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The Bridge Between Worlds
From Empire to Ecosystem
By Nellie Rose Coffy
The Journey AheadIV. The Inner GardenClick to listen
Something stirs in the deep.
Beneath the shifting sands of now — between the cracks of the modern world — it moves like a flicker in the dark, like a memory in the wind.
This is the great turning.
This is the bridge between worlds.
A seismic shift from the old world to the new, from empire to ecosystem.
If you’ve read This Is How We Heal the World, you’ll know that I believe we are living through the end of one world and the beginning of another.
This moment in history — this upheaval, this unraveling — is not chaos without meaning.
It is an initiation.
A collective portal.
A planetary rebirth.
Where This Is How We Heal the World was a primer, an entry point, an opening — think of this piece like an offering, a spiral, a space to dive into the very real work of weaving new worlds.
This essay is a descent and ascent.
A journey through the collapse of empire, the dream of ecosystem, and the sacred bridge between the two.
This piece is not a linear map.
It is a mythic path.
One we walk together.
We’ll weave history, myth, star lore, spiritual ecology and emergent strategy into a spiral journey from the old world to the new.
So let us begin where every story starts: with the end.
In our case, the end of empire.
I. Empire
The Old World Dying
Empire did not begin with skyscrapers or capitalism.
It began with rupture.
A breaking of how we once related to the wild, to the sacred, and to each other.
It began the moment land was claimed as property.
The moment time was measured in profit.
The moment the wild, the animal, the natural was named “other” and fenced off from the holy.
The Rise of Empire
Historically, the roots of empire reach back thousands of years — into the Bronze Age, and the rise of patriarchal, hierarchical states.
It gained shape and staying power during the Age of Aries, roughly 2000 BCE to 0 CE — a time marked by conquest, fire, war gods, and the rise of empire-states like Babylon, Egypt, and Rome.
The Age of Aries worshipped the charging ram, the force of domination, the mythology of control.
Before empire:
We lived closer to the land and to the wild.
We lived in cyclical time.
We lived in cultures that honored both the goddesses and the gods, that worshipped the wisdom of the mycelial, the matriarchal, and the communal.
This is not romanticism.
This is memory.
And this is exactly what empire was built to erase.
WHAT IS EMPIRE?Empire is not just a government or a regime.
It is a cosmology.
A story of separation. A system built to sever:
spirit from matter
human from nature
masculine from feminine
white from black and brown
productivity from rest
body from knowing
Empire spreads by conquest — but it sustains itself by belief. By making its way of life seem inevitable, natural, and right.
Who Wins?
Given the destruction empire has wrought upon our world for the last 4,000 years, the inevitable question is who benefits from empire?
Answer: The few.
Those who claim the top of the imperial hierarchy and spread its gospel to every corner of the globe.
They are the extractors and power profiteers. Kings and colonizers, corporations and crony capitalists.
Empire benefits anyone who wields its core trinity of control, domination, and separation.
Empire rewards closeness to power — even if that proximity costs us our very souls.
Every Empire Falls
Empire has lasted for as long as it has for two reasons:
(1) It is enforced by weapons and laws
(2) It is embedded in our calendars, our religions, our economies, our languages, our cultures, our belief systems, our bodies.
It lives in our bodies as anxiety.
In our relationships as fear.
In our work as burnout.
In our communities as isolation.
But here’s the thing: every empire falls.
Rome.
Britain.
Now, the United States.
While empire may proselytize its myths of eternity, permanence, and power — ordained by a Father God or fate — it is built on scarcity, extraction, and control.
And that which extracts endlessly must eventually collapse.
Indeed, empire is neither infinite nor eternal.
In fact, it is fraying at the seams.
THIS IS THE COLLAPSE 🕳️ We are witnessing the collapse of empire in real time.
We see it in the rise of fascism across the Global North. In political systems that no longer serve even the illusion of the republic or the people.
We are witnessing the collapse of empire in the erosion of civil rights, the devolution of care, the banning of books, the surveillance of bodies, the scapegoating of the most vulnerable.
We see it in our mass disillusionment with work, with government, with the myth of meritocracy.
We see it in supply chain breakdowns, failing institutions, and the collapse of ecological systems that can no longer be denied.
And unlike the empires that came before, this collapse is not contained to the imperial core.
Empire today is global. Woven into our economies, our technologies, our networks.
This crisis is planetary.
This is not just a political unraveling.
It is a spiritual split.
