I mentioned to him that I could totally resonate with his anxiety and felt like I was in a state of just “dodging the meteors until you clear the debris field.”

He and I got a good chuckle out of that, (as we usually do about the often absurd nature of today’s realities). It was the exact sentiment of how we were both feeling in our individual states in life.

Any time I talk about something from nature or science, even if I just say something off the cuff, I always take it as an invitation to make sure my metaphors are accurate in what I'm saying and thinking because I never want to say anything about science that is wrong. It’s a paranoia I have as well as a standard I rely on in my work.

So I went back and looked at what I was actually expressing.

The first thing I found was that I had the word wrong. Meteors are an atmospheric event. What I was picturing were the chunks of a star and its worlds thrown outward by a collapse. Those have their own name. Astronomers call the dense pieces fast moving knots, and the whole expanding field is the ejecta.

The second thing I found was something that was much more profound than what I said, and thus, this article was born.

The four elements

In this, the practice that I call Dream Farming, there are four elements that a Dream Farmer, or someone looking to become a Dream Farmer, must learn to work within. In learning them, you can begin to understand how they can cultivate a new world, a possibility for themselves, in any soil, in any environment.

Those four elements are stars, seeds, soil, and seasons.

The one that I think can have the most challenge in wrapping people’s minds around, and implementing, is related to stars.

Almost every star in the known universe was born from the death of stars that came before it. Collapse, as I’ve learned in this work, is the point of origin for new stars. The very first generation had no ancestors. It formed from the hydrogen and helium that already existed. Everything after that, including every star capable of holding worlds like ours, was built from the remains of stars that died first.

_{All images credited to NASA. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals Egg Nebula. This structure of gas and dust was created by a dying, Sun-like star. NASA, ESA, Bruce Balick (UWashington)}

The balance in the heart of a star

At the death of a star there is a shift. There is an exhaustion that takes place in the fuel source within the core.

Inside the heart of the star there is a delicate balance. Hydrogen is fused into helium, and that fusion releases enormous energy, pushing outward in all directions. At the same time the forces of gravity are pulling everything in the vicinity of the star toward the center of its core.

There is this perpetual tug of war between the internal explosion and the external pull of gravity. Somehow these two things form a balance.

That balance is not static. A star is not a static thing. It is an active balance perpetually, having a push and pull between these two forces.

Because of this, stars form. And that same gravitational pull draws other things into the star’s sphere of influence, the radius of influence a star has on the celestial objects around it. Within that sphere, planets form from similar raw elements floating around, pulled into orbit, building up their own momentum, creating new worlds that accrete, bonding and binding together as they swirl with momentum.

The planets that accrete will eventually form new worlds of possibility around the star.

In the work I do, I share with people that “dreams are stars and seeds.” As stars, dreams become the anchor for what can happen in different worlds of possibility, becoming the assumed norm. In Dream Farming I define dreams as our hopes and aspirations for new norms.

So the star becomes the new norm.

What fascinated me most in going back through this was learning that a star is not a stable thing. It is a moving, dynamic thing that has flares and explosive inflammation. The surface of our own sun is convecting like a boiling pot. Its magnetic field reverses polarity roughly every eleven years. It rings with acoustic oscillations we can actually measure. The most reliable looking object in our sky, the most “consistent and normal thing” in our solar system is actually in constant turmoil at every scale.

It is not a static thing. It is a thing that is constantly in tension with itself.

Our perception of norms as established governing rules. Our perception of institutions and beliefs and systems as inescapable, so thoroughly ingrained in the fabric of our society that they will never change. None of these are solid objects. They are fluid states of balance born out of tension. They can erupt and they can be destabilized at any moment given the right conditions.

And collapse is always triggered by imbalance.

Fuel, balance, structure, and time

You have to fuel balance with the right fuel.

What will be the fuel for you to produce what you need?

The collapse comes from no longer having the proper structure. Fuel, balance, structure, and time. Those are the things that make a star. Pressure is normal, and staying engaged with that is the life of the star.

When the hydrogen in the core runs out, the star does not simply quit. Gravity wins for a moment, the core contracts, and the contraction raises the temperature until helium ignites. A new fuel. A new balance. Then helium runs out and the core contracts again and carbon ignites. Then neon. Then oxygen. Then silicon.

Each stage is a new equilibrium found at higher pressure and higher cost. Each one is shorter than the one before it. Hydrogen burning lasts millions of years. Silicon burning lasts about a day.

Then silicon fuses into iron, and everything stops. Fusing iron consumes energy instead of releasing it. There is no next fuel.

The act of dying creates things that could not have existed while the star was alive

There is this thing known as nucleosynthesis that takes place inside of a star. This is where the raw material inside of the star is being converted into new elements. Carbon, oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, calcium, iron.

In this unimaginable furnace there are new elements being created that will be needed to create what comes next.

And it goes further than that. The heaviest elements, everything past iron, are not made in the star’s life at all. They are made in the explosion itself. Forged during the dying.

The act of dying creates things that could not have existed while the star was alive.

The imbalance causes the collapse. The shockwave is the fodder for the future. Collapse is inevitable, and that is the nature of stars. Collapse of structure is the norm, and these new elements can only be formed through it. Later stars are able to be more complex, and to hold more complex worlds, because of the death of the stars that came before them.

The shockwave you may be experiencing now is actually your gift to the future

Every person is an element contributing to the creation of new stars, of new norms.

The collapse is the ignition and the initiation.

Yours is not the first collapse, or the only one.

In all of this, nothing is wasted. This is the life cycle of stars.

_{NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Danny Milisavljevic (Purdue University), Ilse De Looze (UGhent), Tea Temim (Princeton University). Behold supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A), and the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed by the star before it exploded. Learn more about this dope phenomenon here.}

Collapse is instant. A new norm takes time.

Collapse can take place in an instant. The core of a massive star collapses in about a second.

The creation of a new norm takes time. The remnant, the expanding field of everything the star threw off, lasts tens of thousands of years. Cassiopeia A exploded around 1680 and is still expanding right now. We can watch it move.

The thing that ended is over in an instant. The thing you have to survive goes on for generations.

There can be a point in time where you are just living in the aftermath of the shockwave until a new norm emerges. This interstitial space has just debris everywhere. Raw material, dust, coldness, and darkness.

If you are exhausted in that place, you are not slow to recover from a moment. You are living inside the duration.

Resistance vs. Acceptance

For objects that are within the blast radius of this dying norm, there is a challenge that exists.

Do I try to withstand the impact of the shockwave, or do I allow the collapse of this norm to push me in a direction and embrace the creation of something new?

In space nothing chooses. Everything in the blast radius is displaced whether or not it consents. But in life we often try to resist where a shockwave is pushing us toward a new norm. When we do that we actually work against the wave in a way that causes us to exert more energy through our resistance.

This is not about resistance. There are definitely places where resistance is the only way for us to move forward and survive.

There are places where our norms have collapsed, and there are places where our fear of the absence of that norm prevents us from seeing the gift that a new norm may bring, to build something new and maybe even more beautiful than before.

The grief is star work

Sometimes we think we have to endure long enough to a place where we can finally grieve the death of that norm. Sometimes trying to endure works. But usually, giving in to the collapse of our emotions is when the relief that grieving facilitates is finally released.

Being in the place in between what has died and what is not yet formed, and being pushed into a new norm, can never feel great, if ever.

The biggest part of this is embracing the grieving process of what was.

That too is star work. That is a big part of Dream Farming. Embracing the death, but reframing and rewriting our thinking to understand that death is just the beginning of the next thing. The time we spend around the collapsed star is directly tied to our capacity to be in a stage where we can grieve what was, versus trying to hold on to what is no longer there.

And here is something that is sadly not consolation, it’s just true. The material being grieved and the material of whatever comes next are the same material. Not similar. The same atoms. What you may be grieving is not gone and replaced. It is in transit.

The first great collapse I have experienced was my mother’s death. She passed three weeks before I got married. In her passing, entire worlds of possibility shattered and I had a front row seat. All the worlds of possibility around my children, around my future, all the future memories I was looking forward to holding on to, my girls spending time with my mom, my mother tickling them hysterically, all of the photos of them together, the girls calling her abuelita, the same way all of my nieces and nephews called her abuelita (my mom was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. IYKYK). All of those possibilities obliterated in an instant. Gone was the norm of my mother’s presence in my life. Her laughter on the phone. Her hugs. Possible memories that will now never exist.

Those memories never formed. But the raw material was preserved.

The love that I give my girls is directly built from the love I experienced from the warmth of my mother. The warmth of that sun. Her essence became part of the love that I formed as a star for them, as a norm for them. They never met her physically. They have experienced her essence in the new norms I am building for them, out of what I preserved from her. Seeing how that love was transformed into my daughters’ love is its own gift that I’m still getting used to holding.

