Saving the World

I am not a numerologist, but I believe in the power of numbers.  2 and 4 were the numbers that catalyzed the change you now see in the world in regards to how men and women co-create.

I’ll tell you the whole story.

In  2024, the 24h of January to be precise, I came across an Essay Competition that marked the beginning of what you now call reality.

At that time, the balance between masculine and feminine values, that you now take for granted, was not present. The collaboration between the sexes, that your generation benefits from, has only come about in the past 20 years. You must know, from the stories your parents tell, that the balance between male and female power had been in disharmony for a long time. We were confused, and the gender wars was at its peak.

Let’s backtrack for a moment.

In many of the ancient tribal cultures, women’s and men’s business had been both held sacred. Just like now. Yet, they were also held separately, not together, like we do now. Men’s business was over here, and women’s business over there. Each responsible for a domain of power and they didn’t mix.

As we expanded and became one global tribe, we chucked the baby out with the bath water. Our growth happened quickly, over a few hundred years, and through the process we lost the capacity to see what was baby and what was bath water. Imagine the havoc this caused!

Love, nurturing, community, relationships, intimacy and trust, as you know, are not bathwater. But our systems had been created mostly by men that are quick to act, and for that reason had left out – initially as an oversight – the domains that are held sacred by women.

In 2024 humans were in the precarious position of having more power and technological development than our maturity could handle and not many wise women in the public domain to keep us in check.

Now, as you know, it is very clear that older women in our communities should be listened to. Our culture knows that they are the ones that make sure we are still connected to our core values and that whatever new technology we create needs to remain focused on the well being of all. That is their job.

But at that time, most of our older women were also had by culture. They believed more what gossip magazines told them about ageing than their own hearts. So instead of focusing their energies in keeping society, specially impulsive and creative young men, in line, they spent their time and resources trying to hold on to their youth. It was a difficult period of our history.

The cosmetic industry was extremely strong and women would line up to try to keep themselves young. Youth, culture told us, was the doorway to the appreciation for women.

This was just one of the symptoms of the disconnect of those days and we can’t blame women for that. They were, just like everyone else, trying to survive under those conditions.

We were in a pickle.

Feminism had come about long before that as an attempt to bring gender balance and put an end to women’s suffering and abuse. It was a very powerful and needed movement and it did great good but it also,with the best of intentions, ended up including women’s voice in a world that had barely any feminine input in its design and therefore lacked most of the qualities that women value.

Our systems were dry, devoid of connection, intimacy and play. In fact, even thinking that systems could include such attributes, as we now see,  is the domain of female creativity. And that, was completely lacking in the public spheres. Specially in the way we engaged with the economy and politics.

Women did end up finding ways to be part of such systems but of course they didn’t thrive. Quite the opposite. Even if they achieved financial success and status many had become ill, depressed and anxious. Not to say, they were often misunderstood and underestimated.

To put it simply, to fit into the constructs that were valued back then, women had to give up their  connection to their bodies and many  became, just like the male leaders, talking heads!

This didn’t turn out well for our older women and society in general, as mentioned above, but it also had tremendous negative consequences in the lives of younger women that had been taught by culture to distrust their bodies. An example was that women’s bodies of that time forgot how to birth and breastfeed. It’s never been the head that births. It was always the domain of the body. But our culture subjugated the body to a lesser category and we all paid the price. In many countries, in those days, cezarean sections became more common than natural births and, whats worse,  this fact was not even seen as a problem by our medical system.

Please don’t get me wrong, most women did attempt to give birth naturally, under the tight guidance of a doctor that rarely understood the timing of a birthing body. So she did try and, when she failed, she blamed herself and never the system.

Those were difficult times. There was Covid, climate change, political and economic uncertainties and there were wars, with hundreds of thousands of people dead. We had reached rock bottom with the type of solutions we had been seeking. We needed something else.

There were well meaning men asking good questions but they just couldn’t see that the key that was holding many of the solutions they were looking for, was a key they dared not touch. Or didn’t think of touching.

The menstrual cycle. And that’s where the story gets good!

