SUE's Blog

Back in 2024, at the age of nine, I came home from school one day in tears. My mother gave me a tight hug before asking what was wrong. I explained that when I stood in front of the room to give my book report on The Uninhabitable Earth, I kept stuttering. My classmates, some of whom I had considered friends, started laughing at me.

My mother took a step back and squinted at me. “That’s it?” she said. “That’s why you’re crying?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said.

“You’re kidding me?”

“No.”

“But it’s a wonderful thing to make people laugh. Why in the world are you upset about it?”

“I don’t want to ever talk again in public.”

“Nonsense. You just have to be transparent. Begin every speech by saying ‘My friends, I’m going to stutter because I’m a stutterer and there have been a lot of great stutterers.’”

“Who?”

“Oh, it’s an exclusive club. Sir Isaac Newton was a stutterer all his life.’”

“The guy who invented gravity?”

“Yeah. An apple fell on his head, and by the time he said, ‘Wha-wha-wha-wha-what happened,’ he had figured it out.”

“So I should be proud of being a stutterer?”

“Of course. It’s a great gift you have. Always be transparent about everything in life. Never hide anything from anybody. That’s the secret to success in life. You need to find a way to keep talking in front of people, so that you can really begin to enjoy your stutter.”

I found a way. I practiced magic tricks. All day long, I worked on my manual dexterity so that I could hide coins behind my fingers. I learned to misdirect my audience. I practiced my craft in front of friends. I began my shows by saying, “Hi, I’m a stutterer, and I’m going to ma-ma-make this quarter dis-dis-disappear.” Soon enough, I was making rabbits disappear.

In my teen years, as I became more skilled and accomplished as a magician, and began confidently performing in front of large crowds, my stutter left me. I was concerned, and asked my mother what to do about it.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said. “There have been many great people who didn’t stutter. Nelson Mandela didn’t stutter.”

“Really?”

“The man spent twenty-seven years in prison, where he had a lot of work to do. He had to figure out how to get out of prison and bring freedom and justice to his people. Even if he wanted to stutter, he just didn’t have time for it. So not stuttering is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Just keep doing your magic. You’ve apparently made your stuttering disappear. That’s quite a trick. Explain to your audience that you’re an ex-stutterer. Always be transparent.”

“But I’m not transparent.”

“You’re not?”

“No. That’s the essence of being a magician. I’m tricking people.”

“Then maybe you have to explain your tricks. Always be transparent.”

I took my mother’s advice. I would do a trick, then explain to the audience how I did it. This made me a sensation. Soon I had my own show at the biggest clubs in Las Vegas, and I wasn’t yet even twenty years old. I became famous as The Magician who Amazes and Explains.

I caught a lot of flak from other magicians. They hated me for violating the Magician’s Oath, a code of ethics that insists that our tricks must not be explained. I didn’t care. Sure, I understood their objection to my approach to magic, but then again, they didn’t have my mother.

Soon, I found myself earning $250,000 per show. I had so much money to invest that I decided to improve the quality of the food I was eating on the road. I bought a well-known restaurant in Vegas, and revamped the interior so that the kitchen was in the center of the restaurant, behind glass walls. The customers could watch their food being prepared by magnificent chefs. Everyone loved this form of transparency, and before I knew it, I had a worldwide chain of restaurants called Clear Kitchen. I became a multi-billionaire.

In 2044, at the age of twenty-nine, I was interviewed by a business reporter for The Guardian, who pointed out to me that, while my kitchens themselves were transparent, I was not being transparent about the source of the food being served there. I felt that she made an excellent point.

That’s when began making deals with the small organic farms where I sourced my fruits and vegetables. I arranged to have tours conducted by the farmers so that the public could see where the produce served at Clear Kitchen was grown. These tours became very popular, and lucrative for the farmers.

I also bought existing meatpacking plants, where the meat came from, and made sure that all the slaughterhouses were encased in glass walls. Paul McCartney had long ago suggested doing so, and I was amazed that so many decades had gone by without anyone taking him up on the idea. The man’s a Beatle, after all—you’d think people would recognize genius in an idea coming from a genius.

Once again, people started hating me–especially people in the meat industry. I didn’t care. My food industry critics had something against transparency, but then again, they didn’t know my mother.

I put commercials on television featuring the organic produce farms where Clear Kitchens sourced its food, as well as our transparent slaughterhouses. These commercials caused outrage, and in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission even got upset about the blood and spilled cow guts shown on our commercials, but we live under the rules of capitalism, and my legal team argued successfully before the Supreme Court that Clear Kitchen should be allowed to promote its own products, as long as it did so honestly and transparently.

Then a funny thing happened, all over the world. The meat industry  dried up. In my restaurants, everyone ordered the vegan dishes and skipped the meat dishes. That was fine with me. I took the meat dishes off the menu and made Clear Kitchen an international vegan chain serving only organically grown plant foods.

