In every storefront along my street in Ho Chi Minh City, red and yellow decorations have begun to appear as the Lunar New Year approaches. Last week, family members gifted us two small wooden horse statues carved from dark wood. They now sit in my living room, watching me as I write this.

We are entering the Lunar Year of the Fire Horse. I’m not one to pay much attention to astrology, but I do love a good celebration. This upcoming year’s horse is a rare sixty-year cycle combination that signifies intense energy, rapid change and lots of so-called ‘innovation’. The year, in other words, is filled with what’s supposed to be some very tangible possibilities.

I find myself thinking about what the horse actually is. This sensitive animal that runs free across open grassland. But also the animal that was domesticated five thousand years ago and fundamentally altered the course of human history. The horse gave us progress and possibilities that literally built empires, connected trade routes and changed everything.

The wildness of the horse…and the human ambition and lust for progress. Were these two realities compatible? Could these truly exist together? Or did one have to be broken for the other to flourish?

This is the question I keep returning to. Not just what is possible, but what can exist together?

There is a word for this, though it sounds almost like a typo: compossibility.

Three centuries ago, a German polymath named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was obsessed with a deceptively simple problem: if God is all-powerful, why doesn’t the world contain everything that could exist?

His answer was elegant. Not everything that is possible can exist together. Some possibilities cancel each other out. This universe is not the world of maximum possibility, but the world of maximum compossibility - the world in which the greatest number of compatible things can flourish together.

The philosopher Luis de Miranda puts it this way: “If everything is possible, not everything is compossible.” There’s something almost riddle-like about the sentence. And maybe that’s because it runs against a deep current most of us swim in: the belief that possibility is inherently good and that more options are always better than fewer. But de Miranda is suggesting something different. The task of our time is not to maximize possibility but to cultivate compossibility.

To maximize possibility is to ask: What can we do?

To cultivate compossibility is to ask: What can we do together, given this context and given what matters to us?

This second question requires us to dig into something beyond the ‘doing’. To figure out if something is compatible, we need to feel into our values. Two people who are sitting next to each other on a train may be destined to meet and fall in love. But that possibility relies on many things, including compatibility. And that compatibility is often a question of shared values. To sense into compossibility (compatibility + possibility), we need to sense into those values and the contexts from which they’ve grown.

‘Value’ is also a verb

Value is a noun, but it is first and foremost a verb, an action that’s almost on autopilot behind the scenes in our lives. It’s rare to actively think and ask yourself: what am I valuing in this moment? The last time I actively thought about values was in yet another leadership workshop where a long list of values was projected on the wall for us to pick from. We tend to speak of values as though they were things we can list on a pitch deck or embroider on a pillow. But values are actions. They are what we do when no one is watching, in the meetings we decline to spend dinner time with family and the smiles we offer strangers in the elevator. They are the choices we make, moment by moment about what matters to us.

I find myself less interested in the question what are your values? and more drawn to what are you actively valuing?

When I scroll past a news story because I’m tired, I am valuing comfort and maybe even ignorance. When I buy the plastic water bottle, I am valuing convenience. When we build technologies that maximize engagement without asking what they are maximizing engagement for, we are valuing blind growth. These aren’t necessarily wrong. But they are choices, even when they don’t feel like it.

And here’s the thing about this moment: possibility has exploded. You don’t need to hire a developer to build your next app, you can prompt one into existence. You could start three businesses on the side and still have time to make your bed in the morning. You can learn a language, publish a book, launch a podcast, all from a device that fits in your pocket. The gap between possibility and implementation has collapsed in ways that would be incomprehensible to anyone still alive who remembers horses being used for more than sport; people born eighty or ninety years ago, who witnessed the tail end of a world where possibility moved at the speed of muscle and steam.

We are living in a possibility era unlike anything we have ever known. And yet…something curious is happening.

People are valuing slowness and nostalgia. Actively, deliberately, with their time and their money.

Offline clubs are popping up in cities everywhere, with strangers paying for tickets to sit in a room together without their phones to do jigsaw puzzles, or draw, or just talk. People are building entire rooms in their houses devoted to the 1990s: boxy televisions, VHS players, record collections, analog everything. And it’s not only those of us old enough to remember them. Those born after 2000 who never even knew a world before smartphones are increasingly buying dumbphones. They are longing for a time they never even experienced.

Something is being valued here. Not efficiency. Not progress. Not ‘more’. Something closer to the opposite: the feeling of constraint as relief. The warmth of less.

In Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman reminds that because human time is strictly limited (averaging about 4,000 weeks), so valuing one thing necessitates saying "no" to other things.

I think of what it felt like to choose a movie as a child. There were six VHS tapes on the shelf. Six possibilities. You picked one, you watched it, you lived inside it for two hours. The constraint was part of the experience. The limitation made the choice meaningful. Now with the infinite scroll, spending twenty minutes browsing and feeling vaguely dissatisfied with whatever we land on, I’m not sure the expansion of possibility has made any of us feel more free. If anything, it seems to leave us more restless, less able to settle into anything.

This is a compossibility problem. Infinite possibility sounds like freedom, but it turns out to be incompatible with the kind of presence, commitment, and depth that make choices meaningful.

Perhaps what many of us, the offline clubs, the dumbphone buyers and the twenty-somethings building shrines to decades they never lived through are all reaching for is not the past itself, but the compossibility of the past.

At Davos this January, Mark Carney declared: “Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
Tim Leberecht of the House of Beautiful Business offered a gentle correction, reminding us that nostalgia - from the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain) - is “the pain of an old wound, being cut off from something profoundly meaningful.” It is the human condition, Leberecht writes. And maybe it is also a value that points us toward the kind of compossibility we’ve lost.

Sensing into compossibility

And here is something else: compossibility is not static. It shifts. What could exist together in one era may become incompatible in another. What was once harmonious falls out of alignment as systems change, as contexts evolve, as new pressures emerge. The work of sensing into compossibility is never finished.

There is no shortage of systems thinking in the world. If we want to create positive change in the world, we need to understand how systems shift each other and how entangled they are. Because not everything that’s designed to create good in a system will actually create good. Possibility needs compatibility within a system. You can map much of that out, but that compatibility also needs to be sensed.

Sensing into compossibility is a practice, one that I consider part of systems feeling.

Systems feeling is the capacity to sense into a system to feel its rhythms, its tensions and its possibilities. It is what a skilled gardener does when she walks through her garden and knows, without being able to fully articulate why, that the garden needs. It is what an experienced community organizer does when she enters a room and feels where the energy is, who is ready to move and who is holding back.

Sensing into compossibility is a form of systems feeling. Not calculating all the possible outcomes and selecting the optimal one. But developing a collective sense of what fits, what belongs, what can flourish together. And recognizing that this sensing must be done again and again, because the system is always changing, and we are changing with it.

Compossibility is an invitation to ask not just what can we do? but what should we do together? An invitation to surface our values, including our nostalgia, our longing for home, our ache for a world where things fit, and to test our possibilities against them.

With kindness and curiosity,
Laura

I’m hosting ‘In Other Words’, a five day writing retreat in Hội An, Vietnam in January. And I won’t be hosting this alone. I’m over the moon about bringing this to life with Monika Jiang, a fellow writer, facilitator, and the heart behind The Oneliness Project, which shifts the narrative around loneliness from something to fix or hide, to something deeply human we all experience. We met in 2019 over pizza in Lisbon, admiring each other’s energy from afar before we started actually talking. Since then, our friendship has unfolded through monthly calls, voice notes between Berlin and Montréal, joint gatherings, and time spent together in Ho Chi Minh City earlier this year. Hội An has been a place of returning for both of us. Hosting this retreat together feels like a continuation of that. Friendship as offering.

We’ll be at Creative Play Residency, a space founded by Douglas Holwerda and Linh Trinh, who met as strangers on stage, jamming to “Mr. Tambourine Man” at a local open mic. Their friendship grew in the direction of music and gathering, and eventually brought them to this harbour-view villa they now call home. For the five days of this retreat, this space will be our writing playground.

January in Quảng Nam is the transition from the wet to dry season. Clearer skies, cool evenings, the kind of weather that makes you want to sit outside with a notebook in the morning, and listen to the sound of the rain from a cozy nook inside in the afternoons.

This retreat is an act of optimism. Not the kind that ignores what’s real, but the kind that shows up anyway. The kind that believes words matter, that gathering matters, that making something, even something small, matters.

Central Vietnam has seen serious flooding in recent weeks and parts of Hội An have been hit hard. We’re in conversation with Creative Play about how this retreat can support neighboring communities still recovering (even if only in some small way). More details on that as we finalize plans.

Applications are open until the end of November. If you’re interested, do reach out!

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

Join us

It made perfect sense. Until it didn’t.

Eventually, the conversation shifted. What about the other beings we share this planet with? What about the ecosystems our designs impact? Nature-centered design emerged as an alternative. Then came Life-centered design.

In the Quaker Institute for the Future’s framework, Toward a Life-Centered Economy, they describe a Life-Centered approach as one that “would nourish life, the lives of all people and the beings with whom we share Earth.” It reimagines the economic system as “a subset of the human social system which in turn is a subset of the ecological system.”

It’s a beautiful concept. But it’s also misleading.

Not because life doesn’t have centers, but because we imagine those centers like a bullseye. Fixed. Stable. Something to aim for.

Dandelion logic

In my recent book IMAGINE: Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency, Steven Tooze, a journalist who spent five years as a street activist with Extinction Rebellion (XR), witnesses this center-lessness of living systems in real time.

April 2019: XR starts a joyous non-violent festival-protest in London, one that refuses to back down despite police intimidation. Parliament declares a climate emergency. Government ministers meet with XR representatives. For a moment, it seems like the center of power might shift.

Then comes the backlash. The billionaire-owned press vilifies protestors. Far-right lobbyists funded by fossil fuel companies brand activists as terrorists. Today, nonviolent activists are serving five-year prison sentences just for planning protests involving non-violent disruption.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the authorities utterly failed to envision what would happen next.

They thought they were attacking the movement’s center: arresting the leaders, dismantling the organization, squashing the movement. They “made a fundamental assumption: that movements work like corporations, where if you remove the people at the top, everyone else just gives up and goes home,” Tooze explains.

But there was no fixed center to attack.

The authorities tried to change the system. But living systems can’t be changed (contrary to what many of us, myself included, call ‘systems change’). Systems can only ever be disturbed, which is very different. They were looking for levers to pull, when they should have been paying attention to attractors and patterns of emergence. As a result, and over time, the system evolved toward a new state of being.

