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Thirty seconds and counting.
Astronauts report it feels good.
T-minus 25 seconds.
Twenty seconds and counting.
T-minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal.
Twelve, eleven,
ten, nine,
ignition sequence start,
six, five,
four, three, two, one, zero.
All engines running.
Lift-off.
We have a lift-off.
Thirty-two minutes past the hour.
Lift-off on Apollo 11.
The first moment that I realised I wanted to be an astronaut
was the day where, I, as a young boy,
along with millions and millions of people around the globe,
watched those first footsteps on the moon.
One giant leap for mankind.
I realised that humanity had just become a different species.
We were no longer a species confined to our planet.
That's what I wanted to do.
I wanted to be part of that exploration.
I wanted to be part of that group of people that stepped off the planet
Ron Garan ISS ASTRONAUT
and was able to look back upon ourselves.
WELCOME ASTRONAUTS
As a child, I assumed that I would go into space.
We were trying to get to the moon,
the whole Apollo programme,
and it seemed like we had this momentum moving forward.
Mae Jemison SHUTTLE ASTRONAUT
And I assumed I would be a part of it.
The first time I went into space, it was 2008.
I flew on Space Shuttle Discovery.
It was really an incredible day, it was almost surrealistic.
I remember leaving the crew quarters and boarding the Astrovan,
and waving to everybody as we stepped out.
And we get out to the launch pad, and it was really a spectacular sight.
When you watch a space-shuttle launch on TV,
it looks like you see all this white smoke,
and then eventually this space shuttle
just slowly, gradually rises out of the smoke and heads up.
But what it felt like
is it felt like we were on the end of a slingshot.
And when those solid rocket boosters fire, you realise you are going somewhere.
That somebody just let go that slingshot and off you go.
Shuttle has cleared the tower.
That was a really amazing experience.
On that first day, that first day in space,
the most spectacular moment was when you look out the window for the first time.
When you are able to unstrap out of your seat,
your tasks are over, and you get to really take a look at our planet.
It's just absolutely breathtaking to see that.
It is just an incredible view.
I looked down at this planet, at our Earth,
and you see this thin, shimmering layer of blue light
that's our atmosphere that sustains us.
It almost seems like it iridesces from within.
What's really amazing and beautiful
is watching this line slowly pass across the Earth below us.
Something that you can't see from the Earth.
And watching all the evidence of human activity all of a sudden come alive
as we pass into the dark side of the orbit.
We flew so close to dancing curtains of auroras
that we felt like we could reach out and touch them.
There's so many just absolutely breathtaking things.
The really wonderful thing
that happened to me when I was in space
was this feeling of belonging to the entire universe.
I actually didn't think, "Here's this Earth and that's the only thing I belong to."
I actually imagined myself in a star system 10,000 light-years away,
and I felt I also belong there.
You know, we're as much a part of this universe
as any speck of star dust, you know, any asteroid.
We're a part of this universe.
On the third spacewalk that we did,
I was strapped to the end of the space station's robotic arm
and was flown through a big manoeuvre across the top of the space station and back.
So, at the top of this arc,
I was looking down at the space station
against the backdrop of the undescribably beautiful Earth 250 miles below,
and it took my breath away.
I was filled with awe.
If we can do this, if nations can join together and do this amazing thing in space,
imagine what we can do to overcome the challenges facing our planet.
But the other side of that is
we have this incredibly beautiful, peaceful, fragile planet from space,
but you can't help but think about the unfortunate realities of life on our planet
for a significant portion of those inhabitants.
The real issue is how do we operate here on this planet?
There's a story that comes from India that says,
that once upon a time
humans had the godhead in themselves
but we behaved so badly that the gods decided to take it away from us.
And so they were trying to figure out where to hide it so that humans wouldn't find it.
One said, "Let's put it at the bottom of the ocean.
"They'll never find it there."
And everybody said, you know,
"No, one day humans will get to the bottom of the ocean and they'll find it there."
Another said, "Let's put it in the skies and the heavens."
And they said, "No, humans will fly that far one day and they'll find it."
And then Brahma said, "I know where to hide it.
"Let's put it inside of humans themselves,
"because they'll never think to look for it there."
We have to look inside of ourselves to figure this out.
PLANETARY
One of the truly extraordinary events of the 20th century
was space travel.
David Loy PHILOSOPHER
And by that I don't simply mean
the fact that we went to the moon and came back,
but that this gave us a totally different perspective on the Earth.
A totally different understanding about who we are.
