Dear friends,

I will be dropping off of the internet for the next month or so, but I am not dropping out of the struggle to create a just, merciful, harmonious and sustainable nation and world.   I am taking the next month to improve my ability to contribute to the struggle, as I will describe below. 

The quote from Gus Speth that I have included here is central to my understanding of what we need in order to survive our current polycrisis and emerge into a healthier civilization.  It also is central to my calling as a poet and spiritual writer, contributing to inner and world transformation.  Part of that work is promoting “the emerging ethic of the environment” and “the old ethic of love of neighbor,” with the recognition that everyone and everything on earth is our neighbor, explicitly opposing exploitation or oppression.

Gus says that to make the transition to a new society we need a new consciousness.  He has identified six ingredients to make that change:

1. raising awareness of the unfolding calamity;
2. cultivating wise leaders;
3. articulating a new narrative and positive vision;
4. building a unified social justice and environmental movement;
5. putting out effective social marketing; and,
6. developing models of a new way of living.

We each can contribute to one or more of these.  I am excited to be part of it, but I need to add a precursor in order to be most effective, which is pursuing my own new consciousness and reorientation of life. 

The word for this in my spiritual tradition is “metanoia,” an ancient Greek word that means to move beyond where the heart, mind and spirit have been to a greater level, or as the spiritual teacher, Mark Kutolowski, puts it, to expand the vision of the heart. 

I will be spending the next month or so in retreat with Mark at Metanoia of Vermont, a lay Catholic homestead and community that he and his wife, Lisa, founded.  The mission of Metanoia is to help people grow in lives of prayer, contemplation and care of the land.  Mark is a trained teacher of Centering Prayer and a spiritual director.  He will be accompanying me through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, a retreat experience that I hope will be a path of metanoia.

I can’t know where this path will lead other than into the place we each have within us where we meet the spirit of life that flows through all the earth and makes us one.  The way I understand it, that spirit sparked life into being and inspired every step of evolution, so it must still want life to survive and thrive.  I believe that if we each listen to that spirit’s guidance and let it lead us, we will find a way to contribute to its evolutionary cause—we will discover the individual contributions we each can make to help create the major cultural change that we now need.

That’s what I hope I will be doing over the coming month— practicing listening for that spirit and letting it lead me.  Thank you for your part, however the spirit moves you!  I’m with you all the way.

Peace, joy and love,
Tom