Episode 2. Life Breathes

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Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Negotiating Reality Podcast.I’m your host, Eric Hekler.

In Episode One, we started with a bold aphorism—one drawn from Indigenous prophecy and deeply rooted in the present:

"We are the 7th Fire People."

The 7th Fire Prophecy, shared by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, tells us we’re standing at a crossroads. One path stretches out soft and green—rooted in respect, reciprocity, and renewal. The other? Charred. Blackened. Littered with cut feet and short-term gains leading to long-term collapse.

But here’s the twist: Before we can move forward, the prophecy says we have to go backward. Not in fear—but in remembrance. We have to gather up what we’ve dropped along the way: fractured languages, forgotten songs, broken teachings, pieces of sacred wisdom—and rebuild a foundation worth walking on.

Why?

Because right now, the systems meant to tether us to reality—our civic institutions, spiritual stories, and natural stewardship practices—aren’t just outdated. They’re crashing. We’re trying to navigate 21st-century crises using operating systems built on 19th-century assumptions.

This isn’t the apocalypse. But it is a paradigm shift.

And to see the crossroads clearly, we have to stretch our sense of time.

Which brings us to our second aphorism:

"History is rhythmic—listen to the echoes."

When we zoomed in on history—especially U.S. history—we noticed a pattern. Not a perfect loop, but more of a breathing rhythm:

• Inhale: civic institutions rise while spiritual ones falter.

• Exhale: spiritual institutions rise while civic ones falter.

We explored how American society once had a kind of working dialogue—a healthy back-and-forth—between two kinds of leaders:

• Spiritual storytellers like Martin Luther King Jr., grounding us in ethics, care, and meaning.

• System-builders like John Dewey, organizing us with tools, structures, and policy.

For a while, that dynamic—what James Davison Hunter calls the Hybrid Enlightenment—held the center. But now? The rhythm’s broken. Trust has eroded. The table where we used to negotiate disagreements? It’s gathering dust... and memes.

So we asked: Are we still listening to history’s rhythms—or are we just shouting over them?

From there, we zoomed out even further…multigenerational rhythms, unfolding over centuries—the moments when civic, spiritual, and even natural systems all start glitching at once.

The lesson? If we don’t learn to renegotiate when systems fail, we don’t get renewal. We get scorched earth.

And yet...The past doesn’t hand us a script. It hands us rhythms. Waves. Patterns.

The question isn’t just what happened before—it’s: can we learn to dance with the rhythms instead of tripping over them?

Which brings us to today's focal aphorism:

"Life Breathes."

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Roadmap for today

If history has a rhythm, what happens when we zoom way out—past generations, past centuries—into geologic and cosmic time?

What if history isn’t just human memory—but planetary breath? The pulsing, expanding, and contracting of life itself—across billions of years?

Why does that matter?

Well...If you were riding a tidal wave that’s about to crash into shore—wouldn’t you want to know?

Here’s the roadmap for today’s journey:

Part 1: The Planet’s Vital Signs

We’ll start with the current health of our planet, using the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries model. Short version? Earth’s self-regulatory systems—the ones that keep life livable—are breaking down. Returning to the previous analogy, this is the tidal wave we are riding on that’s about to crash into the shore. Or, put more poetically: Our Mother Earth is struggling to breathe the way she once did—the way that made humanity possible.

Part 2: Why Creation Stories Matter

Next, we’ll dive into the importance of creation stories. (Trust me, it’s more than just ancient mythology.)

I’ll paraphrase some of my earlier writings—posts you can find on my Medium page (erichekler.medium.com)—where I wrestled with a big question:

Can we craft a creation story that honors both what science shows us and what spirit calls us toward?

One rooted in cosmology, geology, and physics—yet grounded in reciprocity, ethics, and awe. One that invites us to live in right relationship with the universe, not just study it.

Along the way, you’ll see how Robin Wall Kimmerer’s telling of the Skywoman story lit a path for me—but also why I felt we might need a bridge-story too, one that can speak to those of us steeped in Western science without losing the heartbeat of sacred living.

