We’re Seeking A Larger Framing Story

Neither revolution nor reformation 

can ultimately change a society, 

rather, you must tell a new powerful tale, 

one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths 

and becomes the preferred story, 

one so inclusive 

that it gathers all the bits 

of our past and our present 

into a coherent whole, 

one that even shines some light into the future 

so that we can take the next step… 

If you want to change a society, 

then you have to 

tell an alternative story.

—Ivan Illich, Austrian former priest, philosopher, social critic, 1926-2002

We live at a moment when our prevailing stories are failing us.

They may have emerged to help us address problems of the past.

But they have become toxic, they have become twisted, 

they are not the medicine we need for today. 

And they are far too small to address the crises we currently face.

We need a larger story that transforms us. 

We need to re-situate, re-discover, re-name and re-frame ourselves

—as individuals and as collectives—

within a larger story that is abundant enough, 

galvanizing enough, inclusive enough, 

forgiving enough, supportive enough and immense enough

that it will empower us as a diverse body 

to respond with bottomless grief, rooted resilience and fierce joy 

to the interlocking crises our times. 

From within this larger story, 

we will see everything differently. 

And we will do everything differently.

—Todd Wynward, inspired by Brian McLaren

HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE? 

In response to this question, ancient Biblical practices have much to offer us today. The practice of contemplation helps us distance and disentangle ourselves from the dominant and dominating stories of our culture.

Despite its horrific track record and its failure to transform most of its card-carrying members,  the Judeo-Christian narrative still has much transformative potential for its adherents, and for those who still are open to its potential for personal and social transformation. For these millions of people, it is a necessary task for us to help God dust off the authentic “good news” framing story articulated and embodied by Jesus and share it with the world again in its original, transformative power. I would say that the CAC’s uplifting of terms like “the Universal Christ” and Alternative Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity and A Generous Orthodoxy, Ched Myers’ Watershed Discipleship and Sabbath Economics, and even my own Rewilding the Way are examples of attempting to renew and transform from within the language and tradition of Christianity.

There is still something immensely valuable here, we are saying.

Yet we Christians must be brutally honest, and conduct a fearless moral inventory of our religion’s legacy: Christendom as an institution has done so much damage worldwide for 1700 years that many people today cannot trust the Jesus framing story to be good news. Sadly, Christendom has perverted, co-opted and corrupted Jesus’ message to such a degree that any dusted-off framing story that uses “Jesus language” and Judeo-Christian religious terms will likely be able to be heard by only fraction of humanity today. In case Christianity’s tragic track record is not painfully clear to you, Brian McLaren does a scathingly good job conducting a fearless audit of the religion’s myriad unforgivable sins across history in Do I Stay Christian? This is an indispensable read for anyone, like me, perverse enough to think that the Jesus Way still remains a potent tool for social transformation.

NEEDED: A FRAMING STORY LARGER THAN CHRISTIANITY

As open and honest Christians, painfully aware of the all-too-often colonizing, dehumanizing and eco-cidal track record of our own religion, is it heretical to suggest that God might be calling us to join a framing story that is larger than—but inclusive of— Christianity? I think not. In fact, to join a framing story larger than Christianity isn’t heretical at all, but is actually God’s specific invitation to Christians today. All around me I hear: your God is too small. To face the interlocking crises of our times, I am convinced Spirit is leading us, beckoning us, alluring us to swim in a bigger river. God is telling us it’s time to jump on in to something larger and wilder and bolder and far more diverse than the conventional Christian paradigm. 

CHRISTIANITY’S ROLE WITHIN A LARGER FRAMING STORY

This larger framing story cannot be so abstract and universal that it dilutes and disempowers; rather, it must be a giant rushing river that can contain within its banks a tumbling and celebratory myriad of diverse streams, specific lineages, and rooted realities. Christians, as members of one religious strand among many, must show up in an irresistible, invitational, humble and courageous way. In doing so they will not only stand a good chance to reform others’ attitudes toward Christianity in a favorable way, but also might just reform their own tradition, bringing out their best selves as transformed and transforming followers of Christ.