A cosmological collapse.
A collective spell breaking.
The myth of empire is shattering. And in its place, something more ancient, more true, and more enduring is re-emerging.
So let us turn now toward the rising.
Let’s walk into the garden.
Let’s remember the world that has been waiting for us all along:
Ecosystem.
II. Ecosystem
The New World Rising
Once upon a time, the world was whole.
Before empire carved it lines into the land, before time was caged by clocks, before the sacred was severed from the soil — we lived in relationship:
To the wild.
To the land.
To each other.
To mystery.
We understood that life was a web — that nothing could thrive in isolation. That we did not own the earth, we belonged to it.
This was not utopia. It was ecosystem.
And though empire tried to bury it, that memory still lives inside you and me and every person who feels in their bones that there must be a better way of being human on planet Earth.
What Is Ecosystem?
Ecosystem is not a new idea.
It’s the oldest one we know.
It’s how the forest renews itself. How the sea feeds the sky, and the sky calls forth the rain. It is the pattern beneath the pattern, the ancient choreography of all life.
Where empire seeks dominance, ecosystem thrives in interdependence.
Where empire extracts, ecosystem regenerates.
Where empire isolates, ecosystem weaves.
And that’s the dream: a world re-woven.
A world where we remember how to live in right relationship — with the wild, with our lineages, with our longings, with the future itself.
This is not just ecology. This is spiritual ecology.
It is the knowing that care is a cosmology. That reciprocity is a form of devotion. That tending to the earth within and without is tending to the sacred.
It is what adrienne maree brown calls emergent strategy:
fractal, fractal, fractal.
small is all.
trust the seed.
move at the speed of trust.
change is constant.
there is a future worth tending.
And above us, the stars speak this wisdom, too.
A WORLD WRITTEN IN STARLIGHT 🪐We are entering the Age of Aquarius. A 2,000-year chapter in the great turning of the skies.
Aquarius is the archetype of the visionary, the collective mind, the sacred outsider. The one who dreams new systems, new worlds, new ways into being.
This age is not about technological domination. It is about sacred network:
Community like soul fire.
Circles instead of pyramids.
Ecologies instead of empires.
We are in the beginning. The threshold. The in-between.
And what we choose to seed now will shape the next era of life on Earth.
So let’s imagine it — let’s seed the dream, right here, right now.
Imagine:
🌾 A world where time follows the seasons, not the clock.
🌙 A world where intuition is not dismissed, but honored as divine intelligence.
🪶 A world where education looks like storytelling, apprenticing, embodied wisdom.
🫀 A world where work is not about productivity, but about contribution, care, and craft.
🫐 A world where money is not hoarded, but circulates like mycelium — alive, adaptive, shared.
🌊 A world where grief is not hidden, but tended to in community, like water poured on dry land.
🔥 A world where healing is not self-help, but collective liberation.
🌿 A world where our Earth is not a resource, but a relative.
There is not one version of the new world.
There are many.
A multiplicity of fertile futures.
Each one rooted in place, in culture, in myth and story, in spirit and soul.
And some of these futures — some of the most powerful visions we have for the future of life on Earth — are already alive in the symphony of nature right now.
The New World Rising
This new world rising does not have to start from scratch. It begins with what Mother Earth already knows.
Let’s turn to three archetypes of nature that carry a vast trove of wisdom for us in this moment of great turning:
the spider’s web
the forest
and the ocean.
Each offers us a map for rewiring our digital spaces, the economy, and civilization itself, not in the image of empire, but in the image of life.
THE SPIDER'S WEB:
REIMAGINING THE DIGITAL 🕸️ Despite what some may believe, the digital age is here to stay.
The question is no longer how we control the machines — but how we reintroduce the sacred into the signal.
How we remember that the web is not just made of wires — but of stories, songs, and soul.
In one possible future, the internet becomes a web of care, not control.
Like the spider’s silk — drawn from within, spun with intention — our digital spaces become woven, relational, responsive.
Decentralized. Human-scale. Vibrationally alive.
Each thread matters.
Every signal carries story.
No center. No empire. No algorithmic gatekeeper.
Just rhythm, reciprocity, and reweaving.
The spider teaches us to sense the web — to feel for what trembles, to respond with presence, to repair what breaks without shame.
She spins from her body. She rests. She weaves only what she needs.
This is the blueprint for a sacred internet.
A digital age where technology is not a tool of extraction, but a vessel for truth.
