When speaking of these parlous times we’re living in, the late, revered activist and teacher Joanna Macy often said: “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s all going to be all right. And don’t let anyone tell you it’s not.”
It certainly seems that the near future won’t be a very beneficent one. Indeed, it’s starting to look like an unavoidable dystopia, with escalating climate chaos and pollution; worsening wars, massacres, genocide, and ecocide worldwide; social and political life becoming increasingly impoverished, boorish and cruel; screen-distracted people feeling ever more alienated and resentful; and a tiny cadre of power-hungry autocrats and ungenerous billionaires controlling almost everything. With all of this looming, it’s hard to conclude that anything will be “all right.”
We know that most human beings everywhere yearn for a future without war, destruction, or deprivation; a future of connection, harmony, and genuine abundance, among humans and on the land. The problem is that we don’t know how to get there from here.
Terence McKenna, the famously eccentric, self-described “psychonaut,” spoke of a Future Attractor that can actively pull us into the future. It’s more usual to think of our past pushing us forward from behind. Instead, Terence proposed that if humanity can remain open to innovation and creativity, rather than staying stuck in arrogance and greed, an as-yet-unimagined, vibrant, interconnected future will pull us and our entire planet into itself.
Growing up among the high-desert mountains and canyons of New Mexico, my first love was for the vast, beautifully complex world of Nature. I’ve always felt that only by humanity transforming to harmonize with the Sacred Land and all of its inhabitants can we solve our many problems. I respect those who work for justice, peace, and equity within the human world, and wish them success. I believe, however, that until we humans overcome our separation from wild nature, we won’t be able to manifest a better world. Why? Because it is our own deepest nature to feel and express our connection with the Earth who created us, and all the beings—human and non-human, material and spiritual—with whom we share it. If we don’t dwell within this foundational truth of who we really are, we have no hope of living in the world we want.
Knowing ourselves as belonging to our planetary lifeweb links us up with the most potent force on Earth: Regeneration. Arising in the Earth’s cold oceans billions of years ago, the mysterious power of regeneration has midwifed the upwelling of lifeform after lifeform, ecosystem after ecosystem, all in support of building and rebuilding the huge web of earthly life. This fertile, life-giving web has peaked and dwindled many times already, through ice ages and meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions and continental drift, and has always re-emerged with increasing vitality and diversity.
So, when we think about Terence’s theory, we don’t have to make it far-out and arcane. The Future Attractor, to me, is the ongoing expression of the regenerative forces of our planet. We can choose to attune with them, and become part of the enormous, ever-renewing sweep of evolving life. Or we can resist them by continuing to impose a limited, stingy, human-centered, ultimately doomed reality onto all beings and places. But one thing we can never do is banish this indomitable regenerative pulse from shaping the future of our home planet and ourselves.
Our ancestors knew about the earth’s regenerative impulse and how it circulates. Stone circles oriented to the cardinal directions have been found on every continent, dating back at least 20,000 years. These constructions display and honor the progression of the seasons, the cycles of the moon, sun and stars, and the unceasing regularities of the land. They show us a pattern of circles and spirals, revealing an essential template of birth, growth, climax, decline, death and rebirth. This template expresses the ever-recurring cycle of regeneration, whether in the 2-day lifespan of a mayfly, or the uplifting and subsequent erosion of mountains over millions of years, with more mountains to come.
How do we resonate with this ever-resurging flow? We all have thousands of generations of indigenous ancestors in our family lines, and we are still those old, primal people in many important ways. We may aspire to their reverent, earth-honoring lives, but we can’t go back to their times, living simply in a lightly populated, unspoiled, abundant world. Nor do we want to stay on our soulless, linear trek forward, into the ever more bellicose, over-consuming human supremacy that defines modern culture.
The vision that I work for is a new-old journey of coming to feel our innate connection and communion with our sacred earth and all those who live here. In this way of being, we know ourselves as contributing members of the lifeweb, not dominating masters of it. We devote our special human gifts to living in cooperative, creative community, with one another and with all beings and ecosystems. And we receive the spiritual nourishment we long for from practices and celebrations of accord and connection inspired by the Green World of Nature.
This journey is traced out by spiraling returns. We neither go forward nor go back. Instead, we move around. We attune with the indestructible cycles of renewal shown by the earth’s indwelling regenerative forces and replicated in those ancient stone circles. We pay homage to the wisdom of our ancestors, while also offering up who we are and what we bring now. We follow the earth’s inherent spiraling paths, moving around again and again, to new, imaginative rungs on the spiral, always enfolded within the enduring organic patterns of land, heart, and spirit.
A journey like this—whatever it may look like outwardly—can support our full, true selves to flower. The more humans make this journey and live this kind of life, the more fulfilled we will become. Our everyday existence will open up, and we will meet practical and spiritual challenges with calmness and hope. Thus, right here, right now, we begin to generate the future we desire so deeply. I’ll see you there.
