I wrote this piece over the summer in one of those moments where something is so clear it just flows through you. I wrote it as the introduction to a potential new book that is currently calling itself “Full Circle – the Simple Act of Coming Home”. I have had two major pieces of writing unpublished on the digital shelf for a while now – Volution Theory and the Pain and the Promise. For some reason I haven’t felt the urge to get them out there yet – it feels like “Full Circle” might be a way to make that happen. I’d love to read in the comments what you think of the title and framing below.
Have you ever felt that we’ve somehow lost the plot? That this incredible, complex expression of life that is you and me shouldn’t be facing a future of suffering and struggle primarily of our own making? That in fact after all these billions of years of evolution we should actually be thriving and celebrating with the rest of life we have grown up with on this planet of ours?
They feel to me like very valid questions to be asking, and ones that I have been on the trail of for many years. I’m writing this book to share what I have discovered on that quest: that it is really very simple, and that once we have made the choice we need to make, we can trust that the rest will reveal itself.
The simple truth is that we have forgotten one very fundamental aspect of who we are: that we are Earth. This is Earth writing to our self and you are Earth reading a message from our self. We are Earth trying to work out how to prolong this experiment that is humanity as Earth being aware of our self. Breathe it in.
Remembering this is our simple medicine. “Simple” derives from the Latin meaning a medicine made from just one constituent, usually a plant. This is our simple medicine. One constituent only. Remember our interconnectedness as Earth.
Simple is not the same as easy. “Easy” derives from Old French and Middle English meaning comfortable or tranquil. The simple step I am describing here is unlikely to be comfortable or tranquil, neither for us as individuals nor for us in our collectives of communities, organisations and nations.
The reason for that is that to re-member (i.e. “put back together”) our felt sense of interconnectedness, we have to revisit the moment that we forgot it. And that moment is full of pain as we realise the suffering we have caused to ourselves, each other and the rest of life through that simple act of forgetting.
However, as we start to feel that pain, we start to come back to life. Deep down, through the tears and anguish, we feel our systems start to settle, and we know this is the right path. A choiceless choice is made as we walk the path of truth and reconciliation. As we peel back the layers of conditioning that have protected us from that traumatic separation, more light is able to enter, and the journey ahead reveals itself, one step at a time.
The good news is that we don’t need to discover anything new. The part of ourselves we need to reintegrate is still there. We just need to stop for a moment, dare to go inside, feel what is there and trust life to show us the way. Simple, not easy.
It is my belief that this step is the greatest way we can contribute to successfully engaging the current challenges we are facing as humanity. All our problems stem from the illusion of separation. Once we remember we are Earth, we plug back into the natural intelligence that has got us this far and can continue to take us as far into the future as we choose.
This book describes the collective human journey that has brought us to this point, the moment of forgetting and how that has played out individually and collectively, some stories of people healing that split in themselves, and examples of what it might look like if we reached a critical mass who made the simple but not easy choice to re-member, to come back home.
