A response to Kevan Gilbert’s post on LinkedIn asking, What is the now? Where are we? What is this moment? What’s happening?
Kevan Gilbert on LinkedIn: 2023 is a time where many of us no longer belong. And yet we are…
On Sunday, I was listening to The Sunday Read on The Daily podcast from The New York Times.
What stood out to me was the experience of moral injury.
Moral injury: the wound that forms when a person’s sense of what is right is betrayed by leaders in high stakes situations. (11:30)
The imperialization, colonization, nationalization, and corporatization of the modern world represents a moral injury for humanity at a collective, mass, and global scale.
A decade ago, I attempted to opt out of the design industry to rediscover my own sense of creativity and imagination, but also to rediscover a sense of self and a sense of community. It turned out to be a form of professional suicide. I don’t know that my career will recover. Most likely not. But it has been a necessary process of healing from decades of fear, separation, disconnection, stress, and panic. I needed to calm down my limbic system and find ways to respond beyond fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
Breathing
Slow down. Rest. Heal.
This past year has been focused on slowing down, resting, and healing. Listening to the NYT episode about The Moral Crisis of America’s Doctors, there was a moment of recognition. I am recovering from moral injury. I feel so betrayed by the leaders and the cultures of family, church, corporation, and nation that I realize I no longer belong in any of these institutions. By participating in this self-destructive and toxic culture, we made an engine to accelerate, proliferate, and amplify entropy and death—replacing life with machines, because we do not understand that the processes of the living organism of the Earth are self-organizing and self-regulating synergy, syntropy, and life.
I have been learning how to recognize and feel and sense that I belong to the Earth and I belong to the Universe.
I cannot serve both God and money. So, I am letting go of my attachment to money for my sense of security and certainty, because it is shifting sand. I joined a community that follows the example of a man whose story is about a moment when he found himself in a desperate financial situation, feeling unable to care for his wife and daughter, contemplating suicide. But in that moment, he recognized that his life was not his own. He belonged to Universe. He spent the rest of his life in service of finding ways to meet the needs of 100% of humanity. In this new iteration of the Design Science Decade, we are extending that ethic to all of life.
Through the pandemic, I joined the Buckminster Fuller Institute and the Design Science Studio. Being part of this community has been a way to connect to myself, to connect to each other, and to connect to the Earth so we can build a world that loves itself. That became the basis for the new model that makes the old model obsolete. The old model is entropy, separation, and fear. The new model is syntropy, integrity, and love. By working on developing that model, a clear definition of love, I seek to transform our relationship to the Earth with a paradigm shift in perception, consciousness, connection, and embodiment.
In the process of developing that new model, learning from nature by feeling the gravity of the Earth in the daily cycles, the gravity of the Moon in the lunar cycles, and the gravity of the Sun in the solar cycles, I came to feel the love represented by this subtle force. I went so far as to name myself Luna Solterra as a way of redesigning my own experience. Buckminster Fuller wrote prose and poetry, integrating physics and metaphysics. He said, love is metaphysical gravity. He also said, love is the integral of gravity and radiation.
I realized that everything is breathing, in the now, at many different scales. Noticing this breath has been my daily practice this year, a practice of slowing down, resting, and healing—to listen to and learn from nature, because I am nature.
That is what the here and now is communicating in each moment. Slow down. Rest. Heal.
fight, flight, freeze, fawn and forest🌱