A few years ago when I was living with my cats, Topaz and Jade, in a ramshackle cabin in the forgotten depths of the Arkansas Ozarks, I wrote this prayer:

In this age when history itself is on fire

In this time of the convulsion of the beast

Of the final dance of the enraged demons

May I keep faith, Lord, in Your sublime alchemy

That has ordained the mystery

That from deepest darkness births the Highest Light.

(from Light the Flame: 365 Days of Prayer, 2013.)

As you know, tonight I begin a class that I am honored to teach for the Shift Network, Embrace the Dark Night to Become the Phoenix Rising, which outlines the birth of the Divine Human.

I have known for the last 20 years two interlinked truths that have kept me awake night after night, and wildly and exhaustingly on the road. These truths are that humanity was heading for a terrifying global dark night and that this global dark night was potentially not at all the end but the shattering, amazing and terrible beginning of the...

I am thrilled and honored to announce that I will be teaching a 7-part class for Shift Network, Embrace the Dark Night to Become the Phoenix Rising. We are living in terrifying times and I know we are all suffering intensely the horrors and ordeals that are exploding everywhere.

As I write this, fires are burning along the U.S. west coast, Antarctica is melting faster than even the doomsayers predicted, the Coronavirus pandemic is still out of control and millions of people worldwide are facing economic collapse.

Given all we are going through, it’s easy to run into the sordid embrace of magical thinking—as we can see from the idiotic and dangerous proliferation of conspiracy theories—or to fall into exactly the kind of nihilistic despair that increases the danger already afflicting us.

What I want to offer at this moment is a way through that is neither grounded in fantasy or tainted by the pessimism that saps will and robs us of the kind of rugged hope that we...