After spending almost a year in the caravan in Sweden I sold it and left the place with two travel bags which contain all my leftover belongings. I am on a new journey to follow again the strong call to find a monastery where I can dive into daily prayer, devoted work and study of scriptures and tradition.

The last weeks in Sweden were chaotic, colourful and filled with all kinds of emotions. Since June the land around me filled up with more people spending days and weeks in their tents and caravans, most of them building on their own projects and dreams for the big Burn that happens on the land each year end of July since 2022. I tried to retreat mainly in the Garden where I have built the greenhouse but also had signed up for some other projects and sometimes joined some common meals and gatherings.

It was great to have some of my closest friends visiting mid of July before the big event and being able to open my tiny home for them to sleep and rest. They worked with me in the garden and helped me make the greenhouse even nicer. They also supported me in a time when I was letting go more and more of the land, the people whom I connected the past years. The last weeks I even fought my inner protector. Living on and caring so long for this land I definitely felt some ownership and protection not so much for the things I created but certain areas of the land. The land became more occupied by people who previously claimed the spot on a map online sometimes never been there before. I judged some as not checking in with the land, the people who know it, the local “spirits”, and caring more for their own enjoyment then what is needed by the local environment.

I noticed again that I have strong judgements in me, wanting things to be a certain way, the right way, my way. Or is it “my way”? I don’t know. It just seems I hold certain values high, or believe in certain things that other’s might not consider so important. So the question often occurred in me if I still belong to this community? Are those the right people for me to hang out with. Most of them probably not.

Home is Where my Heart is

This land and the caravan which I considered home for a while didn’t feel like it anymore. My caravan was a safe and cozy space that was really mine but it is placed on a piece of land that didn’t feel so safe anymore. This saying “home is where my heart is” came up again many times in the past weeks. Isn’t it just a mental thing to feel “at home”? Can’t I just relax and find the stability and silence in myself? The daily structure and routine I am longing for needs to come out of myself, why am I looking for it outside? Can I be free if I have the longing to obey to outer rules?

I also remembered the freedom and liberation that I felt in the few months that I spent the year before in the monastery. Getting up early, going to the prayers without much thinking, doing some work in the garden, meeting with the brothers for meals in silence, reading and listening to texts from the bible and contemplating on them. What else do I need?

Sure a deeper philosophical conversation either with a friend or a random person feels fulfilling. Even dancing to some hypnotic techno beats or banging my head to loud and screeching guitars, or having some insights and awesome experiences while roaming through the woods on some entheogenic substance. All feels like a great human experience, but is it necessary for me to feel whole and “at home”? It seems my soul needs something else and I haven’t found it yet.

I don’t hear voices but sometimes I feel this calling that becomes stronger the longer I deny it and then I make radical shifts in my life. These callings seem to come more and more from within. In the past it was often somebody, my parents, a teacher, a woman, who gave me some advice, or told me what would be good for me. And I listened. It was good for a while until I found something better.

I am not sure if that changed much by following a path of discernment, of listening to “God’s will” rather to “what I want”. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” is a saying by Aleister Crowley, who based his esoteric teaching on this. And too often I met people in esoteric and spiritual circles where it feels more like “I do what I want”. On my current journey it seems for me to find out what is the higher will that wants to live through me rather then having a good live where I feel happy in. I was looking for this so long and haven’t found it, so I guess it’s again time for a radical change.

And I believe only in silence, stability and a clear daily routine I might find the peace within and the way “home”. If you are interested I will let you be part of this quest.

Please support my next chapter in life:
Studying theology and living in a monastery

Donate now

The Ways of the Lord are Inscrutable

Right after I left my “home” in Sweden I spent 5 nights in the Abbaye Hauterive in Switzerland, a monastery which is close to Fribourg, at whose university I will soon start a bachelor in Theology. To be able to stay longer at this monastery I started to learn French as it is the main language spoken amongst the monks and guests.

The silence within the venerable walls and in the surrounding valley is amazing. Almost no noise from the nearest street only a motorbike once a day, maybe an airplane or helicopter as well once or twice a day. Otherwise just birds chirping and singing, and the gentle murmur of the nearby river. This seems to have an effect on the monks and the guests as well. There was not much talking and most of the other guests where only whispering during the meals. How peaceful.

One night I woke up and had thought of my mother just to find out the other day that she has been in hospital for some checkups and was on the way home. I didn’t know she was in the clinic but it was a sign for me the monastery might need to wait for me a bit and I rather go to Austria to spend some time with my mother and support her with what is needed. If this is what God wills from me I shall listen.

So now I am here in Austria, spending a good time with my mother, learning French, reading already some theological texts, cleaning up some projects of long-time clients to be able to let go of them, meditating and going to the local church a few times per week. That seems to me to be a good way to appreciate life until the next calling presents itself. I feel grateful!

Reclaiming Eden / Rejoining the Conversation

I began this book close to the ground—with my hands in soil, surrounded by silence, watching how easily modern life slips into speed, distraction, and separation. That beginning mattered, because the crisis we are living through isn’t only “out there” in carbon charts and broken politics. It is also “in here”: in our bodies, our attention, our capacity to relate.

Across these chapters we returned to the same pattern: when we forget that we belong, we compensate with control. We build lives that look powerful from the outside, yet feel anxious, brittle, and strangely lonely within. We consume to fill the emptiness. We argue to feel certain. We dominate to avoid vulnerability. And the world—other people, other species, the living land itself—becomes either a resource or a threat.

Yet another pattern kept appearing, again and again, across traditions, philosophies, and lived experiments: relationship restores reality. Not relationship as sentiment, but as a way of being. Not nostalgia, but participation. Not “going back,” but remembering what was always true.

Read more

On Technology, Wisdom, and the Future of Participation

There are moments in history when the horizon suddenly widens—when humanity becomes aware that it is playing a new instrument in the orchestra of creation. We are living in such a moment now. For most of human existence, the forces shaping the world were soil, wind, water, sunlight, instinct, and imagination. Today, another force has quietly joined that lineage: artificial intelligence.

Not a creature, not a god, not a replacement for anything sacred—but a mirror. One built from our language, our stories, our choices, our fears. Whether we celebrate it, ignore it, or fear it, AI has become part of the relational field in which we now live.

I do not believe AI arrives as an accident or an attack on humanity. Nor do I believe it to be salvation. Like every tool humans have ever shaped—from the first stone blade to the written word to the printing press to nuclear energy—AI reflects the consciousness of its makers. It holds our brilliance and our blindness at the same time. It can help us listen more carefully to the world, or it can accelerate our forgetting. It can deepen participation, or it can reinforce separation. It can serve life, or it can feed extraction. The technology itself does not decide. We do.

Many people speak about AI as if it were destiny—an unstoppable wave that will either solve everything or destroy everything. But technology has never been destiny. It has always been interpretation, relationship, and responsibility. As the philosopher Shannon Vallor reminds us, “Our technologies will never be wiser than we are willing to become.” Wisdom—not efficiency, not capability—is what determines whether technology becomes medicine or poison. And wisdom does not come from algorithms. It comes from attention, humility, listening, community, and love.

AI challenges us to ask again the questions we thought were settled: What does it mean to be human? What is worth knowing? What deserves care? What is sacred? Who do we belong to? How shall we live together?

These questions are older than language, and AI does not change them—it only makes them unavoidable.

If creation is ongoing, as both science and spirituality suggest, then AI is now part of that unfolding. Not as a replacement for nature, but as another layer of relational complexity—a new participant in the evolutionary conversation. Used wisely, AI may help us restore ecosystems, understand climate patterns, translate between cultures, support loneliness, educate gently, reveal bias, expand imagination, and free human beings for creativity, care, and contemplation. Used carelessly, it may isolate us further, accelerate consumption, harden ideologies, replace human presence with simulation, and erode our capacity for attention, patience, and wonder.

The question, then, is not “What will AI become?” The question is: “Who will we become in relationship to it?”

Artificial intelligence does not threaten our humanity. Forgetting our humanity does. Outsourcing responsibility does. Turning away from suffering does. Believing we are separate does. When AI is treated as a master or an oracle, it becomes dangerous. When it is treated as a tool for participation, discernment, and service, it can become part of the healing of the world.

In that sense, AI places us again before an ancient choice—one that appears in every spiritual tradition: Will we live as stewards or as consumers? As participants or spectators? As companions or competitors? As caretakers of creation or as its conquerors?

This book has returned, again and again, to a simple truth: creation is relational. Everything exists through everything else. We shape the world, and the world shapes us. Interdependence is not a belief—it is reality. AI only makes this more visible.

Perhaps the role of humans in creation has never been to control, but to consent—to listen for the deeper rhythm underneath all things and to participate in it. To align our technologies, economies, relationships, institutions, and imaginations with what sustains life. To remember that not everything measurable is meaningful, and not everything valuable can be optimised.

