I’ve committed to myself now that I won’t open my phone for at least 30 minutes after I wake up. Some days, I make it. Some days, I open threads just to see if there’s a new headline of something horrible that I need to know about. This is what it is like to be in the free fall of multiple collapsing systems. This is what it is like to be living through the age of consequence. You’re not alone.

I remember a most fateful day in early November of 2016. The unthinkable had become reality. The tiny book Tyranny had become my guidebook. I would flip through the pages, reading the signs and seeing them all around me. Collapse felt imminent. My mentor in futures studies had written to all of us in our network the simple sentence: The American experiment in democracy is over. And he was right. But what we must remember is that this is a marathon, not a sprint. Collapse takes her sweet time.

What is mean is that collapse doesn’t happen in a moment. It’s not like the movies. One and done. It happens over decades, maybe even centuries. We’re used to studying history books where we get the cliff notes of the centuries long demise of an empire and we imagine that everyone knew what was happening, how could they not, it was so obvious. Collapse is most often not obvious. It is slow and steady, with punctuated flash points like a 100 ft tsunami in Nepal or a sustained invasion of federal forces in Minneapolis. But it is also subtle, and pernicious like food prices rising steadily at the grocery store, or the fifth friend who tells you with a whisper of fear that their job has been replaced by AI, or the rising cancer rates in children, or the steady, cinching squeeze of authoritarianism.

To be living through a time of planetary collapse means our courageous love of Life matters that much more. It means that we who believe in peace, we who believe in a loving, animate, emerald earth, we who love dolphins, and whales, and gorillas and redwood forests, we who prefer to eat fresh food and want to know our farmers, we who sit in silent prayer with the wind. Us. We have to ground in deeper. We have to become so solid, so rooted, so clear that we can move with swift, calm and decisive leadership in the face of unthinkable happenings.

There is a school headmaster, Rajendra Dawadi, who is gaining notoriety for his leadership in the Nepali disaster. Because he was rooted, clear, calm and response-able to what was actually happening, an unthinkable event, he led 900 children to safety. The entire 3-story school they were in was washed away by a surprise tsunami traveling at 75 miles per hour. This all happened as the school day was beginning and it happened in minutes. He did not hesitate and not a single child was lost. That is the kind of rooted leadership that doesn’t deteriorate in panic and fear, in the face of the unthinkable. That is the kind of rooted leadership that sees with clear eyes what is actually happening and does exactly what needs to be done to protect innocence. That is the kind of leadership we are all capable of in the Great Turning. That is why you are here right now. You are ready for that kind of leadership.

There are more of us who want peace than war. There are more of us who love the Earth than want to destroy her. There are more of us who want a beautiful beloved future for all than want to hoard and dominate. We are the majority. It’s now time we find each other and see eye to heart. We are so much more powerful than we realize and we are unstoppable because we move like mycelia. We are subterranean because we aren’t driven by fame or greed. We’re driven by love of sunsets and fresh berries. That is our superpower. Love of Life is our superpower. That is why I have faith in our futures.

As collapse demands that we become more unstable, we double down on our stability. As collapse invites us to become depressed and anxious, we double down on our simple joys and daily practices of peacefulness. As collapse pushes us to cave into dehumanizing technologies, we get outside and touch the earth and connect with the more than human world. We forge bonds with the tree outside our house, we rewild our lawn with native species, we find a local farm and buy their produce, we bring our grandparents home to live with us, we help our neighbor fix their broken gate, we teach our kids kindness and curiosity, we protect innocence and love each other every chance we get. We double down on the beloved futures we can see on the other side of collapse. This is how we get through. By being the people who already live on the other side in the more beloved futures that are possible.

I have made an inner commitment to bring my basket of love and wisdom to the world. As an offering of my life to Life. Sharing a variety of ways, spaces, writings, gatherings and prayers to our beloved, life-affirming futures. The first of these spaces is called Chrysalis. It is a leadership dojo of sacred study for those ready to co-learn and practice this kind of grounded, response-able leadership and take small, decisive steps towards anchoring the beloved futures here and now. If you feel the call, we begin September 16^th and meet weekly online on Wednesdays. If this is not yet the time for you, you can start with my book Our Beloved Futures, follow here on Substack or Instagram and join my mailing list so you know when the next classes and gatherings are beginning. I’m so excited to know you. You came here with a sacred mission, mine is to help you remember what it is. I already love you unconditionally. You are safe to be here. Take a deep breath and let your shoulders down. We are legion. We are assembling. Now is the time. I hope to see you in circle soon.

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We have a deeply held cultural story, a myth, that collapse is akin to failure. That when things fall apart it’s because we did something wrong, we didn’t try hard enough, we gave up too soon. What if collapse is the best thing we could do? What if a swift death, aided by demolition grade explosives, is the most productive, exciting, creative, hopeful act for our species right now? When you take off the glasses shaded by fear of change. When you actually see the world as it is, not as you wish it to be, but as it actually is for all of the humans, more than humans and the Earth herself, it becomes crystal clear that right now, collapse is our best friend. She is our beloved ally. For those of us who love our emerald Earth and who find meaning in relationships with trees, and birds, and humans and Life, collapse is the answer to our prayers. She is where the possibility of new worlds of liberation and joy live. She is our muse.

What would it look like to embrace collapse and dance with her as she dissolves and destroys all the systems, mindsets and worldviews that have made extraction, domination and violence as normal as breathing?

What would it look like to create pockets of peace and beauty, microcosms of the more beloved futures in the cracks between modernity’s concrete?

This is the work of our moment. This is the sacred assignment you have been given. It can be joyful. It can be beautiful. It can be true.

Joanna Macy has said that “We can trust our grief.” When I can trust my grief and allow it to move through me like water, my grief becomes the wayfinding mechanism by which I remember what it is that I truly love, what it is that I want to protect and bring with me from this world into the next one that is emerging from the ashes of collapse. We are taught to fear things falling apart, that human beings are naturally selfish and violent and that therefore falling apart means more selfishness and violence. This is just a story. Other stories are true. And we are writing the future into being together.

When I speak about collapse as our opportunity, as our ally, people often ask: how can that be true when it’s going to be so violent and disruptive. Reality check: our world today is already incredibly violent and disruptive. Collapse doesn’t come evenly or on time. Today, billions of people suffer in conditions of abject poverty, with an estimated 50 million people living in near or actual conditions of slavery. 1 in 4 of those are children. The world as we know it is already in collapse. We in the ‘modern’ world have just off loaded our experience of collapse by tightening our borders and living in denial. And our denial is bought at the cost of our Earth and all her more-than-human beings. The extraction and violence required to uphold this lie is our collective suicide. This is not freedom. This is false peace and we know it. The courage to face this truth asks us to accept that we must give up some of the ‘luxuries’ we have come to believe are necessary for happiness.

Spoiler alert, those luxuries don’t actually bring happiness. You know what does bring happiness? Relationships with others who love you and support you. Connection to an animate Earth that reminds you of abundance and joy. Experiences of beauty and the sublime that are free and available like a sunset. All the things that cannot be bought and sold are the things that actually make a life joyful, peaceful and profoundly satisfying. It is time to collectively remove the blinders from our modern eyes so we can see that the Billionaire, the Trillionaire, the nation state, the modern day Emperor, actually has no clothes.

You have come here to Earth at this time to witness the most magnificent florescence of the human spirit. What is to come is more beautiful than anything we can even imagine. The stories of dystopian collapse are designed to keep us fearful and frozen. You are more than that. You are nature herself, a creatrix of cosmic proportions with a biological body that is made of Earth-stuff and a soul that is connected to star-stuff. You are a magical miracle walking around dreaming in realities whether or not you realize it.

This is the time for radical collaborations and wild synchronicities. When we realize these truths together and combine forces with our innate genius and joy in the drivers seat. This is why I have created Chrysalis. The first of many offerings to the world in this time. Born from decades of gathering wisdoms of the mind, heart and gut into a sacred basket that I offer to you with all the humility of an invitation - bring your sacred basket and let’s share our resource.

Chrysalis is a place where we help each other to ground during chaos and create in the midst of collapse. I am opening the space of Chrysalis to hold us in the messiness of the moment. To allow us to experience the grief of loss and true love. This is space where we can follow the threads of our own soul’s unique genius and remember why we are here and what we can most joyfully offer to the web of Life.

All of you is welcome. All of you is needed. You are here because you matter and what you hold within your unique lifeprint cannot be replicated by anyone else on Earth. That is the truth of our abundance. There are only 20 spaces available for this 13-week journey. We gather online and will be joined by incredible guest teachers – Alnoor Ladha, Rutendo Ngara and Zach Bush, MD. If you feel this in your bones, you know that it’s your time. You are ready. Join us.

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What is it to be a futurist?

I don’t have any actual stats but I’m pretty sure that I am one of a handful of PhD futurists in the whole world. That’s cool. I forget that all the time. While many people call themselves a futurist, very few have actually studied anything formal related to the field of futures studies. Usually someone has an area of expertise and interesting ideas about the future that they share. Great. Keep going. We need positive, life-affirming ideas about the futures that turn into positive, life-affirming ideas, businesses, books, projects, art, movies. Lots of them. The beautiful reality is that everyone is, by nature of being human, capable of futures thinking. And I believe our successful passage through the Great Turning, through this Age of Consequence, depends on it.

To be a futurist means to think in long arcs of history and long arcs of the futures. It means to know that the future is not singular, it is always futures.

History is a slice of time and culture, a log of certain happenings, just a grain of sand on an endless beach of experiences that occurred, a story told by someone who has a particular perspective.

Just like history, the futures are also stories that are told by people and represent particular worldviews, belief systems, values, dreams.

The futures do not exist.

Images of the futures do.

Which means we get to remember and practice the sacred art of telling good stories. When we lean into our nature as futures thinkers we get to remember that we are natural myth-makers. I’ve heard it said that we are in mythless times, where we don’t have the strong anchor of positive communal myths to guide our behavior and culture.

We can consider things like Santa Claus and rags to riches as unconsciously held myths. But they are not positive or life-affirming. These myths don’t guide us towards cultures of care.

Thinking like a futurist, you will want to spend time uncovering the deeply held social stories that unconsciously become the foundation of all the systems we are enmeshed in. All the toxic systems we want to dismantle and dissolve are held together by unconscious social stories. Things like rags-to-riches or the ‘nuclear family’.

A futurist unsettles unconscious myth and questions the origin story of things.

Public School for example. Why do public schools look like factories? Because they were built by factory owners who wanted to train future workers. The first American state-funded public schools came into being in the mid-1800’s enmeshed in the Industrial Revolution. Philosophers of the time including Joseph Steiner (Waldorf Schools), Maria Montessori (Montessori Schools) and John Dewey (the progressive school movement) all foretold what was coming. They understood the dangerous DNA of an education system that views children as machines and schools as places to train obedience to authority. They warned that this would lead to the death of critical thinking and, with it, our democracy. Interesting. That is futures thinking.

"Democracy requires education that fosters courage, not conformity."

~ John Dewey

As a futurist today, I look at that history, the origin story of public schools, the DNA that they can never fully shed in their current form. I look at the physical infrastructure of the school, the concrete and steel that are durable and will be difficult to dismantle or change without significant investment and political will. I think about the trends and the emerging new technologies, social and cultural innovations that are affecting the way we think about and enact the process of ‘education.’ And then I think about the world I actually want to live in and the world I want to leave my children and their children. This is the most important part.

Who are you?
What do you actually, deeply care about?
What is the beautiful, beloved future of your dreams?

