2024

 

“$2million, Natalia”, said Larry, “and no more, to fund the creation of your startup ecosystem for chocolate grown with syntropic agriculture. And keep the name, Choco-op; my wife likes it.”

 

Natalia Zabija, new Managing Director of Alternative Investments at Blackrock,  had fought tooth and nail to get just the bare minimum seed capital from leadership to make her ecosystem viable. Her experiment’s life, and her position, depended on whether or not she could make it profitable. 

 

She had heard from a friend about this book with a strange word in the title: “The Ergodic Investor and Entrepreneur”. Someone had found a way to increase the chances of economic success when financing and building business ecosystems. “Something about interdependent business governance, profit-pooling, developmental environments, and the death of conventional portfolio management”, her friend explained. Intrigued, and a bit desperate, Natalia dug. 

 

She landed on the website of a company she had never heard of before: Evolutesix. They offered a course, the only course, on ergodic investment strategies. It wasn’t priced expensively, so she enrolled right away.

 

—  

 

This was the first time we had a participant from a major investment firm in the Ergodicity 101 course. I was ecstatic, and a bit nervous to teach Blackrock anything about investment. It was going to change everything, forever.

 

Natalia, and all other participants, relished in seeing how our innovative solution was driving profitability by leveraging collaboration. Even though it challenged her conventional views on finance, it transcended them to sit at a deeper level of intuition.  And the evidence was undeniable: Evolutesix had built 3 rapidly growing regenerative business ecosystems that were outperforming the growth of Blackrocks’ most successful ESG ETFs. 

 

We funded business ecosystems interconnected by governance and wealth rights. This made it easier for information to flow and make wise decisions fast. Collaboration oriented communication made it easier to identify where cradle-to-grave processes could become sources of supplies. With an organically steady pace, circular economies arose within those business ecosystems. Business wastage decreased significantly, because indeed, one business’ trash was another one’s treasure.

 

Pooling a fractional share of even 1% of profits in common lent the laggard and the unlucky with the lifeline they needed to survive until they became stable businesses. When they thrived, they gave their share of profits back. 

 

The course went deeper than finance to show a way to unleash the collaborative power of the economy. It went to the essential tension in business: wealth and power; shares and rights. Tenant to this new ergodic way of investing is that of investing in FairShares businesses where all stakeholders’ share of contributions are honored and rewarded in a free Commons business. 

 

This caught Natalia by surprise. Not only were investors, workers, suppliers, and consumers actual shareholders in the company, but so were Nature and business Stewards. It made good business and planet sense. She knew leadership at Blackrock would not sit well with this, but it didn’t matter. She had full autonomy to build her experimental fund out. 

 

—

2025

 

A year passed.  Choco-op was producing chocolate bars, full steam ahead. Natalia mailed me some, and they were delectable and slave-free.  Profits were up and so were reforestation metrics. 

 

The holy word of Blackrock got around that ergodic investing strategies were making their startup ecosystems antifragile to the uncertainty of markets and even agricultural happenstance.

 

Journalists and investment managers flocked to Evolutesix. Capital from philanthropists and investors seeking to become good ancestors began to pour shortly thereafter. They couldn’t resist the opportunity to be among the first to trial a new model of collaborative economics. We really got to scaling up and out. 

 

We continued our work, now unconstrained by funds, to build whole value chains of business and commons ecosystems. 

 

In just one instance, our regenerative aquaculture farm began feeding a coastal community in Brazil, reconnecting them with the water and land, and healing biodiversity. Community involvement grew around securing the common food supply. Collaborating to secure food made people more civically engaged, and abstentionism in local elections dropped. New young leadership emerged to hold decentralized but coordinated community activities like building gardens and schools to support the community and educate children on the importance of regenerative aquaculture. More children were educated, less young pregnancies happened, and more kids grew up with their fathers. 

 

Our multi-capital accounting system ensured those that weren’t being compensated for the contributions were compensated in some other way. We captured almost all the value, tangible and intangible, that was brought into and produced by the ecosystems. No one’s value was left behind. 

 

Conflict to adopt this new model was abundant at the start. So we organized differently, without imposition nor hierarchies. We embedded holacratic decision making to process tensions. Everyone was heard and considered. 

 

– 

2026

 

We knew we crossed a psychological tipping point when the media started pushing stories of interdependence, symbiosis, and climate resilience from the Global South.

 

As we continued our work to weave regenerative businesses into a united common front, small business media outlets began using markets and commons in the same sentences. The focus on bioregional development as a way to regenerate local economies accelerated. 

 

Bioregional gatherings started to pop up in hotspot areas: places already becoming uninhabitable from rapidly changing climate. These were different to the old way of running festivals. People gathered to have fun, yes, but there was always a strong intent to collaborate with regenerative initiatives. Many found the suppliers or consumers they needed to make their circular business work. Every gathering sought to regenerate the land it took place in, whether via tree planting, trash collection, and guerilla gardening. 

 

Many of these gatherings used mutual credit infrastructures to fund their ecosystem work with the small seed funds regenerative Venture Capital funds provided.  

 

It became commonplace etiquette to ensure the presence of local indigenous groups in the gathering. Their participation and telling of stories became a staple source of inspiration and wisdom for the movement. Through those stories, people deepened their relationship with the land they live from , and all the creatures that made it up. 

 

These gatherings and their imperative of indigenous representation helped chip away at the old mental models of hypercompetition and selfishness. Conversations, panel discussions, and songs in these gatherings all found their way to social media. Even celebrities were hopping on board to amplify these messages of interdependence and humanity as nature, never beyond it. A new ground of solidarity was being fertilized with truth and reconciliation. Seeds of life-centeredness were sown and watered. 

 

A change of values was taking place. A new old cosmology was being adopted by many westerners who had been working hard to unlearn the old stories of greed, capitalism, and conquest they grew up with. This was only possible because of the strongly committed communities that were being born and sustained from these gatherings. 

 

Much of this new cosmology was just a new verse rhyming with the old instruction of the Iroquois Peacemaker: be respectful, stay grateful. It came to soothe the burning souls of hundreds of millions who saw naught but pandemonium in their futures. 

 

Change was happening, but still not fast enough. It was now common knowledge that the West’s way of running economies was outdated and needed a serious upgrade to meet all needs and appropriately prepare humanity for a post-collapse world. Everyone knew it was coming; we just didn’t know when. 

 

– 

2027

 

There are decades in which weeks happen. There are weeks in which decades happen.

 

Lithium mining was in full throttle at Thacker Pass, right in the middle of the Shoshone people’s sacred ground. Years of indigenous resistance to safeguard the land yielded no results, in fact, the second Trump administration struck a deal with Tesla for a 100 year lithium procurement contract. It was a $150 billion dollar investment and the greatest deal Trump had ever signed.  

 

It became the second Standing Rock of the century, but far surpassed it in state-sponsored violence and civilian participation. Over the course of a year, an estimated 5 million people descended upon the state of Nevada to protest against this new neocolonial endeavor. New decentralized and open source social media platforms showed brutal images of paramilitary forces using live ammunition against protesters. Hundreds of people were killed. Corporate media was silent, of course; and the courts were jammed with cases.

 

The American Congress was paralyzed. To stop the killing was unacceptable to the lobbyists. So they just kept on sending police and paramilitary forces, in hopes that oppressing a people so used to oppression would silence them.

 

Every unjust death has a chance to radicalize you. In just a few weeks, a small resistance army was formed. With the 2nd amendment resting in their jacket pockets, they took up arms and conducted small sabotage operations to stall and stop the mining. 

 

The impossible just takes more time, and at Thacker Pass, what we thought impossible happened on June 14th. 

 

A resistance battalion of 500 strong had planned their largest sabotage operation yet: detonating several small explosive charges on mining equipment and transport cars. 

 

At 18:08, 22 minutes before the operation was to commence, American spy satellites relayed 3 potential locations of the battalion to the paramilitary troops.  The paramilitary troops received their orders directly from a paramilitary council chaired by the President himself. 

 

That day, Donald Trump turned 80 years old. He was busy building out American fascism to run away from his crimes, when he heard the news of the threat. In what must have been a psychopathically calm manner, he ordered the execution of Operation Glass Sand.

His devoted administration abided.

 

We all lost on June 14th, 2027 at 18:27 PST.  Just 150 kilometers away from the mining facility, the paramilitary forces deployed tactical nuclear bombs to each of the potential locations. 500 martyrs were created in less than the blink of an eye.

 

At 18:45 the first images of pandemonium began circulating. 

 

What legitimacy remained in American democracy that day was vaporized too, and the streets were flooded. That night, just America, an estimated 100 million people calling for peace and change occupied streets and plazas, institutions, banks, corporate offices, big supermarkets, politicians houses, the rich’s homes. 

