“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Antoine de St. Exupery This is a story about how Gaia is calling from her four directions hearts, minds and souls to [...]
What is Broken? How can Integral Cities learn from Gaia, endowed as her Organs of Reflection? How can we imagine an ecology for the emergence of Peace? What City Capacities can we draw on to recover wellbeing at all scales of human existence – person, people, place and planet? In using the Russian-Ukrainian conflict [...]
Gaia’s Zones of Evolutionary Emergence Integral City integrates and synthesizes the evolutionary dynamics of the city as the most complex human system yet created. Guided by Gaia’s Evolutionary Impulse, we can build Capacity for Peace when we honour Context and live the Master Code of Care: simultaneously Caring for person, people, place and planet. [...]
The Economist headlines. Guardian bulletins. BBC News Flashes. Tweets quoting Zelensky to the UN. Angry videos. Toxic propaganda. I feel bombarded by the day-to-day, often hour-to-hour and sometimes minute-to-minute experiences of the Russian-Ukraine war. But the geography has seemed far away from my Scottish ecovillage. Until last week, when it got very close [...]
I am a Canadian of a certain age who remembers clearly what it was like to live in Toronto in the era of Vietnam Draft Dodgers. In the 1960’s and 70’s young men of draft age beat a steady path to Canada to preserve lives, education and future opportunities. Estimates of about 125,000 men [...]
This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is Planet. When we take the perspective of Caring for Planet, we gain the Overview of a Living System Cosmology that embraces all of the Cares into [...]
For most of the last 3 months I stopped listening or watching news and only scanned headlines. I stopped being a news junkie. But I have started again. Why? Because of the Russian-Ukrainian war. When I am connected to people with zero degrees of separation it is difficult not to care about events as [...]
I need a new language to describe what I see going on in the world. Russia is making so-called “non-war” on Ukraine. Ukraine is defending itself from physical military attack and at the same time it is being accused of acting as the instigator of genocide and aggressive action (a fake story from the [...]
Dear Earth, Dear Earth, let me tell you how I feel. You have given me such treasure. I love you so. The above refrain is a simple Taizé song that awakens my growing edges. Because it honours my relationship to the Earth that birthed all Life, including me, it opens my heart to [...]
A first integrally-informed ExEd program for mayors has been launched by the largest Russian university RANEPA in collaboration with Living Cities community of practice. This hands-on collaboration between a huge state university (with campuses in over 50 regions of Russia) and a self-organized "teal" expert community is unprecedented by itself. March 17, 2021 [...]