Radical Hope #9: The World is Already Speaking. Can You Hear It?
You are a body that thinks.
You are nature.
You are the field of awareness in which everything happens.
You have a regular practice where you return home to systems consciousness.
In Newsletter 8 we explored how small, well-timed perturbation — a shift in rhythm, a restored centre of gravity, a single coherent presence — can reorganise a chaotic field. 1 Breakdown and breakthrough sit side by side.
Over this and the following newsletter, we explore how we can follow, merge with and sometimes find ourselves leading perturbations which spontaneously arise in the field and systems consciousness.
Today, not-knowing, listening and witnessing.
Next Newsletter, following emergent impulses for change.
This is the ninth newsletter in a series called From Generative Practice to Radical Hope. I am exploring why deep personal development — somatic, psychological, contemplative — is not a retreat from the polycrisis but the very ground from which genuine engagement becomes possible.
The world is already speaking
The living world is not awaiting instructions — it is already patterned, intelligent, in motion before the conscious mind arrives.
As we saw in Newsletter 2, the problem in the world is the linear, conscious mind’s desire to intervene without first resting in embodied systems consciousness with curiosity.
In Relationship with the More-Than-Human World
I was feeling deep sadness and grief about the prediction, accepted by the majority of climate scientists, that we are heading towards the mass extinction of many species, including our own. (2)
It is possible for us to mitigate this to some degree, but so far, we have failed to do so.
In this grief, I sought to nourish myself by looking at the beauty of a white rambling rose that climbed up the side of a country cottage, loose cupped and chaotic in its excitement. I stood close to a single flower and looked deeply into its heart for a while, feeling its beauty and love of life in my body.
I felt the urge to step closer, and as I did so, I stepped unwittingly into a tangle of dangling roses above me that landed on the crown of my head. I stood quietly embraced by the flowers and felt a soothing cascade of luminous energy pouring down through my body. It felt like a blessing from the flower kingdom, and I felt deeply nourished and held.
It seemed to me that my grief was met with love.
In connecting with the flower, I offered presence, the rose offered blessing.
We need to think about what we are doing to nature, but equally important, we need to feel ourselves in a direct relationship and conversation with nature.
A relationship of equals.
Reciprocity: an exchange between beings
Reciprocity — the ethical heartbeat of relationship between humans and the living world — is what Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American plant ecologist and botanist, and other indigenous scholars call the ground of right relationship: the earth not as storehouse but as community of beings who give generously and deserve generosity in return. (3)
We are part of nature
We are part of nature, and our biology communicates with other-than-human biologies.
Have you ever tried listening to a flower or a tree?
Have you ever felt that the flower or the tree or the lake or the ocean or the mountain was communicating back?
Getting up close and personal with nature
I love to get up close and personal with the living beings of the earth — a tree, a flower, a river, a sea, an animal.
I was sleeping in the afternoon in the sun outside my tent on a high mountain pass in the Pyrenees. Suddenly I heard whoomph-whoomph-whoomph and looked up to see a large vulture with open wings stalling its descent when she realised I wasn’t dead meat, but alive. She veered off, I sat up and watched the vulture and others circling in the vast sky around me. A little later I found a fresh vulture wing feather on my path, as if it were a gift.
Learning to Listen and Witness
If we want nature beings — trees, flowers, animals (including people), rivers, oceans — to speak to us, we need to learn to listen.
It is more than simply listening. We need to witness — to give our full attention from the state of systems consciousness we have been developing. Systems consciousness facilitates listening with our ears, eyes, the sensing centres of our body, and our gut feelings — the intuitive signals that help us sense safety, connection, openness, and engagement.
Paying attention to the whole and the parts
From an awareness point of view we take everything in; we are everything; we are the whole ecology.
Yet within that wholeness there are nature beings, subsystems, or holons (4) with whom we can relate directly. In the language of science, we ourselves are subsystems or holons nested within the greater natural ecology — permeable, interdependent, and continually exchanging energy, matter, and meaning with the wider field.
I experience the beauty of the whole of nature. I also feel connected to my local river, the Dart. I get angry about the frequent sewage spills there (5) — and in the River Wye, where I have so many memories. (6)
To witness fully is to take in the whole and the precise detail at once — without the detail shattering the whole, and without the whole blurring the detail.
Witnessing is not only receiving; it is recognising the signal that matters, the change that shifts the whole. Gregory Bateson called it the difference that makes the difference. (7)
The same quality of attention that reads a river reads a room.
My friend Kathleen Dameron, a management consultant who reads patterns in organisations and in society, suggests practising in ordinary places: watch a station concourse — how the crowd flows without collision, or how people engage with staff in a hospital waiting room, or how the police and the public interact with each other. (8)
The pattern is usually there long before we let ourselves see it. For example, when people who had belonged to the majority saw for the first time that others were being excluded because of colour, not because they “did not have what it takes.” What changed was the seeing.
