Chapter One

(Agents of Evolution)

Welcome to the Agents of Evolution author community. I am so deeply grateful to have your support on this book publishing journey.

Over the next five months until the book makes it across the finish line in August I will be writing you at choice moments along the path – moments like when I need to choose a book cover and want your input! – probably about once or twice a month. As the project grows and develops, you’ll have a front row seat.

Below I’m sharing with you an excerpt from Chapter One of the book, to give you a sense of the inspiration behind writing the book, and a bit of a feeling for its content. Though this excerpt may still go through revisions, my publisher is encouraging me to share it with you now, as a way of expressing gratitude for your support.

I would love to know what reading this brings up for you; I welcome your comments.

Enjoy…

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I am standing on the balcony of the San Francisco Art Institute on a crisp September day in 2019. As I take in the sweeping vistas of the bay, I see dwellings precariously stacked on the hillsides like so many delicate, brightly colored blocks piled high in a bold, metropolitan flourish. Tomorrow I will shoot at the global climate strike organized by youth for a film I am working on about climate change. A palpable frenzy permeates the social air. My phone is blowing up with texts about how great the strike is going to be and posts about Greta Thunberg, the human icon for this political moment.

But I feel a deeper pulse below the surface, underneath the jittery enthusiasm. It moves as a gray blob surrounding the whole land mass of the San Francisco Bay Area. It deals in dread, and fear, and is buttoned up in a stylish costume of denial. My astrologer self knows that next year, in 2020, a historic conjunction of the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto promises a grand shake-up of our social structures. I think that’s likely to be massive climate events, especially here. All the protests, all the films, all the bandaid-like positive actions in the world won’t amount to a hill of beans when a climate event hits this area. I pause as my stomach sinks beneath me, standing on this balcony in the Russian Hill district, desperately attempting to find solid ground.

Aware of my privilege to be here on this balcony right now, memories from my 20’s, my 30’s, my 40’s, and now my 50’s return to me. This city, more lover than zip code, more muse than metropolis, has called and shaped and grown my artistic soul in inexpressible ways. I took up residence in many of her neighborhoods from 1997 - 2000 and have returned since then for months at a time for stints of work. Her hills live in my bones. Her waters run in my blood. Her stories have put the contours in my language.

Like many of us, at some point in my early 30’s, a little after my Saturn Return, I realized I would not be able to walk the traditional path of career and family as defined by my culture. My awareness had me probing into what makes us human beings who we are, and how to understand our place in the grand scheme of things. I would go on to pursue spiritual paths and healing modalities and ancient wisdom teachings that would offer me clues into these vast subjects. For many years I would try to keep up the façade of being “normal,” holding down jobs and continuing with lines of work that would help me fit in, even trying on marriage a couple of times. But more and more the Path itself led me toward a very unique life – one that exquisitely expressed my true colors. San Francisco had been able to meet me through all those stages of metamorphosis. And here she lay, chugging and heaving before me.

Intimacy with San Francisco as muse allowed me a style of animist communication with her not unknown to indigenous peoples. I found I could speak with her, seek her counsel, relate to her, much like I would relate to a beloved person. She is a being, after all. Just because she’s not human doesn’t mean she doesn’t hear me, and when I’m lucky, answer me back in ways I can understand.

Standing on that balcony with the wind whipping at the waters not far below me, I asked her if she would inevitably succumb to the entropy of climate disasters, political decay, economic breakdown and social collapse. “Protests won’t prevent your demise,” I lamented to her, confessing my deepest fears. “Neither will films. Nor big movements throwing good intentions at the growing problems.”

The wind picking up as an affirmative, I grew quiet, leaning in to the pause in our conversation. Then, randomly reflecting on all the people I would be meeting tomorrow, all the kind, caring, excellent, bright beings who were all doing the best we knew how. I presented these images to her and she shot right back, a small leaf landing at my feet.

“Start where you are,” the leaf seemed to say as she blew my way.

“Oh, that’s realistic,” I was now muttering out loud to myself. “What can any one person do in the face of possible human extinction? These problems are bigger than I am.”

The beauty of the mists offered comfort to that weak-kneed part of me losing courage. “You are not one person. You are multitudes. Through me, you are connected. Together, you are vast,” I took from the movement of her mists. I began tuning in to these others all feeling these same feels, growing these same antennae, sending and receiving signals from points all along the earth.

This book is for those souls--those of you who have also heard this call.

The Evolutionary Call

Receiving the evolutionary call is optional. Not everyone responds to that call when it comes. And I don’t judge anyone who doesn’t – it can be terrifying. But it’s also exhilarating, and highly rewarding. The thing is that ultimately, not heeding the call just prolongs the inevitable. But you do have the option to defer.

The call of evolution essentially requires growing up. Not just in body and mind. It is entirely possible to be a child in an adult’s body. In addition to your body and mind, the task of growing up also involves your heart and soul.

Historian Richard Tarnas points to this when he observes, “Humanity's 'progress of knowledge' and the 'evolution of consciousness' have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts.” ¹

So whose job is this multi-dimensional, evolutionary development? Mine? Yours? If I decide not to take the call, are you fucked?

Your Evolution Speeds Up Mine

When our bodies get sick, it’s not like all of us fails. We might have a cold and still be able to do basic tasks. Similarly, it’s not like one person deciding they won’t evolve kills the deal for everyone.

We on earth are one living, breathing organism – one complete system. Including the Earth that we live on. Thus, the human being evolves as one system.

Not only that, we evolve as one system, through all time. Modern mystic Thomas Hübl was getting at this when he wrote, “It is through incarnation that we come to be rooted in a human life and in its story – though the story we are here to transform is not ours alone, but the collective human story, and ultimately, of life in toto. Indeed, we are actors in a shared hero’s journey, a grand narrative in which we conspire with all members of our race once living, now living, and all those yet to come.” ²

When something happens for one human being, it can affect the whole system. We evolve both individually, and collectively, in mind-bendingly interdependent ways. Your individual evolution speeds up mine. When the collective is ready to evolve certain aspects of its own awareness, you have more evolutionary juice available to you.

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1. Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, p. 487

2. Thomas Huebl, Healing Collective Trauma, p. 32