Listening for the Life Force
We live in a time of undeniable peril. Every day the news brings fresh evidence of overshoot: aquifers running dry, forests burning, species vanishing. We know, if we are honest, that humanity is consuming and destroying far more than Earth can replenish. We are eating into the seed corn of the future.
And yet, within this bleak reality, another truth is quietly dawning: we are not separate from the living systems we are degrading. We are part of them. We are woven into the same fabric as forests and watersheds, salmon runs and prairie grasslands. Beneath all the complexity there is a single current—a life force—that animates every cell and every star, that breathes through us even as we breathe in the world.
This life force is not abstract or distant. It is not confined to religion or metaphysics. It is the pulse you can feel in your own wrist, the wind that carries seeds across a field, the mycelial networks under our feet, the self‑organizing patterns that science is only beginning to glimpse. When I think of it, I sometimes call it spirit, though that word means many things to many people. I might just as well call it the divine intelligence present in all things, or the animating energy of the universe. Whatever name we give it, the challenge is the same: how do we live in ways that honor this force rather than diminish it? How do we draw back from overshoot and come back into balance?
The Great Turning: From Industrial Growth to Life-Sustaining Culture
Joanna Macy, the Buddhist scholar and systems theorist who spent decades working at the intersection of ecology and spirituality, offers us a framework for understanding this moment. She speaks of “The Great Turning”—a shift from what she calls the “Industrial Growth Society” to a “Life-Sustaining Culture.” This is not merely a change in policy or technology, but a fundamental transformation in how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.
“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth,” Macy writes, “is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.”
This awakening is what I recognize in the work happening across the globe—from the restoration projects in Barichara to the emerging initiatives in Panama, from the community gardens taking root in cities to the indigenous-led movements protecting sacred lands. It is not just about fixing what is broken, but about remembering what it means to be fully alive on a living planet.
The Integral Perspective: Honoring All Dimensions of Change
Ken Wilber’s integral theory provides another lens through which to understand this transformation. Wilber reminds us that lasting change must occur across multiple dimensions simultaneously—in our individual consciousness and collective culture, in our personal behaviors and social systems. He writes:
“The integral approach is based on the idea that all human knowledge and experience can be placed in a four-quadrant grid of interior-exterior and individual-collective, and that only by using all four perspectives can we hope to understand and transform our world.”
Applied to our ecological crisis, this means we cannot solve our environmental challenges through technology alone, nor through consciousness change alone, nor through policy reform alone. We need what Wilber calls an “all-level, all-quadrant” approach—one that works simultaneously with inner transformation and outer action, individual awakening and collective movement.
This is precisely what we see in the most effective regenerative projects around the world. They integrate scientific knowledge with spiritual practice, personal healing with social action, local restoration with global awareness. They recognize that healing the Earth and healing ourselves are not separate tasks, but aspects of a single, integrated work.
Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times
These insights are not new. Indigenous cultures have always understood what systems theorist Fritjof Capra calls “the web of life”—the recognition that all beings exist in relationship, that the health of each depends on the health of the whole. In Andean villages they speak of ayni, sacred reciprocity. In Haudenosaunee councils they speak of the Seventh Generation, the children yet to come. Even in our own Western lineage, the echoes are there—Thoreau walking in the woods, Emerson speaking of the Over‑Soul, Rachel Carson urging us to see the world not as a resource but as a miracle.
The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh captures this understanding in his concept of “interbeing”:
“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper… So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.”
This is not metaphor but living truth—the recognition that we exist only in relationship, that our breath is the exhalation of trees, that our bodies are made of stardust and rainfall, that our consciousness itself emerges from and participates in the larger intelligence of the cosmos.
Practical Mysticism: Where Spirit Meets Science
The challenge of our time is learning to live from this understanding—not as a philosophical concept but as embodied practice. This is what Thomas Berry, the “geologian” and cultural historian, called for when he spoke of the need for a “new story” that could heal the split between science and spirituality, between humanity and nature.
