The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude.

Broadcaster Ian Skelly, co-author of the book Harmony, talks about a new film which explores the environmental philosophy and practical achievements of King Charles III

Sabahat Fida contemplates the implications of the caterpillar’s transformation for our understanding of identity

The village you left only hours before — so central then — now rests distant, far below, a small point on a broader unfolding. From this higher vantage, the landscape widens and reframes the familiar in a broader context, inviting the mind to stretch gently beyond its former edges, toward a new horizon.

1) We overrate knowledge and underrate not-knowing
2) We overrate comfort and underrate discomfort.
3) We overrate action and underrate non-action (stillness).

Dostoevsky asserted more than once that understanding is achieved primarily through the heart, rather than the rational mind, and the dry and dispassionate intellectualism (in his view) of the West was a particular object of his contempt, seeing it as a dilution of our humanity.

(There are in this view echoes of Kepler, who believed that the Earth itself is an ensouled body, and of myriad native cosmogonies that regard other animals as sources of more-than-human wisdom and emissaries of the numinous.)

Gabriel Rosenstock gives a poetic response to twelve visionary paintings by the ‘myriad-minded’ writer and polymath, while Jane Clark and Peter Huitson give an overview of his life, work and legacy.

Love
I suddenly felt a powerful rush of energy emerge from my chest like nothing I had ever experienced before and could not even imagine possible.

Brilliant article introducing how to contextualize our human experience --- from First Great Decentering: Copernicus, to the Second Great Decentering: Darwin, to the Third Great Decentering "supplanting the figure of the human as the measure and master of all things".

The Mandelbrot set with its marvellous patterns may help people accept that there can be a different way of understanding reality. —Dr Richard Gault

The philosopher Charles Taylor’s new book, ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them, Adam Gopnik writes.

Charlotte Maberly reviews a new book that argues that it is only by including human beings in nature that we can preserve it

Alan Ereira talks about the wisdom of the Kogi Indians and an important new UNESCO project in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.

Excerpt from The Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore

Ancient concepts of the relational interdependence of humans and nature are being revived.

A plan to stop technology from destroying free will, creating social anomie, and wrecking democracy.

"The prospect of being paid for carbon sequestration while building a resilient landscape... will ensure its permanency."

The great darkness says to me what I often say to heartbroken friends — “I don’t know.”