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Register for the November 12, 2024 live
community discussion at 11 a.m. ET here. See more below.
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"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there." – Rumi
Rumi's 13th century poem gives us clues for where to find allies in transcending culturally engineered conflict. At Kindred, this insight serves as our nonprofit mission and vision: Restoring our Kinship Worldview (expansion) with our evolutionary pathway to wellbeing, our Evolved Nest (grounding). Please join me near a field under a tree, beyond our Dominant Worldview's predictable incoherent manifestations in this issue's letter from the editor. Find this editorials list of resources to keep us moving toward wholeness here (it's long).
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Grounded Expansion:
What The Mother Tree “Ent” Said
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The Beech Mother Tree on the land we steward stands near the edge of the woods atop a sloping ravine between a small, red barn and a perennial, babbling brook. On a walk in the woods many years ago, we discovered the colossal tree and knew instantly it was an Ent by the saggy elephant legs and waving tail on its Eastern side. Its Western side held out massive moss-covered arms along the forest floor, stretching toward the stream, creating perfect seating for two or three humans.
Mother Trees are the trees that have been around the longest and formed the most numerous and meaningful connections with their community. An Ent, if you haven’t met one, is a mythical shepherd of trees that “walks” around the woods at night, and when humans aren’t looking, to tend its tree family. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Ents are allies of the free peoples of Middle-earth. Our beloved tree was both.
Over the years, I have sat in the arms of the Mother Tree Ent listening to the stream in front of me and rustling leaves and bird calls from the expansive canopy above me. As I sink deeper into the strong arms of the Ent, I realize I am holding onto and being held by steadfast roots that disappear deep into the ground beneath and all around me.
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Using my active imagination, I move along the Mother Tree’s roots, into, through, and out of the dark depths of earth, upward through the cambium, sap, and bark of the tree’s trunk toward sunlight, an impossible 80 feet skyward. Steering my meditation, I move through long limbs and curling branches expanding beyond surrounding canopies, finally peering over the miles covered by the stream below on its journey to the river.
The dizzying view from the Mother Tree’s canopy exists, seemingly, in its own world. Eighty feet below, the dark, earthbound root system also thrives in its own world. And yet they form one sentient being: one thriving, colossal, intelligent Mother Tree whose mastery of Grounded Expansion supports her own life, and many lives around her.
The phrase Grounded Expansion emerged for me while exploring Integral Parenting as a Spiritual practice with Miriam Mason Martineau in this timeless Kindred podcast. I described kneeling before my young son, being fully present to our connection, and opening my heart as an experience of Grounded Expansion. But later I realized, of course, this is Love.
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What we are experiencing now as a human family is the long-running manifestation of an ungrounded, myopic Dominant Worldview. America was identified in social science research eighty years ago as an anti-nurturing culture. Today, our notorious Taboo on Tenderness has dropped us to the bottom of all international indices for individual, maternal, infant, child and family wellness. We are predominantly a Loveless culture.
In healthy human development, our rootedness is developed by providing our Evolved Nest, our evolutionary pathway to wellbeing. By providing our Evolved Nest we support the unfolding of our Kinship Worldview, our innate relational capacities to nurture ourselves and all of our kin (trees too). Like the root system and canopy of the tree, these concepts may seem worlds apart, and yet together they reveal our path to wholeness.
Without our deep rootedness, we’re stuck in an ungrounded, myopic culture, creating stories with limited beliefs and very little Love. We explore both the scientific theories, research, and applied praxis of these concepts, the Evolved Nest and Kinship Worldview, at Kindred.
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For over a quarter century, Kindred World’s nonprofit vision has been to forge a New Story beyond our current ungrounded, myopic Old Story. If you are feeling a need to stretch beyond the din of our current cultural contraction and into a more expansive, Love-filled worldview, here and below are a few resources for you to explore.
Or, as Mother Trees and Ents are still allies of the free peoples of Middle-earth, and this Earth, you could just find your local Mother Tree Ent and sit with her for a while. She can also help you go deep and rise above this season.
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Finally, please help us with our nonprofit needs for Grounded Expansion with your donations (check out our 115 five-star reviews here).
Onward and upward,
Lisa Reagan
Kindred Magazine, Editor
Kindred World, Founder
editor@kindredmedia.org
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New Worldview Literacy Project & Updated Worldview Chart for Rebalancing Life Systems on Planet Earth
"The Worldview Chart and the precepts contained within act as a lighthouse or a beacon, grounding in our original ways, returning to balance, and inspiring right action." – Worldview Chart Study & Survey Participant
You are welcome to download the expanded Worldview Chart by Four Arrows in color or black and white PDF here.
You can also purchase a poster of the chart here.
Learn more about Worldview Literacy and restoring our Kinship Worldview on the new Worldview Literacy Project website, a Kindred World initiative, here.
The Worldview Literacy Project offers self-study and communal learning resources and materials, as well a survey to share your experience and insights of working with the chart.
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Wikipedia’s First Ever Definition Of “Stay-At-Home Mother” Reveals Economic & Cultural Realities Creating A Lack Of Choice
Unfortunately most U.S. family policy is crafted through the lens of “working families,” leaving out at-home mothers and at-home fathers, who are forgoing paid employment in order to care for their children by choice or by circumstance. FAHN found that stay-at-home fathers have their own Wikipedia page, and now stay-at-home mothers have one too.
“Care has value, whether it’s done by child care providers or by parents themselves,” says Myers. “At-home mothers, at-home fathers, and other unpaid caregivers must be recognized and their care counted and supported with equitable, inclusive family policies.”