The history of human life on the planet, in one sense,
is a history of wandering,
a history of leaving home.
Sean Kelly PHILOSOPHER
Humans spread out of Africa to eventually inhabit every continent of the planet.
So in that sense, humans became planetary 40,000 years ago.
But they didn't know that they existed on the planet.
With the Apollo mission, we had a kind of visceral experience
where individuals were able to see the whole planet from space.
And through our technology, the rest of us could see it.
I think the first time we got that picture of the Earth
we were seeing our home in a much bigger context.
It was no longer, you know, the house we lived in or the village or the country.
Suddenly we were seeing this is home in the much larger context.
It became a symbol for many, many things.
The environmental movement, the whole global thinking that's happening.
In the past, we could have individual community, national destinies.
The one thing that it did for me was it just brought home the fact
Peter Russell PHYSICIST AND AUTHOR
we are one species on a single planet with a common destiny.
To identify ourselves as part of the human species?
That's really the identity shift, right, of ourselves as a single species on this planet.
You realised that there was a subset of the teeming life on that planet
Janine Benyus BIOLOGIST AND AUTHOR
called humans,
and that you were far enough away to not see our differences. Right?
You could almost see us as one people, as one population.
I spent half of 2011 on board the International Space Station,
and during that time I got into a routine
where I would almost say goodnight to the Earth.
I would go to the cupola,
which is the windowed observatory on the bottom of the space station,
and I would just gaze at the Earth.
One of the really interesting things about a long-duration spaceflight
is you get to watch the Earth transform
over the weeks and the months that you're up there.
You get to watch the ice break up, the seasons change.
And from that perspective, the perspective over time,
you really get the sense that we have this living, breathing organism
hanging in the blackness of space that's riding through the universe.
Very early on the astronauts looked at the whole of Earth,
and this feeling came that it was one single living system.
I think that was part of the shift that happened.
And it's interesting that came at the same time
as Jim Lovelock was thinking about his Gaia hypothesis.
The idea that all the different creatures, the oceans, atmosphere, soil,
were sort of working together,
which throughout the history of life on Earth
had kept the optimum conditions for evolution to continue.
When he looked at the Earth, he saw this was exactly what was happening.
And so he put forward the idea that the whole planet is like one single living system.
If you imagine the famous Earthrise picture,
these first images of the Earth that the Apollo missions were taking from space,
you normally think of it as an astronaut in a spaceship,
looking from outside of Earth at the Earth.
More fundamentally, however, these images are the Earth looking at itself through us.
In other words,
the first images from space are a critical moment
in the emerging awakening of the Earth.
So, we look at those first images that came back from space.
It's important for us to understand that those are as out of date now
as my high school yearbook picture is.
Bill McKibben ENVIRONMENTALIST
I mean, you look at the summer Arctic and there's 40% less ice on it.
You look at those vast oceans, and they're 30% more acid than they were 40 years ago.
It's hard for us to take in both the kind of beauty and majesty,
and to understand the vulnerability and the fragility of those systems.
Clearly, the basic, most fundamental, physical problem that we face
is this exploding fountain of carbon into the atmosphere, warming the planet.
And that comes from the fact that fossil fuel
radically transformed our set of possibilities, beginning 300 years ago.
We are at the point where we know that humans have impacted the planet.
That was something that we didn't think about, you know, 200-300 years ago.
We weren't having that kind of impact.
We know we can affect the world.
We are traversing a terrain
which we, as a species and as a planet overall, have not seen before.
We are facing an ecological crisis
Lawrence Ellis COMPLEX SYSTEMS THEORIST
that has the capacity to tremendously alter life on earth.
We don't know what will happen if major parts of the web of life disappear.
Every species that exists on the planet has been coaxed into existence
over the 4.4 billion-year history of the Earth.
So, literally, it's taken the entire history of cosmic evolution to bring forth
Drew Dellinger ECOLOGICAL ACTMST AND POET
the diversity and complexity of the biosphere that we have now.
When I look back on my life,
there were certain crucial moments that changed me forever.
One of them was the discovery that we are in the midst
Brian Swimme COSMOLOGIST
of a mass extinction.
At the present time, there are perhaps 10 million species,
and species come and go.
But in mass-extinction moments,
species begin to be extinguished in droves.
In our moment, thousands of species are disappearing every year.
Back in the 1980s, there was a conference at the Smithsonian,
and they made an announcement that we were in the middle of this mass extinction.