Uncertain Trajectory

Uncertainty has its own form of turbulence. The floaty nature of no longer being in orbit around something. Now floating away from something that was keeping you anchored and centered.

Earlier this year, by God’s grace, I turned 40 and am going through my own professional and personal period of unanticipated growth and development. For the past 18 months or so, I have been calling “liminal space” my home. The new norms I feel myself being pulled toward are still forming. Rest assured, there is plenty of uncertainty and unknown and angst and anxiety and insecurity in that.

But when I look at what has accreted, when I look at the body of work, when I look at this practice of Dream Farming and the impact it’s been having on people, when I look at this understanding of my identity as a cultivator of worlds of possibility, I do see the reward. I see what is being built in it, even if I do not see the final form and it is not stable yet.

For me it is a really great reminder of trajectory.

I am not slowing down. My life is not slowing down. I am just being moved in a new direction.

Eventually elements of my life and work will (and have already begun to) collide with other resources and raw material. New stars form where an expanding remnant runs into a cold cloud that was already sitting there, waiting. The compression is what triggers the collapse into something new. The thing you collide with is not an obstacle. They are the other elements. What is preserved and what is reimagined into something new is something you can decide whether you are open to or not.

My willingness to face that will allow me to recognize debris as resource. And in recognizing the debris as the resource, the raw material to build what is next, I can also realize and recognize that I am already in the state of building something new.

Something new is accreting, but it may not have taken form yet. Accretion happens through repeated small collisions, long before there is any object to see. There is a real span where it is genuinely underway and nothing looks like it is happening.

And stars almost never form alone. They form in clusters, in nurseries, out of the same cloud. Solitary formation is the rare case. Whatever gathers, gathers together.

The clumps only form by being in community with other people who are willing to care about you. Two people can be the initial clump. One conversation of encouragement can be the initial clump that leads to the formation of a star.

In this state that I find myself in, I am also learning the value of community, and how it is the community of people you are in that forms the protostar. The early stage of the new norm that will be but is not quite yet.

If you are going through a moment of transition, where are those other people that you can clump around and share what you are preserving? Maybe what you are preserving and what they are preserving are enough, together, to accrete into something that can become a new norm.

What I want to say to my friend

These things are not easy. They can be very hard.

What you may think is an end is really just the beginning of something else that has not quite taken form yet.

Sometimes knowing that does not make being in the shockwave, in that interstitial space, any easier.

But I hope it does help you understand the nature of collapse, and the gift that every collapse carries.

Here’s What I Want You to Try

Three Seeds of Reflection

One. Name the star that collapsed. Write down the norm that used to hold your life or your work in place. The thing that was assumed. The balance you were living inside of without having to think about it. What was the fuel that ran that norm, and when did it run out? Was the collapse sudden, or had the core been contracting for a while before anyone said so?

Two. Sit with what died before you look for what’s next. Do not rush this one. Say out loud, or write down, what you actually lost when that norm ended. Not the lesson. The loss. What are you still carrying that belonged to a world that is no longer there? And what would it mean to grieve it properly instead of asking yourself to be finished with it?

Three. Pick up one piece of debris. Look at the wreckage around you and choose one single thing in it that is raw material. A skill you only have because of what happened. A person you only met in the aftermath. A capacity you did not know you had until it was required. If that one thing is already accreting toward something, what is it building? You do not have to see the whole shape yet. Name the piece.

See Beyond. Plant Dreams. Cultivate New Worlds.

Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

Facade by facade, building by building, block by block. The world is crashing. It’s breaking apart around us. The city is collapsing. It might not look like it. But I think we can all feel it.

I close my eyes as I wade into the water. Fleeing from anxious certainty into an ocean of unknown depths and darkness.

I’m holding my breath. A friend is pushing me under, and I let them. I feel the water go up past my ankles. Past my legs. Past my waist. Up over my armpits, over my shoulders, up my neck, rising toward my chin. I feel it reach my ears. My nose. Bubbles slipping out as I sink. The cold of it. The wet of it, moving over my eyelids, up past my eyebrows, a wavering line rising above my forehead, until I feel the crown of my head go cool as the water closes over me.

I open my eyes.

There’s a friend down here. A mermaid. A mer-person. And after all that holding my breath to get into the water, they tell me to breathe. Hesitantly, reluctantly because I’ve been taught that inhaling in this place meant death to me. I’ve been nurtured to believe that the intake of this new environment would cause me to cease to exist.

For a moment, panic sets in at the thought of it, and then my friend, holding my hand this entire way, reassures me with a subtle nod that I can do it.

I inhale, expecting my lungs to fill with water.

I inhale oxygen.

I exhale, and it leaves through gills that have opened along the sides of my neck. I look down. There’s webbing between my fingers. Fins running along my forearms, along the top of my head, one down my back. My feet have gone flat and wide, webbing stretched between my toes.

And now I’m moving. Fast. Fluid. I’ve become a new thing. I am free. I am not sinking anymore. I am thriving in this new world. I am fit for this place. And all I had to do was let myself breathe.

I poke my head up above the surface and I see a burning world. A whole city engulfed in flames, sinking as it burns. Many of us knew collapse was inevitable, but to see the reality of it is its own form of heartbreak. I say a prayer for those stuck on shore, too afraid to approach the water’s edge. I say another prayer for those I see entering the water with the same trepidation I felt when my feet were first touched by the waves.

I go back under. And at the bottom of the ocean I see lights. Life. As if the constellations had fallen into the sea, each one a city full of laughter and love, waiting to be lived in, waiting to be celebrated, at the bottom of the world.

I’m not confused. I’m not surprised. I always knew the end was near. What I didn’t know was how perfectly suited I was for the world that had been waiting for me in the water.

The whole time I lived on land, I had this sensation of drowning. Of being pulled toward the ocean. “This world is not for me,” I’d hear myself say, walking through the cityscape, feeling alien to the systems and machinery it ran on. But the moment I entered the water, a natural comfort came back to me. The waves were home. The deeper I went, the more myself I felt.

I am the ocean.

That’s what the ocean said to me. Not as an introduction to the waves and the winds and the tides. As a reminder of who I am, and the greater thing I’ve always been a part of.

As the city broke apart, as pieces of it fell into the depths, I wept. Not for its burning. Not for its collapse. I wept because I’d known all along that a thing like that was never meant to last. A world that brittle could never hold the weight of its own lies. The collapse was always in it. It was always coming.

But more than anything, I wept for the time I wasted forgetting I was part of the ocean.

I wept for all the days that living in that city made me want to belong to it. The shame I felt for not being an eagle, only because I’d forgotten my true place in the sea. The city looked so tall. Like it could touch the sky. And the birds of prey seemed to have all the answers. Little did I know, that they too were craving a better city the entire time that I was down on the ground, looking up and envying the heights they were perched in.

That city could have been beautiful. It could have been remarkable. It had enough room for all of us. It could have lived seamlessly with the ocean and the sky.

Maybe its rubble will be a reminder of what’s still possible, if we make different choices.

Only time will tell.

Until then, I’ll enjoy the ocean depths.

Dear Friend,

There’s something about dying in one world and waking up in another that is daunting. Terrifying, even. But it can also be liberating, in more unexpected ways than you’d believe.

You have an intuition about where you are right now. You also have an intuition about what could be. And the “could be” asks something of you. It asks for courage. The courage to sink. And then the courage to breathe.

Through the overwhelm. Through the grief. There’s a new identity waiting on the other side of the held breath. A freedom. A liberation from things that were never yours to carry in the first place.

And from that freedom, you can do wonders in the new world that’s emerging. A new world is waiting for you to cultivate it. Amazing is still possible. Beauty is still possible.

See Beyond the Dark. Plant the Dreams. Cultivate New Worlds.

Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

For the last several months I have been unintentionally MacGyvering a wetland ecosystem in front of my fireplace.

It started as a pond. Just a pond. I bought it with no real plan, no fish, not even plants. It was going to sit there and just be a pond.

Then my daughter suggested we add some plants. So we did. One small yes.

What I didn’t know was that a tadpole had come in hidden on those plants. A stowaway. We didn’t put it there. We didn’t plan for it. It arrived on its own, tucked into the roots of something we added for a completely different reason.

That tadpole is now a frog. It’s name is Pickles. It lives in a paludarium we built in our living room, part water and part land, and it’s eating his fill of wingless fruit flies. It is, by every measure, thriving. (A paludarium is essential a tank that’s part water, part land, for semi-aquatic life, exactly right for a frog).

Here’s the part I can’t help thinking about. The thing that’s been blowing my mind ever since my daughters first spotted this little stowaway.

I’m pretty sure it ties back to when I was a kid, about 8 years old or so, I used to want to buy my mom an apartment complex and turn it into a place where monkeys could roam free and climb across the different units on ropes that ran throughout the entire property because my mother loved monkeys. That was the one gift I wanted to give her my entire life, a monkey integrated apartment complex that she could live in and have her friends over and family and just enjoy for the rest of her life. It would be a combination of two things that she was amazing at: Taking care of people, gifting joy and love to others and loving animals.

