Wheel of Wonder March 1st, 2015

Our world is in a time of transition.  Many have said this as we've circled the sun the past decade and a half of the 21st century.  Some still say "We're facing the end of the world as we know it!" even after we made it past the predicted christian rapture of, what was it 2013? And the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012, and yet we are still standing.  We still face climate change and economic inequality, but now on a global scale. Over the past few years, it hasn't taken much research to find that organized churches are seeing a sharp decline in membership numbers.  Yes, it is the end of the world as we knew it in the twentieth century, and the 600 years that led up to it when people from certain areas of the world met people from other areas of the world for the first time, travelling in their ships of wind and wood.  That time when the human race introduced capitalism and currency.  We've now begun to realize greed driven resource extraction is unhealthy for the life support systems that keep our planet and our fellow humans healthy, There are changes we need to enact now to avoid near extinction, we can't put them off until "sometime in the future," that future is now in the present!  This is a time of transition, and many people are building bridges between cultures, the Internet is the new medium for those explorers who will change the future, it is the ship of wind and wires.  Wind carries the signal, the culture's perspective and wires direct it, just as the hulls of ships directed the path of explorers 700 years ago.  Other people are changing the rules of the extractive economy, which is really a relic from the last century and the industrial age, unoccupied spaces in cities are becoming local gardens to raise local food, sustainably, new green areas are being introduced to process carbon emissions and in some cases, protect from floods and storms that kill people and damage property.  The amazing interconnected system that is nature is becoming more understandable to ourselves as people.  Indigenous ideas and intellectual understanding are joining forces to save our world, in this present time.  Perhaps the rebirth of earth based spirituality, and new age or ascensionist thinking, and new scientific discoveries are human expressions of true divine will and the will to survive, both, balanced as we transition into a race on a world that is not the world as we've previously known it. Perhaps that is the true end of the world that people are speaking of, the end of the bad world and the beginning of the good one!
we'll  be exploring this idea today on Wheel of Wonder with articles from Wendell Berry and David Korten  The pictures above and below are both of the good world "Presence o.f Gaia" and "Earth from Space."