As a long-time communal dweller, I know in my bones, mind, and heart, that a nurturing extended family of mostly unrelated individuals is the ideal social grouping for the human species.
“Algeria,” he said and then asked “do you mind if I take a small cutting? You know, you can trim just a short piece of the vine and put it in the ground or a pot and it will grow.” He demonstrated with his hands, miming the cutting and the planting.
Steeping ourselves in the uncertainty of these times, I pray we foster our innate visionary skills and a strong devotion within our hearts to serve what is truly sacred, our planet home.
While it was rare for people to change their positions, the presence of empathy was palpable, whether it was a Palestinian listening to the embedded fear of the Holocaust in Jews and Israelis, or they in turn listening to the violent eviction of one of the attendee’s siblings from their home in Palestine.
The shift is away from the previously dominant materialist view towards an ensouled cosmos informed by a new spiritual and archetypal consciousness consistent with the insights from quantum and complexity science.
I’m talking about some of our most deeply held and cherished ideals: the individual self, left vs right, religion vs humanism, free-market capitalism vs socialism, even democracy in its current form, all these have become false idols and dinosaurs, and the more closely we cling to them the harder it becomes to create space for a new civilisation to emerge.
Much like the interconnected symphonies of trees, fungi, plants, animals, fauna, bacteria, and insects in a forest, immersive, Earth-based educational experiences support collective learning and personal growth within a radically different system from the dominant Western culture of industrial education.