Before I tell you about what the dandelion became, join me on a short tangent.

Centers within centers within centers

I love to think about this quantum theory: before you observe a particle, it doesn’t have a fixed position. It exists in superposition; a cloud of probabilities, all possible states simultaneously. The moment you measure it, the wavefunction collapses. The particle “chooses” a single state.

The act of observation changes everything.

This is the truth about living systems: They have centers (lots of them), but no single, fixed center. The center shifts depending on where you look, when you look, and what level you’re observing.

Consider your own body:

• At the cellular level, each cell has its nucleus—a center

• At the organ level, your heart might seem central, or your brain

• At the microbiome level, the bacteria in your gut are running the show

• At the consciousness level, there’s no single neuron you can point to and say “that’s where you live”

Different levels of organization, different centers, all moving, all temporary, all real.

This is what Steve Tooze saw happen with the climate movement. Each arrested activist wasn’t a loss of leadership but a multiplication of centers. “Each seed was a potential organiser of a new movement or campaign, someone who had been encouraged and empowered over five tumultuous years to envisage, mobilise, and plan a rebellion.”

The movement didn’t die. It became what he calls “an everything movement” standing against genocide, amplifying rewilding projects, media revolutions, and grassroots land ownership. Not one center but thousands, each self-organizing, each responding to local conditions, each connected by understanding rather than hierarchy.

The contradiction at the heart of “Life-Centered”

Here’s what the authorities in London missed and what “life-centered” thinking sometimes obscures: Living systems don’t need a permanent center because they self-organize.

The Regenerative Investing Institute explains that the essential understanding of life is that it exists as a “networked structure, a web of life, characterized by patterns of behavior rather than fixed forms.” In complexity science terms, living systems are complex-adaptive and autopoietic: they create and maintain themselves, they evolve in response to their environment, all without central command.

The mycelial network shares nutrients and information without central command. The forest regenerates without a CEO.

This is a paradigm shift: everything is interconnected, distributed, and there is no single center or inner core. This is where “life-centeredness” contradicts itself. To design something as “life-centered” in the traditional sense, with a fixed center, fundamentally misunderstands how life actually works.

The collapse of my strategies

A vulnerability sidebar: I’ve lived with high-functioning anxiety most of my life. For decades, I tried to manage it by finding its center, the root cause, the core trigger, the ‘one thing’ to fix.

But my anxiety doesn’t have a fixed center. Sometimes it lives in my chest. Sometimes in my thoughts. Sometimes in my gut. The center keeps moving. To top it off, my Western education background encourages a type of reductionist thinking that makes me believe there should be a reason, a central root cause to this anxiety.

When I try to intellectualize my anxiety (a pastime I don’t recommend), to understand its patterns, to map its triggers, to strategize my way out, it comes in full force. Like a wave crashing over my carefully constructed sandcastle of coping mechanisms.

It only settles when I stop trying to force it into a framework. When I ask, in this exact moment: What do I need right now? Not what worked yesterday. Just: What. Right. Now.

It’s maddening for someone who gets paid to create strategies and frameworks.

The revelation came when I stopped trying to observe my anxiety from outside, as if I could be separate from it, and instead recognized: I’m always already in the system. We’re in superposition together.

I’m lying about being an Impact Strategist

I still call myself an Impact Strategist on LinkedIn. But that’s increasingly inaccurate.

Strategies assume you can map a path from A to B. They assume the center stays put long enough for you to aim at it. They assume you can predict outcomes based on inputs.

But what actually works with living systems is emergence.

We love to predict. We love to rely on something working. We build elaborate mental models of cause and effect because it makes us feel safer.

What I actually do isn’t strategic in the traditional sense. I pay attention to patterns. I look for the invisible forces shaping how a system might evolve. I disturb things artfully, mindfully, and then watch what emerges.

What I know for certain is that my ‘strategy’ isn’t to find the center. It’s to follow the centers as they emerge, shift, dissolve, and re-form. It’s to create conditions for emergence rather than forcing predetermined outcomes.

The revolutionary act of accepting moving centers

Life-centered design isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete if we imagine life’s center as fixed.

Life has centers, millions of them, at every scale, constantly shifting. The revolution isn’t finding the right center or rejecting centers entirely. It’s accepting that centers move.

Here’s what nobody tells you about letting go of the center: It’s terrifying. Without a center, who’s in charge? Without a framework, how do we know if we’re doing it right?

But the center was always an illusion anyway. A story we told ourselves to feel safe in a centerless universe.

So what now?

Stop looking for the fixed center. It was never there.

Don’t try to observe from outside the system. You’re always already in it.

Meet what’s here. Ask what’s needed now. Trust that emergence knows more than our strategies ever could.

Start calling what you do something other than “strategy” if strategy implies you can predict and control outcomes in living systems. (Maybe a frivolous exercise in semantics, but I’m curious about this nonetheless!)

Life isn’t centered on one thing. It’s centered on everything, temporarily, simultaneously, impossibly, beautifully.

My anxiety doesn’t like playbooks. Turns out, neither does life.

Maybe that’s been the strategy all along.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

PS. A thank you and shoutout to Genevieve Nathwani, author of the Systems Changers Substack, one of my favorites. In a virtual coffee chat with her last week, she reminded me that there is depth and beauty to layering our inner and outer work. Thanks for inspiring me to write this one!

This expectation runs so deep that we’ve built our work around it. For years, we’ve been supporting communities in awe-based changemaking, advocating for the connection between awe and impact, and designing scaffolding that helps people move from profound moments to meaningful engagement with the world’s challenges. We believed (and still think) that awe can be a powerful catalyst for positive change.

But there’s a difference between “awe to action” and “awe in action.” Two little letters that mean a lot.

“Awe to action” implies a linear pathway: take the profound moment, extract insights, convert them into behaviors, measure the impact. It’s transactional. Awe becomes a tool for producing change.

“Awe in action” recognizes something different: awe already at work, present in the unfolding, resistant to being instrumentalized. It’s about witnessing transformation as it happens, not forcing it toward predetermined outcomes.

This insight emerged powerfully through our collaboration with House of Beautiful Business. Together, we turned their “Between the Two of Us” gathering in Tangier, Morocco, into a research partnership, tracking how a randomized group of participants processed profound experiences before, during, and months after the event.

The Sea Turtle Moment

Consider this: You’re swimming in the ocean and encounter a sea turtle. The experience stops time. Suddenly, life feels different. You’ve never thought about the creatures in the ocean this way before. It feels alive, interconnected, vast beyond your previous understanding of life on this planet.

But it’s also a total mixed bag. The experience surfaces fears about the future of species, including our own. It makes you feel uncertain, small, even scared in the face of this planet’s complexity and fragility.

You return to your job the next day and might instinctively research ways to weave this newfound awareness into your daily routine, to integrate these insights into actionable steps. That response isn’t wrong, and it might even lead to important changes.

But something else has happened that resists such integration: there’s now another version of you that exists. A version whose mindset doesn’t quite fit with the person sitting at your desk, attending your meetings, and living your previous assumptions. And maybe that misfit, that dissonance, is precisely the point.

The Psychology of Awe

When psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt first mapped the terrain of awe in their landmark 2003 research, they identified two core components that distinguish awe from other emotions:

Perceived Vastness – encountering something much larger in scale, complexity, or magnitude than ourselves.

Need for Accommodation – the recognition that this vast stimulus cannot be squeezed into our existing mental models. It requires us to literally restructure our cognitive frameworks to make room for new understanding.

This second component is crucial. Awe, by its very nature, breaks our current containers of meaning. It doesn't just add to what we know; it challenges the very architecture of how we know.

Integration vs. Accommodation: More Than Semantics

Integrating an experience is of a different flavor to accommodating an experience. The distinction shapes how we approach transformational experiences and, ultimately, whether we honor or diminish their power.

Integration implies synthesis, coherence, unity. It suggests taking something new and weaving it into existing structures until it becomes part of a cohesive whole. Integration asks: “How will you make this fit?”

Accommodation, by contrast, honors plurality and contradiction. It acknowledges that what just occurred may not fit within current structures. An ‘aha’ moment can serve as a new architect creating an ecosystem of new understanding, not to override what was previously there, but to create a new level of apartment blocks in the building of your mind. Accommodation asks: “What kind of room do you need now?”

What We Found in Tangier

Let’s get technical for a moment. Using an adapted version of the Awe Experience Scale, we conducted focus group interviews at three key stages: one month before, one week after, and 5-6 months after the gathering. What emerged challenged our assumptions about how transformation works.

Four main pathways to awe appeared consistently: moral beauty (witnessing acts of genuine kindness and courage), nature (proximity to the ocean and orange trees), collective effervescence (shared moments of heightened energy), and art and music (experiences that bridge the seen and felt).

But participants didn’t experience clean, integrated insights. Instead, they held contradictory experiences simultaneously: feeling both hopeful about transformation and deeply concerned about systemic challenges; experiencing profound connection while also confronting isolation; gaining clarity on purpose while feeling more uncertain about action.

The Over-Programming Problem

Our most important finding centered on how the space to metabolize awe is often lost in the over-programming of events and gatherings. Through our observations in Tangier, we documented where the most profound shifts actually happened: not during structured sessions, but in the liminal spaces.

Conversations under orange trees. Silent moments watching sunsets over the Mediterranean. Spontaneous collage-making where participants could “find a childlike wonder state” rather than staying trapped in intellectual processing.

The accommodation process recognizes that transformation doesn’t always look like productivity gains or immediate behavior change. Sometimes it looks like learning to live with beautiful contradictions. Sometimes it looks like developing the capacity to hold uncertainty. Sometimes the most profound shift is simply becoming someone who can see what they previously couldn’t see… even if they don’t yet know what to do with that new view.

Living in the Questions

In a culture obsessed with optimization and immediate application, accommodation offers a different wisdom: some of the most profound changes happen not when we integrate experiences, but when we let them rearrange the very rooms of our being.

The question isn’t “How will you use this awe?” but “How are you learning to live in the room awe has opened?”

Our new report, created in partnership with House of Beautiful Business, documents not just the immediate impacts of awe experiences, but the longer arc of how people learn to accommodate new ways of seeing and being in the world. It explores what accomodating for ‘new rooms’ might look like, spaces where transformation can unfold at its own pace, without pressure to immediately produce measurable outcomes.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

Download the guide

This report is available, for free, thanks to our partners and friends at House of Beautiful Business (who are also entirely responsible for making the report look as beautiful as it does!) and Faraway Projects.

