What will it take to regenerate the Earth?

How does life, in its ever-unfolding evolutionary processes, organise itself? Looking at Earth as an unfolding evolutionary process of life, how does life find coherence with itself? What does it mean to be human in these times? How does humanity come back into right relationship and coherence with how the Earth organises life? What will it take to regenerate the Earth?

These powerful questions brought by Design School for Regenerating Earth co-founders Joe Brewer and Penny L. Heiple set the context for the coming days of bioregional discussion taking place in the r3.0 conference, which has gathered hundreds of participants from around the world online and in locally-based 'confluencing' groups.

After a moving opening invocation by Eastern Pequot Tribal Council member Jelani Fletcher on Sacred Obligations applied to a bioregional context, Penny and Joe shared a deep meditation, brilliant synthesis and 'panoramic scale framing' of the inner/outer personal, collective, systemic, planetary and cosmic dimensions of coherence -- its implications for the bioregional movement and for life on the planet.

Here, we offer word-weavings with Penny and Joe's incredible presentation for StoryMoss Magazine:

Through deep and complex roots of historical trauma, much of humanity has fallen out of coherence with dynamic, living, breathing patterns of life on Earth -- violently colonizing peoples and land, extracting resources, and imposing artificial boundaries completely out of sync with the flows of rivers, contours of mountains, movements and migrations of insects, birds and larger animals.

Drawing on a deep understanding of Earth Systems, Joe described how Earth's living patterns are formed through the rhythmic pressures of lunar dances around a spinning, tilting, orbiting Earth -- giving rise to the movements of weather systems, ocean tides, currents and deep vents, tectonic plates. These in turn shape the geophysical contexts for life's diverse expressions, including those of human cultures.

From the work of Donella Meadows and the Balaton Group in the 1970s and 80s, a strong basis of bioregional thinking emerged in the proposition that people organise themselves by bioregion, creating a planetary network of bioregional learning centres supporting diverse human cultures in living sustainably in their bioregions while sharing resources and learning from one another. This is the story of a Bioregional Earth we are living into now!

The story has wider inner and cosmic dimensions too. Penny spoke of "Embodying Eco-Holo-Fractal Coherence" -- of the 'eco-holo-fractal- nature of the cosmos itself. The hologram, or holon, expressing the wholeness of the cosmos that is inherent in every point. Fractals as repeating fundamental patterns rippling out across scales. The sacred geometry of a unified physics to explain the holo-fractal nature of the cosmos (Nassim Haramein, Marshall Lefferts). From this founding bioregionalist David Haenke, in conversation with Bill Baue, brought in the Eco -- that Earth organises itself ecologically through these same holo-fractal patterns.

"It's an enormous design principle from which we can extrapolate how to live in coherence with life. Bioregions are our master teachers, we just have to learn to listen and connect with the forests, the rivers, the oceans. We just have to wake up and connect with our life places," Penny said.

What prevents this is a dominant, mechanistic worldview of separation and disconnection across individual, collective and systemic levels, born out of trauma which lives and permeates our bodies and nervous systems as well as our belief systems and cultures. Trauma manifests in many ways: in our arrogance and lack of empathy, in avoidance and denial of pain, in individualism, social isolation, fractured relationships and acquiescence to extreme bad actors.

Intellectual, spiritual and embodied awakening from the depths of trauma presents an evolutionary possibility for our species. Beneath all the trauma patternings, there remains the coherence of beauty and life. We just need to find our way back to it. As Penny said: "The wound is the pathway -- if we can turn towards our wounds and meet them with love." The pathway to transformation is through reconnection; through an embodied rediscovery of relationality and reciprocity, through falling in love with the natural coherence -- the beauty, health and harmony of life, we find our way back to Earth.

"Bioregions are already coherent to themselves," said Penny. And because of this, our bioregions and bodies are the only teachers we need. Want to learn how the flows of water naturally organise coherence on Earth? Go and sit by the river, said Joe. As Penny said, "We just need to come back into our body connection and our connection to our life places. Then we will become coherent once again with life on Earth."