That quite simply there had never been a moment more destructive
in the last 65 million years than our moment.
I mean, it was just so colossal, so depressing.
And so, I couldn't sleep that night.
I didn't know what to do. It just really affected me.
The next morning I went out and I bought The New York Times,
and the announcement of this mass extinction was on page 26
ACTION IS URGED TO SAVE SPECIES
of The New York Times.
So, that means that we humans found 25 pages of news items
more important than the elimination of life on the planet Earth.
In that moment, I realised that something was profoundly wrong
with our human civilisation for eliminating life,
for our media for not reporting it and forgetting about it,
for our political system for not doing something about it.
What is it that pulls our awareness away
from sitting with the pain
of what we have done and are doing to this planet,
of what we have done and are doing to each other,
that is so destructive?
Today, we have not only an ecological crisis,
and various economic crises,
but we also have a kind of story crisis,
that is to say there's something very wrong
about the way that we understand who we are,
and our relationship with the Earth.
When we look back at human history,
every culture organises itself around a fundamental story.
We can pretend we're living without a story,
but if we stop and really think about it and ask ourselves,
"What's the way in which I organise my life?
"How do I find meaning in my day-to-day activities?"
you'll start to see that there's actually a story behind that.
So story is,
I think, the most essential organising power within the human experience.
Ever since we grew these big brains,
we've been asking ourselves this fundamental question.
"Where did we come from, what are we doing here,
Wes Nisker MEDITATION TEACHER AND AUTHOR
"what is life in this universe all about?"
And
we've come up with some pretty fantastic stories
to answer those big questions.
Heavens and hells and gods and demons.
And humans became so arrogant
we believed the entire universe was made just for us,
for the education and liberation of our individual souls.
That somehow we weren't connected,
we were specially created,
and were separate from all the rest.
Those are totally dysfunctional stories right now.
The world into which you were born
doesn't exist in some absolute sense,
but is just one model of reality.
The interesting thing is not to say who's right and who's wrong,
but to look at how different belief systems
mediate the relationship between humanity and the natural world
with profoundly different consequences
Wade Davis EXPLORER AND ANTHROPOLOGIST
in terms of the ecological footprint.
Every other culture in the history of the planet
has told stories that they were embedded in nature,
that they were connected to nature,
that nature was their mother, was their father,
was the source of their existence.
We've told stories that we're separate from nature,
that we're superior to nature, that we walk around on top of nature.
When we look at our politics,
when we look at our economics,
we see that they're based on this separation between humans and the Earth.
And I think that sense of alienation has led us to desecrate the Earth.
Every culture, every people, has a worldview.
We all have a place that we come from.
We all have our ways.
We all have our practices.
We all have our creation stories, our cosmologies.
The worldview that we currently exist in as a dominant paradigm
places human beings above all else.
It views the rest of the planet,
views all other beings, as resources that are to be acquired,
Angel Kyoda Williams ZEN PRIEST
resources that are to be used.
And for that worldview to continue to persist and to thrive
it has to ignore the destruction.
In fact, it has to put us all to sleep
because if this worldview were to face the truth of what we have
put into motion
it would collapse on itself.
If we look at the ecological crisis, and if we look at the economic crisis,
I think we can ultimately see them as rooted in those stories
that you've got to keep growing, keep expanding,
because if you don't do it, somebody else will.
There are pressures to keep this economic juggernaut moving,
all I think based upon this ultimate story of economic growth and success.
What we're doing, it seems to me,
is trying to control the conditions of our existence on this Earth,
trying to mould everything into a resource that we can use.
Given this obsession with never-ending economic and technological growth,
it seems inevitable that sooner or later
we're gonna bump up against the limits of the biosphere,
of the planet,
and it seems like it's starting to happen now.
There has to be a part of us that knows the Earth is in pain.
That what brought us forth
Becca Tarnas ARTIST AND WRITER
is in some sense dying.
And our mainstream narrative, it's to allow us to feel numb,
to cut us off from that
inherent intuitive sense that something is really wrong
in how we're relating to this only home of ours.
One of the problems that we face
is that we haven't done a very good job of remembering what makes us human,
and what makes us happy.
The average American
is significantly less happy on surveys than they were 50 or 60 years ago
even though our standard of living has theoretically trebled over that time.
And the reason is that we've gotten out of touch with each other.
Americans spent the last 50 years
embarked on the project of building bigger houses
farther apart from each other.
That has had not only huge environmental consequences,
you have to heat and cool and drive between these places,
it's also had deep social consequences.
