Lately, I’ve been feeling something moving through the collective that doesn’t feel neutral. It’s not just exhaustion or collapse fatigue, it’s a density. A pull toward cynicism, speed, and noise as if the field itself were thick with static.
Some call it despair and others entropy. Lately, I’ve started to wonder if there’s an active dark energy at play, not a villain hiding in the shadows, but the gravitational residue of everything we’ve refused to grieve. It hums through our systems like low-frequency interference: the sound of un-metabolised endings, of institutions that won’t stop even as they break apart.
In the Season of Unravelling, this current first showed itself as collapse. By Drifting, it became fog; a field of confusion asking for patience. By Seeding, it revealed its nature as infection: the way even our best intentions can be co-opted, bright language turned brittle. In Resonance, we meet it as tone, an undertone that shapes every conversation, every choice.
The temptation is to fight it or flee it, but darkness isn’t always the enemy. Sometimes it’s simply the compost doing its work: decay releasing what the soil needs next.
If we rush to purify, we interrupt the fermentation; if we surrender to it, we rot with it.
Our task is stranger: to stay near the rot without being consumed, to witness the breakdown while keeping our frequency aligned with life.
Wheatley calls this staying human in the midst of inhuman times. I think of it as tending coherence in a dissonant field. Every act of listening, every slow breath, every refusal to replicate urgency is a small re-tuning: a way of reminding the world that another vibration is possible.
The dark energy is real, so is the light that compost makes. Our work is not to banish the darkness but to compost it faithfully, to let it feed the next hum of aliveness that’s already rising underneath.
Have a read of Margaret Wheatley’s Life is Still Calling (PDF opens in new window) where she steps into a relational conversation with an AI bott and generates some new practices and situates some tried and true ones as well.