Of course it would be too simplistic to say that the menstrual cycle gave us all the solutions we needed. It wasn’t as simple as that. The thing is, these were days in which women (and men) were living oblivious to the fact that the world of unlimited progress, that was destroying the planet, had been the product of the creativity generated by male bodies.

Male bodies, as you know, are powered by the super-strong and energetic hormone testosterone, and they move from the impulse to action very very quickly. They created skyscrapers, bridges, cities, the internet and so much more. But they lost the “why”.

The why, was the domain of women, hidden deep inside their embodied nature.

Women’s bodies, powered mostly by a very different cocktail of hormones, estrogen and progesterone (and a bit of testosterone), were designed to slow men (and themselves!) down half the month so we could make sure the projects we created together worked for us all and the planet at large.

But instead of women honouring their bodies and guiding men and their creations, men’s creations influenced women’s psyches and they would do anything to not slow down! Menstruation was something that many young women avoided by taking the pill (which would keep women from being cyclical) and the calming hormone progesterone had no chance in modernity! Our resistance to slowing down even got us angry, which culture nicknamed PMS.

Slowing down was what we all needed.

We needed to P-a-u-s-e.

The good news is that the mechanism for that pause was already inbuilt in the system. In our female body-system. We just needed to recognise it.

The menstrual cycle, just like all life cycles, follows a pattern. Birth, growth, full-bloom, harvest, decay, death, re-birth, over and over again. Just like the seasons. Spring (birth and growth), Summer (full-bloom), Autumn (harvest, decay), Winter (death). But we, as modern women, had only been taught to appreciate the birth, growth and full-bloom phases of our cycles, available only half the month! The luteal, and menstrual phases, the answer to what our society needed, we had been taught to push away.

So it became clear to me that reminding women of the wisdom of their body/minds was a worthy enough mission to undertake. It was also important to teach men about such wisdom, after all, we needed to create new culture together. We had already been living as the future of a disembodied past. To correct that we needed to bring the body with us.

This was the vision.

That’s when I created the C-Lab with the mission to dispel confusion about cycles and lines. It all started with conversations that involved both men and women around what it would mean to have a cyclicacly informed society.

The pillar of C-lab, was education through story telling. Women are oral storytellers and if the history books have kept us out of history it was time to create, in our own terms, herstory.

You have to remember that people were still living as if our deep physiological differences didn’t matter. But we now know that physiology trumps psychology and its crazy to think that smart people at that time didn’t acknowledge that.

A lot of our material was designed to bring clarity to such topics and make our assumptions more visible.

The sex hormones, that we now know deeply impact who we are and how we create, had been completely ignored from the field of psychology. Through our material we started showing how modernity had been designed by and for people fueled by testosterone and for women in the follicular and ovulation phases of their cycles. Imagine a year with only Spring and Summer! That’s how we lived.

The modern world hadn’t been designed for or by women in the luteal or menstrual phases. So the world we lived in was the result of only half the way a woman is meant to live and create. The other half had been unspoken for. The Autumn, and the Winter. The seasons our culture had been craving for.

There was a double bind, though, that we also needed to make visible. Estrogen is a hormone that makes women accommodating. So women were quick to accommodate to that reality and work with it. Many women found pseudo-excitement using their creativity towards being beautiful and getting followers on social media.  Think of the beauty and excitement of Spring, that energy needs to go somewhere. The problem was that women were accommodating to culture unconsciously, whist imagining not be had by their hormones.

So the first step, obviously, was to make the unconscious conscious. You know the drill. From unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

The best way we found to do that was through conversations between trusted groups of people. So we started getting people together. Thinkers, philosophers, designers, artists, writers, stay-at-home mums, engineers, psychologists, doctors, teachers, nurses, fashion designers, etc We all came together to speak and to listen.

You have to remember that at that time technology was at its peak and humans had lost the capacity to trust and foster deep intimacy with one another. We thought we could actually create systems and solutions to the worlds most pressing issues without developing love for our fellow human beings. Again, a blindspot created by the male uber-efficient gaze.

C-Lab was working under a very different premise. It kept trust and intimacy as sacred pillars and it grew with it at the centre.

It was truly a simple concept but quite new at that time. C-Lab offered a more private space than youtube, but  more public than regular unrecorded conversations. These dialogues worked as teaching method, but instead of having a teacher at the front, it was a group of people sharing vulnerably how they were affected by certain things and how they saw the world.