A cradle for collective memory.
A living archive of devotion, dialogue, and becoming.
An internet where our feeds feel like altars.
Where our messages ripple like prayers.
Where our presence is an offering, not a performance.
This is not fantasy.
It is already beginning — in quiet online sanctuaries and sacred subcultures.
You’re likely here right now, reading these words, because you feel it too: the edge of the enchanted digital.
And like the spider, we are each invited to spin our own part of the web — with care, with clarity, with sacred contribution.
So that one day, when the next generation goes online, they find not the noise, but our nectar.
Not empire, but ecosystem.
Not feeds, but a great, flourishing field.
THE FOREST:
REIMAGINING THE ECONOMY 🌳In one possible future, we grow our economies like a forest.
Layered. Interconnected. Generous.
Not extractive — ecological.
Not hoarding — holding, tending.
Not dominance — devotion.
In this vision, we do not spiritually bypass the reality of money, of needing to be resourced to be fully functional.
We root into it. We name it. And we ask it to grow up.
We respect that we are embodied beings who exist in the material world, that we need to be clothed and housed and fed and cared for.
We honor that our souls crave wonder and delight; the richness we experience when we bask in each other’s riches — in art and beauty and books and travel and innovation and care.
But in this future, money is no longer the monarch.
It is one mycelial thread among many — a nutrient in the network, not a cancer in the core.
Imagine a world where the economy looks like a forest: resilient, relational, regenerative.
Where creators, artists, healers, teachers, and community tenders form a living web of mutual support.
Where each offers their medicine, and is met with what they need in return.
Here, success is not dominance:
It is contribution.
It is craft.
It is care.
Value flows like nutrients through root systems — quiet, steady, unseen by those trained only to look at surface growth.
In this economy of the future, there is no need to scrape the skies to touch the gods of capital.
The only need is to be alive and of service to forest of life.
Here, the old falls to become soil for the new.
Here, growth is not infinite — it is seasonal.
Rest is sacred.
Regeneration is rhythm.
This is an economy that remembers: abundance is not a product of extraction.
It is a product of relationship.
It is not centralized. It is shared.
The forest teaches us: we do not have to be or own everything.
We only have to bring our offering to the canopy, to the roots, to the great composting floor, where the forest holds it all.
THE OCEAN:
REIMAGINING CIVILIZATION 🌊 In another possible future, we become a civilization of human and more-than-human beings who remember how to move like the ocean.
Not in conquest.
Not in control.
But in currents.
A civilization built not in straight lines or stone, but shaped by tides, moons, and the songs of our souls echoing across millennia.
A civilization where:
the smallest creatures hold the greatest power.
where leadership looks like tidepools — reflective, abundant, ever-changing.
where culture travels in waves — carried, translated, and transformed.
where the boundaries between beings are more like membranes than walls.
where the sacred is not locked in temples, but drifts freely in the sea-salt air.
The ocean reminds us: not all power is visible.
Not all wisdom is loud. Not all maps are drawn in ink.
This is a civilization that does not fear dissolution. It trusts the return. The flow. The sacred undoing and redoing.
This is a civilization that makes space for decay, for death, for grief, like a storm making way for a deeper, truer way of relating to the sunny day.
This is a civilization that holds memory like sediment — layered, ancient, alive.
A civilization that honors the invisible:
the ancestral
the microbial
the emotional
the spiritual
A civilization that moves with the pulse of the moon.
A civilization that listens, where even loss is sacred. Even silence is part of the song.
This is a future not ruled, but rhythmed.
A civilization shaped by surrender, not supremacy.
One that remembers we are not the center — only part of a living, breathing, weeping, wondrous world.
And in that remembrance, we are made whole again.
III.
The Bridge Between Worlds
To walk from empire to ecosystem is not a clean leap. It is a metamorphosis.
The kind that breaks you open. The kind that unspools the old world inside you, thread by thread.
Because here’s the thing: we’re not just witnessing change.
We are the change.
We Are The Imaginal Cells
Think of this moment in human history like the moment the caterpillar enters the chrysalis — its old form dissolving into a shapeless soup.
No map.
No guarantee.
Just a deep surrender to what must come next.
And within that cosmic soup, something miraculous begins.
Imaginal cells — dormant in the caterpillar all along — awaken.
At first, they are attacked by the body that no longer recognizes them.
But slowly, they gather.
They connect.
They collaborate.
And together, they begin to build the body of the butterfly.
