Headwater
Headwater
Seneca Creek rises up out of ancient, wrinkled folds of earth, out of timelessness, an immense continuity.
When I breathe in the space and the sweep from the observation tower at the top of Spruce Knob, it is this image, this whole idea of it, that seems to be what finally distills from my last 30 hours of ranging up and down this stream.
My eyes settle on the long sunken wooded ravine below my perch where the creek has cut into the folds of the mountains, and then beyond that into the purple hued distance and the curves of the overlapping step hills of the Alleghenies that seem to assimilate into a boundaryless haze. I have to strain a little, but I think I can still hear water.
It is a muted echo and may only be a sound that is slowly dying away within my own consciousness – like the diminishing ring of a chime long after it has been struck. Yet up here I want to believe that it is the real thing, the faint descant of flow and riffle mixed in with the feckless ridge winds.
The morning before, I began my trek early in a gray chill.
I remember as I got started that there were a couple of blue jays bobbing around indifferently in the dead lower branches of some Red Spruce trees looming along side the path. I felt briefly then like I had happened in on a pulse, something that had its own inexplicable logic and rhythm, a noisome, feral ceremony of some kind, a liturgy of the dawn, of the night spirits lifting into awakening, the marking of darkness beginning to meld into slow daylight.
Late July is my time of year to come up to this country. It’s good for driving away the dregs of lowland dog days. But mostly I love to track this creek, to walk with its unfoldings, to chase around its spirits. It is a trip that tugs at me all the time, like a lost and insistent child that wants to be heeded and held close and long.
Seneca Creek trickles up from the wet core of the Monongahela National Forest at about 3000 feet in the rises of Pendleton County, West Virginia, draining the high narrow valley slung in between the western dip of Spruce Knob – the Mountain State’s highest elevation – and Little Allegheny Mountain. And I am at its very beginning.
Up ahead, ground scud is just starting to burn off in the intensifying heat of the shrouded sun, slowly unveiling an open wrack of Sphagnum bogs, abandoned beaver dams, and a limberlost of decaying, lichen shackled Spruces, most half fallen over but some still spiring up defiantly into the mist.
A breeze slides down from the higher elevations. This is a zone of purity, like the clean splendor of a Canadian wild, a primordial muskeg drapery, a ghost left behind in the high Alleghenies of a boreal, glacially seized landscape, still claiming cold remembrance. But underneath it, I sense a creek, a nascent wetness below the ooze, percolating, biding its own murky time, fathering its waters, getting ready to pour out into day.
A little further on I hear pulsing. I know that the soggy puddles have coalesced into a flow. And I want to see it fresh, fresh out of the underground, fresh out of the decay and ferment. So I slip expectantly through the trees.
And, as I had guessed, Seneca Creek is there, materialized. It is all light and shadows, delicate and clear, almost as if it were celebrating its own sparkling emergence from the depths of the muck, a slick ribbon of stream sluicing over the rocks, pulling drafts of refrigerated air along with it.
I stand in place for a couple minutes, balanced on the gossamer, hypnotic boundary between earth and water until a word is formed from the sound, from a creek mindfulness that has begun to settle in on me. Allegheny, it seems to whisper, Allegheny, Allegheny – an Algonquian expression, I remember. It translates into something akin to Eternity or Beginning of Many Waters. And it is everywhere in these mountains, Eternity, the Beginning of Waters. You are young with it, awash in it, source and sapling and spendthrift seed in it, the stream’s own fresh language.
I continue down the old narrow gauge rail bed from the logging days, which is now officially designated as the Seneca Creek Trail, soon passing out of the boreal reaches of red spruce dominance into upland hardwood stands of red maple, beech, cherry, and streamside yellow birch.
After about three miles, just beyond a grassy clearing – the remains of a long abandoned farm now called the Judy Springs Walk-in Campground – the road constricts into a rocky footpath that hugs the stream banks more tightly as the valley steepens. It is after this point that the trail also becomes cloistered in tall forest and doglegs back and forth from one side of the creek to the other. Water seeps from ragged layers of mudstone and clumps of woodland ferns and open roots. Papery crustose lichens in dark shades of green and occasional floppy liverworts glisten on the rocks where they seem to have been haphazardly pasted on.
Not too far up ahead the stream drops off an edge and begins a whole other phase of its life. After deftly negotiating a wobbly crossing on somebody’s flimsy makeshift bridge made of yellow birch trunks right before this point, I cautiously ease my way down sideways along a path which cuts off steeply from the main trek. I kick up a lot of loose stones and gravel as I slide. When I reach the bottom, I am in the full view – and embrace – of the High Falls of the Seneca Creek. This is about as far downstream as I can go. The remainder of the trail was washed pretty much into oblivion by the 1985 West Virginia floods.
It is a wide waterfall, and the diving water has scoured out a bowl that amplifies the deepest resonances of the plunge into an eternal hollow roar. I feel a little like Livingston when the Zambezi brought him, finally, to the brink of Victoria Falls: suddenly it’s just there in all of its huge naked thunder. The water pours over the moss slickened walls into a shallow pool where all the powers of the mountains seem to be gathering together before the final run into the North Fork – and then ultimately into a far settling in the humid, flattened expanse of the Chesapeake Bay. It is a little hard to imagine, all that distance.
Maybe in another time I would have been like Ishmael, drawn along by the articulations of the creek to the big waters and Moby Dick and the whales. But today what is being pressed into the weave of my genes is the irresistible instinct for cold upland creeks. This is where I want to stay. And I believe then that the urging will be given down through some newly minted gene and could affect generations.
I can imagine some of my progeny waking up on a hot, steamy morning and feeling sudden cool rivulets veining their bodies, driving out the hangover of sweaty heat killed sleep. What is seeping into me may be my one worthwhile segue to the future. I may have no other such lasting connective tissue as this itinerant spirit of stream, this bloodline of heedless clear waters.
Later on, heading back toward the spongy meadows that squeezed out the creek, I set up for the night at Judy Springs near a solitary apple tree. I gather wood and, after a couple of tries, kindle a fire.
I have a strange awareness right then that I am here on a homesteading project. I’m trying to find my way to the high hidden ground where I can finally take root and tap into the eternal sweet clarity of a creek, trying to find the still point of being where longing and landscape finally meet.
I slouch, legs lotus folded, leaning back against a big Sycamore log – which now seems to have become a permanent piece of campfire architecture. This is the best posture for fire gazing. I fix my gaze on the settling, glowing coals, almost like I was staring into the red hot hissing oven where the earth was fused, waiting until the last dying ember of my own consciousness is swirled around and swallowed up in the creek, in the long liquid beginning of time.
The Role of the Visionary
The Role of the Visionary
Dear Kosmos Family,
Welcome to a new year and a fresh edition of Kosmos – Visionary Spirit.
A visionary is someone who sees beyond the present, beyond the ordinary. For the mystic, vision can arise in a dream, a visitation, the crucible of prayer. For the secular prophet, it can come as a flash of insight, a mathematical breakthrough or scientific leap. And for the visionary artist, in a work that transcends physical reality. Visionaries tap a wellspring of symbolic and harmonic wisdom and activate hidden potentialities. Hildegard von Bingen, Da Vinci, Nostradamus, Pythagoras, William Blake, Buckminster Fuller, Sri Aurobindo, Najmuddin Kubra…a visionary is a seer – even in times of darkness, when they are needed most.
A year ago we greeted the new decade with a call for ’20/20 clarity’ about the converging crises, or polycrisis, facing our world. Now, with ’20/20 hindsight’, we see all too clearly how swiftly crisis can accelerate.
The unfolding year showed us, in painfully sharp detail, the fault lines in our failing systems. Health. Economy. Democracy. Justice. Education. Biodiversity. Climate.
For some, the year’s events triggered fear of imminent civilizational collapse.
For some, a wake-up to the preciousness of life, and greater compassion.
For some, rage at the systems of power.
For some, grief.
And for many, all the above.
Truly, the present quality of time is like no other in our living memory. What is the role of the visionary in these extraordinary times?
The polycrisis has been called a profound global initiation from human adolescence to adulthood, that can lead us to new insight and maturity in the choices we make. Vision and initiation are deeply connected. Our ancestors participated in initiatory rites of passage and vision quests. Alone in the womb of nature, or in ceremonial circles, they prayed, drummed and danced for signs and visions to help guide them.
Like our ancestors, we too are born to manifest our visionary potential. We are meant to be inspired by the wonders of Life. Vision is the very thing we and the Earth need now.
I believe many of the writers and artists in Kosmos are visionaries for our time, and in this winter edition we welcome their visionary spirit. In a very special conversation, Choosing Earth, Duane and Coleen Elgin share a whole-systems view of the converging adversity trends facing humanity and offer three possible scenarios for the next fifty years of life on Earth. Our diverse contributors also offer their visions for global education, governance, and regenerative culture.
