What a marvelous sight greeted me at the bottom of the stairs this morning! Topaz was watching a baby bull snake lying still on the floor. I only saw it when I took a step and it wiggled away. I fended off Wren and picked it up gently. It was so gentle and calm, and curled and crawled around my hand as I considered the best place to release it, but it never panicked or thrashed.

After I released it into the wood pile, where I hope it finds enough mice to remain there forever and live long and grow big, I came back inside and tried to put her collar on Topaz as she knelt at her food bowl, the way I often do. I reached around her neck with the bell and she jerked and flipped around wide-eyed. I tried again now that she knew it was just me, but she wrenched away; after I washed my hands she accepted the collar willingly as usual. I’m grateful for the little dose of wonder that started my day.

One reason I practice gratitude is because of my innate pessimism. Well, I can’t say innate in the sense that I was born with it, I’m not sure I was. But it came to me early through a series of prophetic dreams that started while I was still in single digits. So this article about likely societal collapse didn’t shock me as it might some of you, should you choose to read it. History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, contends economist and international relations expert Dr. Luke Kemp in his new book Goliath’s Curse, which analyzes 5000 years of human civilizations’ collapses.

“…as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

Sound familiar? Kemp lays the imminent demise of our so-called civilization at the feet of “leaders who are ‘walking versions of the dark triad’ – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism”; and while he says that a fundamental transformation of society on a global scale could save our species, “the large, psychopathic corporations and [world leaders] which produce global catastrophic risk” make self-destruction more likely.

This reflects, to one degree or another, my fundamental world view since I was a child. It’s less popular and less acceptable than believing in aliens, so I don’t articulate it often. It’s something of a relief to read it so clearly outlined by a scholar of human cultural history.

Kemp suggests that “even if you don’t have hope, it doesn’t really matter. This is about defiance. It’s about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn’t contribute to the problem.”

Hope is a conundrum for me. It can mean a passive wish for good things, but I prefer the interpretation of Joanna Macy, who died last month at 94, that hope is a verb, that how we live matters, and that this time in history is one of great unraveling and also of the potential for a Great Turning.

My life’s trajectory continues to lean into celebrating this fragile, spinning globe and all the Life that supports our tiny existence. It’s really a question of perspective, of world view: Domination or collaboration? Each of us chooses how to live, every living moment of every day.

Though it’s taking a lot longer than from tadpole to frog, I’m grateful for my own metamorphosis through the years. And grateful to photograph a fully formed froglet flying through the water—next challenge: film it.