I have always wanted to build an ecosystem inside my home. Always. It was one of those dreams with no date on it, the kind you file under someday, when I’m ready, when the time is right. I never scheduled it. I never started it. I was waiting for the perfect moment to begin.

And then it built itself. Not all at once. One yes at a time. A pond. Then plants. Then a stowaway. Then a frog who needed a home. Then a makeshift habitat I improvised and somehow love. And now my girls and I are dreaming and planning building a six foot paludarium from scratch, in the middle of our living room, to house Pickles and whatever else wants to grow in there. We spent a whole lot of money getting this supplies to build this so if anyone wants to start a Pickles GoFundMe I ain’t stoppin’ no blessings for this frog. LOL.

The dream I was waiting to be ready for arrived through the back door, hidden in the roots of a much smaller yes.

This is what I mean when I talk about creating conditions. I didn’t engineer this. I didn’t force it. I just kept saying small yeses, and I built an environment where life could take hold. And once the conditions were right, possibilities I never planned for started to emerge. Pickles emerged. The paludarium emerged. A dream I’d shelved for years emerged, fully alive, because I stopped waiting and started tending. Possibilities I never planned for emerging in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

It’s not the ecosystem I thought I would be building when I was a kid, but it is definitely a community of life that is thriving right now.

You don’t always have to chase the big dream head on. Sometimes you just create the conditions, say the smallest yes you’ve got, and let the dream find its own way in.

Wherever you are right now is fertile soil.

See Beyond. Plant Dreams. Cultivate New Worlds.

Billy Almon,

Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

Naturally, it was fun for me because I had, a while back, purchased this really big umbrella that was kind of like a half-dome tent. I always love setting it up because it makes me feel smart and proficient at camping and stuff. It’s a real ego boost.

While I was setting that up, the girls and their mother went down to the water to play around in the area where the waves first meet the dry sand. After I proudly constructed the tent-dome-umbrella thing, I looked up and saw my oldest daughter just ferociously digging in the sand like a sand crab, just going after it, literally flicking up sand behind her as she dug like a hungry squirrel excavating for a hidden nut treasure. She was so focused she didn’t even realize how far she was flinging the sand behind her. I went over to her, one, to remind her that there were other people around and to just be mindful of where she was flinging the sand. But more importantly, I went over to join her, and to make sure my note about being mindful didn’t quell her enthusiasm for what she was doing. It didn’t by the way. By the time I actually got close enough to see what she’d done, she had dug a hole that was two feet deep and three feet wide. Needless to say, I was thoroughly surprised and impressed.

Our youngest was with their mother, playing in the waves and screaming her lungs out with joy, as she’s prone to do when she’s really happy (I have no idea where she got that from). As I got closer, my oldest popped her head out of the hole she’d dug and asked me to join her in digging. Impressed by the giant pit she’d made, I tried to figure out how I could contribute. Then a big wave emerged from the sea and came up to where she was. I watched her frantically trying to build a wall tall enough to keep the wave out of the pit, but it was too late. The water started spilling into the hole anyway, but she was unbothered. She just shrugged it off and started digging out the sand the water had just brought in. Her joy of digging left her completely undeterred by the inevitability of the rhythm of crashing waves. Seeing her embrace this inevitability and continue pursuing the thing that brought her joy altered my lens, it shifted something in my thinking. In that moment, I saw her give up on the idea of building a wall to keep out the waves. It wasn’t a moment of surrender. She wasn’t abandoning the purpose that she had found. She just embraced that, while she was there digging in the sand, the water and the waves would always be present, and that the wall wasn’t going to be the solution to her continuing to have fun digging the hole.

And in watching her just simply shrug off the wall collapsing and the waves coming in and embrace it as something that comes along with building on a beach, I had my own revelation about the walls that I was trying to help her build. I realized the wall would never be tall enough, and trying to make it tall enough to withstand the guaranteed waves would only cost more than the alternative, which was to stop building up and start redirecting around. To excavate the sand from the rim and channel the water. To make it harder for the water to get in by going lower, by carving a moat around the pit.

So that’s what I did. I knelt down beside her and we stopped trying to keep the water out and started telling it where to go.

In that moment, two awesome things happened. I got my daughter’s nod of approval that I had done a good job, and we both realized that channeling the water was way more compelling than trying to avoid it. We transitioned from being builders to being sculptors of water and sand.

The next wave came in and was diverted, and the water ran through the channel instead of overflowing into the pit, for the most part. She laughed. Not because the water had gotten smaller. The water was exactly the same size it had always been.

This moment instantly reminded me of something I’ve recently just started learning about. It’s an idea in Taoist thought called wu wei. I don’t proclaim to know everything about it, but what I’ve learned so far is that it gets passed around online as a kind of “go with the flow” passivity. Do nothing. Let it all wash over you. But that’s a misread, and the sand proves it. What we did at that pit was the opposite of passive. We dug harder, not less. As I understand it, and as I experienced it digging those channels, wu wei isn’t surrender. It’s working with the grain of a force instead of against it. You don’t stop the ocean. You find where it wants to run and you build accordingly. My attempt at building my daughter’s wall was a bet that the wall could be stronger than the sea. The moat was a better bet. The moat said the sea is going to come, and I get to decide what it does when it arrives.

And that is the whole point. This is not about surrendering to the inevitable. Surrender would have been walking away from the pit. What we did was learn to work with the force instead of against it. And that distinction is everything, because nature has been making exactly that distinction for a very long time, and it leaves the blueprint in the most unlikely place. Inside seeds. In nature, all waves are movements of energy, and movements of energy and flow come in different forms. It can come in the form of water, it can come in the form of wind, and it can even come in the form of fire.

Take the maple seed, the little winged one that spins down every fall. Botanists call it a samara. It’s shaped to autorotate, to catch even a weak breeze and ride it far from the shade of its parent tree. And here’s one of the amazing things about the maple seed. The maple didn’t decide to fly. The maples whose seeds happened to catch the wind are the ones whose children are still here. The wind shaped the seed, across more generations than I can hold in my head, into a thing that uses wind. It doesn’t resist the force. It inherited a body built to ride it.

Or the coconut. A coconut can drift in open ocean for months, sealed against salt, buoyant by design, and wash ashore on a beach it was carried to and root there. Botanists call it hydrochory, dispersal by water. The coconut didn’t surrender to the current on the day it fell from the palm. The lineage of coconuts that floated are the only ones that became islands of coconuts on shores their parents never saw. The sea shaped the seed into a thing that uses the sea.

And then there’s fire. The lodgepole pine seals some of its cones shut with resin, and those cones can hang there unopened for years, sometimes decades. What they’re waiting for is heat. When a wildfire moves through, the resin melts, the cones open, and the seeds fall onto ground that’s just been cleared of competition and dressed in ash. The fire isn’t the disaster. For that seed, the fire is the planting season. The lodgepole didn’t learn to survive fire on the day the fire came. The lodgepole seeds that needed fire to open are the ones that became forests.

Wind, water, and fire. Three forces that, from the seed’s point of view, should be the end of the story. And not one of them surrenders, and not one of them resists. Each learned, over generations of ancestors who tried and failed and tried again, to work with the force instead of against it, to turn the very thing that should have destroyed it into the thing that carried it forward. That’s the secret the seed knows. That’s the blueprint nature already drew for what growth looks like when you stop fighting the flow and learn to leverage it.

And it’s the thing my daughter was practicing in the sand without a word for it yet. The capacity to grow through change isn’t a decision you make the day the change shows up. It’s cultivated. It gets handed down. She thinks she saved a sand pit. What she was actually doing was learning the oldest lesson her father is still trying to learn. That the wall you build against the thing you cannot stop will always be just tall enough to disappoint you. And the channel you dig to direct it can carry you somewhere you could never have walled your way to.

I went to the beach that weekend thinking I was the one who knew how to set things up. The big umbrella. The smart shelter. The ego boost. And my six-year-old, flinging sand like a crab, ended up teaching me the thing I most needed to be reminded of. That I am still learning to be a sculptor of water and sand. Still learning where to dig. Still learning that the waves are not coming to ruin what I love. They are coming the way they have always come, and my work is not to stop them. My work is to learn their grain.

Here’s what I want you to try.

Three Seeds of Reflection

One. What are three waves you feel crashing against you right now? Don’t overthink it. Just the first three that come to mind.

Two. Of those three, which one do you feel most flooded by today? What’s the wall you’ve built to keep it out, and what is that wall costing you?

Three. What might it look like to embrace the wave, and treat the flood as a chance to channel your energy somewhere new?

See Beyond. Plant Dreams. Cultivate New Worlds.

Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

It’s 11:24 PM and I’m up while my girls sleep, after giving a successful pitch to some clients in Hong Kong for a proposed project that would be really cool if it happens.

I just got done “talking” to Claude about analyzing my overthinking about posts and why I’m not as consistent as I’ve wanted to be. Being consistent has kept me from connecting with people on social media in so many different ways, and it’s really just overthinking. Wanting whatever I say to have meaning to someone. Wanting it to be full of depth and enriching insights for whoever’s reading, because it’s time they can’t get back.

And Claude thankfully reminded me that all of this perfectionism is the very opposite of my worldview as an Astrobiofuturist, which is a belief in the power of momentum and what I call ugly progress, by leveraging the power of small things.

So this is my public commitment to just post stuff and not overthink it, and trust that what I say, whether it’s right or wrong, finds its way to whatever it’s intended for and whoever needs to hear it. I’m going forward.

I’m going to break my posting into a few categories.

The first is the Dream Farmer’s Log. Dispatches from the field of my work as an Astrobiofuturist. Things I see on a night hike, or out in nature, or coming back from giving a talk or running a workshop. Even the fun secret projects I’m building inside my home with my two daughters, like discovering that the aquatic plants we just put in our indoor pond had a tadpole growing inside of them. Now I’m debating whether I have to build a terrarium or find a place to release this frog once it grows up. Things like that.

The second is the cultivation pieces. The ones that take me longer to write. The long ones, where I actually dig into the framework. These will be more occasional.

So the Log is most of what you’ll see from me going forward. My thoughts, from the field. The cultivation pieces show up when something needs the room.

Another thing worth saying out loud: I’m a big believer that the most radical thing you can do in a capitalist society is share. And while I have been intentionally looking to grow my business, I think the best thing I can do right now is just share, and trust that whoever picks up what I share will find some good in it. I truly believe that by doing that, the business grows the way I wanted it to. Not because I’m trying to sell something, but because people believe in and have benefited from what I’m giving out.

There’s one more category I want to add: Field Notes on Storytelling.

For almost 20 years I’ve worked as a storyteller, and I’ve been blessed to learn from some of the world’s best. When people think about designing a theme park, they think it’s just roller coasters and rides. But in the roles I’ve held as a creative lead and creative director, what I actually learned was how to tell a story in four dimensions.

How to tell it in physical space, left, right, up, down. How to tell it across time, letting a single narrative start at one point and develop as people move through a place. How to tell it through all five senses, with color, light, sound, effects. And the fourth dimension, the one most people forget: how to carry a story across worlds, turning a narrative into a physical experience, a digital experience, and a physical and digital experience at the same time.

I’ve told stories in games, in television, in film, in built environments, and through ideas and ideologies people walk away believing. A story isn’t words on a page. It’s an experience you walk inside of, and there’s a real artistry to building one.

I know plenty of people post storytelling tips, and a lot of it is great. But the thing underneath all of it for me is something simpler than persuasion. I think of storytelling as a tool to convey value. Not value the way salespeople mean it. I mean: how do I translate the real meaning, the significance, the insight of a thing to you, by way of a story that becomes a bridge to your heart and your mind.

That’s the work. And I think it’ll be useful to anyone trying to build a movement, introduce an idea, or move people to do something.

So this is my commitment letter to whoever follows this Substack. You’re in for some dope shit. Stick with me. Hang with me through my imperfections, flaws and all. I got you.

My creed is to be good to people, to be good for people, and to do the same for nature.

Let’s get going.

See Beyond. Plant Dreams. Cultivate New Worlds.

Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

Nearly two decades at Walt Disney Imagineering, where a founding philosophy is that it is “kind of fun to do the impossible.” Where doing impossible things is not just a slogan. It is the culture. It is the daily practice. It is what you are hired to believe and to build.

In that same period I have spent years studying nature. The biology of everyday creatures living right outside our windows. And what I kept finding, over and over, is that nature does not recognize the word impossible. Nature just adapts. Nature just finds a way. Ant hills. Honeycombs. The human body itself. All of it built from aggregates of small decisions, small actions, small moments compounding into something that looks, from a distance, like a miracle.

And then there is the third thing. Being born into the blessing, experience, and construct called being Black in America. Having family members struggle in ways that no amount of Imagineering philosophy could fix. Living in the tension between a culture that tells you anything is possible and a reality that reminds you daily of what is “not possible.”

Each of these is a world. And a world, as I wrote in an earlier post in this series, is not a place. A world is a system of interconnected relationships and rules, each with its own gravity, its own definition of what is possible and what is not.

Imagineering is a world whose defining rule is that it is kind of fun to do the impossible. Being Black in America is a world with its own rules about what is possible and for whom. Nature is a world that has never once recognized the word impossible.

For years, I found myself in a three-bodied problem. Struggling to identify which world of possibility would be the driving force for the work that I did, each with its own gravitational pull, a tension that left me feeling like a triple-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

I have lived inside all three worlds simultaneously my entire career. And it was not until I lost my sister Stefanie that I understood how all three aligned. Her passing revealed something I had been circling for years without being able to name: that we are always moving in and out of these infinite worlds of possibility, and that each one, if we are paying attention, can help us cultivate the things that are deepest inside us.

Astrobiofuturism is what emerged from holding all three worlds at once without letting any one of them be the only truth.

It is still all possible. As long as you are open to how it shows up.

Dreams For My Sister

If it hasn’t been clear yet, everything that I write about is pretty much related to the loss of my sister. Part of this is the ongoing facilitation of the grieving process of losing her, my own personal regrets around wasting time bickering over pointless things when I could have had more time laughing with her and helping her cultivate her own worlds and dreams. The regret of not doing that and the understanding that other people may be going through what she was going through prior to her passing.

Stefanie is truly the anchor for this work. She is the thing that makes it real and human in a way that I hadn’t had in my work before. Yes, you’ll constantly see me referring to her. She’s the hero of this story, and she’s also the person that I wish I had told that it’s still all possible to explain to her why I believe that. While I can’t do it for her, I can do it for whoever decides to read this long-ass article. LOL.

What Planning My Sister’s Funeral Taught Me

When I lost Stefanie, I was handed a task that felt at the time completely impossible.

Planning a funeral experience that would honor my sister that could also facilitate the grieving process for my father, my niece and nephew, my siblings, and entire family while also grieving. Navigating paperwork and logistics while barely able to function. Consoling my dad throughout the entire process. Designing a curated experience for hundreds of people all being impacted by the collective loss of one person, while also trying to hold my own loss at the same time. It was one of the most agonizing experiences of my life.

And I did it.

Not because I had infinite resources or perfect clarity or a roadmap. I did it the same way nature builds an anthill. One piece of paperwork at a time. One phone call at a time. One decision at a time. The impossible thing deconstructed itself into manageable pieces the closer I walked toward it. I also had the help of the shattered pieces of love each family member could muster, which amalgamated into enough support to get me through facilitating the completion of each task.

And when it was over, I understood something I had been circling for years. Something I consider to be one last gift my sister left for me. The realization that:

if I could do something when I was forced to do it, that means I was capable of doing it all along.

The things that feel impossible only feel that way from the distance we are currently viewing them from. The closer you walk toward the impossible thing, the more it reveals itself. The more your mind can deconstruct it into pieces you can actually hold and navigate and manage. The end is never what you thought it was until you get close enough to see it clearly.

This is what Imagineering taught me in theory. This is what nature confirmed in biology. And this is what Stefanie’s loss taught me in the most human and irreversible way possible.

How Can You Believe Something So Foolish As “It’s (Still) All Possible?”

At Imagineering I came to understand that “impossible” is a relative term. Every project had its own perceived impossible task. The timeline’s too short, the budget’s too small. There are not enough resources to deliver on the dream as I constructed it and as I pitched it. To the higher-ups, there were not enough resources to make it a reality.

What I realized over time was that, at the moment when an obstacle that seems impossible presents itself, if you don’t blink in the face of it, if you don’t give up, and if you choose to step towards the impossible thing, if you choose to investigate and interview the “no”, the perception of a thing being impossible starts to dissipate.

OK, so now let me show you what I mean.

What Darkness Reveals About Dreaming in the Dark

I’ve begun facilitating and hosting night hikes up at Griffith Observatory, where I’ll take a small group of people on a journey where we’ll chart the stars, discuss our own constellations. We interview and examine the darkness and the nature of darkness and what that nature of darkness means for each person. It’s quite a profound experience. (More to come on these night hikes soon. I feel like I’m doing a lot of advertising in this article.)

Anyway. When we first arrive at the point of hiking, there’s a narrow pathway that we go down. When you start on this narrow pathway, you look down the corridor of it. All you see is what looks like a pitch black hole surrounded by pine trees. Something straight out of a Roger Rabbit cartoon.

