The following is the full text from Nina Simons’ keynote address at Bioneers 2025.

As our dire political situation unfolds, I, like so many of us, have been scanning what historians, economists, and media figures I respect are saying—hoping to find my own way to relate to the chaotic and brutal destruction of so many of our norms, institutions, peoples, and places. 

And I am deeply grateful that there are still voices of sanity and moral clarity to turn to. I’m encouraged by the immense turnouts at town halls and demonstrations, and by the intergenerational and intercultural listening and truth-telling that’s inspiring so many to come.

I’m thankful for the courage of independent-minded judges, and for all the mobilizations going on around the country that quite a few of you here are likely involved in—one way or another. All these forms of resistance are critically important.

But I am still finding it hard sometimes not to succumb to anxiety and a sense of grief and impending doom. And I know I’m not alone in that. I am finding that I need to heed Rebecca Solnit’s wise counsel, who wrote: “We may be at this resistance business for a while, so take care of yourself so you can keep taking care of human rights, truth, justice, and the natural world.” This is going to be a long haul, requiring a lot of stamina and regenerative practices.

And so I have felt a burning need to balance my impulses toward action in the outer world with nourishing my soul, because I could feel that without it, I was at risk of burning out or losing hope. 

So I started tuning in to my dreams and the intuitive realms to seek some guidance. One message that came through was that turning to ancient sources of wisdom—from Indigenous peoples, from alternate and symbolic ways of knowing, and long-lived traditional cultures — could be useful sources of sustenance and grounding.

I was recently introduced to an esoteric Hungarian interpretation of celestial phenomena that sees our current period as being under the sway of the constellation Cetus, symbolized by a whale or sea dragon. 

As it was explained to me, Cetus bridges life’s cycles of completion, death, and endings with that of new birth—with all the power and vitality of a seed that breaks open its shell and pushes its way up through the soil to greet the light. It’s associated with the fertile darkness of the womb, with gestation, and with being in the unformed time between eras.

It’s seen as a time of dreaming, of receiving insight through the darkness, and of starting to find new relationships, new comings together. 

According to this belief system, our world will be under the potent influence of this constellation for several years to come, and it’s a time that calls for alchemy and ritual to connect us to the unseen worlds. How else might we shape-shift from watery loss and death to the fiery vitality of new birth?

And—this mythic symbolism warns—this is an epoch when we cannot know what will emerge when the dust settles.

Now, I realize many of us don’t take the interpretation of heavenly cycles or esoteric divinatory systems literally, but the symbolism of this narrative resonated deeply in me when I heard it. It affirmed my intuitive sense that rationality alone won’t be enough to get us through this deeply challenging time. I think we’ll need support from the invisible worlds, the worlds of our ancestors’ knowing, the worlds of our hearts’ wisdom, the worlds of our dreams and intuition—of ritual, art, and magic.

This mythopoetic image of Cetus really drove home to me that I needed to get more comfortable with not knowing. I’ve found that drawing from these sorts of ancient teachings and symbolic systems helps me position myself within a longer time frame. They remind me of what so many of our resilient ancestors learned the hard way: that the future we’re working for will most likely take years or generations to reach.

What I do know for certain is that we will need each other—in common cause, banding together—first to help each other survive, and then to wield our collective power effectively and joyfully. It helps me to remember that the opposite of divisiveness isn’t unity; it’s reciprocity, connection, and collaboration.

Indigenous peoples and long-established traditional cultures with histories of living on the land for centuries and even millennia have endured countless crises and upheavals. Their advice on how to adapt to changes, to weather storms, and to practice right relationship and reciprocity with each other and the rest of nature aren’t theoretical — they’re rooted in painstakingly-acquired wisdom. They have a great deal to offer us, as we face our own dark winds.

Another ancient symbol I have recently found deeply resonant is that of Sankofa, which comes from the Akan people of Ghana. Sankofa is a mythical bird that coalesces apparent contradictions—flying forward toward the future holding an egg, for new birth, while looking backward to the past for insight, inspiration, and guidance. It seems to be encouraging us to remember to always keep alive our webs of relatedness across time and space.

(And, to nourish your soul at any time, I commend to you Cassandra Wilson’s song of the same name — it’s truly glorious.)

Another pearl of wisdom that marked me profoundly came years ago as part of a yearlong training called the Art of Change, in which a guest teacher, Oscar Miro-Quesada of Indigenous Peruvian lineage, said at the end of a very long ceremony:

“If you remember only one thing from this night, remember this:
Consciousness creates matter.
Language creates reality.
Ritual creates relationship.”

Those nine words have been central to my learning ever since.

To practice ritual, we don’t need cultural appropriation—we can create our own. Ritual is more than tradition; it’s the act of making something, or an intention, sacred. Its repetition helps to transform our inner landscape, creating new neural pathways and belief systems.

