'Epiphany'comes from Greek. It means to cause to appear, to bring to light, to make visible. It's also a form of religious experience, though that's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about those pattern-setting realisations we occasionally get which suddenly show things as they actually are, rather than what we, up to then, told ourselves. Nowadays, we tend to tell ourselves a lot and then try to mould reality around it. But life doesn't work like that.

Listen more closely to things than to people - a chunk of wisdom from the Xhosa of South Africa.

We need many more epiphanies, for individuals, social groups, nations and the world. This is crucial in the 21st Century, and our future depends on it.

In the 2020s we're being served waves of crises that seem designed to invoke epiphanies - without which, things can quickly get a lot worse because people seek to restore normality rather than to get the message about the acceleration that's happening. It's a reality-shift, and it started during the Covid crisis.

Covid was but a catalyst of a cascade of further change-processes, prompting myriad personal realisations that life was not going the way many people wished. This in turn will lead to much wider social shifts of values and life-patterns as the months and years progress. There's more coming.

Now, in 2022, we face war, food shortages, economic shocks, climate disasters, and it's increasingly stretching us open. These are all questions we needed to address earlier, but we didn't want to look.

It's a shorter and simpler podcast, this one, compared to a few recent ones. It was recorded outdoors, down the old trackway on our farm. 18 mins.