Everywhere, ranches started going out of business. I bought them for pennies on the dollar, took their fences down, and rewilded the land. Trees, then forests, then streams, then wildlife, starting coming back.

Last year, in 2049, the world was shocked to learn that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dropped for the first time in living memory. This year, it has dropped even more dramatically, as the forests return and the oceans are being restored to health, with thriving populations of fish and sea mammals. Even the sea forests are regenerating, and there is renewed hope for the coral. The polar ice caps are starting to come back, as are the polar bears.

Around the world, people are getting healthier. Heart disease is disappearing. Cardiologists are seeking new careers; in some countries, there are even programs to help get them trained as organic farmers.

Strangely enough, conflict has been reduced in the world. Nations plagued by centuries-old conflicts have begun living in peace with their neighbors.

I have written a new global bestseller called Remembering Meat-Eating and War.

I am being credited for leading a successful, climate-changing, glorious vegan transformation of the world. I have even been referred to with such names as The Beacon of Non-Violence, The Forest Whisperer, and The Gandhi of the 21st Century.

All of this attention embarrasses me. It is unjustified. Let me be transparent about it. The sweet transformation we are witnessing has very little to do with me.

The credit belongs to my mother. She just wanted to make me feel better about stuttering.

 

Indra’s Nest

In 2024 the world was unstable, full of fear, and riddled with uncertainty. Many people feared World War 3 and it was clear that something was not working. Past mistakes were being repeated, and countries borders were at the same time stringent, but also meaningless in the worst possible way. It was clear that change was needed, and how to implement a solution seemed very clear to me.

Children are the future of our world. That is a fact. And, in 26 years we could radically change our world by redirecting the focus onto the children. It seemed somewhat simple from that point of view, and so we partnered with Suzanne Taylor and her phenomenal team, and well, the rest is history!

The results have been outstanding, and the ripple effect reached all corners of the world. The organization grew as more investors implemented our program into other countries – villages filled with little rainbow nations of wonders all living together. All respecting life. All life.

Through our intense trainings to ensure all locations were streamlined, these additional locations were able to replicate the same results of our mother location. All locations by 2050 had an almost 100% college success rate – the majority at well-established and leading universities around the world. Scholarships were readily available, and the doors were open for our graduates to work in their desired professions. As our children began their college degrees at 13 years of age through a hybrid program, we had a majority of PhD students by the age of 21. The leading industries that these graduates chose to work for were industries that were passionate about peace, equality, and/or sustainability. Our children spoke at least three languages fluently and were well rounded and equipped with life experiences.

How did we accomplish this? We had phenomenal teams of doctors, scientists, therapists, professionals, interns, and volunteers with us. All dedicated to our cause and passionate towards being a part of this incredible initiative. Most importantly we believed in the children and the power of their unique individuality. We respected and deeply cared for them for who they were as individuals, and as an extended family. We gave them the education, the resources, the opportunities. We gave them the support. We taught them to be self-sufficient and self-aware. We allowed them to deepen their connection with nature and encouraged them to always keep that child within alive and thriving. We taught them the importance of being empathetic and the value of gratefulness. We encouraged them to see beauty in the world every single day, to always trust their intuition, and respect all living things around them. In all, we allowed them to be whole, natural, loving human beings. We fostered a better future.

How did we achieve this? We adopted children as close to birth as possible, as the most crucial stage in a child’s life is between birth and five years of age. The overall trajectory of a child’s life is said to be determined during these years. Brain development has reached 90% by this age, and the foundations of one’s personality have been laid. It was a phenomenal time to set healthy and positive foundations for learning. This was the optimal time to instill all the values, knowledge, and respect that are all vital for a cooperative Earth.

We built our own village, and many more followed. Multiple villages with children saved from orphanages all over the world to create the most diverse population available. Villages that flew the Planet Earth flag and believed in a borderless world – because the culture that was instilled in these villages were based on equality and respect – respect for all living things, regardless of shape, colour, size, intelligence, form, origin, lifespan, appearance, location, and so forth.

We held daily morning meditations; we taught and read the scriptures of the five main religions of the world (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism), as well as Umbanda; and multiple languages were taught. Children were given the opportunity to follow their passion from an early age – be it sports, academics, nature, art or skills. Our education system followed one similar to Waldorf; children ‘shopped’ in our organic gardens for mealtimes; and the animals were partially taken care of by the children. Each dormitory was set up to represent the most diverse population possible, and all cultures were celebrated equally and frequently.

We created a family – where acceptance towards differences was respected and celebrated. We instilled strong values in our children and created a community of mindfulness. We set the example that all life is sacred, and the world is meant to be one of cooperation. Our values and beliefs were centered around this, and our children have already reached all corners of the world with this pure foundation.

In addition, we ensured that there was ample time for outdoor play and creative expression. This – as with many other programs that were based off recent research – was based off a groundbreaking study done by NASA. Their study showed that 95% of five-year old children were classified in the “genius” category. By 15 years of age this percentage dropped to 12%, and 2% once adults. NASA attributed this continuous drop to convergent thinking, where the focus is on learning information instead of feeding and cultivating creativity. This is what occurs in regular classrooms. However, children need to be encouraged to fuel and nurture their creativity and imagination to allow their curiosity, creative problem-solving skills, and out of the box thinking to thrive. And so, that is what we did.

