Reflections on four days in Minneapolis and New York, August 8–11, 2026
From August 8–11, 2026, a four-day journey unfolded across two cities:
August 8–9 — Being Minneapolis: Healing Our City. Healing Our World
August 10 — Oneness of Humanity Award 2026, New York
August 11 — Oneness and Unity Circle, Central Park
These four days carried many stories of remembrance, encounter, healing, celebration and relationship—far more than one reflection can hold.
Rather than attempting a comprehensive report, this reflection asks what these gatherings might reveal about the moment we are living through—and about the human and relational capacities we are cultivating within it.
A Critical Juncture
In the book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson use the term critical juncture for periods when significant disruption can loosen established arrangements and open possibilities for different trajectories.
What follows from such moments is not predetermined.
Small differences matter. Contingencies matter. What becomes reinforced matters. Through positive feedback, differences that initially appear modest can contribute over time to profoundly different pathways.
Our present moment carries many characteristics of such a juncture. Ecological disruption, war, polarization, technological acceleration, economic uncertainty and profound changes in how human beings communicate and organize are interacting across boundaries that once allowed us to imagine problems separately.
Yet a critical juncture is not only a time of crisis.
It is also a moment of possibility.
The question is not only what is changing around us, but what we are becoming capable of recognizing, practising and strengthening within ourselves and in relationship with one another.
This is one way to understand what became visible in Minneapolis.
Why Healing?
Being Minneapolis brought an international gathering into intimate relationship with a particular place.
The journey moved through sites carrying very different dimensions of the city’s story: from places marked by recent loss and public grief, through George Floyd Square and the surrounding community; from the Agape Movement to historical sites and community initiatives in North Minneapolis; from the Northside Achievement Zone to a shared meal at Indigenous First Kitchen; and into the next day, the seventh annual BLACKSoNDAY at Loring Park.
The movement itself mattered.
The gathering moved through a city where histories, wounds, communities, creativity and responses to crisis were already alive.
Dr. Marty K. Casey was a central force in cultivating the local relationships that made such an encounter possible. BLACKSoNDAY, which she founded, created another field in which remembrance, healing, arts and community could meet. Ben Bowler and UNITY EARTH brought relationships from a wider international community into Minneapolis.
Around them were many local leaders, hosts, community members and global participants, each carrying different histories, experiences and capacities.
Perhaps that is part of what Being Minneapolis revealed.
Something became possible through relationship
Healing is often understood as repairing what has been damaged. But these days suggested another possibility: healing may also involve increasing the capacity for Life to flow through an entire relational field—allowing people and communities to see, hear, learn, respond and create possibilities together that were less available before.
The wounds do not disappear.
History does not disappear.
Difference does not disappear.
Yet uniqueness can shine through, and the possibility for relationships to become increasingly generative and synergistic can blossom.
And when relationship changes, what becomes possible changes with it.
Relationship Is Already Here
This leads to a deceptively simple recognition:
We are already in relationship.
We often speak about creating connection or building unity. Yet interconnectedness precedes our decision to recognize it.
Our families are systems of relationship. Communities are systems of relationship. Economies organize relationships of exchange. Governance structures relationships among people, institutions and power. Technology increasingly mediates relationship. Our relationship with land, water and other forms of Life continues whether or not our economic systems account for it.
Even relationships we experience as difficult remain relationships, with consequences moving through the larger system.
Seen this way, Oneness is not only a spiritual understanding. It is also a way of seeing systems more accurately.
We do not first become interconnected when we choose cooperation. We become more conscious of an interconnectedness that was already there.
The question therefore shifts.
Not merely:
How do we create connection?
But:
What quality and form are our relationships taking—and what are they continually bringing into being?
Healing Our City. Healing Our World begins to take on another meaning from here.
The relationships among individuals, communities, economies, institutions and the living Earth are not separate layers of reality. They continually affect and reshape one another.
At a critical juncture, the quality of relationship is therefore not a “soft” concern.
It can become structural.
From Minneapolis to New York
On August 10, the setting changed dramatically.
From the streets, neighbourhoods and parks of Minneapolis, the journey moved to New York and the extraordinary Oneness of Humanity Award 2026, held at Tillman Chapel of the Church Center for the United Nations. Hosted by Olivia Hansen, President of the Spiritual Life TV Channel, the gathering honoured Ben Bowler and UNITY EARTH for their work bringing people of diverse faiths, cultures and nationalities into experiences of unity.
The continuity mattered.
The gathering was no longer only about a city asking how healing happens. The aperture widened toward a larger question:
What does it mean to recognize the Oneness of Humanity?
An award is itself an act of recognition.