For me, the hardest beings to relate with are people
Not the sea or the vulture or the rose. The person whose way of being in the world I find most disturbing — the one I would rather point a finger at than listen to. Can I hold them, too, as part of the whole? We will return to this later. (9)
I’ve often found myself upset by the actions of Trump, and of Farage here in the UK — slipping into an angry, disconnected state before returning to systems consciousness. My practice has been to meet these reactions with curiosity and not-knowing. Why did so many people vote for Trump? The quick answer is “racism”, but I wanted to look deeper.
There’s a man I dance with locally — kind, generous — who supports both Trump and Farage. I decided to become his friend, and to listen. What I’m beginning to understand is how many people have stopped believing their governments will ever improve their lives. They have a legitimate grievance: the promise that life would get better was quietly broken. Sitting with this has softened something in me. Now I ask: how do we engage with the needs of people far from the centres of politics, power and money?
I am a node in the intelligence of the world
It has gradually dawned on me that if the intelligence is in the whole system, then my individual mind cannot know the answer to what is needed for the whole.
Mind is not mine alone — it is distributed across the system, each being a node in a wider intelligence rather than a separate observer. (10)
If that is true, then not-knowing is simply the honest position.
Tyson Yunkaporta tells us that indigenous people think with the land, with the people, with the stories. Intelligence is not in the individual — it emerges from the pattern. He calls intelligence from within the ecology “right-way” thinking.11
When a decision arises from kinship rather than personal preference, we act from within the web rather than upon it. The choice is no longer an isolated human intention but a movement shaped by the ecology of being, the wider living pattern in which our own thinking is only one strand.
Being Part of the More-Than-Human World
When I think about the problems facing humanity, I feel hopelessness because I do not know the answers, and I don’t know what to do.
This personal sense of hopelessness explodes my sense of certainty and individual agency and opens me to watching and witnessing what is going on in the world.
I don’t have to have the answers — I am just a node within the intelligence of life.
At these times I am open and aware, vulnerable, hopeless, not knowing.
In Zen Buddhism they call this “beginner’s mind” — a sort of childlike openness that pays attention with awe to the world without formulating answers or imposing my cognitive map on the situation.
This is where my grief for our destruction of the world reminds me of my love for the beauty of this world, helping me to step from hopelessness to radical hope: not knowing the answers but taking small steps towards coherence anyway.
Like a small child walking, I lean forward, take a step and find my balance again, before wondering what will draw my attention next.
The Wisdom of Not Knowing
Not-knowing is the honest position and perhaps the wisest one. Intelligence is distributed across the whole living system. To not know is to be available to what the whole knows.
Then the logical mind takes over
In Newsletter 2: Why Our Solutions Keep Failing we discovered that the dominance of the isolated logical mind IS the problem.
If I think I know the answer, I am not in systems consciousness. I am not in the ecology of the more-than-human mind. Of course, the logical mind has a place within the ecology of mind, but not a pre-eminent place, and I have to keep coming back to systems consciousness.
Thus I return to listening from a state of curiosity and not knowing.
The great psychotherapist Milton Erickson constantly used the phrase “I don’t know” with his clients as a way of opening to the possibility of spontaneously emergent psychological coherence and healing from within the client.
Being the More-Than-Human World
I experience myself as part of the more-than-human world, and sometimes I slip more deeply into being the more-than-human world.
Walking along a beach this summer practising mindfulness, I was suddenly taken by the swirling play of the blue, aquamarine sea, sparkling white foam dancing on the shore in the sunshine. I was the dance.
As Judith DeLozier, wise woman, anthropologist and co-developer of NLP, said to me: (12)
Flow like the river
Watch the patterns of nature.
That is us.
A Practice
If you are travelling to another culture this summer, explore this version of the practice. The field will carry cultural difference and noticing it may change your ability to see patterns in your own culture.
Alternatively, choose a place where human beings are under some kind of pressure — a hospital waiting room, a busy A&E, a train station concourse when the departures board shows delays, a public protest, a border crossing, a departure gate at an airport.
Find somewhere to sit. Give yourself ten minutes.
1. Let your thinking mind do what it does: observe, categorise, form opinions. Notice what it reaches for. Let it run.
2. Then soften and open. Come back to your breath and your feet on the floor. Widen your attention until you are taking in the whole space — not looking at anything in particular, but letting everything in.
3. What does your body sense before your mind has named it? What do you feel in your body? What is the quality of the field?
4. Then pay attention to the parts. Notice individuals, pairs or small groups — not to judge, but to differentiate. How do different people carry themselves? Where does the energy concentrate and where does it go still?
5. Are there patterns across the group — ways of holding stress, of seeking connection, of withdrawing, of expressing status or lack of it, or emotional mood? Can you hold a person or subgroup and the whole room at the same time?
6. Notice how you feel in your body in response.
Notice what changes in you as you move between these three modes of attention. That movement — from thinking to receiving the whole, to differentiating — is the practice itself.
