Welcome to the 131st edition of Conscious Humanity — it’s so good to see you here!
You might notice that I’m playing around with a few different layouts (and title/s) here as I plan for the Conscious Humanity website launch later this year. While thinking through ideas in the last few weeks, I’ve found so much inspiration revolving around themes of falling, flying, improvising, inverting, and resisting…
all provide beautiful fuel for our creative fires! 🔥
Firstly, Gina Chick wrote this powerful declaration against AI in her signature soulful style and it perfectly captures the reasons we write, as humans who are designed to create, and how we connect with each other through those words,
“Writing, like any art, is EARNED. It’s an offering, a sacrifice, shaped into a gift, stained with blood and the unique creative force that only we can share. Our essence, somehow wrapped into words.
That’s what writing is. WE write. We, us, you, me, the human falling until they fly and figuring it out along the way. We express our flawed, sad, gorgeous, wisening hearts into the world because we can’t not share this little part that’s demanding to be freed. Fold it into a paper aeroplane and send it out like a prayer to the wild gods for forgiveness, or recognition, or to have them laugh with us at the sheer cosmic joke of it all. We offer up our suffering as art and along the way perhaps even find meaning, and if not, perhaps it’s a stepping stone on the way to it. And maybe someone out there reads it and resonates and recognises themself and realises they’re not alone.
We are designed to create. Us. Humans. Creativity is our fundamental nature. It has a million faces. And for some of us, that means writing. Writing is the whole journey to get there, not just the finished work.”
We sure are. So, let’s explore that creativity some more…
In a happy coincidence, Mason Currey shared this piece about “deep play” a few days ago, which is a creative practice in learning how to fall and fly at the same time!
“This week I’m thinking about “deep play,” a phrase that keeps coming up in interviews with the musician Steven Hall, aka Nirosta Steel, whose groovy and ghostly double album My Skyscraper is the only thing I want to listen to lately, and who told the newsletter Tone Glow last month:
There’s this anthropological term called “deep play.” Arthur [Russell] and I would talk about this. Birds learn how to fall and fly at the same time. It’s the idea of playing and learning at the same time, and that’s the state I’m looking for. I want there to be no distinction between rehearsal, performance, and studio recording. There should be no difference—they should all be one. It’s as if you’re walking continuously from one to the next, and it’s all one party from beginning to end.”
This might seem like a fanciful existence; being able to move in a constant state of experimental deep play. But if you hold the idea in your head, you can tap into it simply by giving yourself space to think, and create. Always observing, pondering, and scribbling notes, sketches, or humming tunes. A constant wonderment, and exploration of ideas.
You don’t need dedicated time to do this.
It’s taking that open, playful approach to all of life.
That’s what it means to me, anyway. What does deep play mean to you?
I have long admired Amie McNee’s creative work on Substack, and rediscovered her essay on quitting hustle culture this week. I love the way Amie unapologetically calls out the ways in which our lives have been hijacked by capitalism, and so many ‘wants.’
Amie explains that while she was worried about what she would lose when she quit so-called hustle culture, she unexpectedly became very busy.
But it was a joyful busy-ness; doing the creative things she actually wanted to be doing.
Things that Amie says, make her brain twinkle!
“There is so much to ‘want’ in our culture that the noise has drowned out our true desires. Buried them under ads for Korean skin care and new TVs. When I was able to truly ask myself, what do I want from my life? Not, what should I want from life? I was able to access a well of energy and resources I had never seen before.
When I realised I wanted to create because I am a born storyteller, creator, maker, I found a huge well of energy. ‘I must produce because that is what makes me a good person’ has morphed into, ‘I want to create because I am a creator’. And living life from this place had made me accidentally, incidentally, prolific. When you reconnect to who you are and what you want outside of ‘THIS’: hustle culture, neoliberalism etc, you access a crazy power. A pure energy source that is so abundant you have to put it somewhere.”
Doesn’t that sound enticing? An abundant energy compelling you to do the creative work that lights a fire in you, or…
…makes your brain twinkle! ✨
Let’s do that!
Here’s Amie’s 2025 TEDx talk: ‘The case for making art when the world is on fire’
Staying with a creative theme, Australian Author and TV Presenter, Holly Ringland, is sharing early chapters of her next book, The World Beneath Her Feet on Substack, before it is officially released in September.
I love Holly’s style and seeing the preview of her next book inspired me to revisit one of her previous books, The House That Joy Built, which is all about the pleasure and power of giving ourselves permission to create. It’s like a motivational letter written directly to the reader. A goldmine of inspirational stories are woven into a well-researched and compelling call to create despite, and because of, our fears and insecurities.