“We are not going to go into the future in any survival sense until we learn to relate to the Earth’s own story,” Berry wrote. “We need to see ourselves as emerging not simply out of human history but out of Earth history, out of universe history.”
The work of people like Joe Brewer and Penny Heiple in Barichara, Colombia brings this into sharp, practical focus. They are helping a whole bioregion restore its soils, revive its water cycles, and rekindle its cultural memory. This is not theory—it is lived practice. The land itself is responding, the streams running clearer, the communities finding new hope. Their approach integrates what Brewer calls “Earth system science” with indigenous wisdom traditions, permaculture design with social healing practices.
Other visions are still emerging, like Jon Schull’s Restoration Lab initiative in Panama—an aspirational effort to bring together science, art, and indigenous wisdom to heal degraded landscapes and renew community life. It is not yet fully lived, but it points the way toward what might be possible if we fully integrate ecology, culture, and spirit.
The Work That Is Ours to Do
In my own work with CRCS and Possible Planet, we see ourselves as part of this broader movement. We are not the center of it, but we help to support and connect it—to create spaces where ideas like these can take root, and where projects can find the resources and allies they need.
What ties all of these efforts together is a simple, profound insight: we must learn again to live as participants, not masters. The old story of separation—humanity standing above and apart from nature—has led us to overshoot. A new story is waiting to be told, one in which we recognize ourselves as strands in a vast web of life, responsible for its flourishing.
Joanna Macy describes this beautifully when she writes about what she calls “thinking like a mountain”:
“When we think like a mountain, we think like the Earth: our priorities become long-term, our sense of self-interest expands beyond our own skin to include the land and waters and all life forms… We are the Earth becoming conscious of herself.”
Small Patterns, Large Change
And how do we tell that new story? Not only in books or manifestos, but in the texture of our days. We tell it by planting trees, by restoring a stream, by sharing a meal grown in living soil. We tell it by beginning our meetings with gratitude for the Earth, by pausing to listen to the wind, by teaching our children not only how to survive but how to belong.
adrienne maree brown, in *Emergent Strategy*, reminds us that big change grows from small patterns:
“Small is good, small is all. The large is a reflection of the small… What we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system.”
When we weave these small acts together, they become culture. And when a culture begins to honor the life force, everything else begins to shift. Policy follows. Economics realigns. The metrics of success change from extraction to restoration.
This is what systems theorists call “emergence”—the way complex patterns arise from simple interactions, the way new properties emerge at higher levels of organization. As physicist David Bohm wrote, “A change of meaning is necessary to change this world politically, economically, and socially. But that change must begin with the individual; it must change for him first.”
Living the Questions
None of this is easy. We are not likely to map every step or predict every outcome. But that is part of the gift, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke understood when he advised: “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
There will always be mystery in the living systems that hold us. There will always be more to learn, more to tend, more to love. This is not a problem to be solved but a relationship to be lived—what Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön calls “making friends with uncertainty.”
The ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak captured this beautifully when he wrote: “The ecological self, expanded and deepened, becomes the path to sanity and compassion for the Earth, not because we should, but because we want to, we can’t help but feel motivated to respond to the suffering of the larger body of which we are part.”
An Invitation to Belonging
And so we offer these reflections not as a finished vision, but as an invitation. We are the breath of the Earth, and the Earth is the breath in us. Let us live as if this is true. Let us teach it, practice it, and pass it on, so that the generations to come may inherit not just a planet in balance, but a way of life that is worthy of them.
As Thomas Merton wrote in his meditation on the unity of all beings: “There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.”
This is the life force we are learning to listen for, to live from, to serve. This is the great work of our time: not to transcend the world but to fall in love with it so deeply that we cannot help but heal it. Not to escape our embodiment but to remember that we are Earth walking, Earth breathing, Earth becoming conscious of herself through us.
The invitation is simple and profound: to come home to the living world, to remember our place in the community of all beings, to live as if the future of life itself depends on how we choose to love.
Because it does.