 

The morning after, the stock market plunged. The S&P was down 1500 points and Tesla’s stock value was reduced to pennies. 

 

The nuclear fallout that now polluted the American southwest fueled the people’s fury for change across the globe, now 1.7 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. 

 

Within a week, the global economy came to a standstill as an estimated 1 billion people in the Americas, Europe, and Africa executed a planetary scale strike. The choice was binary: revolution or extinction.

 

Hundreds of millions lost their jobs over the course of the 3 month planetary strike, but it didn’t matter.  Solidarity flourished to fight, beat, and compost a system that failed us all. 

 

Millions who weren’t occupying streets and institutions, took up the task of building mutual aid networks. Protesters were fed, clothed, and sheltered in the face of police and military violence. Local and decentralized networks grew to uphold the functions of a paralyzed system. Children attended community schools when their own schools failed to stay open. 

 

Local networks planned direct actions, most of them non-violent, but still acts of civil resistance. Some cells grew to adopt violence in their efforts to overthrow illegitimate and colonial governments. Small civil wars broke out. What progress towards collaboration was made in the past years was being tested in the hottest of fires. 

 

–

October 2027

 

When all order seemed lost, spiritual leaders from all cultures began to call for a global Spirit Gathering. 

 

Leaders converged on a simple goal: to take the highest wisdom of spiritual teachings and draft a Spiritual Charter for humankind that could serve as the basis for a new time of peace.

 

The charter laid down a basic instruction: care for the self, the other, and the whole to grow and steward life on Earth. Native American traditions ensured this charter was built to always protect the next seven generations. Adopting this long-thought process ensured the Spiritual Charter of Humankind became a keystone driver of the next level of human co-evolution with all of Earth’s life, and eventually, beyond. 

 

A global referendum, the first of its kind, was held to ratify the charter as an addendum to countries’ constitutions. 

 

Humanity was given a choice: to accept A New Old Spiritual world order for collective liberation, or to deny it, and remain a hedonistic Hierophant cannibalizing itself. 

 

 In an overwhelming victory, 80% of all voters accepted the choice we were given, and we stepped into a new path for humankind.

 

– 

2050 

 

I woke up to the sunlight reflecting off my hempcrete wall. I looked out the window to see the town of Earthships we had built over the last decade. We weren’t the only one, but we were the largest town with some 10,000 inhabitants. We were completely autonomous in the provision of our most basic needs; food, water, and energy were all accessible in the land we held in common. We traded with other Earthship communities and nearby cities for luxuries and technology. We lived modestly and happily.

 

The Spiritual Charter drafted in ‘27 had made its way to schools. We could see this new generation of youths had a different mental model. They sought interdependent peace and were so good at embodying conflict as an act of love. They were eternally grateful for Nature’s abundance and the work of their ancestors, even if just a generation ago they had threatened the world with nuclear apocalypse. They paid attention to their land, and noticed its swings and sways: they listened to what the land was saying. They were so kind with each other, yet so strongly committed to a better life for all. They were natural techies and farmers.

 

The Charter was good for business too. Its caretaking directive catalyzed the institution of economic commons everywhere. We were there to work with a new generation to build regenerative economies that were incentivizing and sustaining local, bioregional, and planetary cooperation.

 

It had also enforced the removal of many of the incentives for money hoarding. Surprisingly, just two years earlier it had become illegal for individuals to achieve billionaire status: they were forced to give away their assets and money over a billion to those who needed it most. This kept inequality in check, and the influx of money from the hundreds of billionaires reduced to centimillionaires had eliminated poverty. 

 

We have always been hardwired for collaboration. It’s what empowered humanity to become the unique species it is. But some 250 years ago, a software of greed, selfishness, and separateness from Nature, took us down a path that by the 2020s had wiped out much of the life on Earth. This placed us squarely in a worldview of human superiority, where hubris blinded us such that we didn’t see ourselves pressing the nuclear button. 

 

The mind is run by stories. So when our old story wrought oblivion on Earth, a change of story happened in a matter of years. We needed a better story, one that wasn’t just about us, but one about something bigger and holier than us, to which we belonged. We quickly realized that this was one of the oldest stories there was. We didn’t have to recreate a new story. All we had to do was listen to and remember the answers we have carried within ourselves all along.

An Idea with Legs

 By Janice P Kehler

 

Opening Ceremonies

                   During the few quiet moments of my day, I dwelled on the death of friends, never able to shake the thought that it could have been me. At times, reliving the sounds of the bombings, I fingered the old-fashioned flat hat of my mentor, conjuring his goofy grin and twinkling eyes, trying to replay the exact way he would speak in his broken English. To trust, to hope, it’s right for a healthy body to guide a healthy mind.

            Life was hard. There was a deep ache that hovered. Moving hurt. I had been sitting, scripting the opening and closing ceremonies for four solid hours, and now, just standing up was taking a toll. I opened my purse and took out the twice-a-day pills. Drugs, Harper would say, all of them a deadly double-edged sword. She popped them into her mouth. Bless her soul, Harper, a citizen combatant armed with numbers, equations, and sharp words, lost herself in the folly of her quest.

Once upon a time, Harper had been curious about holistic medicine. Her research in 2024 was focused on how mind and body worked together to boost the quality of life. Now, she was caught in the body, its physiology too labyrinthine to fit inside the logic of her mind. She had found a way into a tangled web of exploitation, greed, and now revenge that had become a life-and-death struggle. She had used her talents to trace the chemical footprints to promote well-being, and now her well-being was under attack.

            I dared to look at my computer screen. There had been many demands; You must include…the beginning of many conversations…the history of the Games…, and the magic of Coubertin’s poem, Ode to Sport. You must be inclusive of the story of the horse as an athlete. Harper was desperate to highlight that the World Health Organization was to oversee the ‘New Olympics.’ And the athletes, on her phone, daily, demanding that national symbols be abolished, nicely, with artistry. Expectations were high.

Dr. Harper Atherton had eight hours to get comfortable inside the fat lady suit and find her way to the Olympic Stadium. It was a gift from her FBI handlers, who wanted to protect her from the enemies she had made in the world of sport. She was disciplining herself not to complain because this was the only way, wearing this outrageous disguise, she would be safe to attend in person.

            She wouldn’t miss the opening even if her life were threatened. It had been a fight that spiraled down into hell; giving up now was never going to happen, although it crossed her mind daily.

 “Do you want to die?” her handler had said, shoving into her face a photograph of four dead bodies: two Russian scientists and two former athletes. These were whistleblowers who’d implemented global anti-doping regulations and had nailed the corruption of the Russian sports federations. Not only had their athletes been caught cheating, but government officials had bribed and manipulated the process to ensure the victory of their drug-fueled athletes.  Many athletes and coaches had been banned from Olympic competitions, and some in powerful places had been jailed. Who exactly would compete had come into question—it was the main storyline for the media. Money had turned the world of sport into warring cartels, the good guys against the bad guys. She shivered. No justice system could contain the hatred that had been let loose.

“But LA weather is scorching, and you have me wearing pants and a long-sleeved jacket,” Harper said. “Won’t that make me stand out?” The handlers frowned and left her hotel room without a word. Harper amazed herself at her devious spy-worthy instincts. She was a trained physician for crying out loud.

The fact of the matter, the agent had said, is that she had made powerful enemies. Enemies that would stop at nothing to keep her facts and evidence dead and buried, along with her. The dark underworld of sport had paid for the bounty that motivated the unhinged to take her down. The FBI agent said being disguised was the only way she could survive the Games of the New Olympiad.

The tipping point over the story of world records had survived decades of infighting. Athletes had finally defeated the International Olympic Committee, the band of conservative traditionalists who wanted power at all costs. The World Health Organization had won. Between 2024 and 2040, if a world record holder could not prove that they’d been clean (enter the reach of the WHO), the record went to the following best, and so forth. For many records, a pure athlete could not be found. No matter their money, no one was given the benefit of the doubt, not even the superstars.  The WHO was a fortress of health and well-being for all.

By 2040, it was commonly accepted if one athlete from a country tested positive for a banned substance, the whole team would be disqualified from the competition. She remembered how this had made her nervous. Rightly so. The new rules were ironclad, but the dark underworld had unfurled a flood of death threats and had decided that she was the target. Attempts on her life had followed. Less now, but we must be forever vigilant, the FBI said.  World records were non-existent for ten years, yet hatred and revenge survived.

The FBI handlers returned with a dress, a frilly affair that Harper would never have chosen. It had thick, long sleeves and layers of polyester with ripples to make her arms look fat and jiggly. After squeezing herself into the dress, she picked up Sam the Eagle, the quadrennial mascot for the Americas awarded the Summer Games every eight years.  The Americas loved Sam the Eagle.