Long term ground-breaking studies are continuously conducted across many disciplinary fields. For instance, how allowing children to embrace and continuously explore their creativity led to an astounding number of children to remain classified in the genius category once they were 21 years of age. Another study showed the positive impact of a predominant organic, home-grown foods on long-term health. Other compelling studies conducted supported our goal – our children were scaled exceptionally low on the Prejudice and Discrimination Scales, and high on the Cultural Intelligence Scale. They further scored exceptionally high on Conflict Resolution Skills, and on the Interconnectedness Scale.

It started off as a dream, and here we are in 2050, with the world lighter and based off a higher consciousness. Our program continues to grow, and we can truly say that the world will never be the same.

January 1, 2050

Dr. Anna Bouza’s  Journal Entry

Healing & Connection!

It’s 2050, and I am proud to say that humanity has made a monumental shift towards holistic and plant-based medicine, particularly in the realm of psychedelics. This transformation didn’t happen overnight; it was the result of decades of my scientific research, my advocacy, and the recognition of the profound healing potential of these substances for not only my clients, but for all of humanity. The use of psychedelics in therapy and wellness programs became not only accepted but also celebrated as a groundbreaking tool for personal growth, healing, and the betterment of society as a whole.

In all of my years of psychological study, research and hard work in an effort to make a difference and truly heal my clients; I finally found an answer to all their ailments – mind, heart, body and soul. The method I used in getting this shift to take hold involved a multi-faceted approach. The first thing I did was focus on: Education and Research. My extensive research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics was conducted, leading to the widespread recognition of their potential for healing psychological trauma and fostering environmental consciousness. Education about the responsible and intentional use of psychedelics became a key component of mental health and environmental education.

The second key method was Policy Reform. I was able to put progressive policies that were implemented to decriminalize and regulate the use of psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. This allowed for safe and legal access to these substances under the guidance of trained professionals.

Community Integration was the third method, and through Psychedelic Assisted Therapy, centers became integrated into communities, offering a holistic approach to healing and fostering connections with nature. Community-based ceremonies and rituals allowed individuals to engage in transformative experiences and reconnect with the natural world.

The fourth method was a flawless Cultural Shift where art, music, and literature played a significant role in shaping the cultural narrative, emphasizing themes of interconnectedness, environmental stewardship, and mental wellness. This cultural shift contributed to a collective awakening and a sense of global responsibility. Global Collaboration was the fifth and final key method. International cooperation and collaboration among governments, organizations, and individuals allowed for the exchange of knowledge, resources, and best practices in promoting environmental sustainability and mental well-being.

The use of psychedelics in therapy was not just a standalone solution; it set off a chain of initiatives that transformed the way we approached healthcare, our environmental sustainability, and community well-being. With a greater engagement in holistic healing, the world began to reorient itself towards a more harmonious and sustainable existence.

Looking back on it now, I see that the shift in humanity was not immediate, but it gained momentum as more individuals experienced profound personal transformations through Psychedelic Assisted Therapy. As people began to heal from past traumas and cultivate a deeper understanding of their connection to the Earth, a ripple effect of empathy, compassion, and environmental consciousness spread across the globe.

This transformation was not without challenges, but through empathy and understanding, humanity found a new path forward—a path of harmony, cooperation, and reverence for the living planet we call home.

I am proud of my vision, tenacity and true love for humanity. In a time where I found myself desperate for healing, needing answers and lacking hope in a better future for my children; I reconnected with our Mother Earth and She gifted this knowledge to me. This pushed my to finally finish my PhD and find the solution for unity and healing. What a way to reign in the new year!

With love and hope,

Anna Bouza, PhD 

Our world is in the process of massive changes. Some perceive it as a shift in consciousness. Others observe a spiritual awakening. I would suggest both are slightly different perspectives of the same phenomena. People are prompted to embrace change for a variety of reasons but most share some experience of cognitive dissonance. That is the discomfort experienced by a seemingly insoluble conflict between that which we know to be true in our hearts and that which we feel we must do to fit in the world around us. The conundrum is Love vs. Fear.

Those fears aren’t ours. Rather they are reactions in which we have been trained. Some of them are the remnants of our animal natures. Some of them are almost certainly epigenetic, being passed down through the family lineage for generations. Some are generated by personal experience. Perhaps worst of all, we live in a world where control through fear is maintained for the egotistical aggrandizement of a small number of psychopaths and their subordinates (most of whom don’t know the evil they are doing).

It may seem attractive to that part of you that is inoculated in fear to work at stopping ‘the bad.’ However, I would suggest the answer to real change is to create goodness. That can become so attractive that our attention is redirected and the old fades due to lack of interest. The old world was built by the coercion of fear and deception. The new will be built on Love and truth. Imagine that! No really, imagine it. Imagination is the first step of any creation. Let the values of Love found in your heart be the filter for your mind.

