Beauty at the Beginning of the World

A playlist, two photographs, and a letter to those waking up to collapse

A quick note for paid subscribers and those longing for spaces where your wisdom and others can be shared and woven together, where we make meaning, talk story, share art, and practice being together.

Today at 2pm eastern time I’m hosting our monthly Living World Salon, and I hope you can join us!

This is one of the many things you receive when you become a paid subscriber to either me or

Seth Kaufmann

. You get access to live calls like this, a library of 30 different hour-long movement-meditation-journaling flows for you to practice whenever you need them, Practical Wisdom Frameworks we’re always refining and adding to, embodied visualization meditations, and a lot more. We’ve designed our digital home, EMUNAH, to be a wellspring of education, embodiment, and empowerment.

If you are a paid subscriber but haven’t gotten access to EMUNAH yet, check your DMs for a message from me, and feel welcome to reach out! I’m always happy to connect, and make sure you’ve got access to everything we’ve prepared for you.

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Do you remember when you first learned of the true meaning of the word apocalypse? That it literally means “unveiling,“ revealing, the dropping of illusions, the uncovering of sacred truths? This was something we talked a lot about, in my world, in the depths of covid, though it seems we’re in for a longer stranger apocalypse than perhaps we could have imagined then.

There are two points I want to make here:

1. That every ending, every dying, feeds the soil of the future.

2. That art and beauty shape the health of that soil.

This essay was written with, and partially about this playlist, so I welcome you to listen along as you read, though the first song is not something you should really multitask to if its your first time listening. In fact, if you’re new to it, go ahead and watch the video of this original, spontaneous, live moment that produced one of the most supportive and transformative pieces of art to come out of the pandemic which still cracks my heart open when I listen with full presence.

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Sitting in the lecture hall in one of the most sobering keynotes of the Transformation in the Metacrisis conference — Zak Stein’s¹ talk on catastrophic risks (and potentials) of AI, where the scale of our predicament settled heavy in the room — a series of song titles flowed into my mind to add to an old playlist. I scribbled them in the margins of my conference program before turning my attention back to the lectern. This is what I wrote:

Beauty at the beginning of the world, add:

—Birdsong

—(Nothing But) Flowers

—Todo Se Transforma

—Nature Feels

The titles alone register, to me, as a sort of poem. Maybe a lifeline of my psyche remembering something, a creative pulse that emerged in a moment when my mind could have moved down the track of utter dread (which I will add is important to feel sometimes.)

Creation happens like that, often. Unbidden, moving through, a passing thought that can be gone as quick as it came.

I’m glad I jotted them down, so I could both honor the passing thought while returning my attention to the charts on the screen and the intense focus of the collective in the room toward the end of a long and rich day of keynotes about the things we can do to shape what comes out of, and what could possibly be antidotes to, the deepest layers of what ails the Whole.

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Beauty at the Beginning of the World is a playlist I started in July of 2020 that captured in the music of others, things about that time that I couldn’t have expressed any other way.

I first titled it Beauty at the End of the World, but changed the word end to beginning within a day or so. What a difference one word makes.

When I made the change to the title of the playlist, I made this photo it’s cover image, as a reminder:

Photo taken of Thais Aquino by me, after a big Florida rainstorm in 2020. This is one of two art pieces in our garden made of sliding glass doors with wisdom etched on them.

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After the conference, I found myself sitting under a tree on the grass (is this what they call a quad?²), talking with a student who is in the midst of transferring from the Law School to the Divinity School (shoutout to you

Sam Wolf

!). I was sensing into potential futures in my own life there, while also sensing into potential futures of the larger whole.

Daniel Thorson

was nearby and overheard us. "You're thinking about going here?" he asked, a little incredulous. "This place is dead. It doesn't know it yet."

He wasn't being flippant. He was speaking from a place of deep awareness—about AI, about institutional inertia, about the scale of what's happening, and what’s coming. He’s someone who spends a lot of time making sense of and finding wise responses to, well, what is emerging. And he may well be right.

But when someone says something is dead, where my mind and heart go is: what is built from the soil of that death? As a longtime student of death, dare I say, friend of death, I notice consistently that the physical and metaphysical principles of our continuously regenerating universe, what gets transformed through a death is often a surprise.

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Seth and I’ve been talking about this in the weeks since my lil trip up north. About the weird waking death of my own alma mater³, of the massive and mostly inconceivable (until they’re here) changes coming through the AI revolution, and indeed, what will become of colleges, college campuses, how we learn, how we share and develop ideas, what the future of work and business and community becomes, and what will become of the built environments created for institutions like universities and colleges⁴ as they fundamentally transform in the face of what some see as their impending obsolescence. But nothing that dies is ever lost, everything transforms.

