The Summer Everything Changes
Two Cosmologies of Power, Infinite Potential, Clear Choices, and Honeybee Democracy
This essay closes with an invitation to join us this Thursday for a Living Wisdom Salon on Expanding Our Frame of Abundance, which has no cost to join, and which will give you a better sense of the deeper development we cultivate inside of the Emunah Academy.
As I’m passing through this with my final edits, this playlist came to mind, and I wanted to share it and the invitation to Thursday with you here. Enjoy the music, and I hope to see you tomorrow.
This is the summer that will change the world and all of our lives forever.
This is a reality that is present whether you look to the headlines, supreme court decisions, the stars, or the messages of the Earth. Nothing will be the same in six months time, not in our lives, not on our planet, not in our political or economic systems.
The energy crisis that the Transition Network1 and The Great Simplification and generations of Indigenous teachers have warned us about is here. The outer planets are moving through transits that astrologers have been pointing toward for years.2 It is the Year of the Fire Horse.3 The Fourth Turning’s4 Crisis arc is doing exactly what we anticipated: accelerating, converging, causing chaos, transforming the world, breaking the previous order with more death, suffering, and destruction than any one of us can fully wrap our heads around. We are living through the polycrisis, but the polycrisis is the set of symptoms.
The metacrisis is the root cause.5 And the root of the metacrisis is both the mechanistic worldview that separates us from the Living World, and the illusion of separation itself. These frames have informed the deep, civilization-wide belief that I end at my skin, that your wellbeing and mine are different projects, that the Living World is a resource pile rather than a body we belong to.
And yet. This is also the summer that can change everything for the better, if enough of us step into it building personal and collective power, supported by universal power.
I want to show you what I mean.
There are two cosmologies of power operating right now, one manufactured and finite, expiring rapidly as the systems collapse, and the other innate and infinite, rising through the collapse the way that life always does.
On the right side of the diagram: finite forms of power. Role, status, systemic position. When most of us think of power, this is what comes to mind. These are zero-sum models of power. My gain, your loss; your rise, my fall. It’s a pyramid and everyone is trying to get at the top because we know what happens to those at the bottom.
The predator class, the people and institutions who have made an entire civilization serve their own extraction and hoarding of wealth, life force, and all that is sacred, live exclusively in this frame. They have invested generations’ worth of social engineering to convince the rest of us that this is the only frame there is. They have convinced us that there are certain things it is unacceptable to talk about with others, including sex, and God,6 and money. They know that this is where we will source our collective power.
On the left side: infinite power. Personal, collective, universal. Living systems generate power this way, and these forms of power are available to all of us all the time. These forms of power operate not as a pyramid, but as infinitely nesting interdependent circles. Within this model, my personal power and yours both can feed collective power, and it’s all nourished by universal power and the current flows in every direction. Nothing has to be taken from anyone.
Many of of us can feel disoriented when we try to talk about money, sex, or God because we are running finite-power logic on currents that are actually infinite. We try to measure sacred things on a scarcity scale and then wonder why we feel small, anxious, and contorted.
You and I are not the problem. The problem is this false framework that keeps us disempowered and disconnected from the incredible potential of this amazing world, which includes each of us.
God, sex, and money are the three currents to which the predator class has the most over-entitled relationship, and they need us to be disempowered and misled about their true nature in order to maintain the current power structures.
But these are the substrate of human life: the body, the spirit, the means of exchange. Whoever controls our relationship to these controls almost everything else. This is why we have the responsibility to help one another reclaim our power, knowledge, and ability to directly connect with these currents of power as a part of the interconnected whole of our own lives.
This is the work of Sex, God, & Money. It is a summer-long process designed to be the cultivation ground for reclaiming the substrate of our own lives from the operating system that was installed in us. Three months of stepping out of the finite frame together, and into the infinite potential we were born for.
I want to show you the world I know is possible.7
I want to show you a Thursday morning in a neighborhood that takes care of one another: the tool library is open, and there is ripe produce from community gardens being shared on everyone’s doorstep. A grandmother is teaching a teenager to graft fruit trees. The neighborhood produces food and value added products from the collective gardens, and everyone has shared ownership in the business, so everyone benefits from it. There’s a governance meeting at six, and everyone’s bringing something to the table, everyone already knows the agenda from kitchen-table conversations all week. Everyone has enough because we organized around actual root needs instead of manufactured ones.
I want to show you a child asking her mother a question about her body and receiving an answer that is true, empowering, and clarifying. That mother cared for and celebrated in her creative wholeness. Elders thriving, empowered and loving and in their erotic prime. Bodies of every shape and ability regarded as holy. A world where somatic awareness is as ordinary as learning to read.