I’ve imagined elements of a new world for a long time. I don’t expect to see it. Nor do I expect that my ideas are “the answers”. Those must be made anew in each heart. For any ideas to be valuable to others they must embody such a degree of truth to seem self-evident. Then people will embrace them for their own.

Be cautious. Remember our ideas are all imagined to work when Love is the dominant social motivation. Applying any of them to the world as it is would be both impossible and a tremendous disservice to those alive at this time. We aren’t ready. I believe a new world is just beyond our event horizon and will be emerging with amazing, almost miraculous speed. That’s why it is worth imagining it.

 

 

A Hypothetical Journal Entry on a Playful “New Story”

1 Jan. 2050

As I approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of earning my doctorate, I look forward to a bright and playful retirement by reflecting upon the same characteristic prospects at this, my culminating degree’s, beginning. Little did I know how impactful this truly life -nay, world– changing research on play would be.

I recall pleasant surprise by, both, play’s initial, striking appearances and the flawless translation of playful theories into widely applicable practices. The first appearances of play proved striking for active mentions in two major tomes of intellectual and cultural history, Robert N. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. This pleasant intrigue continued through my coursework in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. I happened upon numerous paths through which to explore play as a philosophical -and suitably academic- pursuit. As my dissertation coalesced through avenues for embracing play and the spirit of the child to help us navigate change in a world of perpetual flux, I discovered and cultivated friendships with opportune ‘play-mates.’ These occurrences proved beyond a reasonable doubt that David Abram’s pitch that we need “strategic allies,” or friends in influential places, was not only true but that we were our own allies; in fact, we embraced our role as players on a collective team in a game of pluralistic livelihood.

Aptly capturing our multifaceted approach as ‘friends of play’ and ‘friends in play,” we became ‘playmates for progress,’ first academically, then more universally, rendering play a veritable liturgical narrative. Together, with our shared interests and optimism yet varying fortes, we would help shape the future in part by reclaiming the past, in a remarkably romantic spirit. Indeed, as iconic ‘romantic’ William Wordsworth once lamented, every “original” author faced “the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed,” we faced the challenge of reclaiming the spirit of the Child from its pejorative connotations toward creating a palatable taste for play among adults and the otherwise ‘serious.’[i] We concocted a flavor for a childlike disposition after the fashion of Wordsworth and other romantic poets and philosophers, including Mary Wollstonecraft and J.C. Friedrich von Schiller, and reintroduced play through characteristic qualities once considered sweet but left to stagnate and sour to ‘mature’ tongues. These qualities, collected by play pioneers Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens and Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper, included wonder, awe, curiosity, and humble reverence, all in metaphorical relation to the stature of the child.

We successfully distinguished between the pejorative sense of childishness from the productive applications with the nuance childlikeness; we built a comprehensive historiography from a variety of disciplinary sources proving that humanity has been preparing for such a reclamation of play for a long while; and we implemented various strategies for harnessing the childlike disposition toward a playful approach to life, including a humble spirit welcoming to new knowledge, an egalitarian team-player social structure toward other players in the infinite game of life, and the essential voluntary component that served as an open-ended invitation to engage without coercively pressuring anyone to comply.

One especially notable framing of this project involved borrowing the power of narrative via story and myth. Many notable academic figures provided compelling uses for stories which was the only framework we needed to launch the world into a “choose your own adventure” caliber novel, in which the ‘readers’ were not mere passive observers. Mathematical cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme articulated the significance of “storying” the history of the universe by introducing narrative to cosmology and, thus, properly orienting the human from within an overarching story, for science. Swimme and Thomas Berry, both individually and collectively, advocated the role of narrative in shifting the scientific paradigm, which not only illustrated our agency as co-authors of our story, but its ongoing, unfinished nature, even to this day, nearly a quarter-century later. These perspectives elegantly supplemented the early works on game theory for mathematics and economics as advocated by Eric Berne, M.D., and professor emeritus James P. Carse.

Psychiatrist Berne introduced another branch of the sciences to game definitions and Carse, especially, augmented Swimme and Berry’s storying paradigm by helping us frame life in terms our veritable philosophical patriarch, Plato, would approve of – yet not in the post-modern pejorative colloquial of ‘patriarchy’ we might presume. Plato, in the amply antiquated Laws, advocated a “worthy” or “noble” life was one lived according to playfulness, which Carse, later but perhaps unbeknownst, echoed as the “infinite game.”[ii] Buckminster Fuller, the so-called “inventor of the future,” inadvertently augmented this infinite play with his mid-twentieth century conception for saving the world by recalibrating our relationship with economics, the aptly dubbed, “world game.”[iii] This Platonically “worthy” game of life truly became worldly, akin to Taylor’s description that “civilization is the game we play together.”[iv] We learned to embrace the strengths of play to reassess our roots, re-story our position in, and conception of, history, and reasserted ourselves as the active, philosophical progeny we were always meant to embody and become in playful perpetuity. Through play and becoming “playful revolutionaries” in the full sense Taylor seems to have meant it, we learned to successfully embrace a world hallmarked by pluralism.