A POSSIBLE BEST SCENARIO FOR A FRAUGHT FUTURE

This larger framing story must empower us to sever the tentacles of consumerism. The Christian story, as passed down through generations of organized religion, has been abysmally impotent in this regard. It has become not an empowering narrative for resistance against but rather a complicit bedfellow of conspicuous consumption. A fresh framing story must liberate us from our comfortable complicity with oppressive, extractive, eco-cidal corporations, and provide us with texts and tools to define and create “the good life” for ourselves. Seven years ago I suggested ways to defect from our current narratives and took a stab at naming this larger framing story in my book “Rewilding the Way: Break Free to Follow an Untamed God.”

The outlook for humanity’s near future on this planet is grim. As Brian McLaren notes, humanity’s current appetite and demand load is 2-4 times the carrying capacity of Earth and this precious ecosystem we inhabit. Sooner or later, something’s gotta give. Humanity’s current system and level of resource acquisition and distribution and waste dispersal simply cannot continue without dire, dire consequences to us, the earth, and all living things. 

Of course, I am saying nothing new. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can sense the runaway pilotless juggernaut of late-stage unfettered global capitalism careening our entire species off a cliff. And, like any under-resourced group facing an overwhelmingly oppressive force, our current generation has the following options for response: 

1. resignation, surrendering our agency to its pervasive might; 

1. violent revolution, desperately attempting to overthrow existing power and structures and replace them with something better that we installed; 

1. non-violent systemic transformation through group non-participation with dominant systems and the creative construction of prophetic communities, parallel economies, and alternate social-spiritual structures.

As you might already know, the only real response for humanity is #3. 

STORIES TOO SMALL, INSTITUTIONS TOO COMPLICIT

For decades, Chris Hedges has been one of my favorite social critics. I hate reading him, however, because he is certainly neither an optimistic nor comforting author. Instead, his insights are scathing; he lays humanity’s problems bare to the bone, with no mercy and little hope. 

Our cultural and political institutions are rotten to the core, Hedges states as fact. They are unable to transform society in any meaningful way, completely concerned with their own comfort and compromised by their addictive dependence upon ravenous, short-sighted and self-interested corporations.

Too many resistance and reform movements continue to believe the illusion—the framing story— that current human society can transform to the extent needed through making mild changes in our presidents, our politics, our constitutions, or our bills of rights. They continue to assert that an adequate response to the problems we face is protesting, lobbying, or making tweaks to our current economy. 

Hedges asserts that any real resistance or transformation movement must recognize that there will be no good news coming from our current systems of politics and global capitalism, They both are dead-end systems unable to transform to the extent needed, and we should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to them. 

Today’s corporate pedigree universities and institutionally-funded seminaries—charged with forming our leaders of tomorrow—provide training and framing that is woefully insufficient and completely inadequate for the transformational tasks at hand.

In short, our institutions whom we have entrusted the sacred tasks of framing and forming, revising and reforming, protecting and preserving, have utterly failed. 

IF NOT THOSE KINDS OF INSTITUTIONS, THEN WHAT?

It’s time to get small even as our story gets large. It’s time to hunker down in place, learn to weather the storm ahead. As a whole, humanity’s dominant machine of ravenous consumption will not be able to stop itself, will not be able to rapidly fix the four interlocking crises McLaren describes. An age of consequences and cascading crises is coming that modern humanity has never seen. A disruption of unprecedented magnitude is coming to modern humanity, and as a whole, we are woefully unaware, unequipped, and unprepared. 

As Chris Hedges sees it, the near future forecast is bleak. The honest and industrious will be wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with millions. The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services, food, amenities and security denied to the rest. We will begin a period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs.

WHAT’S THE INVITATION WITHIN THE DISRUPTION?

This bleak truth is not a nonstop flight toward resignation, nihilism and isolated hoarding, as tempting as those options may seem. I still see a gritty gift in this coming breakdown: an invitation to regional self-transformation. Hedges agrees:  “It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.” He’s talking about the choice I described in #3 above: engaging in non-violent systemic transformation through a) daring, difficult, self-transforming group non-participation with dominant systems; and b) the simultaneous creative construction of alternate community structures and parallel economies at a local and regional level. 

