What happens when the strategies I use to fend off wounding become a way of life? Eventually, I no longer notice that I’ve shut myself off from others. When I try to avoid pain or fear from childhood trauma or despair about the world—I narrow what I feel, what I allow in, and how I relate to others. It creates distance, even isolation.
This co-authored essay proposes a radical evolution of leadership—from directing others to healing the whole. Drawing on science, spiritual wisdom, and the urgency of the polycrisis, the authors frame leadership as a sacred act of stewardship across generations.
Soft rebellion refuses urgency and exhaustion. It listens, weaves, and roots. It resists not by mirroring violence, but by embodying tenderness as strategy—disrupting systems with care, beauty, and the quiet cunning of the wild.
...The relationship between song and education is well-known. Many have written on the subject, perhaps most famously Plato in The Republic. In it, Socrates warns about the dangers of teaching certain ungodly songs. If the gods are portrayed as vengeful and cruel, he says, what will prevent our children from emulating them?
Each quilt represents countless lives lost on border ground, a hundred-mile strip of geography spanning two countries. The interstitial border region has morphed into a distinct culture of its own and the quilts, with their binational contributors, fly its flag.
The Mamos want the world to hear their warning and their deep concerns about the precarious state of all life on Mother Earth: “Our ancestors left us in this space, caring for and harmonizing the Earth and Humanity. We live in harmony with all nature's beings: water, earth, fire, wind, the sun, humans, and also animals and plants, which are essence of the divine.”
Gender, like race, is a social construction, which is to say, a story. And the stories of sexism and racism that have cast such a pall over our history and our present illustrate the power of worldview and narrative in generating and maintaining systemic oppression.
The 21st century is witnessing hundreds of millions of people caught up in cascading systemic transformation. Global society has crossed a threshold. We’ve entered the time of the Great Transition—a time when we hospice outworn ways of living that no longer serve us and the Earth, and give birth to an emergent, more compassionate, and resilient future.
The power and abundance of our Earth can never be overstated; what is commonly overlooked is humanity's exploitation and neglect of its own life source.