We have been so indoctrinated into cultures of extraction and domination that many of us don’t even know how to dream like the Earth anymore. This inquiry is where you pause and spend time unlearning the ways of capital and empire. You might spend years here. But we can’t build beloved futures without diving deep, way down deep into the unlearning of modernity. Otherwise we will simply reproduce the same patterns of violence, suffering and decimation that have characterized the most recent era of humanity. We must remember how to inhabit Earth-mind so we can think like a tree, dream like water, build like soil and care deeply about the wisdom and well-being of our feathered, furred, scaled and winged kin.

When I think of something like the futures of public education in America, I imagine a school in my community being turned into a community center of multi-generational learning.

Every community in America has a school in it. Imagine if they became our central gathering places. These are buildings and spaces that can be repurposed to support growing food, sharing knowledge, building culture and holding celebrations. Places where kupuna* (elders) in the area can go to teach and share their lived wisdom. Where families can learn together in multi-generational settings. Where community governance discussions take place. Where visiting scholars and wisdom keepers drop in to offer their lived expertise. Where art and music and other creative pursuits are shared for free. Without hierarchical, dominator systems in place. Where learning flows like the tides, in and out in a natural rhythm that speaks to each person’s divine and unique passions and gifts.

Holding that future vision of a beloved community learning center, I then think about the bridge between here and there. Between now and this future that I can taste. What will it take to move towards that vision? And then I think about a one degree shift, a small thing that can happen now that starts to dismantle the current situation and make space for the new one. I think about who and how to activate others with the vision.

This is multi-generational work. Culture moves slowly. And collapse is our ally.

When things fall apart we are forced to imagine what will fill the vacuum left in their wake. What an opportunity. Deeply entrenched systems are incredibly hard to change. Trust me, I’ve been trying for many years. Collapse turns concrete to ash that can become good compost. We need to fall apart sometimes.

The pull of the futures that we can imagine has to be strong enough to keep us focused on the seed that will someday become the tree, trusting that its DNA holds the essential nature of the forest we can see in our dreams. Nature does this. We can do this.

There are so many frameworks, principles, methodologies I can and will share here and in other areas of my work. But what I want you to know right now is that your dreams matter. Your imagination is magic. Your healing and reconnection with Earth, it really matters.

We need enough people who remember their roots and have the courage to lead through the transition. This is the way through to our beloved futures.

You are way more powerful than you realize. We all are. And together we are an unstoppable force. It’s only a matter of time. Let today be a good day to begin. I see you.

Lexicon

Kupuna: In Hawaiian culture, kupuna refers to elders and ancestors who are honored as wisdom keepers, teachers, and guides. More than an age or title, kupuna embody the living transmission of knowledge, values, and ancestral memory, helping steward the wellbeing of both present and future generations.

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~ Bill Plotkin

Last year I published my first book, Our Beloved Futures. This book arrived through me as a transmission from the future ancestors who know our past as peaceful beings of Earth.

I can remember the times when we lived in peace.

These memories flourish in my dreams and my waking communion with Earth. Peace on earth is possible.

This kind of peace is not a peace without suffering.

The experience of being alive on Earth and in earthling form, is enriched by what we call suffering. The beauty of loving so much that it rips you apart when that love is lost or dies. The suffering of feeling shame or regret when you stray from the true nature of your peaceful, kind soul. The fear that comes when you are actually threatened by an outside force and must flee or defend. These are the natural forms of suffering for humans.

The unnatural forms of suffering are those that are created by the delusion of mind viruses like Wetiko. Mind viruses that infect our thinking and heart with belief in the need for power-over, the insatiable desire for more, the cancerous indulgence of envy and fear-filled domination.

These patterns are a recent introduction to our species. They come at the time of the Kali Yuga but they are not our enduring nature. They are but a blip on a very long cycle of soul evolution.

At our most natural state, we remember that we are the sky and the air and the ocean and the fox and the bird and the tree and the wind and the river. We are that. We are but one shining drop of precious water on the vast and interdependent web of Life. We are at once that important and that humble. Our resonance is our magic.

The book and her words came through me as an oracular vessel. The words came through to arrive on Earth and be absorbed by ready minds and hearts in this time of the great dissolving. This poetry, this myth is here to support you as you seek to remember your deep roots in the Earth. The radical roots that will hold you anchored as everything around you falls apart.

And fall apart it will because it must. Mourn what you need to and release it all with Grace. What lives on the other side of this undoing is beauty beyond our wildest imaginings. You are a bastion of the peace times that are both already here and expanding rapidly to fill the spaces of violence with song once again. You are not alone. Hold to that truth and the truth of you as a being capable of creating worlds.

We can each begin with the creation of love and joy in our own body. Drinking with reverence water that you have cleaned and blessed. Eating food that was grown in soils you know. Moving your body with the rhythms and speed of the wild world around you. Listening to the more than humans and remembering their languages. All these free and simple practices renew and replenish the cellular memory of what it is to be Human, Earthling, child of the Earth. Our souls know. Cultivate that wholesome feeling and spread that love and joy to the communal body of your family, to your wider community and in the quantum realms spread this to the planet and beyond.

I wake up many days feeling the density of being alive in the Great Turning. I am weighted down and shadowed by my love for the Earth and all her beauty, my understanding of the violence enacted by cultures of domination, my self-accountability and knowing that I too am complicit in daily micro-violences despite an immense love for Life. These are heavy awarenesses to carry. I know you feel this too. But we do not carry them alone. The others are everywhere. And every day we are finding each other again.

My ask is simple. Please share these teachings with all whom may benefit. Become entangled with the transmissions of Our Beloved Futures, the book, the podcast, the spaces and conversations held. Bring your presence and wholeness to our circles.

The prayer of this book is in service to Life. My prayer is in service to us. We are human and we come in peace. I know this. You know this. Our beloved temple Earth knows this, and she is inviting us back into relationship with her.

It will feel like collapse. And we must protect innocence from the increasing violence wherever we can. In this cacophony, your sacred purpose is to remember your mythopoetic dharma. The one that traveled with your soul into this embodiment. The one that is naturally and joyfully in service to the web of Life.

I see you.
I’m here to help.
We’ve got this.

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Branches

I sat on the edge
Of the branch of my life
And marveled at the moss of becoming
A bird’s nest tangled in my hair
Left me wondering about the miracle of eggs
And the alchemy of chickens

I am a bloom of someone’s memory
A story for another time
An ancient, wise forgetting
That remembered was confused
Where can we leap when the cliffs have all been mined
And the waterways sucked dry
Off into the ravine I might find my lost child
Or I might choose the end of my days
That risk is what living feels like

I sat on the edge of the branch of my life
And realized I could walk this razor, unaware, and it would pass by anyways
Or I could open my eyes and grieve the lost forest around meIt would hurt
But it would be real.

Either way when I get to the end of the branch
It’s thin
And wobbly
And I’m simply bound to fall off at some point
Simply bound
To fall like a leaf
Becoming compost
Becoming useful

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What if we're not waiting for the new world to arrive?

What if we're already living in the fragile, miraculous moment between worlds?

In this chapter conversation, Aubrey is joined once again by her dear friend Gabriela to explore Mariposa – the closing chapter of Part I of the Our Beloved Futures book. Together, they reflect on the butterfly as a living metaphor for our collective moment: emerging from the chrysalis with wings still wet, suspended between what is ending and what has not yet fully begun.

Rather than rushing toward certainty, this conversation invites us to honor the threshold itself. The awkwardness. The paradox. The beauty of becoming. Aubrey shares why this in-between space is not a mistake to escape, but sacred territory where new forms of humanity are slowly learning to breathe.

As the conversation unfolds, they explore the energy body as a bridge through uncertainty, the invitation to “become immense” in a time of global crisis, and why our greatest capacity may not be individual brilliance, but communal wisdom.

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What We Explore in this Episode

This conversation weaves together mythology, ecology, spirituality, psychology, and systems thinking to ask what it truly means to become human during an age of transformation.

Together, Aubrey and Gabriela explore why the butterfly’s struggle cannot be rushed, how collapse and emergence coexist, the role of the subtle energy body in navigating change, and why the future will be imagined, and built, not by isolated heroes, but by communities learning to listen together.

Key Takeaways

• The Mariposa moment – Humanity is emerging from the chrysalis, but our wings are still wet. Transformation asks for patience, not premature certainty.

• The sacred threshold – We are living between worlds, where the old is dissolving and the new has not yet fully taken form.

• Becoming immense – Rather than shrinking in the face of complexity, this moment asks us to expand our capacity for grief, love, responsibility, and courage.

• The energy body as bridge – Ancient understandings of our energetic anatomy offer practical ways to remain grounded and relational during uncertainty.

• We come in peace – Beneath generations of fear and conditioning lives our deepest nature: one rooted in relationship, belonging, and care.

• Prophecy by community – The future will not emerge through isolated individuals, but through collective resonance, shared imagination, and communities learning to discern together.

This episode is an invitation to trust the slow intelligence of transformation. To recognize that not knowing is part of becoming. To remember that the butterfly does not rush the drying of its wings. And perhaps, neither should we.

With Love and Gratitude,
Aubrey Morgan Yee

FOLLOW AUBREY’S WORK

Website: www.ourbelovedfutures.com
Instagram: @aubrey.morgan.yee
Book: Our Beloved Futures

This essay explores the enduring legacy of slavery and white supremacy and includes descriptions of racial violence and death. May you read slowly, breathe deeply, and care for your heart as these stories ask to be witnessed.

The diagrams of the wooden slave ships that crossed the Atlantic show small human figures, stacked next to each other with no space in between. Like lifeless stick figures, lying straight, no possibility to sit up, stretch, move. These ships were designed to hold just under 500 people at max capacity. In reality, these ships were often stuffed with almost 750 suffering humans. Men, women and children stolen from their homes, beaten and tortured, enduring months at sea with no ability to move. Chained and shackled, swimming in their own feces with people dying around them.

Millions of bodies and bones line the sea floor of the Atlantic. This is our history as Americans. This is what we participated in. This is what we hide behind the façade of ‘freedom.’ This.

I think also about those who upheld these horrific systems of death and domination. The ones who stood on the deck. Making sure that no one broke free. Sleeping in beds. Eating food and drinking water while others lay below in a living hell. I sit with the soullessness that is required to perpetuate that much suffering.

Bayo Akomolafe argues that the slave ship never disappeared. Instead, it metastasized and spread, like a cancer, once it reached our shores. It changed shape and became trickster. I reluctantly know he is right.

“Those cargo vessels took to the western hemisphere the materials with which the megalithic priestly projects of ‘the Individual’ were built. With which the program of modern ascent was reinforced. The slave ship never disappeared. They are not relics of a regrettable past, but active constituents in today’s cross-world tensions and modes of becoming. Instead of vanishing into the insignificance of a footnote, the slave ship — upon reaching the shore — sporulated... purging its fungal guts and spilling its engorged hull on land.”

~ Bayo Akomolafe

The slave ship never left, it just became the compost for terror capitalism and the amplification of empire.

This week I have been obsessively consuming all media about an 18-year-old African American boy, Nolan Wells, a beloved son and star football player who died on the 4th of July under very suspicious circumstances.

Nolan was celebrating America’s 250th anniversary on Horn Island 10 miles off the coast of Mississippi with his friends. He never came home after the boat full of his white friends who took him out there left him on the island with no phone, no shirt, no water, no shoes. He was found Monday morning, dead, floating in the ocean. There is no clear understanding yet of how he died. I can feel the screams of his mother in my bones.

The speculation about what actually happened to Nolan ranges from a straightforward ‘drowning while drunk’ to elaborate conspiracy theories about the KKK and satanic sacrifice rituals. I’m sure the truth is something more complicated and in between. There are far too many strange details to be otherwise.

But what has captured my attention the most is the torrent of ‘me-too’ stories that have flooded my socials as news of Nolan’s death circulates. Black Americans recounting the fear, horror and abuse suffered at the hands of white ‘friends’ who betrayed them. The stories are mounting and they are horrific.