He then goes on to describe the outlines of this new landscape:

All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours.

Hedges’ grim hope: “If we build self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much as possible from commercial culture, and can be largely self-sufficient. These communities will have to build walls against electronic propaganda and fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves…”

We’re Building the Infrastructure of a Kinship Culture

After I composed the musings above, I came across Adam Horowitz’ “Toward an Infrastructure of Sacred Hospitality.” It spoke directly to my own sense of call, urgency, vision, and mission, and did so far more articulately that I ever could. 

In his essay Horowitz writes that, in a recent conversation, the Buddhist teacher Venerable Pannavatti shared her deep conviction that, “God’s rolling out a new wave of communities.” 

I not only agree—I know I am called to be part of that wave. This is mine to do.

Developing demonstration projects of covenantal kinship, incubating prophetic communities, and building bioregional citizenship will inevitably transform me and those around me even if we fail to manifest anything that lasts. Therefore I believe it is a highly worthwhile project to which I will gladly give myself fully, no matter the outcome. And who knows? Maybe through the fumbling efforts of my friends and I, something divinely inspired will emerge, and become a source of renewal, resilience, and resistance in northern New Mexico for generations. It could happen. 

In June 2022 I had a chance to have a deep dialogue with Adam about several of his essay’s key components, which has given me a clearer sense of what is mine to do.  Below, most of the words are his. I will paraphrase many of Adam’s ideas and paragraphs that I resonated with in his essay as a jumping-off point to dive deep into my own life question: What is mine to do?      

—Todd Wynward

Adam Horowitz is co-founder of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, Nuns & Nones, and Taproot. He lives on traditional Tiwa territory, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Building an Infrastructure of Sacred Hospitality

Perched on the precipice of a living-dying planet, we are tasked with prophetic memory and imagination. Now is the time to pursue pathways to awaken our innate and limitless capacity to love mightily, to belong to the earth, and to tend and defend the sacred.

As fires rage, as waters run dry, as species and languages go extinct, as hundreds of millions of people face climate chaos, we must deepen our collective capacity for sacred hospitality.

Sacred hospitality means engaging in the sacred art of offering hospitality — literally opening doors, filling plates, offering hope, care, and refuge. It also means holding and hosting space for the sacred — turning our hearts toward the divine life and mystery in our midst. This world is clamoring for both. The more we practice each, the more we realize they are the same.

There’s no map for the infrastructure of sacred hospitality that already exists….Nor is there a roadmap for the infrastructure of sacred hospitality that yet yearns to emerge. Yet to imagine, embody and create the infrastructure of a different world is our “heretical” task. As we take on this sacred responsibility, we re-cast ourselves as meaning-makers who are finding our common calling as “citizens of a country that does not yet exist” (in the words of Vincent Harding), and as “prophets of a future not our own” (in the words of Fr. Ken Untener).

At this cusp moment in history, there is a vast host of us who—each in our own home places— are contributing to the DNA of a global infrastructure of sacred hospitality. Thankfully, there are innumerable mystics, culture-bearers, freedom fighters, water protectors, artists, care-givers, hearth-tenders amongst us, creating and sustaining sanctuary, dreaming into an infrastructure of sacred hospitality for these times. Along with countless others, it is our task to both uncover and create heritage worth carrying through a time of collapse.

Developing Divinely-Inspired Communities of Contrast

For those of us who have both the capacity and the calling to be bridge-builders across generations, we need to know this in our bones: social movements integrated with wisdom traditions have a special role to play right now at this kairos moment in history. 

Over the next decade, humanity needs to nurture a myriad of diverse demonstration projects that offer community structures of belonging for those who are committed to showing up for the work of collective liberation and restoring right relationship. These “communities of contrast” will integrate the best of the old and the new, weaving traditional and emergent structures, ancient practices and appropriate new technologies. These communities of contrast will look like covenantal cadres, inter-spiritual orders, activist sanghas, place-based resistance and resilience movements. These kinds of communities of contrast will offer social, spiritual, and political home for any seeker who knows what time it is and feels called to another way of life.