The greatest obstacle to vision is unhealed trauma – personal, historic and systemic. This is the taproot for much of the great suffering we endure today. Thomas Hübl, Francis Weller, and Paul Levy – three transformational healers – explore our collective woundedness, and how, through initiation and vision, we can address trauma and shadow.
In articles like Thoughtforms, the Materialization of Sustained Ideas, and Across the Creek, Land Energy Experiences, we are asked to open our minds directly to non-ordinary states of being, subtle energies and sacred sight.
Songwriter David Berkeley talks with us and performs from his new album, ‘Oh Quiet World‘, composed as a prayerful offering for his children. And, as always, in this edition there is beauty, poetry, and much more.
A wise visionary doesn’t live with her head in the clouds. She understands the challenges and knows that some dreams can’t be accomplished in a single lifetime. The visionary spirit is co-creative, intelligent and optimistic.
Resilience relies on vision. Hope is grounded in it. Transformation is nourished by it. And survival depends on it.
When we think of vision, we often think of technology. Future technologies we can hardly imagine are near – VR, AI, human-like robots and abundant clean energy, to name only a few. It will take great vision and will to bend the arc of technological progress toward the betterment of society, (as Japan envisions in its Society 5.0), and away from the forces of oppression and greed. A new spirit of global citizenship and collaboration is needed to guide us, with the Millennium Development Goals at its core. In the over-developed world, this will require simpler ways of living.
If the last 200 years have been shaped by industrialization, materialism and disparity, may the coming era be characterized by a flowering of regeneration, stewardship and sharing. Decades from now, may we look back on this year with 20/20 Insight – as a Great Pause that seeded deeper awareness and a new vision for life on Earth.
In Gratitude,
RF
The Kosmos Winter 2021 Cover is from the painting Communion, by Nancy Earle. See more of Nancy’s work in this edition.
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What Is Global Education and Why Does It Matter?
What Is Global Education and Why Does It Matter?
Adapted from, Educating Students to Improve the World
Global education are both practices guided by a set of purposes and approaches intentionally created to provide opportunities for students to develop global competencies, and the theories that explain and inform those practices and their effects. Global competencies encompass the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that help students develop, understand, and function in communities which are increasingly interdependent with other communities around the world, and that provide a foundation for lifelong learning of what they need to participate, at high levels of functioning, in environments in continuous flux because of increasing global change.
A competence encompasses more than knowledge and skills “It involves the ability to meet complex demands, by drawing on and mobilizing psychosocial resources (including skills and attitudes) in a particular context. For example, the ability to communicate effectively is a competency that may draw on an individual’s knowledge of language, practical IT skills, and attitudes towards those with whom he or she is communicating” (OECD 2005, p. 4).
A quintessentially global topic is climate change. Global competency should enable people to understand climate change, to adapt to mitigate its impact, and hopefully to revert it. Climate Change Education, a subdomain of Education for Sustainable Development, is a modality of Global Education focused on preparing people to achieve more sustainable ways to relate to our habitat. It encompasses preparation to adopt practices that are known to be sustainable, for example slowing down population growth, consuming a diet with a smaller carbon footprint, or using renewable energies. These practices may be individual in the choices we make about our own consumption and lifestyle, or they may be collective, the result of choices we make as citizens when we participate in the democratic process in various levels of government or when we influence the behavior of corporations. Government policies are essential to slowing global warming, and they are subject to influence and preferences by citizens, educated to understand the scientific consensus on climate change and with the capacity to exercise influence as citizens.
But Climate Change Education encompasses also the development of the innovation skills necessary to slow down climate change, which requires advancing knowledge and inventing technologies that can help us transform our interactions with the environment, in a way reinvent our way of life. As a result, educating to mitigate climate change and for sustainability involves equipping people with the necessary skills for such advancement of knowledge and invention.
There are different intellectual traditions that influence how global education is defined and conceptualized. These perspectives draw on various intellectual traditions: globalism, nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, and indigeneity. They are anchored in diverse core concepts: justice, equity, diversity, identity and belonging, and sustainable development. They include perspectives that accept the existing international social and economic order, along with others that are more critical (Davies et al. 2018).
Following a cosmopolitanist and critical perspective, in my own work developing global citizenship curriculum, I have adopted the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a guiding framework because they articulate a capacious vision of sustainability and because they tie global education as a theoretical field and practice to a set of concepts that are widely shared across many fields of human endeavor, including education, but extending also into public health, work and industry, poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, poverty reduction.
These seventeen goals are deeply rooted in multiple disciplines focused on human and social development. The Sustainable Development Goals pose also a challenge to the very notions of development and social progress, emphasizing the interdependence of inclusion, social justice, peace and environmental sustainability (Reimers et al. 2016, 2017).
Global education encompasses the traditional disciplines in service of helping students understand the world in which they live: sciences, social sciences, and humanities. For example, to understand climate change it is necessary to understand the processes that explain how climate works, a subject of scientific study. A global education includes also opportunities for students to imagine and enact strategies to advance human well-being, which draws on the capacities of invention and ethical reasoning. This might include helping students to develop the curiosity to advance scientific understanding in a particular domain, or the desire to create products or services that advance well-being or solve problems, as with the previous example of reinventing toilets to address sanitation and advancing health.
Global education is not necessarily an additional curriculum domain, rather, it is a set of clear purposes which can help align the entire curriculum with real world questions, challenges, and opportunities. As such, global education is a way to help teachers as well as students understand the relationship between what is learned in school and the world outside the school. Global education encompasses also a series of approaches, pedagogies, curricula, and structures to support such instruction that is explicitly designed to help build the breadth of skills that can help students function in a deeply interdependent and increasingly globally integrated world. The Australian Curriculum Corporation defines it as follows:
Global education is defined as an approach to education which seeks to enable young people to participate in shaping a better shared future for the world through: Emphasizing the unity and interdependence of human society, Developing a sense of self an appreciation of cultural diversity, Affirming social justice and human rights, peace building and actions for a sustainable future, Emphasizing developing relationships with our global neighbors, Promoting open-mindedness and a predisposition to take action for change. (Curriculum Corporation 2008, p. 2)
Global education includes multiple specific domains, such as environmental education and education for sustainability, understanding global affairs, understanding the process of globalization and of global interdependence, developing intercultural competency, fostering civic engagement, human rights, and peace education. Sciences and humanities are the disciplinary foundations of global education, for there is no way to understand the world without the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that result from learning to think as scientists do or reason as humanists can do.
An effective program of global education is not the additive result of a series of isolated experiences in various curriculum silos, but the result of coherent and integrated learning opportunities that can help students understand the relationship between what they learn in various grades and subjects in service of understanding the world and of being able to act to improve it. As such, a global education helps students think about complexity and understand the systems which undergird global issues and global interdependence.
References
Brueck, H. (2019). A $350 toilet powered by worms may be the ingenious future of sanitation that Bill Gates has been dreaming about. Business Insider. Curriculum Corporation. (2008). Global perspectives: A framework for global education in Australian Schools. Carlton South, VC: Curriculum Corporation.
D’Agostino, R. (2018). How does Bill Gates’s ingenious, waterless, life-saving toilet work? Popular Mechanics. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a24747871/bill-gates-lifesaving-toilet/.
Davies, I., Ho, L. C., Kiwan, D., Peck, C. L., Peterson, A., Sant, E., et al. (Eds.). (2018). The Palgrave handbook of global citizenship and education. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Montaigne, M. (1575). On the education of children. http://essays.quotidiana.org/montaigne/ education_of_children/. NASA. (2020).
Global climate change. Vital signs of the planet. Retrieved from January 14, 2020, from https://climate.nasa.gov/. OECD. (2005). Definition and selection of key competencies: Executive summary. Paris: OECD. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/35070367.pdf. OECD and Asia Society. (2018).
Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world. Paris: OECD. https://asiasociety.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/teaching-for-global-competence-ina-rapidly-changing-world-edu.pdf. Reimers, F., Chopra, V., Chung, C., Higdon, J., & O’Donnell, E. B. (2016).
Empowering global citizens. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace. Reimers, F., et al. (2017).
Empowering students to improve the world in sixty lessons. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace. UNESCO. (2017). Education for people and planet (Global education monitoring report). Paris: UNESCO.
The free e=book, Educating Students to Improve the World, can be downloaded here:
file:///Users/fbi/Downloads/2020_Book_EducatingStudentsToImproveTheW.pdf
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Choosing Earth | with Duane and Coleen Elgin
Choosing Earth | with Duane and Coleen Elgin
Editor’s note: Duane Elgin’s book, Choosing Earth projects a half-century into the future to explore our world in a time of unprecedented transition. Duane offers a whole-systems view of the converging adversity trends facing humanity and three major scenarios for the future that are most likely to emerge from these powerful trends. By illuminating deep psychological, spiritual and scientific changes that are already underway, it offers hope for the emergence of a mature, planetary civilization beyond our times of crisis. Based on a lifetime of research and a decade of community organizing by the author, Choosing Earth is an unvarnished look at the reality of our world in crisis and an invitation for us to actively shape our future rather than be passive victims of denial and delay. Recommended.
