The following is an edited transcript of a keynote delivered by Bioneers Co-Founder Nina Simons at Bioneers 2024.

My inbox these days is an avalanche of asks, needs, and calls to action. They seem to come from all directions, more with each passing day. My brow furrows, my throat constricts and my neck tenses, knowing I can’t possibly respond to them all. I feel grief, frustration and despair. 

My grief is compounded—immensely—by the splintering, othering and factionalism that’s happening among what were previously beginning-to-coalesce progressive social movements.

My heart, mind and hands want to respond by DOING something—hoping I can somehow contribute to healing by acting on behalf of what I love most deeply. But so many of those calls to action trigger my own deeply embedded pattern of reactive over-commitment—my ego’s desire to live up to some Wonder-Woman ideal. 

And that’s only one of the inward tensions I’m experiencing—the gaps where my heart’s values and my culturally-embedded biases are clashing. I’ve always evaluated my own progress in learning and growing by whether I can show up as truly myself no matter where I am, or whom I’m meeting, and whether my ideas and values are aligned with my actions. When they aren’t, I know I’m not being my best.

One of the main inner conflicts is that there’s often a schism between my pattern of chronic doing—taking on more than I can realistically do well—and my yearning for spaces to just be, to be able to integrate all that’s changing—both within me and in the world. My habituated, knee-jerk response to the sense of urgency—of feeling compelled to respond, to act, and to do—results in blowing past my physical limits, driving myself to work too hard, and too long, beyond my body’s signaling fatigue.

I want to leverage the gifts, privileges and freedoms I have to do as much good in the world as I can. But, while some of those impulses stem from my heart’s honest desire to be of service, it’s become clear to me that my habit of trying to over-perform has also been motivated by a defensive ego. By a deep-seated conditioning—(perhaps from white supremacy)—to always try to seek perfection, by an over-inflated sense of my capacities and by my responsibility to fix or repair what’s broken. 

I may prefer to think of myself as liberated from patriarchy, misogyny, racism and dog-eat-dog capitalist habits of mind, but those cultural patterns have been around a long time and they’re deeply embedded in our psyches. To pretend otherwise can prevent us from working seriously on evolving beyond our long-standing conditioning. 

In my case, unless I’m really being attentive, some ways that insidious, toxic conditioning can manifest is in “more and faster are always better” and “results count more than relationships” orientations. But if I operate from that place, I often accomplish less anyway, and it feels as though I’m hurting my soul. My body and heart need more time and space to integrate and adapt. Bayo Akomolafe quotes an African saying: “The times are urgent; Let us slow down.” 

I’ve become convinced that the “faster-is-better” orientation actually gets in the way of building the collaborations, alliances and partnerships we so desperately need, now. Collective efforts require time, spaciousness and relationship cultivation to build trust. Without that, they lack a solid foundation and won’t last.

One valuable life lesson I learned from a mentor and brilliant writer Terry Tempest Williams, is to turn toward and embrace the challenge of finding ways for opposites—for apparent contradictions—to dance with each other. When I’m able to do that, new pathways are often revealed. Sometimes, it’s in the in-between spaces that useful new ideas and ways forward surface. 

Great collaborative alchemy can often emerge from bringing very different people or ideas together, if they’re gathered with sensitivity and care—whether it’s youth and elders, people with a spectrum of gender identities, or from different ethnic communities or class backgrounds. We may have never needed the mutual aid, insight, solidarity and wisdom that we have to offer each other more than we do now, and in the months and years ahead. 

This attempt to learn to create the conditions for this social connective tissue to emerge has become my life’s work. I yearn to help form alliances among diverse peoples, communities and movements, with strong enough relationships to last for the long haul, because I think that without those relationships and that bridge-building, we may not survive. 

Conservation biologists tell us that ecosystems with the largest diversity of species have the greatest resilience to regenerate, after trauma. That has been a guiding value at the heart of Bioneers since it began: that the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. 

From our very first gathering in 1990, I was blown away by how the very disparate visions, perspectives and projects of the presenters and attendees revealed the weave of a social fabric I’d never understood as connected, before. 

I felt it as an embodied experience of what Buckminster Fuller called the “preferred state,” and it changed me. Nourishing spaces in this pivotal time for collective, collaborative brain- and heart-storming, so that greater wisdom can emerge, together, has never felt more timely or useful.

I’m thrilled to see so many new partnerships, collectives and communities of practice with us here. And to recognize how often sharing leadership is creating more joyful and regenerative organizational structures in our world.

Here, no one way of relating to the massive structural changes, to the reinvention of everything about our society, is considered to be the answer. It’s all connected and interdependent, and we need as many visions and ideas and ways of seeing, listening and being as we can surface, express and cross-pollinate. As Janine Benyus, the godmother of Biomimicry put it: “we need a rowdy bunch of solutions!”