Next Newsletter: When the Flock Moves, Who Is Leading?
We have learned to listen — to open to the field with not-knowing, to witness before we act. But listening is not the end of the story. It is the ground from which action arises.
Next time, we watch a flock of starlings turn as one body against the evening sky, no leader calling the move, and ask what it teaches us about acting together: how a single bird’s shift becomes the whole murmuration’s turn, how we sense the moment to join what is already moving. And the moments when we are called by life to be the one who begins it. From stillness to motion. From listening to the field, to moving with it.
When did you last walk into a room — or a forest, or a stretch of coast — and sense the atmosphere before you had consciously noticed anything? What did that knowing feel like, and where in your body did it live?
Is there a person or group whose way of being in the world you find hard to hold with curiosity? What might it mean to witness them — to take in the whole and the precise detail at once — without yet having to agree or disagree?
If something has resonated, or troubled you, do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.
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In hope and love
Julian
Julian Russell is a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry. He is a co-founder of the Generative Citizen community — a gathering of people who understand that how we are matters as much as what we do. His forthcoming book, Standing at the Edge of Hope, explores why personal and spiritual development is not a retreat from the world’s crises, but the very ground from which transformative engagement becomes possible.
Notes
1. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).
2. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report” (Geneva: IPCC, 2023), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/; Luke Kemp, Chi Xu, Joanna Depledge, et al., “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 34 (2022), https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119; Sean ÓhÉigeartaigh, “Extinction of the Human Species: What Could Cause It and How Likely Is It to Occur?” Cambridge Prisms: Extinction 3 (2025): e4, https://doi.org/10.1017/ext.2025.4.
3. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 27. Kimmerer is a Native American plant ecologist, botanist, and enrolled citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her work brings Indigenous environmental knowledge into dialogue with Western science, emphasising relational, land-based ways of knowing. On reciprocity: every gift from the living world carries an obligation to give back. Value flows through relationship, not accumulation — take only what is given, use it respectfully, give thanks, give something in return. Two parties, a flow between them: this is the ethical heart of relating. On the grammar of animacy: Kimmerer observes that in English, calling a living being “it” quietly ends the relationship; it turns a life into an object. Indigenous languages keep the relationship alive by addressing the world as “you” — as kin, not stuff — using animate pronouns as gestures of respect and intimacy.
4. A nature being is what systems theory in Western science would call a holon: simultaneously a whole in itself and a part of larger wholes, with its own integrity, agency, and internal organisation, yet participating in wider ecological, biological, or social systems. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1967), 48–49.
5. Environment Agency pollution alerts and South West Water incident reports show repeated storm overflow discharges into the River Dart and its tributaries upstream of Totnes. A recent documented incident occurred on 15–16 June 2026, when a burst rising main at Dartmouth caused untreated sewage to enter the estuary. See Environment Agency Pollution Alerts, https://environment.data.gov.uk/bathing-water/explore; South West Water Incident Reports, https://www.southwestwater.co.uk/environment/our-performance/incident-reports/.
6. Intensive poultry units in the Wye catchment produce nutrient-rich waste that drives severe phosphorus loading, algal blooms, and ecological collapse. See Natural Resources Wales, River Wye Phosphorus Reduction Plan, https://naturalresources.wales; UK Rivers Trust, State of Our Rivers Report, https://theriverstrust.org.
7. A difference, for Gregory Bateson, is any variation in the world; a “difference that makes a difference” is one that a living system registers and is changed by — perceptible to the system, novel against its existing patterning, and consequential enough to alter its state. He introduced the formulation in his 1970 lecture “Form, Substance and Difference,” collected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
8. Kathleen Dameron, interview with the author, 14 May and email 9 July 2026.
9. The capacity to hold both the whole and the part at once — without collapsing one into the other — is the perceptual ground of what this series calls Precise Accountability, explored in Newsletters 11–13. In a divided society, it means holding both a wounded people and the specific harm being done — without the wound erasing the harm, or the harm erasing the humanity. This applies at every scale: a community reckoning with racism, a war, a struggle for rights, a political movement whose methods disturb you.
10. Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019), 35. The post-industrial West arrives at the same understanding by its own route: what Gregory Bateson called an “ecology of mind”, in which mind is immanent in the larger system and not located in the individual. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; orig. 1972).
11. Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019). “Right-Way” thinking is Yunkaporta’s term for decision-making that arises from relationship and kinship with the land, the people, and the stories, rather than from the isolated preference of an individual mind. Kimmerer and Yunkaporta are two among many indigenous academics and writers from every corner of the world bringing indigenous wisdom to the industrialised world. Much of what the post-industrial global north is now rediscovering about kinship with the living world — including in the work of the cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram — is a transmission of what many indigenous cultures never set aside. Rather than offer a Western synthesis, I have drawn directly on indigenous scholars as authorities in their own right. May we be humble enough to let those who have always remembered educate us.
12. Judith DeLozier, email to the author, 14 May 2026.