What I then have people do is make a note of that pitch black darkness before they take another step towards it. Then I have them actually continue walking after making that mental note of where that black hole was. I have them stop about 100 ft later and tell them to look around and tell me if they can still see where that pitch black darkness was. The answer that I always get is no. That’s because they’re standing in the exact spot that they were looking at, perceiving it as pitch black darkness. While they’re standing there, their eyes adjust to the darkness. Their stillness allows their other senses to kick in, and they become even more aware of what’s around them in this place that they perceived earlier as being pitch black darkness.

This is the same thing as seeing an impossible task. The minute that you choose to take a step towards it, the illusion of it being impossible starts to disappear. That’s one thing that makes it possible: realizing that impossible is a relative term. Each effort, each project, each idea, each dream has its own silhouette of something that feels impossible within it. The minute you start investigating it, the minute you start asking questions and interviewing the rejection that you’re experiencing coming from that seemingly impossible thing, it starts to deconstruct.

What you do is, as you take each step towards it, you navigate towards it, around it, and through it, and you understand that there is a pathway. It might not be the pathway that you drew up initially. It might not have all the bells and whistles that you thought this dream would have. If it’s something that you believe in, you can find a way to cultivate that thing into happening and existing in this world where the core pieces of it are still fully intact. It can still be fulfilled, but you have to be open to navigating that pathway, to bringing it to fruition.

The Secret to Being Open to How It Shows Up Is Realizing the Dream Is Already In Your Current Reality

There is a version of your dream available to you right now. In whatever situation you are currently in. In whatever soil you are currently standing in.

The dream does not live out there somewhere waiting for the right conditions to arrive. The dream comes from inside you outward into the world. Which means wherever you are is already fertile enough soil to find a piece of it.

So what does this actually look like in practice?

Say your dream is to be a race car driver. But right now you are working at McDonald’s.

The easy response is to see no connection between the two. To see McDonald’s as the obstacle and the race car as the destination. But Astrobiofuturism asks a different question: what does working at McDonald’s have to teach me about being a race car driver?

More than you might think.

Timing. Navigating tight spaces. Moving efficiently around other people. Angles. Pathway management under pressure. Operating at speed with precision. These are not abstractions. These are things McDonald’s will teach you every single shift if you are paying attention to the right layer of what is happening.

The dream is already in the current moment. It is just wearing different clothes. Your job is not to wait for the conditions to look like the dream. Your job is to find where the dream is hiding in the conditions you already have.

A personal example of this was knowing, from the time that I started my Master’s degree program in biomimicry, that I also wanted a future within the world of space exploration. What I did was plant that dream inside every assignment I possibly could. For any assignment I was given, my submission would be in one way or another related to space exploration. I knew that all of these assignments would aggregate into a body of work that I could build my future on and credibility through familiarity with the challenges of space exploration. I also knew that biomimicry, or this idea of turning to nature for solutions and innovation, could be a solution to the challenges of space exploration. What I didn’t know at the time was that this idea of planting this dream into my homework assignments would actually lead to me becoming an Astrobiofuturist.

Opportunities are constellations and breadcrumbs. You find one. Then the next. Then the next. And when you look back after following each one, you realize you have been moving toward the dream the entire time. Moment by moment. Small victory by small victory. The constellation reveals itself in the looking back.

What Astrobiofuturism Actually Is

Astrobiofuturism is a worldview and a perceptual practice. It is the belief that nature, imagination, and empathy are one conversation, and the trained capacity to see through that lens in order to perceive possibility where others see limitation.

The practice it produces is called Dream Farming.

Astrobiofuturism tells you how to see. Dream Farming is how you act on what you see.

What Dream Farming teaches is a rhythm: Dream. Adapt. Thrive.

Thriving is not the finish line. Thriving is the mindset and the systems you develop that allow change to be the thing that keeps you moving rather than the thing that stops you. The cycle never ends. There will always be a new dream after the adaptation. There will always be new conditions to adapt to after the dream. Thriving is what happens when you stop fighting that reality and start building your life around it. It is embracing the ebb and flow of constant change as a healthy way of being, not a burden to survive.

Dreams are seeds and stars simultaneously (more on this soon). You navigate by them and you grow from them.

All of this, every piece of this framework, every post in this series, is a collection of things I wish I had helped my sister Stefanie understand before I lost her.

If it reaches you, then it reached who it was supposed to reach.

It is still all possible. As long as you are open to how it shows up.

Three Seeds to Plant This Week

One. Name the impossible thing you have been viewing from a distance. Then take one step toward it. Just one. Notice what it reveals when you get closer. What was the one step you took?

Two. Ask yourself: where is the piece of my dream that exists in my current situation right now? Look for it honestly. It is there. The soil is fertile enough. The seed comes from inside you.

Three. Find one breadcrumb. One small opportunity, one small action, one small yes that moves you one step closer to what you are dreaming of. Follow it. Trust that the constellation reveals itself in the following.

See Beyond. Plant Dreams. Cultivate New Worlds. Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

Previously in Astrobiofuturism, (I hope you hear that in your head in the voice of the narrator who would say “previously on X-Men” at the beginning of each episode of the cartoon series back in the 90s because that’s how I want you to hear it when you read it going forward).

Greetings Dream Farmers!

Previously in Astrobiofuturism, I talked about how we are always moving in and out of worlds of possibility and how we’re always cultivating new worlds of possibility. I think it might make a little bit more sense if I dove a little bit deeper into what the impact cultivating a world of possibility can look like and why we should stop trying to save the world.

Astrobiofuturism

You Are Already Cultivating Worlds. Are They the Ones You Actually Want?

In my last post I talked about how a world is a system of interconnected relationships and rules. This was a line that many people commented on to me. Here is the full quote…

Read more

5 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Astrobiofuturism

I was talking to a dear friend of mine named Jen recently, explaining my frustration at a certain juncture I was finding myself, resulting from my work being at the intersection of some of the most extraordinary ideas, concepts, and experiences one can have.

Biology. Ecology. Creativity and imagination. Storytelling and worldbuilding. Psychology. Indigenous wisdom. Archaeo-astronomy. Design. STEM. Astrobiology and astrophysics. I take all of that and focus it through the lens of empathy to explore how to improve the human condition and how nature plays a role in that. I am blessed to explore it all and call it “my job.”

The cutting edge of how humans literally imagine and build futures. Literally seeing how to build a whole world in this physical reality we all share. I have been in rooms where these conversations were happening and do happen, and I have been, often, the only person who looks like me in these rooms.

And so I have had this deep and sometimes painful conviction that what I am learning needs to be shared with as many people as possible who would never be invited into these rooms, or see these things, or hear these conversations. I have had this Promethean feeling of being blessed to experience fire and having this need to share it with others so that they could feel its warmth, or light their own fires. A feeling that I must find a way to share all of these secrets with the world. This passion, for me, to save the world by sharing what I’ve been blessed to see and hear and know now, naturally has a way leading me into a great sense of overwhelm of not meeting my own standard for accomplishing this by now.

Jen listened to all of it.

Then she said something I have not been able to let go of since. Paraphrasing, she said:

You don’t save everyone. You start with yourself. You save the people in your immediate world, the ones who can see what you see, the ones whose soil is ready. That’s where you start. And that’s enough.

Not: and then you go save everyone else. Just that. You start with yourself. You save your people. Full stop.

I sat with that for a long time. And then I thought about my sister Stefanie.

She Was the First One

Stefanie was two years older than me.

While our mother worked a full-time job during the day and then worked nights at a mental institution for children and young adults, Stefanie taught me my ABCs. She taught me to read. She opened my first worlds of possibility before I had any language for what that meant. She was a child herself and she was already doing the work, taking what she knew and giving it to the person right next to her. Her person. Me.

I lost her. And losing her changed everything about this work.

Before I lost her, this practice was theoretical. Interesting. Intellectually alive. But it was always reaching outward, toward everyone, toward the world, toward the largest possible scale.

After I lost her, it became real.

Because I understood, in the aftermath of that loss, that I had been so focused on trying to reach the world that I had not fully turned toward the tree standing right next to me. The one who had first taught me that new worlds were possible. The one whose soil I knew better than anyone’s.

I know I could not have controlled what happened to her. I know that. But that does not make me wish any less that I had been more present. That I had pushed through our own difficulties to reach her in moments I now wish I had spent differently. That I had held her hand through more things. That I had helped her see what I wish I had said to her more clearly and more often:

Wherever you are is fertile enough soil. There is still something here. There is still something possible. Even here. Even now. Even in the midst of whatever is going on, you can still cultivate a new world of possibilities.

That is the message I did not give her enough. And it is the reason I give it to everyone I can reach now.

She is what makes this work matter. Every post I write, every talk I give, every person I reach, is the message I wish I had helped her receive more fully while she was still here.

The forest is the tree. I was so busy trying to grow a forest that I lost sight of the tree standing right next to me.

What We Have Gotten Wrong About Saving the World

We have never, in the entire history of the human species, had the kind of access to global events that we have right now.