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This isn’t the essay I thought I was going to write. I’ve been working on a much longer piece — about the intermediate and root dimensions of the metacrisis as outlined by

Life Itself

. About regeneracy as described within the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, about second-order cybernetics and my argument for the ecosomatic cybernetics required to shape life-affirming futures, about how we might learn to steer together through collapse.

That piece is still coming.

The thesis of it is the same as this, that life and death are creating the conditions for new expressions of life, and that with our creative will we have the ability to, in the words of Octavia E. Butler, shape that change.

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.

— Octavia E Butler, Parable of the Sower

That piece I’m writing feels very academic, from the brain-led parts of me that I love and am thrilled to be connecting with more rigorously these days. But it’s very important to me to not fall into the trap that modernity lays for us that leads to the cage of disembodied cognition, of seeking to make sense without meaning. Dare I say we have AI now for that, which means our embodiment, our art, our meaning-making, our connections with one another and the living world, are more essential than ever.

So I wanted to offer this as groundwork for that other, headier, denser piece. A light exploration of story, art, and two photographs made by two young maidens walking barefoot on a dirt road after a thunderstorm in the midst of apocalypse.

Photo of me, taken by beloved Thais Aquino on that same day.

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This is for everyone who is waking up to the great transformations of our times. For those who are in the cracking and the connecting.⁵ For those who are learning — sometimes with grief, sometimes with awe — that the world is ending in some ways, and beginning in others. That everything is connected. That everything is impermanent. That everything is transforming.

I want you to know that beauty is essential. That what you want to create matters. That nothing is too small. That if there is something that wants to pour out of you, even if it seems less important, it’s worthwhile to scribble it out, to bring it into form. Here’s my favorite quote from Rabbi Jesus, from the apocryphal⁶ Gospel of Thomas:

“If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Though the empire-turned-church may have done their best to keep this from us, we would do well to remember. Our creative impulses are holy. They’re sacred. They’re vital. They’re vitalizing. They will shape the future in ways none of us can ever imagine in this mutually causal, interpenetrating, magnificent, mysterious, syntropic universe.

And we would do well to remember that failing to create that which only we can bring forth will destroy us. Look around. Failures of imagination, creation, and collective action are destroying most everything these days.

But destruction isn’t the end. The demolition crew makes chaos, the rubble is overwhelming, but new life and new structures and new ecosystems are longing to be born. New institutions that actually nourish flourishing are possible and we would do well to create them proactively⁷. The wisdom of regeneration isn’t new. It’s compost. It’s mycelium. It’s fire and seed and storm and germination.

Death and life and death and life and death and life.

Regeneration shows us again and again that collapse is not the end of the story, but part of the cycle.

May this be a moment of bringing forth. May we make beauty at this end of the world, may we make beauty at the beginning of the world.

1. A more thorough exploration of this topic than we were able to get into in the conference can be found here at

Nate Hagens

’s

The Great Simplification

2. I went to New College, where we have more claims to obscurity than claims to fame, and are now known best as the testing grounds of the takedown of institutes of higher education through culture wars. Anyway, we didn’t have a quad. We had Z Green, the Banyan, the Crease, the Bayfront, and a bunch of massive mulberry trees to gather under. I definitely have parts of me that are curious for the experience and terminology of an old ivy, even if I have no interest to experience the stress of academic hazing.

3. If I’m honest (and I do my best to be), I’m still moving through every stage of grief about what has happened, and continues to happen, to New College. And. Playing with potential futures (see footnote 4) helps me metabolize those feelings.

4. My vote and vision is for the creation of villages in campuses. Make it an intergenerational village committed to knowledge and learning. Retrofit dorms to function well for families. Update zoning to allow practical businesses and agriculture to emerge. Experiment with what a real community dedicated to embodied, enacted wisdom could look like. Create a good and dignified life full of belonging and honoring different forms of knowledge and know-how among everyone within the broader community, including and particularly those who are often rendered invisible by our current value structures and social norms. See how much you could improve the quality of life of not only those who live and work there, but the wider circles and contexts to which that community belongs.

5. I’ve really enjoyed reading

Siobhán Friel

’s work over the last few days, articulating phases we many of us have gone through but often haven’t had the language for.

6. Apocrypha (yep, same root as apocalypse) refers to texts that were “hidden away.“ Hidden by whom? One day (maybe soon as we’re teaching our Sex, G⟡d, & Money course right now) I’ll write about how the empire that killed Jesus realized his legacy was too powerful and rebranded itself in his image. I’m glad I went to the kind of seminary that taught me that, while also helping me open my heart more to christianity than I ever had before.

7. This is the heart of what we are doing with EMUNAH, and as always we welcome you to join us. Paid substack subscribers get all membership benefits and we are co-creating what this can become with whoever shows up. If you vibe with what we put out there, odds are good that we’d love to co-create with you.