For me, that experience of co-creating connective tissue—to influence, connect and align all of my—and our—parts toward wholeness feels like healing, renewal and freedom. We’ve simply got to keep working towards the collaborative, large-scale movement-building that so many among us have long been cultivating.

Another practice in my learning curve, and I must admit, this one can be really hard for me, is learning to listen first to what others are saying—deeply and without judgment, before my loud inner monologue prompts me to offer my opinions. 

A lot of this is hard work. It requires patience and perseverance. But finding ways to relate to those varied complementary opposites; seeking balance and wholeness in my inner world; putting relationships ahead of tasks; and 

trying to imbue my actions with compassion and empathy: When I can do even some of that, I feel profoundly connected and alive, and then far more able to carry on with my work in the larger world, but with much more centeredness, calm and open-heartedness.

These past months, what I’ve also found hugely helpful in maintaining my sanity, balance and health is remembering to also focus on the immediate—on what’s close to home, in my community and region—on the lands and animals and plants and relatives where Kenny and I live and love.

Our two beloved rescue dogs, Wagmore and Zephyr, died suddenly this winter, within weeks of each other. As I’ve mourned the loss of their big personalities both to our lives and to the land that holds us, I’ve been feeling how deeply I loved and learned from each of them. How much I adored their particular foibles and personalities, their distinctive ways of walking and their expressiveness, not wishing for either of them to change a thing. 

They taught me about paying attention to the present moment, and about the joys of play and rest and food and cuddling as real needs to be tended to and enjoyed every day. I’m grateful now that—regardless of how urgently I felt the world calling, it hardly ever interrupted our rituals 

and the celebration of our lived experience together. Their consistent love, presence and reciprocity strengthened my heart as I worked through their departures.

After their deaths, I created a nightly ritual for myself. I printed pictures of them, and made time each evening to weep, and to write about them. I felt into their love for each other, for the land, and for each of us, and I prayed for their journeys after walking on. That ritual and having a creative expression of our love helped me to integrate their loss. I believe that – if there are masters of unconditional love on Earth among us, it’s likely that they are the dogs.

Within myself, I vacillate between my grief and mourning over the violence, suffering and losses all over our world at the moment, and how to restore and nourish my heart with love, prayer and practice. I’m finding a new muscle growing in me, one that connects the preciousness of life, and loss, with love. Perhaps, as I learned from Alice Walker, fully experiencing grief can expand the heart’s ability to experience love. 

I wonder how we might find healthy ways to grieve the losses so many of us are experiencing—to come into full presence to expand our hearts’ love—while we’re still embedded in a culture that wants us to get over it, move on, toughen up and return to normalcy? Especially when any imagined aim toward “normalcy” has been exposed for the corrupted, deceitful, broken society we used to accept. 

I see how much I—and our Western culture—have prioritized action, endless expansion and innovation, while turning away from limits and death, from listening and from reflecting. And how little we’ve valued tending and healing, rarely creating spacious opportunities for deepening connection, while valorizing heroic interventions and action-adventures.

When I’m able to slow down and give attention to my body’s guidance, I can recognize and release my own reactivity and my conditioned responses to fear, outrage and grief. I’m trying to hold my accountability in balance with self-forgiveness, attempting to stay open, and to ground and center myself as needed, so that I don’t add to the polarized madness I see all around me.

I remind myself to mimic the Earth’s wisdom of seasons and cyclicity within my body; and to create the spaciousness, stillness and rest—and the patient listening that are all needed for my inner knowing to emerge.

Cultivating loving harmony in myself means shifting from evaluating success based upon numbers reached, scale and speed, to measurements of integrity, depth, quality of connection and honesty. 

At the same time, I’m trying to be mindful of my need to compost saviorism, to relinquish my illusion of control, to trust in surrendering to life’s mystery, while recognizing its beauty and brutality. And to pray for, listen to and be thankful for receiving support from the invisible world.

I prioritize opening up and softening to connect whole-heartedly and with a celebration of our interbeing with those I care about, in whatever ways I can, when I’m needed—including the two leggeds, four leggeds, winged, finned and rooted ones.

Dr. Kamilah Majied names three pillars of what she calls pro-social behavior what she suggests we need to cultivate to be in right relationship in this time. I believe these are also essential practices for developing our capacity to become connective tissue, to heed the call for solidarity that’s so needed in service to Life. They are:

• Fierce compassion, caring deeply with empathy and commitment for what others are going through

• Cultural humility, remembering that ours is only one way (and not the best way) of relating to the world, and 

• Discomfort resilience, trusting that we are honestly not nearly as fragile as we may imagine.

If we do that, we may be able to soothe and perhaps help heal our human ecosystem, to be able to collaboratively serve the greatest calling of our time, remembering ourselves as children of Mother Earth, within a larger community of kin, to serve nothing less than the reinvention of human civilization, in partnership, with interbeing and in solidarity. Together, I believe we can navigate the Great Turning that Joanna Macy named so well.