A child who was almost drowned by her white ‘friend’ who dropped her in the middle of a lake. A young woman who was dared to jump off a boat, then left to swim back to shore on her own only to hear her friends exclaim, “Wow, we didn’t think you could swim.” A child left outside in the cold waiting for his parents to pick him up after his mom asked another family if he could wait at their house after school. A black woman who died at an adult sleepover as a result of blunt force injuries which were blamed on Xanax and alcohol. She was also the only token black person in the situation.

The stories just keep coming. Tales of dismissal and cruelty that was sometimes just miserable and sometimes fatal. There seems to be no end to the personal narratives of life-threatening racism and betrayal. They leave me feeling sick to my stomach. What is wrong with us?

What is clear from all those who are sharing is the terrible reality that it is not safe to be the ‘token’ black person/person of color in a sea of white ‘friends’. That friendship in America is itself deeply perfomative, enmeshed with our toxic racist histories of slavery and genocide and therefore cannot be fully trusted.

The slave ship never left us. Black bodies are still treated like stackable commodities. Useful when it’s convenient.

Disposable and discarded for any fickle reason at the whim of whiteness. As my awareness increases of this shared experience among people of color, my disgust and sorrow deepens. What is wrong with us?

And Nolan’s case is not the only one. Last week a young black man was found dead at an EDM concert in Michigan. The authorities cremated his body without asking his family first even though they suspected foul play. Another young black boy in Mississippi was found dismembered in the woods near his house. These stories add up. They are not isolated incidents. The slave ship has never left us. We must pay attention. Those of us with white skin must speak up and stand in solidarity.

250 years is both a long time and also a short burst in the production of culture. The culture of white supremacy moved to the subterranean realms but it did not go away by any means. And it seems to be finding its way back to the top soil. This is very distressing. It is an apocalyptic truth of our moment that we have to see with the clarity of courage.

I had the opportunity to visit the lynching museum in Montgomery, Alabama a few years ago. In that museum and the nearby Legacy museum I saw photos of lynchings all the way up to the 1930’s where thousands of people came, brought their whole family, young and old, set up barbecues and settled in to watch humans be murdered in public.

The plaques on these photos told me that often people would bid for dismembered body parts as a souvenir. My parents were born in 1936 and 1939 respectively. This sickness still lives in our culture. This is not ancient history. We are just a generation removed from the public violence of sanctioned lynching. We have to face the density of this truth if we want to purge it from our futures.

Where does the shape of racial violence live in my cells? No one is immune. How have my tissues been infected by the putrid horror of the slave ship? What is my role as an advocate for otherwise and else-ways? These questions unsettle me in the ways that they should unsettle all of us.

As I follow the unfolding of Nolan Wells’ tragic case, I pray for his family that they may find a shred of peace in a sense of some sort of justice and closure. I pray for the soul of our country as we navigate the unraveling of our myriad delusions. I place in the center of my altar the hopes that we are awakening from this madness and collectively ending the complicity of convenient silence. The slave ship must be dismantled and burned on the fire of our collective liberation. Only then will we truly know the taste of freedom.

~Our Beloved Futures, p. 50

The original meaning of the word collapse* is “a falling in or together.” This comes from 1792, the year the French revolution began.

As within, so without. The paradox of collapse is that it is both undoing and becoming. Being unwoven so we can be rewoven more whole and wholesome.

Collapse is an awakening to the ways in which we are falling together as the unnecessary and harmful aspects of ourselves and our culture fall apart around us.

What if I told you that you already have all the wisdom you need within you to be a maker of new worlds.

Would you believe me?

The human being is a most profound technology. More profound and powerful than any other technology made by the human. By leaps and bounds.

We give away our power to shiny objects (which we created) because the social technologies of capitalism and empire (which we also created by the way) are so powerful in their stories of worth, belonging and purpose. But we wrote these stories and we can write new ones.

What collapse is asking of us is the ability to remember what it is like to thrive, not just survive.

When you begin to design your life along the lines of actual joy, you’ll see that collapse is the invitation to our thriving. Collapse is the invitation to let go of all the old unwell patterns, systems and relationships you have been clinging to out of sheer habit and fear of change. Reality check: they’re dissolving anyway. You’ll have to let go sooner or later. Why not choose sooner?

When you choose sooner, you make more room for Joy.

Joy is sunshine. Joy is hugging and hand holding. Joy is swimming in warm clear waters. Joy is witnessing wildness. Joy is eating delicious healthy food and drinking clean, living water. Joy is simple. Joy is profound. Joy eludes capital. It cannot be bought and sold. A life designed for joy eludes commodification in its radical freedom.

Begin to design joy back into your life and you become increasingly invisible to empire. You make empire increasingly irrelevant. This is revolution.

Begin to design joy back into your life and you naturally find the others who are also prioritizing their joy. The amplification effect of these webs weaving themselves together is incredible. It is magic. Trust me.

I see people around me everyday living deep within the doubts that were placed in their minds by other people who were damaged and suffering. Parents, teachers, leaders, friends who were themselves unhealed. Shrug off these old voices of fear and doubt. They are not true. They are not yours. They are implants that you allowed in when you didn’t know any better.

Learn to hear their tone and tenor and recognize that they are not your voice. They are a foreign installation.

When you identify that imported speaker, the one who lodged in your imagination from past experience, give them a funny name and find out what they need to quiet down. Often it’s something simple like a hug or an ice cream.

Have fun teasing your subconscious. You created these parts of your subconscious when you believed in other people who didn’t even know what they were talking about either. Wisdom is wasted when we live in these dense, hidden realms of past pain.

Become useful and joyful by remembering that you’ll never get it right anyway. The important thing is that you centered on Love, you tried to help others, you walked with integrity and you learned along the way. Anyone can do this. You can do this. You were made for this moment.

Make one small choice today to be ridiculous in your optimism. The term pronoia was created by a sociologist named Fred H. Goldner in 1982. It is the delusional or irrational belief that others are actively praising your work and plotting your success behind your back. They are. I am.

Be ridiculous, delusional and irrational in your belief in your ability to bring joy to the world. Your ability to bring joy to your world. If you don’t even know what brings you joy anymore, perfect! The only way from there is up. What an opportunity! If you are privileged enough to be reading and metabolizing these words, joy is one of your blessed responsibilities. Show up accordingly.

Start noticing when you feel joy and do more of that. It’s almost always found in things that are free and available. And if you really don’t know where to start, start by doing nothing. Start by literally staring out the window in silence for 15 minutes in the morning. Do absolutely nothing and see what thoughts come.

If they’re negative, name them and tease them until they laugh with you and agree to rest. If ideas come, welcome them and give them a soft seat in your heart. If joy comes, offer it your gratitude, give it soft soil and water it with nutrients. Watch it grow from your center of silence. It is magic. You are a miracle.

It can be easy. It can be calm.

Falling apart so we can fall together is holy work.

We’ve got this my love. I’m here holding your heart, rubbing your back, cheering you on. Always.

Let’s begin.

Lexicon

Collapse: From the Latin collabi–com ("together") and labi ("to slip" or "to fall")–collapse literally means "to fall together." Rather than signaling only ruin or failure, collapse invites us to see endings as acts of transformation. It is the unraveling of forms that no longer serve life, creating space for renewal, remembrance, and the weaving of more life-giving futures.

What if the forces driving burnout, extraction, and endless striving are not personal failures, but inherited patterns we can learn to see, soften, and transform?

What if the path toward peace begins not by fixing the world, but by composting the stories, behaviors, and thought-forms that keep us disconnected from ourselves, one another, and the living Earth?

In this episode of Beloved Futures, Aubrey Morgan Yee sits down with her dear friend and collaborator, Gabriela Nova, to continue their exploration of Our Beloved Futures. Together, they enter Chapter Four: The Dissolving – Composting Wetiko, a profound inquiry into the forces of separation, domination, and scarcity that shape both our inner lives and the systems around us. Through stories of burnout, people-pleasing, performance culture, and the longing to belong, Aubrey and Gabriela reflect on what it means to reclaim sacredness, restore relationship, and gently dissolve the patterns that no longer serve life.

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About the Conversation

This conversation offers a compassionate and grounded exploration of awakening in a time of collapse. Aubrey shares how recognizing Wetiko as a collective operating system helps transform overwhelm into agency, allowing us to identify the roots of suffering rather than becoming paralyzed by its symptoms.

Together, Aubrey and Gabriela examine the tension between performance and presence, productivity and rest, separation and interbeing. They reflect on the courage required to say a sacred “no,” the importance of honoring our body’s rhythms, and the lifelong work of unlearning inherited patterns that obscure our authentic selves.

At the heart of this episode is an invitation to see dissolution not as failure, but as transformation. Like the caterpillar dissolving within the chrysalis, we too are asked to release old identities, stories, and ways of being so that something more aligned can emerge.

What We Explore in this Episode

This episode explores Wetiko as a cultural and psychological force that thrives through extraction, domination, and disconnection. Aubrey reflects on practices for composting these patterns through self-awareness, service, sacred relationship, and conscious choice. Together, she and Gabriela explore burnout culture, the myths of productivity, the healing power of rest, and the delicate process of dissolving inherited conditioning so that authenticity can shine through.

Key Takeaways

• Wetiko as mind virus – Understanding the forces of extraction, scarcity, domination, and endless consumption that shape modern culture.

• From overwhelm to agency – How naming the problem allows us to work with it rather than collapse beneath it.

• Sacredness as antidote – Reclaiming reverence for self, community, and Earth as a pathway toward healing.

• The performance trap – Why burnout is often rooted in inherited beliefs about worth, productivity, and achievement.

• The sacred no – Learning to discern what is truly aligned and creating space for deeper, more authentic yeses.

• The dissolving process – How unlearning, self-inquiry, and transformation mirror the chrysalis journey of becoming.

This episode is an invitation to meet yourself with compassion as you untangle inherited stories, release patterns that no longer belong to you, and remember the deeper truth beneath them. Because healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about dissolving what was never truly yours, so that who you have always been can emerge.

With Love and Gratitude,
Aubrey Morgan Yee

FOLLOW AUBREY’S WORK

Website: www.ourbelovedfutures.com
Instagram: @aubrey.morgan.yee
Book: Our Beloved Futures

The beloved futures are on their way.

I name the New Moon, because this New Moon in Gemini brings with it a shock of knowledge, that arrives like lightning. Challenging old ways of thinking and being.

Money is the most ubiquitous collective agreement on planet earth. Every single day 8+ billion of us wake up and collectively agree that money is our shared exchange of value. That money represents a way to understand what we value and what our life force energy is worth in exchange for goods and services. This means that once that agreement has been violated, we can choose a new agreement.

The Earth now hosts a trillionaire while over 800 million live in situations of extreme poverty, starvation, genocide and slavery. The shock of this awareness tells us that the system of value we are using is no longer relevant or useful.

The Law of Three comes from the philosophies of G.I. Gurdjieff. His cosmology speaks of evolution as requiring a third force – a reconciling impulse – whenever opposing forces have reached a kind of deadlock. Thesis and antithesis do not resolve themselves; they require what he called a shock, an intervention that creates the conditions for a qualitative leap to a new octave of being. Obscene wealth concentration on one side, ecological and social unraveling on the other. Both forces have been in stalemate, staring us in the face as we feel powerless to change things.

The technology of extractive capitalism is designed to produce exactly the results we now see. Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire is the shock point. It is the moment the absurdity becomes so legible, so undeniable, so cosmically overripe, that it catalyzes the third force: the collective human realization that the systemic myth of money-as-sole-harbinger-of-value is simply obsolete.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit Catholic Priest, scientist, paleontologist, philosopher, mystic, and teacher in the early 20th century. Teilhard saw evolution as convergent. Rather than being a random, chaotic force, it was always moving toward what he called the Omega Point, a maximum of consciousness and complexity.

