Audio read by guest editors

2020-2160

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Dear Future One,

Sometimes we find it hard to remember that we are the Great Turning, waking up this morning. As we look out at our smoky skies, remembering a virus that means we can’t seek refuge almost anywhere, we shift our attention to gratitude. “Dayenu” is a word from the Jewish tradition, meaning this, right here, is enough.

“Don’t Forget Your Tambourine” is one of the messages we have received from you. Thank you. Music is definitely part of how we’re moving through this moment.

“READ ME,” it said on the front of your message, and so we did, savoring each of your words. They left us yearning to respond. So here are our observations for the future generations. We write from a time of rapid climatic changes, trying to learn springtime lessons as fast as we can, while not letting our summertime memory fade. Corn mother is our teacher — the one who continues to grow even when the rains stop. We listen to her maíz narrativez.

It was really by accident that we find ourselves here, writing this letter to descendants. Change is coming so hot and fast, that death feels ever nearer. We know soon we will be but your poorvaj —  ਪੂਰ੍ਵਜ — that beautiful word in Punjabi meaning “ancestor”. We’re alive in times when we are endeavoring to uncover true histories — that’s all apocalypse really means. Just one practice is land acknowledgment — learning where we sit beneath the illusion of colonization and capitalism. While honoring our pain is a core practice in our time, we also get to experience it coming back around to gratitude — spirals of joy, one, two and three.
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It’s a blessing to receive this fragment from you, ancestor. I’m writing back to let you know we’re coming to visit, to share a glimpse of our world and how we got here. Post-pandemic, post-revolution, as our hearts healed, we worked to remember the beautiful darkness of the unravelling. There might be time to save your world… if you heed our warnings. From this side we can tell you that so much has been lost and found. We surrendered to loving death, and found through wild listening our true freedom.

There are pieces of our world you won’t yet be able to understand. We had to escape much horror, slipping through space and time by way of Ocean Garden Hologram I-VII. Stability? We don’t have that anymore. We are the next generation of the ones that came after the great unravelling. We’re coming to visit you, The Beforers (as we have come to call you) to share some somatic stories, from one generation to another. In case we don’t make it, we have one core piece of advice: gather the seeds. Literal and metaphorical, you will need them all. Life will become a grand experiment, survival dependent mostly on choices you have already made, but still partly on the ones ahead of you. Beware The Impossible Train Story. You still have time. We, together, are trans-incarnate.

Note: you can find the playlists with all the voice recordings from the submissions here (for Waking Up This Morning) and here (for Lost & Found)
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This issue of Deep Times is brought to you by guest editors Morgan Curtis, Armando Davila, Connor Gibson, and Phoebe Tickell. We invited our contributors, and ourselves, into a conversation between present beings and future ones, 140 years from now, living in a mostly devastated world within which just a few have built something beautiful. May you, reader, be inspired, undone and changed by the dialogue.

Deep Times: A Journal of The Work That Reconnects

Vol. #5 Issue #2 – October 2020

Editor: Molly Brown
Editorial  Guest Team: Morgan Curtis, Armando Davila, Connor Gibson, and Phoebe Tickell

Editorial Team: Aravinda Ananda, Karina Lutz , Martha O’Hehir (poetry editor), Carmen Rumbaut, Rebecca Selove, Carolyn Treadway, David Voelker, Frieda Nixdorf and Silvia Di Blasio.  More information here.
Webmaster:  Silvia Di Blasio
Graphic Design: Frieda Nixdorf.

The next issue of Deep Times is planned for March 2021.  We invite your submissions of articles, essays, poems, images, or other material.  Please check the Submission Guidelines and send submissions, proposals and queries to [email protected] by January 15, 2020.

Deep Times is published online twice a year by the Work That Reconnects Network. The Network provides support, guidance, and inspiration to people all over the world in their work for the Great Turning. We welcome your donations to support the Work That Reconnects Network and Deep Times. The Work That Reconnects Network is currently a fiscal project of Interhelp so all donations are tax-deductible.

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0.