There was a time when knowledge of distant events traveled slowly, carried by traders and travelers across weeks and months, filtered through memory and interpretation. That world is gone. Now every tragedy, every act of violence, every climate disaster, every injustice anywhere on the planet arrives in real time. Simultaneously. Instantly. The human brain has never been asked to hold this before. Not once in our evolutionary history have we had to navigate the full weight of the world’s suffering in the present tense, all at once, without pause.

The overwhelm so many people feel right now is not weakness. It is a rational response to an input load the brain was never built to carry.

But here is what I want you reading this to hold: just because we can see everything globally does not mean everything must be solved globally. Climate change is an aggregate. It is the sum of billions of local conditions, billions of small degradations compounded across time until the aggregate became visible as a crisis. Every one of those contributing conditions is still local. Which means every one of them can still be addressed locally.

We have gotten so caught up trying to see the forest that we have forgotten what a forest actually is.

The forest is the tree. And inside every tree is the potential for new forests. Every seed contains not just a tree but a forest. The forest is inside the seed before the seed is ever in the ground.

Save the Tree. Save the World.

There was a show called Heroes. In it, a character who could travel through time kept appearing to people who did not yet know they were heroes. He had one message for all of them:

Save the cheerleader. Save the world.

I keep thinking about that.

Because what I am saying in this post is the same thing, just with different words.

Save the tree. Save the world.

We are living through a moment of genuine overwhelm. The climate has already changed. Reality is catching up. And beyond the climate, there are personal crises, community crises, crises of meaning and direction and hope, arriving from every angle simultaneously. We have never had more access to how much is wrong with the world at any given moment, and we have never felt more paralyzed by it.

But here is what I know to be true, and I say it as my genuine belief even knowing it might be controversial:

We are not going to solve climate change with one technology. We are not going to save the world with one movement. We are not going to fix everything at once. And the delusion that we can is part of what is breaking us.

Climate change is an aggregate. It is the sum of billions of small local conditions compounded across time into something that now feels planetary and impossible. Which means the only real response to it is also local. Also specific. Also one tree at a time.

Not because the big picture does not matter. But because the big picture is made of small pictures. And you can only tend the one in front of you.

Do not fall into the illusion that everything is on fire at the same intensity. Some fires are yours to tend. Most are not. Start with the one in your immediate soil. Start with the tree within reach of your hands.

What Hawaii Showed Me Already Existed (read as Why I love Hawaiian Culture)

I am not Hawaiian. I was proudly born a “brotha .” But if I had been born somewhere else, I believe I definitely would have been born a “braddah” (and would still have a full head of hair). I digress.

Hawaiian culture has always felt like home to me in a way I have never fully been able to explain.

On a trip to Hawaii last November, another dear friend Daniel Kinzer, a Hawaiian of extraordinary brilliance and generosity, broke open something I had been circling for years.

He told me about the ahupuaʻa.

Source: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/1ad9fcf7f2c345a58adef0997fce9b5d

The ahupuaʻa is the traditional Hawaiian land division system. It runs from the mountain to the sea, encompassing every ecological zone: forest, farmland, freshwater, coastline, ocean. Every community within the ahupuaa was responsible for the health of their portion of the whole. Resources were shared across the system. The loop was closed. Nothing extracted and sent elsewhere. Everything cycled back into the community that depended on it.

This was not primitive. This was sophisticated ecological engineering that sustained Hawaiian civilization for generations. Every person had a role. The land was a stakeholder. The community was the technology.

Learning about the ahupuaʻa did something to me. It made the world I was imagining feel remembered instead. Because this world I wanted to dream up already existed. It was designed, tested, and proven to work.

The more I learn about nature and about the indigenous communities who understood how to live within it rather than extract from it, the more I believe the architecture we need already exists. It has just been disrupted. And it starts the same way it always has: locally. One community. One closed loop. One tree at a time.

This is not a novel world of possibility. It is a world worth returning to.

The Soil Is Not the Problem

The late Dr. Elaine Ingham was the world’s foremost soil biologist. She passed away in February of this year. I was taking notes from her work while writing this post, and I want to honor her here because I believe her central insight applies far beyond agriculture.

The soil is not the problem. The mineral substrate is almost always already sufficient. What has been lost is the living community. The bacteria, the fungi, the organisms that break down what is locked in the parent material and convert it into something the plant can actually use. Restore the biology and the soil comes back to life. You do not need new soil. You need to return the living organisms to the soil you are already standing in.

Watch her explain it in her own words:

The community is the soil. The relationships are what unlock what is already there.

Wherever you are right now is fertile enough soil. You just need to find the living organisms around you. The people who already believe in what you are trying to grow. The ones whose soil is ready. Start there. Start with them. (There’s also the soil of the mind, conditioning that soil, and Harriet Tubman, but that will be covered in another article soon.)

Keep Going. Start Here.

Every seed has the potential to be a forest.

But before it becomes a forest it must first be a tree. Before it becomes a tree it must first be a plant. Before it becomes a plant it must be planted. And before it can be planted, the soil must be conditioned to receive it.

That is the whole sequence. That is the whole practice. You do not skip steps. You do not start at the outer ring and work inward. You start where you are and you work outward. Ring by ring. Tree by tree.

I am not telling you to stop caring about the world. I am telling you that the world is made of trees. And you can only tend the ones within reach of your hands.

Save the tree. Save the world.

If you’re feeling stuck right now, or if you’re feeling overwhelmed, whether it is in the world of your mind, in the world of your community, or in the world that we all share on this planet, the trick to moving forward, the trick to cultivating new possibilities, no matter how impossible it might feel to cultivate and grow anything in the soil you’re surrounded with, the truth of the matter is: it is still all possible. As long as you are open to how it shows up.

Start where you are. Find one tree, one tree immediately in front of you, and just start working on it. Find one person who believes in what you are trying to grow. Tell them about the tree. Then start working on it together.

Eventually, the forest will grow.

Three Seeds to Plant This Week

One. Name one tree within reach. One person, one dream, one local challenge that you have been ignoring because it felt too small compared to everything else that is on fire. That is your tree. Start there.

Two. Find one living organism for your soil. One person who already believes in what you are trying to grow. Reach out this week. Tell them what you are cultivating. Let them help condition the ground.

Three. Say this to yourself, and mean it: wherever I am right now is fertile enough soil. Not perfect soil. Not ideal soil. Fertile enough. The seed can go in. The work can begin. Right here. Right now.

See Beyond. Plant Dreams. Cultivate New Worlds.

Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

In my last post I talked about how a world is a system of interconnected relationships and rules. This was a line that many people commented on to me. Here is the full quote:

“A world is not a place. A world is a system of interconnected relationships and rules. Every world has its own gravity, its own definition of what is possible and what is not, its own norms and its own edges. It is essentially our perception of what is possible in a reality governed by aggregated assumptions of what can happen in different environments and scenarios. And we have always moved through worlds, all of us, from the very beginning.”

This is, essentially, a definition for an ecosystem (more on this in my next post, sorry, lots to explain here first). Following that, one of my subscribers named Sharif, shout out to Sharif, asked me something I have not been able to stop thinking about. In relationship to my definition of a world as “a system of interconnected relationships and rules.” Sharif said:

“Some of those rules are, of course, beyond our control like power structures, governments, markets, war, and so on. So where do those fit into this reflection? How do we meaningfully name or reshape a world when parts of that system are not ours to influence?”

Sharif, this post is for you. And for everyone else who felt that same pull when they read that line.

Because you are asking exactly the right question. And the answer is at the heart of everything Dream Farming is built to address.

• • •

Let me start with what a world of possibility actually is at a mechanical level. Because I think the word “world” can feel large and abstract and I want it to feel precise and real.

Think of a bubble.

Not as a fragile thing. As a sphere of influence. A dynamic, living boundary that defines what is possible inside it based on the relationships and assumptions operating within it.

Now think of what bubbles do. They emerge. They float alongside each other. They overlap. They merge into larger clusters. They split. They pop. And when they pop, the air that was inside them does not disappear. It joins the larger atmosphere and becomes part of the conditions that other bubbles float through.

That is exactly what worlds do. At every scale.

The world of your household. The world of your workplace. The world of your city. The world of the market. The world of geopolitical forces moving through the Strait of Hormuz right now. These are all bubbles of different sizes, operating at different scales, overlapping and influencing each other in ways that are real and consequential but that do not all hit every world at the same moment.

That is the key thing Sharif’s question is pointing at. External factors do not arrive everywhere simultaneously. They move from their epicenter outward, rippling through adjacent and overlapping worlds at different rates. The war does not hit your promotion at the same moment it hits the oil market. But they are connected. And the ripple, if it is large enough, eventually reaches every world in its path.

Same mechanics as cells. Same mechanics as ecosystems. Same thing, different scales.

• • •

But here is what makes a world of possibility different from just a set of conditions.