Maybe the task now is not to ask whether AI can become more like us, but whether we can become more like the humans the world needs—capable of discernment, compassion, restraint, reverence, creativity, and joyful responsibility. AI may extend our intelligence, but only wisdom can extend our belonging.

So the invitation is simple and difficult at once: do not relate to AI as a threat or a saviour, but as a mirror. Let it show us what we value, what we fear, what we ignore, what we long for, and what we are becoming. Let it provoke deeper questions, not quicker answers. Let it call us back to the slow, ancient arts: listening, tending, sharing, blessing, choosing consciously how we participate in creation.

If the future is uncertain—and it always is—then let uncertainty be the place where humility ripens, not where panic spreads. Let technology be guided by wisdom, not just by power or profit. Let progress be measured not only by capability but by compassion. Let innovation serve aliveness. Let intelligence serve love.

Because in the end, AI is not the protagonist of this story. We are. Not the isolated “we” of individual achievement, but the great, interwoven “we” of humanity, earth, water, soil, bird, forest, ancestor, child, stranger, future. No matter how complex the world becomes, creation still unfolds one choice, one relationship, one act of participation at a time. AI does not change that. It simply makes it more visible.

If you want a single question to carry with you, let it be this: What kind of world do you want your choices to nourish?

We are still invited—always—to help bring the world into being. Together.

Reimagining Belonging

There is a point where sacred action stops being an inspiring idea and becomes a lived question. Not only What will I do? but Where will I do it? Not only How will I live? but With whom? And, perhaps most revealing of all: What kind of people do I become in the presence of others—when my ideals are tested by dishes, deadlines, disagreements, fatigue, and the ordinary friction of shared life?

Modern culture often treats community as a preference, like a style of housing or a social aesthetic. But older traditions knew something we are now relearning: community is not decoration. It is a vessel. It is a spiritual technology. It is one of the few places where listening becomes accountability, where care becomes structure, where humility becomes practice, and where stewardship becomes more than a private virtue. In this sense, community is not the soft alternative to “real change.” It may be the most demanding form of change we can attempt.

The Missing Organ

Many of us carry a strange contradiction. We are more connected than ever, and yet we are lonely in ways our ancestors might not have understood. We have social networks and group chats and endless commentary, but fewer people we can truly call in the night. We can belong to thousands of “communities” and still feel unseen. We may even be surrounded by people and yet remain internally untouchable—protected by competence, performance, or carefully curated identity.

In a world like this, the longing for community can easily become sentimental. We imagine an ideal village in our minds—warm, wise, harmonious—without noticing that the very act of living together will awaken everything unresolved in us. Community is not merely a refuge from modern life. It is also a mirror. If sacred action is the movement from listening to responsibility, community is often the movement from responsibility to relationship—where we discover that responsibility is not abstract. It has a face. It interrupts us. It asks for patience. It asks for repair.

This is why the deepest crisis of our time may not only be ecological or political, but relational. We have built societies that excel at producing goods and services, but struggle to produce belonging. We can scale almost everything—except trust. And trust, it turns out, is one of the primary nutrients of a healthy world.

The “New (Old)” Paradox

The phrase “new communities” can sound trendy, even naïve. But what is emerging in many places is not simply novelty. It is the return of something ancient, reinterpreted for a fractured age. New forms are appearing—co-housing projects, ecovillages, unmonasteries, regenerative farms, co-ops, community land trusts, worker-owned enterprises, citizen assemblies, networks of care—yet many of the underlying principles are old. Older than modern capitalism. Older than the nation-state. Older than the fantasy of the autonomous individual.

The “old” in these new communities is not nostalgia. It is memory. It is the remembrance that human beings learned to survive and flourish through shared rhythms: meals, work, prayer, council, seasonal cycles, apprenticeship, mutual aid, stewardship of land, and rituals of conflict repair. Monastic traditions understood this with clarity: the spiritual path is not only a set of ideas, but a shared pattern of life—an architecture that holds attention over time.1 Indigenous traditions have long carried similar wisdom: governance is not merely management, but relationship—between humans, ancestors, land, water, animals, and the unseen dimensions of life.

When we call these communities “new,” what is often new is not the insight, but the context. We are trying to practice ancient relational principles in societies shaped by mobility, individualism, digital life, and a global economy that rewards extraction. We are trying to build belonging inside systems that monetise attention and privatise care. In that sense, the task is both creative and resistant: to re-inhabit the human scale without pretending we can return to the past.

Communities as Laboratories

One reason communities matter is that they are not only moral projects; they are experiments. They allow us to test what we say we believe. If we claim to value stewardship, what happens when we share a tool shed, a garden, or a budget? If we claim to value humility, what happens when someone critiques our plan? If we claim to value interdependence, what happens when a member is sick, depressed, or simply unable to contribute?

In this way, communities can become laboratories of the future—not as utopias, but as practice fields. They show us what collapses quickly, what endures, and what requires deeper formation than we expected. They also reveal a quiet truth: many of the changes we long for at a societal level—less waste, less loneliness, less violence, more care, more trust, more ecological intelligence—are difficult to sustain without containers that make those changes normal.

This is why some gatherings, festivals, and temporary “cities” can also function as laboratories. Even imperfect experiments can teach. They demonstrate that culture is not a fixed thing; it is something we practice into existence. Yet the most mature communities often understand that temporary intensity is not the same as long-term belonging. It is one thing to share a vision for a week. It is another to share responsibility for years.

Read more

Learning to Become Human Again

“What good is much learning without fear of
God and a good life?”
— Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

When we speak about the crises of our time—polarisation, manipulation, the erosion of trust, the ease with which fear spreads—it is tempting to look for better information. More facts. Better explanations. Faster corrections. And yet, beneath all of this, something deeper is at work.

What we are facing is not primarily an information crisis. It is a formation crisis.

Long before modern mass media, long before nation-states and ideological movements, people understood that the health of a society depends on the kind of human beings it forms. Not just on what they know, but on how they judge, how they relate, how they carry responsibility, and how they respond when certainty is unavailable.

One historical example illuminates this with surprising clarity: the Brethren of the Common Life, a quiet movement that emerged in the late Middle Ages. They were not revolutionaries in the usual sense. They did not seek power, visibility, or mass mobilisation. What they cultivated instead was something far more durable: people.

The Brethren integrated inner spiritual formation, education, and civic responsibility into a single way of life—not as separate domains, but as one coherent practice. They educated across social classes, encouraged engagement with original texts rather than slogans, and emphasised moral character alongside intellectual rigour. Their aim was not to produce specialists or obedient subjects, but people capable of judgment—people who could think, discern, and act for the common good.

What later became fragmented once belonged together. Inner life and public life. Prayer and study. Learning and responsibility. The spiritual current known as Devotio Moderna provided the inward orientation; the educational communities of the Brethren embodied it socially; The Imitation of Christ expressed its personal, devotional core. None of these were meant to stand alone.

History, of course, intervened. The Reformation, the rise of modern states, and later secularisation pulled these strands apart. Spirituality became increasingly private. Education became instrumental and technocratic. Politics drifted toward power management rather than care for the common good. What survived was often the shell without the living integration.

Seen from this perspective, many of today’s pathologies become clearer. The spread of propaganda, conspiracy thinking, and charismatic authoritarianism is not simply the result of ignorance. It thrives where people have not been formed to tolerate uncertainty, to engage complexity without panic, or to hold belonging without fusion. These are failures of formation, not of intelligence.

The Brethren addressed this differently. They cultivated inner grounding—a stable conscience shaped over time. They valued judgment over opinion, encouraging slow thinking and direct engagement with sources. And they fostered belonging without enemies: community rooted in shared practice rather than shared outrage.

Such formation produces people who are difficult to manipulate. Not because they are cynical, but because they are anchored. They do not outsource judgment. They are less reactive, less addicted to certainty, and less susceptible to the emotional shortcuts on which modern propaganda depends.

Importantly, this way of working did not scale through expansion or branding. It spread through replication, reliability, and quiet excellence. Small communities forming people well. Again and again. Over time. Social renewal came not as a tsunami, but as countless ripples.

Modern expressions of this tradition still exist, often as small, almost hidden communities. They no longer shape entire education systems, and perhaps they are not meant to. Their task now may be more modest—and more radical: to preserve the art of formation itself in a culture obsessed with speed, visibility, and output.

A Living Line of Formation

What the Brethren of the Common Life embodied did not disappear with the end of the Middle Ages. It resurfaced, again and again, wherever education was understood not as training for usefulness, but as formation for life. In the nineteenth century, the Nordic folk high school movement emerged from a similar intuition. Rooted in the concept of Bildung, these schools were not designed to produce credentials or specialists, but free, responsible citizens capable of judgment, participation, and care for the common good.

As described in The Nordic Secret,1 this quiet revolution in education laid the groundwork for democratic culture, social trust, and social justice in the Nordic countries—not through ideology, but through inner formation. Like the Brethren centuries earlier, folk high schools emphasised lived community, dialogue, reflection, and the integration of knowledge with character.