Thank you to the invaluable contributions of Eeshta Malhotra and Elaine Kasket, as well as the honesty and willingness of our focus group participants who shared their experiences so generously. Thank you!

At the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, we gathered to celebrate not just a book launch, but a shared inquiry into what becomes possible when we imagine together.

IMAGINE: Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency is finally here, something we’ve been creating as a labour of love for years (more about that here). But this moment isn't really about the book, it's about what the book represents: a collection of 40+ voices from across the globe who dared to sit with uncertainty as fertile ground.

For those who couldn’t join us in person, here are some highlights!

When Questions Become Gifts

Two contributors to the book from Singapore joined us for the evening; engineer/designer Dr. Hossein Rezai and artist/photographer Marvin Tang embodied everything this anthology hopes to offer. Rather than providing neat answers, we explored questions that opened more questions:

What if a building could become a gift to its place?
What stories might emerge if we reimagined progress as healing?

Hossein shared how his design process fundamentally shifts when nature becomes the primary client. Marvin reflected on how his camera reveals the hidden narratives between Singapore's built environment and its living systems. Both reminded us that the most powerful ‘innovations’ often emerge from the spaces we don't yet know how to name.

A Living Collaboration

This launch happened in partnership with Singapore Design Week and my co-creator at anewkind, who initiated and believed in this project when it was still just an intention. To everyone who made this possible, the contributors who trusted us with their deepest inquiries, the partners who held space for complexity, the readers who showed up ready to sit with questions rather than demand answers, thank you.

For our Montreal community: I'll be bringing a limited number of books back with me in December. If you'd like to secure a copy, add your contact details here!

What Happens Next

The real magic of Saturday wasn't in the book itself, but in watching a room full of people lean into the discomfort of not-knowing together. Someone asked about holding space for grief and possibility simultaneously. Another wondered how we might practice regeneration while balancing the books. These questions don't have simple answers, and that's exactly the point.

In a world that demands certainty, IMAGINE is an invitation to remember that our most profound innovations emerge from collective sensing, from allowing questions to multiply rather than rushing toward solutions.

To everyone who has supported this journey, whether you were in that room on Saturday, sharing our posts online, or simply holding space for the kinds of conversations this work makes possible, you are part of what makes transformation real.

The book is out in the world now, but the inquiry continues.

With deep gratitude and endless questions,

Laura

Imagine—Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency is available now online and at select bookstores worldwide.

Back in early 2021…
My friend Natalie: What do you think about creating a book together?
Me: What would the book be about?

Creative Climate Resilience
Climate resilience and creativity.
Art and climate change - building new narratives for change.
Imagination and changemaking
What does it even mean to ‘imagine’ on a planet deeply entrenched in a polycrisis? How do we experience this planetary emergency together/alone?
Is chaos a bad thing? Is it possible to imagine in the present to start repairing the relationships (to ourselves, to each other, to this planet)?

These questions, and so many others became a book. But not the kind of book I expected to bring to life.

IMAGINE: Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency isn't a book about climate solutions, nor is it about awe. Well… not quite.

Here's what I mean: when we truly encounter the complexity of our current moment, the entangled mess of climate breakdown, social fragmentation, systems collapse and new systems emergence…it's overwhelming. Awesome and awful in the truest sense. That moment when you feel simultaneously vast and tiny, connected and lost? That's awe. And I've come to believe it's often the first doorway into seeing differently, even (and maybe especially) when we feel the weight of this moment on this planet.

When we experience awe, we can often be flooded with new questions. Grand questions about the universe, or tiny questions about our inner landscape. For a moment, we’re present. We’re tethered to that moment.

And in that presence, something else becomes available: imagination.

This isn’t a big book. But it carries artifacts about questions, big and small, and how to think about imagination as something that can exist in the present moment. Not something that only floats you to the future, but that can anchor you to what can exist right now.

The Book That Refused to Be a Book

This book started as something else entirely. When my good friend Natalie Seisser (designer and director extraordinaire), Lars Harmsen (the brilliant head of Slanted Publishing) and Viola Dessin (editorial design genius) and I initially thought we were creating an anthology about creative climate resilience. We thought we knew what that meant. But as we began conversations with contributors across six continents, something shifted. The people who were doing incredibly transformative work - the Indonesian conservationist protecting Asia's last great rainforest, the activists building pathways for women working in landfills, the designers collaborating with more-than-human intelligence - weren't offering solutions in any traditional sense.

They were offering new ways of seeing.

Rudi Putra, who's been protecting the Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra, Indonesia, doesn't just have a conservation strategy. He has a way of feeling into the forest that transforms how you understand our relationships to trees. Vanessa Andreotti doesn't just teach about decolonial futures - she embodies a different relationship to knowledge that makes space for wisdom our dominant systems have forgotten. Dr.Hossein Resai's architectural innovations aren't just about sustainable design -they're about remembering what it means to build with rather than against the living world.

Each conversation left me with more questions than answers. And slowly, I realized: that was the point.

Why "Solutions" Might Be Part of the Problem

In my work with Awe Exchange, I've been exploring how awe can catalyze systems change. But the deeper I go, the more I understand that our obsession with solutions - our need to move quickly from problem to fix - might be preventing us from accessing the kind of ‘intelligence’ we need.

The challenges we're facing are what complexity theorists call "wicked problems"; issues so interconnected and dynamic that traditional problem-solving approaches not only fail, they often make things worse. Climate change isn't just an environmental problem. It's entangled with histories of colonialism, systems of economic extraction, patterns of social alienation, and fundamentally different ways of understanding what it means to be human on this planet.

When we rush to solutions, we risk bypassing the essential work of learning to see and feel differently. We stay trapped in the same thinking that created the problems in the first place.

The Contributors Who Changed Everything

Working on IMAGINE has been like participating in a slow-motion mind meld with some of the most visionary people I've ever crossed paths with.

There’s Eddy Ekete, Congolese Postwar & Contemporary artist, whose practices hold a mirror up to how the West ‘restitutes’ artifacts and art from places like the Congo. His art uncovers what history and politics attempt to hide.

Brother Phap Linh of Plum Village, who helped me deepen my understanding that inner transformation required for outer change isn't separate from systems work—it is systems work.

Nora Bateson, a visionary and pioneer thinker whose work is anchored in the question “How can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?”

Gab Mejia, a queer Filipino photographer, multidisciplinary artist, and environmental engineer whose exhibition “The Forest Listens, Their Spirits Cry” documents the sacred relationship between the Talaandig-Manobo people and Mount Kalatungan’s forests in the Philippines.

Each contributor taught me something about what imagination actually is. Not the ability to envision perfect futures, but the capacity to stay present with complexity without rushing to premature closure. The willingness to let ourselves be undone by what we encounter.

What This Book Is (And Isn't)

IMAGINE isn't a manual. It's not a framework. It definitely doesn't promise to solve anything.

It's a collection of artifacts and provocations, some visual, written, philosophical… that invite you to loosen your grip on certainty and explore what becomes possible when we engage with chaos and possibility through imagination.

The book is organized around six invitations, six chapters:

Imagine... Life Was at the Center - What shifts when we remember that we're part of the living world, not separate from it?

Imagine... We Left No Trace - How do we design for death, decay, and the composting of systems that no longer serve?

Imagine... Beyond the Map - What becomes visible when we venture beyond the boundaries of our familiar thinking? To trust the map, we must trust the mapmaker!

Imagine... in Poetry - How do we make space for ways of knowing that can't be captured in linear logic? What does it mean to be ‘poetically correct’?

Imagine... a Gentle Revolution - What does transformation look like when it emerges from love? Can it be radical?

Imagine... Being - How do we cultivate the presence needed for collective healing?

I narrate the introduction to these chapters, weaving in the work of the other voices that bring this book to life.

The Questions We're Really Asking

Throughout this process, I've been struck by how rarely we create space for the questions that might actually deeply matter. In our rush to be productive, to be seen as an ‘expert’, to have impact, to make a difference, we often bypass the essential and constant work of inquiry.

What if the questions are more important than the answers right now?

What if our capacity to sit with uncertainty is exactly what we need to navigate complexity?

What if the transformation we're seeking requires us to be changed by what we encounter rather than changing what we encounter?

What if imagination isn't about escaping reality but about engaging more fully with it?

With gratitude and curiosity,

Laura

IMAGINE: Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency will be available September 13th 2025. The book emerges from a collaboration between 35+ global contributors, co-created alongside Natalie Seisser, Lars Harmsen and Viola Dessin, published by Slanted Publishers and co-produced by anewkind.

IMAGINE is available for pre-order, and our book launch event in Singapore is accessible to all!

I'm writing this not just as someone who admired their work from afar, but as someone whose life was changed by their teachings. Sometimes we lose voices that feel so essential to our understanding of how to be human that we need to pause and remember what they gave us.

96 Years of Radical Aliveness

I discovered Joanna Macy's work over a decade ago, and it changed everything I thought I knew about how to hold planetary grief. Before Joanna, I thought caring deeply about the world's suffering meant I was either naive or slowly going insane. Her "Work That Reconnects" pointed out to so many of us that our pain for the world is proof of our aliveness, our interconnectedness with all life.

Joanna was an eco-philosopher, activist, and scholar of Buddhism and systems theory. She was a force.

Of all the profound teachings Joanna Macy offered the world, the concept of "holonic shifts" is what I carry most deeply as I continue exploring Systems Feeling. Her understanding that we are living through an evolutionary moment where collective self-reflexivity might emerge - where humanity could develop the capacity to think and feel together as interconnected wholes rather than isolated parts. This feels like the beating heart of everything I write about.

Joanna showed us that this shift doesn't require sacrificing our individual uniqueness but actually depends on it, that diversity and differentiation are what allow larger systems to develop their own intelligence. When I witness people feeling climate grief together, or communities organizing around shared values, or even strangers connecting over mutual concern for the world, I see glimpses of this holonic emergence she described. Her vision that we might learn to "open to flows of information from the larger system" and trust our pain for the world as feedback from our interconnectedness - this is the foundation upon which my dedication to this work grows. Just last year, I had the profound privilege of sharing a conversation with her co-author Molly Young Brown (you can listen to it here).

Joanna's wisdom is something I will quote forever, something I'll tell the next generation about, and the generation after that. Joanna planted the seed; now it's our work to tend the garden.

I hope to live as long as she did - 96 years of radical aliveness! But not just in length. I hope to live with the depth she embodied, as a forever student and the wisest of mentors for people she would never meet. Like me. Like so many others.