The recorded conversations, at the start, were shared only to members and offered people the opportunity to have a look inside intimate spaces and slowly start recognizing what they had been missing but didn’t yet know.

Some of the topics we started with were quite daring for the time, for example: stories of women’s first period. But remember, we had all sorts of people participating, that’s what made it groundbreaking! We had a series of such conversations. Through them, people had an insight of how it felt for many women to start having periods and live in the world as it was, with no role models. These conversations were disarming because they were not preaching anything. They were just disclosing how culture had impacted them.

For a while our topics had to bring the menstrual cycle to the foreground, as a counterpoint to the mechanistic culture,  but soon they morphed into more open dialogues about the workplace, sex, pleasure, relationships, war, grief, politics, the economy, healing, education etc…It became a melting pot of interesting ideas and novel ways of executing them exactly because we included both male and female styles of engaging with problems.

There were some teachings too. The simple approach of mapping the menstrual cycle into the seasons and into other cycles to make it more visible to women and men, was a tool we used a lot in various contexts. Since our female lineage was so broken, we had to teach parents and educators, through videos and articles, about the importance of the physiological rites of passages for girls. We explained how the way a girl was initiated (or not) when she started menstruating would ripple through her entire life. The way she would birth and go through menopause, would be a direct result of such initiation (or lack thereof).

If she was ashamed of her cycle as a young woman and disregarded her body’s signals, it was more likely that she would have medical intervention when giving birth and that she would need HRT when going through menopause. HRT was nothing to be ashamed of, but it kept women in a rhythm that didn’t have her mind/body/spirit wellbeing as priority. It helped her to “keep calm and carry on”. But the world didn’t need more of that. We needed her on her game!

Because of that we started actively working with post-menopausal women. They were a very powerful demographic to work with because they didn’t have the hormones cycling in them anymore, so they were more forthright and sure of themselves then women that were still cycling. Most of these mature women, however, had also not been initiated (when young) in the wisdom contained in a female cyclical nature so they also had to be introduced to that wisdom in order to support the younger generations.

After winning the essay competition, C-Lab became more visible in various contexts and it started getting a lot of traction.

After five years, C-Lab had become a very inclusive platform that offered tools, resources and helped people initiate conversations in their own communities about how to include the cyclical nature of a woman in the wider culture. New policies came out, new ways of looking at psychology, new methods of education, a new and updated medical system, and a much deeper general understanding that both males and females grow and mature in different ways and need different types of support and environments to blossom.

C-Lab became a greenhouse where a new culture could be hashed out, where connections were made, and kinship was re-established.

The good thing is that a few years into C-Lab, new scientific research started coming through to prove exactly that, that female bodies and male bodies were very different and that the menstrual cycle changes a woman’s brain on purpose. This is all very well accepted today but you have to understand that it wasn’t back then.

I became a spokesperson for C-Lab and even though I was the one that initiated that process, C-Lab only became what it is today because it gave voice to the collective. What we soon found out through the growth of C-lab is that people had made really wrong assumptions about each other and by being able to listen to people disclosing their intimate journeys they could recognize how wrongly they had been interpreting their actions in the world.

One of the things that a cyclicacly informed culture knows, as you know by now, is that women are naturally made to be the matriarchs of the outer systems. That’s the role of post-menopausal women. Of course you know that, since you grew up in such environment.

So, my friends, that was the very beginning of what it is now so common to your eyes. It was the beginning of our collective re-membering. The time when we started putting our selves back together and working as a true team. But don’t get me wrong, this didn’t scale. It catalyzed small grassroots movements all over the world and not a coherent and simple movement as some people had thought was necessary. This scaling ideas was also the by-product of the way men think. Women are web weavers and that is what you now see, isn’t it? Webs of connection everywhere!

C-Lab went from a small group of people in one place to many small groups of people and then, just like a virus, it spread.

I hope you like this brief history class on how we went from a world in which the values and systems had been mostly generated by efficient and brilliant men that had lost their “why” to a world in which we, men and women, became equal co-creators, never losing track of the why.

