The Seed — Two Paths is the second book in The Beating of War Drums trilogy, exploring how societies and families divide under pressure and how small choices determine whether a community survives, or collapses. Through parallel narratives of resilience and breakdown, this book reveals the fragile systems we depend on, the psychological turning points that shape human behavior in crisis, and the moral decisions that define the future.

Blending history, survival strategy, and human storytelling, The Seed shows readers how to recognize warning signs, strengthen their households, and choose the path that leads to unity rather than fragmentation. It continues the series’ mission: preparing families and communities to endure war, rebuild after disaster, and keep the vital spark of civilization alive when the world is tested.

There is a follow up Personal Journal called: When the World Trembles: Your Personal Journal of Renewal, Preparation, and War – authored by Charles DesJardins

The following pages are adapted from a series of journals (fictional) allegedly recovered in the aftermath of a major conflict, a collection of notebooks attributed to a single family: the Desais.

Though the precise origin remains uncertain, fragments of these journals surfaced among humanitarian archives and private collections years after the event. The handwriting varied, the dates inconsistent, yet their authenticity feels beyond invention.

What survives is less a diary than a record of consciousness, the voice of an ordinary family whose words endured when nearly everything else did not. These entries have been carefully reconstructed, preserving both their raw immediacy and their quiet wisdom.

The Desais’ writings invite us to look at survival not only as endurance, but as a moral art. Their experience reminds us that even amid the ruins of civilization, the human spirit leaves behind its handwriting.

This book is more than a story; it is the record of a family’s awakening.

The Desais began as so many do, ordinary people living within the rhythms of a stable world, quietly trusting tomorrow to resemble today. When the drums of uncertainty began to sound, they turned first not to weapons or walls, but to words. What began as a family conversation became a discipline: a written act of clarity, courage, and accountability.

This book is not meant to be read and shelved, it is meant to be lived in. It is your companion for the days when the world grows uncertain, and your guide for the seasons when it trembles.

Within these pages of When the World Trembles: Your Personal Journal of Renewal, Preparation, and War is a description and reflection of the original Desai journal then there are two personal journals for YOU, they are two journals, two arcs of transformation:

The First Ninety Days — The Journal of Preparation and Renewal

• The First Hundred Days —The Journal of Survival and Endurance

Together they form a single path: the inner journey of readiness and the outer trial of endurance.

The First Ninety Days —Journaling Preparation of the Desai Family

In the three months before crisis, the Desai journals became blueprints of the mind.

Each entry captured a household learning to see itself honestly:

• What do we truly need to live?
• What habits weaken or strengthen us?
• What are our roles, our skills, our fears?
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By writing, they transformed anxiety into planning. Lists became lessons. Their notebooks filled with small, practical awakenings, how to purify water, how to ration, how to steady a frightened child and with reflections on what it means to deserve survival.

“The first rule of preparation,” the father wrote, “is not to buy, but to become.”

Those early journals reveal that preparedness is psychological before it is logistical. They were not recording supplies; they were recording resolve.

Your First 90 Days of Preparation:

The First Ninety Days — The Journal of Preparation and Renewal

The first ninety days are not about storing things but about restoring meaning. They are your days to awaken, to see your world clearly, take inventory not only of supplies but of values, habits, relationships, and fears.

During this period, journaling becomes a daily practice of awareness and re-alignment:

• What truly sustains my body and mind?
• Who are my anchors of trust?
• What must I let go of to live freely and wisely?
• How do I prepare without losing compassion?

Write daily, even if briefly. Each entry builds the scaffolding of resilience a structure of thought and intention strong enough to hold against uncertainty.

Preparation is not about fear. It is the rediscovery of what matters most.

At the end of ninety days, you will know not only what to do in crisis, but who you are when peace falters.

The First Hundred Days —Journaling Survival of the Desai Family

When war reached them, the journals did not end; they deepened.
Ink became testimony. The family chronicled not only what they did to stay alive, but what they did to stay human.

• The first night without power.
• The first meal cooked over scavenged fuel.
• The first act of mercy given to a stranger.

Their entries show the slow erosion of normalcy and the rise of another kind of order, one born of necessity and conscience. The mother began marking each day not by scarcity, but by acts of endurance:

“We survived another dawn without anger.” “We shared our last sugar with a neighbor.”

Through these pages we witness the psychology of survival becoming the philosophy of endurance.

The Return to Reflection

As their story unfolds, these journals will accompany the reader, part witness, part guidebook. They remind us that writing is more than memory; it is the architecture of understanding. Each reader is invited to continue where the Desais leave off to journal their own ninety days of preparation and one hundred days of survival, even if only in imagination.

Write now, while peace allows it. Because when the world changes, your words may become your first tool of survival.

The First Hundred Days — Your Journal of Survival and Endurance

The first 100 hundred days of War represent a different season, one of test and application. These are the imagined, or perhaps real, days after the storm.

They are your record of living when the familiar has broken, when the structures of comfort have vanished, and yet life insists on continuing.

This second journal asks:

• What choices define dignity when the world forgets it?
• How do I sustain hope amid loss?
• How do I  remain generous when everything urges me to withdraw?

Here, journaling becomes an act of preservation, of conscience, of memory, of meaning. What you write may one day guide someone else through their own long night.