The Conductor of Love

Andrea Gibson's poetry came into my world more recently, about a year ago, when friends began forwarding me their Substack posts and Instagram reflections about awe. They quickly became a favorite of mine - someone who could speak to us as though we were sitting together in the park, pulling at heartstrings with such tender precision.

Andrea was a conductor of love, and we were their orchestra. Even as they faced terminal cancer, they turned their storm into medicine, writing poems that helped the rest of us remember that our mortality isn't our enemy, it's our teacher.

In one of their final poems, Andrea wrote:

“I have never felt awe and shame at the same time, awe and loneliness at the same time, awe and judgment at the same time... and nothing wakes us to awe more than life's brevity.”

And their life was brief. Last week, at the young age of 49, Andrea’s life as we knew it came to an end. But their life has already continued to ripple through the poetry that marked so many of us.

Thank you, teachers.

Both Joanna and Andrea, in their own profound ways, taught me that awe is not a luxury - it's medicine. It's what happens when we stop taking our days for granted and start living like we remember we're temporary visitors to an astonishing world.

Our work certainly stands on the shoulders of these two giants.

There's something almost mystical about losing both of these voices within five days of each other. It feels like the universe is asking us to pay attention to what they spent their lives teaching: that our time here is borrowed magic, and every moment is an invitation to marvel.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

I became deeply engaged in conversations with contributors for Imagine—Embracing Chaos and Possibility in a Planetary Emergency, a book of artifacts and conversations that explore how we might navigate these times. These weren't just any conversations. We were speaking with Nora Bateson, a pioneer thinker, educator, and systems theorist whose work asks how we can improve our understanding of complexity so we can better interact with the world. Her father, Gregory Bateson, changed how many of us think about the patterns that connect all living systems. Nora has taken this further, coining the term "Warm Data" to describe the rich, relational information we need to understand complex challenges.

Then there was Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Dean of Education at the University of Victoria and author of Hospicing Modernity, an invitation to re-examine our relationship with the toxicity of modernity and a guide for how to cope with the dangers of colonialism and capitalism. She's also a founding member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective.

Here I was, collecting wisdom from brilliant minds about impermanence and systems change, while trying to write promises of ‘forever’.

"What can you be when you're with me?" and other questions that changed everything.

Natalie Seisser, a dear friend and the book’s lead editor, and I sat virtually with Nora discussing her insight that the words "'my” and “imagination” are a set of words that should never be together. That creativity doesn't live in isolated individuals but emerges from what she calls "fluctuating interdependencies”. The spaces between us. She posed the question that became the central theme of the conversation: "What can you be when you're with me?"

It's an ecological question, she explained, not a transactional one. Not "how will you make me happy" or "what will you do for me," but what intelligence emerges when we create conditions for something larger than ourselves?

I couldn't help myself. I opened up about my vow-writing struggle. How do you promise "forever" when you know that everything changes? And I’m not just referencing our unprecedented times of Poly/Meta crises.

Nora laughed - not unkindly. She mentioned that her own vows were published in her book Combining. She understood the paradox completely.

Learning to Swim When the Water Rises

The conversations with Vanessa added another layer of beautiful complexity to this ironic moment of promises and hope for the future. She described an exercise called the Three Hope Jars that has become central to her work with groups facing climate and social breakdown. People distribute beans among three jars representing different types of hope: hope that our current systems can continue sustainably, hope that we can consensually replace them with something better, or hope in what she calls "composting harm"—acknowledging we're past tipping points and must learn from the consequences of our choices.

"More and more we're seeing that people are putting more beans in the last jar," she told me, "because something inside them already acknowledges that."

Vanessa was describing a visceral recognition that many of us carry but rarely name—that the systems promising certainty, predictability, and permanence are in decline. We live in what she calls "VUCA on steroids"—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in a context where the old frameworks no longer produce the same results.

But here's what struck me most: instead of treating this recognition as cause for despair, Vanessa frames it as an invitation to develop different capacities. She talks about learning to "hold space for the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, the messy, and the messed up of humanity within ourselves and around us without throwing up, throwing a tantrum, or throwing in the towel."

That line was so good, I almost wove it right into my vows.

How not to “throw up, throw a tantrum, or throw in the towel”

It requires what Vanessa calls a fundamental shift from "narrow boundary intelligence", focused on goal optimization and control, to "wide boundary intelligence," where you can navigate complexity and emergence without falling apart. It's learning to find stability in movement rather than demanding stillness.

”In Brazil, we have a saying, which says that in a situation of a flood, it’s only when the water reaches your bum that you can actually swim. Before that, when the water is at your ankle or at your knees, you can only walk or wade. So for people whose waters are at their ankles and at their knees, there is more resistance, for sure. But when the water is at your bum and you see that the paradigms that worked before are no longer working, are no longer producing the same results, then we generally say that people are in the pit. Then you either drown or you learn to swim. And what we found is that people who are in that pit, and we have more and more people getting to the stage of the pit, then they are interested in what else there is.”

The metaphor landed hard.

I think of moments as a child walking in a pool, slightly fearful of the deep end. I would start at the shallow end, walking through water. As I inched towards the deep end of the pool, craning my neck to keep my face above water, I ended up on my tippy toes. Eventually, I would be submerged entirely if I didn’t lift my legs up and start swimming.

If you’re still wading through the water (if the broken systems are still working for you), you won’t see the need to swim (to let go, be willing to see the fractured relationships for what they are, and the need for healing). But regardless, the water levels are rising.

What I Learned About Promises

The more I talked with these contributors, the more I understood why I'm drawn to this work in the first place. I see it everywhere - teams and organizations desperately trying to solve for the polycrisis, making promises all the time. KPIs that guarantee carbon neutrality by 2030. ESG roadmaps that plot linear progress toward sustainability. Grant proposals promising specific impact results to funders who demand measurable outcomes. But we can't solve for something so volatile, in times so volatile, with the same thinking that kept us believing it wouldn't be volatile.

Just as the romantic belief that two separate individuals could promise to remain unchanged, that love could freeze time, that "forever" was something we could engineer. Just as companies believe they can engineer their way to sustainability while maintaining the same growth-based models that created the crisis.

Nora's work, Vanessa’s work, and so many others in this book showed me that even our individual identities are illusions. We exist in relationship, in the patterns between us. Organizations, too, exist in webs of interdependency that they rarely acknowledge. And Vanessa's insights about learning to "holding space for the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, the messy, and the messed up (…) without throwing up, throwing a tantrum, or throwing in the towel" felt more honest than any corporate promise to optimize our way out of complexity, or any promise to love the same person forever. Because we won't be the same people. That's the point.

The Vows I Finally Wrote vs. The Vows I Finally Spoke

Let’s just say, they weren't the vows I expected to write when I started this book project five years ago. But they were the vows that emerged messily on paper.

The vows that I finally spoke? Those were almost completely ad libbed as it was an insanely muggy 35 degrees celsius that day in Ho Chi Minh City by the river, I could hardly read my paper through the stinging beads of sweat in my eyeballs, and just when I thought I could focus on my sentence, a large cargo boat rang its blaring horn as it passed us and I lost my train of thought!

Maybe the most honest promise we can make is simply to show up to whatever emerges, cargo boats, sweat and all.

With kindness and curiosity,
Laura

Awe is one of the few emotions that naturally moves us from "me" to "we." Even when experienced alone, awe momentarily dissolves the boundaries of the individual self and connects us to something larger. It's a fast-track to feeling part of something beyond ourselves - whether that's the natural world, humanity, or the cosmos itself. In those moments of awe, we don't just think about interconnection; we feel it viscerally, embodied, undeniably real.

This connection between awe and our sense of belonging to something larger led me to explore what I call "Systems Feeling", that embodied experience of collectively sensing our interconnectedness with the larger web of relationships that constitute our world. Awe, it turns out, can be a doorway to remembering our capacity for collective sensing and responding.

I want to be clear that "Systems Feeling" is simply my way of naming and exploring something that has existed long before any of us were born. I'm not inventing anything new. I'm joining a conversation that stretches back through generations of thinkers, practitioners, and cultures who have understood that our individual wisdom is always incomplete without our collective sensing. From indigenous knowledge keepers like Anishnaabe Elder Jim Dumont, to systems theorists like Gregory Bateson, activists like adrienne maree brown, to researchers studying collective intelligence, many have pointed toward this capacity for sensing together. My hope is that by offering this particular framing - Systems Feeling - I can contribute to connecting dots, making that wisdom accessible and actionable for our current moment. This is about remembering and re-languaging something that has always been available to us, not creating something that didn't exist before.

What I Mean by "Systems"

Before we go deeper, let’s take a step back. A system is simply a collection of interconnected parts that work together as a whole. Your body is a system - your heart, lungs, brain, and nervous system are all interconnected. A forest is a system - trees, soil, fungi, animals, and water cycles, all interdependent. Our economy is a system, as is our climate, our families, our democracy, and our global food web.

Systems thinking is the practice of seeing these connections rather than just isolated parts. Instead of looking at pollution as a 'problem’, systems thinking helps us see how it connects to so many systems, industrial practices, consumer habits, political policies, and even cultural values. One system connects to another, and another…

The key insight of systems thinking is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. New properties emerge from the relationships between elements that you can't understand by studying the parts in isolation. You can't understand a forest by just studying individual trees, just as you can't solve climate change by only looking at carbon emissions. Systems are messy, complex and nauseatingly entangled.

When Systems Break Down

Our greatest challenges, from climate breakdown to social polarization to mental health crises, aren't just ‘problems’. They're symptoms of our collective inability to sense into the health of these systems and respond appropriately.

Think about climate change. We have the data. We understand the science. We know what needs to be done. We’ve crafted stories. We’ve built solutions. But we're struggling to act collectively. We've lost our ability to feel together into what the Earth system is telling us, and where we can head. We experience the world as separate individuals making separate decisions, rather than as part of an interconnected living system that we can sense into and respond to collectively.

The same pattern shows up everywhere. In our organizations, we often make decisions in silos, optimizing for individual or departmental success while overlooking the broader impact of those decisions on the larger organizational ecosystem. In our communities, we retreat into ideological bubbles with those who believe what we do, losing our capacity to sense into the social fabric.

What sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls "alienation" - a particular mode of relating to the world of things, to people, and to one's self in which there is no responsivity, i.e., no meaningful inner connection, has become our dominant way of being. We exist together but it is rare to experience the spark of connectivity with another person, let alone the interconnectivity of an entire system. We've become disconnected not just from nature, but from each other and from our ability to sense collectively into what our larger systems need.