Part 3: A New Creation Story — "Life Breathing Together"

Then, I’ll tell a revised creation story—one aligned with what we know from contemporary science, and one that gives us a felt sense of how the universe breathes... and how we belong inside it.

This story—"Life Breathing Together"—will also set up future episodes:

• "Islands Sculpt" — exploring how environments shape us, drawing from the science of ecology

• "Beings Adapt" — exploring how humans adapt to reality bubbles, drawing from the sciences of neuroscience and psychology (finally getting into my home turf!)

These six words: Life breathes. Islands Sculpt. Beings Adapt. are the three part series focused on metaphysics. Explorations into the fundamental structure and nature of reality. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Important caveat: This creation story isn’t meant to be a rigid scientific claim. It’s a living framework—an offering for our moment—meant to be revised as we keep learning.

For those who want the deep dive into the scientific backing (and caveats), I’ve posted a sister essay where I put my scientist hat back on and lay it all out, which you can find on the negotiating reality substack page.

After that we'll wrap up with a few quick reactions, a recap, and then an invitation to try out a breathing and visualization exercise meant to help internalize the story of Life Breathing Together. 

How’s that sound? Good?

Awesome.

Let’s get into it.

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Earth’s Vital Signs

"We Earth system scientists and climate scientists are getting seriously nervous. The planet is changing faster than we had expected. We are, despite years of raising the alarm, now seeing that the planet is actually in a situation where we underestimated risks. Abrupt changes are occurring in ways way beyond our realistic expectations."

— Johan Rockström, Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

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That quote kicks off a TED Talk given by Johan Rockström in August 2024. If you don't know him, he’s the Director of the Potsdam Institute, home to some of the best planetary systems science on the planet.

It’s the team behind the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries Model—a framework that looks at nine key Earth system processes that need to stay in balance if we want a stable, resilient planet. Quick tour of the nine:

• Climate stability

• Chemical pollution

• Ozone layer integrity

• Atmospheric aerosols

• Ocean acidification

• Nutrient flows (nitrogen and phosphorus)

• Freshwater cycles

• Land system change

• Biodiversity of the biosphere

Basically, these are the vital signs of Earth’s health.

And here’s where things get tense: According to the latest updates, we’ve already crossed six of the nine boundaries.

Six. Out of nine.

If you want the full impact, I highly recommend watching Rockström’s talk yourself. (And in his words? “Buckle up.”)

You can find it here.

Now, why does this matter for what we’re doing here?

Because the best science we have tells a very clear story: Life only exists because of a beautifully complex dance across an orchestra of wave patterns and cycles.

When those cycles get too out of tune, life itself becomes fragile. And right now? The dissonance is growing louder.

This episode is an invitation to start tuning your senses—not just to history’s echoes, but to life’s breathing.

To see, feel, and align with the deep rhythms that have shaped existence for billions of years and feasibly eternally.

To do this though, what if we need to do is go back… way back. Beyond 4.5 billion years. Beyond 13.8 billion. And maybe—dare we say—beyond perceivable time itself?

To be grounded in this moment, it is my sense that we need to understand where we are —not just in culture or politics, but in space-time.

Where we are in the breathing of life itself.

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Why we need a good creation story?

If you hop over to my Medium page—erichekler.medium.com—you’ll find an article I wrote back in 2019 called What is the right origin story? If you want the full deep dive, I invite you to check that out. But for now, I’ll just paraphrase the highlights here.

The stories we tell about where we come from aren’t just dinner-party trivia or mythological leftovers. They shape everything—our values, our identities, our sense of purpose, and how we respond when reality starts to come apart.(Which kinda feels like... now.)

The dominant creation story in Western culture—the one Yuval Noah Harari sketches out in Sapiens—goes something like this:

🧠 Big Bang.
🌍 Planets form.
🧬 Life emerges.
🧠 Homo sapiens get clever, invent fire, language, agriculture.
🧪 Then, science.
🛠️ Then, industry.
🌐 Then, globalization.
🤖 Then, the Internet… and here we are, FaceTiming while the planet burns.

