Collapse is Never the End

Hospicing, Midwifing, and Syntropy in Entropic Times

Since the election results, I’ve been returning to some key texts that feel essential in this moment of deep reflection. I recommend these books to everyone looking to make sense of the current upheavals and where we stand as a society. One text I’ve come back to is Margaret Wheatley’s Who Do We Choose To Be? in which Wheatley offers a sobering view of civilization collapse and reminds us that we’re not witnessing something unprecedented. Instead, we’re following cycles— she points toward analysis that tracks a 250-year arc that has seen many empires rise, peak, and fall, only to be replaced by new forms of life and organization.

(Note: this temporal arc of empire collapse in Wheatley’s work is primarily informed by Sir John Glubb’s work which I’ve read some critiques of. Essentially, it’s hard to pinpoint exact dates of an empire’s creation or destruction, and Glubb was certainly processing his own grief at the dissolution of the British Empire at the time of his research. So I’m not holding this as a universal law, but the timing of the United States’ within this framework is interesting. Two years from now is the 250 year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.)

Wheatley’s insights offer a clear-eyed reminder: this moment, daunting as it may be, is not the end. Civilization collapse is a pattern, a transition rather than an obliteration, and we are its participants, actively shaping what comes next. We can, and we must, consider our role in what rises to take the place of what is crumbling into chaos now.

Wheatley speaks about creating “Islands of Sanity” in times of collapse, places and communities where we can retreat from the chaos and reconnect with purpose and effective work. I personally have an aversion to the use of the term sanity here, as it feeds into a sense of pathology that just doesn’t feel quite right to me. I want to reframe this idea as creating “Islands of Syntropy”. Syntropy, as a counterforce to entropy, is about cultivating life-giving systems, actions, and connections that generate renewal and coherence.

Rather than simply creating spaces that feel “sane” in an insane world, Islands of Syntropy are places and communities of practice in which greater coherence, resonance, harmony, and meaning emerge as we remember how to move like living systems, rather than like machines.

This is a good moment to share that there are two upcoming opportunities to learn and grow together and I would love if you would join me:

On December 1st I’ll be teaching a 90 minute workshop on the Syntropy Sequence, an embodied practice for countering entropy, meeting chaos, and finding your place in the Self-Organizing Universe.
Register Here.

And from Winter Solstice to Spring Equinox, I’ll be facilitating a journey of collective wisdom called The Art of Regenerative Living. Over 3 months we will move through Remembrance, Reconnection, and Regeneration, each of us finding our place in the Living World. This is not a didactic course where I teach you things (though you will learn a great deal), it is a shared journey of becoming in which you will nurture the soil of who you are called to be.
Learn more and register here.

Before we begin to envision what the future could be, we must first turn our attention to the present—and to the endings we’re facing. This is where the perspective of hospicing comes in.

Hospicing

We learn the most about life when we are face to face with death. We learn the most about syntropy when we are navigating an experience of escalated entropy. We see things more clearly when they are in sharp relief with their inverse correlate.

I learned how to find my (dynamic, evolving) role within this self-organizing universe the summer my father died. I learned a great deal about the difference between dying and death that year. I learned a great deal about chaos. I learned a great deal about how to respond to chaos.

This is how the framework for the Syntropy Sequence came through to me, a lesson for the living from the field of death work.

As you read this I invite you to continuously take deep breaths and check in with your body. Feel your toes. Feel your connection with the earth. You are safe in this moment, and by proactively thinking about these things, you are ahead of the curve. That is something worth honoring for what it is worth.

For most of us, the systems, institutions, and structures of this civilization are all we’ve ever known. They’ve defined the boundaries of our lives, informed our worldview, and laid the foundations of our education. To know that these structures are collapsing and being dismantled, that the systems we’ve depended on are crumbling and dying, can be overwhelming.

It’s difficult to imagine what might come after, and even harder to believe that a future is possible beyond the collapse. It’s as if the ground itself is shifting beneath us, leaving us questioning where we might stand next, and whether we will be standing at all.

This is always how death is, be it the death of a parent or a lover or a leader or the world as we know it.

Hospicing is the process of supporting someone at the end of life with compassion and presence. We are called now to support and witness the end of this era, recognizing what is dying, reducing suffering where we can, and allowing ourselves to grieve. This is not a time to look away or avoid the pain but to acknowledge it, to make space for it, and to approach it with a compassionate heart.

In 2018, just a few months after my father died, I enrolled in One Spirit, an interspiritual, integral theory rooted seminary with

Seth Kaufmann

, who I would later marry. As an elective during seminary, I took a course with Margaret Wheatley focused on her book Who Do We Choose To Be? The class was all about becoming what, in her book, she calls all of us to claim: “Warriors for the Human Spirit”—those who show up to lead with compassion and courage in the face of collapse.

I am sensitive to archetypes, I know their power, and it’s important to me to be honest about what archetypes feel true and resonant for me. In that moment, the archetype of warrior felt very dissonant with my truth, with my own essence, with my own spirit. So during the course, I asked her if perhaps not all of us are meant to be warriors, if some of us might be called to different roles in this transition. I wondered if our roles could include hospicing or midwifing instead of “warriorship”—holding space for what’s ending and nurturing the seeds of what’s to come.