The Indigenous Foundation

This disconnection from feeling through systems wasn’t inevitable or natural. Indigenous cultures worldwide have maintained collective sensing and decision-making, despite modernity creating systems of extraction and exploitation that treat relationships as resources to be optimized rather than living connections to be tended.

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Seven Generations Principle is a practice of considering the impact of decisions on seven generations ahead. It’s a practice that requires collective sensing into the long-term health of social and ecological systems. The Lakota phrase "Mitákuye Oyás'iŋ" - "all my relations" - reflects a lived understanding that decisions must account for the wellbeing of the entire web of relationships.

These practices represent just the tip of the iceberg. I'm still uncovering the profound depth and diversity of indigenous foundations that offer radically different approaches to collective sensing and systems wisdom.

The Science of ‘Feeling’ within a Collective

Modern neuroscience has validated what indigenous cultures have always known. Research shows that empathic concern via the brain's release of oxytocin, is a trigger for collective action. That empathy reflects the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, coupled with a motivation to care for their well-being.

But this goes beyond individual empathy. When groups of people attune to each other, something remarkable happens. Mirror neurons fire in synchrony. Nervous systems co-regulate. Collective intelligence emerges that no individual could access alone. We begin to sense patterns, possibilities, and needs that only become visible when we feel together into the larger system of which we're all part.

This isn't mystical, it's biological. We are literally wired for collective sensing. Our nervous systems are designed to attune to each other and to our environment in ways that allow us to sense and respond collectively to what's needed. The tragedy is that most of our modern systems actively suppress this capacity.

Systems Feeling isn’t a Product

Here's what I've learned about sharing this work: the moment we try to package it into a methodology or promise a clear path "from A to B," we risk squashing the very thing we're attempting to transmit. Systems Feeling emerges from the quality of relationship and attention we bring to our collective sensing, not from following prescribed steps.

I'm wary of the marketing narrative that says "here's the problem (disconnection, alienation, broken systems) and here's the solution (our program will guide you to connection and wholeness)." This binary thinking of “bad here/good there - we'll take you from one to the other”, is itself part of the fragmentation we're trying to heal.

Instead, this is an invitation to notice and explore. Systems Feeling might sound abstract, but it can show up in practical ways when we create conditions for it to emerge.

When we sense together, when we slow down enough to feel into the larger patterns and needs, we access information that no individual analysis could provide. We can feel when a decision serves the whole or when it optimizes for one part at the expense of others. We can sense into emerging possibilities that haven't yet become visible to rational analysis. We can detect early warning signs of system breakdown before they show up in the "data”.

But this isn't a promise or a guarantee. It's an invitation to experiment, to notice, to remember what we might have forgotten about how to be together in ways that serve the health of our larger systems.

The Path Forward

We can create conditions that support its emergence:

Slowing down enough to feel. Most of our systems prioritize speed and efficiency over sensing and responsiveness. We need practices that help us move at the speed of relationships rather than the speed of transactions.

Creating containers for collective sensing. This means designing events, meetings, decision-making processes, and organizational structures that include space for sensing together before teaching, analyzing or planning.

Learning to work with conflict as information. The health of a system often depends on its ability to hold creative tension rather than rushing to false harmony. In The Fifth Discipline, systems thinking pioneer Peter Senge presented the idea of creative tension, the space that exists between where a system currently stands and where it could go. Rather than viewing this gap as something that needs solving for, according to Senge’s framework, the key lies in preserving this tension instead of rushing to close the gap just to stay comfortable. Disagreement and friction are forms of information about what the system needs. But yes… easier said than done.

Trusting emergence over control. The systems we’re feeling into can feel paralyzingly complex, and especially at this point in time, everything feels like an emergency. Layers of emergencies, in fact.
There are three letters and a world of difference between ‘emergency’ and ‘emergency’. Systems Feeling requires comfort with the ‘not-knowing’, with sensing into what wants to emerge rather than imposing what we think should happen because we are prioritizing immediate action, deadlines, and control, responding to situations as emergencies that demand quick fixes and top-down solutions.
In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown explicitly critiques “urgency-based thinking” and the Western impulse to control outcomes, arguing that this mindset leads to manipulation, competition, and disconnection from natural and communal processes.

The Choice Before Us

Can we honor the intelligence that emerges when we feel together?

This isn't about abandoning reason or analysis, it’s about remembering that there are different types of intelligences. It's about integrating them with our capacity for collective sensing. It's about recognizing that our individual wisdom is always incomplete until it's woven together with the wisdom of the whole.

Systems Feeling offers a pathway toward reconnection - not just with nature, but with each other and with the intelligence that emerges when we remember how to sense together.

With kindness and curiosity,
Laura

Credit: Death to Stock Photo

The False Promise of Infinite Information

We live in an time when we can generate answers faster than we can form questions. AI is accelerating our ability to connect dots on an information level, helping us understand complex ideas and even ourselves with unprecedented speed. I have a friend who sends me screenshots of her deep midnight conversations with ChatGPT, jokingly calling it her "wise, funny, in-tune boyfriend." She's learning about herself through these exchanges, and dare I say maybe even developing feelings for her AI companion? There are clearly moments that truly mark her, ones that unveil something novel about herself and her connection to the world. Sometimes I wonder if she’s having epiphanies - major transcendental ‘aha’ moments.

But here's what's crucial: it's not the information that's transformative - it's how the information makes her feel.

This reveals the central truth that our age of infinite information obscures: information is not the only thing that guides epiphanies. Feeling has much to do with it.

What Makes an Epiphany

Epiphanies are those sudden realizations that shift our entire perspective. The word dates back to ancient Greece where "epiphaneia" meant "appearance" or "manifestation"; revelations brought by the gods themselves.

But epiphanies aren't simply random moments of downloaded knowledge. As Maya Angelou described: "It probably has a million definitions. It's the occurrence when the mind, the body, the heart, and the soul focus together and see an old thing in a new way." They're generated by a complex combination of experience, memory, knowledge, predisposition, and context.

Even neuroscientists, who don't often speak of the sublime, concede that sudden insight can't be forced or manufactured purely from within. This creates a delightful yet maddening paradox: we do experience epiphanies internally, but they often require an external spark.

The Conditions for Breakthrough

Understanding this paradox reveals why our physical and emotional states matter so much for insight. When someone asks us a challenging question, we instinctively look away—upward or downward. Research led by the Milano-Bicocca University explored how our brains solve problems differently when it’s sudden insight (the ‘aha’ phenomemon). We're trying to simplify our visual inputs, removing the emotions and interfering thoughts that come from direct eye contact. We’re trying to somehow insulate ourselves.

This is also why so many people report eureka moments in the shower. ““You have some mild sensory deprivation. You can’t see very much. There’s the white noise of the water. The water is warm so you can’t feel the difference between your skin and the air,” says John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University and co-author of “The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. “This sensory restriction is like an extended brain blink. You cut out the outside world and ideas bubble up into awareness.” All of this creates space for ideas that have been percolating beneath the surface to flash into consciousness.

If you're feeling stuck, a change of scenery might unlock understanding in ways that pure thinking cannot. Trading your desk for a walk in a park. Leaving your cluttered apartment to be able to see the open sky. When we don't actively think about our problem and instead focus on the feeling of the warm orange glow of the sun glowing through our eye-lids. Smelling wet pine and letting it trigger a memory from childhood.

It might take a week, or two, maybe a month, perhaps longer. But when the time is right, the idea, the realization, the ‘aha’ will take possession of you. As though it was just waiting for the moment you were open to feeling it’s presence, instead of thinking it into existence.

Credit: Death to Stock Photo

The Power of Feeling Through Systems

This is why feeling is so crucial to layer onto thinking. Only by combining both can we create conditions where these genuine spark moments emerge. Moments where we can start feeling through our understanding of a problem. And that's where things become transformative.

For the last couple weeks, my partner and I have been having deep conversations about AI, one that circles around both hope and fear. We believe AI will enhance human capability, amplifying our creativity, judgment, problem-solving, and collaboration. We want to see countries in the Majority World leapfrog into the AI age, creating more positive externalities than negative ones, truly accomplishing the United Nations' "Nobody gets left behind" framework for action towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Somehow, that feels closer to becoming real because of AI.

As someone whose built their entire career on the hope that we’ll finally collectively arrive at a place of understanding that human and planetary challenges are deeply entangled (we need systems thinking more than ever), I see AI as helping us put the pieces together in unprecedented ways. We finally have tools that can make crystal clear how global wars are inextricably connected to climate catastrophe, which connects to systems of economic oppression, which connects back to histories of colonialism... and on and on. We now have a ridiculously easy way to access these facts and map these interconnections.

Yet here's the crucial gap: to have the genuine ‘aha’ moment that leads to action, we need more than those facts. To act on knowledge, we need more than knowing—we need feeling.

If we can feel through a problem, especially those that are wickedly complicated, entangled, and obscure, we can better understand what our next best step should be. We can feel through the systems we're part of, and that layering of systems feeling onto systems thinking becomes one of the most powerful tools we have to navigate our current metacrisis.

The story of Srinivasa Ramanujan comes to mind. Known today as the ‘Intuitive Mathematician’, Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematics genius guided by a deep sense of mathematical beauty and intuition, often working on formulas that "felt right" to him even when he couldn't initially prove them. His insights came not just from calculation, but from an almost mysterious sense of following feeling, as well as through his dreams.

Indigenous cultures have long understood this wisdom. In traditions like Umbanda, spiritual guides serve as intermediaries who help people access deeper insights. These mentors understand that true revelation requires more than intellectual understanding—it demands a higher level of engagement with knowledge and wisdom, feeling our way through to understanding.

The Future of Wonder

So as AI becomes ubiquitous, the place we go for confession, insight, and enlightenment, our new ‘digital gods’, we must ask: are these gods supportive of our epiphanies? If they can provide the external spark that epiphanies often require, what happens to our human capacity for felt understanding?

Yes, AI is here to stay. But will phrases like "let me think..." or "have a think about it" or "I wonder if..." lose their meaning entirely?

I hope not. In fact, I want there to be much more wondering, even when answers are so much easier to reach. This wondering will sometimes happen in the body, sparked by what we see, smell, touch, feel. It might come through the sensation you get standing in the rain, suddenly aware of your place in the water cycle. Or the collective gasp in a cinema during a tense scene, reminding you of our shared humanity.

