Gaia as a living being has organs for her body, brain, mind and heart. Great rivers, lakes and oceans are her veins and arteries. Rocks and mountains her skeleton. Prairies and soil are her skin. Fungi, mycelium, microbes and insects are her metabolic tracts. Forests, plants and gardens her lungs. Animals are her animators, [...]
Amsterdam, City of Water is Integral City of the Year 2019. Amsterdam will be the city featured on the new cover of the Second Edition of Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences of the Human Hive. In a year when we saw high tides engulf Venice, Amsterdam (often called Venice of the North) continued to survive [...]
The December solstice opens the door to the theme of Power in the Human Hive. Gaia’s Reflective Organs (as individuals, collectives and human hives) have evolved through three eras of Power: Over, With and As. Power Over In today’s world too often, Power is associated with Power Over. The news delights in reporting [...]
One year ago, I issued a Climate-Challenge to Meta-Findhorn (my name for the larger Findhorn community) for 30 people to select and practise change that could contribute to climate resilience for 30 days. See the blogs on our experience here. One year later many of our participants have graduated beyond our successful experiment [...]
As I have travelled many miles in the last 2 months, I have had the pleasure and fun of learning from the many new friends and colleagues I have encountered. Many of those learnings will take months or years to unpack. But here is a sampler of stories that intrigued me and that I [...]
“People need stories more than food to stay alive.” (Barry Lopez) That observation has always been one of my favourite insights into the depths of human nature. When I review the epic voyage to 10 cities (BC Canada: Delta, Vancouver, Mission, Abbotsford; Scotland: Findhorn, Edinburgh; India: Auroville, Chennai, Agra, Delhi) in the last six [...]
From the beginning of October to the middle of November, 2019, I travelled from Findhorn to Vancouver to Auroville India (with brief stops in Findhorn and Edinburgh on the way through) with visits to Chennai, Agra and Delhi before returning to home in Findhorn. I felt it was an epic journey – the [...]
Dr. Marilyn Hamilton offered a lecture to Dr. Sheeba Chander's class in the Architecture & City Planning Program at Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science in Chennai, India, on October 30, 2019. Here is a picture of the class and the key images we used to illustrate how the honey bee offers lessons in [...]
Keynote Address Ecocity World Summit, October 8, 2019 by Marilyn Hamilton PhD, Integral City Meshworks Founder Introduction Think Global, Act Local – who in this room has heard this expression before? Most of us. Can you even remember the first time you heard this and where you were? It’s not quite a moonshot [...]
What happens when we turn up in our organizations and discover the presence of a “pebble”? Our human systems are living through a time when a small act can cause an enormous result—like the power of a pebble to precipitate a land slide or an avalanche. When I look at a city and [...]