Holly, your work opens up old wounds that I thought I’d papered over. I guess I need to rib off the old scab of callous cynicism and let the fresh light of a new vision work on that deep pain.

When I graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, MS in 1970 with my fresh B.A. in history, I was a wreck. My mental and emotional state was so bad one of my professors told me,”You’ve just given a textbook definition of anomie,” when I described my condition to him. I fled Mississippi a year later for Denver, supposedly for law school, but really trying to flee the demons haunting my soul. Didn’t work. They were inside and no amount of self medication with drugs, alcohol and meaningless relationships would make them leave.I spent endless nights curled in a fetal position in my bed, a joint or beer in my hand, a Bible and a loaded Colt .45 1911 within reach. Silent screams ripped through my sleep as I tried desperately to ease the pain.

I didn’t trust any outside authority but knew on a deep level there had to be another way. I, and we as a people, couldn’t survive this eruption of evil from humanity’s long tortured past for much longer. Change or die.

But how? Violent revolution hadn’t worked — the “winners,” making their grandiose pronouncements from the mountain of corpses on which they stood, differed only in name from the tyrants they’d overthrown. Conditions for most of the world’s people, especially women and people of color, remained dismal.

One summer day in 1974 I happened on an open air talk a man named Buckminster Fuller (Bucky) was giving in Civic Center Park here in Denver. I stopped to check it out and stayed, because one phrase stuck in my head: Youth, Truth and Love. Wow, this is different.

Bucky was, indeed, different. Then in his late ’70’s, he’d dedicated his whole life to his self chosen mission: seeing what one person, unaided by governments or corporations; observing and following the laws of nature; dedicated to designing tools that people could use to make their lives better, could accomplish. He believed that both capitalism and communism were based on false premises (Malthusian scarcity and Social Darwinism) and that humanity is at a turning point. Utopia or Oblivion. For the first time in human history, humanity has the chance to create a successful future with a higher quality of life, in partnership with rhe Earth, and without one group of people dominating others.

A straw of hope, and I grabbed it.

Bucky was a first step, but he did not answer my concerns about alternatives to our, so called, two party, system. For me, capitalism and communism are like the two sides of the same coin: one the heads, the other the tails, endlessly spinning in the air. No real choice, is it?

Not until I, wandering thru the Tattered Cover Bookstore in the late ’80’s, discovered Riane Eisler did I have another “AH HA!” moment. Her The Chalice and the Blade transformed my thinking, my politics and my life. I’ve taken every one of her webinars, on economics, cultural transformation and partnership power and highly recommend them to everyone who is totally sick of the pablum our pet poodles in the media try to spoon feed us whenever we turn on the lobotomy box.

Eisler’s personal story is quite a journey. She tells it better than I can, so I’ll let you find it for yourself in her writings, on YouTube, or on her organization’s website: www.centerforpartnership.org.

Basically, she describes the transformation humanity is going thru as a swing of a pendulum along an arc from Dominator/Control (DC) to Partnership/Respect (PR). The pendulum has kind of been stuck at the DC end for almost 5000 years, but is now swinging toward the PR end. Especially in the last 500 years, from the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, thru the Industrial, ages, the rate of change is increasing as the pendulum gains momentum on its return arc.

This stress we all are feeling is real, but as more and more of us tune ourselves to the music of the Partnership era, the song grows stronger. Holly already knows what I took 45 years to figure out. I hope these resources I’ve come across will make your journey easier. They are great fun. The more you practice with them, the more doors you’ll discover, or invent, for yourselves.

One final note: Sacred Economics, by Charles Eisenstein, is the newest new vision I’ve found. Despite the title, it’s not a New Agey kind of book, with puffy clouds and Kumbaya touchy-feely sentiments. It’s a real, pragmatic, discussion of how we can develop systems of money and economic accounting techniques that honor human creativity and ND our partnership with the Earth.

Happy healing!