Now, to be fair—it’s a story with a lot of explanatory power. It maps onto real evidence. It tracks major leaps in knowledge, medicine, and communication. And yes, some things are better: infant mortality’s down, literacy is up, and you can ask a robot to play you music or the news while you chop onions.

But here’s the plot twist: Even as we’re living through a sci-fi dreamscape, there’s this gnawing feeling that something’s deeply... off. The vibe is not thriving.

🌡️ Climate collapse.
🌊 Dying oceans.
🥵 Heat waves and water shortages.
💰 Billionaires in rockets while food banks run dry.
🗳️ Political gridlock.
📉 Collective burnout.

This wasn’t in the brochure.

And here’s the kicker: Harari’s technocratic, human-centered creation story may be evidence-based, but it’s still... a story.
A story laden with values —like creating the idea of order from “chaos”, efficiency, and progress-through-technology. Values that, frankly, are starting to show some serious wear and tear.

And as we touched on in Episode 1, this progress story—according to Daniel Schmachtenberger and crew—is immature. It leaves the door wide open for exploiting people, places, and the planet in the name of “progress.”

Maybe the real problem isn’t that we took a wrong turn. Maybe it’s that we’re still following a bad map.

Creation stories don’t just explain the past. They anchor where we are in the present—and shape where we think we can go.

If the story we’re living tells us the goal is god-like power followed by planet-scale collapse, which is what Harrari concluded in his follow-up book Homo Deus—maybe it’s time for a new story.

And to be clear: this isn’t about rejecting science or evidence. It’s about being good at science. Good science updates itself. It revises models, which, really, is a type of structured story, when the models no longer fit reality. Indeed, I would argue that I am doing just that in this post and, to see that in action, please visit the sister supplemental article.

So, back in 2019, I went on a little quest: Could we imagine a better creation story?

One that’s about interdependence, not domination. One that honors complexity, not just cleverness. One that shifts the goal from "fix the world" to "tune ourselves to it."

That’s the take-home message I offered then. (And again, you can find my first stabs at different creation stories on Medium if you’re curious.)

To summarize my first attempt: I called it You can’t plant a rainforest.

I was deep in my systems thinking phase at the time—seeing everything through complex adaptive systems lenses. So the “story” I wrote was less story, more... dynamical and emergent systems framework process. A dynamical systems model about how nested systems—physical, biological, ecological, social, technological—interact, evolve, and occasionally give birth to new properties.

The engine driving evolution? A dance between diversification and harmonization.

The goal? Not dominance. Resonance.

And not just bland sameness—diverse resonance.

The kind you find in rainforests.
Or jazz.
Or functional democracies. (On good days at least.)

The rub though? 

You can’t brute-force this kind of resonance.
You can’t plant a rainforest.
You can’t program a symphony.

You listen.
You adapt.
You tune to the moment you’re in—knowing that moments shift, and systems change.

And while I still stand by the systems thinking in that post, looking back now...it wasn’t exactly poetry.

It lacked life.
It lacked love.
It lacked light.

Basically: it made sense to systems nerds (or at least to this system nerd), but to most other humans? It was a dud.

After that, I tried other analogies—comparing reality to computer systems, cybernetics... you name it. Still stuck in the systems frame. Still missing life.

Honestly, every time I finished one, I knew deep down: I hadn’t gotten it yet.

You’ll see on my medium space that I eventually started to explore this idea that I  called "Super Apex Predator Logic"—a set of not so healthily but understandable “guiding principles” that seemed to be pretty central, at least to me, in western culture: Might makes right. Greed is good. Hoard.

(We’ll return to this later, I’m sure, as we continue to understand the allure of the Scorched Earth path). 

But then—around 2021—I stumbled into a different kind of creation story.

Thanks to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, I found the Skywoman creation story. This is the story where the name “Turtle Island” comes from. And let me tell you: that changed everything for me.