Kosmos | We have a lot to talk about, but since we have Coleen for a short time, let’s start with you Coleen. I’d like to begin with something in my tradition we call ‘flower watering’. Tell me about Duane and the things that you admire in him. That way, we can get to know him a little better through your eyes.
Coleen Elgin: | There is so much I could say. One of my earliest memories when I first met Duane is sitting on the beach in 1992 reading the manuscript to Awakening Earth that Duane gave me. Reading that manuscript was deeply moving and intuitively I knew my life was going to connect with that work and Duane would be part of the journey. The depth of his work, his presence, and his commitment to this transformational journey was present from the very beginning of our relationship. So was his playfulness and gusto for living a full life.
One of the qualities I admire in Duane is how he has stayed on course, staying true to his vision, being dedicated to the work and to serving the well-being of the larger world. When you are pushing the edge of what culture accepts, you come up against resistance from many sources. For instances, while on the staff of a Presidential Commission on the American Future in 1971, Duane wrote a position paper titled “The Poverty of Our Abundance.” This was met with a great deal of resistance. Yet, Duane carried on with this theme and eventually wrote the book Voluntary Simplicity that became a best seller and was one of the early books helping to ignite the movement toward simpler, more ecological ways of living.
My sense is that people who make significant contributions with their lives often bring the many strands of their life into an integrated whole. Duane has done that. From growing up on a farm with his mystical experiences as a child, to working on a Presidential commission and seeing how government works (and doesn’t work), to finding himself at the Stanford Research Institute as a young man, as a futurist and visionary working with prominent elders such as Joseph Campbell. It seems life was drawing Duane toward transformation from the beginning. And unknown to most, while at the Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI), Duane became a key subject in the earliest government research on psychic functioning. Over a three-year period in the early 1970s, he was regularly involved in exploring both the receptive side of intuition with experiments in “remote viewing” and the expressive side with experiments in “psychokinesis.” Those years of laboratory experiments along with his early meditation practices, provided a deep foundation for the work that followed including the recognition that we live in a living universe. There have been many seeds of transformation that Duane has planted as well as harvested from life. I am honored to be on this journey with Duane, the cosmic farmer.
Kosmos | Wonderful! Duane, Please ‘water Coleen’s flowers’ and tell us about her good qualities.
Duane Elgin | Thank you Rhonda. This feels like a waterfall going into a little flowerpot because Coleen is a big soul — and an old soul. Coleen invested more than a decade in deep meditation. For several hours a day, she meditated in the Tibetan tradition. So she is a deep practitioner in her inner journey and she is also a very talented documentarian —which means she has both an eye for the outer world as well as an inner eye for seeing the invisible aspects of reality. Coleen is also a community builder — a skill I love and appreciate. Before Covid times she would regularly gather together people in community for dinners and rich conversation and she has convened a number of ongoing groups. Coleen also has a background in transformative learning and social change and that has brought many gifts to our current work. So Coleen is an old soul, a community builder, a deep practitioner, and a visionary. I’m delighted with the documentary that she is completing about the great transition humanity is moving through.
Kosmos | Thank you. Beautiful. It is wonderful to have a partner in life that you can work with so closely. Coleen, tell us about the documentary.
Coleen Elgin: | First, I want to say that this documentary project called me. It wasn’t something that was my passion to do. Instead, it knocked on my door over and over calling me to bring it into form. And that was challenging. When you listen to an inner calling it can take time to reveal itself and that can bring up all kinds of feelings and resistances. My job has been to make space for it and to ride the waves of doubt, limitations, and so forth. To allow it to work me and to stay on course, following the intuition, without knowing the outcome.
The message that it frames is the paradox of our time — profound planetary challenges and profound opportunities for transformation, growth and awakening. The documentary looks wide to explore the climate emergency and species extinction, and even wider to include social and economic inequalities, climate justice, over consuming the Earth, and so forth. Woven throughout are stories about the impacts of some of these challenges and also stories of resilience both individual and community.
A number of elders, including Duane, explore “what is being called forth from humanity by this crisis?” By exploring this question we can see that the crisis can’t be “fixed” by technology and it will take more than mere adjustments. It’s a much deeper crisis that calls forth a deeper response and way of being. Humans have the capacity for maturing as a species, for deepening our awareness, and expanding our care to wider circles. And now is the time to work together to embody those capacities on behalf of all of life.
Kosmos | The documentary is called “Facing Adversity,” right?
Coleen Elgin: | The full title is Facing Adversity: Choosing Earth, Choosing Life. Ultimately that’s what this documentary is about — the deep interdependence of life on Earth, that choosing Earth also means choosing life.
Kosmos | It makes me think of a line in the book, “aliveness is our only true wealth”, right? I would love to hear what that means to you. Aliveness is our only true wealth.
Coleen Elgin: | It’s kind of like a koan. You recognize aliveness directly, and then the meaning becomes clear. Aliveness is the foundation for our existence and all of life is included.
Kosmos | I took a medicine walk this morning and the dew on the grass was glittering in the sun. And I thought, ‘it’s more precious than diamonds’ – just to be here in this moment and see this glittering dew is more precious than all the diamonds, all the wealth in the world. When I came back in and I opened your book to prepare, that line just jumped out at me, ‘aliveness is our only wealth’.
I’m aware you must leave us Coleen. Wonderful to meet you. Thank you so much.
Coleen Elgin: | Thank you Rhonda. Good to meet you.
Kosmos | It sounds like her film and your book are a beautiful hand-in-glove. With events changing so rapidly, is it difficult to know when something is finished?
Duane Elgin | Yes! Whether a book or a film, what do you cut and what do you leave? For example, what you just said about the dew on the grass being more precious than all the diamonds in the world needs to go into this interview.
Kosmos | Okay. I’ll make sure to keep it in.
So let’s see. Where should we begin? It’s your new book, Choosing Earth, that inspired this conversation. I’ve been carrying it with me and sharing it with others, including my son. The subtitle is, Humanity’s Great Transition to a Mature Planetary Civilization.” Tell me why you chose that subtitle.
Duane Elgin | For more than twenty years, I’ve been going around the world, giving talks and, before offering my point of view, I would often begin by asking the audience the following question: “In your personal estimation, what is the life stage of the human family? When you look at the behavior of the whole human family, do you think we are behaving like toddlers, adolescents, adults or elders?” After asking the question there would often be a few moments of silence and then the room would explode into conversation.
After a few minutes, I would then ask people to take a vote so we could learn from our collective wisdom. Invariably, a consistent response would come back: Whether it was schoolteachers in India, business leaders in Brazil, students in Europe and the US, a common response came back. Roughly three-quarters of audiences would vote that we are in our adolescence as a species. When I asked people to volunteer their reasons for that estimate, common responses were: “We are rebelling against nature, trying to demonstrate our independence and superiority.” “We are behaving recklessly, without regard for consequences because we think we are immortal.” “We are seeking instant gratification and not inclined to postpone short-term pleasure seeking.”
Then I would ask a further question: “What was it in your life that enabled you to move from your adolescence and into your early adulthood?” Powerful answers came back. Some said their maturing experience was a “brush with death” and seeing that we are not immortal but have a limited time on the Earth to learn and grow. Others would mention “role models” and persons who inspired them to reach higher and explore new potentials associated with greater maturity. Another common theme was people being pushed to “take responsibility for others” – an aging parent or to take on an extra job to earn money needed by the family. Others said that they took a “hard look in the mirror” and realized they could step up to a higher level of maturity.
The important insight that I take away from this is that the human family shares a collective intuition and understanding: We are behaving like adolescents and we know that we could behave differently if we were to move into our early adulthood. We could give priority to others before ourselves; we could delay gratifications and keep long-term commitments; we could take charge of cleaning up after ourselves; we could consume more consciously and, instead of rebelling against nature, we could seek to design ourselves back into nature; and so on.
Stepping back, we can recognize that it is a short step from adolescence to early adulthood. Often this transition is accompanied by many challenges and stresses but the nature of this transition to adulthood is already recognized by billions of people. The transition into adulthood is almost miraculous. However, it happens all the time for individuals. Now we are challenged to bring our personal capacity for awakening to a higher maturity into our collective lives as a human family.
Kosmos | We don’t have the formal initiations for young people that some traditional cultures have. In some religious traditions, there’s perhaps a formal event, like the bar mitzvah in the Jewish tradition, but generally we lack soul-shaking, soul-challenging initiations. What does that mean to us as individuals and for our collective growth?