You run into people a lot less.
The average American has half as many close friends
as they would've 50 years ago.
That's a very big change for a socially evolved primate.
If we were to walk down the street
and ask somebody in a way that went straight to their hearts,
"What is it that you want?"
They would say, many of them, "Intimacy."
Barry Lopez NATURE WRITER
"I want to be intimate with the world,
"and I want someone to be intimate with me."
That means, "I want a congress of some sort,
"I want to be part of something."
Every traditional culture
I have sat down and had the opportunity to frame the question with,
when I've said, "What's the one word that comes to mind about Western culture?",
the word I hear most often is "Lonely."
"You people are really lonely."
"You've designed something
"that has taken the notion of the individual so far
"you've cut yourself off from everything else,
"and you've created a landscape of desperately lonely people."
More than the environment itself,
what we are losing most dramatically is our own connection,
our intimate connection to nature,
our own sense of ourselves
Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey EXPLORER AND ANTHROPOLOGIST
that we've forgotten and become so distanced from.
I see people dashing all over the place,
and I think,
"We're racing all over, but for what?"
I remember one elder told me, he said,
"You all have watches but you have no time."
And I stopped and had to take that in,
because I find myself doing that.
I'm racing to airports, I'm racing to meetings, I'm racing through email.
I am racing through my life but not necessarily living.
The greatest wound of modernity
is the idea that we are other than life,
or that nature is other than us.
And we were brought up thinking that,
we're in classrooms, cut off from nature, looking outside the window at it,
and studying it in textbooks.
Our upbringing, and our houses, and the way we dress,
Paul Hawken ENVIRONMENTALIST AND AUTHOR
and the way we lived, and the way we cut ourselves off, you know,
was as if nature was out there, a threat, not very friendly.
That wound, that deep, deep wound is such a...
Such a loss, you know.
A lot of people,
if they see grass in the crack of the sidewalk,
that may be the only other living thing
that they see hour upon hour.
You know, and most of us live in cities now,
and are very separate.
It becomes easy to forget
that you're kin with a living planet,
that you're part of a living planet, you know,
when you don't see it much.
It's as if we're living in a museum, you know,
curated by someone who's decided
to not let any natural objects in for some reason. Right?
It doesn't take much to go back into the natural world and go,
"Oh, now I remember."
I work with people all day long and I bring them outside.
I watch them eventually get back in touch
with their evolutionary kin, you know.
They're back in a natural setting.
It's like putting water on a dry plant.
At a certain point, being in that natural setting,
and we talk about, "Are you separate from nature?"
Of course they say, "No, of course not. No, I'm back home."
But, you know,
forty hours from now,
you know, they're in their cube
and they get on their elevator and they go down to the subway
and they get on a tube and travel, and of course...
Of course there's that disconnection.
For either a human being or a social system to change,
the old system has to stop working.
Life as usual has to stop working.
Charles Eisenstein ECONOMIST AND AUTHOR
Normal has to become unsustainable.
Everything that has worked for hundreds of years,
our way of looking at the world,
the ideology of growth,
of mastering nature, of conquering nature,
the technologies of control,
all of these things are coming into question.
So part of making this transition
is to begin experimenting with new ways of doing things.
In other words, to plant the seeds of a new story.
The kind of intelligence we need is not data, but narrative.
How do you put all these disparate pieces together
in a structure
that has direction, momentum, promise?
So, the question for me is not just, "Do we need a new story?"
But, "Do we need a new way of telling a story?"
There are three stories actually
that
Joanna Macy ECO-PHILOSOPHER AND ACTMST
we have to choose from
to make sense of our lives now,
to make sense of our world.
The first story is "Business as Usual."
All we need to do is grow our economy.
So, I call that the industrial-growth society.
But there's another story,
which is seen and accepted as the reality
by the scientists, the activists,
who lift back the carpet,
look under the rug of the "Business as Usual" and see what it's costing us.
It's costing us the world.
We call that story "The Great Unravelling."
Unravelling is what biological and ecological and organic systems do.
As diversity's lost, they shred.
That's not the end of the story, though,
because there's another narrative,
another lens through which we can choose to see.
And that is that a revolution is taking place,
a transition from the industrial-growth society
to a life-sustaining society.
And it's taking many forms, this third story,
"The Great Turning,"
and it's got huge evolutionary pressures behind it.
Any species, any life system,
which develops technology
is gonna go through a similar crisis to us,
because as soon as you start developing technology
you're gonna fall into this phase of evolution
where you start changing the world.