The end is herstory. 😉

Becoming Magnificent by Adruma Victoria A quarter of a century ago, I made the determination to begin honoring the inherent magnificence of ME. I became convinced at that time that even the most immature individuals possess within themselves qualities of infinite magnificence. My challenge became how to peddle this treasure of realization….at all times and in all directions? I knew that if I lived this truth and listened to the frequencies of my soul song, that this vibrancy would multiply. And it did! Now, mind you, I was not alone. Every day I encountered people who felt courageous enough to love self, others and the creation……..just as the sun shines and the palm trees dance. I teach music at a private school. Music theory gave me a wonderful platform to impart onto my students far greater access to their inner light and their own magnificence. My daughter, Kiah, bought me singing bowls for my birthday. I used them to help my friend, John, who was struggling with cancer. After he received just a few sound baths, his wife called me and shared that his diminished blood count had greatly improved, and that the cancer was disappearing. I was amazed at how sound and positive intention had worked to support John’s healing. I wept tears of appreciation at how the magic of sound and positive energy can afford the most benevolent of outcomes. I believe in angels and have vast experiences of how they have healed me and made me strong, so I began to expand my thinking in this area and asked these angels to co-create with me to produce energy resonance that would multiply love and light. My Rock/Soul band, Side Hustle, plays at clubs and festivals. I invited the angels to dance and to inspire the spiritual surrounding of the many individuals who come and enjoy our music and asked them to multiply in their lives. Somehow, we tapped into the forces of light and love beyond the veil. Behaviors of respect and equity for women, the elderly and any group that was so often marginalized began to spread like wildfire. The beauty that seemed dormant in each soul started resonating and vibrating at higher frequencies, such that love stimulating beauty coupled with respect and gratitude became more common. I had to change ME, and the world changed as I evolved. The true beauty of living expanded. Here in the year 2050, each of us embrace the calibration of our unique inner song of love with harmonic overtones. Just as ten thousand birds can fly like a wave and change direction in beautiful harmony, the sentience of all created beings of Mother Earth share the poetic dance of tension and release resolving to beauty within the earth and sky people. The intelligence of water ripples in human consciousness and throughout atmospheres beyond our human scope. The memories of stars that long ago smacked into planets, affording us the elements of the human body and its support systems vibrate joy. The individual sound signature of each of us is as infinite as numbers affords endless stimulation, passion and discovery of life. We live also as masters in the art of living and masters in the art of loving. I lived more and more with focus on my own magnificence and that of every human being. I sought to honor the feminine aspects of the natural world, and, although I am rather masculine, those of myself. The universe cross-pollinated the heart-centered living that was once dormant in our species. Here in 2050, we love living and giving, and we marvel at the myriad of beautiful expressions of love within our global community of the heart. The mountains and trees sing new songs of joy heard and desired by multitudes.

Autumn’s gentle touch is evident even here, in my cozy nook of a floating garden city. The view outside is a canvas of warm oranges and reds, blending seamlessly with the lush greenery of the forest below. Inside, the room is a quiet sanctuary, adorned with simple, earthy elements – a wooden table, a couple of well-loved chairs, and a small, thriving potted plant that captures the essence of the outside world.

It was on a similar autumn day, years ago in a bustling city, when I first heard the music of a street cellist. Despite his slightly ragged clothes, he had a distinguished air about him, his face etched with lines that spoke of years spent perfecting his craft. His melodies were a vivid stroke of emotion amidst the clattering urban monotony, and I felt a stillness come over me as I listened. The man’s silver hair, neatly combed back, gleamed softly in the streetlight, adding to his aura of quiet, unassuming tenderness.

When the man’s performance ended, I found myself walking up to him, a mix of apprehension and admiration swirling within me. As we stood in the fading light, I took a breath, my voice tinged with an unusual vulnerability. “I know this might sound strange, but would you like to come to my home for a meal? I can’t explain it, but your music… it moved me.”

He smiled, a hint of surprise in his eyes. “That’s quite an offer to a stranger,” he said, his voice warm. “But yes, I’d like that. Thank you.”