Duane Elgin | You are right. Most people don’t have initiation ceremonies — already established — for maturing ourselves into our early adulthood. So how do we accomplish this great transition as a species? In my view, the Earth is providing us with that rite of passage right now. The climate crisis combined with species extinction, extreme inequities of well-being, resource scarcity, and much more are together creating a profound rite of passage for humanity. We are creating an extraordinarily demanding experience — which is also an opportunity — for growing up and moving to a new level of maturity as a human family.
Kosmos | You talk about the three pathways for humanity in the book. Can you describe the three trajectories?
Duane Elgin | I see three, major pathways ahead: The first pathway is business as usual which exacerbates adversity trends and leads to the unraveling of institutions and the breakdown and collapse of civilizations around the Earth. The second pathway is one of authoritarianism empowered with artificial intelligence, which is able to pull back before hitting an evolutionary wall but at the cost of human freedoms and creativity. The third pathway is that of a great transition as we move into our early adulthood as a human family and awaken to our responsibility to care for the well-being of all life on the Earth.
Each of these three pathways is now playing out in the world. In more affluent nations, we see the first pathway as strong pressures to return to “business as usual” as many people want to resume their perception of normal — which is living in ways they experienced before the Covid pandemic. The second pathway is that of authoritarianism enabled with artificial intelligence and this is growing rapidly in major countries throughout the world. China has more than a billion people whose lives are monitored and controlled with facial recognition technologies, mobile phone recognition, and more. In the authoritarian pathway, material sustainability is achieved at the cost of a loss of freedoms combined with both rewards and punishments for behaviors.
Kosmos | Is it because we equate ‘thriving’ with economic growth?
Duane Elgin | What does it mean to “thrive”? Let me offer a quote from Simone de Beauvoir. She said, “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.” The primary concern of the two, initial pathways is with perpetuating ourselves — of only not dying, of simply staying alive. In my view, that is not a thriving future.
Kosmos | And what’s the third pathway?
Duane Elgin | The third pathway is one where we collectively take responsibility for the well-being of all life and make a great transition in every area of our lives: the food that we eat, the transportation that we use, the clothes that we wear, the home and community in which we live, the education we seek, and much more. Beyond personal changes are a vast array of other changes ranging from energy sources throughout the economy including businesses and government, the content of television programming and advertising, the nature of education, the structure of the urban environment, and much more. Overall, this is a path of great creativity, new freedoms and conscious choice.
Kosmos | And what’s interesting about the three pathways you propose, is that initially — the next few decades, at least — they all go toward collapse, right?
Duane Elgin | That’s right. All three pathways are present now and, to varying degrees, they will continue into the future. I think sometimes of a roller-coaster ride as an analogy of our global predicament. When the ride begins, we are going up and up — and this is akin to the past few hundred years when much of the world experienced tremendous economic growth, going up and up — although benefits have not been distributed equitably. As we move toward the very top of the roller coaster, we can look out with a grand view of things, and many think this is so wonderful. This lasts only a short while as we move over the top of the ride and then begin to make a swift descent down the other side. We experience a breathtaking whoosh as we begin picking up speed on the downward journey. Returning to our three pathways: One pathway shoots downwards and is unable to stay on the tracks, resulting in a tremendous crash with much death and destruction. A second pathway also descends rapidly at first but is able to slow nearing the bottom by applying strong brakes and severe constraints to the people on the roller coaster. A third pathway also experiences rapid descent with major disruptions and severe dislocations but this is a rite of passage and inspires people to rebuild the ride while it is underway. Before hitting bottom, the ride changes as humanity awakens to new visions of who we are and where we are going. Working together, we create an entirely new trajectory ahead.
People often ask if we have to take a downhill ride on the roller coaster of our global society and economy that is breaking down. Couldn’t we make a more gradual adaptation to sustainability? I reply that we have had a half-century — roughly from 1970 to 2020— in which we recognized there were limits to growth and we could make a more gradual adaptation to a future where we both maintain ourselves and creatively surpass ourselves. However, that window of opportunity has closed and the accelerating descent has begun.
The entire Earth is involved and there is no way off this roller coaster ride. What lies ahead is a period of great unraveling as key institutions — economic, social, political, spiritual — start coming apart. The threads that hold institutions together are beginning to unravel and break, and this continues until there is little to hold us together. With that, we go from a great unraveling to a great fall. The human family plummets downward and we can then: 1) surrender to the downward momentum, feeling helpless to anything other than accepting a great crash at the bottom; or 2) surrender our freedoms to a digital dictatorship that places harsh controls on lives and avoids a devastating crash by pulling back from unsustainable living before hitting bottom, or 3) take charge of our lives at every level by transforming the ride we are on. We experience an unfolding crash filled with destruction and sorrow and this awakens and motivates large numbers of people to create a sustainable pathway forward before hitting absolute bottom and utterly devastating ourselves.
Importantly, the descent of all three pathways has a profound but simple message for humanity: “You cannot go back to the world as it was! The past is gone!” When hope dies that we can somehow return to the past, it opens up a new consciousness for moving toward a sustainable and purposeful pathway into the future. Letting go of hope that we can return to the past creates the conditions for freshly imagining the world anew. Aa a growing proportion of humanity begins to recognize our deep interdependence, that knowing is expressed through more mature actions and ways of being that are the seeds for a new future.
From this time of great awakening can come the opportunity for great choice. We can return to the Earth that is our only home, consciously choosing sustainable ways of living with the Earth. Choose it or lose it.
Importantly, I have not always held the view that a great crash and sorrow lies ahead. Only as I have watched for over 40 years as the window of gradual adaptation has closed have I come to this view. Previously, I worked for a gradual transition to a sustainable future. Only with great reluctance and inner resistance have I come to the conclusion that a time of great sorrow lies ahead. The suffering of all life on Earth can be purposeful. It’s the Earth telling us we’re not going back but, instead, we must go forward into a radically new future.
Kosmos | What kinds of wisdom are in the world right now that can be a bridge to a positive future? Rather than all of us going over the top of the roller coaster of evolution and crashing at the bottom, what wisdom can guide us into a new tomorrow?
Duane Elgin | I think the most foundational wisdom we require is an understanding that indigenous cultures held close for thousands of years. Indigenous wisdom says there is life everywhere and in everything. Therefore, everything we do can connect with a deeper aliveness — the great spirit that permeates and sustains everything. Although this wisdom has been largely neglected in our rush for material development, science and spirituality are now beginning to find common ground. There is an emerging realization that the universe is not a collection of dead matter and empty space; instead, the universe is a living, superorganism. In turn, we are an integral part of this larger aliveness and that has profound implications.
On the one hand, if we regard the universe as essentially non-living or dead at its foundations, then it is natural to exploit that which we think is dead for the living — which we see as ourselves. On the other hand, if we see evidence of aliveness wherever we look, then it is natural to assume that we live in a living universe and feel motivated to take care of all that exists. Aliveness changes how we regard ourselves and the evolutionary journey. We are not who we thought we were — only biological beings. Instead, we are an integral part of the living cosmos — we are biological and cosmic beings — we are bio-cosmic in nature.
Kosmos | You talk also about cosmic purpose. What, in your view, is our cosmic purpose?
Duane Elgin | The universe is alive and we’re a part of that aliveness. From that perspective, our purpose is to learn how to live in the living universe. We are learning about our subtle nature. Beyond our physical and biological nature, we are a larger body of aliveness. The subtle qualities of our body of aliveness are recognizable. Simply stated, we are a body of light, love, music and knowing. We can look into someone’s eyes and immediately see the light that is there. We can also feel the orchestration of resonance that another person embodies — and recognize the music of their being. We can feel and know the qualities of love or compassion that another person personifies. So we’re each an invisible body of essence that endures in the deeper ecology of our living universe. All things end. All being continues. That is the nature of each. Discovering that is why we’re here. We’re learning to live in a living universe.
Kosmos | We have a remarkable opportunity to be fully alive during a time when the universe is becoming aware of itself through us. We have these hidden capacities, as you say, but so much of the universe is hidden from us. I love your description of our cosmic purpose — to align our evolution with the living, evolving universe. It’s very hopeful. And the theme of this edition is visionary spirit. In your view, what is the role of the visionary in today’s world?
Duane Elgin | The role of the visionary is to call us into our maturity, to call us into our sense of collective community on this small Earth, and to call us into the greater aliveness of the living universe. The visionary calls us into the miracle that who we are as a body of light, love, music and knowing.
A visionary calls us to recognize that 95% of the known universe is invisible and, because we are an integral part of the universe, it means a large part of who we are is invisible as well. The visionary says, let’s pay attention to the essence of who we are. Let’s not put all of our energy and attention into the thin slice of material reality. Instead, the visionary calls forth larger potentials, subtle knowing, and love to unfold on the journey ahead.
Kosmos | And to come back to the practicalities of living day-to-day, what do you think our lives will look like 50 years from now? How will our daily lives change?