And the awareness has got to catch up with that.
You've got to then gain the wisdom, the understanding,
the true intelligence to know how to manage that technology
without destroying your habitat.
So, I see this phase that we're in right now,
which has come to a head in our generation,
is probably inevitable on any planetary system
which develops an intelligent, tool-using species.
And if it doesn't destroy itself,
any species which has come through this phase
has got to have let go of this sort of egocentric, materialistic consciousness.
The sense of separation
that all of us usually feel,
the feeling that there's a me inside here somewhere,
maybe behind the eyes, inside the ears,
looking out at you, or an objective external world.
This sense of separation is not real, it's a delusion,
or in more contemporary terms, it's a psychological and social construct.
We can be very selfish as a human being,
and this of course has to do with
Anam Thubten TIBETAN LAMA
the fact that we have to survive as a human species,
and sometimes the ego has a role in this human existence.
That's how we survive it,
and also, our ancestors, our parents, taught, some way or another,
that we have to be little bit selfish in order to survive,
and that is the part of the old consciousness.
The sense of a separate self is not only a delusion,
but it's a delusion that causes suffering, anxiety.
This deluded sense of a separate self is always going to be haunted
by the sense of lack, sense of insufficiency,
the feeling that something isn't right about me,
something is wrong.
We misunderstand the problem as outside ourselves.
I feel something is wrong, something isn't right,
it must be that I don't have enough of this out here,
or I have to solve this problem.
The whole drive of Western society
Alan Senauke ZEN PRIEST
with commodification and consumerism
is "Buy this, get this, own this,"
and that sense of lack,
that sense that you have that something is missing, will disappear.
And of course we know, from our own experience,
it don't work like that.
There will always be something incomplete.
And it's bottomless.
Once you engage in that project, it's like you're digging...
You're digging in one hole, and tossing the dirt in another,
and you'll be doing that forever.
So what's the solution to this?
Is it returning to nature?
Well, we can't return to nature,
because, if we really understand it, we've never left it.
We don't need to return to nature,
but we do need to realise the sense in which we are embedded in nature.
It's a kind of delusion or optical delusion
where we feel like we're the centre of the universe,
and that's not the case at all.
Even to lift our eyes to the sky we can see this earth is not the centre of the universe.
Joan Halifax ANTHROPOLOGIST AND ECOLOGIST
But at the same time, if we lift our own internal eyes into our own experience
we realise that we ourselves are living in a world, a universe,
a reality that is characterised by inter-relationality.
We begin to see that, in fact, what I thought was myself, was not myself at all.
Central to that is that the Earth is seen as a living system.
A living being, where everything we are
and can ever be is dependent upon
this great, verdant, fertile, sensitive,
intricately interwoven web of life.
So, now we're starting to look through deep time at how this universe was created.
I mean, fantastic tools and analysis that we've come up with
has shown us a whole different picture of who we are.
First of all, that we are intertwined with all and everything.
We now know that we are related to all the life that's ever lived.
The story of evolution is everybody's autobiography.
Approximately 13.7 billion years ago, the universe exploded into existence
in a tremendous burst of pure energy.
We come from that original flaring forth of the universe.
We come from that origin moment.
And we are connected to this seamless unfolding process that has taken place
over these 13 billion years.
From the original fireball to the galaxies,
to the stars, to the planets, to Earth,
to oceans, life, consciousness, and humanity.
So, we are part of an unfolding evolutionary process
that includes all beings
and is 100 billion galaxies wide.
We've been on the planet Earth as humans for 200,000 years,
and this is the first moment when we have a common story.
The story of the birth of the universe.
The story of the development of our planet Earth.
That is now bubbling up in human consciousness.
We are all parts of the great circulation that constitutes the Earth
and its ecosystems.
The air, the water, the food,
that comes into me and then passes out of me,
this is embedded, this is part of this larger circulation.
We know, on the most basic level, that the air that we breathe,
the oxygen in that air, we're dependent upon the plants for that.
And likewise the plant world is dependent
upon the carbon dioxide that we breathe out.
One of the ways to understand life
is to just look at ourselves, our own body.
It is estimated that our body consists of only 10% human cells.
The other 90% are other types of organisms.
Bacteria, primarily, and virus.
So, right away, we have to understand
that we are not a human being, we're a human community.
Without those cells,
those so-called nonhuman cells, we would not be alive.
We would perish right away.
Our body itself contains this extraordinary message, if you will,
of how interdependent we are
on the lives of other organisms.
