Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa Is at Noon EST Thursday ~ Stampede!
Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa Is at Noon EST Thursday ~ Stampede!
Join us tomorrow to feel into the future of cities through #NEOM
Dear Friends,
Tomorrow, Thursday, we will gather at noon EST for another session of Cultural Embodiment at The Stoa. Please join me!
In 2019 I had a dream I cannot forget. It was more a premonition than a dream, really. It had the vividness of a vision, something sent from elsewhere, not merely manufactured in my own unconscious. I have dreams like this from time-to-time and they reverberate in my being like almost nothing else. I wake from them changed.
In this dream I was standing in an indoor environment that was all glass and high ceilings, a public space…like a strange indoor mall or courtyard. Outside the glass I could see a barren and arid desert landscape. It looked hot, inhospitable to life. I could feel the climate control inside the space and knew I should be grateful for it, but it also felt so….incongruous with the landscape, so manufactured.
I was standing noticing my surroundings, noticing other people in the space. They were anonymous people, like those you pass on a city street, only most of them were Middle Eastern, the women wearing burqas and hijabs. I was wondering if the scene was post-apocalyptic, trying to place it, when I felt something happening.
It began as a very low and faint rumble and a sense within me that something was coming. I looked out the giant plate glass windows/walls towards the west and saw a rising dust cloud in the distance. Immediately, the rumble got stronger and I could feel the building begin to shake. Then I saw a giant herd of buffalo stampeding along the length of the building, parallel to us, but at a distance. As I registered the wildness and intensity of their energy, they suddenly made a sharp turn and began running straight for us. The herd was stampeding towards the building now and I could see it was a matter of seconds before they reached us. There was no indication they would stop. Others became aware, too, and we ducked for cover, hit the floor and ran out of the way as the herd burst through the glass wall and ran straight through the other side of the building (more shattering of glass and mirrors).
I was braced on the ground, shielding myself from the flying shards of glass. As things settled, I raised my head to look around. Others were rousing. No one seemed to be critically injured, just shaken. A woman in a burqa was lying near me crying and holding her small child. The child was alright, but had tiny cuts on his face from the flying glass. I crawled over to them to help her brush him off and calm him down. Everyone was in a mild state of shock. As I collected myself I noticed the buffalo all grazing peacefully in a green pasture on the other side of the building that I hadn’t noticed before. They’d broken through this barrier, this building, to get to their grazing grounds.
As you can imagine, I woke from this dream feeling like I’d received a message. What was most present for me was the unstoppability of nature. Here we were in this carefully constructed human environment, shielded (so we thought) from the elements, but they had another idea about it all. Those buffalo were a force of nature, they were rearranging the landscape with their hooves, certain of their path, and determined to get to the green grass. The building was only a minor and pretty insignificant inconvenience for them, a folly. They hurt no one, there was a precise kind of animal instinct and awareness even in that wild stampede.
The other moment that left an impression was the intimacy of my connection with the woman and her child. Though we were from different cultures, as I reached out to brush the glass off her child’s face, he was my child, too. The mother in me, the woman in me, was completely connected to her experience. We looked at each other with a knowing…with a kind of relief to be released from the charade of civilization.
I have held on to this dream for years, feeling like it would make more sense one day. Last week, this video was sent to me and I immediately recognized it as the building in my dream. This temperature-controlled mall of a city in the desert has been in the collective consciousness for a long time. Now, it seems to be breaking through into some 3D, material form. I wonder how I feel about that. I wonder how WE feel about that. I know I feel a mix of feelings and also a powerlessness to stop it. But, perhaps the buffalo came to tell me that they’ve got it. Whatever this is, however impressive it may seem to humans, however much money was put into it, the buffalo have another idea about how things will be.
Tomorrow for cultural embodiment, we will watch this promotional video for NEOM, a $500B megacity that will house 9 million people in 2 parallel buildings with mirrored surfaces that will stretch across the desert landscape for more than 100 kilometers. It is being called “The Line.” This is a project conceived and funded by the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. It seems to be his folly, or as developers prefer to call it, “a flagship megaproject.” The project was initiated in 2017, but plans and architectural renderings for The Line were released officially on Twitter last week with this video.
I know promotional videos are tricky for cultural embodiment because they’re trying to sell us on an idea and the defenses are often triggered at once. I think we can take that into account and together feel into what it’s like to be a conscious citizen of earth and human being in this time receiving the plans for “the city of the future.” Does it feel exciting? Terrifying? Confusing? Some mix of all of the above? It’s interesting because we talk so much about needing urgently to solve the intractable environmental and population issues we see on the horizon (actually, they’re here already like those buffalo breaking through), but when someone does offer a solution it can be triggering. At least, that is my experience and I am curious to share it with you to see how WE are feeling about it. And perhaps, by witnessing it we can actually call forth and understand with more clarity, what it is we’re really looking for.
Join me! Noon EST on Thursday to feel into this grandiose plan.