In our own time, initiatives such as the Inner Development Goals point in the same direction. They recognise that no amount of external reform—ecological, technological, or political—can succeed without inner capacities such as discernment, humility, empathy, and responsibility. Different names, different contexts—but the same insight: societies flourish when education forms whole human beings, not just skilled performers. The Brethren remind us that this work rarely begins at scale. It begins in small communities, practicing attention, judgment, and care—trusting that quiet formation shapes the future more deeply than loud instruction.

The risk of contemporary inner-development frameworks is not their intention, but their detachment: when inner growth is separated from truth, moral obligation, and the common good, it can quietly become a soft-skills layer for managing failing systems rather than forming persons capable of questioning them.

What the Brethren of the Common Life understood with remarkable clarity is something we often forget today: political freedom is downstream from inner freedom. A society cannot remain free if its people lack judgment, patience, and moral grounding. Laws, constitutions, and institutions matter—but they are fragile when carried by unformed persons. The Brethren did not set out to create revolutionaries or critics of authority. They formed human beings who could think, read, discern, and act responsibly. This inner formation made people less dependent on slogans, less vulnerable to fear, and less inclined to outsource their conscience to leaders or crowds.

In this sense, their educational work quietly laid the groundwork for later movements of reform and self-governance—not by teaching resistance, but by cultivating maturity. The freedom that emerged was not loud or ideological. It was the freedom of people who could stand on their own inner ground, remain faithful under pressure, and choose the common good over immediate gratification.

What this suggests for us is sobering and hopeful at the same time. No amount of technological sophistication, no flood of information, no clever governance model can replace the slow work of forming human beings capable of discernment, responsibility, and care. Democracy, ecology, and peace all depend on this deeper soil.

Education, in this sense, is not about producing informed individuals. It is about forming persons.

And formation happens where attention is trained, where inner life is taken seriously, where belonging does not require enemies, and where responsibility is learned through practice rather than instruction.

This, too, is sacred action. Quiet. Unheroic. And indispensable.

Formation vs. Optimisation

A Quiet but Crucial Distinction

Formation and optimisation may look similar on the surface, but they arise from very different understandings of what a human being is for.

Optimisation asks how a person can function better within existing systems. It focuses on performance, adaptability, resilience, and efficiency. Its aim is improvement: smoother processes, better collaboration, greater stability under pressure. Optimisation measures success by outcomes that can be tracked, scaled, and managed.

Formation asks a different question altogether: Who is this person becoming? It is concerned not only with skills, but with conscience; not only with effectiveness, but with truthfulness; not only with resilience, but with moral courage. Formation is slower, less visible, and often resistant to metrics—because its true measure appears only when pressure comes.

An optimised person can endure almost anything.

A formed person knows when something must not be endured.

Optimisation prepares people to adapt.

Formation prepares people to judge.

Optimisation seeks to make systems work better.

Formation asks whether the systems themselves are worthy of our participation.

The Brethren of the Common Life understood this intuitively. They did not train people to succeed in the world as it was, but to stand upright within it—capable of discernment, responsibility, and resistance when necessary. Their aim was not efficiency, but freedom of conscience.

In times of rapid change, optimisation is tempting. Formation is essential.

From Listening to Responsibility

Up to this point, this book has asked for attention. It has invited you to listen again—to the world, to creation, to silence, to what different traditions have called God, Spirit, the Tao, or the deeper order of life. It has explored humility, stewardship, interdependence, and alignment not as abstract ideals, but as lived orientations. Now the question quietly shifts. Listening, if it is real, does not end in insight. It asks something of us. Sacred action begins where listening becomes responsibility.

In many spiritual traditions, listening is already understood as an active posture. The Hebrew word shema means both to hear and to obey. In the Rule of Saint Benedict, listening is the first act of the monk—not listening as information-gathering, but listening as readiness. In Buddhism, right understanding is inseparable from right action. In Indigenous wisdom, to hear the land is to respond to it. Listening, in these traditions, is never neutral. It carries weight. It changes the listener.

This is where spiritual language can easily become comfortable and vague. We speak of awareness, presence, consciousness, alignment—and yet our lives remain largely unchanged. Sacred action challenges this split. It asks whether what we hear actually shapes how we live, how we decide, how we spend our time, our energy, our money, our attention. It asks whether listening remains an inner experience, or becomes an outer orientation.

Sacred action does not mean dramatic gestures or heroic sacrifice. It is rarely loud. More often, it is quiet, persistent, and ordinary. It shows up in the way we choose to relate instead of react, to repair instead of discard, to stay instead of withdraw, to speak when silence would be easier—or to remain silent when ego wants to perform. Sacred action is what happens when inner alignment meets the friction of real life.

To act sacredly is not to act perfectly. It is to act honestly. It means acknowledging that our choices matter, even when they are small, and that they ripple outward in ways we cannot fully see. This is where humility and stewardship come back into view. Without humility, action becomes self-righteous. Without stewardship, it becomes extractive. Sacred action holds both together: clarity without domination, commitment without violence.

There is also a more difficult truth here. Listening is not only comforting; it can be inconvenient. It may ask us to slow down where we prefer speed, to simplify where we enjoy excess, to confront patterns we would rather justify. It may call us to step out of roles that no longer serve life, or to take responsibility where we have been hiding behind systems, institutions, or collective anonymity. Sacred action begins precisely at these edges.

This is why listening cannot remain a purely private affair. A world shaped by people who refuse to listen—to the earth, to one another, to conscience—will inevitably drift toward exploitation, conflict, and despair. Not because people are evil, but because disconnection becomes normal. Sacred action is therefore not only personal. It is relational, social, ecological, and political in the deepest sense of the word. It shapes the kind of world that becomes possible.

At the same time, sacred action is not about moral pressure or constant self-surveillance. It grows from relationship, not fear. It emerges when we trust that responding to what we hear is part of belonging to life itself. When action flows from listening, it carries a different quality. It is less reactive, less brittle, less violent. Even when it resists injustice, it does not need to become what it opposes.

You might pause here—not to judge yourself, but to listen more closely.

Conscious Participation: From Inner Awakening to World Repair

What many spiritual traditions have always known, depth psychology and integral philosophy name in modern language: human beings do not act only from conscious intention. We act from layers of memory, symbol, fear, longing, and inherited patterns that live beneath awareness. Carl Jung called this the collective unconscious—not as a mystical abstraction, but as a shared psychic field shaped by the history of humanity itself. When these depths remain unconscious, they do not disappear. They express themselves indirectly, often through domination, projection, and repetition. When they are brought into awareness, they can become sources of meaning, creativity, and care.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
– C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 9i

From this perspective, ecological destruction is not only a technical or political failure. It is also a psychological one. A culture that does not recognise its unconscious drives will act them out on the world. The extraction of land mirrors the extraction of meaning. The domination of ecosystems mirrors the domination of inner life. Jung believed that healing—personal and collective—begins when unconscious material is met consciously and lived symbolically rather than compulsively. In ecological terms, this suggests that acts of care for the Earth are not merely practical responses, but symbolic and archetypal ones: gestures of reconciliation between humanity and the larger life it belongs to.

This is where sacred action takes on a deeper dimension. Planting a tree, restoring a riverbank, protecting a forest, or choosing restraint can be understood not only as ethical choices, but as acts of conscious participation in the deeper patterns of life. When such actions are undertaken with awareness, they resonate far beyond their immediate effect. They speak to ancient images of guardianship, renewal, and belonging that live in the human psyche across cultures. Care becomes more than duty; it becomes remembrance.

Ken Wilber’s idea of conscious evolution offers a complementary lens. He suggests that evolution is not only biological or technological, but also interior—a movement toward greater awareness, inclusion, and responsibility. Humanity, in this view, stands at a threshold where our tools have outpaced our wisdom. The question is no longer whether we can shape the world, but whether we can mature enough to do so without destroying the conditions for life itself. Conscious evolution means recognising that participation in creation now includes responsibility for the future we are actively generating.

“Evolution goes beyond what went before,
but because it must include what went
before, its very nature is to
transcend and include.”
– Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995)

Both Jung and Wilber, in their own ways, point toward the same truth: unconscious participation leads to harm; conscious participation opens the possibility of healing. Sacred action, then, is not simply about doing good things. It is about growing into the kind of beings who can act without violence toward the world, because we have learned to relate differently to what lives within us. Ecological stewardship, social responsibility, and spiritual maturity are not separate tasks. They are expressions of the same movement—a movement from unconscious belonging to conscious participation.

Seen this way, participation in creation is neither naive optimism nor moral burden. It is an evolutionary invitation. To act as though our choices matter because they do. To care not because we are perfect, but because we are involved. To respond not as masters of the world, but as beings who have finally remembered that they belong to it.