Like religious orders, these catalytic communities will be parallel societies existing in the shadow of dominant society. They will be communities of contrast demonstrating a different way to live and breathe and have our being. To do so they will provide affirmative identities, ethical codes, formation experiences, shared spiritual practice, and shared social action. They’ll need to be rooted in solidarity economics to meet people’s material needs. They’ll require significant support and accompaniment in conflict transformation, individual and collective discernment, and shadow work. 

Both Horowitz and I sense that a new kind of “post-modern monastery” is deeply needed today. He writes: Monasteries emerged during the Dark Ages as places to steward wisdom traditions amidst societal disarray. What if, in this age, we are called not to create isolated sites of contemplation and study, but, rather, communities of spirit in service — in plain sight?

He then offers some possible versions of this:

• Urban monasteries, helping to nurture the moral and spiritual capacities required to grieve, serve, and live courageously amidst planetary destruction.

• Houses of Belonging, offering hospitality and sanctuary for people displaced by economics, violence, and climate chaos.

• Centers for Sacred Activism, dedicated to undoing cycles of harm, resisting structural evil, and repairing sacred relationships among people and the natural world, through reparations and land rematration.

• Reimagined forms of “religious life” through which covenantal communities step together outside of extractive systems to steward land and water, renew wisdom traditions, and to take courageous collective action on the side of life.

Incubating a Prophetic Generation

Young people who look deeply at the interlocking crises that face us today know what time it is. They know what’s at stake. They feel in their bodies the peril encroaching on their futures. And so they look around, and rightfully ask: why should we go to school, and sit through standardized tests meant to turn us into cogs, when the house is on fire?

Their questions then spread to larger society: 

• Why should I go to college, when the house is on fire?

• Why should I take a bullshit job, when the house is on fire?

• Why should I buy into a lifestyle of extraction and consumption, when that’s what’s destroying my future, the future of all those I love, and the future of all of life?

Another set of questions inevitably follows:

• And if not college, and bullshit jobs, and consumption and American individualism, what then?

The kids are ready to walk out. What will they walk in to?

What alternative infrastructures do we have set up that offer hope, belonging, renewal, resilience, and resistance?

In addition to doing everything we can to mitigate climate catastrophe — by targeting the corporations wreaking havoc on the planet, demanding government action, developing resilient bioregional food and renewable energy plans — we must also create the structures of community care, learning, spiritual growth, and meaningful work that can support a rising generation in weathering the coming storms.

We need viable, visible models of community for people who would readily give up the profit margins for the prophet margins. We need to incubate prophetic communities. 

For people like me who are ready to jump into the work of establishing these communities of contrast and offering opportunities for spiritual and social formation, the questions then are these: 

What training might help incubate prophets-in-the-making? 

What infrastructures might we offer to keep them vibrant and supported for the long haul? 

- - - - -

Richard Rohr asserts that the foundation of Jesus’ social program is non-idolatry, or the withdrawing of our enthrallment from all kingdoms except the Kingdom of God. Steeped in his lineage, I have tried to embody and spread that same gospel. In my life’s work as well as in my book “Rewilding the Way: Break Free to Follow an Untamed God,” I emphasize that unshackling from a culture of domination is the first step toward a culture of kinship.

Rohr explains that the Apostle Paul tried to create “audiovisual aids” for Jesus’ transformational social program, demonstration projects which Paul called “churches:” living, breathing examples of Jesus’ vision for a different kind of life. These “churches,” meaning “the assembled ones,” employed inclusive social systems and parallel economies that were radical alternatives that stood out starkly from the domination-based society around them. 

Rohr continues: “In Paul’s thinking, we [as followers of the Way] were supposed to live inside of an alternative society, almost a utopia, and from such fullness ‘go to the world.’ Instead, we created a model whereby people live almost entirely in the world, fully invested in its attitudes toward money, war, power, and gender—and sometimes “go to church.” This doesn’t seem to be working!”

How then shall we live? And what is mine to do? 

