H U M A N I F E S T O

On this Great Earth
this landing strip for souls

Human beings have the opportunity
to listen with our hearts
to look with kind eyes
to work wisely with our freedom
and to shape our being-in-the-world as co-creators not exploiters.

This is ‘the great work in the middle zone’
described thousands of years ago - in the I Ching:
to gift attention
to get to the habit level
to expand our ways of knowing
to work with the ‘invisible materials’ of values, attitudes and imagination
to reshape ourselves and human-created systems in the spirit of interconnectedness.

I am for a world
in which we embrace ‘the other’,
in which care is a motivation and we learn to ‘care at a distance’

I am for a world
in which we learn to work with contradictions
as powerful forces of life and transformation

I am for a world
in which questions are embraced as trajectories to follow,
to allow answers to emerge

I am for a world
that sees progress in relation
to consciousness, cooperation and care

I am for a world
in which responsibility is not a duty enforced from the outside,
but an awakened ability-to-respond

I am for a world
in which human beings live in awe,
and with respect, humility and gratitude for the more-than-human world

I am for a world
in which freedom and responsibility
are explored and understood as synonyms not opposites

I am for a world
in which we practice non-violent resistance, resist exploitation,
and overcome oppressions of humans and the other-than-human world

I am for understanding
the aesthetic as all that enlivens being,
and diverse aesthetic strategies as part of a widened understanding of art

I am for an expanded understanding of art
in which every human being is an artist,
shaping ourselves & the conditions that shape our lives

I am for a world
committed to justice in naming, to decolonizing the mind and the land,
and to stopping the instrumentalization of all life as ‘resources’

I am for a world
in which worms are not only seen as ‘engineers of the earth’, but ‘angels of the eairth’
connecting above and below; and the soil is loved and cared for as the living being it is

I am for a world
for a world in which the genius loci –the spirit of place, stones, trees, fruits, rain, rivers, mountains, cultures and of all creatures–is experienced, celebrated and respected

I am for connective imagination:
radical imagination, ethical imagination, moral imagination as pathways
to biophilia, to interspecies understanding, and to a sense of planetary citizenship

I am for ‘sites of commitment’ that become a powerful field of commitment
in a global social forest… for the social mycelium that grows in this forest,
and the social honey we learn to make individually and together

I am for a world in which acknowledging anthropocentric destruction
and decentering the human being,
does not negate the need to develop earth’s most difficult creature, the human being

I am for developing new organs and fields of perception,
new forms of imaginal thinking and regenerative ways of living
that overcome unnecessary destruction and the undermining of life and each other

I am for a humanosphere of warmth and connective intelligence
that overcomes the cold thought of a human created technosphere
whose ‘artificial intelligence’ can have no heart and no conscience

I am for a world that does not negate matter, soul or spirit
in which saying ‘I’ can be understood and celebrated
as the sound of spirit recognising itself in time.

c - Shelley Sacks, Oxford, 2020-2024. Part of the Oratorio for the Unheard Beings - in progress.