About

I’m Mary Tracy and I’m a writer and yoga teacher. I was born in South America, and I now live in the UK.

My people are the misfits, the “failures”, the losers, the outcasts, with souls that crave art and meaning, and hearts that ache from witnessing the devastation of our modern landscape.

I write with my heart and soul about how to BE in this world without losing one’s marbles. I want to help people cope in a world gone mad.

We are living through the Burning Times, when all the Official Narratives of our culture are crumbling right before us. We can no longer follow a certain path and expect good results.

There is no path anymore.

(I’m writing a book about this)

How to Stay Sane

The best way to stay sane in an insane culture is to drink deep and often from the well of ancestral wisdom and truth. This is not a metaphor.

We can no longer rely on mainstream culture’s stories and narratives to stay healthy. We must find other sources.

I aim to help the spread of sanity by writing truthful, heartfelt words. Sometimes these will take the form of politics. Sometimes it will take the form of culture. Or my own personal struggles. All that matters is that it’s written truthfully, for it to have a healing effect on our psyches and hearts.

About Widdershins

This site started off as a project to help people struggling with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

Anyone who has ever gone to therapy for depression will tell you that the “right thoughts” have the power to heal you, and the “wrong thoughts” can make you sick.

Mental illness, in its mildest versions, is directly related to the stories we believe, the stories we tell ourselves. And these stories in turn come from the culture we live in. These are the stories our culture tells about itself, about its people.

Over here we don’t talk about “thoughts”, but rather about “stories”.

The whole world is undergoing a deeper, radical transformation of its very foundations, its core stories.

On a global level, it looks like we can no longer answer questions such as “what does it mean to be human” and “where are we going“.

On a personal level, it looks like being confronted, over and over again, with questions such as “what the Hell even is my life?!?!“, and “why does everything look so messed up“, and of course “how am I suppose to adult?!“.

Previous generations weren’t this lost because what their ancestors had done had more or less “worked”. Today we must rethink everything. And it is exhausting.

This is a safe space, a haven to find solace amidst the insanity of our dominant culture.

No, really, everything is falling apart

The institutions that used to hold us are falling apart. Normal is not coming back. The systemic breakdown of life as we know it is the new normal.

More and more people will be going through this, and yet when it happens, it’s terrifying. The old certainties no longer apply.

These are the times of uncertainty and the unknown.

Our goal shouldn’t be to try and go back to the “old story” that didn’t work for us. Our goal should be to move to a new story, whatever it may be.

We are losing a lot of what we grew up taking for granted. Security, predictability, knowing that so long as we did what I our parents did, we would be OK.

The end of this world, our world, our familiar world, doesn’t have to be the end of THE world. (See: The Uncivilisation Manifesto)

How do we cope with everything that’s going on?

I want to talk about how we cope with the reality of not being better off than your parents. I want to talk about how we cope with not having a stable home, or a stable relationship, or a stable community.

How does our psyche cope with the gap between the life we have been told to expect and the life we actually have?

We need to learn to accept the shape our lives have taken, rather than the shape we expected them to take.

There’s only one way to go, when life presents itself like this, and that way is down. Into despair, and further still, into the roots of the Underworld itself.

This descent is fraught and potentially fatal. Yet if we learn how to navigate the deadly currents of the Underworld, we can reach a deeper truth, that can heal us from the malaise of mainstream civilisation.

We live in an age of collapse. This much is certain, and it is not up for debate. We need to look at it, recognise it, name it, describe it… Accept it.

The dominant culture does not want to acknowledge this collapse. This is done in many ways, but one that I prefer to focus on is this: by systematically ignoring the people whose lives embody the collapse of these decaying stories.

In other words, there aren’t any “unemployed” people, there aren’t any “single” people, there aren’t any poor, hardworking people, there aren’t any “homeless” people. On and on, the system refuses to acknowledge the existence of people for whom life isn’t “working”.

Unless we speak out, the world will continue to tell these stories, and as more and more people bear the brunt of this collapse, they will blame it on themselves, getting sicker and sicker.

I am trying to write a book about this. So if you feel this is playing out in your life, and you want someone to talk to, do e-mail me.

An extra-ordinarily shaped life

To be sure, we don’t all experience this collapse in the same way. Some people are doing fabulously, living fantastically successful lives for all the world as if this collapse wasn’t happening. Social media ensures these people get the most attention, further enhancing the perception that everybody’s life looks like this.

Mine doesn’t. My life is made of the collapse of all the mainstream narratives.