The other night, over drinks, a recently-divorced friend described her search for a new chapter in life as the rediscovery of her own “aliveness.”
Without realizing it, she explained, the rhythm of her life had settled into its own quiet form of desperation, the dormant spirit of which too many of us try to awaken with a renewed commitment to our social media accounts. Inevitably, however, such hashtag-fueled community-seeking is often nothing more than zombified simulacrum.
How, then, do we rediscover our own aliveness?
The German biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber has a lot of thoughts on this subject — thoughts that are refreshingly grounded in a deep understanding of living systems, and, as he puts it, the very biology of wonder.
I first encountered Andreas’s work two years ago when I was immersed in the research that would eventually yield Seed + Spark. In his dendritic poetics, I found a kindred spirit for my own peripatetic search for meaning. At the center of his being is a refutation of the synthetic trappings of modern culture, and an invitation to return to the primordial source.
“With our craving to build a new and better world,” he writes, “we have thoughtlessly given up that one crucial sphere to which we are linked by the umbilical cord of life. We have attempted to sneak away from our Siamese connection with all other beings. We have tried to escape from ourselves.”
How will we find our way(s) back home? And how can we all, as Andreas puts it, share the sentient body of the animate world?
Join us this Wednesday night — April 13, 2022, at 8pm EST (via this link), for a vibrant, free-slowing conversation about aliveness, feeling and the nexus of science and spirituality.
(this is how we #changethestory . . .)