Evolving natures
Pitch dark, softened by new snow, I enter the new year. Figuratively and practically I've learnt to walk again. Metaphorically, that's the spirit of our year, invisible forces becoming visible.
She’ll let you in her house
If you come knockin’ late at night
She’ll let you … deep inside
But there’s a secret garden she hides
Secret garden, Bruce Springsteen
This series is tracking nature: As it runs through us from childhood — while we are identified with everything around us; To setting it aside — just something to enjoy, occasionally breathless, being in the connections and vistas into awe. Maybe that amazement tips into our awareness, cognisance of our altered state, noticing the interpenetrating-melting of ourselves with the entireness around; And now, given what we are intimately part of, there’s a co-evolving too.1
Nature is a consciously co-creating partner. That’s highlighted by a catalyst for this series, 147 governments and the UN endorsing “spiritually reconnecting humans and nature”.
This extraordinary outcome is from a profound depth of science as well as the reality of our shared connections: sensing at some level, wonderment. We feel this in an old-growth forest, or watching big cats perambulating over the savanna, or a sunset lighting us into inner and outer translucence: rays of amber, amaranth and gold over the sky, through us and all around as it sets into the sea.
As well as trust: those representatives need confidence. They’ll be held to account by their colleagues and managers.2
So what helps us evolve, hold space for this trust and open into meta-trust?
New-creating
It’s New Year’s Eve and I’ve learnt to walk again. Quite literally, a part of my path to recovery, most of the year’s been spent on the floor, is re-learning what was previously easy.3
The first time I try something that’s been lost it wipes me out, full crash into raging symptoms. Second time a little easier, far more normalised. Third time nearly full capacity.
This pattern holds for everything — writing, talking and yes, walking. Knowing this I’ve left my house heading for the pass, made it 100 metres cross-country before turning around and shambling back. Second time, a few days later, it is a kilometre. Then suddenly it’s snowing, it’s New Year’s Eve, 7 pm at night, and totally dark in these far north latitudes.
I figure:
Pack a tent
See how far I get
Worst case I’ll stop, pitch it early and work out where I am when it gets light
It’s crystal dark-soft. Enough snow to gentle the landscape underfoot. Clouded, still snowing lightly, light-less. Enough definition to discern the next hill, circumnavigate the lochins and bogs. Little enough distinctness so I’m navigating by touch, sensing into the place as guided by the curving landscape. Once, momentarily needing a compass for re-assurance.
For the innermost decision,
That we cannot but obey…
May the lights in the land of plenty
Shine on the truth some day.
The Land of Plenty, Leonard Cohen
It smooths into a million-like, inner-most decision space: each step, each curve to the hill scarp. Along and up the old — familiar from what feels now like an æons-ancient memory — across to the escarpment, waterfall line. That’s a defining threshold, surge of pride: I’m kilometres from my house, climbing seriously to reach the saddle, landforms on both sides cradling me there, snow to mid-thigh height, softness abounds.
There’s an absolute gentleness to our landscape and world under new snow. Softens our touch, being with and as a view and place that’s been timeless like this. A slownesss that expands, amplified across the far north-solstice time too. It’s blanketing my being, letting love suffuse, like a diffusion into and as the particles across the land. A visceral sense of peace, it’s all done, with the interpenetrating sense of these particulates and more through me. As they have been, with all here, across time.
Realities 1
As you’ve been moving surely toward me
My soul has comforted and assured me…
So I’ve sat and I’ve watched an ice-age thaw
Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Sensing our connectedness, stepping into our multiple intelligence and the normalising of this — from woo to wow — is the zeitgeist of our year. For me, 3 years ago, walking up to the Roineàbhal saddle in the snowy night, is very much a part of making these connections.
These handrails run across time, embodiment and reclaiming our trust in sensing, intuiting and feeling. We’re far more than just cognitive beings and this year there’ve been many standouts to amplify that greater awareness:
Non-local consciousness becoming a New York Times bestselling thriller.
Personal conversations where we’re wanting more, rejecting the old metrics of success.
The extraordinary evidence for forest collective sentience.
They are shifting us, touch-points to measure ourselves against, check our realities, be assured into exploring more.4
Realities 2
The [I/we] perspective is set in brackets because we seem to lack the exact words to communicate the essence of our connection.
Karen O’Brien5
I hear about connection and oneness, we are all one, in many pieces around me.
When I talk about it and ask people about it — experiences of flow and awe, being in our highest selfs, all-one, connected — it is super common to hear:
I can’t really describe what this feels like
It’s difficult to put into words
I engage and don’t name
Yet that willingness is already creating steps past old limiting frames. Those include our society’s privileging of mechanical science at the expense of beauty and goodness. We’ve developed language to talk in those constituent science micro-components. Simultaneously, similar evolutions of our collective expression and subtle languages have lagged behind.
