightly in the fist of fear?

I do not know yet whether camping will find a new place on my calendar this year, or when the parasite outbreak or fires will be extinguished, or when the price at the pump will settle, or how the war will finally resolve. What I do know is that every one of those small daily adjustments from the greens I choose to the gratitude I still manage to feel, is an opportunity to plant something other than fear. Love guides me to hold all those affected in prayers of comfort, and Faith calls me to affirm a greater intelligence at work.

I called it doomscrolling triage when I started writing this. I am renaming it now. Call it Repatterning Triage instead, the practice of meeting each headline not by asking which alarm deserves my attention first, but by asking what pattern I want to plant in response to it.

The facts on the ground keep shifting. The Truth we align with does not have to shift with them. I leave you with this challenge: Pick one thing you rerouted around this week. Sit with it for a minute. Ask what you're planting instead of what you're avoiding. That's the whole practice.