When thinking about the pieces I liked best from the ADR, however, they are the ones that dealt with the spirit -- often the ones that showed the most heart. Here are three series that I feel best showcase that spirit and heart.
#1 The Holiday Cycle
In a series of stories I’ll call The Holiday Cycle, Greer follows a family for holidays through a hundred years. In the first holiday depicted, Christmas Eve 2050, two civil wars have already ravaged the family's part of the U.S.
One thing I like about the stories is that while it does not shy away from the fact that people will die in collapse scenarios, there will be survivors, who will muddle through, find love, and maybe, just maybe, relocate the real meaning of gifts.
So much of what Greer writes is analytical and abstract. The Holiday Cycle brings these issues home and is able to reliably move me to tears.
#2 The Next Ten Billion Years
This piece sets up a kind of long-game sense of spirituality, looking at, or even beyond, geological time. It is a kind of thought experiment -- or, really, a spirit experiment -- that challenges the power of the dominate (yet often hidden) belief in progress. He explores the intellectual side of his experiment in A Sense of Homecoming.
#3 Adam's Story
Lastly, there is Adam’s Story, which keeps it’s focus sharply on one young man who becomes the last survivor of a town who must migrate to an uncertain future.
I find that the courage to face the truth, while maintaining the ability to act and survive to be the Archdruid Report at it’s best.
