September 2025 Equinotes : Cracks Where the Light Gets In – From Collapse to Coherence
Equinotes are published periodically drawing on the Archives of Integral City’s Reflective Organ Newsletter, Blogs, Books and Website. The perspectives of Equinotes weave across: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is: Cracks Where the Light Gets In: From Collapse to CoherenceSeptember 2025 Equinotes are drawn from these publications:
As we enter this Equinox, the world feels fragile — stretched by war, climate extremes, and fraying trust in institutions. Yet, as Leonard Cohen reminded us, “there is a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.” The cracks in our systems may look like collapse, but they also offer us luminous doorways into coherence.
In this edition of Equinotes, we’ve borrowed the lenses of the Civic Managers and gathered writings from across time that speak to this paradox:
Civic Managers the Brain of the CityColony Collapse for the Human Hive or Cracks Where the Light Gets In? (2011) explores how breakdowns in natural and human systems can open possibilities for breakthrough.
Detroit: An Eerie Picture of a Whole City in its Last Stage of Lifecycle (2011) offers a sobering mirror of urban decline, and the invitation to re-imagine cycles of life, death, and renewal.
Archipelagos of Calm (2023) envisions islands of stillness and coherence amidst turbulence — refuges where the soul of the city can be restored.
Connecting Integrally to Community in the 21C: Spiritually, Socially, Politically (2023) reflects on how our connections — spiritual, social, and political — weave coherence across the cracks of our fragmented world.
Together, these voices remind us that coherence does not arise in spite of fragility — it is born through it. The cracks we fear may in fact be the very openings through which light enters, guiding us toward new coherence and fresh patterns of aliveness in our collective life.
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Scroll to end of Equinotes to access Free Resources, MetaBlogs 2013-2025.
A Civic Manager is like the “brain” of the city. Civic Managers (CM) include senior leaders in the city hall, the healthcare system, the justice system, the school system, and the library system. With interlocking responsibilities, a Civic Manager creates conditions for the city to run effectively. The purpose of civic management is to establish and maintain order, knowledge and safety in the city. Sometimes like air traffic controllers, other times like engineers and some days like systems designers, a Civic Manager needs training and experience to coordinate city planning, engineering, economic development, transportation, waste and water management, coordinating energy supplies, street maintenance, cultural and social planning, emergency and medical services, animal/human interface management and ecological/sustainability strategy. A Civic Manager sets and/or subscribes to building standards, maintenance schedules, city official agendas and town hall meetings. Traditionally, CM’s have been organized in chains of command for the purposes of responsibility and accountability. Now a CM needs to meshwork these hierarchies with relationships across multiple sectors and stakeholders. CM’s can use their authority to create meshworks of appropriate functions, skills and capacities, able to perform across disciplines with reliability even in very complex situations.
Click here to find out more about how the Civic Manager can:Develop Leadership CapacitiesNegotiate DiversityMeshwork Effectively With Elected Officials, Staff, Agencies and OthersPlan Strategically for the Global Village
Colony Collapse for Human Hive orCracks Where Light Gets In?Colony collapse disorder (CCD) for the honey bee has been giving me warning signs to look at the equivalent possibility for the human hive. Three stories from this week’s news offer some strong “weak signals” that may be indications of onset of the human hive’s CCD in America.The Tucson shooting of Gabrielle Giffords (reported National Post January 2011) and many others are shocking the system of human hives across the United States. The occurrence is challenging all parties to look at how they speak and make meaning from each others’ communications. It is asking parents to consider how they raise their kids, how schools and universities educate them, how communities nurture and support them, how the justice system protects them, how the political system represents them – or not. It is asking kids to think about what are ” right relationships” with their parents, elders and authorities. It is confronting the responsibilities of all roles for the safety and protection of daily life in the human hive – by conformity enforcers, diversity generators, resource allocators and inner judges alike. Everyone is looking at how they relate to all those basic roles in the human hive.
The very word “right” is being recalibrated into a new “appropriateness”.