The elevator descended into the hot, humid weather. It was possible that LA would never reverse the impact of climate change. The hot winds and wildfires tested the landscape’s resilience; It was why the Games had been moved to winter. The Winter Games were canceled due to the lack of predictable cold weather, even in Antarctica. The invisible pads of polyester stuck to the bare skin of her arms, and she noticed nothing about her jiggled. She tucked her grey-brown hair under a wide-brim straw hat that smelled like someone else had worn it despite the medicinal scent that her newly dyed hair gave off.

The Games had arrived. Despite everything, these Olympics were going to happen. And it just might be the last time.

 

The Drones

            Hubert scrambled after the producer as fast as his old legs would carry him.

“There’s such a thing as too much drone, not enough still shots,” he said as they sat across from each other at Hubert’s desk.

“Explain,” said the producer, a man of few words.

“The sounds from the drones’ motors are ever present, always merging with the sounds of the spectators, the ohh and ahh that builds tension. On the screen, the waves of pixels overlap each other. It’s creepy. Can you stop that?”

“You don’t like the drones?”

Hubert realized he had offended the man.

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s fascinating to watch; I can’t take my eyes off it. But it seems out of this world.” No one had doubted the pictures of the Munich massacre in 2023, revenge for the Middle East wars. The drone buffered reality by interpolating pixels using waves of correcting algorithms to render something that looked like reality. The producer stared at him. I walked across the room and slammed the door as he finally left.

“Well, just in case, I have my army of photographers on the field,” Hubert proudly shouted.

                   Maria’s army, the name he had given the photographers who had volunteered in large numbers. Most were retired athletes determined to honor Maria’s real athletic legacy and erase the never-ending story of her gruesome death at the hands of an abusive coach. They were in position covering every corner of the stadium, dressing rooms, warm-up track, tunnel, and infield. Where possible, they all tried to find an angle to expose each athlete’s unique expression of movement. Creativity and joy married together for a lifetime.

Softly, the hum of cars and people moving about started to build. Within the hour, the stadium began to come alive, each section of seats filled up with brightly colored spectators, each carrying two mascots: a blue checkered stuffed sea serpent that was for the Olympic events as well as a pink companion mascot for the Paralympics. For the first time, the two games were to be held together. In the end, there was not one empty seat. Hubert smiled; the excessive heat, the arid landscape, the destruction of the roadways from the recent earthquakes, and the never-ending smoke from wildfires had only made it more plausible that the Games would go on.

Hubert watched outside the tunnel as Olympic and Paralympic athletes paraded into the stadium. He took side shots of their nations’ flag bearers followed by standard bearers and then shots of the signs that spelled out the names of countries. After every nation was positioned on the infield, the flag bearers, one by one, lowered their national emblems and raised the Olympic flag. A white wave with blue, yellow, black, green, and red rings rippled across the infield. He had positioned the camera crew to catch the movement of every flag. Later, Hubert would compress the image of a fallen nationalism and expand the image of Olympism, its rings rising.

Hubert stepped inside the tunnel and nervously fingered the camera around his neck. He could hear the soft thud of the torchbearer running towards him before he saw the torch. He raised his camera and compressed the shutter. It whirred snapping images: the torch bobbing, the white tracksuit of the runner blurring, and then his face thick with scars and his hands missing fingers—a war veteran.

The torchbearer ran to a spot at the far south side of the stadium and waved at the crowd, handing the torch to a nearby athlete. It was passed from hand to hand up and down the rows of athletes, from nation to nation. The camera crew caught the flames as it lit up the faces of the athletes, but it was the drone that captured the collective impact of a torchlight snaking its way across the infield. It would become a sequence of images that Hubert would play repeatedly throughout his documentary of the New Games.

Finally, the torch came to rest in the hands of a Paralympian in a wheelchair that fit around her body. The chair slowly glided near the stand with a small stainless-steel bowl. Lowering the torch, she tapped the dish, activating the sound of a gong. A beam of light ascended to the top of the stadium walls and split into two. Strands of light slid around the rim in opposite directions, meeting in the middle, an electric jolt captured by the hovering drones. The Olympic flame sprung to life. The drone captured the flight of the light while the camera crew zoomed in on the Olympic flame scorching the night sky.

Hubert stepped outside the tunnel, letting the procession, the Olympic flag, and that of the World Health Organization staffed by soldiers in dress uniform pass by him. For the first time, they would fly together; history marched past in absolute silence. The drones zoomed in on the sacred moments when the flags were secured, then raised, and then on their unfurling and dancing, zooming out to take in the permanence of the poles upon which they flew. Maria’s army used their cameras to capture the indescribable faces of the athletes, including when they all began to sing a long-forgotten song from the twentieth century: I’d like to build the world a home and furnish it with love…Grow apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtle doves…

“Audio, the audio!” Hubert called over his headset.

“We’re on it,” I said, telling the producer at my side that this was so cheesy and then apologizing because this made me look like an awful person, criticizing this choir of voices having unscripted, spontaneous fun. I swiped at my tears. I rambled on about the song, memories of singing it and believing it when I graduated from high school and college and at world championships. It was a theme song I should have sung at the weddings of my friends and fellow athletes who had died during the decade of the bombings. Wrong place, wrong time,

Hubert tried to lift his camera to compose the next shot. But the sight before him undid him. Singing and dancing like spontaneous combustions, except this time, human energy fueled hope and joy. He began to dance while his finger found the shutter. The click and whir swirled with their dancing, forgetting to compose the shot. Later, he published a collage of his photographs, feet superimposed on arms and legs, impossible orientations; it made people smile. He employed a calligrapher to write beneath the collage the title: September 6th, 2050, LA Coliseum, An Idea, with Legs.

 

I eyed the Olympic officials from the WHO in their VIP seats. They looked relieved as if they believed the Games were already successful, while I faced a tsunami of doubt and anxiety. The hard truths were about to emerge. I forced myself to breathe and think positively—everyone had loved the horse idea.

The athletes were herded to the side of the infield behind signs that identified their countries. Restless, some stood on chairs, cameras ready, others mingled with their neighboring countries, and some swapped seats so friends could sit beside each other. Russian athletes embraced Americans, Israelis embraced Palestinians, and Canadians embraced Americans. It looked friendly. It looked like they were having fun.

“The performers are in the tunnel,” the voice over my headset chimed. I exhaled slowly. I could hear the horses snorting.

The producer was at the controls of the drone from the roof of the press box.

“We’re all set,” I yelled into my headset.

“Gottcha,” said the producer.

She could see the shadows of his thumbs up. The drones were rising.

The lights of the stadium dimmed. Darkness. A disembodied voice silenced the crowd.

 “O Sport, a distillation of the life, a shining messenger, at first just a glimmer of light but then sunbeams reflecting off the forest’s gloomy floor.”  A spotlight in the center grew outward. And then another, over and over, until the stadium floor shimmered and glowed.

A loud clash and the stadium was thrown again into darkness.

 “O Sport, a distillation of the life, a vessel of joy, a cheerful game, that mirrors how we show up in the world.

In the center of the stadium, the outline of Waldo, the mascot of Munich ‘72 and 2023, appeared dancing with the Star of David. Daring, flowing acrobatic movements were seen only by bands of LEDs that outlined the limbs of each dancer as if the massacres had never found a foothold.

Darkness descended. This time, it was a child’s voice.

 “O sport, we shall dream.” And then a choir of children’s voices, swelling to a crescendo. “O sport, distillation of life, the ground we walk is the world we deserve.”

The lights slowly came on as if a curtain was lifting. A crowd of former Olympic mascots entered from one end of the stadium, led by an enormous blue-green sea serpent: Waldo the dachshund, Amik, the beaver, Misha the bear, Sam the bald eagle, and Hidori, the baby amur tiger, platypus, a spiny ant eater, What’s it, and Wenlock’s gradually taking over the infield until they quietly broke ranks. A chocolate brown horse and its rider, dressed in white from head to toe, riding bareback, appeared.

Two juxtaposed Jumbotrons sputtered to life, flickering, teetering, and then gleaming. The rider wore a body camera live streaming to one of the jumbotrons. The overhead drones focused on the horse and rider, sending those images to the second jumbotron.

All at once, the crowd could see the horse lower his head and tuck his chin, getting ready to prance. The rider slowly leaned into the steep descent of the horse’s neck. One jumbotron flashed the exact precise regal stepping of the horse, the other fixed on the rider, his jiggle, sway, and then the bump and grind. The rider’s body began to flow with the faster trot of the horse, his hind muscles shivering with power.  The horse rounded the infield repeatedly while the rider’s body melted into the horse’s stride and finally into the swirl of the horse’s mane.