Ever since I participated in the CAC’s ‘School for Prophets’ Internship program 30 years ago, I have felt deeply drawn to manifest these demonstration projects mentioned above: communities of contrast that are living, breathing examples of Jesus’ vision for a different kind of life, hubs that incubate inclusive social systems and parallel economies.

We’re Answering the Call of Choosing Earth

In my writing below I have borrowed many of the author’s original sentences, as I respond to Francis Weller’s foreword found in Choosing Earth, by Duane Elgin

The sheer weight of [today’s] personal and collective sorrows is enough to crush our hearts, forcing us to turn away and find solace in anesthesia and distraction. When we come together, however, and share these stories of sorrow in grief rituals, something begins to change. When our sorrows are witnessed and held within a community of compassion, grief can surprisingly turn to joy, to a love emboldened for all that surrounds us. 

Love and loss have been eternally entwined. To acknowledge our grief is to free our love to fall outwards into the waiting world. Something is stirring in the depths of the times. Our collective denial appears to be cracking. We can no longer deny the fact that the world is radically changing. We sense in our bones the breakdowns occurring and, along with it, our hearts feel weighted with grief. 

It may be our shared sorrows, stirred by our love of this singular, irreplaceable planet, that will ultimately activate our communal commitment to respond to the rampant denigration of the world. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”

Duane Elgin’s Choosing Earth is a demanding book that asks us to participate in the most difficult transition humanity will ever have to make. It asks us do the hard work of turning into the coming waves of breakdown, bewilderment, chaos, and loss.

The planet has already radically and irreversibly changed, and it is now up to us to respond. Our collective job, as leaders in the communities we live in: to shepherd our communities through this time of collective initiation in order to reach our potential as responsible adults, collaborating in the creation of a healthy and vibrant community of all beings. The future is not set and each of us is a makeweight in the shaping of what is to come. 

We are entering what could be called the Long Dark. I say this not with a note of despair, or with an attitude of hopelessness, but, instead, recognizing and valuing the necessary work that can take place only in the dark. Certain things can happen only in this grotto of darkness. Think of the wild network of roots and microbes, mycelium, and minerals, making possible all that we see in the day world, or the extensive networks within our own bodies, bringing blood, nutrients, oxygen, and thought to our corporeal lives. All of it happening in the darkness. 

Even our basic trust in the future has been shaken as we awaken to the emerging climate crisis and erosion of the social fabric. As a result, we now face a vital truth: We are entering a rough initiation. 

Uncertainty has come into our homes and found its way into each of our lives. As we slowly digest the contents of Choosing Earth, we come to realize that we are tumbling through a rough initiation, with radical alterations occurring in our inner and outer landscapes — simultaneously deeply personal and wildly collective, binding us to one another. 

The deep work of traditional initiations was meant to dislodge an old identity. The process was designed to produce enough intensity and heat to cook the soul and prepare initiates to take their place in the care and maintenance of the commons. It was never about the individual. It was not about self-improvement or making them into someone better. No. Initiation was an act of sacrifice on behalf of the greater community into which the initiate was brought and to which he or she now holds allegiance. They were being readied to step into their role of maintaining the vitality and well-being of the village, the clan, the watershed, the ancestors, and the continuum of generations to come. We do not want to come out of these turbulent times the same as we went in, personally or collectively. At this moment in history, we need to respond to radical change. Our rough initiation is bringing about the death of our collective adolescent identity. It is time to ripen. 

So now what? 

How do we navigate this tidal surge of uncertainty? 

How do we engage the world in the absence of the ordinary?

We need strategies to help us across this tremulous threshold into a planetary civilization. we need to amplify the potency of the adult. We need to step more fully into a far more robust identity, rooted in soul. We must become immense, capable of welcoming all that arrives at the gateway to the heart. 

Through our long apprenticeship with sorrow we believe we can find and share a spaciousness capable of holding it all — the loss and the beauty, the despair and the longing, the fear and the love. Our goal is to become immense. The way we walk softens the heart and we feel our connection with the wider, sentient world expanding. We come home. We sense a diminishing distance between us and others. Our identities become permeable, and we feel a growing kinship with the human and more-than-human community. A new reverence for life emerges as we sense the living presence of the Earth as an organism embedded in a living cosmos. This is our dawning experience of a possible future for the Earth. 