If you haven’t read Braiding Sweetgrass yet... seriously, add it to your list. (I know, I know. I keep saying it. I’ll keep saying it.)

You can also find my Medium post Lived Reciprocity where I dig into this story and its implications.

Here’s an extremely short version. 

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🌱 Skywoman’s Fall: A Creation Story Worth Dancing With

Before Earth existed, there was Skyworld. And from that world, a woman fell—not in fear, but in grace. Pirouetting like a maple seed, carrying a bundle of life.

And instead of falling into chaos, she was caught—by geese. Not because they had a plan. Not because she was "chosen." Because community shows up.

Communities came together. All creatures of the earth came together giving and receiving gifts. From that, there was the birth of Turtle Island. For the full story, read Braiding Sweetgrass. 

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Why is this story so powerful?

• It centers gift, not conquest. Skywoman didn’t arrive to dominate. She came bearing seeds and gratitude. She danced the land into being.

• It celebrates reciprocity, not hierarchy. Animals help her not because she’s human, but because she’s kin. Even Muskrat—the tiniest among them—gives the greatest gift. Creation happens through, in part, sacrifice, and, most critically, reciprocity, not domination.

• It honors interdependence. No single being builds the world. It’s an ensemble act: Skywoman, Turtle, Muskrat, Goose...All risking, trusting, creating together.

• It turns the fall into grace. Skywoman falls—but she’s caught. Vulnerability isn’t weakness—it’s the soil creation grows from.

• It redefines being a "good guest." Skywoman arrives not to conquer, but to cultivate. She plants, tends, thanks. She inhabits, she does not exploit.

If we’re serious about updating our creation story, Skywoman offers stunning design principles:

🌾 Begin with gratitude.
🐢 Honor the smallest among us.
🌍 See interdependence as real power.
🍎 Lead with gifts, not demands.
💃 Dance with Earth—don’t trample her.
🌿 Steward, don’t dominate.

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With all this in mind, I’m now taking another shot at a creation story. 

One that is aligned with these design principles from Sky Woman, and, thus, Nature’s way.

Before we dive deeper into today’s story, I want to invite you to a read text-only write-up describing how I built this creation story. 

As I alluded to in the beginning, I am seeking stories and explanations that are resonant with three key ways of knowing: 

1. The Objective Way – rooted in science, technology, and objective observation;

2. Nature’s Way – informed by indigenous wisdom and ecological knowledge focused on experientially knowing how to live in reciprocity;

3. Spirit’s Way – grounded in spirituality, ethics, and religion, focused on experientially knowing wholeness and oneness.

I will return to each of these ways of knowing in future episodes, but, I wanted to tag here that I’m using this approach even in the construction of this story. (note, I also go into a bit more depth on this, if you want, in the supplemental article).  

With this, this is why I started with the Skywoman story.  I found it to be a beautiful story that provides critical values, just discussed, to be integrated into this story. 

In this episode, I’m also drawing from the Objective Way—what we might call the rules of science;  the processes and institutions that grew out of the Enlightenment. 

I am explicitly inviting this story to be reviewed and critiqued, just as any work can and should be when engaged in as part of the Objective Way.   And, While I don’t believe science alone can give us the full picture of reality, I do believe it is a necessary part of our toolset to get there. And I love science—I genuinely do. I want to honor the profound gift of science in this work. 

When building the story, I studied popular works from expert scientists— physicists like Brian Greene and Timothy Palmer. Greene, through string theory, imagines a universe headed toward cold, endless expansion. Palmer, on the other hand, offers the Invariant Set Hypothesis, a bold attempt to explain the universe’s structure using chaos theory and fractals—suggesting the universe may, in fact, be cyclical.

That matters, because the idea of a cyclical universe—one of renewal and return—is something echoed not just in parts of physics, but also in Nature’s Way and Spirit’s Way. So, while science hasn’t definitively chosen a side, I chose to emphasize Palmer’s perspective, because it resonates more deeply with that broader, consilient view.