Duane Elgin | I think the changes over the next half-century are going to be pervasive and profound, impacting every aspect of our lives. The range of foods that we are able to grow in a hothouse Earth is going to diminish markedly. The work that supports a sustainable future will shift dramatically. The transportation that we use will change fundamentally. The homes in which we live will reconfigure as we move toward new forms of community living.
For example, community could be a little pocket neighborhood with two or three homes, or an eco-village with maybe a dozen homes, or a larger village with a few hundred people that’s relatively self-organizing and self-contained with its own gardens, or a transition town with hundreds of thousands of people, and so on. At every scale there will be adaptation and invention. As we shift our emphasis from the material side of life to the experiential, we’ll find new ways to contribute to the healing of the Earth and relationships at every level. It will be a much richer and more communal world where mature people are self-organizing their lives and consciously choosing how to live. Beneath these material changes, I see a new maturity and sense of community as the foundation for a sustainable future. More and more people recognize our deep interdependence with all of life and begin the journey to embody and live into that recognition.
Kosmos | Most scientists say that one thing they can agree on is that life evolves into increasing complexity. Are we also capable of evolving into increasing simplicity?
Duane Elgin | Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” A higher level of simplicity calls us to move beyond the complexity of everyday life in our world that is breaking down. It is often the power of love that makes a higher level of simplicity possible. If we can move into our maturity, we can move through this time of breakdown with all of its complexity and recreate our lives in new and more loving ways. Simplicity has been called the ultimate sophistication and this fits the challenge of recreating lives of sustainability at a global scale.
In the last few hundred years, consumer societies have exploited the material resources of the Earth for the benefit of human beings — a self-serving approach that is bringing ruin to the ecology of the Earth. A fundamental change is needed: Instead of asking what we humans want (what do we desire, crave, hunger for), we are being called to respond to a far deeper and broader question: what does the overall ecology of life need (what is essential, basic, necessary) to build a regenerative future for the Earth? Simplicity is the knife that cuts through luxuries to reveal the essentials. Shifting from a culture of “wants” to one of “needs” represents a penetrating and important change. Consumer societies like the US will be asked to cut consumption of resources by a factor of roughly 75%. Although this challenge is enormous, the pay-off could be even greater. The material side of life can grow lighter, less burdensome, and more easeful at the same time that the non-material side of life becomes more awake, alive, and expressive. To compensate for material limitations, people will cultivate more meaningful friendships, share simple meals, spend more time in nature, make music, do art, develop our inner life, and more.
I often hear people say either that technology will save us or it will enslave us. Technology is not inherently bad, it’s a tool. The question is whether these tools are enough to save us from our overconsumption of the Earth? Stated differently: if the challenge for humanity’s future is to grow up and move into our early adulthood as a species, then will more tools be the key for enabling that to happen? Will material tools be an effective substitute for greater psychological and spiritual maturity? It seems to me that we need to combine our tools with a higher level of consciousness and maturity. Technology alone won’t save us. It is the human heart and consciousness that also needs to grow. A big part of the problem is the assumption that, because technologies have gotten us this far, they will take us into the far future. Yet, the rite of passage that we’re going through now recognizes we’re here to grow our consciousness and experience of aliveness — and that’s largely an “inside job.” Technology cannot substitute for this learning. That is not to deny the importance of technologies; rather, it’s to see the vital importance of integrating our material powers with higher levels of love, wisdom and purpose.
Kosmos | I think there is something to be said for putting our active intelligence into some of these technologies before it’s too late to reshape what we want from them.
Duane Elgin | I’ve been writing and speaking about the decade of the 2020s since 1978. For over 40 years, I’ve been saying the decade of 2020s will be pivotal — that this is when we’re going to hit an evolutionary wall. In other words, we will not simply run into an “ecological wall” and material limits to growth. We will run into an “evolutionary wall” where we encounter ourselves as humans and are confronted with foundational questions: What kind of universe do we live within? Is it dead or alive? Who are we? Are biological beings only or are we also beings of cosmic dimension and participation? Where are we going? Is material evolution the measure of our development or are there invisible dimensions to life that will unfold as well?
“Choosing Earth” is not a prediction for the future; instead, it’s an opportunity for collective social imagination. We have a choice. If we can recognize the future we are creating — enacting it in our social imagination — we can choose an alternative pathway forward. We can move toward a great transition, not waiting for collapse. We can begin to plant the seeds of that future now, working back from a positive future we see in our collective imagination. Mobilizing our collective awareness is part of our maturing. Our freedom to creatively envision the future and then freshly choose is being called forth. To choose Earth and to choose life.
Kosmos | Yes. It’s heartening to see that so many are already building the future without waiting for permission, without waiting for the collapse. Those who are building eco-villages and regenerative economies, the Transition Town movement, the millions of small initiatives everywhere — from community gardens to whole cities like Auroville in India; efforts to preserve and protect forests, animals and indigenous culture. There are so many initiatives right now that are powerful models for what we might do in the future.
Duane Elgin | The human family is being called to a higher role and responsibility of living on this Earth. If we can awaken our collective imagination, we have a future of promise. If we can imagine it, we can create it. First we have to imagine it. Our times call for both a sense of urgency as well as great patience. I’ve had a short poem posted on the frame of my computer for years. It’s a Zen poem, and it says, “No seed ever sees the flower.” We plant seeds with books, films, business organizations, social movements, and so on, in hopes we will see them flower. The Zen proverb advises us to give up hope that we will see the results of our actions. Accept that we may not see the flowering. The seeds we are planting now may flower long after we move on. Our job now is to be visionary farmers — and to plant seeds of new possibilities without the expectation we will see their flowering.
The Choosing Earth Project
A Poem for My Students
A Poem for My Students
A Poem for My Students
soon
it will be time,
soon we will
see each other
walking across
green and brick
and my soul
will soar and
say to itself,
“There they are!
My Dear Companions!”
How I have missed you!
How thinner is my
learning (like thin
leaves in August heat)
without your breeze,
your laugh, even the
November shower
of your complaints!
I know they teach me,
too. The beach is
wonderful, but the
ocean is you —
vast and deep and
drunk with possibilities
— and breaks are lovely,
but vacation from
The Meaning of
One’s Life? Long
enough I have
meditated alone.
Longing
to see the super
novas of your
selves, overjoyed
to read the journals
of stars (your voices
push light through
the most examined
nights) soon
you will see me,
waving to you
from across the quad
like someone meeting
his ship coming in,
because it will have,
because you are.
Previously published in Wayne-Daniel Berard, The Realm of Blessing (Portland, OR: Unsolicited Press, 2020).
Kitchened | Postcard from the Mother Ghost
Kitchened | Postcard from the Mother Ghost
Kitchened
The puppy idolizes windows.
On hind legs she paws
the low sill, scratching,
sniffing for breeze. Outside
a golden retriever lounges.
The little dog whines,
recalling the planes of the big
dog’s back, her mouth
filled with wads of his fur—
she hankers to dangle from his pale
neck above the yellow clover.
I have stopped looking
out of windows. I am
kitchened, stifled in my mind’s
house. Even in afternoon
light I stall at the garden
border. I am cabbage,
layers nested in.
Oh, to be cantaloupe,
to flower with insouciance,
vine into the next yard—
the fruit rough-surfaced,
celled with design, spilling
sweet seeds from the hollow inside.
Postcard from the Mother Ghost
Hammer yourself a ladder.
Lean it against the familiar,
and climb like deep-rooted
squash vines through daylight
and blue-white heat.
Climb into twilight, its pockets
emptied of fireflies. Do not
worry that you’ll vanish,
that you’re alone. Let
the ladder lift you beyond
the heavy face of night.
Turn the postcard over.
See the peonies I’ve brushed
into bloom, how they curve
like hands. In the pale life
that comes, there is no
climbing—only the heart’s
circulation of time and desire.
Only a sweep of words,
the sheen of petal and leaf,
the way love ascends
like dandelion fuzz—the way
it doubles back, like prayer.
Into the Morphic | Reality Ritual
Into the Morphic | Reality Ritual
Into the Morphic
Morphic Resonance: the idea that, through a telepathic
effect or sympathetic vibration, an event or act can
lead to similar events or acts in the future or an idea
conceived in one mind can then arise in another.
—Collins English Dictionary
I wish my worn mind would wax morphic
so to slip unnoticed into the tableau
of chimpanzees asleep in the trees
Or enter a houseful of dogs and
know at which corner of the carpet
I am welcome to lie
I want to fiddle like a cricket
surrounded with so much flora
I learn each plant’s ultimate mission
Or go into bear mind to get wind of
the original quirk that led to
the very first hibernation
I want to sit in the center of a grove of trees
and breathe together in prolonged yoga
while the stories in their rings enter my vertebrae
Or swim for days along the seashore
and be force fed by rays and pelicans
until my own salty blood trades places with seawater
I want to climb a hard mountain
to touch the soft sky
all to confirm: When I don’t think—I am
Reality Ritual
The child and the poet know that Reality
is what does not need to be realistic.