That afternoon, as we shared a meal of bread and cheese in my modest kitchen, the air was filled with a sense of curiosity and exploration. It wasn’t just a meal: it was an act of stepping into the unknown, a bridge built on a foundation of trust and a shared appreciation for life’s simple beauties.

It sounds strange now, but that simple act of hospitality, in the heart of an ordinary kitchen, became a catalyst for extraordinary change. I began to make it a habit, a practice: encountering a stranger, offering them welcome, breaking bread despite all our mutual difference. There was something oddly radical about it – in this gesture almost as old as the world. And as my own practice expanded, it brought on a kind of domino effect: many of my guests began hosting their own encounters, with their own sets of strangers, and these in turn led to more encounters, across class, race, religion, ethnic background. Across geography and imagination. First across the city, then the country, and – with surprising, almost magical speed – beyond, homes opened up, community gatherings flourished, and shared experiences became the norm. This burgeoning culture of openness and empathy began to heal deep-seated political divisions and polarization, transforming the fabric of political engagement with empathy and collaboration.

Even in the face of climate change, these small acts played a pivotal role. Local initiatives for sustainability sprang up, evolving into a global movement of environmental stewardship. Mental health improved on a broad scale, as people found solace and support in their newly forged connections. Society began to value emotional intelligence and empathy as essential qualities, nurturing them in educational systems and professional environments. Cities and towns were redesigned to encourage community living, fostering interaction and connection.

By 2050, the world had transformed in ways once unimaginable. The global community, once fragmented, now thrived on principles of empathy, understanding, and collaboration. The threats of environmental disaster and social upheavel were addressed with a newfound sense of urgency and unity.

One morning, as the first carbon-scrubbing garden city rose into the sky above Nairobi, I shared a cup of tea with a member of the global housing initiative. She turned to me, curiosity sparkling in her eyes. “Did you ever imagine your small act would lead to all this?”

I looked around at the lively, diverse gathering, feeling the kind of awe that is kin to prayer. “Honestly,” I said, “I just hoped to make a difference in one person’s day,.”

Now, sitting in the quiet of this nook, as the first stars appear in the sky, I realize that the radical acts of hospitality and connection we embarked upon didn’t just change individual lives; they reshaped the destiny of our planet. They were the seeds of a global movement that healed, united, and propelled us into a future where humanity and nature thrive together. Sometimes, the most profound journeys begin with the simplest steps, taken with an open heart.

Here I sit, looking at trees of many species I planted in my food forests back in 2024, and the years after, using ranch properties I was able to buy in New Mexico and Oregon. My first site had 708 acres of land, and it was followed by many others, over a hundred thousand acres were turned into food forests, and off grid communities of Earth stewards who joined me, from many nations. I had gathered a seed collection with over 550 species and cultivars, and was happy to get them planted and growing into mature specimens of their kind, giving us seeds and propagative material to continue growing them.

As a former Navy journalist, I know how to find information on many things, including producing clean energy, food and water, to end thirst, hunger, homelessness and energy deficits, and I found those answers, by 2024 I was ready to showcase them to prove what was possible to do in every nation, and for all people, of every generation. Over many years I had gathered a database of companies that provided systems for fuel less power generation, air to water generation, high density growing systems, perma-culture to design and plant food forests that would be around long after we were gone to dust.
https://foodforestabundance.com … https://freedomfarmacademy.com … www.foodnotlawns.com

Years earlier, I helped form the Primary Water Institute to teach people about water, how it forms constantly in the crust and mantle of the planet, why we will never run out of clean, safe water to use,
untouched by surface contaminants. I shared a free eBook .pdf of a suppressed volume,”New Water for a Thirsty World” by Michael Salzman, published in 1960, with over a century of research in fields and labs where people found water in fractured bedrock strata, made by volcanic, tectonic and geochemical processes in the crust and mantle of the planet, trying to end the lie of clean water scarcity.
www.primarywaterinstitute.org

By 2024 I had gathered a merry band of inventive folk, engineers, designers, eager to bring to the world the clean power and propulsion tech they had spent decades working on. We knew that with energy we could produce pure water from atmospheric moisture, and even use sunlight, it was being used in HydroPanels, like solar panels, but these produced pure water. www.source.io One company offered both ‘air to water’ generators, and the new DMIG (Digital Magnetic Inverter Generator) units that could provide off grid power to homes, businesses, farms, entire communities. https://quenchinnovations.com