I did something similar in geology. I read Andrew Knoll and Marcia Bjornerud, two acclaimed scientists who helped me understand how Earth’s cycles—its flows, upheavals, and patterns—supports the idea that life is more than just cells and organisms. Life includes many interacting systems functioning at vastly different, complementary cycles and timescales. Systems—when they’re self-regulating and interdependent—might just deserve the label ‘alive’ too. 

That’s why, in this story, I stretch the definition of life. I invite a perspective of life being inclusive of all complex adaptive self-regulatory systems we are reliant upon for our form of life to exist.  (and, you might then ask, with a definition like that, what is NOT included in life? Good question!  In brief, any human invented technology, machine, or objects). 

That might sound bold, but here’s the thing: it’s scientifically arguable, spiritually resonant, and ecologically grounded. It’s consilient resonance. And that’s the point.

So, as we move forward, know this creation story isn’t just poetic—it’s built on a carefully integrated foundation of what we know, what we feel, and what we’ve inherited across generations of knowing.

For more details and with these arguments written out more with my “science hat” on, please read the text-only sister post to this episode on negotiatingreality.substack.com, which you can find here.  I even propose the starting point of an empirical formalism to test the boundaries of what is alive vs. not. It’s something you could try to prove yourself (though, fair warning, I think you will find my test very hard to do).  All of this is offered in the spirit of scientific exploration and, in that space, hypothesis generation and theory construction.

OK, with all the background, let’s get to the main event!

A revised creation story… Life breathing together.

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Life breathing together. A Creation Story

Before the beginning...
Before even the idea of time...
There was breath.

Not ours.

Before we breathed, there were breaths before us—Breaths that made our breath possible.

There was our source.

Universe.

Turning to one—an all-encompassing inhale, what some physicists call the Big Crunch.

Everything that was, and everything that could be, folded into a single point.

A singularity.

And from that held breath came the exhale—the Big Bang.
The burst of light and possibility.
The one universe turning to many.
The out breath we are riding.

Thirteen point eight billion years ago, energy poured forth.
Matter emerged.
Quarks and leptons.
Hydrogen and helium.
Light and potential.
A radiant sea, spinning outward.

And through it all moved something that birthed our capacity to measure time:
Gravity.

Not just a force, but a space-time yearning—a love that pulls all things to form.

Gravity gathered hydrogen into stars.
Stars into galaxies.

From the cosmic kiln came a new whisper—then a roar:
Fusion.

The great fiery breath of becoming.
Fusion and gravity, singing together, birthed stars, forged elements, cast out the energy that would feed all other forms of life to come.

Stars bloomed.
Elements brewed.

And from the death of one great star came the swirling matter that would become our Grandmother Sun.

And soon after, our Mother Earth was born.

Not as dominion.
Not as possession.
But as gift.

She danced with her Mother Sun, breathing together—just as our Grandmother Sun dances with our Black Hole, at the center of our galaxy, the great steadying singularity of the Milky Way.

Our lineage—from Earth, to Sun, to Black Hole—is not a story of conquest. It is a story of resonance. Of possibility.

Mother Earth was shaped by grace and gravity, forged from fire, dancing with her Sister Moon, born from a great collision.

In her heart, she spun a magnetic shield—a cradle to shelter her children from the storms of her Mother Sun.

Her crust danced.

Plates shifted.
Volcanoes breathed out carbon dioxide and other gases, birthing an atmosphere.
Storms wore down mountains, churning nutrients into the sea.

Her oceans gathered—shimmering blue lungs on her cooling face. The womb where new kinds of breath would begin.

Comets and meteorites offered the whispers of biological life. Lightning offered the spark.

And then—Biological life joined the breathing.

Not all at once.
Slowly.
Communally.

RNA strands copying, adapting.
Bacteria feasting on sulfur and carbon.

And then, in a moment so small it could be missed, one kind of being—cyanobacteria—learned to soak in Mother Sun’s light.
They made food from sunlight—and gave back oxygen.

Oxygen changed everything.
The ocean.
The sky.
The future.