Conscious participation, then, is never only personal. The moment our actions become intentional, they begin to ripple outward—into families, friendships, neighbourhoods, and the fragile commons we share. No one learns to act wisely alone. Sacred action matures in relationship, through shared practices, shared limits, shared responsibility.

What begins as an inner alignment seeks a social form; what awakens in the heart longs for community. If creation is still unfolding, then it unfolds not through isolated heroes, but through people who learn to listen, decide, and act together.

The question that follows naturally is no longer only How will I live? but With whom? And what kinds of communities might emerge if we took participation seriously—not as an ideal, but as a way of life?

Reflection and Practice

Reflection: Listening That Costs Something

Where in my life do I claim to listen, but avoid acting?

What do I already sense is being asked of me—and keep postponing?

Which habits, comforts, or identities make it hardest for me to listen deeply?

When was the last time listening led me to change a concrete behaviour?

Who or what do I tend to ignore because listening there would be inconvenient?

What would become possible if I trusted my conscience more than my fear?

If my life were a response to what I hear as sacred, what would look different—starting this week?

These are not questions to answer quickly. They are questions to live with.

Sacred action does not demand that we fix the world. It asks something both simpler and harder: that we take responsibility for the part of the world that touches us. The place where we stand. The relationships we inhabit. The work we do. The resources we use. The words we speak. The silences we keep. Participation, humility, stewardship, interdependence, and alignment all converge here—not as ideals, but as practice.

There is a temptation, especially in times of crisis, to look for grand solutions or final answers. Sacred action resists this temptation. It trusts that transformation unfolds through faithful response, not total control. It recognises that history is shaped less by singular heroic acts than by countless small decisions made with integrity. To act sacredly is to remain available to life—again and again.

Practice: One Honest Adjustment

Take a few minutes of silence—not to search for new insights, but to notice what is already clear. Ask yourself quietly: What is one small but real adjustment I know would bring my life into better alignment? Do not choose the heroic option. Choose the honest one. It might involve time, money, attention, consumption, speech, rest, or relationship. Write it down. Then decide when and how you will act on it—not someday, but concretely. Sacred action does not begin with grand visions. It begins where listening becomes practice.

No one learns to live this way alone. Attention matures in relationship. Discernment sharpens in dialogue. Courage grows where responsibility is shared. Sacred action, if it remains individual, easily turns into burnout or moral isolation. If it becomes communal, it can sustain life over time.

This is where the journey naturally turns outward—toward places where people are already experimenting with living differently, together. Communities that remember older rhythms. Practices that restore belonging. Structures that invite participation rather than domination. Sacred action, in the end, is not only about what we do—but about how we learn to do it with one another.

And so the path continues.

“What is soft is strong.”
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching §76

I have come to believe that the world’s imbalance is not only ecological or political but also spiritual. Somewhere along the way, humanity lost touch with the feminine principle—the quiet intelligence that knows how to receive, how to hold, how to care. We have celebrated reason, achievement, and control, while quietly dismissing intuition, emotion, and surrender as weaknesses. Yet without the feminine, the masculine loses its heart, and without the masculine, the feminine loses its form. Wholeness requires both.

This chapter is not a defence of ideology. The word feminism carries many layers of history, some liberating and others dividing. What I seek here is not an argument about gender or identity but an invitation to remember an ancient balance that transcends them. The feminine I speak of is not a social category—it is an energy, a principle, a rhythm, a mode of participation in creation itself. It is the power that gestates life, that nourishes what is fragile, that listens before it acts. It is found as much in a wise woman as in a compassionate man.

In many spiritual traditions, the feminine has always been the silent counterpart of divine creativity. In Christianity, she is Mary—the one who consents, receives, and bears God into the world. In that light, Mary’s “yes” becomes a model of strength—not control, but courageous cooperation with life. In Judaism, she is the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God, dwelling within creation. In Hinduism, she is Shakti, the dynamic energy of the cosmos. In Taoism, she is the valley spirit—the yielding strength that gives life to the ten thousand things. And in the Andean tradition, she is Pachamama, the earth herself. These are not myths of passivity, but of participation: each reveals that life unfolds not through domination but through relationship, receptivity, and care.

When I look around today, I see a world starving for this kind of wisdom. Our culture glorifies speed and competition, yet we feel increasingly disconnected, anxious, and lonely. The soil is depleted, the oceans choked, the heart weary. We’ve been taught to strive endlessly for growth and victory, yet what we most need may not be more ambition but more attention—more listening, more gentleness, more room for the unmeasurable to unfold.

Feminine wisdom is not weak. It is the patient strength of the seed that breaks open in darkness. It is the resilience of the earth that renews itself after fire. It is the compassion that refuses to turn away, even when the world grows cruel. It is this quality—this steady, nurturing intelligence—that can heal what our intellect alone cannot fix.

To rediscover the feminine is not to abandon reason or structure but to soften them—to let knowledge become care, to let action become service, to let progress become participation. The feminine principle teaches us that growth without relationship is collapse, and that creation without love is only production. It reminds us that to build a future worth living in, we must learn again to mother the world.

The following sections will explore this rebalancing: how the feminine reveals itself in nature, in our bodies, and in our ways of knowing; how its recovery can restore the harmony of communities, and perhaps even the planet itself.

Read more

Chapter 10: LISTENING FOR THE SACRED

Discernment in a Noisy World

“Silence is the language of God;
all else is poor translation.”
– Jalal ad-Din Rumi

There are moments when the noise of the world feels unbearable. Not just the traffic or the constant hum of machines, but the restless noise within—the opinions, the fears, the endless stream of thoughts that demand attention. And yet, somewhere beneath all this, there is still a gentle pulse. A rhythm that never stopped speaking. Listening for the sacred, I have come to realise, is less about finding silence than about becoming silent enough to hear what is already present.

It’s not easy. Every screen, every message, every unresolved emotion pulls me outward. Sometimes I have to walk into the forest or sit in the garden just to remember what the world sounds like when I stop speaking. There, in the rustle of leaves or the distant call of a bird, I sense again that there is more to this life than what I can control. Something listens back. Something larger, wiser, infinitely patient.

During my stay at the monastery, the guest brother suggested I find a spiritual companion—someone firmly rooted in the Catholic tradition but not directly connected to the convent—with whom I could share my experiences and receive guidance. I reached out to Father David McCallum, S.J., a Jesuit priest I had met years earlier at a conference in the United States. Father McCallum, along with his colleagues, supports the Discerning Leadership Program, which assists Church leaders through formation, accompaniment, professional coaching, and resources, fostering a more synodal, effective, and discerning approach to the Church’s mission.1 It was through this companionship that I first encountered the practice of discernment, and it has been a valuable resource for me ever since.

Discernment, as I’ve come to understand it, is the practice of listening with the whole self—not only to God or Spirit, whatever word one feels comfortable using, but to the quiet movements of the heart. Ignatius of Loyola described this as noticing what draws us toward life, love, and freedom, and what pulls us toward fear or constriction. He called these movements consolation and desolation. It’s a practice that requires honesty and patience—not forcing answers, but waiting until something inside rings true.

Other traditions speak of the same thing in their own ways. The Sufis listen through the heart; Buddhists cultivate awareness of the constant rising and falling of the mind; Indigenous elders listen to the voice of the wind, the river, or the ancestors. Different languages, same gesture. Each describes an intimacy with life—a relationship with the unseen that becomes more audible the quieter we become.

When I first came to the monastery, I imagined that silence would be easy. But silence can also be terrifying. It strips away distraction and reveals the raw edges of the soul. You start to hear what you’ve been avoiding—your worries, your restlessness, the wounds you’ve never named. Yet, if you stay long enough, beneath that discomfort there’s something deeper: a stillness that holds everything, even the noise. And there, in that stillness, sometimes the smallest whisper feels like revelation.

“Be still, and know that I am God.”
– Psalm 46:10

To be still doesn’t mean to withdraw from life; it means to enter it more fully, without trying to control the outcome. The sacred, I’ve learned, doesn’t live in faraway places—it hides in the quiet of daily life, in conversation, in conflict, in beauty, in loss. Every moment can become a threshold if we listen with care.

Perhaps this is what discernment truly means: learning to listen so deeply that the boundary between inner and outer dissolves. To act not from impulse, but from alignment. To move as the world itself moves—in rhythm, in humility, in love.

The next pages will explore how this listening takes shape: how discernment works in daily life, how silence restores coherence, and how attention itself becomes the first act of love.

Read more

Living in Tune with the Larger Whole

To live in alignment is to remember that we belong to something vastly larger than our own will or agenda. Every tradition has tried to name that larger whole: God, the Tao, the cosmos, the sacred order, the web of life. Each name points to the same mystery—that existence itself is not random, but relational. We are woven into patterns far greater than our comprehension, and yet those patterns respond to our choices.

