Aliens & climate change

Listening below the surface of story for our shared humanity

Spirit teaches me all the time, especially about the times we live in.

The one I share below is from a few years back. It’s a story I hold near and dear as I figure out how to navigate this political season and a world that seems to have convinced itself that we as a people are inherently divided and different.

It’s a story about:

• A late night out dancing

• Going deep on the future of the world with a stranger

• Supposedly different views on the surface

• But truly parallel visions underneath

Hope you enjoy!

That time I was out dancing

Okay, story time:

It was fall 2018—which is crazy to think that was 6 years ago. I’m having this “covid stole years of my life” time warp feeling right now. *big exhale* Anywho…

We were out at a club in Brooklyn you might be familiar with if you like dressing up in ridiculously awesome costumes and dancing til 4am (ahh the days before kids..). A Burning Man type crowd. Free spirited and kooky in the best ways. 

While catching my breath between songs, a friend of a friend and I started talking. Let’s call him Steve (because, truthfully, I can’t remember his name for the life of me, but Steve feels like a good fit).

“I voted for Trump,” he said in a sort of antagonistic, look how unique I am, nice to meet you type of way. Which, to his credit, was certainly a unicorn move in NYC during that time. To be an out and proud Trump supporter in the circles I ran in was inconceivable.                           

I could tell he was trying to get a rise out of me but I didn’t give it to him. Instead I curiously leaned in, “Oh yea?” and let things roll from there. 

The aliens are coming…

In classic fashion for me, we quickly found ourselves deep in a conversation about life and the state of the world. I don’t know what it is, but small talk about the weather and what was for dinner rarely stays for long. Especially with other cosmic-minded travelers and deep sea philosophers. We can’t help ourselves but go deep and wide fast.

This time around we quickly found ourselves in the future. Where do we see the world going? What will happen over the upcoming century? 

Steve started painting his picture. From where he was standing, he was certain something big was on the horizon. He could feel it. And for him, it was aliens. 

“Yea, the world’s gonna continue to go to hell. We’re gonna fight and fight and fall apart and hate each other. And then, one day, when we least expect it, the aliens will come, and we’ll need to ban together.” 

My ears perked up. The arc of his story—one of decline and disintegration followed by something big happening that pushes us to come back together—was my story too. Only in my version of it, climate change is the driving force behind our move towards unity, not aliens (although, these days I can totally see aliens playing a bigger role in things, but that’s for another post..). 

What I see for the world is us continuing to dissolve and fragment until our circumstances require us to come back together. That we’ll see waves of this motion—of breakdown and reunification—over the upcoming decades. The pandemic was our first big go at it. It’s a story that’s full of nuances and complexity for me, and that continues to evolve as I do. But a consistent theme in my vision for the future is that climate change is going to be (and already is) a main player in it all.

Steve went on to share how in his vision of things, the regions of the world will be the main axis points where reunification happens. The Americas will become tighter. Asia solidifies. They’ll come together to figure out what to do—to address security concerns, manage resources, develop new cultural norms around alien-human relationships.  

Yea, Steve! Within my story, that’s what I see too!

Meeting each other below the surface of story

It was a beautiful teaching moment for me from Spirit. On the surface, Steve and I had very different stories about the world and where it’s going. But we only had to scratch below the surface slightly to see that we were actually talking about the same thing. 

It was as if him and I were both picking up on the same spiritual vision, but the corporal material we used to express it was different. Different characters and plot lines. Same archetypal energy and direction.

The energy that lives below the surface of our stories is where my heart has been at these last seven years. That beyond the superficiality of the stories we tell ourselves about the world, lives a dimension of life and conscious energy that I can meet people in. I can find touch points of connection there that counterbalance the wildly different stories we tell ourselves about things.

Now, this isn’t me throwing the facts and details that make up our stories out the window. No way. Those things are crucial, of course. They determine what we do concretely in terms of policies and interventions and decision making.

But instead, what has been coming through me, is that it’s important to tend to this layer of things because it offers us an opportunity for understanding and healing. In our materially-driven world, it is a dimension that is often under-acknowledged at best, and invisible at worst. 

Spirit taught me something that night on the dance floor with Steve. In a day and age when we are convinced that we are drastically divided as a people, that actually, if I look below the surface, even slightly, there is actually a whole host of similarities we share. Currents of energies, really. And they can serve as a foundation for some of the reparative work our society needs.

We can meet each other below the surface of story where emotion and Spirit live, even about topics as hot and spicy and fraught with disagreements as politics and the future of our world. We can do so not to succumb to views and opinions we don’t agree with, but to gently high-five our shared humanity, and use that as a resource to do the work of figuring out how to move forward together.