Yes, We’re Going There: Letter from the Editor, Summer 2024
Letter from the Editor, Kindred Summer Issue 2024
What We Did This Summer at Kindred
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Dear Kindred,
This summer, in preparation for multiple book writing projects, I began compiling all of the human consciousness books I have scoured on my decades-long Mother (of a) Quest, an instinctive drive delivered along with the birth of my son that charged me with stewarding not only his life, but all of Life.
Flipping through dog-eared, underlined pages, I remembered how few of the authors viewed Life as a continuum, beginning prenatally, and through the lens of relational, intelligent interdependence. I remembered how confused and worried I became when I didn’t see myself reflected back from these books as a mother who struggled to keep my child whole in an anti-nurturing, fragmented world.
Many authors pointed to and described our interdependency with Life from a safe, academically-sanctioned distance. A few advocated for a shift toward a holistic worldview. Fewer took the next steps of revealing what creating a thriving, whole human while living from a holistic worldview involved.
At one point on my journey, I sat in the garden of a prestigious institute in California and asked a well-regarded researcher pointedly: “Why do you only view humans as adults? What about Joseph Chilton Pearce’s work that shows how we treat children is how they will treat the world?” She promised to look into my ideas. But earlier that week, when I stood before a group of 40 retreat participants and used the words mother, baby, father, family, children – I lost the room. Everyone’s seat became itchy and their toes extremely interesting. Some looked mildly embarrassed for me.
On my next go-around with the same group, I modified my language and simply stated: “When you decide, perhaps with a partner, to steward a new human life, you may find your worldview shifts in ways you couldn’t anticipate. That’s what happened to me.” I scanned the room and found I had not lost them. Interesting. Language matters in authoring a New Story of the Human Family. (We know this at Kindred which is why we maintain a New Story Glossary.)
While most of the beautifully-bound knowledge now stacked around my desk felt dead on arrival, the dynamic, grounded stories from self-identified Cultural Creatives, Trance-Breakers, Wayfinders, and New Cycle Makers, I found along the way imparted welcome wisdom, courage and hope. Identity is the basis for action, so it matters if we chose to identify as relational, intelligent, interdependent species, at one with all Life.
And here we are today, with our little grassroots nonprofit still conducting a meta-inquiry into our meta-crises (asking Big Picture questions). More importantly, we’re listening to you, our companions on the journey, for clues to where we’re headed as we author and live into our New Story.
Here at Kindred, caregivers, practitioners, and a few brave researchers continue to report back from the field how they are breaking cycles and creating counter-culture strategies for wellbeing and wholeness. These stories, including a new one in this issue, “go there”.
Our storytellers confidently sail past modern cultural bias blaring the ancient Rock of Gibraltar’s warning of Ne Plus Ultra (no more beyond) on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea: “Stop now! This is the end of the known world. Don’t find out for yourself. You’ll be sorry! Monsters ahead!”
Like indomitable wind blasts and sea currents, stories carry us forward on the elemental power needed to sail past self-limiting beliefs and unexamined cultural bias. The storytellers and stories curated here on Kindred attempt to answer those unasked questions in the well-crafted tomes of the human consciousness explorers who stopped and turned back.
We don’t stop. We go there.
This month, we’re very excited to present two scholars who bravely lead science’s current stream of thought into emerging, integrated fields. Darcia Narvaez and Four Arrows are beloved Kindred board members and contributing editors who go there.
What does it look like when we intentionally steward human capacities for intelligent relationship with Life? As Darcia Narvaez answers for us, it looks like our Evolved Nest.
In her transdisciplinary research, books, and films featured on Kindred, Darcia presents her award-winning, holistic theory of our evolutionary path for wellbeing and wholeness. The Evolved Nest brings into tight focus our work at Kindred, and our role as the praxis, the living story of the Evolved Nest.
We hear over and over again, including in the podcast interview below, how worldview literacy supports our deep dive into exploring our Evolved Nest.
Four Arrows’ worldview scholarship reveals there are only two essential worldviews: our original, species-typical, Indigenous/Kinship Worldview, that views Nature as conscious and intelligent, and our Dominant Worldview that does not. (See Four Arrows and Darcia’s book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview.)
This summer, in an effort to bring more clarity and engagement with Kinship Worldview, Kindred World’s board members created the Worldview Literacy Project, featuring an updated and expanded Worldview Chart by Four Arrows. Because we are interested in gathering your experiences and insights – your stories – we created resources for self-study and community learning as well as a quick SURVEY on the new website, www.WorldviewLiteracy.org.
Four Arrows will launch the Worldview Literacy Project in his opening of the Veterans For Peace Convention on August 16, 2024. VFP and Kindred World are proud to announce their nonprofit partnership, made possible with a grant from Fielding University. Learn more about the event and this project here.
As we collectively face our planet’s meta crises, we are calling upon our capacities for meta-cognition, worldview literacy, and as a result, begin to identify ourselves as one species, one human family. The language and insights from Kinship Worldview and the Evolved Nest support this emergence and its need for coherence.
How grounded are our efforts here on Kindred? How capable of transforming our daily lives is our work?
Watch the interview with Andrea Dole, a mother of a disabled child, who found herself and her beliefs in nurturing reflected back to her through the Kinship Worldview and the science of the Evolved Nest. So much so, she recently presented to a group of Vanderbilt pediatricians her success in following her heart wisdom to nurture her son instead of abandoning him to recommended institutional care. You can watch her presentation of the Evolved Nest to the university physicians here.
Four Arrows and Darcia join us in the video podcast with Andrea and share their thoughts on what is possible when we reorient ourselves toward wholeness through a Kinship Worldview, and validate our nurturing instincts with Evolved Nest science and insights.
I’ve modified my original questions since beginning my Mother (of a) Quest from, “How do I do this?” to “How can we make room for what will seem like every day miracles to our old Dominant Worldview?”
Wholeness isn’t a miracle. It is our human birthright. Living stories, like Andrea and her son, James, show us what is possible in relationship with a living world.
Let’s go there.
Onward,
Kindred Magazine, Editor
Kindred World, Founder
editor@kindredmedia.org
RESOURCES, what we do best:
And you are welcome to join Darcia and me for a monthly live discussion about the films and our work at Kindred. (Register for the August 22, 1 pm ET, Zoom call.)
You can learn more about our human capacity for wholeness in our film trilogy here.
Check out the new Worldview Literacy Project website, where you can download free materials, including the Worldview Chart and Study Guide, and follow up with us in a survey: www.WorldviewLiteracy.org.
The science of our Evolved Nest is housed at Kindred World’s Evolved Nest Initiative and integrated here with Kindred’s New Story of the Human Family.
Read more about Darcia’s recent Presidential Citation from Division 24 of the American Psychological Association here.
