The Great Reset

Coming to Terms with the Great Rupture

Let’s be honest with ourselves. We humans have never quite made peace with the world we were born into.

Since day one, we’ve been in conflict — not just with each other, but with the planet itself. We’ve been at war with trees, war with rivers, war with weather. We call it progress. But from a broader lens, it starts to look like something else: a species trying to outcompete its own habitat.

And yet, if you zoom out — step back from the headlines, the markets, the latest app drop — you’ll see that everything else in nature plays by a different set of rules.

Trees? They rise and stretch for sunlight, sure — but they don’t do it in isolation. Their roots link up in vast, underground trading networks, swapping sugars from photosynthesis for minerals drawn up by fungi and microbes. It’s a literal living economy — only it runs on reciprocity, not extraction. It’s not survival of the fittest; it’s survival of the most connected.

Everything in nature operates through interdependence. Everything, except us.

We’ve opted out. Built walls. Disconnected. Disentangled. Our entire economic operating system is designed to take more than it gives. To measure success by accumulation rather than contribution. And that disconnection — the refusal to recognize ourselves as part of the same living system — is our greatest vulnerability.

Because here’s the hard truth: life on Earth has always come with a reset button.

There have been five mass extinctions already. Five. Events where nearly everything got wiped clean — like Mother Nature hitting CTRL+ALT+DELETE on the biosphere. Each time, the slate was cleared. And life… found a way back.

It doesn’t take much. A wobble in the planet’s axis. A shift in the ocean’s conveyor belt. A spike in carbon. The Earth isn’t fragile — but it is reactive. It’s not a passive rock waiting to be mined. It’s a sentient, responsive system. And when pushed too far, it doesn’t plead. It rebalances.

You want to talk about AI regulation, quantum supremacy, the latest blockchain breakthrough, or the future of money in a collapsing economy? Fine. You want to debate the ethics of generative models or the geopolitics of lithium? Sure. But none of it will matter — not really — if we don’t address the deeper fracture. Because all these innovations, all these conflicts, are just fast-moving surface ripples atop an ancient, slow-burning wound: our disconnection from the living world.

Charles Eisenstein reminds us: we are not separate. We never were. Our crisis is not environmental, or economic, or political. It is relational. It is spiritual. It is a forgetting of the sacred fabric that we are woven into.

Believing a story that says we are isolated actors in a world of other, rather than participants in a great, interwoven whole.

So maybe this isn’t about punishment or apocalypse. Maybe the sixth extinction — if it comes — is not judgment, but correction. The immune response of a planet reclaiming equilibrium.

But before we can move forward, we must reconcile.

We must come to terms with the great rupture — the story of separation we’ve inherited and internalized. Reconciliation is not a gesture of guilt, but an act of remembering. It asks us to face what we’ve broken: the rivers we’ve dammed, the forests we’ve severed, the cultures we’ve silenced, the inner selves we’ve exiled. It’s the sacred pause between knowing and becoming.

Because without reckoning, there is no reweaving.

Without reconciliation, there is no return — not to the past, but to relationship.

And only through that humbling act of restoration can we begin to live again as part of the living.

And maybe — just maybe — we don’t need another Ten Commandments.

We need one: Belong

Not as metaphor. Not as aspiration. As practice. As design principle. As survival strategy.

Because in a world where everything is connected, the greatest act of wisdom isn’t domination — it’s participation. To truly belong is not just to exist in place — it’s to exist with place. To root ourselves in relationship. To remember that we were never meant to stand apart.

And here’s the deeper truth: only through belonging can we begin to rediscover our interbelonging — the understanding that our wellbeing is inseparable from that of rivers, forests, communities, and future generations.

And from there, we begin to touch the wisdom of interbeing, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say — the lived awareness that there is no “other,” only facets of the same sacred whole.

And only through interbeing can we interbecome — not as fragmented individuals scrambling for survival, but as a conscious species weaving itself back into the fabric of life.

So maybe it’s not that God needs to start over.
Maybe it’s that Gaia already is.

Not with vengeance, but with balance. Not with wrath, but with rhythm.
Life doesn’t punish — it recalibrates. The Earth doesn’t need to defend itself. It just remembers how to heal.

And when one species forgets how to live in relationship with the whole, Gaia does what every living system must eventually do:

It lets go.

And only if we can interbecome do we have any hope of avoiding the sixth reset — and creating a future for ourselves that is, finally, worth fighting for.