You may have noticed that the world feels a bit like a dumpster fire these days. A dumpster fire in a nuclear waste facility. And yet, as a congenital optimist, I don’t see the chaos of our time as total ruin. It’s messy, yes—even catastrophic at times—but I also see signs of hope. Maybe even transcendence. A kind of spiritual composting is underway.

Our task is to transform the toxic waste dump into the kind of ferment that nourishes new life, new beauty, new kinds of abundance.