For Teilhard, spirit and matter were a single process unfolding, what Thich Nhat Hanh calls Interbeing. Teilhard also wrote and spoke of the noosphere – the ultimate, interconnected sphere of human thought – as the next layer of Earth's evolution, the planetary mind coming into coherence.

Money in its current form and use is a primitive information technology. It was invented to coordinate exchange in pre-noospheric conditions – when humans couldn't communicate instantly, couldn't compute value in real time, couldn’t develop relationships, find love and coherence, collaborate and build from anywhere on Earth.

In a fully networked noosphere, the current systems of money are to our human potential of collaboration and value creation like passenger pigeons are to the internet.

Money came to help humanity. Money knows it can no longer serve its purpose in its current form. Money wants to transform. It is sending us a very clear signal today.

Money in its current form is ready to be transcended. Metamorphosis.

The trillionaire is, in Teilhardian terms, the recapitulation crisis – the moment a system reaches its absolute limit and must either collapse or complexify into a new order. The caterpillar does not become a butterfly through gradual improvement. It dissolves into the chrysalis so that the imaginal cells can activate and begin the metamorphosis they were always designed to herald.

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Waiwai* is the indigenous Hawaiian understanding of wealth. The word is structured as a doubling – wai (water, liquid, that which flows) amplified into waiwai. In Hawaiian cosmology, wealth is not what you accumulate; it is what you circulate.

Waiwai is the sense of value, worth, and essence. Wealth is not static. Like water, it toxifies with stagnation. It must circulate and flow to retain and enhance its life force energy. Waiwai is in right relationship with flow – flow of resources, of mana (power), of reciprocity, of connection to land and people. You cannot possess waiwai; you can only participate in it. Hoarding stagnates Waiwai. It must become useful to the whole river, part of the aliveness in the complex web of Life in order to create true wealth.

Hawaiians lived in balance with their natural environment for centuries. Utilizing a permaculture-style land management system called the Ahupua’a* system that relied upon deep relationality with water flowing in through ‘auwai* (complex irrigation ditch systems) and shared responsibilities along land divisions that were bounded by watersheds. Hawaiians were able to thrive without outside influence or imports and a population that may have been as big as a million people. Today, Hawai’i’s population is about 1.4 million with 95% of our food being imported from elsewhere.

When the colonists first arrived, they found a population that they labeled ‘lazy’ because they had so much free time. Their Waiwai was so whole that they could surf, make art, play and enjoy community while still having enough to eat and thrive. Imagine that.

We don’t know exactly how, when, or to whom the idea of money arrived to Earth. Historians try to speculate, but the truth is we don’t actually know. From an animist perspective, I can say that money has agency and a spirit. And she is feminine in her truest essence. My friend Pat McCabe calls her the ‘holy alchemical spirit of the money.’

Money in its true form is holy. Sacred.

Like all other beings in their true form. When I sit with entity of money, I feel a deep sadness from her. From my experience contemplating and connecting with the essence of the entity of money, I can feel that she came here to help, to support, to make transactions more easeful in service to human ingenuity and creativity. Something else has distorted this intention and money is not happy about it. We have treated her like a slave and a whore. This is the message she offered to Pat in her contemplations. This is money’s message to us now.

Wetiko*, the mind virus of consumption and domination is a key culprit. Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption. Sound familiar? Other Native American cultures had similar words for the same mind virus. These behaviors that we have normalized as “business as usual” were seen as abhorrent social anomalies.

When the colonists arrived with their violence, extraction and rapacious appetite for resources and domination, the cultures they invaded easily understood this as Wetiko that had completely taken over its host. The mind virus in full control of the human being. A disease of mind and spirit, not fit for communal cultures or reciprocity with our mother Earth.

In my book Our Beloved Futures, I speak about this and the ways in which we have all to one degree or another become infected with wetiko. No one is unscathed. The beauty of understanding this way of being as a disease, is the reality that we can cure ourselves. Waiwai is a cure to the poison of Wetiko. Musk’s obscene visions of leaving our precious emerald Earth a wasteland on our way to Mars is part of the trillionaire shock. He is the catalytic vector to propel our relationship with money into a whole new realm of collective liberation, true value, life force, mutual respect and thriving.

The suffering caused by wealth hoarding, extraction, violence, genocide, slavery, rape and war on this planet will continue to escalate as empire takes its dying gasps. This is the path of collapse. The only way out is through. We must breakdown to breakthrough.

And as we traverse this phase of our evolution, we have to remember at every step that this violence is not our true nature. What we witness is the nature of empire, not the human. This is the power-over from beings who have been overtaken by wetiko. Ones who have forgotten themselves and are in the deepest suffering of all. They are like tiny lights trapped in a huge soul prison of their own making.

Despite what we see on the news of yachts and parties and power and privilege, the deep inner loneliness experienced when you dominate, control and harm other living beings is profound and soul crushing. It is a hole that can never be filled with any amount of money. This is the travesty of our moment. Those who are suffering perpetuate suffering on others.

Billionaires and Trillionaires do not become obsolete through resentment or redistribution alone. They become obsolete when the concept of money as measure of worth becomes as quaint as a feudal title. And that moment arrives when its most extreme expression – the trillionaire – makes the absurdity so visible that the dream breaks.

The arrival of the trillionaire shows us there is already enough. There is already Waiwai. It’s just being hoarded in systems designed for that purpose.

We made these systems. We can unmake them.

We are beings of Earth and peacefulness and love. We are earthlings of earth stuff and when we remember our earth-mind we will know once again an abundance and joy that has not been seen on this precious planet in millennia.

When we remember and embody our earth-mind, when we can think as river and speak again as whale, the pervasive joy and fullness we will experience will require no money to sustain it. Then, once again, money will find its rightful place in our interbeing. As an exchange of true value. A way to support and enrich loving service towards all Life.

When we live once again in our soul’s purpose and mission on Earth, money will be just one resource in a rich tapestry of Waiwai that holds clean water, healthy food, fresh air, loving relations, creativity and soul expression at equal importance. Because they are. Waiwai is the wealth of wholeness, well-being and nourishment that does not need to hoard or harm to exist. That is the true wealth in a life here on Earth.

Money is ready for this revolution. She is ready to be transformed and placed in service to collective liberation. Our opportunity is to make trillionaires obsolete by making the systems of extractive capitalism and dominator culture obsolete.

The noosphere of interconnection that we currently enjoy is an invitation to see ourselves as a planetary people. To demand that systems where slaves produce products for people in other ‘countries’ be abolished. The noosphere shows us every day on little screens the absurdity and horror of what we have done.

When our ways of working with money are understood as absurd, that is our clarion call to envision something else. Something else where we can dissolve these systems of absurdity and harm. We can dissolve them. Money is praying for us to remember ourselves, our power as legion, and to place her once again in service to Life. We are ready.

With Aloha,
Aubrey xox

Lexicon

Waiwai: In Hawaiian culture, waiwai means wealth, abundance, or prosperity. The word is derived from wai (fresh water), repeated twice to emphasize its importance. In a Hawaiian worldview, true wealth is measured not by accumulation, but by the presence and flow of life-giving resources, healthy relationships, communal wellbeing, and reciprocity with the living world. Water itself is the original wealth, for where there is wai, there is life.

Ahupuaʻa: In Hawaiian culture, an ahupuaʻa is a traditional land stewardship system that extends from the mountains (mauka) to the sea (makai), encompassing entire watersheds and the interconnected ecosystems within them. More than a geographic division, the ahupuaʻa reflects a sophisticated understanding of reciprocity, abundance, and ecological balance, where communities cared for land, water, forests, and fisheries as a single living system. It embodies a worldview that recognizes the inseparability of human wellbeing and the health of the Earth.

ʻAuwai: In Hawaiian culture, an ʻauwai is an irrigation canal or waterway designed to divert fresh water from streams to loʻi (taro fields), fishponds, and communities. More than an engineering system, the ʻauwai embodies the Hawaiian values of stewardship, cooperation, and shared responsibility. The flow of water through an ʻauwai reflects the principle that abundance is sustained through collective care, reciprocity, and the equitable distribution of life-giving resources.

Wetiko: In many Indigenous traditions of North America, particularly among Algonquin-speaking peoples, Wetiko refers to a spiritual sickness or ‘mind virus’ rooted in greed, selfishness, and insatiable consumption. Contemporary thinkers such as Jack Forbes and Paul Levy have expanded the term to describe the collective pathology of domination, extraction, and disconnection that manifests in both individuals and systems. Wetiko thrives through fear, scarcity, and separation, convincing us that we are isolated from one another and from the living Earth. It is often understood not as an external enemy, but as a pattern of consciousness that must be recognized, healed, and transformed.

What if the forces shaping our world are not only external, but living patterns moving through us?

What if healing begins the moment we can name what we are inside of?

In this episode of Beloved Futures, Aubrey Morgan Yee sits down with Cassie Mitchell to continue their journey through Aubrey’s debut book, Our Beloved Futures. Entering the chapter The Golden Seal: Rendering Forms, they explore the alchemical moment within the chrysalis, where dissolution gives way to new form, and what it asks of us in this time of planetary transformation.

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About the Conversation

At the heart of this dialogue is a powerful reframe: the systems we are witnessing are not separate from us, but expressions of patterns we have inherited and can transform.

Aubrey and Cassie explore wetiko – a “mind virus” or thought-form rooted in greed, and disconnection – as an extractive orientation to life that shows up in scarcity thinking, hoarding, domination, and the constant sense that there is never enough. Through personal stories and ancestral threads, Aubrey shares how these patterns live in the body and psyche, and how awareness becomes the first act of healing.

From there, the conversation expands into possibility:

• How do we rebuild cultures of care in a world shaped by disconnection?

• How do we relearn trust, relationship, and community in small, embodied ways?

• What happens when we choose kindness, even in the most ordinary interactions?
  

What We Explore in this Episode

This episode speaks to the power of micro-moments – eye contact, warmth, generosity – as the threads that begin to reweave the social fabric. And they remind us that the future will not be built solely through systems, but through relationships.

Key Takeaways

• Wetiko as thought-form – Naming the extractive, scarcity-based pattern moving through individuals and systems.

• From shame to awareness – Seeing these patterns within ourselves as the beginning of freedom.

• Cultures of care – Rebuilding trust, connection, and relational life in a fragmented world.

• Community as practice – Small acts of kindness and presence as foundational to collective healing.

• Remembering our genius – Each person carries a unique, living intelligence that does not conform to standardized definitions of success.

• Parenting & presence – “See the child in front of you” as a guiding principle for nurturing authentic expression.

• New futures of work & value – Questioning systems that only value what can be monetized, and imagining economies that support creativity and flourishing.

As the episode closes, Aubrey offers a powerful invocation:

“Become a freedom writer. A poet of peace. We are consciousness itself becoming self-aware… Devote yourself to the critical work of self-forgiveness.”

This is the work of the golden seal.

To remain open in the midst of dissolution.
To choose joy, even as the world trembles.
To unlearn, unravel, and reimagine what it means to be human – together.

With Love and Gratitude,
Aubrey Morgan Yee

FOLLOW AUBREY’S WORK

Website: www.ourbelovedfutures.com
Instagram: @aubrey.morgan.yee
Book: Our Beloved Futures

There is a distinct and uncomfortable tension in the space between our visions of beloved futures and the current mess we are in. You can feel it in your body. For those who sit in bridging space between what is and what could be, the stretch required to hold this position with grace is often painful. This is holy work in a time of undoing. We never know when it will be the last time for anything in our life, in our culture. Anyone who has sat at the side of a loved one’s last breath knows this intimately. It is the same with culture.

