What Took Root in the Rubble (revision)
Back then, before The Event, most of us recognized that things were unraveling, and that they were probably going to get worse before they got better. Many doubted that there ever would be a “better.” But a handful of us were determined that we could not only make the depths of the “worse” not so unbearably deep, we could shape the “better” world that would come afterward. We started to practice for that “better” world, even as other things plunged toward catastrophe.
Part of what made this possible was a diversity of new spiritual movements, inviting people toward lives that were more richly imbued with purpose and gratitude. One of those movements was something I’d tried to get started, an idea called Novasutras. While the basic premise was appealing — people co-creating a community of practice, with shared festivals and rituals, based in an ecospirituality that embraced science and change — its early growth was far from promising. The Novasutras community waxed and waned, sometimes thriving with daily online congregations, sometimes surviving only tenuously with a handful of meditators gathering once a week, until the climate-fueled catastrophe we’ve all come to simply call “The Event.” While The Event only directly impacted a few million of us, it sent ripples of change out around the world.
As a few local Novasutras adherents came together in the immediate aftermath of The Event, we vowed to support one another in spiritual practice and camaraderie while doing the important mutual aid work that the wider community of survivors required. In the rubble of those first hours and days, we found one another, meditated together, and then moved with shared purpose, setting up one of the city’s critically-needed impromptu mutual aid centers. We made nourishing meals for refugees and rescue workers. We offered care to the injured and solace to the grieving. We assembled a safe space for gatherings, so that people could make plans and set priorities as a community. Ubuntu permeated our actions, and the word became an intrinsic part of our conversations.
The Novasutras crisis responders offered frequent spiritual practices alongside our care work. I was among a team that offered guided nature-reconnection meditation sessions to groups of survivors and responders starting just a couple days after The Event, providing a half-hour or so of quiet respite when the demands of the crisis allowed. We also provided spiritual grounding in keeping with the cycles of nature: Connecting the Corners practice for a few minutes every dawn and dusk, and larger community meditation gatherings at each phase of the moon. We made sure these were open and welcoming spaces for people regardless of their beliefs or backgrounds, emphasizing our shared humanity and connection to all life on Earth.
About a month after The Event was the mid-season Cross-Quarter. Our Novasutras community helped arrange a day-long Festival of Renewal, with a lovely ritual co-creating an altar to honor those who lost their lives, then transitioning into celebration of the promise of a better tomorrow. We shared music, games, a special feast, and as much beauty as we could create together amidst the ruins. Our Festival evoked reminders of the power of Life to bring vibrant new growth to scarred earth and bare ground. I facilitated a session where diverse, intergenerational teams were invited to create posters capturing their visions of a better future for the community. The results of this joyful and inventive process were hung around our shared gathering spaces as colorful reminders of our shared hopes.
Those vision posters inspired many conversations and further ideas, which in turn became the seeds of new resiliency projects as rebuilding began in the following months. A few of those posters are still on display at the community center in the heart of one of our restoration projects, potent reminders of the human capacity for hope and inspiration even in dire circumstances. Many of the survivors, now leaders and elders at the community center, still speak about the power of doing hopeful work together during those dark days. Some believe that if we had not taken the time for community visions, we would have gone back to the worst of the practices that created the disaster in the first place. Instead, a more vibrant, compassionate, and equitable community grew from that disturbed soil, and true transformation took root.
When the urgent crisis subsided, and it was time to rebuild, the themes of agaya and ubuntu served as guiding principles for realizing many elements of the visions captured in those posters. The planting of trees, and establishment of neighborhood permaculture gardens and community centers, became sacred acts, suffused with reverence and intentions that the future be more resilient and loving than the past. When choices had to be made about places that should be abandoned, the whole community found wisdom and comfort by abiding in agaya, helping Nature to heal those places that were no longer safe for people to live and work.
And as the reconstruction continued, many survivors found themselves called into sacred activism, taking to the streets and speaking up in the halls of power. Together, we rose up to stop the insanity of intensifying fossil fuel production that would otherwise send even more communities through the hell from which we had just emerged. Many in the community aligned to support our activism, recognizing that for every person engaged in nonviolent direct action, several more were needed to support us before, during, and after actions.
The Event, and the communities inspired by Novasutras and other ecospiritual groups around the world, catalyzed a groundswell of activism that transformed the politics and economics of the world in the years that followed. We became a chorus of voices for the better world so many hearts desired. Our prodigious marches and more creative nonviolent direct actions were like a song of transformation sung by a chorus so loud and large that not even the most detached leaders could ignore it. Many were allured by the beauty of the visions that these activists were calling into being with more harmony than dissonance. But even those who sought to maintain their power in the status quo soon realized they were being pushed out of the way of this burgeoning new reality, and resigned themselves to the inevitability of change.
What began as a disaster, fueled by climate disruption, emerged as one of the places where the better future most of us wanted became a lived reality. When we reflect on the world today, it is hard to believe how many of the transformative ideas came from a handful of survivors, sitting around a table, dreaming of the world they wished could be. We rediscovered our collective power to create that future. We remembered our human adaptations for working in community. We taught and learned from one another about ways to remain resilient, healing our grief and becoming even stronger together. As I look back over the quarter-century since The Event, I am honored to have been one of so many participating in the deep transformation of the ways that humans interact with one another and the more-than-human world. Thank you for allowing me to reminisce about the ways that The Event opened so much space for positive change.
1 I’ve been deliberately non-specific about The Event, other than an expectation of a sudden, large-scale, climate-driven regional catastrophe like a hurricane, flood, or wildfire. Feel free to picture whichever of these seems most likely to affect your own life, and imagine the setting accordingly. My descriptions of what happened after The Event were inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.