The mystics of every age have sensed this. For the Hebrew psalmist, “the heavens declare the glory of God.” For the Sufi poet Rumi, “the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.” For the physicist Albert Einstein, reality was “a pattern of energy and matter in continuous interaction.” The language differs, but the intuition is shared: that there is a rhythm, a pulse, a coherence—and that wisdom begins when we listen for it. Alignment, then, is less about deciding what to do and more about learning to move with the tempo of the world—the slow seasons, the quickening moments, the invitations to pause, and the quiet cues to act.

Alignment does not mean submission to fate. It means cooperation with what is life-giving. The spiritual traditions teach that the divine will is not a decree imposed from outside, but the deep current moving through all that is. When we act in harmony with that current—whether we name it God, Spirit, or natural law—our lives begin to feel meaningful, and our actions, however small, become creative rather than reactive.

The practice of alignment therefore asks for two forms of listening:

1. Listening outward – attending to the world’s rhythms

2. Listening inward – sensing the quiet compass of the heart

This is the true art of alignment.

Read more

“Are you building a church?” some people asked when they see this 3 meter high window with precious stained glass at the east side of the green house that I am currently building. And maybe, yes I want to build a church, one that didn’t exist before and will become what people make out of it.

Since Easter I am building this greenhouse, or Växthus (Swedish for plant house, or a house for growth) mainly alone on this land where I am currently living. I got funding to build it from a “dream” that I have applied for from The Borderland event that will happen here end of July. The greenhouse will be a permanent structure and hopefully serve to grow greens and fruits for many years. I still don’t know who will actually use it for that purpose as nobody is yet living here officially all year long. But I want to prepare the ground for this to happen, build some infrastructure so some people will find the amenities to stay here for longer. Same goes with the indoor kitchen, toilet and shower that I helped building over the winter.

Read more

The Sacred Web of Life

How Everything Belongs to Everything Else

When I look honestly at the world around me—at the deep patterns in nature, in society, and even in my own heart—I see how much of our confusion comes from believing we are separate. It’s a subtle story, this illusion of independence. We are told to stand on our own, to depend on no one, to be self-sufficient and self-contained. Yet the more closely I pay attention, the more obvious it becomes that nothing in this world has ever stood alone. In the last chapter, we explored stewardship as the art of honouring limits; here we begin to see why those limits matter—because nothing in creation exists in isolation. Interdependence is not a poetic idea or a spiritual metaphor. It is the architecture of reality. It is the way things actually are. The longer I live, and the more closely I look, the more I see that nothing truly stands alone. At the deepest level, everything arises through relationship, endures through relationship, and passes away through relationship. To remember this is not merely to shift a belief—it is to remember the nature of existence itself.

Interdependence is not just a moral principle. It is the very structure of reality. In science, spirituality, and everyday life, everything is connected, everything participates in everything else. Einstein once showed us, with his famous equation E = mc², that matter and energy are not separate things but expressions of the same underlying reality. What appears solid is, on the smallest scale, a shimmering exchange—a dance of particles that exist only in motion, only in relation, only through constant interaction. Modern ecology echoes this truth in the language of systems: a forest thrives not because individual trees succeed, but because roots, fungi, insects, bacteria, sunlight, water, and soil form a network more intricate than anything we could design. In a healthy forest, there is no such thing as an independent organism; there is only cooperation, reciprocity, and shared survival.1

Spiritual traditions have said the same for millennia. Buddhism teaches pratītya-samutpāda—dependent origination—the insight that nothing has independent existence. The Heart Sutra puts it plainly: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” What we call a person, a tree, a mountain, or even a thought is not a discrete thing, but a temporary gathering of conditions. Take away the sun, the soil, the water, the air, and the tree vanishes. Emptiness is not nothingness; it is the endless potential for relationship, for arising and dissolving, for change.

Alan Watts, interpreting these insights for Western ears, wrote that “you are the universe experiencing itself.”

The Christian tradition hints at this in the language of the body of Christ, a living organism in which “if one member suffers, all suffer together.” The Sufi mystics speak of the One appearing in the many, each being a facet of a single radiance. In Hindu thought, creation itself is seen as the Vishnu Lila, the divine play—a dance in which every being is both participant and expression of the sacred. We are not spectators in this world. We are not separate observers. We are woven into the pattern, as threads in a tapestry or as notes in a song. The world is not “out there,” but happens through us, with us, in us.

Indigenous cultures embody this understanding most naturally. Many traditions do not speak of “nature” as something separate from humanity, but as family—rivers as relatives, mountains as elders, animals as teachers. In the Andean world, the principle of ayni describes sacred reciprocity: life flourishes only through giving and receiving, and imbalance is not a moral failure but a relational wound. Sustainability, in this view, is not an environmental strategy but a way of walking in right relationship with all that is. It is only our modern worldview—our industrial, hyper-individualised imagination—that has forgotten this fundamental truth.

In our own lives, this reality shows itself in simple ways. Think of how your mood changes when someone smiles at you, or how your whole body relaxes in the presence of a friend who listens deeply. Our inner world is shaped by the people around us, and their world by us. Every conversation, every meal shared, every act of kindness or neglect ripples outward. No gesture is too small to matter.

This is why so many relational practices feel like homecoming. Circling, Authentic Relating, Nonviolent Communication, the Way of Council, and other dialogical practices do more than improve communication; they restore our memory of belonging. They invite us to show up as we actually are, to be witnessed and to witness, to listen without fixing, and to feel how the space between people becomes its own living field. These practices do not create interdependence—they reveal it. They help us remember what we already are: beings who are shaped by and shaping the lives around us. They are invitations to meet one another, not as roles or ideas, but as living beings—each a unique part of the whole.

Permaculture expresses the same wisdom ecologically. A gardener who follows permaculture principles does not force the land into submission. They observe, listen, collaborate with existing patterns, and allow relationships to guide their actions. Health comes not from domination but from cooperation. A garden thrives when its participants—plants, animals, fungi, water, soil—support one another in a web of mutual nourishment. In this sense, permaculture is not just a method of agriculture but a model for human life.

To live as if interdependence were real—because it is—requires humility. It requires us to move from the fantasy of control to the reality of participation. It means accepting that we are responsible not just for ourselves, but for the world we help shape. It means asking, again and again: “What is needed now? How can I serve the whole, not just myself?”

The sacred web of life is not a metaphor. It is the truth of our existence. The more we awaken to it, the more clearly we see that our well-being is tied to the well-being of everything else—of the earth, the water, the air, the people we love and the people we forget.

Interdependence is the ground of meaning, the source of responsibility, and the invitation to participate—fully, courageously, and with open hands.

Back in Chapter 5, I wrote that participation is not something we add to life, but something we awaken to—that our actions matter because we are already part of the unfolding whole. Here, in the lens of interdependence, that insight widens into a more fundamental truth: participation is not merely ethical; it is ontological. We don’t participate because we “should,” but because we cannot exist in any other way. Everything we do ripples through the web that sustains us. Interdependence is the deeper structure that makes participation possible—and in many ways, inevitable.

In this chapter, we return to this thread to follow it more closely. What if relationship is not something added to life but the ground from which life emerges? What if everything exists only through connection? This insight, expressed in quantum physics, ecology, indigenous wisdom, and contemplative spirituality, reveals interdependence as the underlying unity that makes diversity possible.

Read more

”This is the heart of participation—to see
ourselves not as owners, but as caretakers,
called to a way of life that honors limits,
listens to the land, and remembers our kinship
with all beings.”
– Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, (paragraph 139)

Enough Is Plenty—The Art of Caring for Limits

There is a moment in every life when “more” begins to taste thin. Not because abundance is wrong, but because we begin to notice that the constant pursuit of it draws us away from what we truly hunger for: meaning, connection, relationship, rest, and a sense of belonging within the world rather than standing apart from it. After exploring participation and humility in the previous chapters—the call to offer ourselves to life with sincerity—the next step is to understand the posture that makes participation sustainable. That posture is stewardship.

Stewardship is often misunderstood. We tend to imagine it as managing resources responsibly or taking good care of what we own. But stewardship, in its deepest sense, is not about ownership at all. It is about care. It is the recognition that nothing in our lives truly belongs to us—not the land, not the air, not our talents, not even our time. Everything is given, borrowed, entrusted for a while. Stewardship begins the moment we shift from “How can I use this?” to “How can I tend this? What does this ask of me?”

Every spiritual tradition carries some form of this wisdom. In the Hebrew scriptures, the Sabbath is not merely a day of rest but a structural reminder that creation does not belong to us. The land itself is granted a Sabbath every seven years—time to regenerate, to recover from human ambition. The Jubilee year goes even further, releasing debts and redistributing land so no family can accumulate without limit. These ancient practices challenge the modern myth that accumulation is natural and inevitable. They whisper a different truth: that health comes from rhythm, restraint, and reverence.

Indigenous land ethics echo this profoundly. Many cultures do not speak of land ownership at all; they speak of relationship. The land cares for the people, and the people care for the land. Rights are balanced by reciprocal responsibilities. A river is a relative, not a resource. A forest is a living community, not timber. The Māori concept of kaitiakitanga captures this beautifully: guardianship rooted in kinship. To steward the world is to participate in its flourishing, not to extract from it.

