Dying to the Self to Create Anew

Chevalia Reflection on Human Extinction and the Return to Nature

The world as we know it is dying—but it is not the Earth that is ending, it is the human paradigm; the egoic architecture that has built cities without roots and systems without soul. Nature is not in crisis. She is shedding what cannot sustain her. The extinction event we fear is not hers, but ours. And it is not punishment, but an invitation.

In the Tao Te Ching, Laozi wrote:

“If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial.If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.”

This is not defeat. It is rebirth.

To die to the self is to return; to die to the illusion of control, to the cravings of the ego, to the myth of “progress” that severs us from soil and soul—this is how we create again. Not from force, not from knowledge stacked like bricks, but from surrender; from deep listening and from humility before the intelligence of life.

Dr. Zach Bush, physician, and regenerative thought leader, speaks often of this dying as a remembering. He warns of the sixth extinction not as prophecy but as the direct result of forgetting who we are.He reminds us:

“The extinction of the human species will not be due to the collapse of nature—it will be due to our disconnection from her.”

Bush’s research into the microbiome reveals a deeper truth: Even at the smallest levels, we are not isolated individuals, but walking ecosystems. Our bodies are not ours alone, they are shared. The more sterile we try to become, the more life disappears from us. This is science meeting spirit.

To die to the self is not to give up—it is to give over; to return to the uncarved block, to allow the old scaffolding of ego and empire to fall so that life can flow again, unimpeded.

Just as the soil must lie fallow to nourish new seed, humanity, too, must descend into stillness. This isn’t nihilism. It is gestation.

“Nature always finds a way... but mankind is so caught up in his own ego and his own personal drives for success and attainment… that he is literally driving an extinction event for himself.” —Zach Bush

It is the ego’s hunger that consumes, the Tao nourishes by emptiness. And in Chevalia, among the horses, you feel this truth viscerally—how stillness is not the absence of life, but the fullness of it.

Beauty lives “in the quiet beneath and between.”That is where true creation springs from.

Nature’s wisdom is not only biological but mystical. The mycelial network beneath the forest floor is fungal but Divine intelligence which mirrors our brain synapses, our gut-brain axis, and our ancestral memory. We must return not just to soil, but to the soul; surrender our linear ambitions and re-enter cyclical knowing.

The Tao reminds us:

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

The urgency of our time is not a call to panic, but to re-root in a rhythm that cannot be controlled, only remembered.

This is not the end. This is composting.

We are not being punished—we are being purified.

So what kind of human might rise from this sacred dying? A human who no longer clings to identity built on separation—but who lives from attunement, from awe, from the intelligence of the unseen; a human who creates not for profit but for being; a person who listens to the trees as teachers; a person who partners with animals not as lesser beings, but as elders. This is person rises and walks with the ancestors, the nature spirits, the Fae, the guardians of the forest, and speaks with reverence to every rose, horse, chicken, plant and insect.

The body is not separate from this mystery. It is a garden, a forest, an ecosystem, and our inner soil and our gut, our microbiome is crying out for reconnection.

Glyphosate and industrial toxins rain down not just on our crops, but on our bodies, our minds, and our spirit. Eating clean is not enough when the terrain is broken.

Just as the forest floor relies on the wisdom of the mycelium to nourish and communicate, our gut relies on its own invisible intelligence—the bacterial symphony that sustains us. But when the land is depleted, so are we. When the gut is healed, clarity, vitality, and presence return.

Zach Bush has developed a sacred offering to this return—a product called ION, designed to restore the healthy microbiome, to open the channels of true nourishment once more, because healing is not about fixing—it is about remembering. It is about returning to relationship.

🌱 And so…

Let us no longer fear extinction, Let us honor it for what it truly is:

A a passage.

A portal.

A return.

The Real is waiting—beneath our striving,

beneath our noise, beneath our names.

It pulses in the soil.

It breathes through the horse’s nostrils.

It sings in the ancient bark of the trees.

It rests in our bellies, in our breath, in our remembering.

The Tao is not far.

It is beneath our feet.

It is above our heads.

It is within us.

It is the ten thousand things

It is no thing

It is everything

It is you

It is me

It is nature

It is the sun

It is the moon

It is the heavens, the stars, the cosmos

It is all there is and isn't

Let us lie down.

Let the old self die.

Let the soil reclaim us, so something real can rise.

And in that rising—not of empire,

but of essence—a new world begins.

One of reverence.

One of reciprocity.

One of radiant remembering.

This is not the end of the world.

This is the beginning of the Way.

Giselle