I want to show you what it looks like when God is known as immanent and transcendent at once, within everything and beyond everything, in the hive and in the machine, by every name and by no name, always a force of love.
I want to show you a person at a small daily fork in the road choosing love over fear. And then the next person. And then the next. Until the small choices become the shape of the culture, the shape of the future we all deserve.
This world is not some distant utopian future. It’s the world I live within, that I work toward every day. And I am far from alone. There are thousands and thousands of us everywhere, and we are growing increasingly connected with one another, all around the world, coordinating and supporting each other thrive.
None of this requires that we all think alike. The opposite. This world depends on the friction of many strategies and many perspectives, the way a Honeybee hive’s intelligence depends on scouts who disagree and dance their disagreements until a clear direction for the collective emerges, and they all take flight together.
In the summer of 1945, in the heat and the rubble of the last Crisis cycle, a young man named Martin Lindauer, recovering from severe physical and moral injuries from his brief and traumatic conscription into the Nazi military at 18 began his PhD in biology, committed to his studies helping to inform “a new world of humanity,” where people create rather than destroy.8
One mile from where my own father would be born six years later, Lindauer studied under Karl von Frisch in Munich, focusing on Honeybees. And what he found, in the chaotic and psychologically disoriented darkness of postwar Germany, is that honeybees make collective decisions democratically. When a swarm needs a new home, scout-sisters fly out, find candidate sites, return. They may be covered in black soot, red brick, white plaster, golden sawdust. The sisters dance to communicate what they have found. Other scout-sisters go check. They dance back what they have seen. Many options are danced and over hours or days, the swarm’s attention concentrates on the site that is actually best, and they go together, as one body, having decided as many.
The queen does not govern the hive, she mothers it. She is so present to the enormity of her reproductive labor, that the collective intelligence, the collective wisdom, the collective power of the hive informs every choice, all together. And they decide what will protect the mother best.
Lindauer discovered this incredible wisdom of the Honeybees in the darkness of the end of the last Crisis cycle.
Now that we are in the midst of the current Crisis cycle, we must apply all that we have learned to help us navigate through the regeneracy into a new High that truly works for all life.
I have been keeping Honeybees for just a few weeks after studying them for more than nine years, and I am learning a tremendous amount from them in my little matrifocal, mutualistic corner of the world. The hive cannot be wise if the individual bees are not paying attention.
Personal power is the substrate for collective power.
And personal power is innate, unique, and limitless potential within each of us.
The presence and wisdom of the Honeybees in all of this are one of many factors informing why Sex, God, & Money this summer will be unlike any of the previous 3 years we have offered it.
The collective wisdom of the group that is convening presently is enormous. Multigenerational, multiracial, interfaith, spanning very different careers and life paths. Everyone who has joined us so far are truly some of the warmest and wisest people I have had the honor of getting to know on the internet (mostly through substack) and some are also my actual neighbors.
It also turns out that the three months of Sex, God, & Money will match precisely onto three months that I will be moving through a deep process with the Right Use of Power Institute with elders and leaders of my community of origin, a spiritual community with a complex and often painful relationship with Sex, and God, and Money. Doing this kind of power-analysis work with them is something I have dreamed about for years, but did not actually believe would be possible. I am so excited. This training is leading eventually to my becoming a facilitator of that lineage of work, and I have no doubt that it will be informing the discussions and insights that will be flowing throughout SGM this summer as we work with these three core currents of power in our lives.
This year for the first time, we are offering SGM at a sliding scale because the wide range of financial realities we are all living through is vast.9
We are also adding optional live calls every week of the summer because the intensity of this season asks for a consistent pulse, a place to gather, a hive to come back to.
Sex, God, & Money is not a course about three distinct topics. It is a framework for clarifying the flow of these currents in our lives, to help us step out of the finite frame and learning to live in the infinite one personally, collectively, and in relationship to the Living World that holds it all.
We are in the fruitful darkness.
This is where new life begins.
The womb knows.
The seed knows.
The hive knows.
The darkness of the hive overflows with sweetness and nourishment and collective care. Everyone has their own unique role to play. This becomes the place where, together, we remember the kind of power we were actually built for.
That is the field we are cultivating this summer.
If that is the world you want to co-create, you are warmly welcome.
If you want to get a feel for how we gather, please join us this Thursday for Expanding Our Frame of Abundance: A Living Wisdom Salon. No cost to join, donations are welcome, but the main gift you can bring is your own presence and wisdom.