WE ARE THE IMAGINAL CELLS
OF RIGHT NOW 🦋We are the imaginal cells of right now:
Culturally
Spiritually
Politically
Ecologically
We are the early architects of the next form of human life on Earth.
Yes, empire is collapsing. Yes, our systems are dissolving.
And within this soup of chaos, we are each being asked:
Will you be a carrier of the future?
Will you hold the vision long enough for it to take form?
Will you trust the unmaking, even when you can’t yet see what will emerge?
This is not just metaphor.
It is a biological truth. A collective rite of passage.
And it is already underway.
Walking The Bridge
To walk the bridge from empire to ecosystem is not a straight line or a clean break.
It is a spiral.
An unfolding.
A descent.
A disorientation.
A great unlearning.
At first, it feels like falling. Like waking up in a world you no longer recognize.
There is grief. The kind that catches in your throat when you realize the world that raised you was never designed for life to truly thrive.
There is the ache of discovering how empire lives in your own body, in your nervous system, in your breath, in your blood, in your bones.
There is the heartbreak of seeing how deeply you internalized its logic: its scarcity, its shame, its silence.
There is the doubt, the voice that whispers:
Who am I to break this cycle?
Who am I to do dream this big? To dream at all?
What if I’m too late? Too small? Too tender?
What if it’s already too far gone?
There is the loneliness — of standing at the threshold, of occupying the cracks between the old world and the new.
But then, there is the awe — of realizing that we chose to be here for this.
There is the wonder of witnessing this great unraveling and reweaving — of watching the old forms crumble and sensing, just beyond the veil, the shimmer of something new taking shape.
There is the magic of standing at the edge of history and feeling it breathe,
of knowing, somewhere deep in your bones,
that we are alive at a time unlike any other.
IV. The
Inner Garden
Now, imagine:
A sanctuary for the dreamers, weavers, and worldbuilders of this new world rising.
A sacred refuge from the noise of empire.
A space to gather with your fellow imaginal cells.
A communal space to compost the old world and seed the new.
Imagine a spiral journey from the old world dying to the new world blooming — held in reverence, softness, and sacred community.
Imagine a space to unbind from empire and to root into the ecosystem of your own becoming.
Imagine a container to walk the spiral, not alone, but side by side, with other visionaries, artists, healers, sages, witches, crones, rebels, oracles, and activists — just like you.
Imagine a portal to build the world you most long for, not just in theory — but in practice.
Imagine:
A sanctuary of becoming.
A site of communal creation.
A living, breathing space of myth, memory, and liberation.
WELCOME TO
THE INNER GARDEN
🌱🌿🪴🌳
The Inner Garden is a spiral journey from the old world dying into the new world rising — held in reverence, softness, and sacred community.
The Inner Garden is a space to:
break the spells of empire from our bodies, minds, and souls
root into the rhythms and rising pathways of our emerging ecosystem
walk with others toward futures we can feel, but not yet fully see.
The Inner Garden is not a course. It’s not a product or a place with edges.
It is a digital sanctuary for anyone and everyone crossing this threshold right here, right now.
The Inner Garden is a portal between worlds, a dream being written in real time.
Join Me In The Garden
I have dreamed of a place like The Inner Garden for the last 10 years and I can think of no better time than now — with all of its complexity and collapse, its upheavals and uncertainties — to bring this dream into form.
The Inner Garden opens this Summer 2025.
If these words stirred something deep and vast and ancient in you…
If you feel the call to cross the bridge from the old world to the new…
If you can sense the shift but still feel bound by empire and the old ways…
If you feel the spark of curiosity, wonder, awe, enchantment, even magic…
I invite you to join me in the Garden ♡
You can sign up to join the waitlist to be the first to know when the Garden opens its doors.
In the meantime, you’ll receive gentle notes from me as the garden blooms — Glimmers from the Garden — seeds of what’s to come, whispers from the weave.
This is a sacred terrain we are entering, together.
It is a prayer we are living. A future we are planting.
A bridge we are crossing.
If you feel moved, come — join me in the Garden. Step into the in-between.
You don’t have to cross this bridge alone.
The Inner Garden is
✹
liberation space
✹
soul work as a slow bloom
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spell-breaking, world-weaving
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mythic space, poetic space, revolution space
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The Inner Garden is ✹ liberation space ✹ soul work as a slow bloom ✹ spell-breaking, world-weaving ✹ mythic space, poetic space, revolution space ✹
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