Dear friends,

I hope you had a peaceful turn of the year. I’m experiencing in myself, and hearing from others, a tender hope that 2023 is truly a turning, an opening to freshness and promise and some sturdier ground on which we can better walk into our callings with stamina and love. I’ve been walking around with some words of the late John Lewis in recent days — words he lived and embodied — that in the space between the world as it is and what we long for it to become, we are called to “live as if” the possibility we aspire to is already present. Our job is to make it more visible, more vivid, more definingly true.  

Interestingly, mysteriously, when you do this, you begin to see differently. You get oriented to notice tendrils, traces, the new shapes of emergence that we miss when we are oriented around the distractingly noisy and obvious headlines and memes of “what is.”

I’m translating this life practice, this spiritual discipline, into my editorial lens of the new season of On Being (!) that we are now producing as I write. It feels so good to all of us to be back in production. If there is a broad creative theme for the season, it is perhaps that word I used above and that adrienne maree brown left us with back in June: emergence. We’ll wander through the thrilling new science of awe, the fascinating field of biomimicry, the intersection of technology with consciousness and the vitality of all of life, the human birthright of creativity. We’ll delve, too, into the emergence of deeper truths and larger stories of ourselves as societies, as a planet, as humans, that at once complicate and enliven our capacity to live with dignity and joy and generative wholeness.

I’ll speak with poets along the way, of course. And, just this week, I interviewed James Bridle. I have probably never been better prepared for an interview, given that I read their book nearly six months ago and wrote about it for many weeks in this newsletter, and have taken in what this writing gave others to chew on as well as myself.

Speaking of Bridle, I am aware that the holidays, and my round with Covid, brought our contemplative reading exercise to a rather abrupt end. I revisited the closing chapter we never reached this week, and was touched to realize it brings my ruminations here truly full circle. I first shared news of Ways of Being — and its distinctive invitation into so many themes close to my heart and to the heart of On Being — when I wrote here about my restorative weeks in Patmos and Berlin last summer.

I am continuing to bring forward the writing I began there, including how experiencing the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall have shaped my sense of life and time and social evolution. That divided city and country taught me that there is always more happening than we can see, and more change possible than we can begin to imagine. Because for all the world and all of us who inhabited that place, the Wall seemed the shape of geopolitical forever. To invite us to “live as if” it could fall in our lifetimes would have been taken as the most ludicrous pie in the sky advice.

Strangely, I have never pondered what became of the border that ran not just through a city but the European continent. We called it the Iron Curtain. (What a testament to the power of a metaphor!) Of course it was a line born of human history and human wills and imagination, which fell away to invisibility, reverted to a series of benign borders, when the world shifted on its axis. Or so I imagined. 

Bridle’s final chapter, “The Internet of Animals”, reminds me how partially I am able to take in my own best advice. It reminds me of my conversation with the late wonderful zoologist Alan Rabinowitz, as well as with the great Jane Goodall, on how we keep understanding in the most existential and surprising ways the interrelatedness of human and plant and animal vitality. Wildlife corridors, James Bridle reinforces, can be part of human healing processes. And, the freedom of movement of animals, as well as humans, is one of the most vital faculties our world possesses for weathering the coming shifts and storms.

But my heart nearly stops at this: today, Europe’s largest nature reserve, and one of the longest wildlife corridors in the world, is the European Green Belt, “a 7000-kilometre network of parks and protected lands following the line of the Iron Curtain, which once separated Western Europe and the Soviet bloc”: