The word hearth is a quiet constellation. Within it live both heart and earth — warmth, home, and the living planet held together in just six letters. A hearth is where fire is tended, where stories are shared, where a community remembers what it cares for. When the World Ethic Forum Firekeepers gather online, this is what we are: a dispersed yet connected hearth, a circle of hearts in service to Earth, meeting in the glow of many small fires.
In our regular online Firekeeper calls, we arrive as we are, carrying questions, griefs, and seeds of possibility. The screen becomes a contemporary fireside — a digital hearth where we lean in, listen, and let silence speak. As we sit together in this way, something else becomes visible: the warmth of the hearth is also the rhythm of our shared breathing, a subtle field that connects us across distance. Out of this shared field, in our last call, an image surfaced with clarity: we are a conspiracy in the original sense of con-spirare — to breathe together. *
The word conspiracy is often loaded with suspicion or something hidden to be on guard for, yet its root meaning is tender and radical at once. To “breathe together” is to share vulnerability, attention, and care for life itself. In our Firekeeper circle, this is what happens around the hearth: breath by breath, word by word, we participate in a quiet conspiracy for life — for regeneration, for reverence, for re-weaving the torn fabric that connects us all. In this sense, to conspire is to align with the living patterns of the world: the murmurations of starlings, the drifts of mycelium, the subtle intelligences that bind ecosystems into coherence.
We are, in this way, weaving an invisible fabric — threads of story, care, and presence. Its strength lies in the space between the suspension, where trust and tension create the pattern. The Firekeeper calls are one such loom, holding us in connection though we sit in different time zones, climates, and cultures. Around this hearth of shared breath, ethics ceases to be a fixed list of principles and becomes a practice of presence: a way of asking, together, what wants to live through us now, in this moment, on this Earth.
Some of us are drawn to the image of morphic resonance, as articulated by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who explores the idea that self-organising systems may inherit a kind of collective memory from similar systems in the past, forming “morphic fields” that strengthen as patterns repeat. Without requiring agreement on its scientific status, this hypothesis offers a poetic lens for our experience: that every time we meet in this spirit, we deepen a relational field, making it a little easier for others to find and inhabit. In this sense, our Firekeeper calls may be seen as small but persistent contributions to an emergent field of planetary care and an archipelago of islands of coherence.
This is how the World Ethic Forum practices: as a murmuration, a living field of attunement. Flocks of birds and schools of fish seem to move as one body, turning through sky and sea with astonishing coordination. Researchers describe these patterns as examples of self-organised collective behaviour, where each individual responds to its neighbours rather than following a central leader. Our shared practices, like deep dialogue and embodied awareness, are ways of cultivating a similar quality of movement among us. Each person senses, adjusts, and responds, allowing direction to emerge rather than be imposed.
Holding hearth, heart, and earth together invites a simple, demanding question: what do we choose to keep warm and at the center? Each call is an opportunity to feed the fire of reverence, courage, and responsibility, and to let what no longer serves be offered to the flames. From this shared tending, small practices travel outward into our local contexts — families, organisations, communities, landscapes — like sparks carried on the wind, igniting other hearths of care and imagination.
This update from the hearth is offering a glimpse into our online gatherings: bringing breath, questions, grief, joy, and love for Earth, for life in all its myriad ways of expression, forms, shapes and beings. Together, as Firekeepers from many places and traditions, we are learning what becomes possible when we come together to be warmed into being — a gentle, persistent conspiracy of breath, heart, and earth, tending a future in which all life can thrive.
* This is also something to which Hannah Arendt has drawn attention.