A letter from the future ...

200 years from now …

Dear Mike – We're still here.

Somehow, through all the turbulence, ignorance and near-misses, humankind made it this far. While our bodies look and smell the same as yours, we have become something very different inside. Our basic impulses have not gone away – we still love, hate, yell, do stupid things, forget what our partners tell us just two minutes before, and make funny, sometimes embarrassing noises in public. Yes, we're still alive.

But we also learned a few things over the past two-hundred years that enabled us to avoid extinction. We view these insights as so precious, we regard them as more valuable than any material possession. They are simply this:

* We are loved unconditionally and in turn our love flows through "all"
* We accept each other for who we are
* Anything we do to another we do to ourselves
* Creation proceeds from "thought, word and deed", so we place great emphasis on thoughts that nurture compassion
* We've forgotten how to hate

To get here we saw massive populations decimated by overproduction, consumerism and manipulation. A relentless focus on systemic growth led our civilization to behave like a cancer that almost destroyed the organism it is by non-regulated self-replication of destructive behaviors. We almost perished.

But didn't.

What happened?

It began as small pockets, much like seeing random fireflies on a warm summer night. A flicker here – then it was gone. But then another. And another. This went on for a long time. Then some of the flickers became sustained. Then another. Then some connected with others. The light became more brilliant and radiant. It began to look like a large ball of string made of light. Then an amazing thing happened – we saw that we were that light. And we all just knew what to do as we were already doing what was needed .

So here we are.

Just keep going …
Your friend from the future

(from a workshop exercise based on the book Coming Back to Life, by Joanna Macy)