That feeling is what will make you wonder. Not the answers that AI generates, but the embodied experience of being human in an interconnected world.

Credit: Death to Stock Photo

Can AI Have Epiphanies?

This raises a fascinating question: can artificial intelligence have its own epiphanies? While we're still grappling with questions of digital consciousness, what seems clear is that the human capacity for felt understanding, for emotional resonance with ideas, remains uniquely valuable.

The future doesn't belong to those who can process the most information, but to those who can feel their way through complexity toward understanding. These awe-inspiring moments of epiphany can lead us to understand the systems we're deeply entangled with on a profound level.

In our rush toward an AI-integrated future, we must preserve space in our day, in our routines, in our culture, for wonder. For the kind of deep feeling-through that transforms mere information into genuine knowing. Only then can we harness both human insight and artificial intelligence to make the next right steps through our interconnected challenges.

In preserving our capacity for epiphany - that superpower we have too often ignored - we preserve something essentially human and essentially necessary for navigating the world ahead.

With kindness and curiosity,
Laura

Micro updates & re-emergence

I've been quiet here for a while—there have been seasons for many things, beautiful human things that pull us away from the keyboard and into the messiness of living! But I'm excited to share that much has been happening behind the scenes.

We're publishing a book with Slanted Publishers, slated for September release (pre-orders and more details coming soon!), and we've just relaunched our Feast of Awe cards for those wanting to host their own gatherings of wonder and connection.

I'm grateful to be back here with you, with renewed energy and perspective on this work.

We are searching for clear answers in a complex world, but our need for tidy solutions often drowns out the power of moments that don’t fit neatly into our expectations. What if a missing ingredient in our pursuit of change isn’t more data or action plans but something far more elusive—a moment of awe?

Over the past year, I’ve explored awe as a catalyst for change, working with community partners across Canada, Europe, North and South Africa. From urban reforestation initiatives with Parks Canada to the Lugongolo Foundation’s work redefining masculinity and reducing gender-based violence, our journey reveals that awe-based changemaking is not about following a linear path. Instead, it’s a constellation of human experiences that challenge conventional approaches to what drives us to change. Awe, it turns out, doesn’t always lead to immediate action—but sometimes, that’s exactly the point.

The Liminal Power of Awe

Awe is a fleeting and liminal state—a brief window into the vastness of existence that disrupts our tidy narratives. Researchers like Dacher Keltner have highlighted how awe can break through our conventional thinking, reminding us of the interconnectedness of everything around us. His insights have fueled my approach to ‘awe-based changemaking,’ seeing awe not just as an emotional response but as a powerful catalyst for reimagining our role within complex systems.

At the University of Central Florida, researchers describe awe as “a direct and initial feeling when faced with something incomprehensible or sublime.” They’ve been measuring awe’s physiological effects—changes in heart rate, breathing, and even our sense of time—showing that awe is a full-bodied experience that momentarily unmoors us from the illusion of control. Awe can make us feel small, part of something larger, and intricately connected in ways we rarely acknowledge. It’s a powerful reminder that we are not separate from the systems we try to manage but deeply embedded within them.

Yet, awe isn’t always comfortable. It can unsettle us, disrupt our perspectives, and challenge our sense of certainty. It’s not about remaining in awe but about what unfolds afterward—how it nudges us into new ways of thinking and being. This mirrors the work of Renee Lertzman and Project Inside Out, which emphasizes the importance of creating space for emotional processing as a critical step in addressing complex challenges.

In our work, we’ve observed that awe often leads down two distinct paths: for some, it sparks immediate action, while for others, it opens up a deeper sense of wonder and inquiry. In our rush to act, we often overlook this crucial reflective space—a space that not only helps us process our emotions but also challenges the very systems we seek to change.

Introducing Awe-Based Changemaking

Through my exploration, I’ve come to see that awe can lead us to a multitude of places, each as varied as the individuals who experience it. Although I initially sought to create a structured framework to map these outcomes, I’ve instead begun to visualize awe as a constellation—a dynamic network of potential directions. The real challenge lies in guiding and supporting individuals as they navigate these points, helping them move from moments of awe toward meaningful shifts and lasting change.

Awe as a Gateway to Wonder

Often, the ‘woah’ of awe naturally transitions into wonder—a quieter, more contemplative feeling where we sit with our questions. Wonder is what happens when we can’t immediately fit an awe-inspiring experience into our usual mental frameworks. It’s not about the immediate emotional rush but about the thinking that follows.

Imagine witnessing a meteor shower, standing beneath a sky ablaze with streaks of light. Awe grips you first—a visceral reminder of your smallness and the universe’s grandeur. But as the moment fades, wonder takes over. You begin to ask: How does this happen? What does it mean? Wonder invites us to dwell in uncertainty and exploration, rather than rushing to simple answers.

From Wonder to Curiosity

This shift from awe to wonder naturally gives rise to curiosity—a willingness to explore beyond what we know and to question the status quo. At this year’s Karnival der Kulturen (Carnival of Cultures) in Berlin, we focused on moral beauty—one of the eight universal ways to experience awe identified by Keltner. The carnival, rooted in a history of bridging divides, now serves as a platform to celebrate diversity and dialogue. For our team, it was a place for exploring depolarization strategies, and as part of this ongoing experiment, we invited strangers to connect unexpectedly.

Participants were paired, asked to sit face-to-face, gaze into each other’s eyes, and write letters to one another without exchanging words. This simple act of seeing and being seen created micro-moments of awe. The air was charged with unspoken connections, and curiosity replaced small talk. People began to ask deeper questions: What has shaped you? What are your dreams? The exercise didn’t seek answers; it sought to ignite deeper engagement, empathy, and connection. The outcomes of this experiment are still unfolding, but early reflections suggest that awe, even among strangers, can open doors to new possibilities for understanding.

One of the many letters written from one stranger to another. Berlin 2024

From Curiosity to Self-Directed Learning

Curiosity often nudges us into self-directed learning—a shift from passive absorption to active exploration. During my time leading Fashion Revolution in Malaysia and Singapore, we focused on raising awareness about supply chain issues, from microplastics to labor ethics. But simply presenting information rarely led to real change. The turning point came when individuals experienced a moment that disrupted their habitual thinking—a spark of awe or curiosity that made them want to dig deeper on their own terms, like the 9meter tall closet I built with artist Von Wong in one of Egypt’s largest shopping malls.

Von Wong https://blog.vonwong.com/tallestcloset/

I’ve seen consumers, previously disengaged, become passionate about understanding the stories behind the clothes they wear. They shifted from passive consumers to active learners, driven not by guilt but by a genuine desire to know more. This is where awe-based changemaking diverges from traditional advocacy: it doesn’t push; it pulls.

Connecting with Others: The Communal Effect of Awe

Community amplifies the power of awe. When curiosity evolves into self-directed learning, it often brings people together, deepening their commitment and broadening their impact. Collective moments of awe—from public art installations to shared experiences in nature—remind us that we are not isolated actors but part of a larger, interconnected web.

A powerful example of this is Little Amal, the 12-foot puppet of a Syrian refugee girl who has journeyed across cities worldwide, sparking conversations about displacement and human rights. Little Amal’s presence isn’t just symbolic; it creates communal moments of awe that disrupt apathy and provoke empathy. People aren’t just spectators; they become part of a shared experience that challenges the boundaries between self and other, between the familiar and the unknown. Amal’s journey shows how awe can transform public spaces into sites of reflection, connection, and collective action.

Little Amal https://www.walkwithamal.org/

The Shift

Ultimately, awe connects our individual experiences to broader systems, helping us see ourselves as both part of the problem and the solution. This shift—from micro to macro—is not necessarily about grand gestures but about the small, everyday moments that ripple out into the world. Awe reminds us that we are not separate from the systems we seek to change; we are entangled within them. It’s this entanglement that gives our actions—however small—the potential to shape our future.

When we experience awe, we momentarily step outside the boxes we’ve constructed around reality. We see the interconnectedness of our choices, the complexity of our world, and the possibilities that lie beyond the obvious. In those moments, the question isn’t just what we do next, but who we become.

Rethinking Changemaking Through Awe

The journey from awe to wonder, curiosity, self-directed learning, community, and ultimately, change, is not simply another framework approach—it’s an invitation to engage with flukes, and the fleeting moments that can unexpectedly shift the ground beneath us. Awe, in all its unpredictability, offers us a chance to pause, to reflect, and to reconnect with the complexity of life. It’s a reminder that the answers we seek are often found not in the grand narratives but in the quiet, overlooked moments that challenge us to see the world—and ourselves—in a whole new way.

With kindness and curiosity,
Laura

Where to Find Us During Climate Week NYC 2024

• The PolyOpportunity – Hosted by the House of Beautiful Business and The Acosta Institute, this event will delve into the intersection of emotions and systems change. I’ll be speaking about how awe can shift our perspectives and open new pathways to impact. Learn more.

• Moving Climate Action from Depletion to Health, Awe, Regeneration - In partnership with Futur.io, Steelcase, we’re joining experts Parneet Pal (Systematically Well), Fanny Eliaers (nuway), this Climate Week NYC session brings together business leaders, sustainability officers, and changemakers to delve into how awe and inner restoration can sustain long-term climate action. Through dialogue, scientific insights, and emotional processing, we’ll transition from a place of depletion to one of health, awe, and regeneration. Learn more.

Additionally, check out these important community events happening soon:

• Humanize Program by Monika Jiang

  – An inspiring program that focuses on vulnerability and human connection in a world often dominated by efficiency. Monika’s work invites us to rethink how we engage with ourselves and others. Learn more.

Making Loneliness Visible

Loneliness has long been a part of the human condition, an evolutionary prompt motivating our ancestors to seek out the safety and support of tribal communities. Like hunger's motivating force, the pain of isolation originally drove early humans to congregate. Something in our evolutionary biology makes solitude feel unpleasant while togetherness brings contentment. In modern times, however, this once-adaptive response has morphed into a pervasive sense of alienation, an unspoken epidemic lurking beneath the surface of our hyper-connected society.

By destigmatizing loneliness through open dialogue, we reveal what was once unseen - the undercurrent of societal suffering and alienation. In doing so, we foster connection through an experience both unique and universally human.

Rediscovering Awe

Rediscovering awe nurtures the very capacities that allowed our ancestors' communities to cohere: empathy, compassion, trust, humility. Awe encourages questioning deeply held beliefs as we shift perspectives. It can destabilize how we view ourselves and our relationship to the world and each other. Yet awe also dissolves the ego, reminding us of bonds beyond the isolated self. A forgetting and remembering. Awe allows feeling and thinking beyond a single unit, guiding us back to "oneliness" - the realization that all is one.

