By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Kosmos Quarterly | FALL 2018

Unity holds the essential vision that we are one living, interconnected ecosystem—a living Earth that supports and nourishes all of its inhabitants. If we acknowledge and honor this simple reality, we can begin to participate in the vital work of healing our fractured and divisive world and embrace a consciousness of oneness that is our human heritage. This is the opportunity that is being offered to us, even as its dark twin is constellating the dynamics of nationalism, tribalism, isolationism, and all the other regressive forces that express ‘me’ rather than ‘we.’

by Charles Eisenstein
in Kosmos Quarterly

“As to what kind of spirituality is needed now, it is to take seriously the experiences and perceptions that we have relegated to the “spiritual” realm and to reincorporate them into the material. It is to embrace non-quantitative ways of knowing. It is to move past the old mechanistic view that saw human beings as the only full subjects in the world. It is to explore the universal indigenous perception that the world, and everything in it, bears consciousness, beingness, and some form of intelligence and purpose. Then we no longer need to impose our own intelligence on the world, but we seek instead to listen for and participate in something greater.”

By Nora Bateson
Kosmos Quarterly | FALL 2018

“The nourishment of Cezanne’s awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.” 
― Jane Hirshfield

In the everyday gesture of a parent providing breakfast for a child, the entire future of humanity, and of thousands of other organisms, pivots. Like other animals, the human species is tasked with feeding the next generations. Life is dependent upon this seemingly simple mandate of continuance. Feed the babies. Don’t fail…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.

By Judy Wicks, Pat McCabe, Li An Phoa, and Eve Miari
Kosmos Quarterly | FALL 2018

Judy | I never really understood how important water is to our lives until my time at Standing Rock. The thousand-year-old Lakota prophecy of the Black Snake foretold of a black snake rising up out of the earth and traveling across the land causing great suffering and destruction. The Lakota saw that black snake as the fossil fuel industry and the pipeline that was coming toward them.

We were instructed by the Native Leaders that when we got home, we should look to see how we could protect Mother Earth and our water supply in the places we come from. When I got home to Pennsylvania, I found it in the fracking and the pipelines for the fracked gas going through our communities and under our streams. It got me to focus on the threat to our water in Pennsylvania. Mni Wiconi, water is life!

By Drew Dellinger
Kosmos Quarterly | SUMMER 2018

I was sitting in a classroom in Assisi, Italy, with one of the leading environmental thinkers of our time, and he was talking about the power of story. “It seems that we basically communicate meaning by narrative,” he said. “At least that’s my approach to things: that narrative is our basic mode of understanding.”

In that summer of 1991, Thomas Berry was a 77-year-old sage; a Catholic priest—though never quite comfortably—a cultural historian, and a scholar of world religions, retired from teaching but at the height of his intellectual and prophetic powers. His central focus was addressing the deep roots of the ecological crisis.