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Spring 2019 Rising Earth Awareness | Climate, Consciousness and Community
Introduction
The Earth is Doing Her Best
This stuff of creation we are made from requires something from us now. Animals of the world, trees and flowers, minerals deep in the earth, already know their true nature, how to be. We have forgotten. The species with the most gifts, the most to give back, has forgotten its place in the order of things, has forgotten about stewardship, awe, and grace.
Articles
Dancing with Gaia
It may be difficult for organizers and strategists, planners, activists and environmentalists to comprehend how an event as broad in scale and as detailed as the upcoming gathering, 'Climate Change & Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth', was delivered completely through spiritual guidance. But it was.
The Community Awaiting Us
To help us meet the challenge of climate chaos, the biggest challenge humans have ever faced, we have the science now, the telecommunications, and vast amounts of information. What we need more than anything is our natural strength and legacy of being in community.
Resilience, the Global Challenge, and the Human Predicament
Global strategies are beyond the ken of most of us living ordinary lives. What is firmly within our ken is to make our lives and our communities and organizations more resilient. What that means will differ depending on circumstance. But the shared intention to make future shocks survivable is something we can all share.
Book | Trees of Power
They have come from the mysteries of the deep past. When I look at the sky, what I see there is not simply blue. There’s a radiance, an energy, a power. It is from this power that trees feed. Literally building their bodies out of the radiant sky, trees of power are strong beings to ally ourselves with. Their wisdom and abilities are very different from our own.
Cultivating Right Livelihood
When framed as an individual journey, right livelihood is less about what is right or wrong at the moment and more about our own approach to work, on both a daily basis and over the course of a lifetime.
Quiet Places Initiative
Gordon Hempton is a natural born listener. Known as the Sound Tracker®, he is an acoustic ecologist dedicated to capturing and preserving one of Earth’s most precious experiences on the verge of extinction: silence.
Conversations
Consciousness and the Combustion Engine
Getting to zero emissions by 2050 as the IPCC Report demands requires a collective detox from our addiction to oil. We are in the midst of a global overdose. We need to enter a universal treatment center with consciousness as the lead therapist. We have to come clean.
Essays
Rejoining the Great Conversation
[Greta Thunberg's words] brought tears to my eyes, as my soul heard her speak about real care for the Earth—for this living, beautiful being who has given us life, who has nourished us with Her endless generosity, even as we have abused and desecrated Her, raped and pillaged Her body, which our culture regards greedily as just a “resource” for our endless use and abuse.
Rights of Nature
There are enormous questions and hurdles to contemplate. Does the mountain have the right to exist without being blasted with dynamite for coal or roads? Does the air have the right to be free of the mercury and sulfur in coal smoke?
Council of the Wild Gods
Many years ago, in a wide-ranging conversation with environmental education students, I asked if the human species might have a particular purpose in the planetary ecosystem. The students puzzled for a few moments before one advised me that human beings have no purpose in the community of life. No purpose. Take a moment here.
Galleries
Gallery 3 | Guardians of the Sacred in Tibet
The nomads and other Tibetans hold a reverence for the natural world, which ensures that they remain stewards of the land they have lived with for thousands of years. Small pockets of awareness of the land's magic, its sacredness, its deep inner value, still remain.
Music
Emergent Universe Oratorio
The EUO was deeply inspired by the work Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim from the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University. These seminal thinkers have endeavored to lead us to a new understanding of the place of humans in the Universe.
Winter 2018/19 Global Citizen | Global Spirit
Introduction
The Practice of Global Citizenship
Global unity is our evolutionary destiny. This is what we believe at Kosmos, and why we continue.
We Are All Global Citizens | Seeing Ourselves in the Advancement of All
Our Keynote authors represent the Coalition for Global Citizenship (CGC2030). The Coalition, based at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, advocates that governments, public and private sectors, and civil society, all work from a basis of values of just and fair treatment, inclusion and cooperation.
Articles
Evolving Toward Cooperation
Of course, the question was—after a century and a half of “Social Darwinism” claiming that it was all about competition, from the lowest to the highest—could our world now dominated by the shark-tank rubrics of business, economics, and politics adjust to this astounding news? Could it realize that because of this basic blunder about Darwin’s message, we had, in fact, ended up with dystopia instead of utopia?
Breaking Out of the Domination Trance
I have been asked to tell you about the findings from my research identifying the core components of a safer, more equitable, and caring world—especially one where women and children are finally safe—a goal that is very close to my heart.
Music
Xiuhtezcatl Martinez | Break Free
My identity and my life as an activist has a very specific energy that people associate me with. In many parts of my life, I saw it as definitely putting me in a box in the way people saw me and my story. People didn’t understand the complexity and diversity of what I was fighting for or the way I wanted to use my voice to influence change.
