From Emergency to Emergence

March 2019

The Story That Unites

I was awoken in the early hours of the morning by a collective voice in my head. The ancestors were calling me from my slumber. I was visiting a friend in the mountains of Montana. It was March. Snow was still lying on the ground and capping the tops of the Rockies that curled around the house like the embrace of a lover. The voice asked me to rise and go outside. After a moment of hesitation I dressed, emerging from the house into a bright clear, mountain dawn.

Drawing breath at the splendour of the scene around me, I walked barefoot across grass crisp with frost. The moon hung as a crescent, low in the purple sky and the morning stars were still visible above me. As the first rays of the rose gold sunshine kissed the slopes of the mountains awake, I found myself approaching the wooden fence where my friend’s horse Epona was waiting for me. Dark bay in colour with a white lightning bolt on her forelock, she walked gently across the pasture to greet me. Moving slowly, guided by a force greater than my intellect, I found myself leaning forwards. Instead of the predictable human action of reaching my hand out to ‘pet’, my head kept going. I found myself face to face, until my forehead touched that of my horse friend.

Time hung still. I don’t remember noticing any sound, except that of our collective heart beat felt skin to skin. We rested there in communion for what seemed like an eternity although it was probably only 15 seconds in the ‘real world’. We were peaceful, living, connected. As I started to lift my head up to gaze into Epona’s dark, soft brown eyes, I heard the voice speak once again.

“You must tell the story that unites.” They said.

Their words vibrated across the valley.

Emergency or Emergence?

It is obvious to many of us that we are facing ‘emergencies’ of various states and forms across our beautiful planet. Whether this is through the destruction of ecosystems and ancient habitats for agriculture or mining, the increasingly unfair distribution of wealth across social demographics, or the disintegration of communities in our increasingly urbanised landscapes, we are all…

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