The 2050 Chronicles

The 2050 Chronicles

Rose Diamond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humming the World Awake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WritingPoetry as a Tool for Inner Transformation and Sacred Activism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Songs for Irene

February twilight,

alone in a caravan thrumming with raindrops

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

drawn to my ritual cave

for some ancient ceremony, feast or purification,

a rite that blood once sang,

forgot and returned to earth.

Now my dulled senses beckon and

I turn to listen.

In the city the festival of peace has started.

I cannot be there, having no vision

for a world, a people, a person

at peace for more than moments

that vision not yet born in me

but knowing we could feed, clothe, house and educate

all the people of this world

for a fraction of what we spend on killing.

We are all in crisis

We never really talk about what’s really going on

the invisible prison fence

the repetitions of old patterns

the safety of habit

the laws we did not make

the self-imposed torture

the scores of ways we numb ourselves

the treadmills of the patterns we can’t break

the maze we walk unsensed

the pressures we’re under

the deadlines

the holes in us

through which our love and beauty leak away.

Irena was imprisoned for being a poet

one of many poets tortured for her truth

arrested at twenty-eight and sentenced

to seven years of strict regime

and a further five of internal exile

they said she’d have her liberty at forty

then chose to release her at thirty-three.

They called it liberation.

When she scratched her poems on soap

committed her lines to heart to save her sanity

and when she walked the streets of an alien culture

was she free?

the poem is in the body

the poem is in the gut, blood, breath

the poem is an old woman

who has lived through many lifetimes

listen, her voice is cracked

she has waited, waited for her time

the poem is a gift and a burden

it is a song of freedom

a demanding teacher, a guide

the poem is eternal,

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

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

Rose Diamond, 1987

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

Stepping Up to the Work that Has My Name on it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Humming the World Awake

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for listening,

Rose Diamond

February 14, 2024

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

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