It was amazing when we had it together, off grid power, water, food forests, homes made with Cob, Earthbag, Compressed Earth Bricks, Strawbale, and shelter domes, even our own PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) railways to move our people, and produce, around as needed on our sites, linking them to nearby communities where our co-op members could hop on for a ride to our food forest sites. Our interns, guests and visitors from many countries helped us to reach people back home, and to let them see what was possible to do in their communities. By this year of 2050 we had helped to bring a world at peace, with abundant clean energy, food, water, materials that went back to compost when we no longer needed them. We had achieved a truly ‘circular economy’ where nothing was wasted. We were lucky in 2024 to gain the financial means to buy ranches, and buildings zoned for industrial use, using our 3d printers to print what we needed on our sites, cottage industries, and R&D / education centers, with biopolymers from the plants we grew. https://berri-llc.com …. www.telfordinc.com …. https://3dwasp.com …. What we discovered was that there are a lot of people around the world who
are looking for answers, and once they have those amazing things happen.

All conflict and suffering arises from identifying with “me, myself, and my story.” This is true no matter where on earth we live, no matter the color of our skin, the language we speak, the culture are raised in, or our religious beliefs or practices.

When things are going well in our view, we feel good, but when things aren’t going well, we spiral down into worry, anxiety, self-doubt, and often despair.

The fastest and surest way to true freedom is to learn to love—or at least accept—our triggers, those times when we have an emotional reaction to someone or something.

We learn to say, “Ah, I welcome this, it is showing me where I am not yet free.” Then we affirm the mantra: “I am the awareness in which everything comes-and-goes…” and relax into the awareness we are.

Then, from a place of alert yet relaxed presence, we look inwardly at what is true. We notice how thoughts, beliefs, “stories,” and even the ego “I” itself—along with its associated feelings and emotions—do come-and-go in the awareness we always are.

Imagining ourselves facing the triggering incident again, but from presence this time, we come increasingly to the realization that our true nature is pure, thought-free awareness.

This is felt as a current of peace, harmony, and flow here, now—and a deep love for all humanity. Our ego is still there when we need it, stronger and more powerful, and our thinking is much more creative.

Amazing, huh?

Becoming Rhizomes in the Midst of Biospheric Collapse

What have they done to the earth, what have they done to our fair sister?
When the Music’s Over, The Doors 1967

They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell 1970
Where We Are: Dissociated from the Biosphere

I’m six years old – it’s the height of modernity; vegetables are frozen; appliances are hawked on TV, transistor radios crackle, the sun gleams off of car fenders. I’m home with my mother and tell her, “I want to go home.” What do you mean, she asks. Cadwalader Avenue? “No. I plead, I want to go h-o-m-e.” The word, Solastalgia was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his 2003 book Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity.[1] He describes it as “the homesickness you feel when your environment is changing in ways you find distressing.
Today the sheer Real is saturating our psyches with multi-faceted pandemics related to the Cartesian mindset which separates, exploits and extracts resulting in ecological degradation, habitat destruction, species extinction, biospheric collapse commonly known as climate change alongside mass shootings,a viral pandemic, rapacious inequity, the rise of facism and a war which has brought the other “n” word (nuclear) to the forefront of our consciousness. As though there’s not enough suffering from the slings and arrows of daily living within the context of the Great Matter of LIfe and Death.

How We Got Here: Divide & Conquer
I and many of us would not be alive today were it not for advances stemming from a Cartesian mindset and I honor that; nevertheless, it’s this very mindset that has brought us to the brink of biospheric collapse.
Cartesian dualism coursing through our culture. We operate by separating, by spliting – from splitting atoms to separating calves and their mothers and from separating our minds from our bodies and ourselves from nature; in short by objectifying subjects aka othering – this in tandem with the delusion of a permanent I who must always win, results in ends used to justify means; for example, a manager at work advises: Don’t administer the questionnaire until after the treatment plan is written so as to delay the clock from ticking on our metrics, which is tied to bonuses. The Organization Man now sports blue hair. Moreover, this fetish for metrics is reinforced by the reigning paradigm’s belief in unlimited growth and consumption so that consuming is now an expression of patriotism. Self-restraint is tantamount to sedition. What was Bush’s advice after 9/11? Go shopping.