Rob Hopkins and his community in the village of Totnes in Devonshire, England founded the Transition Network, which I have been studying and experimenting with for more than twelve years. Michael Mezz at Better Future recently interviewed Hopkins in a beautiful conversation that I warmly recommend.
The outer planets right now are in positions that astrologers have been pointing toward for years. Uranus has returned to Gemini for the first time since the years of World War II. Saturn and Neptune met in conjunction at zero degrees Aries this past February, the reset degree of the zodiac, the point traditional astrology uses to read the fate of empires. Pluto is settled into Aquarius for the next two decades. What is most interesting to me about this configuration is not just that these three slow-moving planets are activating positions that echo previous crisis cycles, but that the major aspects between them are harmonious trines and sextiles, the geometry of flow rather than conflict. The energy for cooperation is intensely available for those who are ready to step into it.
This specific combination within the Chinese Zodiac returns only once every sixty years. The previous Fire Horse year was 1966, the year the civil rights movement reached its highest pitch, the year the Cultural Revolution began in China, the year of the Black Panther Party’s founding and the height of resistance to the Vietnam War. The Horse carries the qualities of movement, drive, and forward momentum. Fire amplifies all of it. Fire Horse years are read as fast-moving, intense, and transformative.
The Fourth Turning is an Anglo-American generational framework developed by Neil Strauss and William Howe describing a 80-100 year long cycle in which the institutions that organized one era stop working, a massive Crisis emerges in the form of war and all the awful things that come with it, the collective recognizes the depth of the crisis, and when enough of the collective wakes up to their own agency and power, the Regeneracy phase begins which determines the outcome of the chaos of the Crisis.
Regeneracy is the rising of collective power into the political and economic restructuring the moment requires. Previous Fourth Turnings include:
The American Revolution produced the Constitution and a new form of self-governance.
The Civil War produced the abolition of slavery, the Reconstruction Amendments, and the foundations of a modern federal state.
The Great Depression and the Second World War produced the New Deal, the social safety net, the Bretton Woods system, and the postwar international order.
Each crisis dismantled what came before and built something structurally different in its place. The framework is actively informing strategy by figures like Steve Bannon who use it to justify authoritarianism, but the pattern does not belong to them, it belongs to all of us. What the Regeneracy actually shows is that collective power, once it rises, can build something that was not imaginable before the Crisis began. That’s where we are, and it is our collective responsibility to meet the moment.
My friends at Life Itself and Second Renaissance have created an excellent primer on clarifying the situation which can be found here at metacrisis.info.
When I use the word God, I am referring to the sacred in all forms. Unified and pluralistic, by every possible name. My own perception of the sacred is a Panentheistic one (distinct form pantheistic). Immanent and transcendent. The sacred, in this view, runs through and animates all things. That ultimately includes our own bodies, life force, and the desires that move us, as well as the world of creation and exchange that shapes our lives.
Visioning the best possible timelines for ourselves and for the collective (they are not separate) is one of my favorite things to facilitate. It’s what we’re going to be doing this coming month in our yearlong cohort BeginWithin, and how we will begin and end the summer in Sex, God, & Money. Because I’ve been facilitating this process for over a decade now, I am already living in the futures that have been envisioned and then enacted through this process.
Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 13.
The science of honeybee democracy is most fully developed in Thomas Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2010), which draws on decades of his own experimental research at Cornell and builds directly on the foundational work of Martin Lindauer. Lindauer’s original 1955 paper, Schwarmbienen auf Wohnungssuche (”Swarm Bees in Search of a Home”), extended Karl von Frisch’s work on the bees’ dance language by showing that the dance is used not only to communicate food sources but also to communicate and decide between potential nest sites. Seeley’s research has since been picked up across fields, including organizational theory, democratic governance, and the study of collective intelligence, as a working model for how decentralized groups make wise decisions without central authority. This is what I’m currently reading, and absolutely loving it. The biographical detail about Lindauer being conscripted, surviving the war, and turning to biology comes through Seeley’s account.
If you are reading this and you want to join us this summer, but the sliding scale and payment plan options are still out of reach for you, please reach out. We can work with you to put this work within reach.
Ha, wow! I recommended a stack to.you last night that is SO aligned with this it is uncanny. My little mind is blown again. I am deliberately and deliciously sinking into my own hive and family here, feeling so loved and supported. The astrology thread has been vivid for me lately as well, so all of this information coming together at once makes me feel tingly with anticipation. It's daunting, but we have our people around us. God/dess and Company are good!
Yes, we are in a fruitful darkness.
I am also excited … excited to be making deepening contact with the womb of EMUNAH
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