Seven Foundations for a New Era
featured photo by Damir
Out here on the coast it is early Summer. The lavender is flowering, sweet smelling, attracting bees, the wild rose bush falling pink over the fence. The deer and her still-speckled fawn come in the evening to eat the grass near the house, as a red-tailed flacon alights on a branch outside my window. Today it was also announced that the world will experience record heat levels over the next five years, which “will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management, and the environment,” and it will be likely “to breach the 1.5C climate threshold by 2027.”
These two opposing stories, the beauty and wonder of the natural world and the polycrisis of our present civilization, speak to me of this moment in our shared journey. They make me wonder into what future are we are walking, and how should we respond? Some are working to spare us from the worst of the climate and biodiversity crisis, reducing our carbon emissions, rewilding and regenerative farming, a possible degrowth economy. Here climate and social justice walk hand in hand, as we can no longer afford to deny the history of our exploitation and greed, the burdens placed on the Global South. Others are looking towards a time of transition as our present culture unravels. What are the tools of resilience we need, or communities that can support us through possible social collapse?
I am drawn to look further, seven generations or more, to a possible future waiting at the edges of our vision: a journey together with the Earth and her more-than-human inhabitants, a way to live rooted in the living oneness that is the foundation of the ecosystem to which we belong. This is the future I am drawn to explore, a half-hidden path like the deer trails that lead from my garden into the deeper forest.
I do not expect many to follow this pathway, it is too hidden, too far from the images and structures of our present-day consciousness. It belongs to a past when we walked together with a fully animate Earth, when Her inhabitants spoke to us and we listened, knew Her stories and signs. When our dreams and visions were woven into the texture of the land. When we knew where we belonged. But I sense it can also belong to a future quite different to now, when we can once again be a part of the “great conversation” with the rivers and the winds, rather than existing solely in today’s blinkered world of rational consciousness.
I know that the coming decades will be darker, as the seas rise and the forests burn, as climate refugees flood the borders of our present world order. And that those clinging to the old stories will resist these primal changes, often through power and oppression. But over the last decades I have sensed, seen deep in the inner worlds, shifts taking place that belong to this future, how the Earth Herself is changing. And I believe that there is a need to begin to work with these changes, to lay the foundations for a radically different future—a new civilization emerging organically from the wasteland we have created.
One morning last Summer, I awoke long before dawn with the clear sense of a number of foundational qualities that belong to the next era. I express them here simply, with only a little amplification, in order to convey the way they came to me.
Here are seven foundational qualities for the next era:
- Respect for women and feminine principles, such as receptivity, patience, nurturing, listening (with the senses, the soul, and the heart). This does not mean that we will be returning to a matriarchal era, but that patriarchal oppression in all its forms will no longer be part of our culture. Without the return of the feminine nothing new can be born, nor will we be able to nurture a new way of being with the Earth.
- Respecting the land as sacred and developing different new and old ways of working with the Earth in harmony with life’s biodiversity and interdependence.
- Time no longer seen as linear, but a return to the rhythms and patterns of nature, the seasons—how Spring follows Winter—but also our place in other patterns of time, within our bodies and the world around us, for example the waxing and waning of the moon and the seasons of our human lives. Through this quality human life will no longer be seen as part of a linear image of progress, instead we will return to living in harmony with the many different rhythms of time, recognizing our place within nature and the cosmos. This will also help us to live more fully in the present moment.
- The coming era will be non-hierarchical. How the present hierarchies—their dynamics of power and patterns of control—fall apart will be one of the defining experiences of the coming decades, even as new, non-hierarchical ways of living and working together emerge, often experimental, like seed nurseries for the coming era.
- There will be a focus on forming communities of all types, which can connect together in an organic way, be interconnected and interdependent as in nature.
- Oneness will be a foundational principle. No one will be excluded, everything and everyone will have their own place and be intrinsically recognized for their own nature, their note in the symphony of creation. This will be the most simple and the most difficult, because it is counter to so many of the patterns of human behavior of the present time. But with this principle, life and humanity will reorganize itself, reconstellate into new ways, new patterns and connections, that reflect the unity that belongs to all of life.
- Love, love and care for each other and for the Earth will be the central spiritual principle. This will reawaken the Divine in a new way, returning us to an experience of divine presence.
These seven qualities will be held together in a new way of being, a new space, which is connected to the cosmos. Through it all will run the axis of love, from the center of the Earth to the center of the cosmos, present in every cell of creation.
Through these foundational qualities life will regenerate in ways at present we cannot even imagine. For example, there will be new sources of non-polluting energy which will be freely accessible. How long it will take before this new civilization fully emerges is not known, but it is my understanding that within two centuries it will become visible. The next 100 to 130 years will be a time of increasing insecurity, disturbance, chaos, and then out of this will gradually emerge a new civilization, quite different to now.