Through the Watershed Way here in Taos, we can see that a more mature humanity is emerging— but it is tender, vulnerable, and fragile. If we want to be a portal for our Taos community to enter what Elgin calls “The Great Transition,” we are required to return to humility again and again. Our work is to protect this emerging sensitivity and pass it along to the generations that follow. Each successive generation can fortify this evolving awareness, adding its own understandings, practices, rituals, songs, stories, and more — until it becomes a robust presence in accord with the evolving cosmos. 

As we mature as a species, we enter a more reciprocal relationship with the Earth. We are called to strengthen the values and practices that help sustain the body of this exquisite world. Values such as respect, restraint, gratitude, and courage help to fortify our ability to stand and protect what we love. 

Reverence and humility remind us that our lives co-mingle with all life. What affects one strand on the web affects all. We are here to participate in the ongoing creation, to offer our imagination, affection, and devotion to sustaining the world. Elgin makes the need clear: we must cultivate a robust collective of adults whose primary allegiance is to the life-giving world on which we depend. We must be able to feel our loyalties to watersheds, migratory pathways, marginalized communities, and the soul of the world. We must feel the bedrock of our aliveness, and the reality of our wild and exuberant lives. Initiation tempers the soul, drawing out its hidden essence and calls forth the medicine we came to offer this stunning world. 

Initiation ripens us and readies us for greater participation in the care of the cosmos. This is at the heart of why we are here as a species. Our cosmological purpose is to keep the dream of the world alive. There is beauty, dignity, and grandeur in that calling. It is becoming increasingly clear that this realization must become deeply embedded in the hearts and souls of people in the coming decades. In essence, we are being asked to consecrate our lives, to practice reverence in our actions. This is the first truth that must settle into the bones of anyone who undergoes this planetary initiation. In addition, initiation implies soul medicine. We are asked to give away the particular gifts we came here to offer. Initiation also loosens the tight collar of civilization and leads us to reclaim the wildness within. The grip on our domesticated psyche relaxes and we are able to enter a multi-centric world where everything possesses soul and is a form of speaking. And one last truth that comes with initiation: We are asked to build a house of belonging that can extend places of welcome to those who feel unseen and disconnected. 

Further reflections

In Duane Elgin’s most recent book, humanity is being asked to choose earth, and I for one say yes. I am answering the call to jump in to what Francis Weller calls the most difficult transition humanity will ever have to make. We are being asked to not turn away, but instead to do the hard work of turning into the coming waves of breakdown, bewilderment, chaos, and loss. And I for one am saying yes.

I am preparing to embrace and be ready for what Weller calls the Long Dark. I say this not with a note of despair, or with an attitude of hopelessness, but rather I am pledging myself to help in the necessary work that can take place only in the dark.

I am preparing myself to be a guide and a refuge through what Weller calls our rough initiation. Whether we are ready or not, in the coming years there will be some radical alterations occurring in our inner and outer landscapes — simultaneously deeply personal and wildly collective, binding us to one another. I aim to be present and awake and inviting in this period of cultural, social and economic upheaval.

We are asked to build houses of belonging that can extend places of welcome to those who feel unseen and disconnected, and I for one say yes. I’m dedicating myself to creating and supporting multi-cultural, multi-spiritual, multi-class, multi-generational spaces where our sorrows may be witnessed and held within a community of compassion, where grief can surprisingly turn to an unexpected joy, and where the bold love of a fierce mama bear can be offered in service to protect and cherish all that surrounds us.

We are being asked to consecrate our lives, to practice reverence in our actions. We are being asked to go through this rough initiation with a surrendered heart, and turn this initiation into soul medicine. We are being asked to surrender ourselves to the land and to all our relations, to give away the particular gifts we came here to offer.

Our job: to shepherd our community through this time of collective initiation in order to reach our potential as responsible adults,  collaborating in the creation of a healthy and vibrant community of all beings.