The two jumbotrons in synch, horse and rider, became one. The stadium echoes only the breath, the snort, and the sounds of exertion that mingle with the gaspy gusts of the spectators.

Finally, I leaned back into my chair and took off the headset. The final scene is underway: a wave of children and athletes throwing mascots up into the air accompanied by a roar of laughter. The drone engineer was whooping it up in his press box, and those around her were crying, hugging, and giving each other high fives. It was over.

I overheard spectators speaking: “awesome, fantastic,” followed by enthusiastic foreign words, “fantastico, fantastisk, Yasso, prima, chuffed, zdorovo, macanudo, genial, sugoi, and Niú accompanied by the muffled sounds of arms raised, or a slap on the back, or a swipe of teary faces, or loud whistles and ending with the rapture of “oh my god!”

            I took off Mr. G’s hat and laid it on my lap. I fingered the inside flap and finally felt a return of courage; it had been twenty years. I turned the flap inside out. There were two pictures: my two girlfriends and me hugging, and Mr. G and me celebrating my gold medal, and one of Mr. G with me and the stoic and brilliant Domino, my winning horse. The usual wave of grief never materialized, just a warm loving glow, memories that fell into place, the yesterdays and today cohering.

             After the crowds had gone, I left the control booth and found my way to the center of the stadium, where only a few athletes remained huddled together in a fog of disbelief—the competitions, their Games, were to begin early in the morning.

I sat at the edge of the infield and watched, then nodded as the athletes walked past, and then spied a fat lady negotiating the stadium steps with unexpected grace. The drones were still flying back and forth, viewing the now-empty stadium. My mind looped back and forth following the soft hum of the drone’s motors that conflated into one image— I replayed how the Olympic flag was carried like a coffin and juxtaposed that against the moment of horse and rider, a celebration of athleticism, spectator and athletes together conspiring to defy the laws of gravity.  The Games would continue; surely, the Games must continue.

The fat lady, sweating profusely, grunted as she shuffled alongside me, preparing to sit on the ground. I recognized Harper’s face, but the body was not Harper’s.

“Can you help me?” she muttered, struggling to catch her breath. “I can’t unzip this crazy suit by myself!”

I erupted into a full-body chuckle and chortle that lasted the whole time it took me to locate the zipper cleverly hidden inside the folds of the squishy polyester. I tugged at the zipper that extended from Harper’s neck to her heel. The bodyguards appeared out of the dark shadows, edging closer. When Harper emerged from the polyester pile, her shorts and a white cotton t-shirt hugged her slim, older body. She had no hint of being remotely aligned with athleticism, but she had a defiant posture; gravity would not defeat her, no matter how awkward and spindly she was. She had the fight in her, always had.

The bodyguards halted.

“Let’s run a lap of the track,” Harper said, giving the bodyguards a thumbs up. Several turned and began to scan the stadium, looking for the dark underworld of revenge seekers.

 “I want to feel it in my muscles, and not all wrapped up in polyester, a fat-lady suit no less!”

I pulled on Mr. G’s flat hat, and together, we began to jog, walk, and talk, shadows rippling through the night. We passed under floodlights that spotlit track sections and disappeared into unlit areas without fear. Two bodies gliding with arms swinging, feet scuffing and tapping the pebbled track. Sometimes, we stepped quickly; other times, we strolled, drunk with the sweetness of the night air, ignoring the sour taste of darkness.

We passed from dark to light to dark, over and over, and finally, arm-in-arm, exited the stadium, leaving the fat lady suit in the middle of the infield.

The bodyguards closed in behind us. We could hear them chuckling.

Indeed, we all had embraced the wonder of what tomorrow might bring.

Listen, listen, listen

I had an insight on a training event in 1970 that we could solve all our organization’s problems if we listened to each other. A week later I had an “Old Kent Road” moment from very high up that said, “This is the world problem, Nick and it’s your job to fix it.” This led to me changing my work completely from science to organisation development, coaching and training and facilitating. Listening is an important and neglected social skill. It is critical. We won’t save the world without it.

Now it’s 2050 and  how increasing the amount and quality of listening has created  a more cooperative world. But first, what happens when you listen?

When you listen with an open heart and an open mind, you begin to understand the world and needs of the other. Then you know how to help them or influence them in a way that gives you both what you want. If you have ever listened deeply to someone who is different to you by race, class, sex, age, faith you will never stereotype anyone from that group again.

When someone listens to you profoundly, you don’t just feel better. you also think better and act more confidently.

Here is what happened!

1. We taught young people in schools and higher education to take

turns listening to each other

1. .

 

1. We did the same in and

between organisations

1. . People felt and thought better and worked better together so their organisations and society thrived.

 

1. The idea of taking turns

listening to people who were very different to you

1. went viral. Social media platforms first competed to deliver this service and then worked together to enable it world wide.

 

1. People everywhere and almost simultaneously realised that we are literally members of one squabbling family and decided to stop.

 

1. Although there were problems, there were places where cooperation, creativity and joy were already happening.

We started to look for them

1. , spread stories about what was already working. Thes stories inspired more action and created an optimistic virtuous circle.

 

A group of visionaries challenged us all with this, “Imagine that it’s 2025 and we have had a message from some benevolent aliens that they will be visiting the Earth on 2050 to see how we are getting on. What do we want them to say?” This has caused a world-wide tidy up, just like when the in-laws visit a young couple the first time.

Finally, doing this work was fun for everyone. There is nothing more enjoyable than doing great work together! Let’s get on with it.

Clunky at first as it sounded to so many. Yet this mere brainworm of a notion, spreading through humankind from 2024, was indeed the bug, the lover, the fermentive mother, that saved civilisation. Anything lengthier would simply not have worked. Anything lengthier could not have allowed the space, inspired the faith, provoked the understanding, given heart and ‘prepared the soil’ as it did.

 

As it does.

The 2050 Chronicles

 

Rose Diamond

 

It’s 2050 and I am called to bear witness to how we humans survived the madness of the first quarter of this century.

 

I will not revisit the events of 2025, there are others better suited to that task and, while it is important to remember the suffering visited upon so many, those of us who survived prefer to think of the event as a Great Liberation rather than a great cataclysm. Part of the social contract that now knits us together into One Community is that we choose to remember the distorted thinking that caused so much death and misery so that we may never go back there, and at the same time we refrain from dwelling on the old stories of division, lack and self-interest; we are united now in living a new story.

 

An important part of our new story is that every individual counts – the choices we make, the actions we take, the thoughts we have, the ways we treat each other – a myriad of small conscious choices made every day by millions of individuals form the foundation of our new world. We are each a cell in the body of humanity and in the body of the world and we can choose to be vibrant cells supporting the liveliness of the whole. We recognise that each individual is an ordinary expression of a shared humanity and, at the same time, has extraordinary potential to create, inspire and encourage. In that spirit I will tell you about the small but vital part I have played in our recent transformation.

 

I live in the land we used to call the United Kingdom. Those of us who survived dwell around the coastal edges, the centre is as yet uninhabitable, and our numbers are relatively small. We live as locally-based and globally connected, technically enhanced hunter-gatherers. It’s remarkable how quickly life returned to the seas once we stopped using nature as a resource to be exploited, and now we take only as much fish as we can use. We grow all our crops, fruit and vegetables, using greenhouses and hydroponic farming, alongside community farms and gardens. There is more than enough food for everyone. The sea, the wind and the sun give us all the energy we need to power our homes and enterprise hubs. We connect all around the world using the latest technologies which are constantly being enhanced. Now that we are released from dualistic and limited thinking it is very exciting how we can all think together and very quickly evolve solutions to any problem. We meet in local and regional councils across the generations, races and religions; anyone who is interested in a particular aspect of our community life has a voice and we have evolved methods of conversation that draw the best from everyone so that we can weave ideas into solutions and move quickly into creative experimentation. Together, we give rise to a great joy knowing that this is how human life was meant to be and we are now truly living in a way that makes us proud to be human, taking care of life on Earth and each other. This is the Great Liberation.

 

If you are wondering how this consciousness and culture shift happened I can only tell you that the events that unfolded in 2025 created such a seismic shock a collective awakening was evoked. This could only happen because there were enough of us who had been preparing the way and were holding the space for such an emergence. When I look back I realise the biggest gift I brought was listening. There can be no co-operation with anyone or anything if we don’t listen, and that includes listening to our inner authentic truth, to each other, to nature and to the evolutionary impulse.