Belief.

A world of possibility is not just a set of relationships and rules. It is a set of relationships and rules that you are actively animating and cultivating through the belief you pour into it. Through your attention. Through your actions. Through the hours and energy and focus you direct toward it every day.

When external factors shift what seems possible inside a world, what they are actually doing is challenging the assumptions that world is built upon. And in that moment you have a choice. You can reassess your belief and continue cultivating. You can allow that world to expand in a new direction. Or you can allow that world to die.

None of those choices is wrong. They are all part of the cycle.

The critical thing to understand is this: you are always pouring belief into multiple worlds simultaneously. You cannot help it. You are a Dream Farmer whether you know it or not. The question is whether you are farming with intention or farming by default.

• • •

Here is a story that might make this land more concretely.

Imagine someone who has spent the last two years cultivating a world of possibility around getting a promotion. They are putting in extra hours. They are building relationships with the right people. They are making themselves visible in all the right ways. They believe that in this world, hard work and visibility lead to advancement. And so they act accordingly.

Meanwhile there is another world of possibility quietly calling to them. A business idea. An entrepreneurial dream that has been sitting in the soil of their mind for years, patient and dormant, waiting for the right conditions.

Now a ripple arrives from the epicenter of something larger. The global economy shifts. The market tightens. The company freezes promotions. Suddenly the world they have been cultivating so carefully has changed its rules. The assumptions that animated it no longer hold in the same way.

What happens to all that belief they poured in?

It does not disappear. It composted. It became experience. It became skill. It became relationships and reputation and a developed understanding of how that world operates. None of it was wasted.

But now they have a choice about where to direct their belief next.

And quietly, in the background, that entrepreneurial dream is still there. Still calling. Still holding the compressed potential of everything it was always meant to become.

This is the moment Dream Farming is built for.

• • •

Here is something I hope to convey to you emphatically. It’s something I want you to understand that took me a long time to see clearly.

You do not have to choose one world of possibility and abandon all the others.

Dream Farming is not about picking one dream and ignoring everything else until it comes true. It is about understanding that you are always cultivating multiple worlds simultaneously. Just like a real farmer does not plant one seed and wait. They plant a field. Different things at different stages. Some being planted. Some being watered. Some being harvested.

The skill is knowing which world needs what kind of attention and when.

But here is where intentionality becomes essential. Because you are a limited resource. Your time, your energy, your focus: these are finite. And if you are cultivating many worlds of possibility with equal intensity and no clear orientation, you end up with a field full of things that are all half grown.

This is why Dream Farming teaches you to cast a North Star.

Not to abandon the other worlds. Not to declare them less worthy or less real. But to choose one dream that becomes your primary point of orientation. The one that gives you clarifying order and priority when the terrain gets complex and the path gets unclear.

There’s one thing that’s important to understand about the other dreams when you cast a North Star. They do not become lesser. They become a constellation.

Every one of those other dreams is still a star. Still real with its own gravity and pull. Still worth cultivating. Still capable of becoming a North Star at a different point in the cycle. But now they have a relationship to each other and to your primary orientation that they did not have before. They form a navigable map. And when the North Star is blocked, which it will be sometimes by the terrain of whatever season you are in, the constellation is how you keep moving. The other stars become your approximate navigation until you can see your North Star again.

In the story above, the entrepreneurial dream has been there the whole time. Patient in the soil. Calling quietly. The disruption of the promotion world is not a failure. It is an opening. An invitation to finally cast that deeper dream as the North Star and let everything else begin to orient around it.

The star was always there. The disruption just cleared enough sky to see it.

• • •

There is one more thing I’d like to introduce, and I will go deeper on this in the posts ahead.

Dream Farming is a practice built on four fields of knowledge. Four things a Dream Farmer understands in order to cultivate worlds of possibility with intention and skill.

The first field is Stars.

Understanding stars: what dreams are, how they generate gravitational pull, how to cast a North Star and orient yourself by it, how to read the constellations your other dreams form around it, and how to navigate by those constellations when your primary orientation is temporarily blocked.

Everything I have been writing about so far lives inside this first field. And we are just getting started.

More on the other three fields, and much more on stars, soon.

• • •

Here are three seeds to carry with you.

One. Name the world of possibility you are currently pouring the most belief and energy into. Is it the world your deepest dream is calling you toward? Or is it a world you chose because it felt safer, more immediate, more socially legible? Neither answer is wrong. Just be honest about which one it is.

Two. Identify one external factor that is currently rippling through your worlds of possibility. Is it disrupting something you were cultivating? Or is it quietly creating an opening for a world you have been neglecting? Disruption and invitation often arrive wearing the same face.

Three. Name the dream that has been quietly calling to you from the soil of your mind. The one that has been patient. The one you keep setting aside for later. Is it time to cast that one as your North Star? You do not have to abandon everything else to do it. You just have to give it the sky.

It is (still) all possible. IF (this is the key part) you are open to how it shows up.

See Beyond. Plant Dreams. Cultivate New Worlds

Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

This is probably the longest post I will ever write. It might also be the most important thing I have ever said, written, or posted. Anywhere. Ever.

I am a little nervous about it, honestly. It asks me to be more vulnerable than I am used to being in public. But given what we are all facing right now, I think that vulnerability is exactly what this moment requires.

I hope it is worthy of your time.

After sitting with this essay for a while, I realized something. This is not one post. It is the first in a series about a practice I call Dream Farming: the intentional cultivation of worlds of possibility using nature’s own blueprints. Over the next several posts I will introduce the different elements of that practice, building toward full Dream Farming sessions and lessons for those of you who want to learn how to cultivate new worlds of possibility in times exactly like these. This essay is where it begins. It is the ground clearing. The soil preparation. What grows here feeds everything that comes next.

•  •  •

On the evening of April 1st, 2026, two things happened that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

Four astronauts climbed aboard a spacecraft and left Earth for the first crewed journey around the Moon since 1972. Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen became the first crew of mixed gender and ethnicity in history to travel to lunar space. That is not a footnote. That is a world of possibility taking shape.

On that same evening, the President of the United States spoke about the war with Iran and offered a vision of the future that looked, to me, like the architecture of a completely different world. One built on a different set of beliefs about who we are and what we are capable of.

I sat with both of those things at the same time. Not because I had to choose between them. But because I have learned, as an Astrobiofuturist, that these moments are not asking us to choose. They are asking us to see.

This is what it looks like when multiple worlds occupy the same moment.

•  •  •

This is not the first time I have witnessed this pattern.

In the spring of 2020, as the world watched George Floyd take his last breath, SpaceX launched the first crewed Dragon capsule into orbit. Within the same week, the country was simultaneously holding the grief of a civilization confronting its own history and failures and watching two astronauts ascend into space on a privately built rocket for the first time in history. Two worlds. Occupying the same atmosphere. Same people standing in each world but holding different perspectives of what’s possible.

Go back further. In 1968, the year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, NASA launched the Apollo program back into crewed flight after an eighteen month pause following the Apollo 1 fire. The nation was inside one of the deepest collective wounds of the twentieth century and the space program was reaching toward the Moon within the same calendar year. The grief did not pause for the launch. The launch did not wait for the grief to pass.

Renowned writer William Gibson once wrote that the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed yet. I think about that line often, because I think it points at something true but only halfway. Futures are not just unevenly distributed across geography. They are unevenly distributed across experience. The world of the astronaut and the world of the mourner can exist in the same city, the same week, the same breath. What separates them is not distance. It is perception. It is which world you are standing in when the moment arrives.

•  •  •

Let me talk about worlds for a moment, because I think we use the word without understanding what we actually mean by it.

A world is not a place. A world is a system of interconnected relationships and rules. Every world has its own gravity, its own definition of what is possible and what is not, its own norms and its own edges. It is essentially our perception of what is possible in a reality governed by aggregated assumptions of what can happen in different environments and scenarios. And we have always moved through worlds, all of us, from the very beginning.

The first world any of us inhabited was the world of the womb. In that world, we were growing things. We developed capabilities slowly: fingers that could flex, limbs that could kick, ears that could register the muffled sound of a voice from outside. The womb was a complete world with its own atmosphere and its own limits on what was possible. And then we left it.

We entered the world of the delivery room. Cold air. Light. Sound without the buffer of amniotic fluid. Our lungs opened for the first time. Our nervous system lit up with new information. The same body. The same essential resources we were born with. But an entirely new world with possibilities that the womb could not have offered.

From there: the crib. The first car ride home. The home. The world of crawling. The world of standing up and reaching objects on a table. The world of walking. Our first classroom. The lunchroom. Our first new friend connection. The first time someone hurt us. The first time we understood that other people were living in worlds that looked nothing like ours.

Same body, every time. New world, every time. New possibilities, every time.

This is the developmental arc of every human life. And it does not stop. The worlds we move through are not stages to be completed and discarded. They are living systems that grow, change, and eventually, when their time has come, begin to decay.

