Heal to Lead

24Project Rebuild

THERE ARE MANY reasons why Indigenous peoples refer to plants as the strength of the earth. They are intelligent and resilient and have so much to teach us. At the tail end of my Ayahuasca journey in Peru, I had the honor of witnessing the reciprocal reverence that is possible for us all. The final vignette that I was shown enabled me to understand where we might be headed as a global ecosystem first, and as humanity second.

Soaring slowly below cloud level, I could see a return to symbiosis. As opposed to natural resources being available as raw materials, property, or capital to humans, we were in intimate relationship with nature. We worked with the breathtaking biodiversity and topography instead of going against natural law for the benefit of our singular species. We abided by gratitude-centricity, and we knew the land as a library, as medicine, and as a source of wonderment. Humans worked together seamlessly, bartered goods, and combined their innate gifts and technical prowess in the most innovative ways imaginable. There were groups and leaders of groups, of course, yet the latter changed based on what needed to be accomplished. Now, there were also fewer people throughout this vision and I was privy to only one portion of the world, but I got the distinct sense that this was a microcosm of the new global systems of currency, food production, and business. Some of our current systems seemed unnecessary and were nowhere to be found. To me, this version ...