 

First I need to give you a bit of context. I am of the generation we called the baby boomers who came into life after the previous great cataclysm, the second world war. We were a generation fired with a vision and a mission. (Later generations had their visions and missions too and I will let them tell those.) Some of us came to Earth at this time to be midwives for the Great Liberation and, for me, it took the best part of a lifetime to remember this mission, step into it fully and embody it. It was a path of remembering who we truly are and fully connecting with that truth through a spiritual quest and a path of conscious healing. Each of us had to find the motivation for that journey inside ourselves and then we were carried on the waves of our collective awakening.

 

There is so much I could tell you but in the interests of brevity I will concentrate on just five crucial strands of my life story where I participated and made a contribution to a new co-operative culture.

 

1. Identifying with a Counter-Cultural Movement and the Heroic Journey of Liberation

 

1. Writing Poetry as a Tool for Inner Transformation and Sacred Activism

 

1. Stepping Up to the Work that Has My Name On It

 

1. Walking the Path of Conscious Healing: Being Willing to Descend into Inner Shadows, Endure Dark Nights of the Soul and Sit with Death.

 

Humming the World Awake

 

 

Identifying with a Counter-Cultural Movement and the Heroic Journey of Liberation

 

I came into young womanhood as the second wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement was breaking on our shores in the early 1970’s. This counter-cultural movement arose spontaneously from the collective consciousness and opened many doors in my mind, enabling me to discover and follow my destiny.

 

Growing up in a family in which my father dominated my mother I was already predisposed to the work of women’s liberation. From the moment I read my first feminist book, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, I was awake with excitement and throughout my life I chose to follow that intense whole-body-whole-mind creative impulse whenever it arose.

 

The Women’s Liberation Movement, like any other counter-cultural movement, was based on shared understandings a) that our current mindset and sense of identity were the products of centuries of oppression through which we had been conditioned into limited ways of knowing ourselves and the world and b) that liberation from oppression is a collective endeavour. Our mantra was “the personal is political” and our basic tool for making the connection between the personal and the political was the consciousness-raising group. Coming together in local groups and national conferences we’d sit together in circles and explore our experiences as women and then, emboldened by the sharing, we’d take actions for change. This simple formula of first becoming more aware of our experience, finding strength in a collective practice, and then taking action, is one I have continued to nurture and encourage throughout my life. Back then, some of the actions I took included participating in the early days of creating refuges for women and children suffering from domestic abuse. I was a member of a women’s writing group for several years and we published our own poetry. I initiated a collaborative project, Women Start Here, creating a guidebook and collection of case studies which encouraged group leaders in local communities to bring women together in informal learning groups, in particular those living in peripheral housing schemes. I was then commissioned by a community organisation to undertake research into women’s unemployment and was shocked to discover the collusion of government agencies to cover up the truth about the extent of women’s exclusion from the workforce. As a result of my research a training centre upskilling women in technology skills was opened in Edinburgh. I also ran my own groups and workshops exploring  themes of women and the creative process and I wrote the first draft of a book on this subject.

 

What was most exciting to me were the books by feminist writers I feasted on for twenty-five years. They were unashamedly breaking new ground by leaving old stereotypes behind and stepping into being a whole new kind of woman – unadorned, radical, intellectually brilliant and challenging. Over the years, the themes evolved from outrage and social critique, to the roots of women’s psychology, to the suppression of soul and nature-based spirituality. Each deepening of theme revealed me to myself and helped me to understand, not only how women had been oppressed over the centuries, but how the process of colonisation works through the theft of land, language and spirituality. In this way I began to empathise with other oppressed and indigenous people’s throughout the world. This was an expansion of consciousness and a deepening of worldview which, in turn, led to an understanding of just how challenging and heroic is the human journey to liberate ourselves from the limiting conditioning so deeply etched into our minds and bodies.

 

The transition of humanity, from the old life-threatening cultural paradigm to a new life-affirming paradigm and culture, had begun and it provided a heady mix of new, life-changing ideas, radical commentary and experiments in living differently. Of course the Women’s Liberation Movement wasn’t the only counter-cultural movement – the Civil Rights Movement, the Campaign against Nuclear Disarmament, the Environmental Movement, Gay Rights, were just a few from those earlier years. And later we saw the Occupy Movement, Extinction Rebellion, the LBTGI community, Black Lives Matter, and the Me Too movement, to name a few. Those years, from the early 1970’s right through to the Great Liberation, which began in 2025, gave rise to an exhilarating explosion of creativity and new ways of thinking, seeded a new culture and pointed the way towards a better future, although amongst all the mayhem and political insanity it was often difficult to see how this evolution was manifesting on the ground

 

Our collective journey towards liberation, expanded consciousness, protest and creativity was thrilling and sometimes great fun, but it was not easy. By the early 1980’s it was becoming apparent to me and my feminist sisters that our consciousness raising groups, along with our growing cultural analysis, were not enough. Untamed ego was rampant within and between us and our energy became dissipated as we turned against each other, unable to accept our differences. We soon realized, if we wanted to change the world by raising our consciousness, we needed more tools and practices. Many of us began to seek out the diverse forms of psychotherapy and intense experiential learning groups suddenly available everywhere. A treasure trove of healing modalities and therapies appeared alongside spiritual practices and traditions. Some of these were ancient practices that had been well loved in the past and then repressed and forgotten, others evolved out of new psychological understandings. It was only when we started to use these tools to look inwards that we discovered just how deeply and tenaciously the old, life-denying culture had taken root inside us.

 

WritingPoetry as a Tool for Inner Transformation and Sacred Activism

 

The cultivation of co-operation is not only a social phenomenon; it begins inside each individual heart and develops through the transformation of consciousness, one person at a time.

 

It is essential that we learn to co-operate with the unfolding of the creative process as it touches and flows through us and with the evolutionary impulse which is always available to inform and guide us. This is the art of sacred activism which puts our whole state of being at the heart of all we do.

 

When I started to write poetry in my late 20’s I had no language for the inner world. If someone had asked me how I felt – and I don’t think anyone ever did – I would have struggled to put a sentence together. I was living from the surface of myself, driven by emotions and urges I did not understand or reflect upon. From my present-day perspective I would say I was unconscious – intellectually bright but lacking in the awareness and wisdom that enables any depth of self-reflection and deliberate choice. In other words, I wasn’t guiding and shaping my own destiny but simply reacting to whatever was put in front of me.

 

When I came out of an eight year relationship, and went to live for the first time alone in a rural cottage, I began to sit quietly in the living room after work, with a pen and notebook, and poems spontaneously started to flow through me. It was as if a lively stream of wisdom had been waiting for its time to be released so that it could ripple across the paper and show me who I really am.

 

The poems astonished me because I didn’t think them up, they simply showed up, fully formed. They spoke in a different voice to my everyday personality; an  authoritative, authentic voice far wiser and more knowing than my personality. I was thrilled – and that is one of the primary characteristics of creating – excitement lifts me out of the mundane repetitions and frustrations of daily life into a transcendent realm which is always new, unexpected and surprising. Excitement is a mobilisation of energy which becomes a momentum the more I give it my attention. It wasn’t only the artefacts of the poems that delighted me – the fact that I had created something out of nothing, something that would last – it was the discovery of a whole new dimension of  being I hadn’t previously known existed. When my inner world revealed itself in this way, I found an Aladdin’s cave; a magical, mystical world of endless riches and possibility. And this was very compelling.

 

This opening into my inner world made me more intelligent, capable and confident in the outer world too. I had been underachieving since the age of twelve. In the face of problems at home and tedium at school, my intelligence had gone underground, like a bulb patiently awaiting the right season to bloom. When the time was right, my petals effortlessly opened to reveal the poetry and magic hidden in my soul.

 

A deeper self was communicating with me through poetry, and the solitary, rural life I’d chosen gave me the space, stillness and silence in which I could concentrate on the practice of listening deeply. This came naturally to me, as if I was already skilled at it. As a personality I was frequently inarticulate, full of self-doubt, lacking in confidence and confused, yet the poet’s voice was strong, knowing, powerful and mature. Where was this voice coming from? How could these two totally different beings – the immature, unconscious personality and the wise, knowing author, inhabit one body?

 

A door had swung open into a whole new dimension of being. I was bowled over by awe and wonder and the activities of daily life paled in comparison. Later I came to understand this as an opening to the spiritual dimension within me through which my soul was emerging to be heard. Writing poetry enabled me to focus the intense energy of this spiritual awakening and became a boat to carry me through the turbulent seas of the following years.