– Lewis Thompson
Put three small scraps of paper each with an important symbol
in your pouch. These should proxy a religion, a mythology, a metaphysic text.
Leave your books. Pack a lunch. Go heavy on instinct.
Guide your caravan of one into a wild expanse.
Make camp. Collect a basket of dead twigs and dried grasses.
These can stand in for your pet dogmas.
Gather a few downed limbs.
Name each of them after one of your so-called problems.
Look for eight rocks which you can barely lift. Pretend
these are all of your obstacles. Whisper politely as they surrender.
Make a ring with them to contain the fire you light
with matches given you by a fool.
Make certain the fool is fully certified. Be generous. Ask that
he or she will become brilliant the instant you strike the match.
Throw all your realistic conclusions into the flames. Trust Supreme Reality
to emerge once you are one hundred ten percent bereft.
Throw in your three paper scraps. Let their sudden flash of light make you
weightless for a long instant. Pretend their heat engraves you with peace.
Lie on your back. Allow the sky to acquire you. You are becoming
a life-size figurine. Pull your knees toward your belly. Defy being a fetus.
Roll onto one side and look out. Lock onto what you long for.
Keep your eyes open. Invite the horizon to be your soulmate.
Stretch all the way out. Turn onto your stomach. Love all matter deeply.
Relish the exchange of breaths. Accept the mutual conduction.
Looking Back | The Visionary Spirit of Resilience
Looking Back | The Visionary Spirit of Resilience
When I was a young girl, my family would go to South Carolina’s Litchfield Beach for a week-long summer vacation. I wasn’t a get-in-the-water kind of kid. My joys came from walking, barefoot, as far up and down the beach as parental permission would extend, sometimes a bit farther. I scanned ahead for favorite shells and sharks’ teeth. Dozens of these treasures have remained with me for decades; cherished belongings set in a glass case to which my front door opens. When my eyes fall upon them, I know that I am home.
I remember, on one especially blue-skied day, playing with the footprints that I’d left in the sand just seconds before, noticing how the impressions changed according to my stride and speed, the dampness of the substrate, and the force and stay of the waves coming and going across them. Instantaneously, the world works on the experiences we’ve had. Looking back, nothing can be as it actually was in the moment that it happened. There is addition (salty water), deletion (sand grains swallowed by the ocean), and distortion (shape-shifting form) in all of it.
“I don’t look back, only forward,” has become something of a prideful mantra in modern society. It’s as if there is some personal growth prize to be won through the act of annihilating our own tracks. I think not.
Thomas Hübl, an expert in processing collective trauma, wisely observes that “an integrated history is presence, and an unintegrated history is the past.” We see—backwards and forwards, right and wrong—with eyes informed by the bits and pieces that we pick up and claim as part of our integrated identity—sometimes consciously, sometimes at depth. The world, as we meet and experience it, is an amalgamation of the fragments that we and our ancestors chose to re-collect and hold on to.
But, not every ‘shell’ gets picked up. We don’t associate with them. We dissociate from them. Maybe they are too big, or too small. Maybe they are too broken, or chipped, or drab, or common. Maybe there is something squishy or clawed, scary or icky inhabiting them. For whatever reason, they are bypassed—maybe with regret, maybe not. We forget about them. They do not become part of our sense of identity, presence, or self-expression. We can’t put them to our ear to listen into other realms. We are not at home with them.
I left a lot behind in my childhood. In recent years, I’ve become particularly aware of deletions, absences of eventful memory, that—thank the gods and neural synapses—served to keep a traumatized child safe enough in her own skin. As an adult, I’ve started to look for these fragments, pick them up, and cherish them.
We stopped going to the beach after my father left. His decision to pursue an affair with his secretary drew an immutable line in the sand between my childhood and the child-adult that I had to become. It shattered the illusion of ‘family’ as a word to be equated with trust, security, and happiness. Waves crashed hard against the white, Protestant, middle-class semblance of familial perfection, of a normal home life, that I had been conditioned to accept and project into the world.
But, now that I can look back, there was more to the story—more to my story.
I knew. I knew from a very early age that my father’s attentions were not focused on my mother. Putting pieces together a few at a time over decades, I’ve rediscovered memories of a child confused by her father’s routine visits to other women, as well as the incongruous explanations, directives for silence, bribes, and threats that followed my innocence-grappling questions.
I knew. But, I was told that I was mistaken. I was led to believe that to seek clarity and align with the truth was an act of betrayal that could cost me and others in my family the benefit of the necessary illusion. My powers of observation, intuition, and discernment were invalidated. Parts of me had fragmented and receded. Unconsciously, I concluded that I couldn’t trust myself.
Thomas Hübl observes, “The one way to realign the intelligence of the process of splitting is to be willing to feel uncomfortable. We have to be willing to feel the discomfort of that which we excluded in the past. To realign, we have to feel uncomfortable.”
Shame is an intensely painful emotion frequently associated with traumatic memories. Early-life trauma may arise in a child’s voice saying things like, “If I’d only been better.” “If I’d only done ‘this’, then ‘that bad thing’ wouldn’t have happened.” In my case, well into adulthood, the child of me secretly felt a shame of complicity: “By not believing in and communicating what I sensed as true, I betrayed my mother.” Shame can drop us into wells of grief and launch us into fits of rage.
But, reflection—when cast in the light of self-worth and intent to understand without judgment—can draw bright, shiny objects to the surface. The beachcomber of me is a trustee of healing. She keeps her favorite sand bucket ready so that I can bring home precious things. As an adult, I’ve learned, step by step, that claiming these small beauties as my own enables me to honor my truth and standby it even if the act of doing so feels risky—sometimes, like it could cost me everything. There is no shame in that.
As a society, as a species, I think this is where we are at: this place of—in the sands of time—needing to consciously look back and observe the marks that have been made, our impressions on each other and the Earth, while being humbly aware that there have been decades—life times—of wave action.
A footprint can be an impression left by the sole of a foot or shoe in a substrate’s pliable surface. The term ‘footprint’ can also refer to the area affected or occupied by something—typically a human activity or societal expression.
Climate change is an ecological footprint of our unintegrated history.
As a species, traumas of separation from the places that created us have led us to deny our animalness, our earthly belonging. We’ve lost trust in our senses and thus committed senseless acts in an effort to construct security.
Racism is a cultural footprint of our unintegrated history.
Separation from an animated life has led to the objectification of our surroundings and ourselves. We are all fugitive and colonist—departing from and arriving at seaports across the whole of the world—real and imagined.
Shells and other Marine Life from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities (1734)
The Dutch pharmacist and collector Albertus Seba (1665-1736) was an ardent collector of plants, insects, and animals, amassing a collection which in 1716 was bought by Peter the Great. Together with the collection of one of Seba’s countrymen, the anatomist Frederik Ruysch, the collections formed the base for the Kunstkammer in St Petersburg, the first museum in Russia. The coloured engravings found here are from a volume focused on the life of the sea, including various shells, fish, and plants. (Source: The Public Domain Review)
These, and other crises facing modern society, are symptoms of long-term pathological dissociation: separation, exclusion, denial, denigration, objectification, and destruction. They are the geographic and biographic accounts of the traumatic history experienced by our ancestors, other species, and our planetary home. Storms have a tendency to resurface— en masse—the shells no one wanted.
Thankfully, Nature informs the potential of human nature. Marine snails of the genus Xenophora are also collectors. They scavenge small rocks, shells, and debris from the ocean floor, adhering the fragments to their own shells—the way they show up in the world—as they grow, interval by interval. The outcome may initially come across as a bit messy, woefully disorganized, but beauty eventually arises out of the reanimation of discards. We are all collections of the treasures we gather from murky realms—those things brought to us by strong currents and upwellings with greater force than gravity’s hold in a crevasse.
Thomas Hübl continues, “…we find out that the absent parts of our social and individual life, are basically parts that you don’t see and that you don’t feel. I think that it is very powerful that in order to come back to sensing and seeing you will have to attend to what has been excluded.” This is individual and collective soul retrieval—to discover scattered parts of ourselves, reclaim them beautifully, and give them an embodied home, one that enables us to become ever more sense-able in the way we envision and live into the future, one that enables us to attend to the yet-to-arrive-traumas with greater resiliency.
So, then, in order to see the horizon, where we are headed individually and collectively, we must—from time to time—turn a soft gaze upon the excluded past, as well as the story-augmented and -distorted past. The visionary spirit needs to be able to listen carefully to the voice of integrated adulthood, rather than go skipping down the beach with adolescent abandon, proclaiming to the gulls above that it’ll never grow up.
Litchfield Beach gets its name from Litchfield Plantation, circa 1750. The old oaks, draped in Spanish moss, have watched rice transition from a slave-labored crop to a luxurious-wedding throw away.
