Remembering the Future

Dear Reader,

I believe the future is here with us. And if time is more like a gyre than a river, we brush up against the future more often than we realize – through vision, intuition, synchronicity – ways of remembering what has not yet arrived.

Our ancestors remembered us through dreams and prophecy. They must have tried to imagine the lives of their descendants far beyond the visible horizon, just as I contemplate the lives of my grandson’s children’s children – wondering what kind of world we are shaping for them now.

So, I listen for what the future has to say. Sometimes I hear it in the disquiet of the wind, more often in silence. The future speaks of transformation – of dissolution and renewal, of cycles great and small. It always speaks of these things. Yet it also trembles under the weight of sorrow, violence, and ecological unraveling.

For billions of people, this “future” has already arrived as war, famine, fire, and flood. Political regimes respond, barring the gates and clutching the economic spoils of what were once our commons: land, water, oil, minerals. Nature.

And still, Kosmos does not treat the future as a single destination or a problem to be solved. Again and again, our contributors return us to a subtler orientation: the future is not a time. It is a relationship. A practice. A responsibility we take care of in this very moment.

Greg Anderson invites us to shape the future by looking back with discernment – to learn from the past without being imprisoned by it. Memory, in this sense, is both a record and a teacher. It shows us patterns, consequences, forgotten wisdoms, and unfinished responsibilities. Like the past, the future repeats itself and remembering the past differently can help us mend what lies ahead.

Báyò Akómoláfé reminds us that real change rarely enters through well-designed doorways. It comes instead through cracks – moments of rupture that unsettle our certainties and loosen our grip on familiar frames. Cracks are not solutions. They do not guarantee safety or coherence. But they are openings where new forms of belonging might begin to take shape.

And Fan Yang, in a remarkable position paper, A Commons-Based Architecture for Climate Finance, speaks in the language of stewardship rather than control, of holding what matters in trust rather than claiming ownership. She asks what it would mean to design our institutions, economies, and currencies not for extraction or accumulation, but for care, regeneration, and the well-being of Earth’s gifts and the future generations we will never meet.

As I reflect on these themes, I remember our founder, Nancy Roof – her vision, her fierce devotion, and her unwavering faith that humanity could awaken to its belonging with all Life. Nancy understood that transformation is not merely external. It begins in consciousness, in culture, in the stories we tell about who we are and what we are here to serve.

For the past seven years, I have stewarded Kosmos as a volunteer, with few material resources but immense gratitude for Nancy’s guiding example and for the generosity of this community. Many of you have written to share how Kosmos has accompanied your own journey. Thank you. Your letters, reflections, and support are daily inspirations

If we are afraid to listen to the future, we may miss the shimmering beauty beyond the cracks, the grace notes, and widening field of relationship ahead. New ways of belonging and creating together. New capacities to open, share, endure, and repair.

Whatever emerges next, Kosmos will remain devoted to awakening awareness and nurturing the inner and outer conditions for transformation, in service to all Life.

I invite you to dream into this future with us. Your presence and your discernment matter. The future of Kosmos lives in all of us who sense the turning of the world and who wish to meet it awake.

With love and steadiness,
Rhonda Fabian
Kosmos Editor

Kosmos Journal Volume 25 Issue 6

emergence

Learning from the Past to Reimagine the Future

By Greg Anderson

This reflective essay explores how our relationship to the past shapes the futures we can imagine. Greg Anderson invites readers to examine inherited narratives, question entrenched assumptions, and use history as a creative resource—opening possibilities for more humane, relational, and life-affirming ways of living forward together.

modernity

The Unbehaving World

By Báyò Akómoláfé

Akomolafe explores “cracks” as sacred ruptures in the architecture of modernity—sites where the world exceeds its own design and invites new forms of becoming. Rejecting doors, solutions, and behavioral frames, he gestures toward a geophilosophy of fugitivity, where instability reveals emergent possibilities beyond human exclusivity and settled assumptions.

Presence

‘What the Pond Teaches’, ‘Crow in a Persimmon Tree’, ‘One Morning’

By Pradeep R. Varadwaj and Jerome Gagnon

These poems offer a contemplative passage through stillness, grief, and renewal. From the pond’s quiet teachings to the crow’s unexpected joy and the monarch’s morning-lit flutter, they gesture toward the subtle ways the living world invites us back into relationship, presence, and the possibility of ripening.

Stewardship

Position Paper | A Commons-Based Architecture for Climate Finance

By Fan Yang

Drawing from systems thinking, indigenous stewardship models, and emerging legal innovations (such as rights of nature and intergenerational governance), the author outlines pathways toward a multi-level trust structure that redistributes authority, redefines prosperity, and embeds long-term ecological resilience at the core of global governance.

Attention

Can Anything Still Touch Us?

By Dr. Renatus Derbidge

A single wildlife photograph stops a writer mid-scroll, breaking through the numbness of our image-saturated lives. Confronted by a sloth clinging to a fencepost in fragmented habitat, he explores what it means to still be touched—by grief, tenderness, kinship—and what such moments ask of us.

Continuity

The Coincidence of Meaning

By Martina Moneke

Martina Moneke explores Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity—the mysterious convergence of inner experience and external event that carries symbolic significance. Using Jung’s famous “golden scarab” story as a point of departure, the essay explores how such moments suggest a more profound coherence in reality, one in which psyche and matter reflect a shared source.

belonging

The Unbroken Field

By Michael Gray

A contemplative essay weaving Tarthang Tulku’s Time–Space–Knowledge vision with quantum theory, grief, and the longing for coherence in a fractured world. Through personal loss, philosophical inquiry, and a search for belonging, the author explores how openness, interconnection, and spacious awareness may form a field large enough to hold human suffering and renewal.

Kosmos Journal publishes a diversity of voices that reflect the complexity of our time and the depth of our shared inquiry. The views expressed by individual contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Kosmos editorial team, Board of Directors, or affiliated partners. We honor the freedom of expression as a path to deeper understanding, and we strive to hold space for perspectives grounded in compassion, truth-seeking, and the well-being of all Life.