We’re acculturated into an excess of individuality. Excess in the ecological sense of coping capacity, a concept describing the limit of stressors that a system is capable of carrying adaptively. And excess in the sense that lack is manufactured in our ever TB-like consumptive society – there’s never enough – there’s always something new and improved to buy and then some. A consumptive jouissance that can never be satisfied and keeps markets open 24/7 with disregard to our circadian rhythms, to the fact of our being earthlings. In his book, The Nutmegs Curse, Amitav Ghosh writes about omnicide as the outcome of the Cartesian, colonial mindset. We’ve only recently started to extradite ourselves from falsely separating our minds from our bodies and from nature to reclaim relationship as an essential condition of existence, consistent with indigenous and Buddhist wisdom of interdependence.
The way we’ve been living for the past 250 years is maladaptive in the long-term; a seven-generations mindset such as held by the Iroquois, who consider the effects of our actions on subsequent generations as distinct from our society’s quarterly shareholder gain mindset. Excessively separating ourselves from nature is boomeranging to bite us. It’s as though the natural world after patient, long suffering is in the midst of a fierce transference neurosis. Please be so kind as to indulge my animisitic explanation: Despite Cartesian dualism, we are in a relationship with Nature, one in which we’ve been chronically abusive. For a long while Nature cowered, all the while resentment seethed to coalesce and rise up against the oppressive Other, occasioned by serial hissy fits of flood and fire that kill and destroy. The biosphere is raging, sobbing, convulsing. We didn’t set limits on serial, ruthless exploiting and now the violence is coming back to haunt us. And just as with our patient’s, we’re not the original offender, but we bear the brunt of it – the intergenerational transmission of trauma isn’t limited to humans.

Exploitive, extractive industries view nature as a resource that Others through commodifying, through monetizing soil, air and water, the very sine qua non of life. Moreover, there’s a new obscenity called, Natural Asset Corporations (NACs), which the World Bank touts as, “Harnessing the power of capital markets to conserve and restore global biodiversity.” Environmental concerns are hijacked by NACs representing themselves as the solution to climate change whereas their mindset of making a buck in all situations problematizes their so-called solutions. The neoliberal, rational, enlightened mindset performs the slave/master function to posit nature as out there, to be conquered and mastered and couches this as in the best interest of the enslaved. The insidious appellation Human Resources was coined to refer to office Personnel. Employee’s energy is extracted so that we go home completely exhausted, good for nothing and who is the silent partner? Human Resources. HR is a forceful driver in the world, a kind of sub-global corporation in its own right, deciding our health plans, our pensions, our benefits. It would be progressive to reclaim the term, Personnel. There’s a confusion of pricing and value in the reigning paradigm; however, not everything has a price. Value is inestimable.

To accomplish the nefarious task of monetizing nature, the world outside our doorstep had to be othered, objectified, desouled, desacralized, deadened, a Cartesian machine existing as resources for our use without regard for the inherent value, dignity and uniqueness of every grain of sand, every blade of grass, existing within the web of universal life.

What is the psychology of those who have a choice of vocation and choose to engage in the extractive industries? Is the earth a mother, a child or simply a resource? What is being enacted here?

In 1947, the Mont Pelerin Society* began to sculpt today’s reigning economic world order. The intention was to integrate the global economy with minimum regulation and without planning. The metaphor, “market forces,” is reified now to such an extent that it is experienced as a literal force of Nature but is in fact a force by design, by policy.

How We Transform: Two-Eyed Seeing The Ecological Third and the Rhizomatic Theory of Mind

Transforming the current wealth-based paradigm to a life-based, ecocentric paradigm requires “two-eyed” seeing; that is, dialectically intertwining indigenous knowledge and wisdom traditions with current science such as advanced systems thinking and interpersonal neurobiology. Truth emerges paradoxically via the pataking of alleged opposites. Affirming dialectically intertwined, disinterested disciplines circumvents the audacity of reductive, autocratic certainty of mechanistic dualism.

