Dear Friends,
I’ve just returned from our epic Impact Safari Scandinavia, where we went deep on sensemaking in the meta-crisis with Kate Raworth, Nora Bateson, Stan Grant, Daniel Shmachtenberger and Nate Hagens. What a trip. My body returned to Australia 10 days ago but my soul has been astral travelling with a long lag.
The truth is that we are in quite a serious bit of trouble, with multiple factors driving us further away from the safe and just world we all dream of. From climate change and artificial intelligence to geopolitics and biodiversity loss, we have work to do. So how do we move forward?
While I sit here on my balcony, processing what can’t be processed, I can acknowledge a few powerful things. Firstly we need rites of passage throughout our lives, to help hold stages of development that can feel impossible for one soul to contextualise. The cognitive stretch of this Impact Safari experience was meaningful and it can take a village to weave the threads together. According to Arne Rubinstein, a rite of passage typically goes through three stages: Separation, transformation and reintegration. Like a butterfly in its chrysalis, during the transformation we can turn to mush, needing to rematerialise into a new form, ready for reintegration to the world. The reintegration ain’t always easy.
Another crucial aspect of a rite of passage is the power of rituals and stories. Without community rituals for telling stories to one another from the different realms of our consciousness, we are strings without a kite, knowledge seeking wisdom but with no landing pad. Human creatures alone in the wilderness. To that end, we need new stories and rituals, or even better, revive our ancient ones. We have rejected so many of our old rituals (some for good reason) and the current stories we tell – particularly through movies and popular culture – that we are violent, greedy and untrustworthy, have worn us out and left us feeling hopeless and empty.
Amongst the many incredible people we met on our trip was Dr Rune Rasmussen, who is reviving a movement to explore Nordic animism by bringing back the powerful stories of folklore to inform our future and reconnect to a wisdom that seems distant. A wisdom embedded in all Indigenous traditions around the world, calling us back to a deep, sacred belonging to nature. We have a place here on Earth – we need to stop acting like strangers. We are the tree and the river, the soil and the ocean. Through telling stories of Nordic mythology, we examined where we are today and how we can understand the complexity of our times in relation to the larger cosmic dance of nature and the deep wisdom to be found in animist traditions. They are often epic tales of man’s ego in conflict with the gods: stories of chaos, but also pathways through it that lead us to a time of harmony with nature and ourselves. These old stories chart a course towards reintegration, bringing our separateness back into realignment with wholeness. We need new stories to help us hold the complexity of this moment. What I learned over and over again on the Scandi trip is that the only way to solve our predicament is by re-orienting away from the hero’s journey to community, away from the Situation Room to the meadow. The elegant ecological systems that make up the fabric of our world are our way back home.
