At the same time, we see extinction, crisis and an order that is slowly falling apart. Simultaneously, there is also an order that is emerging: a new era. If you want to participate in the birth of a new era, you will see that sometimes things work exactly the opposite of what we collectively think. For example, we are sentient beings who think instead of thinkers who feel.

With much violence and noise, we see destruction. After all, destruction is always loud. Yet, no one hears a small seed that germinates and comes out of the ground or a creative idea that comes into the world. Creation is often silent and hardly noticed. It escapes our attention if we are not paying attention.

This makes it necessary to make ‘The New Times’ visible, to pay attention to it and to carefully put it in the spotlight. The New Times is of a different order, one that is both serious and playful, considers the whole and the parts, connects the outside and inside. In which we assume a role of consumer and producer, of employee and employer and dependency and independence.

It is an invitation and a warning, in freedom and with responsibility, in unity and within duality. A few more paradoxes as an extra: seeing scarcity and abundance, acting globally and locally, moving intrinsically and extrinsically, organizing centrally and decentrally, short-term and long-term direction, seeing light and dark and to see from love and fear.

We are expecting and perhaps even overdue. Do you see and feel the birth pangs yet?

Martijn Derksen

ps. please see three quotes below that shine more light and give you a sense of this new era we are embarking upon.

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” 
―  Leonardo da Vinci 

"Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole - such is the law of growth. The unifying of difference is the eternal process of life - the creative synthesis, the highest act of creation, the at-onement."

- Mary Parker Follett

See I am near says the Lord, see I make all things new. - Taize