A Spring Breaking in the Collective Heart

Notes on networks, nectar, and the time it takes to truly change.

There is a sensation many of us are coming to know all too well, a kind of suspended free fall.

We are watching a collision, a collapse, in slow motion.

As the old world is coming apart mid-air, its myths and comforts shredded in the atmosphere before it even hits the ground.

And the living world whispers to all who listen: this is the opening.

As Leonard Cohen sings, in his gravelly voice in Anthem–
the song and poem I read, pregnant, at my grandmother’s funeral–
”There is a crack in everything. / That’s how the light gets in.”

William Irwin Thompson named one of his books The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, a title that holds within it myth, mystery, and collective transformation. In it, he traces how the earliest cultural consciousness arose not apart from nature, but from deep relationship with it. How sexuality, art, ritual, and myth evolved together, rooted in the cycles of the living world. The book invites us to consider: what does it mean to fall—into matter, into form—and through that fall, become light again?

Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association, a cultural and spiritual think tank in the 1970s. It gathered together poets and physicists, Sufis and ecologists, architects, cosmologists, and contemplatives. People like James Lovelock, Wendell Berry, Lynn Margulis, E. F. Schumacher, and Thomas Berry. They didn’t simply share ideas, they were midwifing a cultural transformation. One that recognized our deep embeddedness in the living world, and sought to reintegrate the sacred into the scientific, the poetic into the practical. One that we are all still called to participate in.

Lindisfarne wasn’t just an institution. It was an ecology of minds. A hive.

And it was not alone. All across human history, there have been constellations of such networks, relationships, temples of thought, where the threads of cultural evolution were spun and shared. Today, I feel echoes of that sacred pattern in the relational field around me. New associations are being cultivated around the world as gardens of possibility.

Right now I am a member of many, and helping to shape others. I’m presently in a co-creative process with three other collaborators, seeding a synarchy—a new form of institution for the comprehensive co-design of regenerative futures. It will have multiple channels for cultural development, shaped by the values that center love and life and the love of life. I look forward to inviting others into this when the time is right.

At the same time, I find myself reconnecting with extraordinary networks I’ve been part of in the past, and being welcomed into new communities that are dreaming toward collective, planetary regeneration. I’m moving between worlds, cross-pollinating, bridging disciplines and timelines.

In Open Space Technology, there’s a principle known as the “Butterflies and Bees”—roles that remind us of the sacredness of beauty and cross-pollination in emergence. The bees move between spaces, connecting ideas and ecosystems. The butterflies may move between spaces or take time to sit seemingly still, radiant, doing invisible and essential work. I see myself in both these archetypes lately, buzzing and connecting, observing and resting, while weaving relationships that are steadily forming mycelial pathways of new culture.

And lately, I feel a similar resonance emerging in the relationships forming around me. In the slow shaping of new communities, organizations, institutions, and networks that are deeply focused on seeding life affirming futures with integrity. I’m reminded again of the post I made here on Substack the day after the election—

It feels like the mycelium is connecting.

Like a spring is breaking out in the collective heart.

Bees have been coming to me more insistently than ever. More vividly. More clearly. I am now rooted enough, mother enough, connected enough within a web of care, to be able to prepare to be a keeper of, a guardian of, a student of the bees. We are slowly preparing, learning, researching, and connecting with the feral hives in our area hoping to entice a swarm to make a home with us.

Ancient beyond our comprehension, the bees have long been agents of transmutation. They sip light-made-liquid—nectar—from flowers whose blooming is triggered by sunlight. They return to the hive to alchemize it into wealth (honey), into medicine (propolis), into structure (wax). They pollinate the plants, spread genetic material, and enable life to not only reproduce, but evolve.

They bring life to life to life to life.

They also have an intimate relationship with death.

They are midwives of becoming.

And they are speaking to me these days.

I find myself pausing over honey, beeswax, propolis. Studying hive designs. Seeking out teachers—both human and more-than-human. Honoring the intelligence of the swarm. Listening in the quiet hours of night for the low hum coming to me in my dreams that speaks to a deeper wisdom.

Meanwhile, in the garden, spring surges forward. Beans grow plump on their bushes, the seeds we sowed in February are stretching toward the sun. Radishes ripen underground. Mizuna and mustard greens establish themselves in the plot where they will live for generations. Life insists on itself.

In this space of transformation, I’ve developed a new daily ritual: carefully peeling the inner membrane from eggshells I’ve cracked for breakfast for my family, drying them, and grinding them into a fine powder with my mortar and pestle. This simple act connects me to the cycles of life and death, nourishment and renewal. The powdered shells, rich in calcium, become offerings back to the soil, to my body, to the body of the earth. It’s a practice of honoring the remnants, the overlooked, and recognizing their potential to feed new life.

Even as systems falter and illusions fracture.

Even as despair flirts with the edges of our attention.

Anna Akhmatova, who lived through unspeakable horrors once asked:

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

And in the same poem, she answers:

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses—
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

Anna Akhmatova knew what it was to live in the slow implosion of a world.

Writing from within the shadow of state repression, she bore witness to the disintegration of her culture, her people, her own family. Her poetry, often composed in fragments and silence, carried the unbearable weight of truth, exile, and survival. “Everything is plundered,” she writes—not metaphorically, but literally. Homes, relationships, dignity, language. And yet—she does not let the poem end there.

She finds the cherries, blowing summer into town.

She finds the galaxies, still glittering above.

This is not optimism. It is something far more enduring: the holy instinct to remain in relationship with beauty, even in ruin.

And from that threshold, we cross into the dreamworld of Antonio Machado.

Where Akhmatova names the devastation, Machado names the miraculous error:

That in sleep, in the vulnerable opening of unknowing, a spring breaks forth.

A beehive forms. Honey is made from failure.

A sun rises inside the chest:

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error! —
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error! —
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error! —
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt,
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error! —
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

I think many of us are learning to drink that water now.

To listen to the bees.

To grind eggshells by hand.

To grow slow, delicious resilience in the soil of our lives.

And somewhere in all of this, a part of me knows I’m meant to be writing more about Sex, God, & Money, the course Seth and I are offering for the summer. Learn more about it here. It’s a journey structured with intention and spaciousness, designed to invite a deep process of becoming, education, embodiment, and empowerment in these three potent areas of life. While the material is alive and rich, the structure is spacious, light on live calls, and oriented toward integration—inviting you to walk with the material as it weaves through the rhythms of your own life. It’s meant to honor the spontaneous rhythms of summer, the nonlinear nature of transformation, and the wisdom that arises when we are given time to truly listen and integrate.

This is not the time for speed.

This is the time falling bodies take to light.

On this holy day, Erev Pesach, Venus direct, Full Moon in Libra, I pray we find our way through the narrow places we find ourselves in. That the waters will part. That the journey through the wilderness brings us wisdom, healing, and surprising moments of joy. I pray we shape our world with milk and honey. That we make the world to come here and now, together.