interconnectedness

When I think of you, I think of community. You’re so devoted to uplifting the voices of others. Can you talk about this impulse in yourself?

What I'm devoted to is the idea that a brain is really the result of its connections to other brains. A life is really the result of its connection to other lives. So we’re the sum of our connections. Those... See more

Tyson Yunkaporta has many such anecdotes in his book Sand Talk:

[The Elder] says things like, ‘It is going to rain in twelve minutes,’ and the kids time it on their phones and laugh in amazement when his prediction comes true. He predicts events like an annual emergence of flying ants from the ground, then follows seasonal signals, winding through... See more

In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. There are no isolated variables—every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and the context. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated. The relationship between the knower and other knowers, places and senior knowledge-keepers is... See more

“Our individual psychological doom manifests collectively as a universal ecological calamity. Both are interwoven with one another. Both are symptoms of a fundamental misunderstanding of ourselves and of reality. In a world of ruined aliveness, it is impossible to be alive oneself. Both inner aliveness and the aliveness of the natural world are... See more

systems thinking has arisen in response to our dawning realization of interconnectedness, our discovery that working with things in isolation is increasingly ineffective and even counterproductive.

We are not separate from each other. But we don’t always believe it, and we certainly don’t always practice it. In fact, we often practice the opposite—disconnection and domination. From unconscious bias to “cancel culture,” denial of our inherent interconnection limits our own freedom. 

But when we step into the new story of inter-being and understand we are not separate selves but that we are the mirrors, the reflections, the holographic image of everything and everyone; when we understand that anything that we do affects everything; that every act has cosmic significance; that anything that is happening to any being on this... See more