Awakening ~ Blessed Unrest
When Something Sacred Stirs Within
This reflection is part 1 of a seven-part exploration:
Becoming the Humans Our World Is Calling For:
Human Development in an Age of Acceleration
Across this series, we explore a question many people are quietly sensing:
In a time of exponential change, what kind of human development allows us to become structurally stronger under pressure?
These are trying times. At first glance, it can seem like chaos reigns: ecosystems are collapsing, institutions are fracturing, relational fields are fraying under the weight of what isn’t willing to be faced. The pace of change is accelerating. The disruptions are staggering.
But if you look more closely, a different story begins to emerge.
A new kind of hero is being shaped. Easily overlooked, but unmistakable once seen. The ones still watching the horizon ~ with care, coherence, and quiet resolve. Not seeking to escape what’s coming ~ but to respond to it wisely, from a state of love rather than fear.
If you are reading this, chances are you are such a person.
And if you are, my guess is you have often felt like you’re the only one ~ a strange outlier in a world bent on business-as-usual. You…
…sense suffering others refuse to name.
…move toward coherence in a culture of control.
…feel, care, and act for the good of the whole, even when the cost of doing so is high.
If so, know you are not alone. The ache that drives you ~ to tend, mend, and defend Life ~ is not yours alone to carry. It is the signature of a deeper current moving through our species. A force that environmentalist and systems thinker Paul Hawken calls “the largest social movement in human history.”
Blessed Unrest: A Movement of Movements
Blessed Unrest isn’t a title or role. It’s a signal ~ a sacred stirring in the soul when life is out of alignment with love. A signpost that something ancient is reawakening through you.
Paul Hawken traveled the globe meeting thousands of people quietly working to heal their slice of the world. But where others saw isolated projects and scattered causes, he noticed a different possibility:
What if these were not disconnected efforts ~ but expressions of a single, emergent force? A movement of movements ~ largely unaware of itself, yet coherently responding to life’s suffering with acts of courage, care, and regeneration.
He wrote a book about it called Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World [1].
“Blessed unrest” is a term choreographer Martha Graham used to describe the life-force of creativity:
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique… [This] blessed unrest [is what] keeps us marching and makes us more alive.”
~Martha Graham as shared in The Marginalian [2]
Although this movement is global and diverse, this divine dissatisfaction is what animates the people who belong to it. Not ambition. Not saviorism. But devotion. An unwillingness to abandon love ~ even when the dominant culture has.
What if your ache isn’t a burden, but evidence of coherence reweaving through you?
The Great Underground
The Blessed Unrest isn’t a new global phenomenon. Hawken believes it is a modern manifestation of “The Great Underground,” a term the poet Gary Snyder used to describe:
“A current of humanity that dates back to the Paleolithic. Its lineage can be traced back to healers, priestesses, philosophers, monks, rabbis, poets, and artists ‘who speak for the planet, for other species, for interdependence, a life that courses under and through and around empires.” ~Gary Snyder, as shared in Blessed Unrest [3]
The Great Underground is like a river that surfaces in times of rupture. Not to fight. But to reweave. Not as rebellion, but as an immune response.
This lineage is not nostalgic. It is evolutionary. It reappears when life is at risk. Not to fight collapse ~ but to compost what’s crumbling and offer something wiser in its place.
It moves through those willing to feel and remember: Love is more than sentiment. It’s the powerful force of regulation that leads transformation on all scales.
The Call to Adventure
Some who sense the blessed unrest may resist the call for years. Others will reorganize their lives around it. But all are being invited into a deeper arc of participation.
The ones who say yes embark on a journey of transformation. Their sensitivities intensify. Life as they knew it begins to shift. It can feel disorienting. Lonely, even.
But they are not broken. They are becoming exquisitely adapted for the times ahead.
Biologists call it a niche shift ~ when the environment changes so drastically that some species evolve new ways of being to survive. Those who do become bridge-beings, carrying sacred patterns across thresholds.
They are no longer traveling by land, but learning to walk on waves.
An Invitation
If you feel that stirring ~ the blessed unrest rising within ~ you’re not alone.
This is just one thread in a much wider weave. If you’re seeking resonance, language, or companionship for the path ahead, you can begin by exploring the ecosystem.
References & Lineages
[1] Paul Hawken wrote the book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World, “primarily to discover what I don’t know.”
[2] The Martha Graham quote is from a conversation found in the 1991 biography Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (public library) by dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille. As shared by Maria Popova, The Marginalian “Martha Graham on the Life-Force of Creativity and the Divine Dissatisfaction of Being an Artist.”
[3] Part of what Hawken learned when writing the book “concerns an older quiescent history that is reemerging, what poet Gary Snyder calls the great underground, as shared by Peter Coyote.” LA Times, 1998 article Los Angeles Times, 6/4/98 Book Review — Sleeping Where I Fall by Louise Steinman. “Nine years in the writing, Coyote’s memoir establishes the spiritual lineage of the counterculture. He credits his close friend, poet Gary Snyder, with giving him the notion of ‘the great underground . . . the continuum since the Paleolithic of shamans and healers and priestesses and poets and dancers and artisans who speak for the planet, for other species for interdependence. A life,’ he says without pausing, ‘that courses under and through and around empires, and that whole other materialistically oriented worldview.’”
🌿
This reflection is one step in
a larger developmental journey.
Becoming the Humans Our World Is Calling For:
Human Development in an Age of Acceleration
Together these essays explore how human beings and social systems can
strengthen our inner integrity in a world of accelerating change.
If something in this piece resonated, you may wish to explore the wider arc of the series: