Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us until we [humans] take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake.

– Christopher Fry (1951, from his play A Sleep of Prisoners)

Since the US election I feel like an activation button has been pressed inside of me. I wonder if you feel the same. And I wonder if, like me, you have sabotaging parts inside of you scrambling to reverse that activation; to dull the conviction. Silver-tongued, are they saying things like: “It’ll be fine. Some clever people will sort out all the problems. There’s time. Just keep your head down, finish the project, pay the bills, get the kids through school and university, keep things ticking over, and who do you think you are anyway, believing you, YOU!, can make a difference in this crazy-arsed world?”

I have an ongoing image of Mother Nature in her trickster-Crone aspect, sitting round a campfire in an otherworldly forest, surrounded by woodland creatures. She drains another glass of cognac, looks us hard in the eye and says: “We knew this would happen. Do you remember? We knew it would take this much, and more-some, to wake up enough of you . . . to set in a motion a chain-reaction like none we’ve ever seen . . . of people uniting and taking a stand for all that’s wholesome, and a stand against all that isn’t. Not fighting. Fighting comes from fear and divides people. Take a stand from a place of soul and its no-bull-shit-mountainous-compassion, its deep-rooted-deep-seeing intelligence, its iron-cast boundaries. Don’t lose faith. Not now. Get off your arse, find your tribe, and together do something. It must be together. Start small if it helps. Do it now. Stop waiting for the world to find you and invite you. You have to create the moment. As the world speeds up, help create the healthy stillness from which loving creativity is born. Never forget that you’re not alone. Powerful allies walk at your side. I walk at your side. And what I connect you with.” Raven caws a harsh reminder that all we have is this moment, and asks: “So what are you going to do with it?”

As an animating thought-experiment, I keep asking how would it be to live 2025 as though it were our last year of life? Maybe a six month limit would be more effective. Would we retreat into our caves, into the worlds we’ve created where we believe we’re safe, but where we’re effectively alone and so not really safe at all? There are as many such worlds as there are people – over eight billion psychic worlds here on Earth, each inhabited by a single person. Or will we stride out in a blaze of ordinary-extraordinary beauty, unite, and act on behalf of future generations? Trusting that together we’re capable of something miraculous.

Had you noticed how often the word “fight” is used in everyday language, especially in righteous-sounding causes? Kamala Harris’s eloquent campaign was full of that word. If there’s a positive to Donald Trump being elected perhaps it’s the scorch factor. I expect you’ve herd of the “boiling frog syndrome”: the idea that a frog placed in tepid water that’s slowly heated will cook the frog to its death, like the current policies of the Democrats, and many other parties like them, paying lip service to what needs to be done, but offering too little too late. But if the frog is dropped into scorching hot water, it will leap out. Without his realising it, perhaps Donald as he currently stands, and those like him, is that hot water – part of a dynamic tension that dares us to leap out of binary choices (neither fit for purpose) and create a wholesome third way forward, be it through citizens assemblies, new political parties, or any organisation we care to create or join, small or large, as we move towards being fully-embodied humans. Embers in Dark Age.

What organisation could you join this year, part-time or full-time? Or what organisation might you create? Perhaps creating an organisation within your existing place of work, even if it starts out as just two of you – a place where you can be real; name things; reframe them in an empowering way; and create boundaries from a grounded place. I’m asking myself the same thing.

Understanding backstory is a golden key to uniting us. What hardships did today’s dictators suffer in childhood to become what they currently are? How unseen, how brutalised must someone feel that they cut off their feeling function completely, or almost completely, and become what we unhelpfully label a “psychopath” or a “sociopath” or a “narcissist”; perhaps driven to hoard mountains of money in order to feel seen, worshipped, though perhaps not loved in the way they secretly crave. What stories have they created for themselves to justify their actions in the world? No person thinks of themselves as the “baddy”.  What assumptions do they make about the “enemy”? Is there a masterful question someone might ask the dictator that could dance through their psychic defences and open them up? What would you ask them? And if that doesn’t work, what intensity of heat will it take to melt their Icarus-wings-of-wax and bring them crashing back down to earth where the life is, and ask for help?

The most compelling stories we read or watch are usually about orphans whose start in life is very rough and who, despite ever-increasing obstacles – or because of them – finally, with vital kindness and insight along the way, return to their once-suffocated wholeness. It’s a return to soul, our primary lover, our inner Elder, and how she connects us with the Great Mystery. That’s how I experience it. Do you sense this orphan within yourself? Do you sense this Elder? Have you noticed that when you embody this Elder’s stillness, compassion and deep listening you shift the atmosphere in a room, which invites others in from the cold and calls forth their own inner Elder? Have you noticed how this quality of stillness and compassionate listening acts a powerful boundary against closed minds unconsciously seeking to banish your soul for a second time? And how, in the heat of the moment, instead of striking out, a long pause helps you to reconnect with this deeper nature?

As long as we’re disconnected from our soul, our inner Elder, we’re lonely, depressed, struggling, no matter how emphatically the fearful parts of our psyche might try to convince us otherwise by keeping us busy and distracted, not least through compulsive thinking.

Why are so many super-rich people even more depressed and isolated than the rest of us? What does it mean to fully unlock the value of money? Is it done through giving back, and the genuine respect and love and sense of belonging that comes with it? Isn’t this more healthy than attracting envy, and struggling to discern who one’s real friends are?

If you now close your eyes, take a few calming breaths, then a few more, what does your soul have to say to you in this moment? If you only hear silence, perhaps that’s the message. In that silence listen more deeply. Keep listening. Keep listening. Keep listening with your whole body. Each time more subtly. If instead, you hear an inner-cynic, then put the kettle on, bring out the cakes, and have a chat with this cynical part. What’s it afraid would happen if it wasn’t cynical? Does it realise that you’re no longer five years old? Does it know you’ve weathered storms, that you’re pretty damn impressive and worthy of trusting?

Is this chaotic-feeling world, where it’s increasingly difficult to trust newsflow, oddly helping us to once again trust our soul’s intuition and connect with a network infinitely more sophisticated than the internet and the artificial intelligence that feeds off it? To connect with a network far beyond human comprehension, but not beyond human sensing. The internet holds our collective knowledge. You could say it’s our collective head. But it’s not our collective soul. All the poets and sages through the ages tell us that the natural order of things is for the head – the super-computer of our brain – and our hands to be at the service of soul. The practical tools at service of the wholesome vision. But it hasn’t been that way for centuries, or even millennia, not on a collective scale.

What does the longest stride of soul look like in your life? What seemingly-small acts of beauty and courage could spark a chain-reaction and change lives in this finely-balanced world? What difficult conversation have you been postponing, for years, maybe decades, until the right-feeling moment that will probably never arrive unless you create it? What do those whales gliding through your melancholic depths have to say? Will you let them sing your every atom back to vibrant life? A song that calls home your inner refugees and convinces your inner dictators that it’s time to welcome those refugees back, one by exhausted one; offer them a hot bath and a hearty meal; a home.

The elder Stephen Jenkinson defines destiny as the place where you passion meets the world’s needs. What are your passions? What makes you feel most alive? What is your unique gift that this world desperately needs? In what context does it shine brightest? What specific aspect of the great challenges confronting us calls out to you? Do you sense that someplace deep inside of you is a secret vault of infinite-feeling love hammering on the door to break free? Screaming to be let loose into a world that needs it. I do.

In the film Shadowlands, C. S. Lewis, played by Anthony Hopkins, says: “God doesn’t want us to suffer. He wants us to grow up, to leave the kindergarten . . .” In other words, life asks us to let go of the child’s version of Eden where everything is done for us, and journey towards the deeper, darker, brighter adult version of Eden where our taking responsibility deepens the gifts we have to offer, and so deepens our joy when the gifts are shared.