“Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”
Barack Obama
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein.
Thank you so much for visiting this website! Your support and feedback is so vital – it will help me create something of value. I won’t get there without you. Truly.
I want a plan to save the world. A plan that might actually work. A plan that addresses all of the needless suffering of the world. Coming up with a shared plan is my deepest desire. When I tell people this they tend to recoil back – whoah! way too big! Is that your reaction too? To be completely honest I also feel like that at times. It seems so overwhelming – who am I to even bring this up? But why are we so quick to assume it is impossible? Maybe because we tend to hold ourselves as small, helpless, and separate. It is kind of like a trance we are walking around in. But we can shake off that trance. It doesn’t have to be like this. It really doesn’t.
I used to think that this is someone else’s work to do, not mine. No longer. I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone else to rescue us. It took me that long to finally realize this is my work too. And actually people have been hard at work all that time. They have done so much and yet here we are. On our own we can only get so far. We need a movement that brings us together. Because together we are strong. Strong enough to heal this hurting world. I know you already are doing as much as you can to help. Your service is so important and needed. But even as you do that vitally important work I’m asking you to look up and out to an even bigger dream – saving the world together.
This site is a home for this bigger dream. For big problems like this we need the collective intelligence and wisdom of as many people as we can get. This site is set up to encourage and enable people to collaborate. Because we have work to do. We need to come up with something very new. To paraphrase Einstein, you cannot solve problems with the same consciousness that created them. We need to step into a much bigger consciousness.
The situation is quite scary and there are excellent reasons why we might choose to stay in the comforting trance of helplessness. But there is too much at stake now. My teenage daughter recently asked me if the future is secure enough for her to have children someday. Ouch. Truly ouch. What a question. At the time we were talking about global warming, but the question brings in so much more than that. I had to really think about it. Getting to the truth is really important here, but it is so hard. Maybe her children will be OK? But then she asked what about her children’s children? And what about all future children? What kind of world are we passing on to them? I don’t know.
My son had his first child recently. I am so grateful to now be a grandfather. I find my focus as grandfather is less on myself and more towards the health of the tribe. And it is not looking so good. The reports on global warming are now so bad I no longer can read them. We are blasting past the temperature that scientists thought might let us continue on as somewhat normal. That is no longer going to happen. Now we will have to adapt to a very different climate and we already have failed our first tests. Syria collapsed in large part because of climate change droughts and sent desperate immigrants to Europe. Those immigrants sparked the rise of authoritarian parties in Europe demanding racial purity. Drought in Guatemala forced people to flee to the U.S. and helped fuel the rise of MAGA anti-immigration craziness. Intolerance and hate are on the rise all over the world. These things are connected. If we don’t start helping and caring for each other it could start a cascading failure where one thing leads to the next and then billions of people die. That is a very real possibility.
Let’s pause here. I know it might seem like a weird question, but where do you feel all of this in your body? As I wrote this I felt pain in my stomach and a strong tension in my neck and shoulders. That’s fear. I’m scared. Really scared and it hurts. It is hard to just sit with this pain. Up to now I have had lots of strategies to push off the pain. I made it someone else’s problem. I let myself off the hook by going to helplessness. Nothing I can do, not my fault. But now I’m holding my grandson in my lap — he is the world to me — and thinking about what kind of world he is going to live in. All my evasions are no longer good enough. I see them for what they are. And actually I am grateful for them. They have kept me from getting crushed with anxiety. Stepping out from their protection feels tremendously vulnerable. And it is completely OK for you to have your own armor. I don’t want you crushed by the weight of all this. And yet I am asking you to lower your armor just a tiny bit. Asking you to, what Brenee Brown calls embrace the suck of vulnerabilityat least a little.
Because disaster is not inevitable. Even as some farming areas fail others like Siberia might open up. We probably can grow enough food for everyone, but only if we learn to share. Learn to get past all that othering and truly love each other. But that is going to require a massive cultural change that requires everyone. It requires even someone as ordinary as me. It requires even you. Opening up to this hope and caring is tremendously vulnerable. It is an enormous ask. I can’t promise you won’t get hurt, but please know it feels so much better to directly face the fear together than alone. With all my heart I want my daughter to have children if that is what she wants. Her children will help heal this world. But they are going to need our help.
How do we give her children the tools they will need? We first need to investigate the deeper causes of our problems. What prevents us from opening our hearts wider and wider? What would it take on a practical level to save the world? I have been looking for answers. And they are out there! Many people have such important things to teach us. Now we need to bring these separate teachings together into an integrated whole. First we must awaken these teachings in ourselves because of course it has to start there. That is the ground we must stand on. But once we are standing in that place of strength we can then look out to others and ask, “What is it that we want to create together?”
Apparently, the best way to get an answer to a question on the internet is to answer the question wrong. That provokes people to correct you. It is quite amusing, but it seems to work. So in that spirit I am going to provide my own answer to the question. If you have a better solution – great! you have no idea how eager I am to hear it.
What do we need to make the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible?
We need a better story. We forget how much our stories define us. Our stories tells us where we came from and what it is we are to do in this world. Right now our collective story holds us as very small. It tells us there is nothing we can do. But it doesn’t have to be like that. We can choose to tell ourselves a very different story. A story that reminds us we are not alone — not really . A story that lets us shake off this trance of helplessness and take on the task of saving the world with a heart full of passion. The right story will provide us hope. Hope that something huge might just want to awaken soon.
When I am hurting, my personal world collapses down. All I can manage is just to make it through the day. I can’t take on anything beyond that. Most people are in too much pain to do the bigger work. But it doesn’t have to be like that. It is not hopeless. Therapy can really help, and there have been some exciting, recent breakthroughs that make it even better. We need to spread this healing to everyone that needs it. When people emerge out of pain, incredible things happen.
Beyond that there are potent workshops and teachings that can help us step into happiness, even joy. We need to teach people how to find it in themself and then how to teach it to others. It is from this place of joy that we will heal the world.
We feel separate and lonely. We feel helpless and small facing the problems of the world. But that is just a story we keep telling ourselves. In fact we are big, very big. But to get there we need to embrace all of ourselves. Not just the comfortable parts that get approval from others, but the darker hurting places as well. They need love too. Especially those parts. And when we embrace all of ourself it becomes possible to embrace all others. Even the ones that have hurt us. Even the ones that scare us and make us crazy angry. The more we can have deep compassion for ourselves, darkness and all, the more we can have compassion for others, darkness and all.
We are not alone! This work is going to take everyone. We need programmers and poets, accountants and artists, bankers and bakers. We think this work belongs to others not us. We await the next messiah, someone who is more qualified or capable than us. It can’t work that way. All of our voices are precious and needed. Each one is a gift, and when joined all together will create a beautiful, world changing song.
It is time to dream a bigger dream. Our way of living does not work. This calls for change. Radical change. We all know what needs to be done; we just are struggling to believe it possible. But imagine us coming together as a loving, supportive, wise tribe. That will be the core of it. It will feel electric and right when it happens. People will flock to it because it is so much fun. Together, we will start telling ourselves a different story.
A story about how this could actually work. Work well enough that maybe we can start to dream a far bigger dream. A dream of what is possible if only enough of us could get out of our pain and step into the joy of service. And from there maybe we can step into a whole world of joy. Why not? It has always been possible to save the world, we just need to wake up from this trance and do it.
I can’t guarantee that we will get there. The possibility of failure is always very real, but I would not be creating this website if I did not truly, truly believe it is possible. The very first step is to hope. Are you willing to take that risk with me?
To care? I think I do know what I’m asking of you. Please join me anyways.