I always felt like an outsider. Or at best, part of a tiny group of like minded folks trying to dispel those persistent illusions that hem us all in; the barriers, visible and invisible, erected by history, family, society (and, complicitly, ourselves) that curtail Life’s fullest unfolding.

Today I perceive, distributed among every country, hundreds of millions of people who have, each in their own way, come to an expanded sense of human potential and its power to remake the world. They have heard the same signal, summoning us to regenerate our communities and ecosystems, inseparably and immediately. They know in their bones that we are already the change we wish to see. And that the civilization we find ourselves in; for all its brilliance, a clanking machine, bristling with nightmare armaments and dead-hand paradigms, lurching toward the edge of a cliff; reflects neither our highest aspirations nor our collective ability to actualize them.

Animated by fierce compassion and what I might call “applied consciousness,” new forces, like an immune response in the common body, are mobilizing to expel the spiritual parasites of hatred and greed. The atrocity of the Ukraine war, the Code Red of climate crisis, the specter of failing planetary life - support systems and the spectacle of mega - billionaires joyriding in rockets to nowhere; the narcotic churn of meaningless media, and the industries that mindlessly drive the engines of consumption and destruction; all juxtaposed with the ineffable beauty of this world and the stellar goodness we can manifest together; created this historic inflection point.

A great, yearning cohort of humanity is weaving the threads of a new tapestry. It is working not just for “change” but transformation beyond window - dressing and hand - wringing and clean - up duty. As we emerge from the miasma of a fearsome pandemic, as whole nations fall into war’s gaping maw, we can yet see the global outlines of what I call The Regenerative Society (call it what you want, but it’s unmistakable, and unstoppable). As in the old Tom Petty song I cranked up today to summon my courage and my resolve, “We Won’t Back Down.”