Modern permaculture offers a practical expression of this ancient wisdom. Its core ethic—“earth care, people care, fair share”—reveals an economy built not on domination but on reciprocity. A permaculture gardener does not ask how to maximise yield, but how to create conditions where everything participates in the health of the whole. Fungi, insects, soil, water, wind, and human hands all become collaborators in a shared ecology. This is stewardship: not controlling life, but aligning ourselves with the patterns that allow life to thrive.

And this brings us to a difficult truth: the dominant economic story of our time is built on the opposite assumptions. Endless growth, limitless consumption, expanding markets, rising productivity—these ideas shape not only policy but imagination. We have been trained to see “more” as progress, “bigger” as success, and “enough” as a kind of failure of ambition.

This is where I want to introduce a word for what keeps circling in the preceding few paragraphs: enoughness. Enoughness is not scarcity, and it is not the shrinking of life. It is the capacity—personal and cultural—to recognise sufficiency before “more” becomes compulsion. It is a kind of spiritual maturity, a frugality of the heart and hands: the ability to stop without panic, to share without fear, and to enjoy what is here without treating the world as incomplete until we have taken more from it. Without enoughness, stewardship collapses into management and control. With enoughness, stewardship becomes care—attentive, restrained, and rooted in gratitude, aligned with the boundaries the living world keeps showing us.

Yet the earth, with its clear boundaries and fragile balances, tells another story. Economists like Herman Daly warned decades ago that we had entered an era of “uneconomic growth”—where the pursuit of more now causes more harm than good. Ecologists show that we live beyond the planet’s regenerative capacity. Psychologists note that once basic needs are met, happiness no longer rises with consumption. In fact, it often declines.

This is where the modern degrowth movement—often misunderstood—becomes a surprising ally to spiritual wisdom. Degrowth does not mean deprivation or collapse. It means choosing health over speed, justice over profit, sufficiency over excess. At its heart, degrowth is an exercise in restraint, not as a rejection of abundance but as a recognition that true prosperity lies in right relationship. It proposes that wealthy societies can improve well-being by consuming less, sharing more, working differently, and valuing care, creativity, and community. It echoes Jesus’ teaching that “life does not consist in the abundance of possessions,” the Buddhist Middle Way, the Sufi emphasis on inner richness, and Indigenous teachings that warn against taking more than the land can give.

Stewardship, then, is not a moral burden. It is an invitation to live in alignment with reality. It asks us to imagine prosperity not as accumulation, but as right relationship—with ourselves, with others, and with the earth. It is built from simple gestures: repairing rather than replacing, sharing rather than hoarding, resting rather than rushing, tending what we have rather than craving what we lack. These are the practices of frugality, a way of living that honours limits not as constraints but as invitations to simplicity and depth. Frugality is not about deprivation; it is about recognising that true abundance lies not in what we possess, but in how we relate to what we have.

Stewardship has always been the opposite of domination. Wherever care replaces control, peace becomes possible. This theme is so central that it deserves its own brief meditation later in the book—an exploration of how war violates the fabric of creation and how peace restores it.

And it is a bridge—from participation (Chapter 5) to interdependence (Chapter 8). Participation teaches us that we are part of the great symphony of creation; stewardship teaches us that our instrument has limits and must be tuned with care. Stewardship is the art of honouring boundaries so that the music can go on.

To live this way is not to retreat from life, but to meet it with clarity. Enoughness is not scarcity; it is spaciousness. It is the freedom that comes when desire returns to its natural size. When we stop grasping for the infinite, we begin to taste the beauty of the finite. We discover that enough is not the enemy of abundance—it is its doorway.

To live this way is not to retreat from life, but to meet it with clarity. When desire returns to its natural size, the world becomes vivid again. The finite stops feeling like a prison and starts feeling like a home. And we discover something the growth-myth cannot teach us: that enough is not the enemy of abundance—it is the doorway into it.

Reflection and Practice

Reflection Prompt

Where in your life have you been living as though “more” would finally make things whole? And what becomes possible if you trust that enough—given, received, shared—might be sufficient after all?

Embodied Practice: The Gesture of Enough

Sit or stand comfortably. Place one hand on your heart and the other, open, before you. As you inhale, feel the spaciousness of receiving. As you exhale, gently draw your open hand toward your body as if gathering only what is needed. Pause for a moment, and then let the hand extend outward again, offering something small back to the world—a blessing, an intention, a quiet yes. Repeat this a few times. Let your body feel the rhythm of sufficiency: receiving, taking only what nourishes, and giving from overflow rather than strain.

Closing your eyes, notice how your body feels when you do not grasp, but simply receive and give in balance. This is the embodied memory of stewardship.

The shift from stewardship to interdependence is subtle: once we learn to live with what is enough, we begin to see how everything depends on everything else. Stewardship plants the seed of responsibility; interdependence reveals the whole living garden. And so we turn now to the deeper truth that underlies everything—that nothing stands alone.

Knowing Your Role in the Orchestra of Life

True humility is not low self-esteem or shrinking into the background. It is the clarity of knowing your role in the orchestra of life and accepting it with grace. Humility is what allows a person to play their part fully without needing it to be the central one. And here again the image of the triangle player reveals something essential: they do not envy the violin, nor wish to be the conductor. They do not need to fill the silence with more sound. They wait. They listen. They trust the music enough to enter only when it is theirs to do so.

To live humbly is to recognise that the value of a life is not measured by its volume or visibility. A single act of kindness, a quiet word of encouragement, a moment of courage, a gesture of forgiveness—these may be our triangle notes: brief, understated, yet transformative. Humility lets us offer such moments without needing applause. It teaches us that the worth of what we do lies not in how impressive it seems, but in how faithfully it fits the unfolding of the whole.

Humility also means accepting that others have their roles, their entrances, their crescendos. The violin cannot resent the flute for its melody, nor the timpani for its thunder. In a true orchestra, every instrument exists for the sake of harmony, not competition. Humility frees us from comparison and envy, allowing us to celebrate the brilliance of others without diminishing ourselves. For when each plays their part—no more, no less—the music becomes whole.

This section connects directly back to the previous chapter: Participation is joining the music; humility is knowing how to join it well.

Without humility, participation becomes self-centred performance. Without participation, humility becomes passivity. But together they form the posture of a life aligned with creation—a life that listens, responds, and trusts that the music is wiser than we are.

To live humbly is to accept that your role may sometimes be small, perhaps even momentary—but never unnecessary. The symphony waits for your note.

Standing in Our Rightful Scale

Humility also has a quieter, more ancient meaning: standing in our rightful scale within the vastness of creation. Not too big, not too small. Simply true. When I walk in a forest or sit under a night sky, I am reminded that I am neither the center nor the edge of anything. I am a participant—one voice among billions, one creature among countless others, one moment in a story that began long before me and will continue long after I am gone.

Strangely, this does not make me feel insignificant. It makes me feel held. It frees me from the burden of self-importance and from the equally heavy burden of self-doubt. To know my scale is to know where I fit in the great unfolding—not as master, not as mistake, but as a needed presence in the living whole.

Read more

Chapter 5: PARTICIPATION

Finding Our Place in the Unfolding of Creation

There is a subtle loneliness that runs through modern life. Not the loneliness of being physically alone, but a deeper ache—the feeling of being cut off: from meaning, from belonging, from the pulse of reality itself. Many people live surrounded by noise, information, and choice, yet feel strangely disconnected from the world they’re supposedly part of. We scroll, we consume, we react, but we rarely feel woven into anything larger than our own thoughts. Something in us knows: this is not how human life is meant to feel.

Participation begins where this loneliness ends. It reconnects us to the world not as observers or critics, but as contributors—as beings whose presence matters. It is the shift from drifting through life to joining it. Not in grand gestures, but in small, sincere acts: tending something, listening to someone, shaping our corner of reality with intention. Participation restores to us a sense of belonging, because it reminds us that the world is something we co-create. We are not just in creation; we are participants in creation.

The Antidote to Modern Isolation

Most modern people—even those surrounded by others—feel isolated not because they lack company, but because they lack relationship in the deepest sense. Psychologists speak of “disembodied living”: a state where our attention is scattered, our actions feel disconnected from meaning, and we move through life without sensing our impact.

Participation is the antidote to this disconnection. When we participate—whether in a community, a garden, a conversation, or an act of service—we re-enter the web of reciprocity that makes life feel real. Spiritual traditions have known this for centuries. In Buddhism, interbeing says: “You are in everything, and everything is in you.” In Christianity, Paul describes the Church not as an institution but as a body: each member belongs to all the others. Indigenous cultures speak of “all my relations,” meaning that every being—stone, river, human, wind—participates in the one living circle.