All of us, human beings and animals,
each live in dependence upon each other.
We human beings depend on external things
for the food that sustains us, clothing,
HH. The 17th Karmapa TIBETAN LEADER
and even the air we breathe.
I usually think that this planet, the world,
and the sentient beings who inhabit it,
are a single living system,
like a body, for example.
A whole with parts or a single assemblage.
Thus we are all,
as human beings or as individuals,
aspects or parts of that living whole.
In terms of looking at a truth like interdependence,
how interrelated everybody's life is,
we often just ignore that fact
because it's so mind boggling
Ethan Nichtern MEDITATION TEACHER
to think about just setting foot in one city on this planet.
If one stepped onto a subway platform,
to even think about there's 500 other
feeling, thinking, eating, you know, loving, human beings here...
It's just, we feel like we can't handle that. That level of awareness.
You can instil a view but then there actually have to be processes like meditation
that actually shift the way the mind relates to others.
You can't just say a lot about how we're all connected.
You have to actually offer tools
for how you would become more aware on that subway platform.
It's not just like, you know, "Love thy neighbour", you know.
That's a great sentiment, but how?
Many of us have explored the way
that we can heal this sense of alienation or separation.
And it's been an exploration that has not been in our time, our generation, only.
It's gone on for thousands upon thousands of years.
And it's expressed in traditions of indigenous cultures.
It's expressed in a world of global religions.
And it is really coming to actualise or into the deep insight
that there is no inherent separate self.
That we are coterminous with everything.
We're not separate.
And it's not just a mystical perspective.
I mean, it's a completely pragmatic view
that science has been validating for decades.
But, of course, the great religious meisters of the past
have seen and have tried to open the human heart
to the awe of existence.
I believe that
the next revolution in human world
is meditation.
Meditation will open a whole new channel
of our consciousness through which we can see
the very thing that we're talking about.
The sacredness, the majesty, the beauty of our existence.
And anybody can practise
without adapting a belief system.
Mindfulness is important because it helps you get in touch with what's going on
with yourself
and with your thoughts
and even with your actions and the actions of others and how their energy interacts.
You start to become more present and your mind isn't all over the place.
Your mind is right where you are.
Ali Smith MINDFULNESS AND YOGA TEACHER
And I think you're better able to pick up on other people's problems
and become more empathetic.
You become more compassionate. You become more loving.
Therefore, we should definitely make sure
that our minds don't come under
the power of external things.
Sometimes it should be like we are bringing our mind home,
letting the mind rest peacefully, letting it relax.
Once the mind has relaxed,
at that moment we should recognise our mind.
And if we are able to sustain this essence,
the mind will become peaceful,
and I think that we will feel that today
we have something worth keeping in our minds.
I sometimes refer to mindfulness as the opposable thumb of consciousness,
able to reach out and take hold of reality in a totally different way.
Mindfulness is gonna change our sense of identity and our ability to move out
of our individual story and into community,
and into a healthier mental life.
This question of identity is central
to how we feel about ourselves and how we treat each other
and how we treat the environment.
Who we think we are in the scheme of things really influences that.
The more we start to bring our attention into our bodies, into our breathing,
the more we begin to feel connected to the rest of the breathing life of this planet.
And we start to lose that sense of,
"I am my individual story."
We begin to expand our sense of identity.
The spiritual path is not to eradicate your personality,
but to just expand the context in which it lives,
and gain wider identities.
I remember once
taking a group of young people out camping,
up in the Adirondacks
and the great wilderness of the American east where I spent much of my life.
We were out on an island, and it was a dark night,
a new moon, and so the stars were in great, wild abundance.
We were sort of looking up at them and talking and it became clear that
five or six of these ten kids, no one had ever shown them the Milky Way before.
And, they had the appropriate reaction.
It was like, "Whoa, dude..."
And really that must've been almost the moment at which humans became humans,
when some ape looked up at the sky and said, "Whoa, dude..."
It's the experience of feeling
a small part of something very big
and mysterious and orderly
and cool and buzzing and beautiful and harmonious.
And that kind of
feeling small is a really useful thing to do.
It's the opposite of the message that we get sent
by all those screens all day long.
That we're very big and very important, and the most important thing
that there possibly could be.
One of the greatest resources for me
is slowing down,
settling,
becoming still,
and attuning
to the interconnected world that already exists
all around us.