Articles
BOOK | Farming for the Long Haul
Farmers in urban civilizations have always been subject to powers beyond them. Indeed, there is ample evidence that urban civilizations were invariably built on the conquest and subjection of farming cultures. Our current food industry grew out of the defeat of farmers’ efforts in the late nineteenth century to win fair prices for their production.
The Insurgent Power of the Commons in the War Against the Imagination
I believe the commons paradigm can help us develop a new social and cultural vision, and new strategies for practical change. Paradoxically enough, redirecting our attention away from conventional politics and policy may offer the most promising possibilities for developing a transformational vision.
Conversations
On Elevating the Human Narrative
Judy Rodgers | ...I think decisions about things like governance or institutions source from our awareness. We can’t build something if it’s outside the scope of our awareness. We can’t design a true commons if we’re in a very limited consciousness.
FILM | LIFEBOAT, Refugees Adrift at Sea
Kosmos Journal | In 2015, your team produced 50 Feet from Syria, a film focused on the civilian impact of the Syrian conflict. Your new film, Lifeboat, bears witness to refugees desperate enough to risk their lives in rubber boats leaving Libya. What was different for you personally about making those two films?
For Love of Place | Reflections of an Agrarian Sage
How do we cultivate a sense of place in an industrialized, globalizing world? Writer and farmer Wendell Berry discusses the role of agrarian values in nurturing communitarian consciousness with Tellus Senior Fellow Allen White. *** Allen White | You have [...]
Essays
Sacred Diplomacy in the Emerging Ecozoic Era
International diplomats are worn out from the toxic politics, overriding militarism, and positional bargaining for land, money, and power that define present negotiations.
The Economics of Solidarity, Spirit, and Soul
Economics is a scary word. It has this way of making basic, critical questions of life—How shall we spend our time? Who gets access to which resources?—seem impenetrable, none of our business and, of all things, boring.
Global Citizenship | An Emerging Agenda in Education
Introduced at an early stage of child development, global citizenship education enhances mutual respect and understanding, tolerance, and cultural literacy, while substantially weakening the power of radicalized messages.
Galleries
The Most Important Thing
Since 2012 Brian Sokol has focused on telling the stories of refugees, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and stateless people in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The Most Important Thing—his ongoing, long-term portraiture project—seeks to humanize and convey the dignity of individuals who have been dehumanized by conflict, government policies and the media.
Poetry
An Overcast Morning, I Sit Down To Write
Inhalation and exhalation, this just happens and I’m in the middle of it.
The Rebel’s Silhouette
That which then was ours, my love, don’t ask me for that love again.
Music
Playing for Change
The idea for this project arose from a common belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people. No matter whether people come from different geographic, political, economic, spiritual or ideological backgrounds, music had the universal power to transcend and unite us as one human race. And with this truth firmly fixed in our minds, we set out to share it with the world.
Documents
Toward a Global Ethic
Toward a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration was prepared to establish a shared ethical framework for all peoples across religious lines. It was drafted by Dr. Hans Küng with input from nearly 200 scholars representing many world religions and presented to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in September 1993.
Fall 2018 All Consuming!
Introduction
The Four Nutriments
There are four kinds of nutriments which enable living beings to grow and maintain life. What are these four nutriments? The first is edible food, the second is the food of sense impressions, the third is the food of volition, and the fourth is the food of [...]
Articles
un-pick-apart-able
Bringing a morsel of food to your lips or to the lips of another is an act of intimacy. It is a personal contact point with the seasons and the generations...It is in this intimacy that I suggest a possibility for system change lies.
Tending the Wild
What looked to European settlers like untamed wilderness was actually the product of millennia of intentional human influence. Calling it wilderness, or “virgin territory,” gave them license to occupy it, cultivate it, “develop” it, and “improve” it.
The Problem with “More”
Our globalized world lures us to crave more. The culture of “more” is a culture of not enough, accumulation and conquest, and sought but constantly deferred satiety. Every time we text message or update Instagram, researchers tell us that our brains loop in a dopamine cycle of neurological yearning.
Conversations
Water and the Rising Feminine
Pat McCabe | As women, I see us as the relational glue, the relational builders, so I need to get it really straight in my own mind and heart from what ethic will I address these pressures and potential conflicts around water.
A Tale of Two Pipelines
Malinda | We came together as a community, saying to the corporation, Williams Partners, "We're not going to stand by and let you destroy our land. We will stand between you and the land if we have to."
