At the Apex of Transformation

We are living at a moment that will be looked back upon the way we look back at the invention of fire, the emergence of language, the Renaissance. We are at the apex — the hinge point — of transformation.

I say this not as hyperbole. I say it as a sociologist, a shamanic practitioner, an 86-year-old man who has watched the arc of this civilization across nearly a century. I have watched the consciousness revolution of the 1960s, the digital revolution of the 1990s, and now the emergence of Artificial Intelligence — a development so profound that most of us have not yet understood what it means.

At the same moment, we face the consequences of 10,000 years of a particular story — what Daniel Quinn calls the "Taker" civilization — a story that told us we were separate from nature, that the land was a resource, that more was always better, that the individual was the fundamental unit of meaning. That story is breaking down. We can see it breaking down in real time.

And here is what I have learned from fifty years of shamanic work, from the Dagara teachings of Malidoma Somé, from Jean Auel's rendering of our Paleolithic ancestors, from the Potawatomi wisdom of Robin Wall Kimmerer: when a story breaks down, the question is not what comes next — it is what was always true and was temporarily forgotten.

What was always true is the village.

Not as a romantic fantasy. Not as a return to something primitive. As the human-scale arrangement that allowed our species to survive, to thrive, to create culture and ceremony and meaning for hundreds of thousands of years before the great forgetting.

The village is 40 to 400 people. Small enough to know each other. Large enough to hold the full range of life. With elders who carry the memory, neophytes who carry the future, and everyone in between doing the work of being human together.

The great world-changing movements have always begun this way — in small, intentional communities where people practiced something new before the larger world was ready to receive it. The early Christians. The Quakers. The kibbutzim. The intentional communities of the 1960s and 70s — which, for all their failures, planted seeds that are only now germinating.

The stories that carry this memory are everywhere, if you know how to look. Jean Auel spent decades researching the Paleolithic village in the Clan of the Cave Bear series. Ursula Le Guin imagined a future village civilization in Always Coming Home. Starhawk built one in The Fifth Sacred Thing. These are not escapist fantasies. They are maps.

We are at the apex of transformation. The old story is ending. The new one — which is also the oldest one — is trying to be born.

Soul Cultivation Now exists to midwife that birth. To train Village Elders. To create curricula that can be carried into neighborhoods and faith communities and families and circles of friends. To demonstrate, in real time, that the village is not dead — it is dormant. And dormancy is not death. It is waiting.

If you are reading this and something in you is saying yes — not with your mind, but with something deeper — then you already know what I am talking about. You have always known.

The question is not whether the village is possible. The question is whether you are willing to be one of the people who begins it.