Indeed, we “got our story straight” as Swimme and Berry long advocated and inspiring social activist Suzanne Taylor expounded. The latter’s activism provided the long-missing ingredient that created the necessary traction to gain the attention of the world at large: money. A essay contest for Changing the World gained public attention and further engaged the lay public, spreading awareness beyond academia. Our new story, like all stories, fostered empathy on a new caliber, cultivating perspectives for sight and insight other than our narrow and, often, myopic own. This included transcending a practice we’d not yet named: adulteration. Indeed, adulterated information often lost the story quality in its boiled-down form. Somewhat to our great surprise, our story of play effectively appealed to adults and children, alike. As (Jemma) Rowan Deer aptly noted in quoting George Marshall, “stories perform a fundamental cognitive function; people may hold information…but their beliefs about it are held entirely in the form of stories.”[v] Participation in narrative supplied the necessary catalyst to maintain a story’s integrity, even if we were a bit appalled at the initial impetus in monetary currency.

What helped effect the change, the growing disinterest in capitalist practices was a new focus on language. The language specific to stories proved conducive to our playful efforts by pointing us to the importance of play-like language. In his work The Ever-Present Origin, advocating a cumulative ‘integral’ structure of consciousness, Jean Gebser posited “investigations of language will be a predominant source for insight.”[vi] Insightful, indeed! Language, as it turned out, offered hope in the ever-unfolding quality of our collective story through the revisitation to, and reclamation of, magic. Just as stories prove compelling for embedding of meaning for adults and children, alike, the magical quality proved equally -if strikingly- captivating. Philosopher, linguist, and poet Gebser not only suggested language as the “most potent weapon” toward effecting a group consciousness, he identified it as “authentic spell-casting.”[vii] Language, after all, operates like an incantation, which did not pass under Deer’s radar for animism and story. Deer described how poetic authors as Virginia Woolf demonstrate a ready capacity for “attunement to the wild force of rhythm and the animism of the non-human world more generally.”[viii] Empathy was just one manifestation of this trans-linguistic magic.

Through storying and living, or participating, our words we came to embrace “eco-poetics” a branch of poetry and literature aiming to revive “the old human habit of weaving word to world,” or “helpfully troubl[ing] the dichotomy” between nature and the human by reasserting the active role of the environment.[ix] Nature, the earth, we finally learned, is not a mere resource to tap and exhaust, it is our home; it is the place in which we are embedded, but it is, too, an agency, a valid player and not a mere ‘field’ upon which we play without consequence. Ecological poetry offered an eco-po-ethics for us to participate our ethics, playfully and aesthetically. Not only did neologisms and cooperative arts-and-semantics projects visualize how to break down the false bifurcation between nature and humans, but helped facilitate an entire popular culture movement through which many and varied persons engaged in this truly global endeavor to save the world. We learned to play ‘civilization,’ interpreting its ‘seriousness’ a new way, more interactively and cross-culturally, and invented a truly pluralistic game. Theoretical efforts increasingly translated into popular praxis and saving the world became, in large measure, saving ourselves; we incorporated play into nearly all aspects of our lives revivifying our liveliness. Indeed, we reclaimed our agency we had falsely deferred to some alleged supernatural ‘savior;’ we became our own saviors because we once again became infinite players.

Through the word play of poetry, which “is a form of action,” even a “pleasure activism,” we learned “a way of ‘doing things with words’.”[x] For we learned, akin to language’s universally accessible quality, that play is a nearly universal, certainly cross-species, language, especially for its bodily component that bypasses the intricacies of grammar that often led to mistranslations. Play proved so translatable, in fact, that an increasingly popular story recounted by Stuart Brown, M.D., attested play’s capacity to short-circuit a primal drive for survival. An emaciated polar bear approached a campsite in the arctic, much to the dismay of the camper; yet, upon a play bow invitation by a sled pup, rather than devouring the camper or the unsuspecting canines, the bear not only reciprocated but returned for a week to continue the play![xi] This not only attests to play’s deep evolutionary significance and cross-species translation, but an equally primal sense of trust – trust that the play invitation would succeed. We humans trusted this impulse in kind and implemented play invitations into our social and political lives, initiating humility and egalitarianism in various ways, most purely in the smile and handshake. The sheer successes of playful encounters in semantics, epistemology, politics and ecological concerns, and the rough-and-tumble wild, all prove play is evolutionarily deeper and therefore more powerful than our superficial prejudices and uncooperative exclusivist practices.