How long before extreme weather events and sea-level rise engulf Litchfield, and all of the human and other-than-human tracks left upon that land?
For me, getting a true sense of ourselves necessitates that we meet the shores our beliefs with inquiry. We call up questions to lap—sometimes gently, sometimes with vigorous intent—at forms that have bounded the solid ground on which we and our ancestors have stood. I’ve come to regard answers as transient guideposts: buoys anchored in shifting sands. Even the stars betray our confidence at some point; we can’t navigate by the same storied-constellations forever. Questions, though, they are timeless.
Looking back, what do the changing tides bring into your awareness?
Xenophora. Xeno, from the Greek ‘xenos’ meaning a stranger. Phora, also Greek, meaning to bear, as in to bear children. I think this is what life’s greatest questions ask of us: to bear the strangers of the past as if they are our children.
Looking back, what does the child of you want to collect and place in your favorite sand bucket?
Dying Into the Creative
Dying Into the Creative
How does anyone possibly express in words the state of collective madness that humanity has fallen into at this time in our history? What modern-day humanity is confronted with, to quote the noted author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, is “a crisis of sanity first of all.” Our species and our civilization are currently in the throes of a collective (nervous) breakdown. If what we, as a species, are doing to ourselves (destroying the biosphere, the very life-support system of the planet, to use one example) isn’t collective madness, then what in the world is?
It is no badge of honor or measure of sanity to adapt to a world gone mad. Instead of trying to adapt to the world’s insanity, a person who is awakening remains open to the world—and open to their wounds—such that a regenerative and curative power arises from within their own dark depths in response – this healing power is the creative spirit. A person who is able to connect with their creativity becomes an anti-psychotic agent in the midst of the prevailing collective psychosis we are passing through.
Creativity is one of the greatest medicines at our disposal during times such as this. Our spirit, the sentient presence that animates us, is by its very nature, creative. A human being is a creative force thirsting for conscious realization. Our creativity isn’t as a mere hobby, a sideline, something that we should just indulge in on our days off. The creative spirit is an essential part of our being, the life-giving oxygen for our soul. Unexpressed creativity, on the other hand, is poison to the human psyche. The malady that our species is collectively suffering from is, in essence, the fact that we are not connecting with, mobilizing, and expressing our creative nature, which turns against us in self-and-other-destruction.
Our underlying institutionalized and incorporated structures that are purportedly serving us but are in actuality keeping us asleep are breaking down. Analogous to what can happen within an individual’s psyche, only collectively writ large on the world stage, we are going through a collective spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation process—a breakdown/breakthrough—and whether this process will “take us down” or “wake us up” depends upon how we dream it.
Our species has gotten drafted into an archetypal death/rebirth experience – in symbolically dying to a part of ourselves that is no longer serving us, another part of us is being reborn. We, as a species, to quote the doctor of the soul C. G. Jung, have been “drawn into the cycle of the death and rebirth of the gods.” In other words, having become part of a deeper mythic, archetypal and alchemical process of transformation, we are going through a cosmic death/rebirth experience of a higher order.
We hear everyday – “We are all in this together.” In the late 1950’s, Jung wrote words that are as relevant today as they were then, “We are in the soup that is going to be cooked for us, whether we claim to have invented it or not…. We are threatened with universal genocide if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death.” In other words, we are fated to suffer an unconscious “literal” death if we don’t consciously go through a “symbolic” death.
As we go through a species-wide dark night of the soul—the mythic night sea journey—our illusions about the world we live in—and ourselves as well—are being shattered. Seeing through our illusions is a symbolic death of the self that was wed to—and lived by—illusion. Being disillusioned—having our illusions dispelled—is to become sober and begin to face reality.
Whether consciously or not, since the advent of the coronavirus, we are all in a state of grieving. The world we knew, as well as a false part of ourselves, is dying. The artist, poet and visionary William Blake calls this fraudulent part of us, “a false Body, an incrustation over my Immortal.” Having identified with an imposter of ourselves, we are unknowingly blocking the light of our own (Immortal) radiant nature.
Our sense of who we think we are—imagining we exist as a separate self, alien to and apart from other separate selves as well as the rest of the universe—is an illusion whose expiration date has now been reached. If not recognized as illusory, this illusion can become reified and become a lethal mirage. Either our illusion (of existing as a separate self) expires, or we do.
Speaking about the majority of our species, the great healer and alchemist Paracelsus writes, “what he fancies himself to be has no worth.” This is because the fictitious identity that most of us identify with isn’t real in any sense of the word except for the fact that it is an unreal product of a deranged imagination that we then take for being who we are. It is a forgery, a counterfeit, of no intrinsic value in and of itself. We have become brainwashed into conceiving of ourselves in purely spatio-temporal terms, believing that we exist as a reference point in time and space. Instead of thinking that we, as physical beings, live in a purely physical world—we can die to our ill-usion of ourselves—and can wake up to that we live in a psycho-physical world that, just like a dream, is infused with consciousness.
As always, death strips away our masks that we use to hide ourselves from both the world and ourselves. At the same time, we are—potentially—being born into a novel world and a new, more coherent version of ourselves. We are simultaneously the being who is dying, being born and midwifing the whole process.
The divine process of transformation is typically experienced as punishment, torment, an experience of death and then transfiguration. This divinely-sponsored process is subjectively experienced by the human ego as torture. However, if we don’t personalize the experience, identify with it or get stuck in its nightmarish aspect—a great danger—but allow this deeper process to refine us as it moves through us, it can lead to a transfiguration of our very being.
If we remain unconscious when a living archetypal process is activated within us, this inner process will physically manifest itself externally in the outside world, where, as if by fate, it will get unconsciously dreamed up and acted out in a “literal,” concrete and oftentimes destructive way. Instead of going through an inner symbolic death, for example, we then literally kill each other, as well as, ultimately, ourselves. If we recognize, however, that we are being cast to play a role in a deeper cosmic process, instead of being destined to enact it unconsciously, and hence, destructively, we are able to consciously and creatively “incarnate” this archetypal process as individuation.
It is as if we—as a species—are having a near-death experience. The more immanent the death experience, however, the greater the possibility for transformation.
We, both collectively and individually, are making a shamanic descent into the darkness of the underworld—into the netherworld of the unconscious shadow side of our psyche—where we are demanded to face our own dark side. We are no longer able to postpone this encounter with ourselves – the time is now. As the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides pointed out, there is no way of getting around first having to make a journey to the depths of the underworld before we are able to discover the living reality and fullness of the eternal now moment.
We are living in dark times. More accurately, we are living in times where the darkness is emerging from hiding in the shadows and is becoming visible. It helps to remember that dark shadows are an expression that light is nearby (for it is light that is casting the shadow); the darker the shadow, the brighter the light. Current political and social events are the manifestation of a deeper process that has been brewing in the cauldron of the collective unconscious of humanity for many years, perhaps even from the beginning of our appearance on this planet. What this means is that the darkness that is emerging in our world is—just like a dream—an externalized reflection of an unknown darkness within ourselves. Something is being revealed to us through this process that it is most important for us to know.
Living in such an uncertain topsy-turvy world gone mad naturally creates extreme stress, anxiety and creative tension. And yet, there is an opportunity of a lifetime that now becomes available to us hidden within this very challenging internal process. Rather than distancing ourselves from what has been triggered within us—social distancing from ourselves—if we are able to bear, carry and suffer the uncomfortable, and sometimes excruciating tension in a conscious way, we can potentially ignite the creative spirit within us to be set aflame by the light of divine inspiration. Describing the creative individual, Jung’s colleague Erich Neumann writes, “Only by suffering, perhaps unconsciously, under the poverty of his culture and his time can he arrive at the freshly opening source which is destined to quench the thirst of his time.”
There are treasures buried within us, concealed within our unconscious. These hidden gems are like precious jewels or diamonds in the rough that are encoded within the fabric of the unconscious psyche. They can be conceived of as existing in a higher dimension relative to our conscious mind, and as such, are typically invisible to our intellect. These sacred treasures, having lain buried and dormant in the collective unconscious of our species from time immemorial, are typically awakened in times of great need. Oftentimes humanity is not saved from a crisis by what we consciously think, but rather, the saving grace comes from something being revealed to us that emerges unexpectedly as a result of the crisis. The hidden treasure, the great revelation that is hidden within our unconscious—also referred mythically as “The Treasure Hard to Attain”— is the creative spirit itself.
In our own individual suffering of the powerful archetypal energies which pervade and make up the collective unconscious, the spirit within us intimately experiences the profound depths of the woundedness of the collectivity and the time in which we live. Spiritual practitioners and true artists are able to find within their own subjective experience, however, a unique and utterly original response to their wound. As if organs of the collective body politic of humanity, sensitive, spiritually attuned and creative people are the alchemical retorts in which the poisons, the antidotes and the psycho-spiritual medicines for the collective are distilled.
