Letter from the Editor

Kindred’s November 2024 Issue

Read this issue in your browser here.

*

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”

― Rumi

What does the Mother Tree offer us at this time? By going deeper, nesting and nurturing our neurobiology, we will unfold our innate grounded capacities  to expand into a New Story for Humanity. As our Loveless Old Story composts itself, it is now time for us to become masters of Grounded Expansion/Love.

The Beech Mother Tree on the land we steward stands near the edge of the woods atop a sloping ravine between a small, red barn and a perennial, babbling brook. On a walk in the woods many years ago, we discovered the colossal tree and  knew instantly it was an Ent by the saggy elephant legs and waving tail on its Eastern side. Its Western side held out massive moss-covered arms along the forest floor, stretching toward the stream, creating perfect seating for two or three humans.

Mother Trees are the trees that have been around the longest and formed the most numerous and meaningful connections with their community. An Ent, if you haven’t met one, is a mythical shepherd of trees that “walks” around the woods at night, and when humans aren’t looking, to tend its tree family.  In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Ents are allies of the free peoples of Middle-earth. Our beloved tree was both.

Over the years, I have sat in the arms of the Mother Tree Ent listening to gurgling water in front of me and rustling leaves and bird calls from the expansive canopy above me. As I sink deeper into the strong arms of the Ent, I realize I am holding onto and being held by steadfast roots that disappear deep into the ground beneath and all around me. It is her hidden root system that supports her visible form.

Using my active imagination, I move along the Mother Tree’s roots, into, through, and out of the dark depths of earth, upward through the cambium, sap, and bark of the tree’s trunk toward sunlight, an impossible 80 feet skyward.  Steering my meditation, I move through long limbs and curling branches expanding beyond surrounding canopies, finally peering over the miles covered by the stream below on its journey to join the James River.

The dizzying view from the Mother Tree’s canopy exists, seemingly, in its own world. Eighty feet below, the dark, earthbound root system also thrives in its own world, with its own stories, legends, and mysteries. And yet they form one sentient being: one thriving, colossal, intelligent Mother Tree whose mastery of Grounded Expansion supports her own life, and many lives around her.

I first coined the phrase Grounded Expansion while exploring Integral Parenting as a Spiritual practice with Miriam Mason Martineau in this timeless Kindred podcast. I described kneeling before my young son, being fully present to our connection, and opening my heart as an experience of Grounded Expansion. But later I realized, of course, this is Love.

What we are experiencing now as a human family through meta-crises is the long-running manifestation of an ungrounded, myopic Dominant Worldview. America was identified eighty years ago as an anti-nurturing culture. Today, our notorious Taboo on Tenderness has dropped us to the bottom of all international indices for individual, maternal, infant, child and family wellness. We are predominantly a Loveless culture.

In healthy human development, our rootedness is developed by providing our Evolved Nest, our evolutionary pathway to wellbeing. By providing our Evolved Nest we support the unfolding of our Kinship Worldview, our innate relational capacities to nurture ourselves and all of our kin (trees too). Like the root system and canopy of the tree, these concepts may seem worlds apart, and yet together they reveal our path to wholeness.

Without our deep rootedness, however, we’re stuck in an ungrounded, myopic culture, creating stories with limited beliefs and very little Love. We explore both of these concepts, and their practical individual and collective applications, at Kindred.

For over a quarter century, Kindred World’s nonprofit vision has been to forge a New Story beyond our current ungrounded, myopic Old Story. If you are feeling a need to stretch beyond the din of our current cultural contraction and into a more expansive, Love-filled worldview, here are a few resources for you to explore.

Or, as Mother Trees and Ents are still allies of the free peoples of Middle-earth, and this Earth, you could just find your local Mother Tree Ent and sit with her for a while. She can also help you go deep and rise above this season.

Resources for Grounded Expansion

1. Find Nesting Tools, for grounded and soothing our neurobiology, here.
2. Reimagine your world in less than 30 minutes with the Evolved Nest’s trilogy of short films, including Breaking the Cycle, the Evolved Nest, and Reimagining Humanity. Find film discussion guides on each of these links.  JOIN US  for free monthly discussions! Register for November’s call.
   1. Breaking the Cycle illustrates our capacity for breaking our current Cycle of Competitive Detachment and returning to the pattern of 95% of our human history: a healthy, peaceful Cycle of Cooperative Companionship. Breaking the Cycle is based on the multi-award-winning book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, Wisdom.
   2. The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children is the second short film in a series that includes Reimagining Humanity and Breaking the Cycle. This short film in an accompaniment to the acclaimed book, The Evolved Nest, by Darcia Narvaez and G.A. Bradshaw. Read the foreword to the book by Gabor Maté, MD, here, and the first chapter of the book, here. Both are exclusively found on Kindred.
   3. The goal of Reimagining Humanity is to expand human imagination, based in deep history and transdisciplinary science, about human potential. We have not always been so stressed, disconnected and mindlessly destructive. For most of our species existence we have lived in cooperative companionship. The film illustrates what this looks like.
3. Download for free the Evolved Nest Self-Study and Communal Learning Curriculum to learn more about the nine components of our Evolved Nest, and how we can normalize nurturing.
4. Discover our collected resources for worldview literacy and shifting at the Worldview Literacy Project. You can download free Worldview Charts, study guides, and participate in a worldview chart survey.
5. When you’re ready, join the discussions on our dedicated Mighty Networks platform at www.KindredCommunity.org.
6. Help us with our own Grounded Expansion at Kindred World with your generous donation!