Participation heals isolation because it reveals a truth we can forget: your presence changes the world, and the world changes you. The moment we act from this awareness, however humbly, we cease to be spectators. We become part of the ongoing symphony of life.

Read more

Peace as a Practice of Recollection

War is often spoken of as if it were inevitable, a tragic but permanent feature of human existence. Yet when we look more closely at the world we actually inhabit—its ecological patterns, its spiritual teachings, its deep relational fabric—war appears not as an expression of creation, but as a rupture in it. War is what happens when the illusion of separation becomes so thick that we forget who we are to one another. It is a form of collective amnesia, a turning away from the truth that our lives are woven together.

Bertha von Suttner saw this with uncommon clarity. Her cry, “Universal Peace is not a question of possibility, but of necessity,” was not idealism but realism. Peace is not a decorative virtue; it is the condition for any enduring future. Creation does not guarantee harmony, yet it continually leans toward relationship—toward renewal, reciprocity, and the patterns that make life possible. Forests regenerate through exchange, not conquest; rivers carve their path without hatred; ecosystems endure through limits, balance, and repair. Violence exists in nature, but organized human warfare—violence scaled into systems, strategies, and economies—is an aberration, not a law.

War does not arise from weapons. As von Suttner wrote, it arises from Gesinnungen—from the mindsets that tell us others are less than human, that the earth exists for our taking, that fear justifies domination. War is the political expression of spiritual disalignment. When individuals forget their interdependence, societies eventually forget it too.

But if war is a forgetting, peace is a remembering. Lasting peace is neither passive nor naïve. It is the most courageous form of participation we can offer the world: the commitment to repair what violence has broken, to restore dignity where it has been denied, and to protect the vulnerable not because they are useful, but because they exist. Peace asks us to meet every being as a Thou, not an It. It asks us to practice enoughness in a culture of hunger, to choose restraint where domination feels easier, and to listen more carefully than we speak.

Von Suttner insisted, “Der Friede fällt nicht vom Himmel; wir müssen ihn schaffen.” Peace does not fall from heaven; we must create it.1 Yet peace is not created by force. It arises wherever people live in alignment with the deeper truth of creation—where stewardship replaces possession, humility replaces arrogance, relationship replaces control. Peace is a rhythm, and like all rhythms, it becomes audible only when we quiet ourselves enough to hear it.

If creation is a great unfolding symphony, then peace is not the finale—it is the underlying key in which the music is written. Our task is not to invent peace, but to learn how to participate in it: with reverence, with courage, with the willingness to be changed by one another. When we do, the fragility of peace reveals itself as something else entirely: a form of strength, woven from the fabric of belonging.

To speak of peace honestly also means to acknowledge something uncomfortable: even if we believe deeply in peace, we cannot assume that peace will always be given to us. History teaches us otherwise. Wars arise not only from cruelty, but from fear, breakdown, and collective failure. There may come a moment—for any of us—when war reaches our doorstep, our country, even our own body. We may be called to choose: to fight, to refuse, or to serve in another way.

Peacetime, then, is not only a gift—it is also a training ground. Just as the body learns steadiness through repetition before it is tested, communities and individuals can practice the inner and relational capacities that conflict tries to destroy: clarity under pressure, the ability to pause before reacting, the discipline of truth-telling, the habit of cooperation, the courage to protect without hatred. We can rehearse peace as resilience: learning to regulate fear, to recognise propaganda and scapegoating, to strengthen networks of care, and to cultivate skills that serve life in crisis—mediation, first aid, trauma awareness, and the simple readiness to show up for one another.

Preparation for peace, therefore, does not mean denial of conflict. It means cultivating an inner clarity strong enough to remain human when the world loses its balance. In such moments, slogans and ideologies are useless. What matters is whether we can listen—deeply and honestly—to the higher power of our understanding, and act from conscience rather than panic, hatred, or obedience. Some may choose to fight, believing it necessary to protect life. Others may refuse violence and serve through care, healing, resistance, or witness. Peace is not a single action; it is a way of being that must be renewed again and again, especially when it is hardest.

The question is not simply whether we are for peace, but whether we are prepared to remain awake, responsible, and compassionate when peace is threatened.

Attention as the Foundation of Peace

Peace begins with attention—not the distracted, utilitarian kind, but the kind that empties the self to make space for the other. The French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909–1943) called this “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”2 She meant the willingness to see what is, rather than what we wish to see. This is not passivity; it is the most courageous form of participation. When we attend to another person, a place, or a moment of suffering, we acknowledge that we are not the center of the story. We are participants in something much larger, something that asks us to listen before we act, to receive before we give.

Such attention is an act of humility. It requires us to set aside our own agendas and simply be present. In a world that rewards speed and control, this kind of attention is a radical act. It is how we resist the gravity of force, which turns human beings into objects, and instead restore the other to their fullness. Weil spoke of enracinement, or rootedness, not as nostalgia for the past but as a willingness to inhabit the present with all its demands.

Rootedness is the antidote to the uprootedness that makes war thinkable. A rooted person does not ask, What can I take? but What am I part of? This is the question that underlies all stewardship, all care. When we forget our interdependence, we forget our humanity. War is what happens when the illusion of separation becomes so thick that we no longer recognise one another. But attention—true attention—reminds us that our well-being is bound up with the well-being of all things.

Peace, then, is not a distant ideal. It is the practice of belonging—to one another, to the earth, to the unfolding story of creation. It is the discipline of meeting every being as a Thou, not an It. In a culture of distraction and division, attention is the first act of peacemaking.

Power, Natality, and the Space of Peace

The German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) understood that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of a different kind of power. Not the power to dominate, but the power to act together, to create something new. She called this the “space of appearance,” the place where words and deeds reveal who we are and what we value. When this space is destroyed, when people are reduced to functions or statistics, violence becomes inevitable. But when we act in concert—when we speak, listen, and create together—we weave the fabric of peace.3

At the heart of Arendt’s vision is the idea of natality—the human capacity to begin anew. Every act of forgiveness, every promise kept, every moment of care is a new beginning. This is how we interrupt the cycles of harm and say, We will do things differently. Peace is not a static condition. It must be renewed, again and again, through choices that affirm life over fear, relationship over control. It is the courage to show up, to act, and to trust that the world is still being born. In a world that often feels broken beyond repair, natality is a call to hope—not the naive kind, but the stubborn kind that insists on beginning again, even when the way forward is unclear.

On the Paradox of Divine Completion and Human Participation

There are questions that return to us again and again, especially when we walk through gardens or forests, when we look at the stars, or when we sit quietly with our own thoughts. Is creation already perfect? Does anything in this world need to be changed—or is everything unfolding exactly as it should? And if God, or the Great Architect of the Universe, has designed all things perfectly, what could possibly be left for us to do?

These are not theoretical puzzles. They live close to the bone of human experience. They arise in moments of despair, when the suffering of the world seems unbearable, and also in moments of wonder, when everything suddenly appears luminous and whole.

The first pages of Genesis tell us: “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.” The Qur’an echoes: “You will not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency.” Lao Tzu writes: “The Tao never acts, yet through it all things are done.” At first glance, the message seems clear—creation is complete, harmonious, perfect.

And yet, the evidence of imperfection surrounds us. Forests are burning. Children go hungry. Nations tear themselves apart with pride and fear. Even within us, anxiety hums like a second heartbeat. How can all this pain be part of a perfect plan?

Perhaps perfection is not what we imagine it to be.

Read more

Letting go of enemies, finding our shared ground

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there”
– Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi (1995)

We live in a time of sharp lines and quick judgments. Scroll for a minute and you will find them: the good people and the bad people, the ones who “get it” and the ones who are “the problem.” Our age is not only noisy; it is also deeply divided. Politics, religion, culture, even families—everywhere we turn, blame seems to be the default language.

Sometimes the blame is understandable. There is real harm in the world. Injustice is not an illusion. When forests burn, when communities are displaced, when people are humiliated or ignored, anger is a sane response. To say “don’t blame” must never mean “pretend there is no suffering” or “ignore abuse.”

And yet, something in the way we handle conflict today keeps us stuck. Our collective habit is to look for enemies rather than partners, to ask “Who is at fault?” instead of “What is needed now?” We treat one another as symbols of what we hate, rather than as human beings shaped by stories, fears, and long histories.

This chapter is not an argument against justice. It is an invitation to move beyond blame as our primary lens—so that we can actually do the work justice requires.

Eight Billion Stories, Not Just Two Sides

A simple fact often gets lost in our debates: there are more than eight billion people alive today, and each one carries a different worldview. No single ideology, religion, or theory can contain this much diversity. Yet we keep organising ourselves into camps that pretend the world is neatly divided into “us” and “them.”

Blame thrives on simplification. It reduces complex people to single labels: liberal, conservative, woke, backward, globalist, nationalist, believer, atheist. It tells a story in which our group is rational, compassionate, enlightened, while the other side is irrational, dangerous, or ignorant. This may feel satisfying in the short term. It gives us a clear identity, a sense of moral superiority, even a kind of belonging. But it also blinds us.