Cells partnered.
Mitochondria danced.
Life burst into multitudes.

Life never rose alone.
Plants and fungi joined to colonize land.
New forms of life emerge through co-creation.

Earth nurtured life not by control, but by nourishment—through breathing soil, through the rise and fall of mountains, through the tides of carbon and oxygen, the flowing currents of her seas.

Animals learned to breathe too, when the conditions were right.

Some crawled.
Some swam.
Some hunted.
Some danced.

And always—there was breath.
The invisible song, passed from fin to leaf to hand to sky.

And there were disruptions.
Mass extinctions.
Volcanoes raging.
Ice ages blanketing continents.

But life always breathed again.
New forms.
New rhythms.
New songs.

And in time—mammals.
Apes.
And... us.

We, the improbable ones.
We, the beautiful, ephemeral, fragile ones.
The next experiment in the long unfolding of life breathing together.

We, who can not only breathe—but know we breathe.
Who can tell the story of living breath.

We carry the breath of trees in our lungs.
We dance on the shifting crust of our Mother Earth.
We hold the stardust of ancient suns in our bones.
We are woven with bacterial kin, and we hear the whisper of ancient tides in our ears, when we stop to listen.

We are not above our Mother Earth.
We are of her.
Made by her.
Sustained by her.
Breathing with her.

But we forgot.

We mistake dominion for belonging.
We trade dance for drilling.
We exhale more carbon than our sister plants could receive.
We burden our oceans until they strain from our pollutants.

The sacred breathing that sustains us is thinning.

And so we stand at a threshold.

Will we breathe with life, all life?

Cosmic, geologic, biologic.

Or will we steal breath?
Hoard it.
As if breathing were a human-invented, non-living commodity.
Some thing that can be bought and sold.  

We are the first to know this breath, to name it, to feel the resonance of our breath with the breathing of our oceans, moon, Mother Earth, Grandmother Sun, Uni-verse.

We are the first to understand:
We breathe with stars.
With soil.
With tides.
With trees.
With each other.

Cosmic, geologic, and biological Life breathing together.
One turning to many.
Many turning to one.
A breathing, living, universe that we are breathing with and are a part of. 

Here we are—on our beautiful small blue ephemeral orb Mother Earth, warmed by our fiery Grandmother Sun, churned by a flowing Sister Moon,
Stitched together by breath upon breath upon breath.

Let us remember:

Breath is not a resource.
It is a relationship.

🎶 [Music swells, fade out]

A response to anthropomorphizing the universe

Before we do a recap, I want to name something that might already be bubbling up for some of you.

Maybe you just had a gut reaction like:

"Wait a second—you’re anthropomorphizing everything!"
"The Universe! The Sun! The Earth! The Moon! The Oceans! You can’t do that!"

If that’s you—first, I see you. And honestly? Good instinct.

We don't want to fall into the trap of assuming that the way we are, humans that is, is how other beings move and feel and do.
Projection is a real thing.
Respecting difference matters.

And yet—If that was your reaction, I want to gently invite a follow-up question:

What if this reaction is, itself, a little like when people insisted the Earth was at the center of the solar system?

Could it be that in trying so hard not to anthropomorphize, we end up swinging to another extreme—refusing to engage with the deep, strange, and beautiful ways that other beings are alive, on their terms?

Could we be cutting ourselves off from the possibility of a kind of radical empathy?
A way of seeing, feeling, and tuning to the deep, diverse, resonant breath of life itself?
Not just human life—but cosmic life, geologic life, biological life?

Because from where I sit, this allergy to "anthropomorphizing" sometimes feels a lot like insisting the Earth is still at the center of everything.
It’s another way of subtly privileging the human perspective—And it can be protected, when one only sees through the objective way.
This is a big, important tension—the profound beauty and necessity of the Objective Way, and the unintended blindspots that can happen if we use it alone, without also weaving in Nature’s Way and Spirit’s Way.
If you’re feeling skeptical—or just curious—I’d love for you to check out the sister post to this episode.
It’s a supplement where I break down the books I used to develop this story, the method I used to choose those authors, and how I applied ideas from systems science to define what we even mean by “life” versus “non-life.”