There are four characteristics of indigenous culture shared by Indigenous people around the world, according to Comanche activist LaDonna Harris: relationship, responsibility, reciprocity and redistribution. All are our kin, including animals, plants and the living earth and we are responsible to nurture and care for them. Taking and giving are reciprocal: We share – skills, time, energy and material wealth. And as Daniel Wildcat advises, we relate to flora, fauna, all that is as relatives, not resources.
People who live indigenously experience flora, fauna and entities such as rocks, minerals, soil as living, ensouled beings with their own subjectivity, which fosters intersubjective relationality, a living network that I call the Symbolized Real. Symbolized because nature appears as characters in indigenous storytelling, growing out of a felt, experiential relatedness. There is a felt porousness
with the surround. I harm only what I need to harm in order to survive and conduct myself with reverence towards those whom I need to harm. All beings and entities are a who – not an it. Let’s each of us ask, What is my relationship with the biosphere starting with the shrub outside my door? And whatever it is, does it, and if so, how does it affect my work with my patients?

Just as the clinician and patient create a third intersubjective reality, let us now admit the biosphere into the clinician/patient relationship. Let’s call it the Ecological Third. And not just because of the calamitous crisis but because this is our reality as beings in the biosphere, with other beings, many embodied, many not in what we would commonly identify as a body. We’re here together in one massive bio-heap, composting together. We’re rhizomes, continuously growing horizontal underground stems which put out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals, rooted in the Wood Wide Web. Like the quote from John Muir which Joseph will share, we’re all threaded together. We are the natural world. The biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes, “The mycelial web looks like a network of neurons . . . extending through the dirt, sending molecular messages between plants, like the electrical impulses of the nervous system. These signals can confer greater resistance to disease for the plants.” Resilience is strengthened when we relate & communicate as part of the web of life, such as rhizomes do by forming networks, which relate and communicate laterally. This is significant towards our goal of creating an equitable world. Trees are great. Who doesn’t love a tree? But trees have become stand ins for hierarchy as shown in umpteen corporate organizational charts. By the by, I hope that we start to call Case Conferences, Emerging Conferences to reflect a rhizomatic trajectory of the psychoanalytic experience as the concept, case seems to me to be stuck in positivist, reductive thinking, connoting something that’s encased, ossified in space and time and objectified, denying the ongoing, emerging evolution of an intersubjective field.
Our minds are distributed throughout our body and beyond; these are the vibes we pick up from one another. Such intuition implores us not only to do no harm, but to assume sentience in all who are – fish & wood, water & soil – yes, let’s use animate pronouns to indicate sentience in all matter, including inorganic.

Because I’m disheartened by extractive capitalism, don’t think for one moment that I’m heartened by how socialists or communists treat the fauna and flora dwelling in their midst as their economies operate in an human-centric register; that is, I have a prefrontal cortex and opposable thumbs and therefore can do what I want, when I want, to whom I want whereas an ecocentric civilization reflects the reality of our existence: we’re one species in a vast network of myriad interdependent species. Similarly, let’s consider the psyche as distributed not only throughout our body but throughout the planet.

Psychotherapy is a liberatory experience as it strengthens the capacity for choice. It seems to me that a critical psychotherapy would engage with liberatory social transformation. We are the shamans of our culture. We create realities. Our job now includes being doulas to midwife a ecocentric civilization as we transform from a wealth-based to a life-based economy. How do we listen to our patients in the midst of the pervasive ontological insecurity ripping through the world today. Do we have the will to engage adeptly with multiple subjectivities? Do we have the courage to dwell in uncertainty, in interstitial limbo? With Todd we ask, What stories will emerge, shepherding us into this new paradigm of symbiotic holobionts as one jewel within the web of life?

A plethora of organizations worldwide is percolating to address all aspects of living such as regenerative energy, economics and agriculture and includes indices for well-being and flourishing economies to replace the GDP, an index of the monetary economy.

I realize now that my homesickness expressed at age 6 was a longing for a loving relational experience with the natural world. Now, decades later I have a word for it, solastalgia. Let’s create a world where matter matters, where the well-being of all beings matter & every entity, organic and inorganic is and feels at home.