Awe and gratitude nurture our fundamentally social nature. Practicing them fosters interconnection, shaping our thoughts and behaviors across the whole spectrum of human experience - in work, in community, in family etc.

Three Dimensions Converge

The Self
How to be alone but not lonely: to connect with others, connecting with feelings, needs, and body is essential. Knowing how to be alone equips me with how to navigate moments of feeling alone. Awe can be a catalyst for learning how to be alone but never truly alone as I am aware of the connections to a greater whole, to systems beyond what I can see and grasp.

Others
Experiencing awe collectively, at events or gatherings, can impact relationships profoundly. One-on-one intimacy fosters awe, reducing loneliness. Developing skills like active listening, positive communication and conflict resolution allows us to connect meaningfully with loved ones and strangers alike.

Many dimensions of awe arise through relationships. Consider Durkheim's "collective effervescence" - when a group shares parallel thoughts and actions, generating unifying energy and higher purpose. Or moral beauty - others' acts of kindness, courage and humility inspiring personal growth through awe. These shared awe experiences from cement profound intimacies transcending superficial aloneness.

The More-Than-Human World
While religion once provided purpose, meaning and humility, these are being redefined. Awe reminds us of our small place within the greater whole, reconnecting us to nature and beings beyond the human realm. This awareness could be an antidote to eco-anxiety and the narrative of separation fueling many of our climate movements.

Existential loneliness reflects the converse longing - for deeper significance amid self-sufficiency, guilt and powerlessness. Interconnectedness could offer humble solace to our collective spiritual search - the reassurance that we belong within nature's wildly interwoven systems.

The practice of awe is universally accessible, helping elevate individual and shared human experience. Cultivating awe in daily life strengthens our capacity to pause, to notice, and to regularly engage with wonder.

Can awe lead us toward deeper realizations of interdependence? And in these moments, might we share in our loneliness?

An invitation to our Berlin gathering on May 26th.

The Surprising Match of Awe and Loneliness: A Community Gathering on (Re-)Connecting With Ourselves, Each Other, and The World Through Awe-Based Practices

Hosted by Laura François, co-founder of Awe Exchange, and Monika Jiang, initiator of Sharing Our Loneliness. They both became friends somewhere along the way through a handful of encounters involving delicious stone-oven pizza on a rainy day in Lisbon, a heart-to-heart conversation during a dance break at Heideglühen in Berlin, and epiphanies shared on voice messages between Montréal and Madrid. On the rare, serendipitous occasion of being in the same place at the same time, they felt called to create and hold space together. Coming from different spaces—one activism, one business-ish, exploring different topics—one awe, one loneliness—they share a love for daring to do things unconventionally. Will you join us?

Have you experienced times when the natural world seemed to sustain you or provide guidance?

In this episode, eco-psychologist Molly Young Brown cracks open our perceived separateness from the natural world, inviting us into a profound interconnectedness with all life.

Through insights from decades of work, Molly guides us to "see with new ancient eyes" - to experience ourselves not just as bystanders to the ‘natural’ world.

Her work reminds us that we are not operating solely from personal callings, but are expressions of a vast, planetary life force urgently emerging.

Molly's wisdom is anchored in her work as a writer, educator, workshop facilitator, and life coach. She draws on the Work That Reconnects, ecopsychology, psychosynthesis, and systems thinking, and specializes in working with activists.

She is the author and co-author of several books, including Growing Whole: Self-realization for the Great Turning; Unfolding Self: The Practice ofPsychosynthesis, Held in Love: Life Stories To Inspire Us Through Times of Change (co-editor Carolyn Treadway); and Lighting A Candle: Collected Reflections on a Spiritual Life. 

Extras from this episode.

• Practices from "The Work That Reconnects"

• Understanding eco-psychology

• Dr.Roberto Assagioli’s work and pioneering of psychosynthesis

I can't tell you what happened next, because I was dumbstruck. Tears in my eyes. Unable to say anything except 'Oh my goodness' over and over again.

As we stumbled back into the light, you could hear the existential reverberations in people's conversations - "I forgot to take a photo, I was so in it..." "Do you think we're alone in the universe?" Everywhere I walked that day, and online in the days following, I re-lived the eclipse over and over again.

But it's not the blurry photo of a white orb that I'm intrigued by. I'm pulled in by the countless videos of people hugging, tearing, jumping, singing. Humans being humans, but doing it very much together. This was no ordinary afternoon - the change was palpable in the way people looked at one another. A closeness between strangers. The palpable nature of 'the collective'.

In Niagara Falls, hundreds of people even spontaneously sang "You are my sunshine" as the sky darkened.

@matthewscott97☀️☀️☀️ #solareclipse #niagarafalls

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Back in 2017, a similar total solar eclipse could be seen in parts of North America, and a group of researchers pored over millions of tweets from that day and found that the change in behaviour around the eclipse made perfect sense.

People who witnessed the total eclipse used way more "we" and "us" words and way fewer "I" and "me" words compared to those who missed the full show.

Eclipse-viewers were more likely to express sentiments related to helping, sharing, and supporting one another in the aftermath of the awe-inspiring event. It's as though the event yanked us out of our self-centered bubbles and stitched us back into the collective fabric - our communities, the earthly 'us'.

When everything is uncertain - everything is possible. - Mariame Kaba

For a brief moment during the eclipse, everything was uncertain. Was the sun going to re-emerge? My rational brain knew it would, but another part of me contemplated the potential that this could very well be the end of the world. The moment felt that big.

Two wildly beautiful things emerged at once: Total uncertainty (What's going to happen?) and total togetherness (We're all in this together). In that moment of collective unknowing, we felt a profound sense of connection to everyone around us.

What if we could bottle up that feeling of unity and bring it back into our everyday lives? In a world increasingly fragmented by hyper-individualism, we're losing sight of the fact that we're all in this together. The challenges we face - from climate change to social injustice - are too big for any one of us to tackle alone. The only way forward is through collective action, through recognizing our interdependence and working towards our shared well-being.

How do we harness the unifying power of awe and translate it into effective, sustainable action?

The key likely lies in building strong, resilient communities. As writer and organizer Ayesha Khan eloquently puts it:

Khan's words resonate deeply with my own experiences and observations. Time and again, I've seen how:

1. Building strong, trusting, and vulnerable relationships with the wider community enables us to take more risks, experiment, and imagine together. The more we share time, rituals, and commitment towards each other and our planet, the more we can organize change.

2. The less isolated we are, the less we are controlled by oppressive systems (like capitalism).

3. The more we practice being a 'we' and thinking of ourselves as part of a collective, the more we can withstand the volatility of making change happen - the burnouts, wins, losses, and mess. It becomes something we can share.

That groundedness in community sustains us for the long haul of changemaking. When we're enmeshed in webs of mutual care and solidarity, we're far more equipped to weather the inevitable storms that come with threatening the status quo. We can take bolder risks and experiment with more imaginative solutions, knowing we have a safety net of relationships to catch us.

So while awe alone isn't enough - the hard daily labor of building beloved community is even more vital - it's undeniably powerful medicine for renewing our sense of connection. In a world hell-bent on alienating us, that felt remembering of our interdependence is revolutionary.

Awe simply reopens our minds to the speculative, to the seemingly impossible, to the more just and compassionate world we may not be able to see yet but can still feel.

As we stumble back into the light of "normal life" after an awesome event like an eclipse, the challenge is to hold fast to that visceral knowing of our inescapable oneness - that bone-deep sense that our fates are bound up with each other and with this achingly beautiful planet we call home. To let it fuel our courage to keep showing up for the slow, unglamorous work of making change happen.

For a few minutes there, as darkness descended and the sun and moon did their dazzling dance above us all, I think we knew that deep down.

Let's not wait for the next eclipse to remember it.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

This week’s recap

1. Plants can make music. In our most recent interview with biofield musician Shane Mendonsa, we explored the wild world of more-than-human creative collaborations.

2. We delved deeper into the awe-filled world of interspecies creativity. At its core, more-than-human collaboration is an act of decolonizing perspective, challenging the narrative of humans being the only main characters of the story of this planet. Read more here.

3. We’re heading to Olso, Norway! We’re joining up with Katapult Future Fest to explore how awe connects to the impact investment landscape. Two unlikely words in the same sentence. More to come… But for now, we’re stoked to join their events in May!

What we’re reading

In Light-Years There's No Hurry: Cosmic Perspectives on Everyday Life by Marjolijn van Heemstra

“Could it be that our lost view of the stars has blocked out our view of the future? That our everyday hustle and bustle, the stress, the artificial lights, are so ever-present that we, slowly but surely, can’t imagine anything except this frenetic, infinitely recurring here and now? A constant battle for those few square feet in our field of vision? Could it be that we experience more brokenness because there’s no more darkness into which our differences can dissolve? Darkness in which borders become visible, where we can breathe, and where we can step back form everything we so resolutely stand for in daylight?”

This week we recorded an episode of Awe Effect with author Marjolijn van Heemstra, and we can’t wait for you to hear it. It’s an ode to all we cannot see. Check out her book here.

What we’ve been listening to

I often work from a café down my street. It’s my favorite spot because many musicians practice there, performing short sets of music, testing new material on a relaxed audience of coffee sippers and laptops.

Yesterday, someone struck up a conversation with me as I wrote this Substack post. I told them about awe and why I’m so utterly convinced it’s power to contribute to systems change.

He immediately referenced Hania Rani - a polish pianist and composer that I had never heard of. To him, this specific music video was a waterfall of awe.

Shane Mendonsa is part of that shift; a composer who went from scoring Bollywood movies to improvising alongside an unlikely ensemble – living plants. Mendonsa uses sensors attached to leaves to drive synthesizers, allowing the plants' bioelectrical signals to shape the music in real-time.

It requires really listening and being completely present. I can't impose my expectations, I have to accept each moment as the plants express it."

-Shane Mendonsa

This openness to authentic dialogue across species is at the heart of his botanical music-making.

Mendonsa is part of a growing group of artists, designers, and researchers exploring what's being called "more-than-human collaboration" – the act of decentering human perspectives to engage creatively and respectfully with our non-human kin. From visualizing animal "superpowers" to simulating how horses see, this work challenges our assumptions about our human supremacy.