Listen to the podcast interview.
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Beyond Attachment and the New Trauma-informed Feminism
Women, as I have observed from the perch of my decades-long role as a trauma therapist, have been devoted to unwinding and discarding the burdens of trauma.
Indeed, research shows that women are more likely to seek treatment for trauma than men (National Center for PTSD, 2023). Using fMRI data, the National Institutes of Health published research that shows that women’s regulatory capacities are more adroit when it comes to resolving trauma and moving past it (McRae, 2008).
What is clear to me is that women are highly motivated to become unenslaved from the shackles of trauma. We are acutely conscious of the physiology of those shackles, and actively seek strategies for liberation. Our health depends on this and we know it in our bones.
Read the post and watch the podcast interview.
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Does Your Mind Need To Be Decolonized?
Colonization goes deep.
By Darcia Narvaez
Interestingly, deciders and perpetrators in the efforts to forcibly assimilate Native children, like many people still today, were unable to see that they themselves had been colonized (though in a less extreme manner). They and their ancestors were forced away from their own ancient Nature-centric cultures. Growing up, they likely were treated like property or commodities to be used for family gain through labor or marriage. In babyhood, they were likely treated as nuisances or burdens, which still continues today.
Read the post.
Read more of Darcia's Fall 2024 osts on our Evolved Nest:
Child Humiliation
Contemporary Eliminationism and Facism
Virtue and Vice, Individual and Cultural
Dishonoring and Disrespecting Young Boys
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10 Ways To Be An Exceptional Listener
By Kelly Wendorf
These behaviors not only affect how you are perceived as a listener; they influence your own attitudes and inner feelings. Doing your part actually changes how you feel inside. This in turn makes you a better listener. And if you’re reading this essay and wishing others would do this for you, keep this in mind: the more you model great listening, the more you’ll inspire others to listen better to you. Exceptional listening elevates the whole system.
Read the post.
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Babies Love Rhyming Time
By Pam Leo
In our post-pandemic family literacy epidemic, one in four homes have no books at all... One of the ways parents and caregivers can give babies the best shot at literacy, without an abundance of books, is by singing and saying as many nursery rhymes and songs to babies and young children as we can every day. For babies and young children, the three R’s are rhythm, rhyme, and yes…the dreaded repetition.
Read the post.
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Kindred Board Member PRESENTATIONS | |
Worldview, Peace, And The Socially-Purposeful Life: Four Arrows Workshop On The Worldview Chart
In this lively discussion and Worldview Chart Workshop, Four Arrows leads us, and Veterans For Peace members, through how to view the recently updated Worldview Chart and how it can be used to create a socially-purposeful life and peaceful world.
Kindred World launched the Worldview Literacy Project, a self-directed or community learning program exploring rebalancing life on earth with worldview literacy, in August 2024. The WLP features the Worldview Chart by internationally renown Indigenous studies scholar, Four Arrows, as well as instructions for how to participate in a 90-day engagement with the Worldview Chart ending with a survey to gather participant’s stories and insights.
Watch the presentation.
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Feminine Futures
Darcia Narvaez presented at this conference.
By Darcia Narvaez
Kindred World's President
I spent most of a week with a set of remarkable women in Devon, England. Organized by Local Futures leader, Helena Norberg-Hodge (with assistance), our interdisciplinary group spent a day planning and then gave a daylong workshop and evening session to about 100, mostly women, participants. The focus was on our work investigating and promoting life-affirming lifeways, what was labeled “Feminine Futures”—with “feminine” here meaning the aspect of every human being that aims towards enhancement of living beings, human and non-human, and Earth. (Local Futures is a nonprofit partner of Kindred World.)
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The Biology of Belonging
ACES Aware Scotland - May 7-8, 2025, Darcia Narvaez, Kindred's president, will be a keynote speaker.
ACE-Aware Scotland held our first major event in 2018. Nearly 2500 people came because they wanted to know more about the importance of relationships for human thriving. Every year since, we have hosted a major event, and every year we continue to be inspired by the public’s enthusiastic hunger for this information.
ACES Aware Scotland is a nonprofit partner of Kindred. Read their stories here.
Register for the event.
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Join the Kindred COMMUNITY | |
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Kindred Community is a safe, kind, and vetted space to engage and connect with our Kindred Community through Mighty Networks!
This platform is ad-free, algorithm-free, and owned by us. You can download the app to the network and post and stay up-to-date with group discussions, research, and upcoming events.
Join at www.KindredCommunity.org.
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A Question from Our Community ANSWERED | |
QUESTION: "I’m hoping this wonderful and inspiring community of change makers might have book suggestions that I could read with my middle school aged son? Specifically, I am wondering about stories that show and teach a worldview different from our WEIRD one 💕!" – Dara Schulbaum
ANSWER: Thank you to everyone who responded to Dara's question and helped us to create the Children's Books with Indigenous/Kinship Worldview section of our book store on Bookshop here.
All of your purchases in our Bookshop store support independent book sellers and our nonprofit work!
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Read 115 Five-Star Reviews and Statements of Impact of our Nonprofit Vision-Holding Work! | |
Kindred Magazine is an educational initiative of Kindred World, an American 501C3 nonprofit that has Served the Re-Generation Since 1996.
Discover what we've learned in a quarter century of vision-holding for a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society, here.
Read 115 five-star reviews here.
Our gratitude to everyone who has supported Kindred World's work over these past 25 years!
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Kindred Media - www.KindredMedia.org | |
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