More than 35 years ago, after the death of a friend, I wrote this poem following an experience that profoundly affected me.
Listening to it again now, I’m struck by how much of the journey I have been writing about was already there, long before I had words like Culture of Separation, Ancient Blueprint, or Symbiotic Culture.
I wrote then that:
Love isn’t sentimental, but it is the glue that connects and keeps the entire universe whole.
And the message I heard was intensely practical: become an empty vessel for Love; love those who are different from you, across clans and tribes; begin with yourself and your family; serve the people, rivers, living things, and culture of the place where you live.
Looking back, I can see a progression running through that experience:
Heart of Love → empty vessel → love across clans and tribes → self and family → people and living beings of the region → community → nation and world → thousands of local communities.
Listening to those words more than 35 years later, I now have language that helps me make sense of what I experienced then. The ancient Christian understanding of the Logos helped me make sense of the deeper wisdom and relational order I sensed woven through creation.
Divine Love is not something we manufacture, but something already present that we can open ourselves to, participate in, and embody.
I have come to see Love not simply as a feeling or sentiment, but as part of the invisible architecture of reality—the relational power through which life is held together.
I’ve explored what it might mean to understand Love this way: What If Love Was the Blueprint for Society?
But one question has followed me ever since: If this Love is woven through creation, why is so much of human life organized around separation?
And how might that Love move from an inner spiritual reality into the relationships and structures of human life?
What I have come to call the Ancient Blueprint is the recurring pattern I first witnessed in nature and later began searching for in human life—a pattern through which Love can take form, from inner transformation, through Virtue and relationship, into families, communities, institutions, and ultimately culture.
Most striking to me now is the vision at the end of the poem: thousands of local communities coming together through what I called an “unnamed eruption of spirit.”
I’ve spent much of the last 35 years trying to understand how such a vision could actually become a lived social reality.
Over the last few years, in conversations with friends and colleagues in nonreligious spiritual, regenerative, and new-economy circles, I kept hearing a different answer: bring people together under the right conditions, and coherence can self-organize. Create the right relationships and processes, and new possibilities can emerge.
I have come to wonder whether this is only half the story.
What if there is also a deeper coherence already present—woven through creation and the relationships between us—and part of our work is to become receptive to it, align ourselves with it, and allow something new to emerge from it?
This doesn’t reject emergence or self-organization. It places them within a larger frame: coherence can emerge among us because we are participating in a coherence that precedes us.
This may also offer a bridge between two worlds that too often speak different languages: people rooted in religious traditions and those exploring spirituality outside religion. Perhaps both are reaching toward different dimensions of the same mystery—how we participate in something larger than ourselves and bring it alive in the world.
And that has led me to a possibility that turns much of our conventional approach to social change around:
Perhaps coherence is not something we create through better systems and structures. Perhaps coherence precedes design.
That discovery is at the heart of a new essay I’m working on.
And if coherence precedes design, another question follows:
What might a strategy for social change actually look like if we began there?
I’ve been exploring that question through my own community-building experience and what I have learned from other community-building movements throughout history in The Ancient Blueprint: Building a Culture of Connection in a Broken World
More soon.
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ahhh...agree
love is the blue light reflected deep in the lake that imprints us with belonging
Love = A Blueprint of Belonging
Yes, your poetic instincts were right
A northstar that has gotten you this far
and the light you share
is so full of hope, love and care
it is shifting the frequency
of the biological art
that has been here from the start
no need to take it apart
when its connected to our heart
TaHoh!