When the last breath of freedom is taken, do we hear it, or is it subsumed with the other breaths that taste the same despite their difference?

In this era of dehumanization and fear, kindness and connection are deeply radical acts of revolution. Trust yourself in this and make eye contact every time. We need to see each other to remember that we are never alone.

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The other day a friend told me that their high-school age daughter casually remarked that none of her friends eat dinner with their families anymore.

When did our connection to nourishment of the body and spirit take its last breath? How might we resuscitate that ancient and powerful practice?

It’s no wonder loneliness is epidemic in the age of artificial and constant blue-light connections. Maybe it’s time we rewired our wireless lives and remembered the electric power of touch, the radically life-giving nature of authentic conversation, and the healing potency of song.

Can you believe that not so long ago it was normal to sing together after sharing a meal? How beautifully wild is that… Perhaps the tendrils of song served more than one purpose, weaving their frequencies between and among us in ways unseen that threaded us together as a communal body, with shared understanding and commitment. Perhaps.

It is sad to see the futures of possibility when the world is on fire and suffering is so poignant. We are in the painful stage of witness as each horrific act surfaces to be seen, known and then purged. Purging is painful. And it is also a relief.

In Hawaiian there is a word for our seat of visceral knowing, na’au*. Our na’au is literally our guts, our intestines but it is also the place from which we know, gnosis, in ways that cannot be explained by the mind.

We have known in our na’au that something is off, something is up, something is not well with this world. So there is a soft sense of relief along with the painful purge of witnessing the horrific depths of unwellness in a patriarchal, colonial, capitalist global empire. And with that soft relief of the purge comes guilt.

How can I feel relief from my place of privilege when there is so much suffering? What is mine to do?

And yet, relief is part of the process of becoming fully relevant to the great turning. Because with the relief of the purge comes just a little more space for something else to enter. Compassion, unprocessed grief, love, kindness, care, the ability to feel beauty in the depths of your being. We need these things for what comes after. It is the only way out and through.

When we fully remember that we are one being, always interbeing with every other perceived separate being on this temple planet called Earth, then we also remember that our ability to metabolize suffering from a place of relative privilege is an important service to the web of Life.

Paying attention and bearing witness is part of the work. Purging our delusion is part of the work. It is only the beginning but it is part of the work. And as we make space within our bodies to hold more of the kindness, love, connection and care, we begin the deep shift within that will sustain us and carry us through the dissolution of everything we once believed to be solid.

We move from modern-mind with all its delusions of grandeur and exceptionalism to Earth-mind with its deep nourishment of sacredness and interdependence. And from Earth-mind we enter a reciprocal relationship with the most incredible, abundant, sacred planet in all of creation. Our Earth. She is majestic, precious and generous.

Remember her in the wind, the water, the birdsong, the fruits.
She is ready to hold our undoing.
She is ready to carry us back to our holy wholeness.

Lexicon

Na’au: In Hawaiian culture, na’au refers to the gut, intestines, or deep inner seat of knowing. More than a physical organ, it is understood as the center of intuition, wisdom, feeling, and moral discernment – the place where truth is sensed before it is intellectually understood.

—Hawaiian proverb, Ōlelo No’eau

I recently learned that our ancestors, just like us in the world of the living, exist with varying degrees of wellness and trauma. Some ancestors are wise and well and some best to be avoided. When we engage in the work of ancestral healing, our healing carries forward and back in time and space. So does our wounding. Ancestral trauma and ancestral healing are both multidimensional and layered, compounding with time and also miraculously dissolved with the right intention and attention. The ancestors are waiting for us to remember them, and we have the blessed opportunity to heal them as we heal ourselves.

Experts in intergenerational trauma and epigenetics say that trauma compounds through the generations. It gets worse, more intense, more thick and nasty if it is allowed to fester and replicate. As I look at the world around me and the daily news in my feeds, it seems we have reached peak ancestral trauma. It’s time to call back our wise and well ancestors, we desperately need their support.

Institutional collapse, ecological grief, AI disruption, social fragmentation – this is not failure, we are in the chrysalis stage of metamorphosis. This is the era where the caterpillar melts into an unrecognizable goo that allows enough room for a radically new form to emerge, the butterfly.

In this planetary chrysalis moment, everything we thought we knew is becoming porous and translucent so that there is enough spaciousness in the smoke of reality for radically new ways of being human to emerge. We are the more beautiful futures walking and talking. We are the myths of tomorrow, the future ancestors. We are relational fields of possibility tending the fires of love and belonging. And we are everywhere.

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Wā is the Hawaiian concept of the relational, living field between all things. The space that holds possibility and collapse simultaneously. In the Hawaiian cosmovision, the wise and well, healed ancestors guide us forward with their wisdom. Meanwhile the futures that are emerging from the great mystery of creation, form themselves behind us, in our wake. The past is before us, the futures behind. We, in the center, are navigators: riding waves of experience and dreams as we become the futures. We are only, always now.

Guided by wind and water, carrying within our bodies the wisdom of plants and the radical abundance of the more than human beings, we are seeding new worlds that even we have not yet experienced. It will take many generations to move through our breakdowns. This is the time of the great unraveling. This is the opportunity of falling apart.

Wā is the chrysalis. A space of melting to forget everything that once felt solid. This is the time where the most generative, alive, intelligence-rich moments of transformation exist. Wā is not an empty space between moments, it is the space where Life is. Enmeshed in a civilization committed to the violence of industrialized time, urgency, productivity, and linear progress, wā is pure medicine. And we get to be here for it. What a blessing. Don’t miss this.

We are being called into a surrender, trust and release so profound that nothing in the current culture of modernity can support us. We have to look elsewhere and otherwise. In the spaces between the familiar. In the cracks where the light can get through.

We are in this sacred interval between the world that is dying and the world that is not yet born. The chrysalis, the wā. The melting. The dissolution of everything that once felt solid. The caterpillar becoming unrecognizable. It will feel like death. Don’t be deceived. This is where Life takes its place at the center of everything once again. We are in the tentative space in between our guiding ancestors and our peaceful dreams of otherwise.

How do we inhabit this threshold with enough presence, rootedness, and wisdom to dream what comes next into being?

Along with this understanding of where we are, there is the grief of fully recognizing who we have become. We are creatures committed to deep cultural operating systems of domination, extraction, destruction, enslavement, and desecration of innocence and the sacred. All of us are complicit in this commitment. It is impossible to be absolved from the enmeshment. The tangles are simply too thick.

What does it look like to live and move in the wā? It is a process of untangling and a practice of forgiveness. We move in stops and starts allowing the grief to move through our bodies.

On some days, we wake up, pay attention, and do the deep work of becoming unrecognizable and ungovernable to the matrices of control and subordination. We become liminal and opaque so that we can move through modernity and not be captured by it.

On other days, when we feel the energy of creation moving through us, we create. And when we create from wā, we access the deep well of joy that is always available from our animate, emerald Earth. She is everywhere because she is everything. Ask the grass growing through concrete, the seeds breaking through soil, the tree roots taking hold in an abandoned building. They speak of true resilience and abiding peacefulness. They know the stories of the fall and the myths that allow us to get back up and keep going.

This is sacred work. And you are never alone.

We can begin to understand this time of chaos as the moment of creation. As we move through the world awake, the somnambulance we witness in others becomes the rich and productive background of our myth making.

As we surrender to the mystery of creation, we become witness to the beauty of beginnings that transcend time and space. We are capacitated with radical compassion and the ability to forgive and keep moving despite the grief and sorrow. It is the only way we can hold both the dying of the world and its birth at the same time.

Begin or deepen the relational field with your ancestors who are wise, well, and waiting to support you. Engage with the Earth as the animate, wise being that she is. Remember your place as a bridge between worlds and forgive yourself for the times that you forget and become entangled with the tight knots of modernity’s grip. It is ok.

You are always standing in sacred relationship – to what came before, to what is emerging, and to the living field that holds both. Each time you lean back into right relations, you loosen that knot until finally it unravels completely and without ceremony. Once the unraveling is complete, we will have arrived fully in the new and ancient ways of being. It will feel like death, but know that it is the portal to Life.

What we are being invited to as a species is truly magnificent. Just look at what Earth is asking of you: deeper connection to nature, tending relational fields with cultures of care, peaceful countenance and generosity, healthy food and clean water to nourish your body and spirit, simple living that is close to the Earth and slow in its pacing, rest that is deep and restorative. These are radical blessings and they can become true for you.

What new choice will you make today, guided by your ancestors, to build beloved futures in your wake?

We are surfing now you and I. We are in the blessed time of becoming.

Lexicon

Wā: In Hawaiian culture, wā refers to sacred, living time-space – the relational field between all things. More than a moment or interval, wā is understood as an alive space of connection, emergence, memory, and possibility where past, present, and future coexist.

Ka wā ma mua: Literally “the time before.” In Hawaiian cosmovision, the past is understood as being in front of us because it is known, seen, and carried as ancestral wisdom that guides our path forward.

Ka wā ma hope: Literally “the time that comes after.” The future is understood as behind us because it is unseen, emerging from mystery, possibility, and what is yet to be revealed.

These words from my 12-year-old son in their sincerity and heartfelt truth are like sugar to my soul. He says something like this at least a few times a day. And as the horrific abuses of men continue to mount in our news feeds, his professions of true love feel particularly sweet, tender and profound. How did he and I get here? Where our love is real and true. Where he knows that I am a safe place and that his tenderness, his empathy is a superpower. How can we share this knowing with other boys so they too become gentle men someday? He is not motherless. He is grounded in his mother’s love and his love of his mother Earth. This is his strength.

As I felt his words hit my ears, I sat and simmered in them with deep joy. And then that joy settled and unsettled within me as I imagined the crude worlds of male privilege and violence that my sweet son would inevitably be up against in his life. There is no going around it. And I cannot protect him forever.

How did we arrive at this place? Where being male in the dominant culture often means engaging in horrific acts of micro and macro violences against women and the Earth? What is the responsibility, the kuleana*, the blessed work we mothers have to do to raise boys in a society that trains them to harm women? Yes, our society trains them. From the earliest moments of life we train our boys to be toxic to women. Only a lucky few survive this gauntlet of socialization without permanent damage.

What are we doing to ourselves? To our boys?

It starts early. We teach girls in grade school that the boy who is bullying them must ‘have a crush on you.’ Excuse me? So the jerk who just pulled my braids is unable to express his affection for me in a healthy way. I’m supposed to think that’s normal? What kind of psychopath perpetuates violence on the woman he is attracted to? Oh yeah, a majority of men in the modern world. That’s right. Motherless.com. Epstein. The guy nextdoor who hits his wife. Not all men, but far too many men.

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I remember when I first got to college at UCLA and learned about the bizarre institutions that we call fraternities and sororities. I somehow found myself ‘rushing’ – the term for interviewing to join a sorority or fraternity house – and then being part of that cultural conundrum for two years. “It’s a great way to make friends,” my mom told me. I did find friends there who have become lifelong. We all defected the sorority together after year two. I found the whole mess of it so confusing but now I can understand from the inside out this deeply problematic way of supporting young people who are tenderly emerging into adulthood. Maybe there was a time when these institutions served the greater common good. Maybe. But I’ll tell you for sure, that time was not the mid 1990’s.

Sororities were strange with an operating system programmed to homogenization, gossip and competition. But they were nowhere near as toxic as the fraternities. The stories I would hear from my friends and boyfriend were horrifying with some ‘houses’ being much more violent than others. Even then, I knew that they weren’t telling me the worst of it. We’ve built a world where boys get together to hurt and humiliate each other in a socializing practice called hazing. Hazing often so bad that the ‘brothers’ are sworn to secrecy. Racist and mysoginist worldviews are baked into these rites. In 2022, a University of Miami fraternity was shut down because members were recorded chanting about having sex with a dead woman. That was in public with women present and someone recording them. We can begin to imagine what happens in private.