It is truly wonderful to reflect upon how the once rather isolated circles of academics translated into a playful, pluralist praxis at large, in society, in cultures, and in life, overall. We Playmates of Progress, or “pops” of hope, light, and color in a monochrome gradient world, truly sought and succeeded in reclaiming an essential component of our individual and collective past, in the inner and archetypal Child respectively, proving both Bellah’s and Taylor’s pitch that “nothing is ever lost” and “there is no such thing as irreparable loss.” Like a true liturgy, we effectively performed how rituals and narratives truly are rooted in a participatory culture and an evolution of play.[xii] By embracing our playful and childlike roots, we redefined what it means to be human; we saved ourselves and the world by salvaging play.

[i] M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971), 44; Kate Rigby, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021), 24; italics added.

[ii] Plato, Laws, as quoted in Robert N. Bellah in Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 110; James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Free Press, 1986), 23, 26.

[iii] Alec Nevala-Lee, Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Harper Collins, 2022).

[iv] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007), 142.

[v] Taylor, A Secular Age, 146.

[vi] Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 4.

[vii] Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, 6.

[viii] (Jemma) Rowan Deer, Radical Animism: Reading For the End of the World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 3.

[ix] Scott Knickerbocker, EcoPoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 1, 3-4.  

[x] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 29; Sam Mickey, in “EcoPoetics” class, PARP 6152, Fall 2022, CIIS.

[xi] Account provided in Stuart Brown, M.D., Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Penguin, 2009).

[xii] Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 13, 88, 267, 489, 501, 512; Taylor, A Secular Age, 125.

It is January 1st, 2050. This year, I will turn 75 years old, a number that feels strange to me, especially since my father passed away at 57. Times are changing; indeed, they have already changed. Our daughter, Laniakea, is soon to welcome her daughter, Abya Yala, into the world, and I am filled with a profound sense of calm and joy at the prospect—a sentiment I could not claim when Laniakea herself was born.

Back then, when a friend asked me what I expected the world to be like in 2050, my immediate response was, “We will either be in the midst of the most horrific war ever, or recovering from it.” Simultaneously – inducing some hope – I observed countless individuals around the globe attempting to navigate a path out of the bizarre predicament we had steered ourselves into. And I was among them.

The prevailing sentiment closely resembled a phenomenon sometimes observed in ants: as they follow the pheromone trail back to their nest, they inadvertently intersect their own path and begin circling until they perish from exhaustion. Back in 2024, this analogy aptly captured the essence of human existence as we confronted a wide array of interconnected crises, all stemming from the manner in which we managed our civilization.

Abya Yala will inhabit a world vastly different from our own. It is a world still healing from the scars of the last few centuries, yet it is also a world in the process of recovering, repairing, and regenerating everywhere. This is a world that has transitioned from mutually assured destruction to mutually assured thriving.

In every community across our planet, in anticipation of welcoming a new member, whether through birth, love, or serendipity, the people are starting to contribute to the life-gift: a box that will contain all the seeds Abya Yala will ever need to cultivate her food, produce materials for her clothing, and also all the microorganisms and mycelial spores necessary for growing any other materials she might need for a fulfilling life.

Back when we were ensnared in an extractive economy, fueled by the combustion of ancient sunlight, materials were scarce. This, in hindsight, while tragic, is almost somewhat comic. We completely overlooked the existence of a parallel economic system that had been operating on ten thousand times more energy, provided freely by the big fusion reactor in the sky, recycling the same six atoms for billions of years. I am referring to nature, of course.

As this understanding and perspective expanded and gained traction among individuals from all walks of life— including scientists, those still connected to lineages of original knowledge, and everyday people like myself—we began to experiment with this concept. We started simply, by creating bricks and plastic-like materials from biological waste with the aid of mycelium and microorganisms. Initially, this movement was almost imperceptible, but due to the exponential nature of nature, these solutions rapidly expanded across the world as they matured.

The catalyst that tipped the scales and sparked this exponential expansion, was, like many groundbreaking ideas and innovations, both outrageously unconventional and radically evident. In this instance, it was the endeavor of a group that remained anonymous, referring to themselves as the “Pirate Partners.” Among other things they launched a series of investment funds dedicated to nurturing the nascent seeds of a paradigmatic shift in our perception of the materials economy. Operating under the name Project MIRACLE, these funds broke free from the extractive and exploitative modalities central to the late-stage capitalist paradigm deeply ingrained in our society back then, attacking the issue from both ends.

Firstly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the funds were owned and operated by an independent not-for-profit foundation. However, the mechanism that truly moved the needle and changed everything was something they termed “Exit to Planet.” This concept revolved around the simple idea that large pools of money, ultimately owned by the public—such as sovereign wealth funds or pension funds—would purchase innovative, life-serving solutions at market prices, only to then provide them to the planet and her inhabitants for free. This act made these solutions part of the infrastructure for life, dedicated to and for the commons.

Norway was the first to embrace this innovative and groundbreaking idea, which allowed conventional market forces to be harnessed in a manner that ensured they were life-serving rather than extractive and exploitative.