•  •  •

I am not writing this from a distance.

In the past few years, several of my own worlds have ended. I want to name them plainly, because I think the only way to talk honestly about world endings is to stop speaking about them in the abstract.

There is the world where my sister is still alive. The world where we argue and disagree and get on each other’s nerves and then call each other back and say I love you. That world ended. And what grew from the collapse of it is a world where I am much more present in the lives of her son and daughter, an eighteen year old and a fifteen year old who are navigating their own grief while I am navigating mine. A new closeness that would not exist if that other world had not ended. A new responsibility. A new kind of love that the previous world did not require me to practice. That world ending broke something in me. And it also built something in me that was not there before.

There is the world where a house in Los Angeles still stands. A house that belonged to family. A house full of holidays and memories and the specific warmth of a place where people have gathered over and over for years. The LA fires took it. That world is gone. What it held cannot be rebuilt. But what it gave to everyone who moved through it still lives in the people who were shaped by it.

There is the world where a four pound chihuahua named Pumpkin was still with us. Small enough to hold in one hand. Gone now. And if you have ever loved a small creature completely, you know that the world where they exist is its own real thing. And its own real loss.

There is the world of my marriage. That world is ending too, and I am grateful that it is ending with love and with care for one another still intact. But even an amicable ending is still an ending. And the world that is dissolving is the one our two children have always known as home. The one they have organized their understanding of safety and family and possibility around. They did not choose for that world to change. And they cannot yet fully see what is forming in its place.

Sitting with that, trying to prepare two children for a world they can feel shifting beneath them before they have language for what is happening, is what brought all of this into the sharpest focus for me. Because you cannot tell a child that everything is fine when a world they love is clearly changing. What you can do is help them understand that they have survived the end of worlds before. That they moved from the womb into the delivery room. From crawling into walking. From the safety of home into the complexity of school and friendship and loss. Same body. Same essential self. New worlds of possibility each time.

That is what I have been trying to do for my children. And it is what I am trying to do here for you.

Because if we can learn to recognize when a world is ending rather than flinching away from that recognition, if we can grieve it honestly and name what it gave us and choose what we want to carry forward, we do not lose our agency in the transition. We are not simply swept along by it. We become active participants in what gets cultivated next. And that matters more right now than I can fully express. Because the world that many of us share is ending. And we still have a say in what grows from it.

Grief is not the enemy of new possibility. Grief is the mechanism through which we release the old world and begin preparing the soil for the new one. Letting go of a world takes courage. It is gradual and it is not easy and there is no timeline for it. But there is beauty in the decay. There is beauty in knowing that what crumbles can feed futures we have not yet imagined. Different futures than the ones we planned. But not lesser ones.

•  •  •

We are living through the decay of a world right now. I want to say that plainly, because I think most of us feel it and do not have language for it that does not also feel like panic.

The signs of a world in decay are recognizable once you learn to read them. The systems that once felt permanent begin to crack at the seams. The rules that once seemed universal reveal themselves as agreements that some people never consented to. The norms that held things in place start to feel more like weight than structure. Trust erodes. The future that was promised starts to look like something that was only ever promised to some of us.

If you have been feeling a heaviness you cannot quite name, a flattening of imagination, an inability to picture what comes next without your mind going blank or going dark: that feeling has a name. It is dream atrophy. And it is not a personal failing. It is a natural response to living through the end of a world.

Dream atrophy happens when the conditions for dreaming are depleted. When urgency crowds out aspiration. When survival becomes so consuming that imagination feels irresponsible. When the soil of your inner life has been so thoroughly exhausted by the demands of the outside world that nothing can grow there for a while.

It is a signal. Not a sentence.

•  •  •

Here is what I have learned from studying the natural world, and from watching how worlds die and what comes next.

Nature does not waste its endings.

When a world ends, whether we are talking about a forest after a wildfire, a reef after a bleaching event, or the landscape around Mount St. Helens after the eruption of 1980, the biological memory of what existed before does not disappear. It goes into the soil. The nutrients from what burned feed what grows next. The root systems of trees that did not survive become the pathways through which new growth finds water. The rubble is not the obstacle. The rubble is the resource.

This is what disturbance ecology teaches us. Transformation is not replacement. The new world does not erase the old one. It grows from it.

What this means for us, right now, in this particular moment of collective grief and collective uncertainty, is something I believe with every part of my practice as an Astrobiofuturist: we get to choose what we carry forward. Not everything from the old world deserves to seed the new one. But the things worth carrying belong in the soil of what grows next.

•  •  •

The world is not ending. A world is.

And that distinction matters more than I can fully express in one essay. So let me just say this for now: the world that is ending is not your world. It is one of many worlds you have moved through, are moving through, and will move through. You have survived the end of worlds before. You survived the end of the womb. You survived the end of childhood. You survived every version of yourself that you had to leave behind in order to become who you are now.

Same body. Same essential self. New worlds of possibility waiting to form around the dream you are still carrying, even if right now it feels very small and very quiet inside you.

That dream is not gone. It is dormant. And dormancy, in nature, is not death. It is the intelligence of a seed that is waiting for the right conditions to break open.

Wherever you are right now is fertile soil for what can come next.

•  •  •

Here is what I want to leave you with. Three things. Simple things. Seeds for thinking and an open door for reflection.

One.  Name the world you are grieving. Not in despair, but in honesty. What did this world offer you that you are afraid of losing? Let yourself acknowledge that something real is ending. Grief is not weakness. It is evidence that something mattered.

Two.  Name one thing from that world that you want to carry forward. What is worth composting into what comes next? What did this old world leave behind that the new one needs? Not everything that dies was wrong. Some of it was just early.

Three.  Name one thing that feels abnormal today that you want to be the assumed norm in the world you are helping to cultivate. That is your North Star. That is where you plant first. (More on casting North Stars and building constellations of orientation in a future post.)

You do not have to have a plan. You do not have to see the whole new world from here. You just have to be willing to name what you are grieving, decide what is worth carrying forward, and plant the first seed of the norm you want to live inside.

This world is ending. But that is not the end. It is the composting of one reality into the conditions for the next. The power to choose what gets cultivated is still ours. The unimagined futures waiting to emerge from this rubble are still ours to grow.

In my next post I will share something that has become the foundation of everything I teach about Dream Farming. The darkness is for dreaming. And this particular darkness is full of seeds. More on that soon.

See Beyond.

Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾

Right now, there’s so much happening in the world. And the most understandable response to all of it is to feel overwhelmed — like there’s no clear path forward because everything keeps changing faster than you can adjust.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: after several millennia of upheaval, of things bigger than any of us, we are still here. This planet and all the living things on it are still here. That is not luck. That is a testament to the resilience of life itself.

Dream atrophy happens when we become so focused on what’s happening within arm’s reach — the next five minutes, the next news cycle, the next crisis — that dreaming feels like a luxury we can’t afford. The idea of imagining tomorrow, let alone ten years from now, starts to feel irresponsible.

But here’s what’s true: your capacity to adapt and endure in uncertainty is directly connected to your ability to dream. To aspire. To hope for something beyond what’s right in front of you. That’s not escapism. That’s fuel. It’s the rocket fuel your endurance needs to keep going when everything in you wants to stop.

That’s what it means to dream in the dark.

The darkness is not the absence of possibility. It is where dreaming begins. Dreams are both seeds and stars — they anchor us in hope for better days, and they propel us forward when we’re ready to give up.

You don’t need to wait for the light to keep moving. There’s enough light in the dark if you let yourself adjust to it.

Consider this: when darkness falls, your brain’s pineal gland releases melatonin — the hormone that triggers your body’s shift into its deepest restorative and dreaming state. REM sleep, where the brain does its most creative and emotionally integrative work, happens deepest in the dark. Your body was literally designed to dream there.

The darkness isn’t where possibility goes to die. It’s where your brain does its most alive work.

Here’s what I want you to try.

Don’t worry — it’s a light lift. (I know you’re busy.)

Set three alarms throughout your day. Five minutes each. That’s all.

In the first five minutes — dream about something beautiful that could happen for someone you love. Not for you. For them. A moment five years from now that you somehow made possible. It doesn’t have to be grand. Just real enough to feel.

In the second five minutes — dream about one impact you created in the world. Something that exists ten years from now because of something you did today. What was that one thing?

And if both of those still feel too big — use the third five minutes to dream about just one thing immediately in front of you being solved. A bill that gets paid. A weight that lifts. And then ask yourself: what becomes possible for me when that one thing is no longer in the way?

That counts as dreaming too.

Dream atrophy heals the same way any atrophy does — slowly, with small movements, repeated consistently. You don’t need a grand vision to start. You just need five minutes and a willingness to ask: what could be?

The darkness is for dreaming. And you were made for both.

— Billy Almon, Astrobiofuturist 🖖🏾