I want to quote the whole book (so just go and read it!), but here is Holly’s concept of the Toolkit of Unfuckable-with Magic (TUM) to get your creativity flowing this week:
“When I feel fear, I meet it with play.
When I experience self-doubt, I meet it with self-compassion.
When I think I am a failure, I remind myself that nothing is wasted.
When I am stuck in the hell of procrastination, I practise presence.
When I struggle with the intrusive noise of my inner critic. I unleash my inner fan.
When I’m terrified of an outer critic, I remind myself of my resilience.
When I’m suffering creative block, it’s time to crank up the daydream machine.
When I’m plagued by imposter syndrome, I remind myself I belong here.”
I also love the quote at the start of the book because it so beautifully captures what we’re doing with our creative work, which is trying to find ourselves:
I’m out with lanterns,
looking for myself.
~Emily Dickinson
Moving onto something a little different, I listened to Nate Hagens speaking to Olivier Hamant, a French biologist and biophysicist whose work combines plant science and civilisational thought this week. Olivier argues that of all the problems we face today, it’s our pursuit of efficiency that has made us fragile.
As Nate and Olivier discuss, once humans figured out how to mine vertically (access ancient sunlight via oil), we moved from being a robust species, to a very fragile one. While there are abundant resources we can survive, but as soon as there is turmoil or uncertainty, we fail. In simple terms, the human species has become a parasite, mining resources for endless optimisation, but stuffing up all the natural systems we rely upon in the process.
This may sound really crude and dire, but Olivier has some beautiful wisdom to share and says that it’s possible for humans to turn around this extractive, fragile machine, and start cooperating rather than competing for resources. And we can look to nature to teach us this. Even species that we think of as high performance, are so for a few moments… but they’re not constantly performant. For example, reducing the lion to a “hunter” is performance biased. Of course, a lion is in high-performance mode while it is actually hunting, but the lion also sleeps for sixteen to twenty hours every day!
As Nate says,
“So the problem is that in nature you have to perform, but the percentage of your week or life in performance mode is very small, whereas modern humans are thrust into this performance mode ninety percent of our waking time. And that can’t be healthy!”
It’s not healthy and it leads to burnout, of humans and living ecosystems, and this is the crux of it: Olivier says that the root cause of all our problems is performance; not just selfishness or individualism, or even oil. It’s the constant orientation towards performance and efficiency.
He explains that there are three principles of rebuilding robustness:
Circularity: everything in life is circular, so we need to create a circular bio-economy, which means making objects that feed ecosystems rather than pollute them (no tyres, right?)
Cooperation (to achieve symbiosis): activate a culture of cooperation rather than competition, everyday; not just in moments of crisis.
Robustness by design: building local, dynamic, adaptable systems (like permaculture farming practices) to prioritise robustness instead of performance.
This all sounds good in theory, but saving the world seems like a huge ask. Luckily, there are practical things we can each do to rebuild a robust world, and it starts at home, with our families, and in our communities. And with what Olivier says is “life education.”
“…when I see, companies, schools, engineers, I mean, life is often absent. The machine is present. And so if you have education for life, then you think differently, then you think fluctuation, then you think robustness, then you think cooperation, then you think circularity… So when you’re at school, spend some time outside, get out of the room, be exposed to fluctuations, to bees, and all this.”
Yes! The bees. And importantly, this change in mindset and action is joyful. It’s not sacrifice, or hardship (if we choose to do it now).
Robustness is about preparing for the future, and for fluctuations, but it also makes our lives better right now!
So, go outside. Plant some veggie seedlings. Look at the bugs, and the stars. And remember who we were before the machines came to optimise our lives.
If you want to dive deeper, Olivier has written a 60-page e-book called Antidote to the Cult of Performance: Robustness from Nature to explain all this.
Now, to young people who know that we need to stand up for what we believe in! Thousands of Australian young people took to the streets this week to protest against Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party’s discriminatory and divisive policies.
As Cheek Media Co. reported,
“Parts of the mainstream media have already started publishing condescending coverage claiming that young people ‘don’t know what they’re talking about’ but the reality is: they know better than most.
Young people are engaged, and out in force to stand against bigotry and to defend their future.”
Cheek Media also spoke to some of the protestors…
My favourite sign in the crowd said this:
“Skipped school, not my values.”
How good is that!?
To a gathering of a very different kind now, and hundreds of people gathered in Edinburgh last week to watch a man fold a fitted sheet. It was a publicity stunt by comedian, Dan Boerman, and there’s something about an enthusiastic group of people gathering in a public place to laugh at some nonsense that is just so wholesome. (Found via The Good List).
And that’s the end of this edition! I hope at least one thing brightened your day, inspired you to take action, or helped you return to what matters most.
🙏🏻
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