 

Anyone who doubts that a poet can be a visionary, a seer, a prophet, or that poetry can originate from the place where the personal is political, should consider the lives of poets in Soviet Russia in the 1980’s.  Just this week I came across a poem I wrote in the late 1980’s about the poet, Irina Ratushinskaya, who was arrested in September 1982 and sentenced to seven years hard labour for writing poetry and “being a danger to the State”. (Under Stalin’s despotic regime, between 1925 and 1941, other Soviet poets were persecuted –  Sergei Yesenin hanged himself, Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself, Osip Mandelstam died in a prison camp, Isaak Babel was executed and Marina Tsvetayeva also hanged herself. In 1964 Joseph Brodsky was exiled for his “social parasitism” and “decadent poetry”. The celebrated Russian modernist poet Anna Akhmatova wrote a long poem, Requiem about the suffering of people under the Great Purge which was finally published in 1987, 40 years after she wrote it. Poets have been persecuted in other countries too such as the Spanish poet Frederick Garcia Lorca who was assassinated in 1936. And, according to a Guardian article written in 2021 similar persecution of poets was still happening, for example, in India, the author of a viral poem about Narendra Modi’s handling of Covid-19 has been demonised and” all around the world, from Myanmar to Belarus, poets are being persecuted”.)

 

The tragic truth is that to an authoritarian regime an authentic voice is threatening. For me, this puts into perspective the importance for each of us to develop our authentic voice and to speak our own deepest truths as the bedrock of true democracy. My own experience has shown me that the more I speak from this authentic place within me the more I bring forth transpersonal truths and when we come together for this purpose we are committing r/evolutionary acts.

 

 

Songs for Irene

 

February twilight,

alone in a caravan thrumming with raindrops

in a garden, on a hillside, in the western lowlands,

drawn to my ritual cave

for some ancient ceremony, feast or purification,

a rite that blood once sang,

forgot and returned to earth.

Now my dulled senses beckon and

I turn to listen.

 

In the city the festival of peace has started.

I cannot be there, having no vision

for a world, a people, a person

at peace for more than moments

that vision not yet born in me

but knowing we could feed, clothe, house and educate

all the people of this world

for a fraction of what we spend on killing.

 

We are all in crisis

We never really talk about what’s really going on

the invisible prison fence

the repetitions of old patterns

the safety of habit

the laws we did not make

the self-imposed torture

the scores of ways we numb ourselves

the treadmills of the patterns we can’t break

the maze we walk unsensed

the pressures we’re under

the deadlines

the holes in us

through which our love and beauty leak away.

 

Irena was imprisoned for being a poet

one of many poets tortured for her truth

arrested at twenty-eight and sentenced

to seven years of strict regime

and a further five of internal exile

they said she’d have her liberty at forty

then chose to release her at thirty-three.

They called it liberation.

 

When she scratched her poems on soap

committed her lines to heart to save her sanity

and when she walked the streets of an alien culture

was she free?

 

 

the poem is in the body

the poem is in the gut, blood, breath

the poem is an old woman

who has lived through many lifetimes

listen, her voice is cracked

she has waited, waited for her time

 

the poem is a gift and a burden

it is a song of freedom

a demanding teacher, a guide

the poem is eternal,

it is water, it is fire, it is rock.

 

Irene whose name means peace, was a celestial attendant to Aphrodite, goddess of love. She both announced the coming of death and acted as mid-wife to the gods.

Rose Diamond, 1987

 

Writing poetry led me to the understanding that the root of all oppression is the colonisation of soul. Feminist writers gave me a means to understand my own oppression as a woman and pointed the way to how I could liberate myself. Poetry gave me a tool through which I could listen deeply to my own inner experience, become an archaeologist of soul and connect with transpersonal truths. In the 1980’s I wrote a 60-page poem, A Poem for Voices, which led me on an inner archetypal journey of transformation, starting from a lonely state of alienation to being part of a group of 8 people sitting on a mountain top humming the new world awake. I invited four women actors to read the poem and we offered it to a full house at the Edinburgh playwright’s workshop. The practice of listening deeply to inner wisdom from a space of presence became a  prime motivator and tool for my personal mission. The vision of a group of people summoning in a new world by humming returned to me at the darkest hour of our transformation in a way I will reveal later.

 

Stepping Up to the Work that Has My Name on it

 

Those of us in my generation who were on a conscious healing path were breaking new ground, turning up the soil of the soul, and laying new tracks, so that generations coming after us could move forward more easily. At the beginning this was mostly unconscious, it just seemed to arise spontaneously but over time as I understood my mission better my strategy was to learn everything I could from the inside out and then to pass on whatever I learned to others as quickly as possible. My roles as a teacher, and then later as a whole person educator and gestalt therapist, and a personal and professional development trainer, gave me the freedom to design my own educational programmes and to provide a theoretical framework of understanding alongside the facilitation of process, skills and creative empowerment.

 

A few years after I started writing poetry and began to experience the bliss of deep listening, I began to seize every opportunity I could to extend these skills with others. Backed by the Open University, I wrote a handbook and simple training course for group leaders called Listening Helps. And then I followed with another project designed to support group leaders to facilitate the shift from a competitive culture to a co-operative culture. I wrote training materials and ran trainings for leaders in community and health education and in the prison service. The project with prison officers was particularly interesting as the intention was to seed and grow a compassionate prison culture by training the officers in groupwork skills and giving them a safe forum in which they could explore their own experiences. It was very clear that many of the officers were as imprisoned by the punitive system as the inmates. Going into the prison at regular intervals reminded me of the myth of Sisyphus, in which a large boulder is rolled to the top of the hill, only to roll down again. Although some of the officers were able to seize the opportunity we offered, on the whole it was a constant process of starting over and pushing the boulder up the hill again. This caused me to realise the weight of the individual and institutional inertia we were up against.

 

We all have unique gifts to bring and when we bring them wholeheartedly our individual contributions add up to something bigger and more powerful. The practice of deep listening is one of the best gifts I bring and it became the key to everything that gave my life meaning.

 

I trained to be a gestalt therapist over ten years, and continued to practice and teach gestalt for many more years. It was here I first experienced the excitement of transformational process in an ongoing group and within an international community. At the time we thought our trainers were magicians who could draw out each individual’s deepest soul themes and then weave the threads into a fabulous group tapestry, which in turn was part of a bigger collective web of meaning. A conversation would start over here and end up over there and we never knew where we were going or how we got there. The basic underlying theory focuses on the ways we interrupt our contact with experience and how we can use the practices of presence, awareness, deep listening, the imagination and experimental action, to re-connect and co-operate in the unfolding of the creative process. These skills and understandings have stayed with me ever since and become the bedrock of the groupwork skills and personal practices I use today.

 

I had discovered the exhilaration of connecting with myself and with others and unfolding the creative process together through conversation. Throughout my life  I continued to create spaces where these deep discovery conversations could be held. In the late ‘90’s I joined a community of 40 people in New Zealand, in a dialogue circle over 8 days, and again I was thrilled by the adventure of it. Afterwards I started to evolve my own way of holding such circles in my local community. I didn’t fully know what I was doing, how to put language to it, or how to facilitate the process, but people responded to my call and demonstrated a hunger for this adventure of speaking from the authentic self and discovering the truth of our deepest wisdom together. A few years later I found my soul mate and he shared this love so we had ten years of exploring our inner lives, resolving tensions in our relationship and, most importantly, c0-creating a vision for a whole new world. It became clear to me that if we want to create a new culture with a new story, each of us needs to live our passion and I wrote a book based on conversations with 20 ordinary-extraordinary people who were changing their local communities by being love-in-action. After that I went on to record 200 or so conversations with new culture makers. Making podcasts is very popular now but back then I was a pioneer.

 

When my soulmate died in 2015 I wrote my way through my grief by writing a handbook for Deep Discovery Conversations and these are now part of my current transformational offerings.

 

So when you ask me how I have contributed to co-creating a collaborative culture,  one of my best contributions has been inviting people into spaces where we can explore and harvest together our common wisdom, the wisdom of the tribe. In our transition into new ways of living together these simple skills and practices become the hub around which we live and make us a connected culture, honouring diversity within unity, recognising each other’s contribution and always remembering that we need each other and we are more whole, well and powerful together than we could ever be alone.

 

 

Walking the Path of Conscious Healing: The Willingness to Descend into Inner Shadows, Endure Dark Nights of the Soul and Sit with Death.

 

Just one more thing. Another contribution I have made that has been very useful through these transitional times is to pass on to others what I have learned about  moving consciously through grief and death to participate in the renewal of life. There was enormous grief in the loss of life around 2025, but when entered into consciously, shock, crisis and loss can be the very ground from which consciousness grows.

 

My conscious walk with death began in earnest when my soulmate died in 2015 and six months later my brother died suddenly too, leaving me the only remaining family member. I began an inquiry into death, grief and loss which lasted for seven years.