To this end, a set of principles was defined and made public, clarifying which types of solutions would be considered for an “Exit to Planet” by the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. These principles laid the foundation for what we today recognize as the “heliogenic civilization.” As other nations observed that this initiative was not only positioning Norway at the forefront of a new world order but also attracting the most talented individuals to the country, they quickly began to emulate this model.

First Singapore, then the EU, followed by the African Union – now known as MOTHERLAND, which had started as a grass roots movement to liberate rural African communities from economic pressures, and quickly gained steam as the climate pressures started fully unloading their energy on the African continent and the then-emerging Union of Central and South America. This shift tipped the balance of economic power in the world, not by outcompeting the GDP-rich regions but by simply bypassing them, rendering their materials and products unnecessary. As their economic activities became obsolete, so too did their traditional asset classes.

An organization dedicated to researching the necessary advancements for our economic models, known as the “Initiative for the Regenerative Market Economy,” outlined a set of asset classes that aligned with a life-serving economy. These were deeply influenced by the wisdom of the permaculture movement and encapsulated in what was known as the “Eight Forms of Capital”: financial, living, material, cultural, social, spiritual, intellectual, and experiential capital. The challenge of the subjective and qualitative nature of most of these capitals was addressed by measuring them not as static figures but as vectors of development, assessing accumulated wealth by the vector’s directionality towards a goal.

This approach meshed well with the emergence of a new and enhanced paradigm of governance, as we will explore later. Among the first to embrace these innovative ideas were cities. They felt the kaleidoscopic pressures of multiple, simultaneously unfolding crises with an immediacy that rendered action unavoidable, and they possessed more political leeway for action than nation-states typically did. This movement was spearheaded by a nonprofit organization that had its origins in the early 2020s in Israel, known as GITA, which stands for Global Impact Tech Alliance. GITA presented a straightforward proposition to those cities ready to undertake transformative change: it would facilitate the creation of necessary alliances between unlikely partners to address the infrastructural challenges these cities faced. This was aimed at keeping them within planetary boundaries and fostering conditions for their populations to thrive.

Through these alliances, heliogenic solutions were swiftly identified for all pressing issues cities encountered. Simultaneously, a network of seventy cities coalesced around an economic model termed the “Doughnut Economy,” conceptualized by British economist Kate Raworth. As these cities began adopting the new solutions, their success served as a model that prompted other cities to follow suit.

Witnessing these processes was astounding. As millions lost their homes due to ecosystem disruption and climate change, they embraced these new concepts of freely available and regenerative materials to construct new dwellings for themselves. In doing so, and with the aid of modern science, they managed to create the most incredible and life-affirming houses you could imagine.

To you, today, this is normal. But back then, people lived in boxes within boxes in cities, detached from nature and detached from each other. In other words, people started building regenerative asset classes from the ground up.

Over the span of ten to fifteen years, we witnessed a tremendous surge in innovation and creativity as we advanced from cultivating materials for our homes and clothing to more complex items like communication devices, satellites, and transportation mechanisms. This transition from an extractive and scarcity-driven economic model to one of abundance, almost felt like magic, paving the way for something even more remarkable.

With the newfound assurance that material scarcity was a thing of the past, individuals began to explore their talents and passions, crafting the most exquisite jewelry, food, clothing, furniture, and homes, alongside incredible innovations that enhanced life for all. As everyone had access to everything they needed, the transactional, money-based system of exchange yielded to a relational gift economy, reminiscent of the way humans had lived for millennia.

This newfound sovereignty encountered another force that had been emerging slowly, silently, yet just as relentlessly. It began in Germany, where two hundred years earlier a similar idea had taken root. Back then, in the salons of Goethe and Schiller, people wrestled with a notion akin to what we faced in the 2020s. They sensed a massive paradigmatic shift on the horizon. In their era, it was the transition from aristocratic monarchy to the early forms of European democracy. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s always easier to recognize such shifts as inevitable, whereas living through such transitions can feel overwhelming and frightening. Reflecting on how to navigate this leap into the unknown, they concluded that it would require deeply grounded individuals, prompting the critical question: how do we consistently cultivate such groundedness in people? Today, the answer seems obvious: by providing them with free time, space, and guidance to connect with the essence of their being, enabling them to become proactive agents in the world based on their discoveries.

This idea, though never actualized in Germany due to the distractions posed by the uprising of 1848, did not lose its potency. In this instance, Denmark took up the mantle and implemented it, allowing 10% of their young population to participate in what is still known today as the “Folk High School.” There, young individuals were given the freedom to explore themselves, each other, and the world for several months before embarkingon a productive life in society. From Denmark, the idea swiftly spread across the Nordic countries, particularly setting Norway on the path to implementing the foundation for the “heliogenic civilization” almost two hundred years later.

In the 2020s, a similar series of discussions unfolded. However, this time it was clear that the challenge could not be addressed by grounded individuals alone but required collective grounding and coordination. It was essentially an effort to upgrade democracy to better reflect the principle that the sovereign in a democracy is the population itself. Back then, it was still customary for the public to exert periodic influence on political behavior through voting every few years. The significant change that occurred in 2024 was the establishment of a citizens’ assembly, self-organized by the population, which defined what a good life looks like from the perspective of someone living in Germany.