What are we doing?

In the chaos and separation myths of modernity, we have lost the radical root of rites of passage. Rather than rites that secure a sense of belonging and responsibility to the collective body of a community that cares for one another, we have committed ourselves to empty, saccharine rites of passage that are most often unconscious. Rites that have no integration or cultural contextualization and that actually deepen an already prevalent sense of isolation and fear rather than building feelings of connection and care. Think Lord of the Flies versus vision quest. Boys walk into these lion dens with little to no preparation. So many mothers have no vocabulary to talk about these awkward, sensitive topics. We weren’t given any tools by our parents. It’s no wonder many of our boys get swallowed whole.

It’s true that rites of passage in more traditional and indigenous cultures can sometimes be violent and scary. But these rites of passage are held with a fierceness that is also deeply rooted in the love of a tightly knit community. A community that wants to strengthen and support their young ones to become powerful, kind and compassionate leaders in the future.

Francis Weller, author and psychotherapist focusing on grief and healing rituals, shares that the core difference between trauma and a rite of passage is whether or not the initiatory experience is held in a strong and safe container by community. When our boys show up to the fraternity party, they are food for the wolves of misogyny. Held by a culture that doesn’t even understand how toxic it’s become. Where elder-hood is exchanged for domination and fear. Where fitting in requires harming others and yourself.

What are we doing?

Fast-forward to young adult Aubrey being exposed to the equally bizarre world of bachelor party culture. Even as a young woman I knew it was absurd that a man who was about to get married was supposed to celebrate that divine, precious connection with his life partner by going out with a bunch of guys to a strip club, sometimes having sex with a stranger. Excuse me, what?! Ridiculous didn’t even cut it. The whole thing was absurd to me, and I let my boyfriend (now husband) know my opinions very clearly. One particular night my boyfriend and I were having a huge fight about whether he would go to the strip club with ‘the boys’ to celebrate a friend’s upcoming wedding. I was directly confronted by another young woman, a few years older than me, drunk as a skunk, telling me to chill out and stop ruining the boys’ fun. Seriously. That’s how programmed we women have become.

What are we doing?

Strip clubs, pornography, sexist jokes, leering, cat calls all the way to rape culture and pedophilia. Growing up as a boy is a confusing, intense mine field, especially if you truly love your mother, your sister, your grandma, the girls and the women in your life. And isn’t that the point? Our mother is our life force. She literally birthed us. Women are life givers. The ones who bring souls earth-side. In the same ways that we have abandoned our boys to dis-eased cultures of violence, we have abandoned our mothers to dis-eased cultures of neglect, violence and overwhelm. Motherless.

We mothers have to take back the reins. We are the first line of defense for our boys, their example, their safe space. The ones who show them how a woman should be treated and what a healthy femininity feels like. We need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable and taboo topics of masculinity, sexual and gender based violence, positive sexuality and eros. To show our boys what it truly means to be a gentle man who is a safe place for women, children and all the creatures of the Earth.

We mothers need to model a natural beauty that embraces all stages of life. One that doesn’t chase its worth in plastic surgery and the impossible quest for forever youth. If we don’t love ourselves enough to be authentic, to age with grace, to love our body, then we teach our boys that being a woman is a performative act rather than a sacred role in the social fabric of humanity.

What are we doing?

Our society is committed to centering, supporting and perpetrating a sick form of sexuality that has become normalized. A recent study confirmed that the worst forms of sexual content are easily accessible in one or two clicks on a computer. The worst forms. Ones I can’t even bring myself to say here lest they be made more real. That’s how bad it is.

I started talking to my kids about pornography when they were still in elementary school. Most of the other mothers I spoke to were horrified at the prospect. But the facts are clear - the chances of a child seeing pornography before they are 13 are astronomical. Motherless demonstrated yet again that porn sites proliferate. Days after they were shut down, they were up online again. Somehow, despite our very clear ability to censor and shut down anything we want to, porn sites are immune. We have to come to terms with the harsh reality that we live in a society that glorifies violence against women.

What are we doing?

The hard truth is your child is going to see porn at some point. It’s imperative that you talk with them about it. In a way that is calm and comfortable, with no charge and no shame attached. If you’ve already warned them about porn and let them know that you know what it is and that they can talk to you about it, the chance that they will come to you for support increases exponentially. We can’t be afraid to talk about these things. The porn industry is not afraid at all. It’s coming for all our innocents. It’s our job to protect them.

The deep sickness that proliferates this harm is our disconnect from our first mother, Earth. This disconnection from Earth is then mirrored in normalization of a systematized disconnect from our human mother. Women in America get on average 10 weeks of maternity leave. 10 weeks! And close to 25% return to work after 2 weeks. What? A 10-week-old baby should be with their mother. A 2-week old baby should definitely be with their mother. We are disconnecting children from their primary source of love and safety. It is time to face the truth that we are awash in an entanglement of systems that devalue mothers and women and teach boys to become abusive men.

What are we doing?

My son is 12. A tender age of growth and change. He is a sweet, loving, kind boy. I teach him that kindness is a superpower. That he is always safe with his mother. I show him that I see and honor his unique gifts even if I don’t understand them. I let him know that I don’t expect him to be anyone other than himself.

He knows that violence is never the best answer. That protection of Life is his kuleana, his blessed right and responsibility, as a protector in this lifetime. I teach him that we are peace makers. That he is part of a wider, magnificent web of life. That he is safe to cry and feel and have empathy for others. That empathy is powerful and strong and wise. It is a gift to be his mother.

May his small acts of bravery and kindness be a drop in the waves of change coursing through our dis-eased cultures of violence. May every mother everywhere feel supported in raising her son(s) to be honorable men who love and protect the women, children and more than human beings in their lives. May we remember the holy sacredness of our precious mother Earth. May all these things be true in our lifetimes.

This is my potent prayer. Please hold it with me.

Lexicon

Kuleana: In Hawaiian culture, a relational sense of responsibility, privilege, and stewardship. It refers to what is rightfully yours to care for within a web of relationships – land, family, community, or role. It implies reciprocal belonging. What you are entrusted with, and how you show up to tend it with integrity.

What if the anxiety gripping the world is not entirely yours?

What if this moment of dissolution is not the end, but the chrysalis?

In this episode of Beloved Futures, Aubrey Morgan Yee sits down once again with her dear friend Cassie Mitchell to continue their exploration of Our Beloved Futures. They enter Chapter Two: Waking from the Nightmare – a meditation on anxiety, consequence, hatred, and the radical cultivation of inner peace during times of global reckoning. As headlines intensify and the collective nervous system hums with instability, they explore how to stay informed without being consumed, protect innocence where we can, and cultivate resilience not as rigidity, but as a grounded, bendable strength.

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About the Conversation

At the heart of this dialogue is the chrysalis – the stage where the caterpillar dissolves into formlessness before becoming something entirely new. Aubrey speaks to this moment as an age of consequence, where both personal and collective choices are revealing their effects. This reckoning is not only happening “out there.” It is happening within each of us.

Aubrey offers a powerful reframe: peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the ability to move through conflict without creating additional harm.

What We Explore in this Episode

In one of the episode’s most moving moments, Aubrey reads her poem from the chapter – a raw invocation of courage in the face of historical amnesia, violence, and moral collapse. Yet even here, the invitation is not despair. It is tenderness. It is choosing to meet this time not with hatred, but with clarity and love.

Key Takeaways

• Anxiety as frequency – Not every thought or fear belongs to you. Discernment is a practice.

• Homeopathic news – Staying aware without flooding your nervous system.

• The Age of Consequence – Personal and planetary reckoning as both challenge and opportunity.

• The Chrysalis Moment – Dissolution as necessary for emergence.

• Peace as resonance – Hate transfers; peace resonates with our original nature.

• Response-ability – Releasing reaction to cultivate grounded, compassionate response.

• Small acts matter – A hug, a home-cooked meal, forgiveness, breath. These are not trivial gestures. They are culture-making.

For anyone feeling destabilized by the pace of change, this episode offers a steady hand: Root into your present moment. Tend your inner life. Protect innocence where you can. Let peace begin as an inner resonance and ripple outward from there.

We are in the chrysalis. And courage, in this time, is choosing love again and again.

With Love and Gratitude,
Aubrey Morgan Yee

FOLLOW AUBREY’S WORK

Website: www.ourbelovedfutures.com
Instagram: @aubrey.morgan.yee
Book: Our Beloved Futures

In the first days after the flood, I watched our community light itself up. The government was absent. Community flooded in to fill that void.

Mutual aid networks streamed out of the woodworks. Completely community organized, no governmental or military support in sight. Distribution points were established for supplies. Volunteer lists were created and organized to deploy labor for clean-up in homes and on farms.

People with heavy equipment and trucks started circulating to help with clearing our damage and hauling away the remnants of destroyed lives and homes. A makeshift dump was created in the middle of the highway so people could move debris into one consolidated place.

It was and is mycelial and rhizomatic. Shoots that had been dormant under the surface of isolation and separation remembered themselves as part of a community ecosystem and they bloomed.

The first day I got to our farm to begin cleaning, I was hit with the overwhelm of acres of mud everywhere. Daunting and intense. My beloved soul sister, friend of over 30 years, Leslie had written to me that morning saying, “One shovel at a time sister, we will get through this.” I found her in one of our containers that morning, already shoveling mud with two of her friends I had never met. Smiling and shoveling. Smiling and shoveling. One scoop at a time.

I saw my husband Brady in our temple shoveling the mud that was 8” thick and sludgy like chocolate pudding. The temple where we had sat and done so much healing work for our community, connecting people to each other and to ‘aina. I waded through the mud to climb a ladder into the temple, the only way in was through the window, and I did the only thing that made any sense, I started shoveling.

And as I was shoveling and cleaning our temple, more people began to arrive. People I had never met. I had no idea how they had found us. Strangers in boots and gloves, long pants and some with masks on because of the mud’s toxicity. They showed up, simply said, “Where can I help?” and got to work.

These people didn’t expect anything in return. They showed up to help. Simply help a stranger they know needed their support.

One person brought a speaker and next thing you know we were scooping mud and dancing.

The temple had placed me in ceremony. It looked different but it was so sacred.

Something very deep shifted within me that day.

As someone who has studied collapse for many years, I have all the intellectual, political, poetic language to articulate, debate and guide people as we make our way through these transition years. And we don’t know how long this transition will take. It may be lifetimes.

But that day it hit me – the true gift that the Earth is offering to us through the disguise of disaster.

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When things fall apart, our humanity shines brighter. We remember ourselves as part of a whole. A sparkling drop of dew in the infinite web of Life.

Over these past 12 days, friends came and gave us all they could. Strangers showed up from all over the island. They appeared out of nowhere. Boots on, smiles wide and they just got to work. No questions, no hesitation, no transaction, looking for nothing in return. Pure service. I don’t even know how many of these people found us.

We shoveled and laughed and danced. We got stuck in the mud and dug each other out. We buried a dog who had drowned and been washed by the river into one of our cabins. We cleaned a big, daunting mess. Together.

The temple went from 8” of juicy thick mud to pressure wash cleaned. People arrived with trucks to take away trash. Every single one of them an ordinary citizen with other jobs and family to tend to. They showed up for people they had never met. This is happening all over our town. This is what solidarity feels like.

In a culture that glorifies rugged individualism and brutish competition for resources, this is revolutionary, radical… this is a path to redemption.

