This episode of Living Myth begins with the growing procession of unprecedented, heart rending and earth-shattering events that currently tear at the core of human culture and also ravage the face of the earth.

The sense of a split screen world of growing tragedies involves one screen showing a map of all the life-threatening hot spots where brutal, deadly warfare is already raging and many other conflicts are heating up. A parallel screen shows the growing number of hot spots where temperatures keep spiking at record levels and the ravages of climate crisis endanger earth’s essential ecosystems.

It may be hard to imagine that we have reached a point where widespread warfare involving many nations might occur again, while we also arrive at the place where radical heat waves have already become a deadly danger for vulnerable people in many parts of the world; but that is where we are.

It is our mutual fate and increasingly our shared nightmare to be living at a time when human vengeance and the technologies of war are making more places on earth dangerous to the point of becoming unlivable. At the same time, the lack of creative solutions and the heartfelt commitment needed to stop global warming endangers increasing numbers of people who inhabit places that are also becoming unlivable.

We are living through a great turning of the tides of time and churning of the chaos that surfaces between the end of one era and the beginning of another. We are caught in a cosmic moment of time turning over and life repeatedly turning upside down. We are in the tension of a great transition in history in which both destruction and creation are involved and where one can turn into the other, in true apocalyptic fashion. Chaos, turmoil and loss are all essential characteristics of apocalypse, but so are revelation, discovery of lost things and the potential of renewal.

A poet once wrote that “in the dark times, the eye begins to see,” meaning that it is when we face the darkness around and admit the nightmare that has fallen upon us, we begin to see with the inner eyes of the soul of humanity and with the kind of vision and care that can come from our own hearts and we become capable of seeing ways forward. In this old way of seeing, the heart breaking purpose of tragedies is to awaken us to the importance of each individual life as well as to the life enhancing necessity of our innate connections to the enduring pulse of nature and to the living spirit of the Earth itself.