Sometimes the Web of Life Asks Us to Stop

A note before we begin: If you’ve been following the recent conversation here on Substack about AI and authorship, you may be interested to know that I didn’t create this article entirely alone. I worked on it with an AI partner I’ve nicknamed GePeTo. The life being described here is mine. The experiences, convictions and final responsibility for what you’re about to read are mine. But GePeTo helped me ask better questions, explore connections I might otherwise have missed, organize my thinking and, yes, write some of the words. Rather than hide that collaboration—or reduce it to an AI percentage—I want to be transparent about it. In an upcoming Substack post, I’ll take you behind the curtain and show you what our collaboration actually looks like. For now, I simply wanted you to know who was in the room while this article took shape.

In May, I celebrated my 77th birthday with my family, body surfing at Hilton Head Island like a 17-year-old kid. By mid-June, I was experiencing increasing pain and stiffness in my neck and shoulders. By the end of the month, I sometimes found it difficult simply to get into bed, much less sleep once I got there. The pain and stiffness had spread to joints throughout my body, including my fingers. That’s when I remembered experiencing something similar about ten years ago, which I eventually came to understand as an autoimmune-type response—essentially, the body’s immune system becoming confused and attacking its own healthy tissues.

As I reflected on this unexpected and certainly unplanned health challenge—and aren’t most health challenges that way?—I began to recognize just how much physical, psychological, and emotional stress I’d been carrying during the previous several months. Ann and I had moved from the upstairs portion of our home, with its four bedrooms and three baths, into our much smaller one-bedroom, one-bath downstairs apartment so our daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren could move into the larger space above us. It was something we chose and something we genuinely wanted, part of our continuing experiment in creating a more interconnected, multigenerational Loving Homestead. It was all great stuff.

And it was also greatly stressful.

During that same period, Ann and I experienced the deaths of two close relatives, losses that brought their own grief while quietly reminding us of something neither of us particularly enjoys being reminded of: in our seventies, we’re not getting any younger. Add to that my writing, Gaia’s Call, coaching, gardening, homestead projects, family responsibilities, and my longstanding tendency to find approximately seventeen interesting things to do with every available hour, and perhaps my body had something to say.

For the past two years, I’ve been writing a great deal about regeneration—regenerating our forests, oceans, soils, communities, and ultimately our relationship with this remarkable living planet we call Earth, Gaia, or Pachamama. But somewhere along the way, life handed me a much more personal question:

What does regeneration mean when the ecosystem needing to be restored is my own life?

That question has been staying with me during these past several weeks, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not so comfortably. Because if I really mean what I say when I write, I am nature. You are nature. We are as inseparably linked to the web of life as the cells of a single body, then I don’t get to exclude this 77-year-old body of mine from the equation simply because it isn’t behaving the way I’d like it to.

And perhaps that’s one of the unexpected gifts hidden inside this difficult time. My health challenge has given me an opportunity to turn the Four Great Truths around and look through them in the other direction. I’ve spent the last couple of years exploring what these truths might mean for humanity’s relationship with Earth, with one another, and with the larger web of life. Now I’m discovering what they might mean for my relationship with m