For designer and researcher Alan Hook, this represents "an exercise in empathy" that can reshape how we understand our role on this vibrant, multi-species planet. His "Equine Eyes" project allows humans to briefly experience the world through a horse's panoramic visual field and unique color perception. The prototypes he developed help us better understand how the species experiences the world. Playing with this empathy could inform new ways of building for inter-species inclusivity in the future.

What might the future look like through the eyes of a horse?

Equine Eyes - Alan Hook

“We understand the world from a very fixed human-centric point of view … so [we] can’t really understand what it must be like to be a different creature.”

- Alan Hook

While these simulations can never fully replicate another being's subjective experience, they crack open an "imaginative space" to ponder how our fellow more-than-human friends experience life. At its core, more-than-human collaboration is an act of decolonizing perspective, challenging the narrative of humans being the only main characters of the story of this planet.

Anthropocentrism literally means ‘human-centered’. It speaks to the belief that humans are the only living things possessing any intrinsic value, and all other living things hold value only in the way they serve humans.

Some examples of how anthropocentrism plays out in our day to day:

• Humans treating nature only as a ‘resource’ to be extracted for progress and development.

• Environmental problems being solved purely by technological innovations.

• Categorizing animals based on the degree of intelligence we perceive them to have.

The concept of collaboration with nature is a direct reminder that the natural world is populated by wise, reactive beings with their own coherent sensibilities, as indigenous knowledge systems have long understood.

From this perspective, more-than-human collaboration is not a novelty, but a profound reframing and deep remembering. As Mendonsa's plant music reminds us, creativity arises not from individual genius but from attunement to the plurality of experiences always unfolding around us.

The human is far from being alone.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

PS. Check out these more-than-human masterpieces!

The Mosquito Translator by NonHuman NonSense

Equine Eyes by Alan Hooks

Goldenrod by Shane Mendonsa

You may never look at a plant the same way again.

In this episode, we explore the world of biofield musician Shane Mendonsa, who has composed music for award-winning films and blockbuster Bollywood movies. But most recently, Shane has focused on more-than-human collaborators.

By tapping into the bioelectric fields of various flowers, ferns, and foliage, Shane reveals an unseen world where nature isn't just a source of inspiration but an active co-creator.

His experience in enabling plants to compose their own music evokes a sense of awe and interconnectedness, inviting us to rethink our relationship with the more-than-human world around us.

As we grapple with environmental crises, could this be a key to building a regenerative future where we see plants not just as a backdrop but as partners on this planet we all inhabit?

Extras from this episode

Find out more about Shane Mendonsa’s work.

What’s a biofield?

Listen to an incredible performance by Shane and a sugar maple tree

This week’s recap

1. We’re *dying* for you to listen to our latest Awe Effect episode about death and awe featuring death doula Paul Simard. Warning: It may leave you open to talking about death.

2. Based on the above-mentioned conversation with Paul, we explored what it might mean to become death doulas for dying systems. Economic systems, systems of oppression, and extractive systems. If you missed it, check out our article Doulas for Dying Systems. We’re dead serious about it.

3. Collaboration announcement! We’re partnering with House of Beautiful Business to develop a special case study at their gathering in Tangier, Morrocco. Our focus? Exploring how experiences of awe at gatherings like this connect and inspire people to take action. More below.

What we’re reading

The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

“There are moments in everyone’s life when an experience of integration with the world transcends the business of survival - like seeing a grandchild for the first time, witnessing an Olympic record broken or the uncommon bravery of an ordinary citizen. For many, the experience of attending the dismantling of the Berlin Wall or of witnessing the emergence of Nelson Mandela from twenty-seven years of imprisonment may have been such a moment.

Some find admission to the realm of possibility at a religious gathering, some in meditation, some by listening to great music. Often people enter this state in the presence of natural beauty or at the sight of something of infinite magnitude, an expanse of ocean or a towering sky. These are moments when we forget ourselves and seem to become part of all being.”

What we’ve been listening to

MARO is a Portuguese singer-songwriter. She wrote a song called ‘saudade saudade’ that speaks to me on another level these days.

The Portuguese word ‘saudade’ doesn’t have a direct English translation, but the closest might be ‘yearning’. It speaks to a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia. Yearning for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Yearning for the little wonders. Yearning for moments of awe.

Between the two of us... a moment of awe?

Excited to share the Awe Exchange will be collaborating with the incredible House of Beautiful Business team again this year in Tangier, Morocco for their "Between The Two of Us" gathering to develop a special case study.

Our focus? Exploring how experiences of awe at gatherings like this connect and inspire people to take action.

Having felt profound awe myself at past House events, I can't wait to dig deeper into how we harness the power of those moments. The program unfolds between May 2-5 with over 50 brilliant speakers from the intersecting worlds of technology, arts, philosophy, civic leadership.… Tickets are still available here.

Are you an organization interested in identifying opportunities for awe to weave into changemaking strategies?

We are currently looking for case study partners and collaborators to develop a case for awe in impact.

We are seeking organizations who are:

• Open to integrating awe into climate strategy, programs, or activations

• Imagination driven, data informed

• Inspired to be part of the first generation of organizations exploring awe-based change-making

Curious? Questions? Reach out laura@awe.exchange

They ask some incredibly pertinent questions.

People are out there doing the research on how not to die and the question that we should really be asking is: what happens if they are successful and we no longer get to die?
- Paul Simard

Death doulas guide individuals and families to consciously engage with death and dying. They create space for grief while bringing meaning to life’s closure. It’s a beautiful concept. The shepherding of someone’s experience in crossing over to ‘the other side’ is an experience that requires patience, empathy, and curiosity for the unknown. What it can give in return, is the feeling of awe.

Death can be awe-filled.

Yet, I’m not sure I feel entirely comfortable with the concept. As I age, I feel less and less thrilled with mortality in general. Perhaps it’s one of the subconscious reasons I started working in ‘sustainability’ over a decade ago. I want to ‘sustain’ forever and ever and ever…?

When death doula Paul Simard and I sat down to record our most recent episode of Awe Effect, he surfaced the importance of the dying process. There is the obvious argument of making the best use of our time on earth and ‘embracing finitude’; Oliver Burkeman speaks to this in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and the message is clear. The more we think about our own deaths, the more we’re likely to enjoy our lives.

And similarly, the more we think about the deaths of the systems that no longer serve our planet, the more likely we are to successfully transition to a new one.

Systemic Hospice Work

Talking about death, facing it, and even making friends with it may also be one of the keys to rethinking our relationship with our linear economy (the system in which people buy a product, use it, and then throw it away).

As paradigms shift and outdated economic structures decline, we need death doulas to midwife necessary changes.

The Berkana Institute’s Two Loop model tries to capture how systems change or paradigm shifts can happen at the level of whole societies. It depicts new “emergent” systems gaining influence while outdated “dominant” systems struggle to survive.

Despite how destructive outdated dominant systems might be, they do require a certain amount of hospicing to put to rest what no longer serves our planet.

As these old structures enter their “hospice” phase, imagine individuals whose role it is to compassionately facilitate the transition, supporting those of us who resist it? In essence, that’s the role of a death doula.

Imagine what economic death doulas might do.

First, they might help us grieve, helping us release attachments to counterproductive models. For example, it can be easy to convince someone that fast fashion is polluting. What is often more difficult is giving space to grieve the death of a hobby (shopping) and all the fun that was once had awaiting a daily shipment of online shopping deliveries.

Truthfully, this can be a sad and uncomfortable transition for a fashion shopaholic. Supporting someone’s grief in this transition might make the difference between that person committing to this change.

Next, death doulas might curate rituals and celebrations to honor the meaningful accomplishments these systems enabled. They might also highlight what remains nourishing to carry forward versus compost.

Most importantly, death doulas dignify the essential mystery that change involves. They ease fears around the unknown future by blessing endings and honoring life’s cyclical nature - death enables new growth.

Designer Death Doulas

It’s not just your imagination. The things we buy used to have a longer lifespan than they do now. When I first moved into my apartment, I was certain I would have to replace the stove from the 1980s, but it’s still running strong.

It’s becoming widely accepted that products just don’t last as long, when in reality it’s designed that way. Designers have immense power to shape aspirations and relationships with the material world.

Designers architect the birth, life, and death of the products they create.

An often-cited example is Apple, who got in trouble a few years ago when accused of slowing the speed of iPhones as the battery depleted, which was seen as a means to trigger people to buy a new one.

The idea of intentionally limiting product lifespan was first proposed in the early 20th century. Manufacturers realized they could boost sales by designing goods to break down or become outdated faster. This "contrived durability" meant products were made with parts meant to fail sooner. It evolved into "progressive obsolescence" - styling products in a way that would go out of fashion quickly so consumers felt compelled to buy the newest version.

Both approaches were meant to shorten product lifespans, ensuring more frequent replacement purchases. This planned obsolescence was seen as a way to stimulate continuous consumer demand through faster turnover of goods.

We went from overtly engineering failure to more subtly manipulating consumer tastes, but the goal was the same - get consumers to replace items more rapidly by intentionally limiting their usable lifespan versus making them as durable as possible.

Design decisions determine what we eat, what we wear, and what we value. They also determine the dying process of the things they design. Designer ‘death doulas’ can fertilize the soil for economies aligned with the living world, by designing products with death in mind.

As we undertake the necessary work of guiding the transition away from our linear economy, here are 3 questions to sit with:

1. How might we grieve what is dying while also imagining possibilities for what could emerge? The path ahead requires releasing attachments to the current system, while cultivating optimism for the next.

2. In what ways are we complicit in perpetuating linear systems - as designers, producers, or consumers?

3. Where might our own behaviors and mindsets need to shift to hospice which no longer serves our planet?

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

PS. I’d like to spotlight a few individuals who are supporting the process of grief and welcoming a global transition.

1. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and her book ‘Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism’

2. Dr. Renée Lertzman supports people to become Guides, to lead with grace and strength, compassion and empathy with Project Insight Out

3. Sherri Mitchell and her book Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change

Does anyone truly know what it’s like to die? What we know for certain is that the topic of death calls for an immense amount of not-knowing. Death is, in fact, one of the wonders of life.

A death doula is someone who supports the transition between life and death, and on this episode, we chat with death doula, Paul Simard.

Paul talks about the "death industrial complex", our modern system of death fostering denial and disconnection. Yet death can be filled with mystery, reverence and awe. He shares how reclaiming death's role in our lives can, in fact, nurture us.

Extras from this episode

Find out more about Paul’s work.

The untranslatable word: "hiraeth"

The Mushroom Death Suit

Stephen Jenkinson’s book about grief, and dying

Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death