Realities 3
The last great shift in our understanding of existence was the scientific revolution, which saw the rejection of mythic religion leaving us in a meaningless universe.
The next big shift will see a return of spirituality, but in a radically new way that could only exist after the discovery that existence is a process of evolution.
Tim Freke
As a child my magical worlds were subsumed by modern-day science. For others it is by organised major-modern faiths. Both dimmish, labelling perception as superstition: the dogma of rejection killing curiosity and inquiry. Easy to ignore what we don’t want — for me spirituality, others science.
Yet it’s obvious more is going on. This is subjectively present for all of us, all who’ve had experiences of awe, wonder and including into bliss and oneness. Which automatically gets me asking about what’s changed, why can we get past those limitations more easily now?
Our collective psyche is evolving too!
We’ve great evidence the universe is a probability enhancing machine, not the least the continuous evolution of more complex life. However, if that’s the case, it’s totally reasonable that our collective understanding and connectedness is evolving too — embracing nourishment, illumination and integration — in a process of evolutionary emergence. Into and beyond, far more than the sum of the old damnation and paradise parts.6
2026 openings
And really? This is a love song
As constant as the pendulum,
Her heart beat always glad…
Joy is free to a’ where scented clover grows,
Whaur the echo mocks the corncrake amang the whinnie knowes.
The Corncrake, Janice Burns & Jon Doran
You’ll already see this in the land and all relationships around us.
May 2026 be a time of co-creating and remembering far more of them and our wholeness.
Please set off with your actual and metaphorical tents. See how far you get. You can always stop and camp when needed.
I’ll join you.
Pictures: Cairngorms, Highlands Scotland. 26 Dec 2025; Roineàbhal saddle, Harris, Western Isles. Morning after 31 Dec 2022. Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US.
This journey is done as stories and a playlist as we feel, sense and intuit such awareness before adding rationality to it.
You are reading part 3. Descent is part 1 and The nadir is part 2. With all as a triplicate of articles in a three act romp — The rascal, the mongrel and the seeker:
Act 1, the rascal
Scene 1 is The rascals immunity
Scene 2 is Rascal visions
Scene 3 is Rascal’s descent
Scene 4 is Boom, crash, bounce?
Act 2, the mongrel
Scene 1 is The Rascal and the Mongrel
Scene 2 is Western logic
Scene 3 is Unfolding realities
Scene 4 is The red pill
Act 3, the seeker
Scene 1 is Bondi bend
Scene 2 is Descent, Regeneration Pt 1
Scene 3 is The Nadir, Regeneration Pt 2
Scene 4 is this article, Evolving natures, Regeneration Pt 3
There is one interlude: That rascal. Got me
I am deeply indebted to my dear, dear friend Teresa Zimmermann including inspiration to write, developmental brilliance, integrate the songs … and so much more.
The 147 government and UN outcome is from an international process, IPBES. It’s the summary for policy makers, biodiversity Transformational Change Assessment, concluded December 2024 after a 3 year science process. For more see https://soulcraft.space/#ipbes (note I’m an IPBES author).
See Act 1, The rascal. Link in footnote 1 above.
Dan Brown’s Secret of Secrets. I was expecting consciousness to play a small part. Instead it’s front and centre, driving the story, surprising the hell out of me. Then I learnt something about my year on the floor too. I’d not had the capacity to research the neuroscience of epilepsy, too busy recovering. You’ll find congruent pieces here, in Secrets of Secrets, about GABA, the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter and its dysfunction that is fundamentally linked to epilepsy. Alongside both GABA and epilepsy is an entanglement of these into profound senses of unity or spiritual connection people, including me, experience in such states (along with the totally problematic parts of seizures too). Amazon and Public library.
Forest collective sentience, Nate Hagens & Anastassia Makarieva. Our forests learnt to consciously create their global environment for harmony. Humans, a more complex order of collective beings, are currently doing this. More on this viewquake and evoking meta-trust here>
Karen O'Brien, You matter more than you think. Draft for discussion, June 2020 p5.
For evolution of our collective psyche see: Tim Freke’s fabulous interview with Alexander Beiner (paid substack); Tom Morgan a New Worldview, an awesome substack interview; and, Tim’s fantastic podbook (free).
Ken Wilber’s the universe as a probability enhancing machine. Finding Radical Wholeness Amazon and Public library
Emergence of higher orders: Elegant attraction is a great talk by Daniel Schmachtenberger on this, here>