The Greatest Regeneration
Some years ago we heard about “The Greatest Generation” and it led us down a path of respecting our elders. The year was 1998 and the author was newsman, Tom Brokaw, and the people he was talking about are now mostly all gone. Today their children make up the bulk of our living elders and they did not live through the Great Depression, nor did they fight in World War II, and neither did we. This means we are all unproven in our greatness, or are we?
The thing I didn’t like about the idea of a Greatest Generation is that it quickly went from respect for our elders to setting up a nostalgic precedent that nobody alive could ever match. Live through a school shooting at age 6? — Sorry you’re not great for going on quietly to have a normal life. Watch your income shrink in comparison to the rising cost of living as you near retirement? — Oops, there is nothing heroic about your willingness to play out the raw end of the social contract. That has been the message and it has been debilitating, humorous at times and viciously disempowering.
It’s important to recognize the past and to learn from the fortitude and forbearance of previous generations. It is also important that we recognize ourselves across our multiple generations, as being involved in the same struggles, as sharing the same challenges as they relate to social and climate justice. There is a Great Regeneration happening and each of us is a part of the movement. From the way we eat, to the way we speak and to the way we are choosing to work with instead of against our common interest as humans, as Earth inhabitants, we are The Great Regeneration.
There are rules to how this all works, from the rules of nature to the rules of cyberspace. I talk and write about them from time to time, and I will continue to do that here and in my work with the amazing team at JustOne Organics™. I will talk about it all the time because there is nothing in the past that is greater than now. This time is ours and it is a time of healing, of airing old grievances and mending the pains brought on by injustices. This is a time for righting old ways of thinking that limit our beliefs and skew our relationship to this planet as a system. This is our time to regain ourselves as members of something much bigger than ourselves, and to do it with independence and interdependence in mind. The Great Regeneration is about just this: seeing each healthy part as necessary to a healthy whole.
If you have heard about Regenerative Agriculture then you have heard about a basic premise that goes something like this: the soil is alive, and supporting its health keeps everything else alive, too. It really is that simple. Farming with poison, poisons people and everything they need. It goes on from there. Farm with neat rows of monocrops and all you’ll get is problems, just like a Stepford movie. The overly neat and perfect world we used to seek is a myth of health and order. Chaos and unfolding, a deep and constant listening, that’s what life is really like and from cities to fields we know that diversity is everything. Diversity is life.
If you want to find your place in The Great Regeneration you can go make a farm, or you can start buying your food more strategically. You can do other things to be part of The Great Regeneration. You can pick a vice, any vice you have and find ways to make it more ethical for those around you. You can switch from corporate beers to local craft ones. You can stop eating turkey at the upcoming holiday or you can stop eating that soy one. You can sculpt your own turkey from beans or roots or insist on buying from a local farm. You can do a million creative little hacks to get to a better place in your health and your world.
That in fact is maybe the other and last key I want to share with you today: The Great Regeneration is about hacks. The Great Regeneration has to be about hacks because otherwise it would be just another ego-driven revolution with all sorts of ideas and policies hammered out by a few and doled out to the many. The Great Regeneration is about decentralized evolution. It’s a name for you to see yourself and your efforts and those of your friends and neighbors as worthy and wonderful. The Great Regeneration is the rise of new consciousness out of the books and videos and into practice and back into those forms and others again and again. The Great Regeneration is about a whole new level of hack and remix that is not limited to any one area of life or commerce.
I don’t mind that someone went in and noticed that people who live through famine and scarcity have something to teach us. I appreciate that those who lived through the last “great” world war suffered and endured atrocities. I also appreciate that many millions of people now are enduring forced labor, trafficking, and substandard conditions. I recognize that children have a future looming in front of them that is equally apocalyptic to any in the past. The terror of war is now a distributed experience and that is the major difference between the last world war and the world at war with itself we encounter every single moment these days.
With eyes open and hearts brimming with desire for something more than slogans for hope, the Greatest Re-generations are here. From elders to children, from a diverse set of perspectives and backgrounds, from multiple and fluctuating identities of self, the healers of Earth are here. They are making music and making farms. They are making food and placing it on altars mashed up with wisdoms and traditions from ancestors and science fiction films. The Greatest Regeneration is active and in process and it will define a whole new way of playing at this thing called life. Enjoy your part in this. Dance with this new piece of your self awareness and never let yourself doubt for one minute that this is possible, true and real. You come from a living planet. You come from an intelligent soil. You and your neighbor, and your neighbor’s neighbor are The Great Regeneration. Own it.
