About
We are the bridge. Those who are alive now are the bridge between all ancestors who have come before us and all descendants who are to follow after us.
What kind of bridge will those alive today be? Because of the current trajectory of anthropogenic climate catastrophe and widespread ecosystem collapse, the choices made collectively by humans in the next ten years will determine in large extent the composition and quality of the community of life on planet Earth for the next ten million years.
What kind of world do we want?
What kind of world do we collectively as the human species want to contribute to for those alive today and all who are to follow? A seriously deteriorated and dead world or a resilient and robust living world? Can we shift course? Can we avert some of the worst collapses? Can we not just be less bad, but actually be a force for healing and good? Can we learn as a species to fit in again in mutually enhancing ways with the other members of the community of life on planet Earth? Can we belong again as good neighbors rather than acting like alien conquerors?
Living rEvolution is a revolution and an evolution
Living rEvolution leans into those questions and is a revolution and an evolution in human relationship for those who have strayed from respectful and reciprocal relationship with the community of life on Earth.
Living rEvolution is rising to the intersecting crises of our time and redefining the human sense of self and purpose, and transforming our collective relationship with the wider living world. It is an exploration of how we can be medicine in the healing of a deeply wounded Earth. Because of emergence, we cannot predict what healing is possible until we give ourselves to it.
Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, “If we surrendered to Earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.” Living rEvolution is an epochal turning towards working in concert with Earth’s intelligence towards healing.
About Aravinda Ananda
It is an honor for a message of and invitation to Living rEvolution to come through my mind, heart and body. I have been supported and guided by so many friends and teachers and so while there are ways I am a principal author of this invitation, this is also a deeply collaborative effort made possible only through the love of many.
I am a social ecologist living in Pequosette homelands in northeast Turtle Island, under the municipality of Watertown, Massachusetts. I consider Living rEvolution as my life’s work, and most days I feel honored to be alive at this time when there is so much opportunity to be of service to healing and transformation. Some days I can get discouraged at the magnitude of the intersecting crises, and still my love for this exquisite living planet and the gift of being alive have been a strong guiding impulse throughout my days. If I had a religion or a designated spirituality, it would be love for the community of life on Earth and a desire to act for the welfare of all beings, of all species, and of all times.
Some of the ways I identify in terms of social identity and social location are as a mixed-race (primarily Irish and African American), white-presenting, pansexual woman with a lot of education privilege and a mixed-class background.
My deepest longing is to work towards intergenerational interspecies and intraspecies justice, and so that is a big part of my identity and purpose.
My undergraduate and graduate environmental studies at Yale started me on my path of helping to shift the human-earth relationship from ones of domination, extraction and depletion to ones of respect, mutuality and regeneration. I have been working on a book of the title Living rEvolution on and off for the past 12 years, and for me it is much more than the book. It is my calling, my purpose, my life’s work, and a process I hope to engage others in broadly.
A rEvolutionary life partnership
I am so grateful to have Joseph Rotella as my primary life partner and to explore together the ways we can live the rEvolution in relationship we want in this world. As one small window into how we have been living the rEvolution in our lives, we have converted all of the lawn in the yard in front of our home to vegetable and herb garden beds, and in the backyard we are working on establishing a food forest and have a chicken coop and pen where four laying hens live. Food – whether wild harvesting food, co-cultivating food, preparing food, or sharing food – is one of our favorite doorways back into a sacred relationship of reverence with the Earth.
We greatly enjoy deepening in community with each other as humans and do that in a number of ways from hosting a monthly meditation, discussion and gift economy dinner at our home in Watertown to facilitating workshops and programs that assist people in healing and transformation. The primary modality in which we have offered group work is The Work That Reconnects, but we enjoy a variety of processes that facilitate connection including storytelling and resonance, Council practice and roleplaying how to interrupt and transform oppression. Anti-oppression work is a growing edge for us and we feel deeply committed to transforming how we are together as humans. In July 2018 we helped to convene and host a month-long regenerative culture living laboratory with this intention.
We enjoy living the rEvolution day by day and supporting others in their paths of living rEvolution.