Click here to read the full Thought Piece published January 14, 2011.
Detroit An Eerie Picture of a Whole City – in Last Stage of LifecycleDetroit in ruins:The Photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre
In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city’s painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America.
[This is an eerie story by Sean O’Hagan of the Observer, Jan. 2, 2011 that is a commentary on a new photo-journalism book by Marchand and Meffre. What struck me was how it chronicled the lifecycle of a city in its death-throes. This describes a chronic despair that goes beyond what is still arising from the acute disaster that struck New Orleans – because Detroit’s situation is like society has abandonned the city as if it were a chronically ill parent in a Dickensian old age institution. It is a stark reminder that the most fantastic investments in brick and mortar, do not a city make — it is the breath of consciousness and culture that brings the marble and glass artefacts and art to life. Despite the dark shadow of this story, the last paragraph (copied below) offers a glimmer for future re-birth. For the full story click on “Detroit in Ruins” above.]Click here to read the full article published January 15, 2011.
Archipelagos of CalmIslands of Calm Meditations, on Saturday mornings started on Zoom and continue on Zoom so that we can ripple calm out from Findhorn across the world every week.
From the original disturbance to our systems starting with Covid threats and lockdown isolations, we have become aware how life conditions in the world can impact us as close as the family we live with or friends we walk with or workers we create with. Or change that ripples through our communities, hedgerows, food gardens or tree guardians. Or we can feel the trauma of wars far away or earthquakes across the world. Or climate-change weather turning places we know into flood zones, burning infernos or tornado alleys.
David Spangler proposed that finding an Island of Calm in ourselves, creates the capacity to influence 1000 other people. With the challenges we face in such a turbulent world we have asked ourselves – is this practice what the world still needs? And, in true Findhornian fashion, we found instruction from Eileen that assures us our practice has merit. Eileen says:
There is a tremendous amount you can do to help [the world] by the work you do on the inner in radiating Love and Light … this work which is being done on the inner is simply tremendous. lt is holding the whole world in balance, so never cease, never let up in any way but carry on faithfully. (Eileen’s Guidance, Dec. 30)
Click here to find out more about the Islands of Calm Meditation published February 21 , 2023.
Connecting Integrally to Community in the 21C: Spiritually, Socially, PoliticallyThis was a series of blogs inspired by the Edinburgh International Centre for Sustainability and Peace, 2023 Forum: Connecting with Community in the 21st Centure: Spiritual, Social, Policy Perspectives. This was delivered by Marilyn Hamilton, March 1, 2023.We have always believed “If you want to improve the health of a system connect it to more of itself.” This session will disclose the infinite but strategic ways you can nurture communities in the 21st century to connect to more of themselves.
Connecting Communities has been central to the evolutionary impulses that created Integral City Meshworks and is now growing Living Cities: Earth.
From the start we defined community as “a journey to wholeness for a group of people.”
In the last 2 decades our research has explored how to serve and influence communities of interest, communities of culture, communities of living, communities of practice and communities of Nature – online, in ecovillages and in cities and their ecoregions.
Let me share some examples of these community emergences from the Findhorn Ecovillage where I live.
Click here to find out more about the series of blogs published March 5 , 2023.
Explore Integral City Archive of Newsletters, Blogs, MetaBlogs:Bonus: Findhorn as Beacon & Lighthouse Blog Series
Bonus Integral Europe Conference 2025: Dr. Karen O’Brien and Fractals of Soul Power: Weaving Change Across Scales
Bonus Integral Europe Conference 2025: Dr. Elke Fein – Wholeness in Politics, Wholeness in Cities
Integral City ArchivesMarch 2025, Equinotes: Regenerating Our Planet’s Soul
December 2024, Reflective Organ: Soul Power as Beauty, Truth, GoodnessSeptember 2024 Equinotes: Placecaring & Placemaking Capacities
June 2024 Reflective Organ: Ecovillage, City, 4th Voice
March 2023 Equi-Notes: Roots of City Peace in Joy, Happiness and Care
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