24. Global Challenges Are Directing Us Toward a Unity of Purpose
An exploration of how global crises, social division, and collective uncertainty can become catalysts for greater cooperation and unity. The authors consider the movement from separation and hierarchy toward wholeness, ethical responsibility, deeper listening, and a shared sense of purpose across differences.
13. How and Why Did We First Lose “Right Balance” with Mother Earth?
A reflection on how humanity may have lost its intimate relationship with the Earth and with one another. Drawing on Indigenous teachings, Goddess cultures, and Marija Gimbutas’s interpretation of prehistoric Europe, the piece considers the relationship between connection, reciprocity, patriarchy, exploitation, and our growing separation from the natural world. It ultimately asks what we can learn from older ways of relating to Earth and each other as we face today’s climate crisis.
10a. Giving Better Back
A practical approach to responding differently when conflict arises in an intimate relationship. Drawing from Mona Barbera’s Bring Yourself to Love and Internal Family Systems, “Giving Better Back” encourages us to meet criticism, agitation, judgment, or distance with greater curiosity, calm, compassion, clarity, and connection. Rather than trying to change our partner, the practice invites us to take responsibility for our own responses and create new patterns of relating.
22l. Indigenous Ways of Working with Sacred Medicine
A panel discussion exploring Indigenous approaches to sacred medicine, healing, spirituality, and psychology. Leslie Gray, Kevon Simpson, Belinda Eriacho, and Kelly Yi discuss Indigenous worldviews, traditional healing practices, sacred plant medicines, cultural context, and the importance of bringing these perspectives into contemporary approaches to healing with respect and cultural awareness.
22g. Turtle Island: A Message from White Eagle During the Corona Crisis
This message from White Eagle, attributed to a Hopi Indigenous perspective, reflects on the COVID-19 crisis as a time of uncertainty, reflection, and transformation. It invites us to care for ourselves and others, reconnect with spiritual practice and community, and draw on Indigenous traditions of resilience, ritual, art, joy, and connection to move through difficult times with greater clarity and purpose.
22f. The Wisdom of Our Ancestors
David Korten draws on wisdom traditions from Africa, the Andes, Asia, and other cultures to explore a worldview grounded in interdependence, community, and care for the Earth. Through principles such as ubuntu and buen vivir, he examines how our ideas about purpose, power, economics, community, and education might shift toward greater wellbeing for people and the living world.
22d. An Interview with Francis Weller: Initiation, Trauma and Ritual
In this conversation, Francis Weller and Alnoor Ladha explore the relationship between trauma, initiation, ritual, and community. Weller reflects on how traditional and Indigenous cultures have used communal practices to hold grief and major life transitions, contrasting these with the isolation and individualism of modern culture. The dialogue considers belonging, soul, sacred relationship, and the need to restore community, ritual, and reciprocity in times of profound change.
22c. Francis Weller: Soul, Ritual, Nature and Community
Francis Weller’s work brings together psychotherapy, mythology, Indigenous wisdom, poetry, ritual, and the natural world. Through his soul-centered approach, he explores grief, imagination, community, and the recovery of ritual as a way of reconnecting with nature, culture, and a deeper sense of belonging.
22. Remembering and Honoring Indigenous Practices
Drawing from an interview with Francis Weller and Alnoor Ladha, this reflection explores what Indigenous and traditional cultures can teach us about restoring community, ritual, belonging, and connection with the natural world. It considers the wounds created by isolation, individualism, extraction, and separation, and asks what we might reclaim through communal healing, reciprocity, sacred relationship, and a deeper sense of our interconnected place within the living world.
In the Absence of the Ordinary – Francis Weller
In In the Absence of the Ordinary, Francis Weller reflects on living through a time of uncertainty, upheaval, and profound transition. Across 17 essays, he explores grief, soul, belonging, and our relationship with the natural world, inviting readers to cultivate new ways of being, relating, and caring for one another and the living Earth.