 

My personal sorrow morphed into a growing collective grief as we suffered the pandemic, the running down of the infrastructure of our country, the war on  democracy, mass migrations in response to authoritarian regimes, senseless brutal wars and complacency in the face of the climate emergency and the extinction crisis. There was so much to grieve and yet the majority of people had never been given the space or encouragement to do so and any show of emotion was considered to be an indulgence. Using my own grieving process as the starting place to deepen my understanding, I took up the call to educate, encourage, empower and equip people to move through grief towards fulfilling participation in community life by creating a programme I called, Sitting with Death and Choosing Life, the cornerstone of which is deep listening. I didn’t set out to create a programme but it just kept coming through me until in the end I had created an eco-system of five courses, a library of resources including over 50 recorded conversations with diverse practitioners and  eventually I completed my book, A Story of Transformation, How grieving my brother’s death brought gifts of healing and awakened me to our power to renew the world. I offered all of this as stimulus materials designed to help participants contact their own truth. The essential thing was the willingness to meet in circle and find the courage to put words to experiences which are often beyond words; and yet it is this attempt which helps us to touch our common humanity.

 

“My seven years of grief” carried me into my fourth life chapter of Eldership. Here is what I wrote in A Story of Transformation:

 

“Perhaps it is grief that expresses our human-ness more than any other experience. Only the human part of us dies. Spirit is eternal. Only the human in us experiences loss and separation. Spirit knows no separation. Perhaps the most vital work of the human project, and the grand design of Soul, is to bring the eternal spirit of wholeness and interconnectedness into our daily human lives and to embody it. Perhaps this shift into a compassionate identification with all that it means to be human is essential for the future survival and thriving of our world. The seven years of grief which began after my brother’s death was a rite of passage, a time when I was called to immerse myself fully in the experience of loss and grief and to face into the inevitability of death, not just for myself alone but as a way of contributing to the collective consciousness of humanity.”

 

This life chapter I’m calling Eldership is about completion, integration, coming to peace with life and being of service to the greater Whole. Earlier in life I was preoccupied with discovering who I am in relation to the society and culture in which I live. Then I was dedicated to remembering who I am as a spiritual being. And, in my fourth soul chapter of Eldership, I returned to an interest in what it means to be a human being, only now, with the understanding and awareness that I am a spiritual being having a human experience. The more consciously I can live this human experience the better I bring together the human and the spiritual within me and embody my soul.

 

 

Humming the World Awake

 

The story I’ve told you is a story of how evolution plays out through an individual and how our life purpose can unfold effortlessly, as our greatest adventure, if we let it.

 

I began as an unconscious young woman lucky to be born into a time of expansion and creativity. I allowed myself to be borne along by the energy of a counter-cultural movement and found an identity and purpose within it. I discovered a gift for deep listening which opened up all sorts of opportunities that brought me a great deal of joy and fulfilment – writing poetry, initiating deep discovery conversations, bringing people together for experiential learning and transformational practice, giving voice to all aspects of our humanity, deepening into soul and history. I became very excited by the prospect of a cultural transformation through the evolution of consciousness. At a certain point many of us believed a whole new world was inevitable and was just around the corner. And then the darkness deepened and the insanity in the world became more and more rampant and I began to think that the only way we would get through this was by divine intervention. And, because I had been delving so much into death, and so many of my loved ones were residing in another dimension, it dawned on me how much spiritual power surrounds our world – all of the enlightened great ones and the “ordinary” souls who worked for the good of the whole  – are still here with us. The task of those of us who had agreed to midwife this Great Liberation was to connect with each other all around the Earth and with the spiritual energy surrounding the Earth where all our loved ones are cheering us on and lending their energy to the awakening.  That’s when I came upon the idea of the Great Hum.

 

Soul has a resonance, a call, and that resonance, at its purest, is a call to life that can wake us into our next expansion of wholeness. What if, as a collective practice  we came together and, with intention, started to hum, calling in all the spiritual energy that is here in all the dimensions of cosmos.

 

And so we did. And you may remember the old story of the walls of Jericho. Well it was like that. When the walls of the old authoritarian story came tumbling down we were ready, holding space for the new consciousness. And as people recovered from the shock this new consciousness was here, ready to welcome and hold them as they awakened.

 

We transformed from a fragmented world, held together by domination and threads of light, to a field of unified knowing in which the interconnectedness of all life within a purposeful cosmos, guides our every action. This is the foundation from which we now live. When you realise you are a soul here on Earth to have a human experience within an interconnected universe, nothing other than co-operation is possible. It is still possible to make mistakes and mess up but failures are seen as opportunities to increase skills, understanding and compassion. It’s a path of lifelong learning, creative empowerment and endless fulfilment. I am so privileged to have been part of it.

 

Thanks for listening,

 

Rose Diamond

February 14, 2024

 

Rose Diamond is author of the forthcoming book, A Story of Transformation, How grieving my brother’s death brought gifts of healing and awakened me to our power to renew our world. She has published three other books on various aspects of the transformational process and is the creator of the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme.  She lives in Wales,UK, and you can find her here: https://sittingwithdeathandchoosinglife.com; www.tribeintransition.net

 

 

That I may live to be 97 years old should not surprise me. All my recent ancestors I know of minimally lived into their 90s. My mother’s mother lived to 96 and two of her older sisters both lived to 106. As a child I recall grandma, who lived with us, having some odd words in her vocabulary learned in the Appalachian hills of West Virginie.

As a young pedant, I determined the words were Elizabethan English, which tells me when my/her people arrived in the area. One great grandad had a country store. I inherited the special pliers he used to pull teeth. He was also likely the closest thing to a doctor in the area. For 400 years, I’m guessing, childhood mortality was at least 50%, hence there was a cleansing of the family gene pool, but for which I would not have saved the world.

And how do I know I wrote a story about how I saved the world? Well, I don’t. I do have random access to Wikipedia as it appears to exist in the future. The latest entry/date is from June 2353. The device I found appears to be of alien manufacture (I call it the WayForward Machine — WFM). For some reason, it only works for a few hours once a year.

It had never occurred to me to search for someone born in 1953 by whatever name I may come to be known by. I prefer learning about the future’s recent past, i.e. the next 329 years. But I found references to someone about my age called Mooper Dude.

The last time I was on the WFM I was reading more about the Mooper Dude, who had saved the world per some sources, and following one of the 143 references I found speculation that the Mooper’s real name was Eric Lee.

The Dude developed something of a cult following and in 2050 the Dude had written an essay about how he had saved the world, not the Suave Ones who claimed they had (at the time, they were busy writing revisionist history that had allegedly been proven wrong by 2353 when everyone believed in the Dude’s version — but what could I know?) .

Okay, so I found and read the WFM entry on the Dude’s essay. As most Wikipedia entries are, it is way too long — too many cooks, and so I’ll summarize. Of interest is that, up to 2024, everything the Dude claims is as I remember.

As for the next 26 years, I suppose I’ll “believe it” when I live it, but probably not (my future may be influenced by the story, but it cannot determine my future).

The next time I have access to the WFM, I could find out when/how the Dude died, but I don’t believe anything I read on Wikipedia now, so why should I believe claims made by a machine I found while making crop circles? [And sorry about that, joining the Crop Circles Guild and making crop circles in my travels is the only thing I can regret doing, as so many people were fooled — I must feel bad about that.]

Wiki claims don’t always check out now, but most other sources (e.g. all social media) are not worth reading, so 99% of the prattle (tavern talk to MSM) doesn’t even merit being known of, to then not believe it. I don’t remember when I stopped reading Scientific America (after it went over to the dark side to become a pop-sci rag for experts), but some journals are still trying.

Death can come at any time, and someone could have used my obscure life as a starting point in creating a fictitious person (who allegedly saved the world), so they could command and control humans as usual (and save the empire, see history 101 — JC Superstar). But for those who are easily amused, I’ll share the Mooper’s story.

He had been born an idiot, skipped kindergarten, and when tested by the local school, his mother was told he was functionally “too immature” to start first grade, but he was put in school anyway (mother knows best).

He had no memory of his first two years in school (traumatic amnesia), and made his first friend at the start of third grade in a new school (who asked about the school he had been going to, and all he could remember was it was a light green color on the outside).

He was assessed to be uneducable, and so was on the receiving end of the then policy of “social promotion” to prevent the harm of pointlessly failing a student and having them repeat a grade level (at public expense). He never did homework nor asked questions (he had noted it annoyed the adults, so he stopped). He couldn’t follow what teachers were saying, so he stopped trying.

In his senior year of high school, the Dude became extremely discombobulated by evidence he was not an idiot, but he was the only one aware of the evidence (apart from one teacher). After the last day of his public schooling, he didn’t go to do the graduation thing. He decided to be a lifelong learner and never graduate.