What this assembly articulated was remarkably similar to what we now understand as a universal human aspiration. It was the realization that we are most fulfilled when embedded within a community of no more than approximately four thousand individuals, living close to nature and in harmony with both people and the environment. At the time, this vision seemed utopian and unattainable, yet the German population made it the cornerstone of the mandate they issued to their politicians. Although initially skeptical, politicians quickly recognized that this directive offered them an escape from the short-term marketing cycle of electioneering in which they were trapped. This cycle had engendered ideological warfare, rendering everyone incapable of addressing the looming challenges. Once this obstacle was removed and the political sphere was provided with a clear, population-updated objective, it unleashed a wave of civic innovation unprecedented in history. In a pioneering move, German politicians institutionalized this concept by establishing an independent commission with the power to veto any policy decision that could not justify its relevance to the definition of a good life as determined by the sovereign. While this step was radical, it was also facilitated by the precedent set by Wales, which had implemented a similar measure ten years earlier.

Rosa Parks, who became a pivotal figure in the American civil rights movement, had attended the Highlander Folk School, a U.S. adaptation of the Folk Schools described earlier. Just as we can trace a line from the salons of Goethe and Schiller to Barack Obama becoming the first black president of the U.S., today we can draw a connection from the efforts of the first citizens’ assembly —then known as the “New Wohlstand Campaign”—to our current self-governance system. This system, as you are aware, places a strong emphasis on deliberation and consensus around shared objectives and aspirations. This approach enables the rapid deployment of hierarchical implementation groups to construct what needs to be built, while also keeping dark-triad personalities in check through a straightforward mechanism that allows anyone to initiate a vote of confidence on any leader at any time.

And there was another element that proved to be crucial in the shift towards effective self-governance, buoyed by the waves of change we were experiencing at the time. It was a renewed understanding of gender and sex, championed by a formidable group of women who rooted their womanhood in both ancient wisdom and modern science. Initially, they rediscovered the power inherent in the embodied understanding and engagement with hormonal cycles for themselves. Then, they taught this knowledge to as many women around the world as they could—in 2024, there were only about 250,000 of them, known back then as the “Womb Blessing Movement,” a figure that seems unimaginably small compared to today, now that it has become common knowledge. The real turning point occurred when they began educating men.

As men came to understand the deep and inherent biophysical dispositions that influence the sexes, it created space for both sexes to leverage their strengths in balance and harmony with each other, while acknowledging the profound differences in their ways of being, seeing, and acting in the world.

Thus, in the midst of the greatest catastrophe humans had ever witnessed on this planet, the nurturing of life and love gradually became the focal point of our civilization, manifesting in new forms of governance and economy. We were able to look forward once more, moving beyond conflicts over ideologies entrenched in dogmatic stances. Collectively, we became agents of our own fate, embracing generosity towards ourselves, each other, and the world.

It even allowed us to laugh the dark-triad types out of power, since they did not have any lever over us anymore. We could finally be free to live as we all already had known to live deep in our being. We had found a way to tap into the unkown knowns that our species had cultivated over the course of deep time into embodied knowing that runs deeper than fear. We were finally free to love.

This newfound freedom to love empowered us to truly place LIFE at the heart of all human endeavors. As every aspect of human existence was liberated from the constraints of profit-seeking mechanisms, they transformed into versions that served life. With the opportunity for everyone to spend time in nature and enjoy leisure, our parasympathetic nervous system was reliably activated, inducing a relaxation response essential for our biophysical regeneration. This, coupled with a diet rooted in what grows in our bioregion during the current season and aligned with the needs of our biome, restored the healthy bodies that had been compromised by a food system optimized for profit. This system exploited our reward pathways by offering excessive amounts of sugar and fat.

And then, schools and universities were eventually supplanted by what you now recognize as INFINITIVE, which, 25 years ago, was an almost imperceptible endeavor to grant every human on the planet access to the principles that had shaped Rosa Parks into the formidable individual she became. Simultaneously, it aimed to provide lifelong learning, tailored to the situation one finds oneself in. Just as it is today, this was facilitated by individuals who volunteered on the basis of a relational gift economy, sharing whatever skills and knowledge they had acquired. This was complemented by the mutual support and accountability groups that are now so integral to our lives that it’s hard to imagine existence without them.

And now you know the most important parts of the story that created your world. While it feels natural to you, it is far from it. We-all created it together and we must continuously nurture it to keep it. So, tell it forward, so that the cycle may never repeat again and rather we will progress further in the increase of the density of the fabric of life and love we are weaving together, making everything more beautiful and more exciting at the same time. Making life worth living.

I will have to go now. High tide is coming,the waves are amazing today, and my beautiful woman, Abya Yalas’s granny, is waiting for me at the line-up.