Just to cite one small example: when I sought to heal my tendency to negatively judge my body, I created a ritual. Every morning for years, I moistened my body with scented oil and poured love, appreciation, and gratitude into it. I have invented and practiced a number of such personal rituals over the years.

I was present when ritual enabled more potent intercultural issues to find at least a measure of healing at a women’s leadership training in Northern New Mexico. Our time together included a collective dive into the pain of racialized wounding in very personal terms.

We heard about the Chinese grandmother whose bound feet hurt so much, she had to be carried. We learned of the great uncle who’d been lynched in the South. The Peruvian Indigenous grandmother who’d been forced to leave her ancestral homelands. And the woman of mixed ancestry who’d grown up shamed and targeted for being the darkest of her siblings. A white woman spoke of her slave-owner lineage, acknowledging the guilt she feels alongside her privilege.

We listened to each other’s stories deeply and tenderly. Together, we designed an embodied healing ritual. Each of us created a symbolic piece using branches, leaves, and twigs with colored fabrics and paper. We crafted messages that captured the hurts and beliefs we wanted to shed, and tied them onto the piece with colored yarn.

Then, with the cleansing spirit of fire, and a drum to connect our heartbeats, one by one we burned the ceremonial art pieces — naming, as we did, the aspects within ourselves we wished to release to the flames. Completing, we savored the sense of relatedness and the liberation we felt in witnessing each other’s work.

We have so much more in common than what divides us. And for the sake of Mother Earth, and all our living kin, we can no longer afford to cancel each other or torpedo alliances due to dug-in identities or self-righteous positions.

I also believe that to reclaim our resilience and human wholeness, this confluence of crises asks us to alter how we relate to ourselves—by tending to our hearts’ messages, our emotions, that we may have buried or undervalued.

To do that, I’ve got to first give myself permission to slow down, shift my attention, and listen inwardly to fully feel them. Then, I connect with others—to share what I’m experiencing, vulnerably, to transcend my isolation.

The emotions I’m talking about are not some soft, peripheral “gendered” aspect of our humanity. They’re how evolution has equipped us to meet life’s ups and downs—and to alchemically transform the tragedies we encounter into learning and engaged action. Each emotion is intended to convey vital information.

Karla McLaren, author of The Language of Emotions, says that anger is our body’s way of informing us that a boundary has been trespassed. If we truly allowed ourselves to feel the outrageous fact that every baby in this country is born containing over 240 chemicals not found in nature already within them, we’d have been out in the streets in full force long ago.

The outrage and fury I feel about right-wing judges rescinding women’s right to choose will help to fuel my actions. And I feel smoke coming out of my ears at the North Dakota court’s recent ruling against Greenpeace over the Standing Rock resistance.

Fear, Karla says, hones our senses—increasing our ability to respond effectively to new or changing situations. Sadness or depression is an indication that we need to release sorrow and weep, as many traditional Indigenous cultures ceremonially do, to cleanse our system, regenerate, and renew vitality after loss.

I believe that the tsunami of unexpressed grief and unprocessed trauma in this country is directly related to the increased violence in our society, and to the dissociation that allows the cruelty and violence to continue.

To help heal our relationship to emotions, let’s compost the binary tyranny of categorizing “good” and “bad” emotions—and of sweeping “negative” emotions under the rug and acting as if everything’s okay, when it’s not. 

Our sorrows and joys are twin poles of the same system, inextricably bound together in mutuality.

We’ve been culturally conditioned to turn away from pain, death, and hardship. But now, it seems to me, life is requiring us to face directly into the suffering, to fully feel in order to fuel our courage, to nourish our love, and then to connect with others to develop wise pathways to engaged action.

To weather the storms we’re facing—and to co-midwife a future that’s healing, caring, equitable, and joyful—we need to remember, co-create, and practice a culture of relationship. A culture where the health of Mother Earth and all of our kin who share this exquisite home are central to our collective well-being, and where all of that is indivisible from our social justice struggles.

Our future will require the engagement of us all… each in our own unique way.

Together, I believe, we can become the connective tissue for healing that our social body so badly needs — to form the coalition that can prevail to reinvent our worlds with love, grace, grit, creativity, and song.

In the long run, what I know is that all of our efforts need to focus on cultivating connection across issues, communities, and movements, toward coalition-building. I believe we’ll need rituals, wisdom, humility, and relational commitment to help develop trust and solidarity among the many with whom we share common values and ground.

It will be a journey of healing, and of courage, fueled by our great and enduring love. A love for the mystery and magic of all of creation, of Mother Earth, and of her sacred waters, earth, air, and fire that sustain us.

May it be so.

Awomen, amen, and aho.

Thank you.