We Are Here: Creating a More Beautiful World
A reflective dialogue between friends about climate grief, spiritual imagination, and the stories that move us toward presence and co-creation.
Following Questions Together
Last week I received a text from my friend Janice about climate grief, imagination, and the longing for stories large enough to guide us toward a more beautiful world.
As I typed my reply, I sensed that we may not be the only ones trying to follow these questions. With Janice’s permission, I’m sharing our dialogue here.
Janice’s Text
I wanted to share something I’ve been thinking about and see if it resonates.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges that face the world, mostly in terms of climate change. I think we need better narratives to guide us. Fear is not motivating, but a more beautiful world is.
Anyways, I wrote this this morning. Would love to hear if it feels like a narrative that could motivate people’s hearts.
We did not come here for fear or war or a battle or to prove anything. We did not labor our way into this life to be better than, or expand our territory, or have power over, or even for comfort. These purposes are far too small for our humanity.
We came here to be a part of something. To find our place in this encompassing wholeness. We came here to plant our feet in the dirt and sigh deeply in contentment. To offer our hands to the collaboration that makes a better world. We came here from a love so vast that it needed new forms; that same vastness that makes you feel both fragile and expansive when you gaze at the stars. We came here to make something together — to imagine and create a more beautiful world.
Kirsten’s Reply
Dear Janice,
I’m so glad you shared this with me. My immediate experience of your words was deep resonance.
Over the past couple of years, you and I have talked at length about what’s been shifting in our sense of the world and our inklings about why we are here. In this offering, there’s a deepening.
My heart is magnetized beyond your words to the presence from which they arose. Something stirred in you directly. You saw. You knew.
You asked me a specific question, and in this letter, I hope to respond with what arises in me as I am present to that inquiry. You asked if this feels like a narrative that could motivate people’s hearts.
I wonder if what moves hearts is not narrative alone, but the presence from which a narrative is spoken.
Our current context seems less and less able to receive new narratives, especially narratives that ask us to imagine beyond what is familiar. Does this mean we stop sharing? I don’t think so.
I remember meeting you for the first time in the fall of 2022 when we gathered in a circle with twenty other folks beneath grand oak trees at the Ojai Arts Center. We were kindred in our questions. Both of us had been called into new inner terrain over time as we listened to Rob. And what was he doing? He was telling stories. He was sharing what he saw from where he was. He was showing up to a microphone week after week, and our hearts recognized something true and beautiful in his words and his presence.
I am grateful our hearts recognized an already existing connection in a remarkably brief convergence of our coordinates.
Let’s open more deeply to the fullness of your question:
What was it like inside you as these words flowed through? Was there a felt sense you can recall?
As you re-read the words that arrived that day, what do they stir in you now? What do you notice in your body, your heart, your intellect?
Do they still feel alive?
We are living through a moment when the dominant structure of consciousness is splintering. For hundreds of years, many of us have been trained to engage reality primarily through the mental and the rational.
What once was a deepening for humanity is now a heavy weight around our necks. We are collectively gasping for breath as we witness the ways that orienting to reality solely through the mental structure is no longer tenable. There is no lifeguard on duty here to pull us safely back to the familiar.
Something deeper is springing forth.¹
This “something” is not a bigger, better new phase in a linear or developmental progression. It already lies largely untapped within us, waiting to be actualized.
Like rooms in a museum, this structural orientation called Integral will co-exist with and draw upon all of the other ways humanity has experienced time and reality: archaic, mythic, magic, mental. Integral consciousness will be an intensification. A mutation. Dimensionality we cannot yet comprehend. A return to what Jean Gebser called “originary presence.”
We have both tasted what it’s like to see and know from depths that transcend our understanding. We have each perceived something real shimmering beyond ordinary material reality, outside of linear time. With equal parts incredulity and awe, we’ve held these glimpses in our hands like snowflakes: unquestionably real, yet impossible to grasp or explain.
I remember when you told me about your experience with C.S. Lewis’ work. You knew how the book you were reading would end with your subtle senses before you read the last chapter. When the actual ending was precisely and uncannily what you had sensed, your trust in a vast, loving mystery surged.
This seeing was personal, stabilizing, and evocative. It is still alive in you, and in your recounting, I tasted the aliveness, too.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “Truth has only to appear once, in one single mind for it to be impossible for anything to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.”
I’m deeply curious about what it’s like to create from these inner stirrings at this junction in our emergence, to sing the things I see² when doors open in time and the timeless wells up and pours forth.
Though I hope my fluency and craftsmanship will deepen over time, I will continue to offer what arises in me along the way as artifacts of presence, or maybe even homing beacons. I hope you will, too.
Thank you for inviting me into the synergy of our shared becoming.
Love,
Kirsten
Sources
1. I’ve barely, primitively, and organically scratched the surface in describing the emerging integral leap. These sources have helped me begin to orient:
Jeremy Johnson’s book Seeing Through the World, on Jean Gebser and integral consciousness
This episode of the Tension of Emergence Podcast
2. The phrase “sing the things I see” is from The Lost Words Blessing.
If this reflection stirred something in you, I’d love to stay connected. I send occasional Soulspace notes with contemplative questions, spiritual practices, and resources for becoming. You can subscribe below.
If you’re carrying questions about how to live, create, and remain openhearted in this moment, I’d be honored to accompany you.