He bought a bus ticket to the US desert southwest (to Flagstaff, he was too terrified to walk alone to the Wichita city limits and hitchhike). Once out of the Arizona bus station, he had no choice but to find a road and hold his thumb out. It was 1970. It was common, almost normal, to do this. He ended up doing migrant farm work summers for the next ten years.

He had built a box on the back of a $200 1954 Ford pickup to live in when not on the road, and for three years took classes at a small (very inexpensive) community college. Then he wondered, why bother? Why not feed directly from the trough (a bigger one) for free?

So he moved to live in the student ghetto just outside UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara) where he spent his days (and nights until 11pm when the library closed) mostly wandering the open stacks for books to read.

Seven years passed. His summers on the road (he added hopping freight trains to his free transportation options) was the needed correction to too many books. He was a fool-errant.

One story of Dude (which is as I recall) is that he once was in the bookstore in Isla Vista and needed to ask the staff a question, but couldn’t — he had lost his voice from disuse (usually his lips don’t even move when he reads).

One fine year he was on his way back to California from picking apples in Washington near the Canadian border. He was watching the Oregon countryside pass, sitting in front of the open boxcar doors. The possibility occurred to him that if he became an agronomist, an “expert,” he could travel to other countries, as another tramp had prior to 1896, to go observin’ matters till he died.

He had never joined the other tramps after payday to spend his money on booze and whores. He just took to the road, and to never be afraid of being jack-rolled for his money, he would buy a money order and mail it to his parents. He had saved up enough to pay his way through three years and two degrees (crop and soil science) at CalPoly, a state land-grant university.

He became an expert, but as he had read H.T. Odum’s Environment, Power, and Society in 1971, he knew that everything he had learned was, in effect, how to turn fossil fuel into food. Going overseas to share this how-to knowledge would make more humans dependent on modern techno-industrial fossil-fueled society (and more food = more people), i.e. he would be doing harm long term.

So he never used his formal education to make any money. After the last day, he skipped doing the graduation thing and spent his summer doing farm work, but not for the incidental minimum wage he was paid. What could be better?

He did apply for a job (no need, no good reason) as an instructional assistant to help special ed teachers. He was chosen, perhaps based on the one essay question (there were over two hundred applicants and a lengthy proctored test given to all in the same place and time, and as he had graduated magna cum laude he likely aced the test), and so worked a year doing what most normal people do (dress up and show up).

Okay, end of school year, been there, done that, so he built a better box on the back of the family’s 1965 Chevy pickup his father gave him, and started living on the streets of Santa Barbara and frequenting the city library.

During his sedentary year of doing the “work” thing, he had taken up computer programing (C64) using a luggable portable(SX64), and he spent a year developing word processor software. He sold it to computer clubs (many at the time) by giving them a master copy, and whatever number of manuals, intro booklets, numbered disk labels, and keyboard overlies they ordered. They could add a dollar for copying and sell to members.

He made so much money (unintentionally) that he became a credible human, president of the local computer club. His status was high enough that 33 years ago (as I write this), a user came for user support, he provided it as usual, and she married him for lifetime user support, which he continues to provide.

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None of this seems to have anything to do with saving the world, and you’d be absolutely wrong again, as usual, if you think you are right. But to seemingly be more on topic, the Dude was “in student mode” until about 2014 when he noticed that he was surrounded by experts (idiot savants) who were cluelessly unaware of how the world really worked, as were those misinformed by them.

So, against all his instincts and better judgement, the Dude felt compelled to become a watchman, to declare what he seeth in front of his pug-nosed face — for posterity’s sake.

He was behind on his studies (domestic life can distract), so he started where his education (as distinct from schooling) had started, by reading the updated version of H.T. Odum’s book, mentioned above, that was published posthumously in 2007. And more books, articles, offerings, conferences followed.

In 2026 the Dude completed his 1742 hours of publicly protesting unsustainable denial (same as the number of times Al Bartlett gave his public lecture on Arithmetic, Energy and Population and for the same reason).

The way the Dude saved the world was by successfully spreading a recognition of humanity’s need to love that well which thou must leave ere long. Like every meme he spread, he had stolen it.

But it caught on. He had won some essay contest in 2024, but what saved the world was a video of him burning the prize money.

He converted it all into $100 dollar bills (so the video wasn’t too long), and in obvious triumph over Plutus, sat at a campfire and, in the pose of a meditating Buddha, burns each.

There are two candles by the fire, one bill’s length apart, and he remarks at one point that as all poets know, burning your candle at both ends gives a lovely light. It went viral on TikTok, public intellectuals were forced to refute his message (a URL was captioned) to humanity, but couldn’t, and that’s how the world was saved.

The public didn’t care about his message (they just saw the Dude as cool), but so many mimicked the Dude, by repeating his claims to taunt the establishment (to seem cool and get laid), that the intelligentsia (who pretend to be running the show) couldn’t ignore his claims.

It just happened that they were reaching a WTF moment when they realized they didn’t have a clue as to what to do, and that everything they had been doing was having the opposite outcome of what they intended. Worse, everything they thought they knew was falling in a faint glow of ashes all about them.

The Dude seemed to be yet another threat to their keeping on keeping on. They were starting to look over the net energy cliff. They were starting to see the Rocks of Dissolution below. They were afraid, deer-in-the-headlights afraid.

The Dude told them: Stand down.

For the first time in their lives, they could not obfuscate those like the Dude into going away. They who had seen themselves in the form of God on high and not as mere puppets — they could only mutter and mumble low.

Only by standing down from our hubris heights (before we fall down) can humanity hope to come to again love and understand the planet, and live with it properly.

Like Greta, the Dude was invited to go to the Davos den
of money changers and give his message, but he refused.

If you don’t love Mother, you are a pathological form of dysfunctional animal. Humans who would rather not be sick-minded, will step down and endeavor to go back to that which worked for our ancestors from the beginning of life to about 75k years ago when we mutated into an expansionist form of animal whose exceptionalism defies Nature.

We have forgotten that we are animals. To again endeavor to listen to Mother so as to thereby persist long term as the millennia pass is not wrong. Endeavoring to keep on keeping on as a non-viable metastatic pathogen is wrong (has no long-term viable outcome for humans, but the biosphere may benefit from our passing — Nature is unkind, but never wrong).

This was the meme that saved the world, changed humanity’s form of civilization. Of course, in 2050, there was still a remnant of rule by political animals who would rather die than see themselves as dysfunctional animals (humans of NIMH).

And they were dying, but they were still pretending to be running the world. They had fought the good fight against the Fascists and won. They claimed that the Dude’s message had been stolen from them, and they wrote 42 books proving they were right. So it was in this context that the Dude had written his essay in 2050.

Mt. Hubris, California

But the prosperity that was sweeping the world of the formerly hubris ones was not because of the Suave Ones, but despite them. The Dude had also explained why there could be no political solutions, and as this understanding spread, political animals mutated back to being evolvable cooperative animals (i.e. normal).

Conflict between the Fascists and those suavely pretending not to be fascists, was a distraction. The existence of independent sovereign individuals/states IS war. To understand this is to be delivered from your belief in sovereign powers (human exceptionalism)—and so the dream (of Lord Man) ends, Self and Other go away of their own accord. There is no one to blame, not even your alleged self.

The Dude’s radically Rₓevolutionary offerings (stolen from John B. Calhoun) were antithetical to the existence of the Suave Ones, so history in 2353 (403 AA) notes that the Suave Ones could not have been the source of the paradigm shift that saved the world (from expansionist humans).

They incorrectly attributed the change to the Mooper Dude by neglecting to note that he had never had an original idea in his life (neologisms are not ideas). The humans of 2353, as of today, persisted in telling stories that are not true (but their stories are better than the ones we tell and their belief in belief was still on the decline).

The Dude became the imagined source of ideas, a worldview, a mindset, (Mooper called it MILI). Humans came to love and understand the world system again as evolvable animals living within limits that Gaia alone defines. They stood down and again listened to Nature who has all the answers. They learn to think (political animals cannot) in systems, to live properly with Mother (who tells you when you are being good or bad if you will listen).

Humans came to just say no to patriarchy and became matrifocal again. To live cooperatively, in all due eudemonic love and understanding, they started to get over their five-year-olds-with-machetes (and cars) phase and grow up (by standing down in all due humilitus).

And that’s what saved the world (biosphere) from us moderns and posterity too even though they still had to pay our overshoot debt (but because of the Great Renormalization, they did not go extinct and had a relatively prosperous way down).

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A new form of civilization will need a new language to preserve information packages.

Semantography: A logical language for preparing information packages for a near or far future

“If society does not succeed in changing attitudes and institutions for a harmonious descent, the alternative is to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing.” — Howard T. Odum