When survival becomes endurance, writing becomes resistance.

At the end of these hundred days, you will hold in your hands not just a journal, but a map of the soul under siege.

Epilogue — The Story We Carry

The Desais’ tale is not theirs alone. It is ours. Their two paths remain open before us. Survival is possible. Collapse is possible. The difference lies in how we live today.

This is not a manual. It is a mirror. This is where the manual becomes human.

In the first book of this trilogy, How to Survive the Next World War, I wrote about tools, skills, and preparation. It was practical, food, water, shelter, and medicine. The work of survival stripped to its essentials.

But survival is never just about tools. It is about people. It is about choices. It is about whether families hold together or fall apart. Survival is not only a science; it is a story.

This book tells one such story.

It follows a single family, the Desais, through the fire of collapse. You will watch them endure hunger, cold, mistrust, and despair. But you will see them in two mirrors: one path where they survive, another where they do not.

The facts remain the same: the same famine, the same neighbors, the same winter. What changes are their choices. Do they ration, or squander? Forgive, or resent? Share, or hoard? Trust, or isolate?

The two paths diverge in small decisions that ripple outward. One path bends toward endurance, the other toward collapse.

This book is not prophecy. It does not predict what will come. It is parable. The Desais are not only themselves; they are us. Their kitchen table is our own. Their arguments echo ours. Their choices mirror ours.

Stories of Survival and Collapse sits at the heart of this trilogy.

• The first book taught us how to endure.
• This second book shows us why endurance matters, and how fragile it is.
• The final book will ask us how to prevent war altogether.
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Here, in the middle, we dwell in the human face of survival; where manuals become flesh, where decisions become destiny, and where one family’s story becomes the story of all of us.

Before the storm, there was a home.

It stood on the outskirts of a small town, neither rich nor poor, sturdy but unremarkable. The garden grew wild in summer. The roof leaked when the rains came. The woodstove smoked when the wind shifted wrong. But it was enough.

Inside lived the Desai family: Daniel and Ruth, and their two children, Lena and Arun. Daniel was practical, Ruth was cautious, Lena was curious, Arun was restless. They were, in every way, ordinary.

In those days, life still carried its rhythms:

• Bread baked in the oven, steaming in the morning air.
• Neighbors trading gossip across the fence.
• Children  chasing one another down the dirt road.
• News crackling from an old radio, too distant to matter.

But beyond their small routines, something larger was stirring. Crops were failing in neighboring regions. Markets grew empty. Prices climbed. Rumors whispered of shortages, rationing, unrest. On the radio, talk of conflict far away grew sharper, louder. The fire had not yet reached them, but the smoke was already in the air.

The Desais felt it dimly, in the tightness of Ruth’s jaw as she counted flour, in Daniel’s silence as he stared at the empty fields, in the way neighbors paused before speaking, as if weighing how much truth to share.

This is where our story begins: not at the height of collapse, but at the edge of it. A family, an ordinary house, an ordinary table. Choices waiting to be made.

What follows is not one story, but two.

• In one telling, the Desais endure. They bend but do not break. They ration, forgive, share, and teach. Their survival is hard, but it carries them  through.
• In the other telling, the same family falters. Fear and mistrust grow. Resentment festers. Small mistakes multiply into collapse.
• 
  

Both paths are possible. Both live in the same soil, the same kitchen, the same people.

The difference lies not in the famine, nor the winter, nor the storm. The difference lies in the choices made at the table, in the words spoken or withheld, in the trust given or refused.

This is their story. And in their story, we may see ourselves.

Book II: Stories of Survival and Collapse_ 11

Preface_ 15

Part I: The Family That Prepared_ 19

Chapter 1: The Quiet Preparations_ 19

Chapter 2: The World Shifts_ 29

Chapter 3: The Lights Go Out 39

Chapter 4: Surviving Scarcity_ 49

Chapter 5: Facing Danger 59

Chapter 6: Hard Choices_ 67

Chapter 7: The Escape_ 73

Chapter 8: The Valley of Survivors_ 87

Chapter 9: Enduring the Winter 103

Chapter 10: The Breaking Point 119

Chapter 11: Aftermath_ 133

Conclusion: The Thaw_ 145

Lessons Learned from the First Path_ 151

Transitional Reflection — Between Two Paths_ 153

Part II: The Family That Did Not Prepare_ 155

Chapter 1: When the Lights Went Out 155

Chapter 2: The First Nights_ 167

Chapter 3: The Failed Scavenging_ 175

Chapter 4: The Road Too Late_ 183

Chapter 5: The Shelter That Failed_ 191

Chapter 6: The Raiders_ 199

Chapter 7: The Valley_ 207

Chapter 8: The Winter 215

Chapter 9: Survival Psychology Broken_ 222

Chapter 10: The Thaw_ 229

Chapter 11: The End_ 237

Afterword: The Two Roads_ 243

Reflection — The Two Paths and the Greater Work_ 245

About the Author and Series_ 247

Author: Charles DesJardins, Ph.D.
Series: Trilogy of The Beating of War Drums - The Seed
Genre / Category: Geopolitics, War & Peace, Resilience, Preparedness
Format: Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle (Coming Soon)
Publisher: Independent — Safe Haven USA Press
Official Websites:

www.thebeatingofwardrums.com
www.safehavenusa.org