Soulcraft Musings

Friday, May 16, 2025

Creating a New World, Part I

Beyond Here Be Dragons

[NOTE: Although this Musing series is adapted from a few pages I originally published in 2013, in Wild Mind, I see it as still quite relevant for our current times and crises.]

The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.

~ Joanna Macy [1]

As a culture and as a planet, we’re now collectively toppling over the edge of the world as we’ve known and mapped it, into a future that, without doubt, will confront us with unprecedented danger, hardship, and suffering — greater, even, than that of past centuries — as well as unparalleled opportunities. We’ve already been besieged for quite some time by the formidable human-spawned dragons of climate destabilization, environmental and genetic poisoning, species loss, nuclear accidents and weaponry, epidemics, resource scarcity (“peak everything”), overpopulation, and endless resource wars (masquerading as rescue missions). And there will be additional dragons of these kinds, quite possibly fiercer, materializing soon enough.

But at least we’re beginning to consciously recognize that we have, in fact, wandered, irreversibly, beyond the edge of our previous world and outside the range of the prosaic stories we’ve been telling each other for millennia. We’ve crossed beyond all familiar borders into an unknown mysterious territory, a mythic realm in which we no longer recognize our world or ourselves.

Here in this new realm, if we are to survive, we must be radically reshaped. We must be transformed by our encounters with dragons of another sort — dragons that have been waiting for us in the depths of our individual and collective Shadows, the dragons of our own forsaken or never-known potentials, the dragons of our human destiny. Engaging these demons, angels, and shape-shifters constitutes the necessary dangerous opportunity of our time, the current initiatory journey of our species and planet.

The future — ours, and that of everything else on Earth — will be what we make it: we, the humans of the generations currently alive. We’re going to need all the resources of our innate wholeness if we, as a species, are going to accomplish something our ancestors would be proud of and future generations will be grateful for.

In one sense, we’re all emigrants now, on a great sea voyage, and a long way yet from the shores of the new world, a place no one has yet visited. We’re not even sure such a place really exists, or, if it does, whether we’ll ever arrive there. We could all perish in the Great Storm while still in our Lifeboats.

But, in another sense, emigration is entirely the wrong metaphor. We’re not actually going to reach a new world, the reason simply being that a new world does not exist somewhere “out there.” A new world, a new story, is one we’ll either manifest ourselves or there won’t be one.

To create and live by a new story is to invent a new, healthier, and more mature culture. In the next two Musings, we’ll take a look at the fundamental dimensions of culture (re-)invention.

Adapted from Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche (New World Library, 2013)

References

[1] Joanna Macy, from the website, Joanna Macy and Her Work, www.joannamacy.net, accessed November 29, 2012

To read previous musings click here.