Looking for a committee to think with
For a Conversation to Save the World
Calling good minds to get us out of the mess we are in. This is about the possibility of taking our stride now! There’s no coordination looking for timely action to meet the urgency of our situation. I want to launch a Conversation to Save the World. How can we get humanity wised up to become cooperative, which would fix everything? Think Margaret Mead and an island of coherence doing the job. Reply to this email. Tell me what you would do if you ran the world or talk to me about your reaction to my ideas for a sense of what you would bring to the table. There will be honorariums for participants. From armchair philosophers to Nobel Prize winners…
My nonprofit is called Mighty Companions, and I’ve been 35 years working up to delivering on this:
“Now comes a period of settling down. This is a quiet time, in which the teacher of God rests a while in reasonable peace. Now he consolidates his learning. Now he begins to see the transfer value of what he has learned. Its potential is literally staggering, and the teacher of God is now at the point in his progress at which he sees in it his whole way out. 'Give up what you do not want, and keep what you do.' The teacher of God needs this period of respite...when he is ready to go on, he goes with mighty companions beside him. Now he rests a while, and gathers them before going on. He will not go on from here alone.” - A Course in Miracles
This is what I wrote when I created my Mighty Companions website, 35 years ago:
These times are dangerously out of balance. Exploitation has supplanted interest in the common good. What can be done to bring about a more life-sustaining perception, grounded in an awareness that we are one?
The good news is that seeking God is giving way to expressing God. After lifetimes of spiritual practice, self-aware people can sit around the campfire, glowing together. This is an everyday God sort of thing, hearkening to earlier connections to the land and the tribe that have been acculturated out of us. It is timely now for those with a developed capacity for seeing through the illusion to grow a field of awareness.
What is coming clear to you? Let this site be a focal point to pulse the vibe of an awakened humanity.
This is on its homepage:
What got me looking for my mighty companions was Inside the Intelligence, my own personal Course in Miracles, where I got my marching orders to do a roundup.
A focus on the big picture is hardly for anyone. Although, since the ‘60s, understandings about consciousness have become widespread, it has not yet gotten to the place where we run the world based on them, which is what must happen if humanity is to survive. Most good people are in a more narrow band of thinking and operating, from the many good things being done to just handling survival, and what we can do in timely fashion to turn ourselves around has not become the conversation. However, for the unusual people who think along these lines, the conversation I’m looking to have would be your island in a storm!
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For me, the basis, the foundation for all change and awareness is Love, with a capital "L". My grandmother taught me that Love is the most powerful force in the universe. So for me, Love is what others call God. And another awareness I have is that there are no "things" here. We are all beings. Every single rock, tree, river, worm, insect . . . we are kin and we are all, even those who appear inanimate or "dead", are alive and sentient. And I've felt this and known this every since I was a young child. This is why I loved Brian Swimme's "Green Dragon" book way back when it first came out. Because here was someone who knew the universe in a similar way, and had a language to describe it. It confirmed my experiences and inner knowings, which usually just got me shrugs or eye rolls.
Back in the 1980s through the late 1990s, I was an activist, a writer and researcher, an organizer and director of a nonprofit based in Montpelier, VT. I was one of the first people to integrate Earth into economics, what I called Gaian Economics (Economics as if the Earth Really Mattered, New Society Publishers, 1988 and a few years later, Invested in the Common Good, same publisher, both with forewords by Thomas Berry). Then I moved from Vermont to Maine to care for my disabled sister, and started a large, magical herb, flower, and vegetable garden that became one of my greatest teachers. I started making herbal medicine and body care products that I sold (and still do - Gaia's Garden Herbals on Etsy), and now my passion is making natural perfumes. I also joined the fight against Nestle (now Blue Triton) in Fryeburg, ME until I moved to NY to be closer to my kids and grandkids in 2018.
For me, my work and my "leading edge" of thought and awareness is Earth is alive, so we are living within the living body of Earth, as the cells of our body live within us. It is time, as Thomas Berry said, to recreate the human at the species level, right down to the DNA. Indeed, we are changing our DNA without even being aware with the technology we use (and abuse), with the chemicals in the environment (and in our food), with the myriad traumas being inflicted upon all life right now in the name of profit and greed. It is time to wake up to who and what we are, as individuals, yes, but more . . . as a species. I want to help people FEEL, within their bodies, and hearts, and spirits, that not only do we have a responsibility to engage with all species, as kin, but it is our birthright! By engage with I mean love, communicate with, play and work with, and bring into our conversations, just as we do with our human friends and families. These kinship relationships have the potential to shift our awareness, open us to the true nature of who we are, and form the foundation and the basis for a New Story, that humanity (and all life) desperately needs if we are to continue this journey together.
I'm humbled to meet you, Suzanne. I hope there will be a time some day that we can speak further.