Out of Control...

She hadn't intended on starting a cult. It was one of those things that could have happened to anybody. 

Okay, maybe not anybody. It was one of those things that just seemed to happen sometimes. 

Okay, maybe not sometimes. It was one of those things that you look back on and still can't quite figure out what the hell just happened.

It started with an accidental social media post. 

She had woken up in the middle of the night with a thought, that at the time seemed genius so she wrote it down in her notes program and went back to sleep; fully realizing that when she read it in the morning it probably wouldn't be genius at all but at least this way she could get back to sleep. 

But, as it was the middle of the night, she hadn't typed it up in the notes program but had sent it out into the world. Which by the time she woke in the morning had been reposted 2000 times. And she had gained 10,000 new followers. 

And she had been right. What had seemed genius at 2 AM made very little sense in the bright light of morning. 

"If all one sky, why different weather systems?"

When the local news called her to get more information about "the local woman whose post was 'Storming' the world" she debated talking to them. She knew her 15 minutes of fame would end with the interview, as soon as she explained the wacky dream she had been having and how she hadn't meant to share the note at all, but she also knew she was already being memed so she might as well at least try to cut the embarrassment off quickly.

It didn't work out that way. 

She was told later that the whole time she was talking she was getting more and more followers. A friend of hers trademarked "All One Sky" for her while she was on the air, realizing that if she didn't someone else would. She went back to read the transcript and still couldn't really understand what had happened.

"...yes, that's right, I hadn't even meant to send it out in the world. I had been having a dream, and you know how sometimes in dreams you think you have a very profound thought and later realize it was only dream logic? Well in the dream I was trying to understand how, if the world is covered in one sky, we have different weather systems. I mean, it's not like North America is under one bubble, and South America another. I was imagining like clear walls between areas, like the world sectioned off into giant terrariums. But we don't have that. So why can't we move weather around? Why if it's raining in Australia and causing massive flooding, why can't we pull that system to someplace we are having massive drought? Which, I totally get, people have been thinking about for years. But why do we talk about it the way we do? Why if the whole world is under one sky, if we are all sharing this one atmosphere, why do we say it's hurricane season in the Atlantic, or it's Monsoon season in India or there is an Artic Vortex? I mean, isn't it more accurate to just say it's hurricane season without sectioning it off like that? It's all connected."

"Like the butterfly wings theory?"

"Maybe, sort of. But more direct. More like throwing a pebble in a pond and then calling the ripple of waves out something else. Like it's ripple season on Walden Pond, totally ignoring it was rock skipping time on the shore."

"Oh, so this is a climate change argument."

"What? No, I mean, yeah, it is all connected there as well. You can't release pollution in one place and not expect it to drift all over the globe, we've seen it with satellite images of forest fire smoke and volcanic eruptions so of course pollution would be the same thing."

And it kept going like that. The more she seemed to be rambling the more people were following and tagging her in their own posts about interconnectivity. And it became about more than just weather or pollution or butterfly theory or...it became All One Sky.

And everytime she tried to clarify that she hadn't really meant anything except to write down a weird sentence stuck in her head from an every weirder dream it just kept growing. 

All One Sky, now her trademark thanks to her quick thinking friend, started getting donations. So she registered it as a nonprofit. She couldn't see taking people's money that they thought they were sending to do good in the wider world and just living off of it. That was the worst sort of interconnectedness. Which she said out loud in another interview which lead to another round of follows and even more donations and now she was being memed next to Keanu Reeves. And then she was being interviewed next to Keanu Reeves on one of the late night talk shows and her donations and follows skyrocketed even more. 

She was named one of the most influential activists of 2023. But she wasn't an activist. She was just one person trying to do the best with what had been given to her. Trying to do the most good with things she hadn't ever sought to receive. To spread a blanket of kindness under All One Sky. 

And the donations flooded in. 

"People just want an opportunity to be the good in the world. But no one tells us how. People just scream about how awful everyone is and how scary everyone is and nobody takes a breath and realizes that screaming is what is scary. Being mad at everyone else is what is awful. If we just take a minute and look at the world as one place, All One Sky, we realize we need to stop throwing rocks in the pond and blaming the ripple for flooding the beach. You know?"

They did know. Apparently. 

So now she was holding weekly All One Sky meetings. People would come from all over. First all over the city, then all over the state, now all over the world. She had a guest speaker from Australia talking about the massive flooding and how people could help. She had a guest speaker from the weather station in Antarctica come and talk about how they had discovered smog in the permafrost. She had local teachers talk about books with missing pages. She had politicians and preachers. She had musicians and actors. Her only rule was they had to speak about how to unify, not divide. There was no talk about us vs. them. It could only be All One Sky focused. 

She left the public forums and set up a new space. One that was only focused on All One Sky. She didn't have anything against people making a living working on a troll farm, not really, she hated what they did but understood for a lot of them it was the best way to support their families, but it wasn't part of her messaging and she didn't want it amplified. She got some push back for that. Free speech! You're censoring me! She said she wasn't, that's why she was leaving, not blocking them or forcing them to go. They could say whatever they wanted about her. She just didn't want to stick around and listen. And that was about her, not about them. She couldn't focus on doing the most good if she was feeling hurt over a comment someone posted about her teeth looking so wonky and how she should spend less time on All One Sky and work on All One Direction.

So she left.

People left with her.  

So now she had her own website, her own social media systems, her own in person meeting space, her trademarked catchphrase, her registered nonprofit and a large following of people who waited every day to hear what she had to say and sent her, and others that they had heard about because of her, donations of either time or money, to make good things happen in the world. 

She hadn't intended on starting a cult. But she wasn't mad about it either.