In these conversations about the Third Attractor, one truth keeps coming back: we cannot build a new world if we have not learned to feel the old one dying. Beneath our philosophies and visions, there is grief. A grief that belongs not only to us but to the whole of life.
Bruce Alderman spoke of it as an apprenticeship to sorrow. Elizabeth Debold called it the opening of a new kind of love, one that is vast enough to hold the suffering of the world without turning away. I feel both are right. To love the future, we must first learn to grieve the present.
For a long time, I resisted this truth. I wanted to stay inspired and strong, focused on creation, not collapse. But as I listened more deeply, I realized that grief is not the opposite of hope. It is the soil from which hope grows. When we allow our hearts to break open, we begin to feel the pulse of a much larger life moving through us.
Joanna Macy once said that the only heart big enough to hold the world is the heart that has been broken open. This has become a living practice for me. When I feel the pain of the Earth, the fear of our uncertain future, or the loss of what we love, I try not to close down. I try to breathe it in, to let it move through me, to trust that this heartbreak is not personal. It is the cry of life itself seeking to awaken in us.
In that surrender, something else becomes visible. There is a love that does not depend on outcomes. A love that is fierce and tender at once. A love that knows we may not see the fruits of our labor, yet gives itself fully anyway. This love is the seed of the Third Attractor. It is what allows us to act without despair, to create without certainty, and to serve without needing reward.
Our work is not to avoid grief but to become transparent to it. To feel deeply, but not be paralyzed. To let sorrow cleanse us of illusion until only love remains. When that happens, we begin to sense a larger coherence behind the chaos, a quiet assurance that something wiser than us is moving the whole process forward.
This, to me, is what it means to have a heart big enough for the world. Not to fix it, but to hold it. Not to escape its pain, but to love it awake.