Driving home that first day, I cried as my heart burst open and I truly felt in my body – we are going to make it through time of systems breakdown, we are going to survive as a species. We are going to make it through.

The average person wants to help, not hurt. We have been confused because toxic, destructive and violent systems reward the people who are able to best play their game. And those people tend to be psychopathic. So, we’ve come to believe that our world leaders and celebrities, the top dogs in business and in politics, that they are a representation of humanity in general. They are the anomalies.

The average person is kind, the average person wants to live in peace, the average person wants to help all the other average persons and more than human beings around them. This is who we are.

In the age of consequence, in the polycrisis where we find ourselves, we will be hit by compounding disasters and challenges that amplify and entangle. What I am here to share is that each of these challenges is a gift, hiding behind water or fire or air or earth.

These are challenges with real suffering. But they also provide the opportunity to come fully online as the loving, kind, peaceful humans that we most naturally are. And this is the solution to our problem in a culture where we don’t know our neighbors, where we live in isolated homes and drive alone in our cars to jobs where we work on computers and don’t talk to strangers.

We are most naturally communal beings. And when we exist in service to the communal body over the individual body, something else becomes through us. Fear, anger, hatred – these are a distortion of our divine design.

My friend and mentor Pat McCabe tells the story of the buffalo. When huge storms come across the plains, the buffalo lock shoulders in a line and walk straight into the storm. Together they know that they have a better chance of surviving and they know that walking straight into the storm, they will move through it quicker.

The age of consequence is here for all of us.

There is no getting out unscathed. It is our greatest opportunity to remake the world in our vision of peace. It will not be easy but it can still be joyful. Even the sorrow of loss when held with others has a sweetness to it.

I read a quote recently that has stuck with me…

“One of the shining qualities that heroes possess is the willingness to be educated by all things.”

~ Gregg Levoy

May we find the lessons in the mud and absorb them into our ways of being together. May we see the solution in the problem. May we remember each other as part of a greater whole called Life and treat each other with the dignity and respect of that entanglement.

I wish that waste and suffering were not necessary for us to regain these intangibles. But we must allow ourselves to see that the daily waste and suffering of the dominant culture is so much greater than the waste from these disasters and crises.

As I scrolled past images of the flood online, another image of children shoveling gold out of a mine in Africa came into my feed. Horrific work. Children.

Every day these kids live with immense suffering. And they are in the company of billions across the planet suffering in so many different ways, just so that we can uphold a culture and lifestyle built for the lucky few.

We are being woken from our fragile peace. We are being shown the truth of the world as it is so we can build the world as it could be. With thriving for all. Thank you for this chance to see. Disaster. God-send. Earth is offering us a gift disguised as struggle.

It’s all Life. All of it is Life happening for us…and I’m here to be present for ALL of it. It’s all precious and profound. Someday it will be my last day. Today I am alive. Thank you.

What is mine to do, mine to tend in the great unraveling? Who am I to say that planting seeds is more important than shoveling mud? Earth knows more than me. So, if I am here, it is for a good reason. I will pay attention. I will kilo*. I will listen.

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t realize we were seeds.”

~ the Zapatistas

Lexicon

Kilo: In Hawaiian culture, the practice of deep, sustained observation, watching closely, examining, or forecasting. As a noun, it refers to an observer, seer, or expert (e.g., kilo hōkū or stargazer). It implies using all five senses to understand the environment, often to detect subtle changes in nature.

~ Our Beloved Futures, page 64

What is disaster?

Dis-aster: Catastrophe, calamity, tragedy.
And its opposite: Windfall, manna*, godsend.

Two sides of a pendulum, one of the great paradoxes of our age of consequence.

But… What if disaster is god-sent manna disguised as tragedy?

Bill Mollison, often referred to as the “father” of permaculture, taught that a core design principle of working with nature is to remember that: “The problem is the solution.“ A cryptic, oracular mantra from Earth. The problem is the solution.

What if disaster is a solution disguised as a painful problem?

On March 20th, my sweet, beautiful, agriculture community of Waialua on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i was decimated by a massive flood. Our farm and healing temple space went from green food forests, orchards and fields to a mud bog covered in 4 feet of thick, toxic sludge. In our temple, in our cabins, all over the crops, the mud is everywhere. This mud is toxic because it carries the glyphosates from farms upstream that still use chemical poison to grow food (how insane is that?) and because raw human sewage was released into the waters of the Kaukonahua river behind our farm through leaking cesspools and failing infrastructure.

We live in a fragile peace. This I know. Fragile because it is built on systems of oppression, dominance and daily micro and macro violence. You know this too, even if you don’t want to say it out loud just yet. Fragile, shallow peace is a defining quality of the 21st century. All of our dominant systems are built on fragile peace and we’re seeing the cracks more and more as this fragility increases.

The conditions of possibility for this flooding event are deeply baked into the operating systems of our current brand of modernity here in Hawai’i. We are occupied territory of the United States, where Queen Liliu’okalani was forcibly imprisoned and the sovereignty of our islands stolen by white landowners and businessmen in 1893. She courageously never signed their treaty which would have abdicated power and therefore the sovereignty of these islands is still intact, albeit beneath layers of imperial structures, imposed cultural myth and rewritten memory.

All the forces that maintain the fragile peace of this imperial outpost co-mingled and collapsed that day in a perfect storm to create this flood.

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• Rain falling at record rates as a result of a ‘rare’ Kona low storm, a product of climate disruptions and geo-engineering, human overconsumption and business philosophies that believe the Earth is a dead rock and she and all her more than human beings are here for our extraction, use and profiteering.

• Water gathering in a failing dam in need of major repairs. A dam that was created and left in disrepair by Dole, a colonial plantation corporation whose wealth was built on the process of erasing Native Hawaiian land ownership in order to create the pineapple plantations of Oahu.

• A Utah based land-owner upstream on the Kaukonahua river who has not maintained the proper planting on his thousands of acres which resulted in mud and silt washing into the river and onto our community. That same owner who has been in a fight with the community to build a gondola and restaurant on our most sacred mountain on Oahu, Mount Ka’ala.

• The military, also upstream on the Kaukonahua river, who have been doing controlled intentional burns in the upland forest to prepare for another kind of disaster, fire. Something that is high on everyone’s minds after Lahaina violently burned to the ground in 2023. The intentional burns left tracts of dirt next to the river that also became mudslides of silt and debris washing downstream and onto farms and homes below.

• And then all the farms, homes and gentleman’s estates who have filled in old irrigation ditches that either seemed out of use or inconvenient to development.
  

Lands that were once tended sustainably for centuries as one continuous watershed in the Hawaiian Ahupua’s system have been divided and fractured as a result of all the ~isms of modernity. All along the watershed, we forgot we were part of a larger system. Earth decided to remind us otherwise. Disaster.

This event happened on March 20th – Spring Equinox. A day usually associated with planting seeds, preparing for the bounty of spring. As my friend and astrologer shared about this time:

“There’s a strong sense this month of standing between worlds. Part of us is still dissolving old habits, identities and attachments. Another part is quietly orienting forward ~ not with certainty, but with instinct ~ and a knowing that something is aligning beneath the surface, even if the whole picture isn’t clear yet.”

Something aligning beneath the surface. An invitation to something else that wants to emerge. Manna from the heavens.

What if the solution is in the problem?

What if all these disasters are forcing us to remember ourselves as interdependent, part of a unified web of Life, never separate, always interbeing?

What if that is the whole point?

This is a moment to catalyze cultures of care and remembering the nourishment of belonging in a community where we support and uplift one another. If you would like to support the community of Waialua, Oʻahu – all of whom were impacted by the catastrophic flooding of March 20, 2026 – please follow the link below.

Support the Flood Relief Fund

Lexicon

Manna: A miraculous food described in the Bible and Quran as provided by God to the Israelites during their 40-year desert journey, known for appearing with dew and having a sweet taste. It is often used to mean unexpected spiritual nourishment, divine aid, or a unexpected gift, originating from the Hebrew phrase man hu, meaning “what is”.

What if the future is not something happening to us, but something moving through us?

What if remembering our place within a living cosmos is the beginning of true empowerment?

In this episode of Beloved Futures, host Aubrey Morgan Yee sits in intimate conversation with her dear friend and longtime creative companion Cassie Mitchell, continuing the unfolding of the Our Beloved Futures book. Together, they open a deeper layer of the book’s architecture, philosophy, and prayer – exploring futures thinking as liberation, ecological belonging, and sacred participation in the ongoing creation of the world. This episode is both reflection and invocation – a remembering of ourselves as participants in a living Earth, and an invitation to imagine futures rooted not in domination, but in reverence.

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About the Conversation

In this contemplative and expansive dialogue, Aubrey speaks to the courage required to remain authentic in the creative process, especially when navigating feedback, doubt, and the pressure to make one’s work easily digestible. She shares how Our Beloved Futures was never meant to be a conventional book, but a transmission – a frequency that works on the reader beyond linear logic.

The conversation moves between the intimate and the planetary: from the vulnerability of trusting one’s inner voice, to the profound responsibility of recognizing that the future is shaped through imagination, relationship, and collective dreaming. Aubrey invites us to shift from the “modern mind,” rooted in separation and extraction, into an ecological or Indigenous mind – one that understands interdependence, reciprocity, and the aliveness of the world. At its heart, this episode asks us to remember: we are not observers of the future. We are co-creators within it.

What We Explore in this Episode

This episode offers a deepening into the philosophical and energetic foundations of Our Beloved Futures. Aubrey reflects on the nonlinear, initiatory nature of writing, the chakra system as a map of collective becoming, and the power of metaphor – particularly the butterfly – to help us understand the necessary dissolution of old systems and identities. Woven throughout is an invitation into futures work as empowerment, imagination, and sacred responsibility, grounded in our relationship with a living Earth.

Key Takeaways

• Writing as soul retrieval – the creative process as a journey of remembering, integration, and transformation.

• Words as living frequencies – language as spell, transmission, and embodied experience beyond intellect.

• The chrysalis moment – understanding collapse, uncertainty, and dissolution as part of emergence.

• Futures as empowerment – recognizing our role and agency in shaping what comes next.

• Co-creating with a living planet – remembering ourselves as participants within an animate, intelligent Earth.

For anyone moving through personal or collective transition, creative becoming, or the longing to live in deeper alignment with life, this episode offers a steady and visionary reminder: the future is not fixed, and we are not powerless. Through imagination, devotion, and relationship, we participate in the emergence of our beloved futures.

With Love and Gratitude,
Aubrey Morgan Yee

FOLLOW AUBREY’S WORK

Website: www.ourbelovedfutures.com
Instagram: @aubrey.morgan.yee
Book: Our Beloved Futures

What if the future is not something we wait for, but something we remember how to co-create?

What if our words, our bodies, and our imaginations are already shaping the worlds to come?

In this episode of Beloved Futures, host Aubrey Morgan Yee sits down with longtime collaborator and trusted friend Cassie Mitchell for a deeply intimate conversation about Aubrey’s book Our Beloved Futures. Together, Aubrey and Cassie explore the birth of Our Beloved Futures – from its mythopoetic origins and shamanic writing process, to the moments of doubt, feedback, and profound soul-retrieval that shaped its final form. Aubrey shares how the book emerged not as a linear argument, but as a frequency – an invitation into remembrance, ecological belonging, and collective imagination.

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About the Conversation

In this rich and expansive dialogue, Aubrey reflects on writing as a devotional practice – one that channels wisdom beyond the intellect and asks the writer to trust their own genius, even when it is not universally understood. She speaks to words as living forces, carrying frequencies that work on us beneath conscious thought, and to the future as a collective dream we are already co-dreaming with the Earth.

From personal stories of creative vulnerability to sweeping reflections on planetary transformation, this episode offers a grounded yet visionary lens on what it means to live, imagine, and create in times of profound change.

