turning point

I’m just getting back from a three week break. Two days into it, Charlie Kirk was killed.

I’d been struggling for some time regarding how to speak about what’s currently going on in the world and in the country where I was born; where, notwithstanding something of an internal struggle, I’ve chosen to continue to live. Current discourse is a sort of cacophony, swirling and reckless, like a tornado spewing debris. I want to do my best to try and be sure that anything I contribute is thoughtful, that it actually helps.

My mission and beliefs still feel clear:

The current money system is the root of many if not most of our problems. On a deeper level, what ails it is its foundation in the unhealthy masculine energies that still permeate this world, that live inside of almost all of us, and therefore dictate the systems humans create. It’s been mostly men who designed, implemented, maintain, and most benefit from these systems to which we are all subject, including the monetary one.

Seeds is meant to introduce a new, working paradigm to help us transcend this, creating a bigger pie for all through rewarding giving, by design. And I have to steward Seeds, nurture it, help it to grow so that it’s ready to meet that moment, which has turned out to have been father in the future than I could have predicted when first working on the earliest versions of the ecosystem circa 2011.

But despite that throughline, this continued conviction about my role, I haven’t really known what to say probably all along - how to share about Seeds in a way that can connect with more people who want to help bridge this tumultuous time into a brighter future - though I’ve certainly tried, employing just about every means I could think of to accomplish this short of writing a book (which I intend to do now). I find myself frustrated with language itself, with its roots in the unhealthy masculine as well.

And maybe part of the reason that nothing I’ve tried has significantly cut through so far, I think, is that we all have to wait. Until the world changes enough, maybe, to wholly receive the message and act.

What’s in a name? Is this too flip a question to presently pose? Whatever unconscious part of Kirk understood his own life’s path seemed to recognize that what he called his organization would play out as exactly that, though not in the conscious way he intended. In this country, daring to mention the divisiveness he channeled has become dangerous since his death. But something about that event, the tragic, violent way he was taken has provoked a new level of divisiveness. It’s coming to the surface like a thick smoke, even darker than before, making the better world harder to see.

What can be the positive, after all of this?

I remember something I heard that the founder of another social good movement once said. To paraphrase, his idea was that social change often means long periods of waiting. Then something happens, and there’s suddenly a doorway you can walk through. All the work you’ve been doing, perhaps for years or decades, can finally fully connect. Its positive impact, its potential, can be realized in a way that wasn’t accessible before.

I’ve felt for a while that these dark times we’re in are the last gaps of that old way, that unhealthy yang that has dominated and terrorized us, and that it’s kicking up a terrible fight as it marches on to its inevitable, overdue end.

On the other side of that, I believe we’ll have harmony like we’ve never known. As I write this, I’m 41 years old, and I think I’ll live to see it in my middle age. Healthy feminine energy - yin - will no longer be systemically and individually oppressed, and humans will much more easily thrive.

It feels like that was the world Seeds is made for…and that it’s been my job to uncover what Seeds is, to do my best to care for it through what’s been an often difficult night. We can bring in that cliche, the idea that it’s always darkest before the dawn.

And then as the sun crests the horizon, I think that light will be enough to make Seeds grow.

What’s in a name? When I chose to call our ecosystem ‘Seeds,” it was meant to evoke the idea of helping to plant something that would benefit others, even far down the line. Another proverb says that, “a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

But I’m not yet “old.” And in choosing that name, I hope I didn’t inadvertently bring in the resonance of continual arrested development. I hope those seeds soon sprout.

I think they will. I think they will.

-Rachel