Morning light shining through pine branches
I was standing in my outdoor kitchen surrounded by pine trees. Those trees, part of a regenerative forest, are special as they are not seen by their human stewards of this land as a commodity to be chopped and sold, but as alive beings that are being actively nurtured and taken care of. I eat delicious meals on the terrace every day. Suddenly I felt this sentence softly landing in my system like a snowflake melting in the lake: “Abundance is not having a lot for later; abundance is having enough right now.”
These past two months have been full - full of travels, full of work, full of meetings and encounters, and full of the quiet reminders that life is a web in which we are closely interconnected in ways we oftentimes don't understand. My humbling experience is such that synchronicities keep happening: when I give, when I stay open, something in the world responds. Oftentimes in unpredictable ways.
I know the universe does not “reward good people”. So many people live with structural barriers that no intention can overcome. I’m aware that what arrives in my life is shaped (when viewed by the social lense) by privilege, by access, by my upbringing and family conditioning, by the networks I move through. And yet there are moments - brief, delicate - where things align, where conversations open into invitations, where strangers extend trust, when my prayers bring me resolutions. I take them as reminders of the web of interconnectedness. And I remember there are other lenses I can tap into - lens of magic, lens of trust, lens of acceptance.
(Photos below are from last two months. They show that service, support, contribution - can take many forms)
When you turn around not knowing what you will see
We could call it “mythic exhaustion” or "cultural exhaustion” (following the writings of some researchers and philosophers). That sense that a culture has run out of generative stories, ideas, and moral legitimacy. That is the feeling that my partner and I share about the “Western culture” we live in and that shaped us. We are mostly disillusioned, or perhaps sober, about what our current economic, social and cultural systems are doing to human potential and wellbeing and planet Earth.
One day, a few weeks back, an impulse arose within us. What if we go and visit some places that still have at least some connection to cultural knowledge that is different to the logic of extractivism, globalisation and capitalism that are wiping the same cultures off the surface of this planet as we speak. How about we visit those communities not only to support them in what they need, but to learn - to learn from ways of living that might still value community and proximity to the land and its creatures. So much of our global crisis comes from the unraveling of community. When community collapses, everything else becomes brittle: the psyche, the soil, the sense of belonging.
I haven't been to Africa, I said. Let’s visit Africa.
Not because it's “exotic”, not because we want to “idealise” other cultures. Because we want to get more glimpses, more fragments to the kaleidoscope of how different communities deal with the gradual collapse of modern civilisation as it is happening.
A few weeks later, almost effortlessly, without "research" and “planning” we met Tomy Garnett, founder of the Environmental Foundation for Africa, the organization behind the community-led wildlife sanctuary called Tiwai Island - now Sierra Leone’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Our call with Tony wasn’t about logistics. It drifted immediately into existential and emotional terrain - caring for the planet, interdependence, responsibility, the thin lines between despair and devotion. And at the end he simply said:
“Come. See what we do here. Meet the land and the community. And let’s see what we can do together.”
And now, as I write this, the ticket is in my inbox. In March, I’m going to Sierra Leone.
***
Every month a flow of giving flushes through me in series of offerings - a workshop, a process, a piece of writing - and every month something returns. This web isn’t moral. It isn’t guaranteed. But it is real. And I feel privileged to experience Life the way I do. My commitment is to keep using this position - this mobility, this access, this synchronicity - to widen the circle wherever I can.
Thank you for being part of this web with me.
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With love,
Berenika