What We Explore in this Episode

This episode offers a contemplative glimpse into the nonlinear, shamanic writing of Our Beloved Futures, where the creative process becomes an act of soul retrieval and devotion to authenticity. Aubrey reflects on words as living frequencies, the chakra system as a map for collective becoming, and the butterfly as a guide through collapse and emergence. Woven throughout is an invitation to shift from modern mind to ecological mind – remembering ourselves as empowered co-creators, dreaming the future alongside a living Earth.

Key Takeaways

• Conversation as medicine – why Aubrey thrives in dialogue and relational inquiry rather than solo transmission.

• Density as devotion – how contemplative writing invites readers to slow down, breathe, and listen between the words.

• Trusting your genius – honoring the truth that not all work is meant to be legible to everyone.

• Words carry power – language as frequency, disruption, and re-patterning.

• Futures are plural – the future is not fixed, but shaped through imagination, choice, and collective dreaming.

• Ecological mind – remembering ourselves as relational beings within a living, intelligent world.

• Find the others – how authenticity becomes a beacon for imaginal cells to gather and build what comes next.

For anyone navigating creative doubt, planetary grief, spiritual awakening, or the longing to participate consciously in what is unfolding, this episode offers a resonant invitation: to clean and clear the vessel, listen deeply, and trust that your presence matters in the shaping of our beloved futures.

With Love and Gratitude,
Aubrey Morgan Yee

FOLLOW AUBREY’S WORK

Website: www.ourbelovedfutures.com
Instagram: @aubrey.morgan.yee
Book: Our Beloved Futures

~ Maria Montessori

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I found myself reading a series of quotes from Maria Montessori the other day and sobbing. Maria Montessori is the visionary who created the Montessori school movement. She birthed an educational philosophy in the early 1900’s to counterbalance the (then) newly created public school system. A public school system that was created to get ‘unruly immigrants’ off the streets so they would become well-trained factory workers. A public school system which Montessori and others knew would eventually destroy democracy. She was a visionary, leading from a heart in coherence with the cosmos.

Her words speak about children with dignity, reverence and care. She saw in children the future worlds that they have come here to build, grow and love with their divine souls. She understood childhood as the precious gift that it is. To be protected, guarded, honored and enjoyed.

I read Maria’s quotes against the backdrop of 165 Iranian women and children killed by the United States and Israel when we bombed a school on February 28th. We bombed a school.

We bombed a school.

Not the first, and it will unfortunately not be the last. Bombing schools is a new war tactic. Unabashed and brazen. And we’ve tried to pretend it wasn’t us. Everyone knows it was.

We are being led by psychopaths with a blood lust for what they believe will herald the second coming of Christ. I wish I was making that up. They actually said this out loud to U.S. troops last week. Over 200 enlisted folk filed formal complaints as a result. Our leaders are completely comfortable carpet-bombing Tehran, a modern city of 90 million inhabitants just trying to live their lives. We struck first. We are the aggressor. Business is good when we drop bombs.

In case you haven’t noticed, any flimsy myth of American piety around our value for freedom and democracy, for the rule of law and the sacredness of life has been obliterated.

So what comes next?

I wish I had an answer. There is so much that is uncertain. So much that hangs in the delicate balance of Wetiko, whim and profit.

What I do know is that this doesn’t end tomorrow. And what I do know is that the death-cultures that run our geopolitical world will continue to wreak havoc and chaos as they experience their own death spiral. Because the systems are dying, they no longer work. And the powers that be know it.

The old world is dying. The new one is yet to be born. This is truly the time of monsters.

What I do know is that another world is currently being built beneath the tatters of all this ash and that we cannot be stopped. Every day, I meet, talk to, read, encounter, pray with and sing with other humans who are actively building more beloved futures where everyone gets to thrive. There are too many of us humans who have tasted the beauty that lives and breathes on the other side of war. We know what peace hums like.

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We’ve been eating fresh foods from the earth. We’ve been medicating ourselves with plants and sunlight. We’ve been getting reconnected with nature and our souls. We’ve remembered how to say thank you to creator, source, god, goddess for the gift of this life. We’ve been blessing our water and befriending our neighbors and we’ve been filling our minds with peace. Peace and quiet and stillness. We now know how to be still in chaos. We are becoming ungovernable. We know the taste of true freedom.

When I actually sit with the devastating violence that some humans feel comfortable enacting on other humans, more than human kin and Earth herself, it can become very overwhelming. But when I sit with this reality, my ancestors sit with me too. They were warriors. They know too much of war. As ancestors they have dreamed me into being. They sent me here with a mission of peace. I’ve learned to translate their whispers. You too are the peaceful warrior dreamed in by your ancestors. That is how you have found me.

We are warriors of a different kind. Peaceful warriors who build the new that makes the old obsolete. We don’t even have to tear anything down. We simply remove our attention and our fear from the places that seek to siphon it and we focus on the love and simple beauty that is right in front of us. We become ungovernable and from that place, we build. We know the taste of true freedom.

We teach this to our kids and we protect their innocence. We pull them out of traditional schools so they can learn in the forest from their elders, so they can remember what it is like to play and dream. We protect their dreaming so that they can build the new worlds with us. They came with blueprints for beloved futures that we are just now beginning to understand. And with these moves, the futures become ungovernable. No longer ruled by governments that oppress, silence and kill. We find circles where once there were squares. We can breathe again.

We are the quiet movement that has been growing in every place in every way, slowly and steadily remembering what it is to be fully human and actually alive in the magical miraculous bodies that Earth gave us. These truths are self-evident and they cannot be taken from us. We become ungovernable when we know the taste of true freedom.

True freedom does not oppress others to survive. True freedom does not enact senseless violence. True freedom is satiated with simple beauty and authentic connection. True freedom thrives with collective liberation and the abundance of nature. Because true freedom knows that everything on Earth is of Earth, us included. And true freedom knows that Earth is a magical jewel in all the universe. True freedom speaks love poems. True freedom knows the gift of song. True freedom is who we are.

“The cloudy grey enchantments of a world gone mad fall away, replaced by the sacred drift of our collective geometry, bright and alive with potential. We remember ourselves in alignment with every other being of creation. In this remembering is a deep peace that passes any understanding of the mind. I can love you without ever having met you. I am you. We are together.”

~ Our Beloved Futures, p. 202

I’m here today to tell you - hang in there. Call me crazy, but I know that the best is yet to come. It’s going to be a rough road and the end is not in sight. But we are the future ancestors who understand the illusion of time. We dream new worlds with our breath. Build beauty where you can. Protect innocence where you can. Build communities where people care about each other and help others when it gets weird. Because it will get weird. So don’t be surprised by anything that comes our way. Most of all keep your heart open. Even in the most difficult circumstances, keep your heart open. It’s a superpower we’re still just beginning to comprehend.

~ Aubrey Morgan Yee, Our Beloved Futures

I picked my 12 year old son up yesterday from a land restoration field trip near our house. They were planting trees in an albatross nesting sanctuary and learning about the albatross. An amazing bird that can live to over 75 years old, they lay one egg per year and spend up to 5 years raising each young that they hatch. My sweet son told me that the Albatross hunt on the top layer of the ocean for small fish, plankton and shrimp. But now they also inadvertently fish up plastic and bring it back to feed their babies. And the babies are dying because their parents think they have been fed, but their stomachs are full of plastic.

Devastating. As a mother, my heart cracked open with sadness. Albatross babies with their bellies full, dying of hunger.

I thought about where in my life am I filling myself with plastic. Not literally, but metaphorically. Where am I full and starving at the same time. Where am I consuming manufactured, synthetic nourishment and mistaking it for Life?

We are all, every one of us, feeling so full and not realizing that our fullness is actually plastic. It’s not real, earthen or nourishing. We’re insanely busy, exhausted and still somehow there’s never enough time to ‘get it all done.’ What is ‘it’ anyway? Our inboxes are full and we have 10,000 text messages we can’t read or properly respond to. This isn’t what we came here to experience. We know innately that this is not the point of life and yet we are on a hamster wheel and don’t know how to get off without crashing.

Humans survived and empires thrived for centuries with hieroglyphics on stone as their main form of written communication. The email can wait.

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We have lost the sacredness of things. We are surrounded by what we perceive to be inanimate objects, items we consider dead, which makes them easily disposable, convenient, temporary and lifeless. Horrifically, this belief has extended to our treatment of people. Our systems now consider the majority of humans on earth expendable, useful for the extraction of their labor or life-force, convenient and disposable.

Let that sink in.

The plastic cup you got at Starbucks is a whole world and we toss it with abandon as if it will magically disappear to some place we call ‘away.’ Sometimes we are so lazy we don’t even get it into a trash can. It starts with the cup and extends to concentration camps in America where humans are being aggregated for a twisted purpose we don’t yet fully understand. That’s how sick our dominant global culture has become.

But what I really want you to digest as you read this, is that we must not become frozen in the face of mounting fear. Our number one job right now is to stay awake, to keep feeling, to keep our hearts open. It’s really not productive to soak for too long in the absurdity and toxicity of the world we have inherited.

The absurdity is everywhere, it’s quite violent and all of this is increasing as the systems that are dying take their final thrashes and death throes. Getting stuck in the multiplying rabbit holes that are everywhere is destabilizing and it has a freezing effect. You’re of no use to anyone, least of all yourself, when you’re frozen.

We have to face this moment courageously and with dignity. Spine straight. Eyes wide open. Heart wide open. We can be complicit no more. We have to look at the absurdity, at the albatross babies dying of starvation with bellies full of plastic and we have to be full of enough sacred rage to say “Fuck that, we don’t do that anymore.” It starts there and it builds like a wave.

Grieve. Feel. Be courageous enough to feel fully the fucked-up-ness of the moment and let those feelings move through you so they don’t get stuck. You are also of no use to Life when you are numb.

What does that look like? How does that show up in my day-to-day life? How can I fit anything more in my ridiculously busy life?

What if the shift isn’t doing more, it’s doing less. If a massive ship makes a one-degree turn, in no time it will be headed towards totally new lands. It didn’t do anything new, it just turned ever so slightly to the east. What is your one-degree shift? Could you make a one-degree shift, a micro movement toward the beloved futures you can feel every day, every week, every month?

Less consumption of disposable goods. Less social media. Less saying yes to events you don’t really want to go to. Making space for a quiet morning and a snuggle with your kids before they go to school. Shopping less. Eating out less. Making space by needing less stuff, less commitments, less busyness. Trading convenience for quality. Quality time, quality food, quality goods and quality relationships. Clear the clutter, less and less and then less again.

Slow down. Walk slower. Speak slower. Literally stop and smell the roses, the plumeria, the jasmine. Let each small step be a celebration of your natural enoughness. You are a drop in the ocean and we are a building wave. Be shocking with your stubborn commitment to joy in the face of collapse.

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We are in for a long haul of world-shaking changes. The structures that created this absurdity, this carnival of being that we now experience, are dying swiftly and the new worlds are being born. Birth is messy. Death is frightening. Despite all of that, we are ready. I’m here to remind you that you are ready. Start today and continue. That’s all it is. One day at a time. Going forward little by little and unsticking yourself when you get stuck.

I offer a prayer from my book Our Beloved Futures. May it bring you solace and solidity. You are a magnificent, magical agent of peaceful transformation, and I love you:

I am ready. My whole life has prepared me for this. I will tell the dying stories into the next world, alchemizing and composting their violence, so that stories of peace may awaken and shine. I will shed the guilt and shame of my privilege so that I may speak with confident humility and listen with full presence of heart and na’au, my gut. I will forgive and clear the passage of my throat to sing these songs of peace, the songs of Earth.

And so it is.

And so it always has been.

And so it will be again…