Dear Future Human,
This is Ronit Herzfeld, writing to you from planet Earth. It is the year 2026.
I wonder who you are as you read this, what your world feels like, what has changed, and what has not. I hope that by the time these words reach you, you will find what I am saying here unnecessary, that humanity will already have found its way to deeper alignment with life and with one another.
I am writing now because I feel, to the depth of my being, that the path we are on is leading us toward a collapse we may not know how to come back from.
I still believe we can change.
I have to.
Everything I have lived has led me here.
I was four and a half years old.
My mom and I were sitting on a bus, on our way to visit my grandparents. I was particularly excited, having not seen them since our move to another part of town. As I sat there, I curiously observed the people around me. My eyes rested on an old man sitting directly across from me. I moved my gaze from his stubby gray beard to his wrinkled face and up to his gray eyes. Suddenly I found myself inside his body. I was looking through his eyes, feeling his sadness and loneliness as if I was living it myself. Then, just as suddenly I was back in my body.
Shortly after, it happened again. My eyes caught a woman sitting at the back of the bus. I examined her face, her jewelry, her hair, and again, I found myself inside her, seeing through her eyes and feeling through her heart.
When I returned to myself, a thought crossed my mind, one that felt completely natural:
Ah… we all have different faces and bodies, but the same thing is looking through the eyes.
From that day forward, I couldn’t see people the same way. I couldn’t feel separate from them. It led me to feel the world’s suffering as my own. There was no boundary, no way to filter it. It was overwhelming. For a long time, I didn’t understand what was happening, or what to do with it.
It nearly destroyed me.
By fifteen, the weight of it brought me to the edge. A voice inside me pulled me back, and I chose to live, not only for myself, but because I needed to understand why we suffer.
Now I feel it pressing closer. We are lost, in pain, searching for meaning, purpose, and a place to belong. Even as I continually work to stay clear and grounded in the face of our collective evolution, I can feel the chaos moving through me. The divisiveness. The apathy. The helplessness. I know us. I know how deeply we long to feel connected, to be in the service of the greater Garden of We.
I see each one of us as an essential element in the Garden of Humanity, as I see us, the birds, the trees, and the smallest insects as essential elements in the Garden of Nature.
Nothing is extra. Nothing is separate.
This is not how we are living. We see each other first through identity: race, religion, culture, ideology, nationality, as if those were the most important truths about us.
From there, we divide. We blame. We fight. We defend.
What if we are seeing this backwards? What if we are human first, and everything else comes after? What if those differences are not meant to divide us? What if they are meant to enrich the whole?
The way different birds fill the sky with different colors and songs. The way trees, flowers, and insects each play a role in sustaining the same living system.
We don’t look at a garden and wish everything were the same. We are nourished by difference. We celebrate it.
With each other, we turn differences into divisiveness.
We have forgotten an essential truth. We are not standing outside the garden; we are part of it. What we do to ourselves, we do to each other. What we do to each other, we do to the earth that holds us. The way we adapted early shapes the world we make. The planet is hurting because we are hurting ourselves and each other. The hurt inside us, the hurt between us, and the hurt we see in the world are deeply connected. They arise from the same separation.
Deep in my being, I believe that the pain we feel is disconnection: from ourself, from our purpose and from our ability to express and contribute the Garden of We.
We are a force of nature, and as such we have the creative and resilient power of nature.
Everything I am about to share grew out of forty years of sitting with people in pain. From watching how we think we understand ourselves and still repeat the same patterns. From seeing how we lose contact with ourselves, each other, and the natural world, and what it takes to find our way back.
It also comes from my own life. I know what it is to come apart, and to put myself back together slowly, learning to stay and to speak when everything in me wanted to disappear.
I am sharing this because I trust we can mobilize our resources and turn the wheel away from the cliff. To do that, we have to be willing to see what keeps repeating. The stories change. The circumstances change. But underneath them, many of us are still looking through the same lens, reacting from the same wounds, and relying on the same strategies we learned long ago to protect ourselves.
A child who learned it wasn’t safe to be who they were carries that learning forward into everything, how we react, how we shut down, how we hold on. After a while, the protection starts to feel like truth: I’m not worthy. I’m not enough. People leave. It shows up in our relationships, in our families, in how we speak to each other. The same patterns moving through us, often without anyone realizing it. They don’t stop there. They shape how we lead, how we follow, how we make decisions together. In our institutions. In our politics. In the systems we create and the ones we sustain.
The forces shaping our world are moving faster than our ability to respond. The wiring that once kept us alive now keeps us from seeing clearly what is unfolding around us, and within us. At its core, what we face is a crisis of perception. This will ask more of you than your attention. It will ask for a willingness to feel what you usually avoid looking at. Because understanding alone does not move us. I have watched brilliant people see themselves clearly and change nothing. The work happens in the body, in relationships, in the small ordinary moments when you choose presence over protection, connection over control.
We are not powerless and we are not alone.
Take what serves you and leave the rest.
Please, read with your body, not just your mind.
The same nervous system that learned fear can learn freedom. I have seen it in others. I have lived it myself.