If you've ever had an opportunity to go to a pond or an estuary or a stream
and just sit and settle,
the experience is one of becoming aware
of a vibrant, alive,
pulsating world
which we hadn't been aware of
just a few minutes or a few hours before
because we were going too fast.
When you sit,
separated from all of the noise,
all of the messaging,
all of that chaos but just
go to a quiet place
and settle down,
we remember again
that what we've been really seeking
is this.
This map,
this compass, this internal compass is the one that matters.
This is the way we find our way.
This is the way we navigate these times.
Really, the place
that we need to return to
in order to recognise home
is our own bodies.
Our own sensation,
our own direct experience
with sound and movement,
and feeling sense
and emotion
and pain
and joy
and the complicated things that we're not able to give words to.
We all have the capacity to feel our connection to the Earth,
to feel our connection to others,
with people that seem
different and foreign and strange from us.
We're of this Earth, we're not on the Earth.
We're of... We're of the Earth.
Part of what I think is needed
for this emerging planetary movement
is to turn to and honour
those people who,
for thousands and thousands of years,
have lived this path
of radical, deep interconnectedness.
There's a lot of people who are interested and curious
and wanting to hear about the indigenous perspective,
Mona Polacca HOPI INDIGENOUS ELDER
and having the sense that it's important.
To me it's sort of like an awakening.
It's an awareness that
people have to feel a sense of identity.
It causes one to reflect on
who they are,
and what are my roots, what are my connections?
Everyone is indigenous.
That's deep within all of us,
that knowledge knows us better than we know it.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse LAKOTA INDIGENOUS LEADER
But when we live in compassion with that knowledge,
it becomes spirit of who we are.
We know our first protection is for Mother Earth.
That's what we have to do.
We have to protect Mother Earth and her natural processes
in order for all of us to live here.
Without self-reflection, we are never going to resolve
this process of self-destruction
that we have adopted towards our own annihilation.
This disorder that we are witnessing
Luntana Nakoggi KOGI MAMO AND INDEGENOUS LEADER
is not a game.
It is going to end life.
We have to remove from our minds
borders, divisions,
and let all the peoples have value.
We are all equal.
Most people think, "Well, we are individuals."
But the truth is that
even when you are sitting in your room, by yourself, you are not alone.
You, as an element of this family,
you are an integral part of a system
Sobonfu Some DAGARA INDIGENOUS LEADER
that is functioning.
We belong, whether we want to belong or not.
We belong to the Earth.
You are still connected.
The Earth has not forsaken you.
I think we have disconnected because we have forgot to appreciate.
Appreciation takes us beyond Mother Earth,
it takes us beyond the stars,
and knows that every little speck of matter,
every living, breathing being, matters.
That's the key, is appreciation.
We have a connection
not only in this world, on Mother Earth,
but we also have a connection all the way to the universe.
All my life, that's what I've been told.
Be conscious about our actions
and the things that we're doing.
And so you're always looking
to see what you're doing
and its effect on your children and your grandchildren
and your great grandchildren and the future generations,
the ones that are yet to come,
the ones that we won't see.
That's why I'm here today.
It's because my ancestors, they did that.
They thought about me.
I'm one of those grandchildren
that they made a prayer for.
Now, I'm a grandmother.
I have this responsibility.
Not just me, but all people
should make that prayer
that their ancestors made
and carry on that sacred responsibility.
The sense of sacredness
is really very much the heart of all spiritual traditions
and at the same time it's non-conceptual.
We really can't learn this notion of sacredness.
It's like love, you have to feel it.
Everybody can feel it
because it's all around us.
If we can feel that, more and more, in our society
perhaps we will begin to realise that there is a benevolence,
there is a beauty pervading everywhere,
all things... All living beings, as well as also all existence.
I think we realise it's time to fit in here.
It's time to come home.
And it's time to figure out how to function
in a way that will allow us to stay here.
When we get to the point where civilisation is functionally indistinguishable
from the ecosystem that surrounds it,
then we'll be a welcome species.
Well...
The good news and the bad news
is that we know nothing, absolutely, for certain.
We've put the planet into violent flux.
We've taken ourselves out of the Holocene,
this 10,000-year period of benign stability
that underwrote the rise of human civilisation.
Now, we're into someplace else.
And in that someplace else all bets are off.
What the world looks like is going to depend on
what we do in the next few years.
Everything's up for grabs now.
Gary Snyder, the great poet, said once,
"There's no final resolution."
In other words, you're not going to fix the world and have it stay that way.
It's not the way this universe works.
