Advocating Ecoliteracy and Relational Fluency – Falling in Love Again with a Living World
Remembering the Web of Life
At this moment of planetary crisis and transformation, humanity is asked to recall what Indigenous elders and transpersonal traditions have long carried in their wisdom streams: that life is relationship. The mechanistic worldview that dominates our global systems has reduced the living Earth to resources, fragmenting wholeness into parts. Yet, as systems thinkers such as Fritjof Capra remind us, life coheres as networks of interdependence, dynamic and self-organizing (Capra, 1997).
To advocate for ecoliteracy is to re-root education, spirituality, and culture in the recognition of these interwoven patterns. It is to teach that rivers, fungi, animals, ancestors, and stars are not objects but kin. It is to listen to the living world as a text of sacred pedagogy, where every being has voice and agency.
Relational Fluency as a Pathway
If ecoliteracy is the knowledge of life’s interconnectedness, relational fluency is the practice of living it. It is not enough to understand ecosystems; we are called to feel them, converse with them, and embody their rhythms in daily life. Relational fluency emerges from Indigenous ethics of Respect, Reciprocity, and Responsibility, which I have written about as an “ethics of the heart.”
This fluency is not abstract—it is cultivated through ceremony, ritual, and embodied practice. In my work, whether guiding transpersonal education, psychedelic-assisted healing, or sacred women’s retreats, I witness how relational fluency transforms participants. Through movement, art, prayer, and nature encounters, we learn to shift from extraction to offering, from domination to dialogue, from fear to intimacy with the living world.
Falling in Love Again with the Living World
The great planetary teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called this InterBeing: the felt truth that one cannot be without the other. To fall in love again with the living world is to awaken incarnations of this truth in every cell of our being. It is to realize that healing ourselves and healing Earth are not separate endeavors, but one sacred gesture.
Love here is not sentimental; it is radical, demanding, and transformative. As Satish Kumar (2023) calls forth in Radical Love, love is the most potent medicine in times of fragmentation. When practiced as daily ecology—walking gently, sharing generously, speaking truthfully—love becomes the ground of peace-building.
Advocacy as Sacred Action
To advocate ecoliteracy and relational fluency is to step into sacred activism: weaving together transpersonal psychology, Indigenous sciences, and planetary education into a living curriculum. This advocacy does not stay within classrooms or conferences—it extends into sanctuaries, riversides, community fires, and the silent listening of dawn.
As Visionary Founder/Director of Birthing an Ancient Future – Multidisciplinary Council of Peace-Builders, I see our task as cultivating spaces where this advocacy becomes embodied reality. We gather in councils, retreats, and global symposia not only to think together but to remember together. We weave the wisdom of grandmothers and grandchildren, shamans and scientists, fungi and forests, into tapestries of resilience.
An Invitation
The invitation before us is simple yet profound: to live as if Earth were alive, because she is. To walk with humility, intimacy, and joy. To reclaim ecoliteracy as a sacred literacy of life. To practice relational fluency until it becomes second nature. To fall in love, again and again, with the living world.
This is the path of peace-building. This is the task of our generation.
Mitakuye Oyasin – To All My Relations.
From heart to heart,
Dr. Regina U. Hess
Birthing an Ancient Future – Multidisciplinary Council of Peace-Builders