In that post, I take a structured, thoughtful approach—rooted in the Objective Way—to explore where the boundary of life might reasonably be drawn. And beyond that, I lay out how I’ve tried to weave together evidence from the Objective Way, Nature’s Way, and Spirit’s Way. My aim? To show that the creation story you just heard is, indeed, consilient—grounded in and resonant across all three ways of knowing.

So seriously—go take a look. And once you’ve read it, if you’re still unsure, or if something isn’t sitting right with you, that’s great!

Negotiate with me.

Tell me what I’m getting wrong. Let’s get into a real dialogue—a peer review process, for real. I mean that.

I’m here for respectful debate and critique that honors the rigor of the Objective Way—as long as we also keep space for the wisdom of Nature’s Way and the insights of Spirit’s Way.

(And yes, spoiler:We’ll come back to all this in much more depth in future episodes.)

But for now, I’ll leave you with a few questions:

• What if all forms of being were part of life? Cosmic life. Geologic life. Biological life. Human life.

• What if we thought of life not as something humans "own" or "represent," but as something we participate in—a vast, living symphony of becoming?

• How might that change the way you see the stars? The soil? The trees?The oceans? The air itself?

• How might it change the way you act? The way you listen? The way you breathe?

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Recap Time

With that, we move to the episode recap, with follow-up invitations. 

🎶 [Music swells, fade out]

Alright, before we wrap today, let’s take a breath together—and do a quick recap of where we've been.

We started by zooming out—way out—past personal timelines, past national histories, into the deep breathing rhythms of Earth and the cosmos.

We heard from Johan Rockström and the Planetary Boundaries work, showing us that Earth's vital signs are flashing red. Our Mother Earth is struggling to breathe the way she once did—the way that made our existence possible.

We explored how life itself relies on a complex harmony of cycles and waves—and how when those rhythms are disrupted, life becomes fragile.

From there, we asked a deeper question: What creation story are we living by?

We traced the dominant Western narrative—Big Bang, clever apes, industrial machines, internet dreams—and how that story, while once powerful, feels like it’s fraying under the weight of its own assumptions and the implicit values that came along for the ride and shaped its structure.

We explored why creation stories matter—because they shape how we see ourselves, what we value, what we believe is possible.

And we dug into my own journey of wrestling with these questions: from systems thinking models, to grappling with "Super Apex Predator Logic," to discovering the Skywoman Creation Story through Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Skywoman showed us a different way: A story rooted in gift, reciprocity, vulnerability, community, and tending the world rather than conquering it.

From that inspiration, I offered a new creation story: Life Breathing Together.

A story that invites us to see life not as hierarchy, not as conquest—but as an unfolding, breathing symphony across cosmic, geologic, and biological life.

We named a common gut reaction—the fear of anthropomorphizing—and gently challenged it.

Maybe respecting difference isn't about severing connection.Maybe it's about listening more deeply.Recognizing that we are participants, not spectators,in a vast, living cosmos.

Finally, we closed with an invitation:

🌿 To breathe with life, not against it.💫 To marvel in the possibility that we belong to a breathing universe.

🌎 To honor breath as relationship, not resource.

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So here we are—on our small, shimmering, living, blue Mother Earth, stitched together by breath upon breath upon breath.

The question before us isn't just: What will we do?It’s deeper than that:

How will we breathe?

Together.

If you’d like to explore a guided breathing meditation that pairs with this creation story—a sort of sister piece—I invite you to check it out. It’s available now and ready whenever you are.

I suggest listening to it somewhere you can sit comfortably, relax, and really drop into the experience. No rush. Just presence.

And whenever you’re ready, I’ll be here—whether that’s in a negotiation episode, where we dig into the ideas more directly, or in a future aphorism episode, where we let ideas marinate and point toward finding ways to represent meaning.

Either way, I look forward to continuing the conversation with you.

🎶 (Music swells to close)