I am responding to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call to let my grief be a doorway to love, to weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

I intend to be a midwife and a navigator as our culture sheds old identities and stumbles into something new.  dislodge an old identity. As a guide I intend to embrace the intensity and heat necessary to cook our souls as a collective, so we might become elders and servant leaders robust enough to maintain the vitality and well-being of the village, the clan, the watershed, the ancestors, and the continuum of generations to come. I want to lean into the teachings of this rough initiation as it brings about the death of our collective adolescent identity, and I want to help my bioregion discover a new normal in which all can thrive.

Elgin and Weller say we must become immense. Through this rough initiation, we must become capable of welcoming unprecedented levels of grief and joy, responsibility and possibility. I have never known how to do this, but I am not afraid to try. I will tap into the wisdom of mentors, allies,  and my own prophetic imagination to develop strategies and methods to help us walk through this Long Darkness, across this tremulous threshold, and into a planetary civilization that honors all our relations.

But grief, unfixable and unconsolable grief, may be our most common visitor. Our wise ones warn that our ability to stay present to the tidal wave of loss ahead will depend upon an essential skill I am unfamiliar with: to take up an apprenticeship with sorrow. This gives me pause, but I’m slowly understanding that, as we move forward into the Long Dark, we will need to learn to welcome the pervasive and encompassing presence of grief, and hold it in the communities we create. Someday, my own too-big-to-be-contained pain may find its freedom in others’ witnessing of it. I can only trust the wise ones who tell me that we as a people possess the capacity to metabolize this sorrow, turning it into something medicinal for our soul and the soul of the world. 

Weller says one of the essential practices my community and I will need is the ability to hold one another in times of grief and trauma. This is a foreign skill for me and most of my fellows that has been lost under the extreme weight of individualism and privatization, especially in Western, industrial cultures. This has had a profound impact on how we process and metabolize our personal encounters with loss and intense emotional experiences. Without the familiar and reliable container of community, these times can leave us shattered and shaken, frightened and unsure of our next step. 

I can only trust Francis Weller when he says that through a long apprenticeship with sorrow, I might find and share a spaciousness, a soul space capable of holding it all — the loss and the beauty, the despair and the longing, the fear and the love. This is how I hope to become immense, and open an expanding connection with the wider, wilder sentient world. Over the past many years, through wildland treks, through yurt living, through mushroom journeys, through wilderness vision quest and fasting, through earth sabbath, and through following a social-spiritual path in Taos that we call the Watershed Way, I have been experiencing a growing kinship with the human and more-than-human community. Indeed, a new reverence and fierce protective instinct for life has emerged as I have felt the pulsing, living presence of the Earth as an organism embedded in a living cosmos. 

This changed heart—and changed perspective—has shown me a dawning experience of a possible future for the Earth. Through the Watershed Way I see that a mature humanity is emerging— but it is tender, vulnerable, and fragile. If we want to be a portal for our Taos community to enter what Elgin calls “The Great Transition,” we are required to return to humility again and again. 

It seems my work will be to protect this emerging sensitivity and pass it along to the generations that follow. 

My work may be to help develop structures and systems such as the Watershed Way so that each successive generation can fortify this evolving awareness, adding its own understandings, practices, rituals, songs, stories, and more — until this awareness produces human collectives who can live in reverence and humility and gratitude, in accord with the evolving cosmos. We are transition people, and my calling seems to do my part to lead humans on our own exodus away from a culture of domination and toward a kinship culture. 

I am choosing earth, and heeding the authors’ call: Yes, I am here to participate in the ongoing creation, to offer my imagination, affection, and devotion to sustaining the world. I will do my part to cultivate a robust collective of adults whose primary allegiance is to the life-giving world on which we depend. I pledge allegiance to the precious earth, and help others also to re-claim our loyalties to watersheds, migratory pathways, marginalized communities, and the soul of the world. 

I am ready for this time of initiation to ripen me and ready me for greater participation in the care of the cosmos. This is at the heart of why I am here, and why we are here as a species: we are here to keep the dream of the world alive. There is beauty, dignity, and grandeur in this calling. This is my fierce yes. This is me, choosing earth.