When I was in my early thirties, the certainties I had grown up with disappeared from my life. Doubt became the starting point of my exploration, which has led to a rich harvest via different pathways and crossings and as I dared to question everything, including rationality itself. I tried to find my way in the logical analytics of my thinking, and, on the other hand moved by my sensitivity to the mystery of existence. I gained many new insights into the great dimensions of existence. For me the beauty consists in the fact that patterns, regularity, and form can arise from the basic forces and principles of physics and chemistry, selected and refined by the exigencies of biological evolution. I have looked at the stars, daring to marvel at the mystery of the universe, and have been confronted with an overwhelming mysterium mundi, and I am beginning to somewhat understand my place in space and time. This invites me to listen, think, sense, feel, and intuit the next move — being responsive, responsible, and regenerative, capable of directing emotionality to reality outside myself, without sacrificing my own subjective experience. There have been many shifts in value, and I look now at the world in a different way, a look with genuine concern. If I had to live purely in critical rationality and reduce my ethical consciousness to a legalistic convention… how to breathe in the thin air of a cold world. It is time to reperceive life as a planetary process of cooperation in which a unified whole expressing itself on nested temporal and spatial scales of complexity evolves in intimate reciprocity as a living planet.
For me life is a regenerative community rooted in patters of symbiosis and cooperation that creates shared abundance and conditions to life. But under the current global context of trespassing Earth System integrity, one can predict that new and/or less predictable abiotic and biotic stressors will affect symbiotic interactions with potential cascading effects on the eco-evolutionary population dynamics of host species and the communities in which they are embedded. Climate tipping points are conditions beyond which changes in a part of the climate system become self-perpetuating. These changes may lead to abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity. It is desperately important to understand that climate change is just one of the global thresholds (tipping point) of Earth System integrity and regime shifts. Less than 3% of our Earth’s ecosystems remain untouched by human influence and whether we intend to or not, our choices have and will have profound impacts on the future of Earth’s biomes, and through reciprocal feedbacks, our own species. The fact that we have agency (and responsibility) should empower us to take a more active role.
I wish, hope, that we will understand that humanity exist in a dynamic, multi-scale landscape in which multiple symbioses with biological, human, and cultural components are interacting, declining, forming and evolving simultaneously. This forces us to re-examine our relationships with the natural world. It is not realistic to maintain a perspective that views us as detached from the Earth’s ecosystems, acting merely as custodians or guardians. We have no choice but to face Gaia and understand that we and the effects of our society are inextricably connected with all ecosystems on Earth today
We literally are — at one and the same time — participants, agents, and emergent properties of life as a planetary process and the transforming nested complexity it expresses. We can recognize our profound interbeing and interdependence with the rest of the community of life. We can create diverse regenerative cultures as elegant expressions of the bio-cultural uniqueness of the places and bioregions they inhabit. We are not selfish beings whose emotionality is only in service of himself. Altruism is equally part of our nature and emotionality can transcend our ego-centeredness. We will need to collaborate locally and globally to restore ecosystems and planetary health. We are capable of co-creating conditions conducive for life and a thriving future for all of humanity.
The elusiveness of life and the cosmos in which we live escapes our rational thinking and in that sense it is silent. I’m still on my journey gripped and guided by the mystery of existence. You’re invited.