The Children of New Earth : We need to create more of them!
I had a realisation recently that has moved me, and set me free, more than I could ever explain. Not because I discovered something new, but quite the opposite. I realised that something I have always considered completely normal in my adult life is not just the magic; it is the medicine: integration.
And that the awakened women have a special role within this medicine.
I grew up in a completely white society in Northern Ireland, where it is still much the same, and from being very young I was fascinated by other cultures. After a career in fashion advertising, my favourite advert of all time is the old Coca-Cola advert with people from different cultures singing, "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony." I think it was made in the early 70s, during the hippie years. When I first saw it as a kid in the 80s, I was fascinated by the Inuit woman, and this was long before I knew about Pocahontas, whose story became important to me when I stepped into my healing gifts as an adult. I didn't have the language for what I was feeling as a kid, and I certainly didn't understand anything about representation or cultural identity. I just knew there was something about seeing all those different people singing together that completely captivated me.
Fast forward to my wedding in 2012. My gay best friend looked around and said, "It's like the United Nations in here." I remember wincing. At the time, I thought it was such an un-PC thing to say. But now I smile at it, because he was right. There were thirty five of them there: friends from different countries, cultures and backgrounds, mixed-race friends, friends who, as they later told me, had been some of the first mixed-race children in their schools. And the thing was, I hadn't consciously created that room. They were simply my friends. This was my normal.
That is what I am beginning to understand. I have spent much of my adult life in East London, where the mixing of cultures, races, languages, religions and identities is simply part of everyday life. You don't necessarily stop to marvel at it when you are living inside it. The new normal is powerful precisely because it becomes normal. Perhaps that is what I find so moving about it.
When I chose my son's primary school, I went for the one I knew would have the highest number of mixed-race kids. Not because I was consciously trying to create some particular kind of environment for him, but because I recognised something. I recognised the children, and I recognised something in their parents too. They had lived. Properly lived. They had travelled, changed careers, fallen in love with people from different backgrounds, moved countries, built businesses, made unconventional choices and experienced different worlds. They weren't living inside one narrow definition of what a life was supposed to look like. They had stories and experience, and that mattered to me.
I wanted my son to grow up around children whose families had stories from different sides of fences, both positive and negative. I have always believed that exposure expands us. As a former secondary school teacher in London, I had also seen the other side of it. Twenty years ago, mixed-race children didn't always fit neatly into one group. There could be a complicated sense of not belonging, of being asked, explicitly or implicitly, to choose, or, at its worst, to be excluded. But something has changed, for the better and for the stronger. The children coming through now are growing up in a world where being mixed, multicultural, multilingual or carrying several identities is not just increasingly unremarkable, but extremely powerful, sought-after and beautiful.
My own relationships followed a similar pattern. I was usually with someone who wasn't white. I've always been a serial monogamist, very much ride or die, but none of those relationships made me feel that I wanted to have children. Then I married a British Persian man and suddenly I understood. I wanted a child with him.
People sometimes used to say to me, "It must be so difficult being married into his culture, because of the way women are treated." My response was always, "It's not his culture where the problem lies. It's mine." I could see the misogyny much closer to home than people assumed. At the same time, there were deeply embedded expectations on the other side of the family too: ideas about who their son should marry, what a Persian family should look like, what a wife should do. I arrived with a career in fashion advertising and no intention of becoming a 'good Persian wife'. I had laser-like focus on earning enough my money to go out raving and make the yearly pilgrimage to Ibiza. I didn't understand then quite how radical that was to some people.
But something else was happening. Two very different family histories were meeting, and our son would not have to inherit either of them. He could begin somewhere new. That idea has stayed with me. We choose his names based on zero links to either heritage, and instead with links to music.
As I've gone further into my spiritual work, I've found myself working in the spiritual collective field around the formation of 'New Earth' — the belief that a higher kind of human consciousness is emerging and will keep raising the frequency of the planet. For me, I see it in integration: in children who don't have to choose one side, in families made up of different cultures, histories, languages and traditions, and in people carrying several identities at once and discovering that this becomes a stronger foundation to build from.
One that, to me, represents freedom in its purest form.
Perhaps this is why I have always had such a softness for mixed-race children. It wasn't accidental. Something in me recognised them. I see integration as one of the great possibilities for our future. Not the erasure of culture, and not asking everyone to become the same. Not taking people from one place and planting them somewhere completely different and expecting difference to disappear. But the complete opposite: bring the cultures, the histories, the languages, the food, the music, the dance, the rituals, the stories and the contradictions. Bring all of it, and then let something new emerge.
When cultures meet and children grow up carrying more than one lineage, they can stand outside the old divisions. They don't inherit the same outdated boundaries. They can become the bridge.
Twenty years ago, when I was starting out as a London school teacher, I lived with a South African colleague who was the same age as me. We'd just left university. She had studied at Stellenbosch University and told me about the country's history, the divisions and the complexities of race and identity. Like my own childhood, schooling and university experience in Northern Ireland, so much of her world had been white. I went to her wedding in Stellenbosch in 2007, and the divide struck me like a lightning bolt.
Earlier this year, I found myself listening to The Circle of Life repeatedly. That song has always felt like a kind of soundtrack to my philosophy: life as a continuum, everything connected, nothing existing in isolation. Then YouTube — or perhaps the universe at play — served me a version I'd never heard before, from a choir I'd never heard before: the Stellenbosch University Choir.
I was in tears within moments. Not just because of the music, although it was magical and, in its own way, medicine to me. Not simply because of the movement, or because the choir was so fluid with the aliveness of all those different cultures. It was the diversity.
I could see the distance between the Stellenbosch I had witnessed in 2007 and this group of young people almost twenty years later, and I thought: look what has happened. Look at what can change within a generation. Look at what happens when people who were once separated begin to belong to the same room.
I wanted them all. I wanted all of those children. And then I realised something else. Perhaps that is part of my role too. Not necessarily to have them all myself — although I would happily have an entire football team of New Earth children — but to be a steward of this part of the future: to recognise it, celebrate it, make space for it and protect it.
There is power in becoming something neither side, or culture, could have imagined on its own.
That, to me, is integration. And perhaps that is what I have been drawn towards my whole life. I just didn't have the words for it when I was the little girl watching the Coca-Cola advert, completely mesmerised by a woman from a world I knew nothing about.
There is far more than one way to belong, and far more than one way to 'become'.