If you want something like that or like to live happily ever after,
you came to the wrong place.
It doesn't work here.
And there's some kind of grace
and ease and a lightness that can come in
when you have that attitude
that we're not going to fix the universe forever.
Our work is not for us.
It's for people we don't know.
It's for generations to come.
And there is a kind of grace in that,
because then you can let go of who you think you are
and what's important.
And all the things that are considered important today,
almost without exception, will be trivia in 50 years,
unnoticed, unremarked upon, meaningless.
Except those efforts
enjoined by people everywhere
to reimagine what it means to be a human being on Earth
and what it means to relate to each other in our place here.
Each one of us, as individuals and as a global community,
we have to live with a vision of interconnectedness.
That vision has to be in our marrow.
It's also a vision of compassion.
It's compassion that is not directed just toward our in-group.
It's to recognise that we're not separate from any being or thing.
Whether it's mycelium or it's the aspen trees
or whether it's our very atmosphere.
There's a kind of non-separateness between those worlds,
or those domains of existence and us, each one of us, as individuals.
What we need is a dynamic social awareness.
We need to recognise that what we do as individuals
is connected to the fate of the planet and the fate of other people.
So, if we consider, say, where our clothing comes from,
we might act in a way to protect the lives of people who are making it,
to recognise this interconnection,
rather than to just sort of succumb to our isolation and our privilege.
In order to see that interconnectedness you actually have to open to it,
which means to be curious about the world.
If you actually go and experience someone else's culture
you can't help but connect to the humanity within them.
It's not gonna be,
"Oh, well, these people are poor and they're separate from me."
If you're sitting back in your home, and you're watching on TV,
yeah, it's easy to do that.
But if you get out and you start interacting with people
and you make friends with people,
I think that's how real change happens.
People have to get out and interact and spread that love.
It's hard to not be empathetic and sympathetic to someone else's plight
if you're in it with them and you're there
and you see everyone as the same group of people.
Scientists have finally proven it to be true
something that anthropologists have always intuited to be correct,
something that philosophers have always hoped to be true.
And that is the fact that we're all literally brothers and sisters.
We're all cut from the same genetic cloth.
It means that, by definition, all human populations
share the same raw genius, the same mental acuity,
the same intellectual potential.
And critically, what that means
is that the other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts at being modern.
Each culture is, by definition, a unique answer to a fundamental question.
What does it mean to be human and alive?
And when three thousand cultures
or even more in the world answer that question,
those voices, collectively,
become our human repertoire
for dealing with all of the challenges
that will confront us as a species in the ensuing millennia.
We are Earth beings.
We are Earth kind.
We have been gifted with this extraordinarily magnificent planet.
That gift takes a lifetime to understand.
And even then,
Mary Evelyn Tucker PHILOSOPHER AND ECOLOGIST
we're in the face of mystery.
I think the urgency of our moment
calls us to be in awe
of this beautiful, blue-green planet.
There's nothing like it that we know of.
When you're looking at the world from a great height,
you don't see those lines on the map that we all learn when we're children,
and you see the world that's spinning.
So, if you stay in one point, relative,
you will see the entire world pass beneath you.
This is our field of practise to me. The whole world.
Everything is giving
and it's giving without borders.
It's giving without separation of my tribe, your tribe.
There's no chosen people.
We're all chosen.
And once you look at the spinning planet,
you realise it's all holy.
We have a lot of solutions that are already present across the planet.
But I think at the heart of this
is a deepening sense of awe and wonder
at the beauty and astounding,
infinitely astounding complexity in which we live.
What is required
is the intrinsic value of nature is known to all of us,
from a child to an adult, through the window of wonder.
That's what we need more than anything.
I think that that state of awe is highly instructive.
And it remains unexamined for us in modern culture,
because we dismiss it as a childlike response to the world.
It's not. It's the doorway to a kind of peace
and an opening through which
I hope an undreamed-of politics,
an undreamed-of level of co-operation,
an undreamed-of level of reconciliation, is possible.
What instantly
touches the heart-mind
and it's sudden and you can count on it,
it's like the kiss of the universe, and that's to glimpse its beauty.
It doesn't take long.
It doesn't take an argument.
You're just stripped
of all your explanations and all your notions
of who and what you want to be as an achieving individual
and then you're just hit.
And you're struck with such a gladness of that beauty
and the originality of it
that you don't have time to think about
how is it going to turn out.
All you know is you'll serve it
to the last breath.
RECONNECT TO SOMETHING BIGGER