Essays
Unity and the Power of Love
Oneness is not a metaphysical idea but something essential and ordinary. It is in every breath, in the wing-beat of every butterfly, in every piece of garbage left in on city streets.
Galleries
The Prophecy
Through his stunning work, Belgian-Beninese photographer Fabrice Monteiro challenges us to examine issues of fashion, race, consumerism and exploitation.
Green Medicine
I use photography as a tool to explore the raw elemental power of the natural world by visiting and re-visiting places I’m drawn to in order to be touched by their spiritual essence.
Poetry
May Everything Flower
Que Florezca Todo
Music
Healing Sound with Jesse Paris Smith
Sound and music are very powerful, and we as emotional beings are sensitive to what we hear. We do not only hear with our ears but with our whole bodies.
Consumption As The Path
I had to consume everything. I had to try every possible avenue of filling the God-sized hole from the outside before I could even fathom the possibility that the emptiness and energy swimming through the cosmos was the same emptiness and energy swimming inside of me.
In Brief
Climate Reports
The power and abundance of our Earth can never be overstated; what is commonly overlooked is humanity's exploitation and neglect of its own life source.
Summer 2018 Unlearning Together
Awake, Awakened, Woke!
In our collective dream, we are racing toward a precipice. Earth’s human children have lost their way, propelled by swift currents of mindlessness and greed. The more we struggle against the current and try to cling to passing debris, the more exhaustion[...]
Articles
Unlearning Together
...We’ve entered the era that the Hopis predicted in their prophecies of the “great purification,” the unstoppable entropy of not only our external political, economic and ecological systems, but above all the unexamined assumptions underlying those systems.
Change the Worldview, Change the World
Gender, like race, is a social construction, which is to say, a story. And the stories of sexism and racism that have cast such a pall over our history and our present illustrate the power of worldview and narrative in generating and maintaining systemic oppression.
Presence at the Edge of Our Practice
Humanity is in a time of transition, one that we can navigate successfully only with a shift in consciousness. How can we wake up from the collective neuroses that have driven our civilization into decadence and decline?
Dynamic Governance
The 21st century is witnessing hundreds of millions of people caught up in cascading systemic transformation. Global society has crossed a threshold. We’ve entered the time of the Great Transition—a time when we hospice outworn ways of living that no longer serve us and the Earth, and give birth to an emergent, more compassionate, and resilient future.
Indigenous Worldview Is a Source We Now Urgently Need
The Mamos want the world to hear their warning and their deep concerns about the precarious state of all life on Mother Earth: “Our ancestors left us in this space, caring for and harmonizing the Earth and Humanity. We live in harmony with all nature's beings: water, earth, fire, wind, the sun, humans, and also animals and plants, which are essence of the divine.”
Conversations
The Deschooling Dialogues: Grief, Collapse, and Mysticism
Alnoor: ...There is no doubt that we are in the midst of unprecedented moment where there is no return to old certainties. Part of this pain that we are facing in the world is a pathway toward transformation. Or will we perish in the horror of the onslaught that we are facing?
Social Breakdown and Initiation
Orland: ...A 'right' is not just for me. It's an acknowledgement that the framework that gives me access to my own potential is the same framework that gives access to someone else's potential. So this is the idea of civility. Civility is the framework that allows people to communicate in ways that allows the collective potential to be realized and achieved.
Essays
The Migrant Quilt
Each quilt represents countless lives lost on border ground, a hundred-mile strip of geography spanning two countries. The interstitial border region has morphed into a distinct culture of its own and the quilts, with their binational contributors, fly its flag.
Resilience
...The car is now standing still. I smell the disaster before I see it. A smell of fuel and burnt steel. Where are the kids? Not in the car. I look for them on the highway. I find their bodies. I take care of them until ambulances arrive. While running from one child to another, I discover strength in me.
Poetry
Galleries
absence presence
In December 2007, I was asked to participate in, Pulling Down, an exhibition and performances about the Holocaust, honoring the Day of Memory, held at the auditorium in Rome, Italy in January 2008. I was staying in the neighborhood of the Jewish Ghetto [...]
Mixed Media
Sapient
Composer Steven Chesne spent a year unearthing ancient, precious peace invocations and prayers from all over the world: words of the oneness of mankind, spoken by Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed, the Sikhs, the Hindu, the Jews, the Cheyenne, the Kikuyu, and the Baha’i.
Music
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan
"We all have our own subjective beliefs in the band, but the music unifies us regardless. There are certainly moments when we are playing together when I feel genuine elevation, a sense of ecstasy, and a deep feeling of connectivity. That’s magical and it’s a joy to experience. That’s the edge, not found in practice, but always sought in performance. Sometimes it happens, but you can’t force it. You just have to stay open to the possibility."