Certain individuals gifted with particularly strong intuition sense the moving currents taking place in the collective unconscious and are able to translate these changes into communicable language (whether verbal and/or nonverbal). These original and creative expressions can potentially spread rapidly—going viral—and have such powerful transformative power because parallel changes have been taking place in the unconscious of other people. Contagious in its effects, genuine creative expression emerging at the right moment can “virally” spread via the unconscious of our species in ways that can ignite latent, creative energy lying dormant in the collective unconscious of humanity. This can bring forth and actualize hidden possibilities (both within us and in the world) into the light of conscious awareness, which is a process that has the power to effect real change in the world.
Our species is desperately in need of the guidance and aid of the boundless creative forces latent within the depths of our unconscious to help us find new ways to resolve the myriad interwoven aspects of our multiple world crises. In its collective archetypal dimension the unconscious contains the wisdom and experience of untold ages and could serve as a guide par excellence for us during these troubled times.
Given that our widespread systemic crises are the result of a deficiency in human consciousness, it becomes obvious that it is only through an expansion of consciousness that we will be able to navigate the tight passage before us. Consciousness can evolve and develop, however, only where it preserves and cultivates a living connection with the creative powers of the unconscious.
When tapped into, the creative spirit is a seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration within us which issues forth a stream of revelations like a spring bubbling upwards from the depths of our unconscious. This living current is our greatest resource; as it helps us to continually re-source (and refresh) ourselves, i.e., connect with our source. Becoming an instrument for the creative spirit to move through us, in Jung’s words, “evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.”
Change in the world starts with the individual. What the world needs more than anything right now is for any one of us to become familiar with and enter into intimate relationship with our source, with our creative essence, with the ground of our being. This is the greatest offering any of us can make for a world that needs all the help it can get.
Cinderella Story
Cinderella Story
It is early morning, still dark. You awaken from a glowing sleep and clutch the last shreds of warmth to your thin body. Soon, you will get up and go down to the kitchen, which is like a damp tomb. You will sit by the fireplace, in the ashes of your dreams. You will not despair.
You will not despair, because there is a Mother you thought beyond reach who brings a love beyond imagining. She transforms golden vegetal life into a carriage to bear you out of the mire and into the glory of the world, into the ring of the dance.
You will not despair, because there is the promise of romance. A prince filled with quiet strength who offers his hand to you, and secretes iron and its mineral allies into your bloodstream, and re-kindles your sacred fire.
You will not despair, because of who you are, and are becoming.
Intelligent women are suspicious of this story. They feel their daughters should not imagine the release from torment will be through a benign godmother appearing out of the starry blue; nor – especially, not this – that their soul will be saved by some young buck waltzing up to the palace ballroom, and sweeping them off their feet. While the values informing this rejection are reasonable, the narrative spell here contains teaching secrets.
Some stories are found almost everywhere in the world, in cultures remote from each other, and this suggests certain deep patterns in the human psyche. Surveys of people’s most cherished childhood stories show these universal stories are the ones we tend to love best and the Cinderella story is the most universal of all.
The prevalent theme is typically that the wellbeing of a maiden, naturally pure and gracious, is compromised by the malice of an evil ‘other’ (she is imprisoned, or enslaved, or enchanted into a death-like sleep) and has to be released from her trance of helplessness.
This tale belongs firmly in the feminine domain. It has not been censored or interfered with by men, and always has been and remains an instruction manual for girls. It actually flies quite cleverly under the radar of ‘inquisitorial’ masculine attention; after all, it it appears on the surface that the ‘baddies’ are female, and that ‘it takes a man’, ultimately, to set everything to rights.
Yet, there are two vital points here. One is that such stories were never meant to be interpreted literally. They are depth-charges, designed to float down below the surface of our consciousness and detonate in our metaphorical mind, shifting patterns of despair. The other is that the colorful cast of ‘players’ in mythical stories is purely illustrative. There is only ever one character, and it is the singular you.
The ‘ugly’ sisters and ‘impostor’ mother model the daughter’s own agents of diminishment. The fairy godmother is her own kindly and resourceful larger ‘self’. The dynamic masculine is a ‘sleeper’ in her soul awaiting discovery and awakening. The story is a guidebook for the sacred marriage of all the discrete instruments in her, and becoming ‘virgin’. That is, poised and complete in herself, and self-regenerating.
Entire in herself. Actual men optional.
The irrepressible Imogen, in Shakespeare’s ‘Cymbeline’, affords us a picture similar in all its vital respects. The poet, Ted Hughes defines her as “the soul of England”. The deep feminine is fully integrated in her, so nothing daunts or overwhelms her (including the malign designs of the step-mother, who also looms large in this story). And, in the final part of the play, she moves out from her ‘sleep-death’ in masculine guise as, a warrior, conjoined with that most rigid of male-dominance constructs, the Roman army. She releases this identity only when balance is restored in her soul and her relationships. Then, the whole realm, in danger of becoming a Grail-deprived wasteland, is restored to health.
This is the resolution of the despair of an earlier play, King Lear, in which the eponymous ruler comes to his senses too late to save anyone at all. His virtuous daughter dies, as do the two ‘ugly’ sisters – and so does he. Shakespeare’s audiences deplored this ending, and their offended instincts were correct. This is not how things end in the true mythos of these isles.
‘Lear’, in Celtic lore, is ‘Lir’, god of the ocean, and his daughter, Cordelia (Cor-de-Lir), is a divinity in her own right. She represents his ‘maiden’ heart (as Miranda does for Prospero in The Tempest) and governs spring flowering and renaissance. In these final ‘Romance’ plays, we are shown over and again it’s impossible to negate or suppress this regenerative daughter.
Her spirit is perennial, and her luminous presence dispels the miasma of our social malaise.
There are a surprising number of young women like this in Shakespeare’s plays and he makes plain, in his last dramas, that it is they who pose the right questions, and are the embodied answers, to all the fractured relations in family and realm. After Imogen, in the gnostic fable of Pericles, comes Marina, the resilient daughter who negotiates horrific schisms, then glides untouchably through the ‘mean streets’ and seedy culture of a sea-port, moving eventually to heal her despondent father, and re-unite him with her long-estranged mother. After Marina, in The Winter’s Tale, comes the ‘lost’ maiden, Perdita, who finds her innocent yet utterly assured way to repair the rifts within her kin, and between the states ruled by alienated fathers. Finally, after Perdita, comes that epitome of grace and compassionate action, Miranda, who moves out ultimately from the magical island milieu of The Tempest – and from the protective ambience of a flawed father – again, to re-unite warring families and city states.
In each case, these plays are variations on the same message: that it is the spirit of the ‘daughter’ that addresses and rectifies the faults of the ‘father’. Also notable, in each case, is the daughter does not disrespect the father but, nevertheless, proceeds with absolute determination to effect what she knows in her heart is necessary (for example, in the lively flower festival scene which shifts The Winter’s Tale into a different gear, Perdita listens to the cogent masculine arguments for the ‘rightness’ of interfering with natural patterning – and rejects them decisively).
The archetype that corresponds most nearly with this spirit is that of Artemis, the classical protector of the irrepressible nature of the ‘maiden’. While the other leading female players in Greek mythology, Athena, Aphrodite and Hera are submitting themselves to the masculine judgement of Paris in the Miss Olympus beauty contest, Artemis is running free in the forest, challenging any man to set boundaries on her – or to fracture those she has established herself around her world (as Actaeon, among others, discovers to his chagrin when he dares to spy on her bathing). That Shakespeare acknowledged her vital importance is without doubt: the plays are suffused with her presence and iconography. In her latter-day Roman incarnation of Diana, she is referenced directly in more than half of them and, even where not, it is still her associated lunar and wild-wood domains that often play critical roles in the drama.
As we might expect, given the timeless importance of Artemisian qualities, particularly for an age where rigid and outworn structures are crumbling, this archetype has also surfaced in key figures in modern culture. A prime example is Katniss, from The Hunger Games, whose father predicts she will surmount all hunger if she amasses the courage to “find herself” truly, which she does. Katniss, like our Shakespearean heroines, engages with the world of men and their intrigues, but is neither defined nor defiled by them. In the end, it is her clear perception, her courage, that saves the beleaguered populace; her arrow that pierces to the heart of the malaise.
Thankfully, it is not only in fantasy that such figures are emerging and stepping into leadership. Among many others, we have Malala Yousafzai taking her brave stand against the Taliban, Emma Gonzalez challenging rabid gun enthusiasts in Florida, Greta Thunberg raising the stakes in the climate control debate, Autumn Peltier guarding the sanctity of native waters. Each of these arriving on the scene, rather enchantingly, not as seasoned political schemers, but as raw ‘forces of nature’. Their heartfelt actions defining our truest hope.