The truth is that each person’s view of the world is shaped by many layers: family history, culture, trauma, education, media, class, religion, personality, and the accidents of life. Behind every opinion lies a story. Behind every reaction lies a need.

To live beyond blame is not to deny these differences. It is to remember that, beneath them, we share something more fundamental: our vulnerability, our longing to belong, our need for safety and dignity, our dependence on the same earth.

Many religious and philosophical traditions keep pointing us back to this shared ground. Paul’s letter to the Galatians speaks of a deeper unity that runs underneath ethnic, social, and gender divisions.1 The Qur’an reminds humanity that we have been made

into “peoples and tribes” not to despise one another, but to know one another.2 These are not calls to uniformity; they are calls to recognise that our differences exist inside a larger unity.

Read more

Distraction, anxiety, and the loss of silence

“We expect more from technology and less
from each other.”
– Sherry Turkle, Alone Together

We are living in the noisiest era of human history. Not only are our cities full of sound—cars, planes, voices, construction—but the “noise” now runs much deeper, right into the core of our attention, our nervous systems, and even our sense of self. For many people, true silence has become a rare, almost uncomfortable experience.

It is tempting to treat this as a minor irritation, another background hum of modern life. But there is growing evidence that the constant flow of information, digital media, and distraction is more than a nuisance. It is shaping our minds, bodies, relationships, and spiritual lives in profound and troubling ways. The age of noise is not just about volume. It is about fragmentation, acceleration, and the loss of inner and outer space.

Even during my time at the monastery last summer and now here, in this hermitage surrounded by the quiet of a Swedish nature reserve, I am not immune to the pull of distraction. The same WiFi that connects me to research, friends, and the occasional client work is also a portal to the endless scroll of articles, posts, and videos—each one a siren call away from the silence I came here to cultivate. It is a daily practice to notice when my attention has been hijacked, to pause, and to gently return to the stillness within and without. This tension, between the tools that enable my work and the noise they bring, is not unique to me. It is the paradox of our time: we seek connection and meaning, yet the very tools we use to find them often leave us more fragmented than before.

Distraction: The Shrinking of Attention

If you want to understand the scale of the problem, consider this: the average adult in Europe or North America now spends more than seven hours a day in front of a screen—often switching between multiple devices, tabs, and apps.1 For teenagers, the number is even higher, prompting governments to intervene: Australia has banned social media for adolescents, and the European Union is now debating similar restrictions, recognising the cost of living in a constant stream of notifications, messages, and updates.

The result is that our attention has become fragmented. We are, in the words of Nicholas Carr, “losing our capacity for contemplation and concentration.”2 In The Shallows, Carr argues that our brains are physically rewired by the internet. We become skilled at skimming, scanning, and jumping between stimuli, but find it increasingly hard to sit with a long thought, a difficult question, or even an uninterrupted conversation. The very capacity to dwell—on a text, a problem, a prayer, a person—is eroded.

Multitasking, once praised as a modern virtue, has been shown to be a myth. Studies at Stanford University found that heavy media multitaskers perform worse on tests of attention, memory, and task-switching than those who focus on one thing at a time.3 Each time we switch tasks, the brain pays a switching cost. Every notification, every ping, every alert steals a small piece of our presence.

This is not only about productivity or efficiency. It is about our ability to listen: to each other, to ourselves, to the subtle movements of life around us. A fragmented attention cannot rest. And without rest, it becomes very hard to hear anything that does not shout.

Recent research from MIT underscores the stakes. A study titled Your Brain on ChatGPT found that relying on AI assistants for tasks like writing creates what researchers call “cognitive debt”—a weakening of our ability to think independently, remember deeply, or generate original ideas.4 The tools designed to save us time may, in the end, cost us our capacity to engage with the world at all.

Read more

Chapter 1: THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL

The Discomfort of Civilisation

Every age has its prophets of unease. Long before the era of smartphones and social media, Sigmund Freud sensed that something in the human pursuit of progress was quietly misaligned. In his 1930 essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilisation and Its Discontents), he observed that the very civilisation meant to protect and fulfill us had also become the source of our deepest anxiety.

“The intention that man should be ‘happy’ is
not included in the plan of creation.”
– Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur
(1930), Chapter II

Freud believed that the pleasure principle—our instinctive drive toward satisfaction—inevitably collides with the constraints of social life. The more we master nature, the more we are mastered by our own restlessness. Even our tools of comfort become instruments of dependence. He saw that the project of endless gratification could never succeed because the structure of reality itself resists such perfection.

Read more

The Many Beginnings: What Our Ancestors Believed

Listening Again: Why This Book Now

On a hot summer’s day, I knelt in the soil, digging my hand deep into the earth to grasp the weeds at their roots. The sun blazed overhead, and I had already spent more than an hour preparing the ground for new plantings. My back ached, pleading for rest. I sat down on the low concrete border that framed the garden bed. Nearly all the beds in this monastic garden are edged with small concrete enclosures, criss-crossed by paved paths from whose cracks herbs and wild plants grow untamed.

For several months, I have been living in this Cistercian monastery, exploring whether this might be a place I could truly belong. About half a year ago, I felt a sudden, insistent pull to enter monastic life—a thought that had surfaced repeatedly over the years. I had also dreamed of founding a place of my own, where people might live and work together in a community modeled after monastic principles. But such a vision requires companions who share this longing.

As I rested on the little stone wall, I watched children playing outside the iron-wrought garden fence. The monastery is home to a private Catholic school that has existed for over a century. Younger children ran across the lawn playing tag, while older students clustered in groups, heads bowed together over their mobile phones. These children, most from respectable, middle-class families, wore clothes that subtly indicated their background—likely not second-hand, as I was used to seeing back in Copenhagen.

Many of the elderly monks who now live in the monastery once attended this very school. Some later returned as teachers, educators in the boarding school, or even as rectors. Until about 20 to 25 years ago, it was not uncommon for young men to join the monastery after graduating. Some remained, others left to pursue careers and start families. But since the school began operating largely independently of the monastery—and most of its faculty now come from secular life—the students rarely encounter spiritual role models who might inspire them to consider monastic life. They catch only occasional glimpses of the monks, perhaps through the garden fence, or during the monthly obligatory Mass, or in the confessions with one of the priests.

The Cistercians are known for having introduced various innovations throughout Europe since the Middle Ages—whether in democratic governance, architecture, or agriculture. Naturally, much has changed over the centuries. In the last 50 years alone, many monasteries have lost significant numbers of monks due to aging, and new vocations are rare. This is partly due to the wider crisis within the Catholic Church, including the grievous consequences of clerical abuse. But societal shifts also play a role: many of the values once cultivated in monasteries—such as simplicity, discipline, and communal labor—have faded from public consciousness.

This monastery, too, has grown into a large operation, one that the roughly dozen remaining monks can no longer manage on their own. Much of the work—from finances and guest accommodations to building maintenance and cleaning—is now done by staff or hired professionals. The garden is still tended by the oldest monk, now over 90, with help from a volunteer nearly as old. Most of the monastery’s food is purchased, and the surrounding meadows and farmland are leased out.

It saddens me to see many of the old values—such as self-sufficiency and manual labor—slipping away. The “dignity of physical work”1 was once a cornerstone of monastic life and, arguably, a key to its enduring legacy. I hesitate to judge my fellow residents harshly, especially given their age, but it’s clear that few here still engage in physical labor. And if the elders no longer model this, what example do they set for the younger generation?

The school here offers various programs—football and sailing among them—but I wonder how much spiritual or ethical guidance is imparted, even within a Catholic framework. I can’t say for sure, as my insight into the school’s inner workings is limited.

What I miss most is a visible and meaningful connection between the monastery and the school—something as simple and profound as working side-by-side in the garden. What better way to teach young people reverence for God’s creation than by inviting them to witness the slow miracle of ripening vegetables, the sweetness of berries or apples picked straight from the tree, and the ever-renewing surprise of weeds reclaiming the earth the moment we turn away?

Around the time I began writing this book, I noticed that this unease was not mine alone. Many voices—scientific, indigenous, and spiritual—were beginning to speak in similar terms. Reading Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’2 was part of that moment: not because of its theology, but because it articulated, in public language, a growing awareness that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of relationship, limits, and attention.

This made me reflect on what it takes for people—not only the young—to once again perceive the beauty of creation, and to be inspired to engage with it, to participate rather than merely consume. How can we transform creation into co-creation, together with the Creator—surely someone must be responsible for all this? Perhaps it is us—not as owners, but as stewards.

Perhaps the answer lies not only in receiving the gift of creation, but in learning how to respond to it. Perhaps it begins with wonder. With the courage to see ourselves again—not as owners or outsiders—but as participants in something greater than us all.

How It All Started

The Power of Creation Stories

Read more