Her response was less than enthusiastic; I gather that she sees a very specific value in the warrior role, and that she sees that role as paramount. I honor that as her truth, but her reaction only deepened my conviction. I realized that we need all of these roles, that warriors are just one part of the ecosystem in a time of transition. My view is that we we must be aware of our cultural habit toward creating monocultures, and reorient toward a polycultural way of approaching things, including in the archetypes and roles we are called to step into for the times to come.

I have recently been introduced to Vanessa Andreotti’s work on Hospicing Modernity (I’ve just ordered the book), and I welcome you to join me in listening to her episode on

The Great Simplification

here. I gather that in her view, hospicing is an act of deep witnessing—a way to see and engage fully with the suffering and decline around us while acknowledging the limits of what we can control. Andreotti encourages a layered, compassionate approach to the complexity of our time, allowing us to hold space for endings while also respecting the diverse roles each of us plays in this transition.

I look forward to deepening into her work, as this death work goes hand in hand with the work of midwifing new life into this world.

Midwifing

Where hospicing creates space for new life, midwifing actively brings it forth. I have known deeply within my bones for nearly a decade now that I am here to be a midwife of regenerative culture, and I have been experimenting with and embodying that in countless ways, leading to the shape of my work now, in which I deeply support leaders, creators, and nurturers of regenerative futures in the subtle dimensions of shaping change.

My own personal journey in this work has even brought me into a powerful partnership with

Dajé Alōh

, aka The Story Doula, who has an entire deep and robust framework for Vision Midwifery, which we teach in our business development community The Vision Society.

Anyone who has given birth will tell you that the best midwives don’t rush a birth. They don’t push for a specific timing or outcome because they know best. They get present. They ask questions. They tune in.

This is what is called for now, in the midwifing of the futures that are asking to be born now in this world.

Daniel Christian Wahl’s Designing Regenerative Cultures invites us to live the questions that will help us shape cultures that live within natural limits, honoring the interconnectedness of all life. Regeneration, unlike mere sustainability, is dynamic—it’s an act of creation that seeks to establish systems in harmony with natural cycles.

One of the key insights I received from my teachers within the Regenesis Institute is that regeneration is all about potential, and that the potential of any living system is always both of these two things: limitless and unique.

Consider a newborn baby. If you’ve ever held one, try to return to a clear image of that experience. Can you conceive of that newborn baby’s potential as completely unique and also totally limitless?

Touching into this truth is expansive and beautiful.

Now, take a moment to sit with that, and feel it as it relates to you.

What does it feel like in your body to imagine, even for a moment, that your potential is completely unique to you? What does it feel like to imagine that your utterly unique potential is also completely limitless?

It may be challenging. It may be uncomfortable. You may come up against many layers of belief and assumptions about yourself that have built up over time.

But you too were a newborn baby once, and that unique and limitless potential still lives, as potential, within you.

Now, let’s zoom out and consider the collective potential of all of life on this planet. Not just humanity, but all the life forms we share this world with, all of the interactions and relationships and superorganisms to be found, all of it.

The unique and limitless potential of life on Earth is beyond comprehension. This potential becomes more and more realized as we learn to listen and communicate better, with one another, and with the more than human world that has so much to teach us.

As someone who has given birth to life, I know firsthand how massively transformative birth is, how devastatingly close to death we have to go in order to bring new life into this world. It is not an experience that can be adequately prepared for in it’s magnitude. It is a massive initiation.

This is the initiation that we are moving through as a collective. It may have begun before we were born, and it may continue for a while after we’re gone. But while we are living, we have to find our place within this birthing process. We have to find our place and take it.

The role of the midwife is one of profound presence, listening, and attunement before action. Yes, experience and preparation matter a great deal, and the actions taken in the birth space can make the difference between life and death. But the core thing, the most essential thing, is creating the space for the birth to progress in the unique way it must.

Every birth is unique, and every death is unique, just as every life form is unique.

Islands of Syntropy

When I notice that something is devolving into chaos, be it a gathering, a moment in my household, an organization, a community, an experience where many factors are out of my control like major delays in travel, even in the face of natural disasters, I have a practice that reminds me how to be an Island of Syntropy even in a sea of Entropy.

Syntropy is actually all around us. It’s the force of life that pulls things together. From a metaphysical perspective it has been argued that in space it is gravity, in time it is evolution, and intersubjectively it is love.

Syntropy is the reason anything works at all from your body to the biosphere to the galaxy and beyond.

But we as humans have to cultivate syntropic consciousness if we want to be a counterforce to the extractive destructive patterns we were born into within dominant culture at this time.

The Syntropy Sequence I teach is something that emerged through me during a time of death, and it has now been extensively tested in the chaos of new life as well.

I’m teaching the Syntropy Sequence on December 1st, and I hope you’ll join me! It is a powerful practice and resource for all of us to hold and experiment in the face of whatever life brings us.