And recognition may be far more consequential than it first appears.
What a community notices, honours and values receives attention. What receives attention becomes more visible and more available for others to recognize and participate in.
Olivia’s work offers a quiet yet powerful example of the capacity to recognize and amplify what is emerging.
Ben’s work through UNITY EARTH reveals an experiential and connective dimension: creating environments in which people from different spiritual, cultural and geographic worlds can encounter unity through relationship rather than only as an idea.
These capacities were not confined to the ceremony.
The following morning, the inquiry moved outside again.
On August 11, an Oneness and Unity Circle gathered near the Central Park Boathouse, convened by Kristin Hoffmann, Sommer Joy Ramer and Deborah Moldow.
People gathered in a sacred circle for reflection, music, prayer and remembrance—in relationship with one another, with ancestors, with the Earth, with the Universe and with the larger mystery of Life.
Water began at the centre of the circle, then moved from person to person through prayer and intention, accompanied by continuous sacred sound.. At the close of the gathering, participants walked together to the lake, where the water was offered back to the Earth.
Each person brought something uniquely their own, while each offering became part of a shared experience.
Perhaps Oneness is something like this.
It does not ask uniqueness to disappear. On the contrary, uniqueness is what makes contribution possible. Distinct expressions enter relationship, and through relationship something can emerge that none carries alone.
Unity is not uniformity.
Coherence is not standardization.
Oneness is not sameness.
The deeper possibility is participation: becoming more capable of expressing what is uniquely ours while perceiving and serving the larger living context of which we are already part.
From Recognition to Practice
A gathering can create a powerful experience of recognition. But how does such recognition continue when the circle disperses?
This is where the work of Jon Ramer through Compassion Games and ONE WORLD adds another dimension. Compassion Games brings compassion into everyday practice, while ONE WORLD provides a continuing relational space in which people and communities can connect, share, learn and act.
Underneath both is a simple understanding:
What we practise, we become more capable of doing.
Capacity, then, is not merely something we possess. It can grow through relationship, participation, feedback and repeated practice.
Truth, Beauty and Goodness
There is another thread running through this wider field.
UNITY EARTH’s World UNITY Week 2025 centred on the transcendental values of Truth, Beauty and Goodness—not only as ideas to contemplate, but as qualities to embody.
Truth — attune to the Universal Order.
Goodness — let goodness naturally flow through being.
Beauty — allow soul-expression to shine coherently in One.
Together, Truth, Beauty and Goodness can function as a light by which we continually calibrate our thoughts, words and actions.
They do not give us a standardized answer.
Perhaps they offer something more useful:
an orientation.
And perhaps this is especially important at a critical juncture. When we cannot know exactly what comes next, our capacity to orient may matter more than our capacity to predict.
A Field Already Alive
Through Marty Casey, Ben Bowler, Jon Ramer and Olivia Hansen, we glimpse four among many expressions of a much wider field already alive with inquiry and practice.
Across communities, peacebuilding networks, Indigenous traditions, spiritual communities, social initiatives, education, governance, arts, technology and countless everyday relationships, people are already exploring different dimensions of a remarkably similar inquiry.
Perhaps the opportunity is for shared inquiry to become more visible across difference—for learning to circulate, relationships to deepen, and action to become increasingly coherent while the diversity from which new possibilities arise continues to flourish.
This may be one reason gatherings matter.
People encounter one another.
Questions travel.
Practices travel.
Stories travel.
Trust develops.
Relationships strengthen.
Something recognized in one place can enter another—not as a program to replicate, but as capacity available for further learning.
The gathering ends.
What it sets in motion may not.
Toward Angkor
That makes what comes next particularly interesting.
From January 3–10, 2027, UNITY EARTH and World Weavers plan to convene the Angkor Convergence in Cambodia.
The gathering is described as an immersive eight-day experience for bridge builders, peacebuilders, social entrepreneurs, spiritual leaders, artists, philanthropists and changemakers who understand lasting transformation as involving both inner renewal and collective action.
That “both” may be important.
Inner and outer.
Being and doing.
Individual and collective.
Local and global.
Giving and receiving.
Distinct, yet participating in relationship.
The question is not how to make these dimensions identical, but how greater awareness of their relationship might generate greater coherence.
In that sense, Angkor may continue an inquiry already alive in Minneapolis and New York:
How might deeper recognition of our interdependence become lived capacity—and how might that capacity allow our diverse expressions to contribute increasingly coherently to the flourishing of the Whole?
We cannot know what Angkor will reveal.
Perhaps that openness is part of its possibility.
A New Beginning?
On June 21, 2026, the seventh annual World UNITY Week began under the theme A New Beginning.
Perhaps Minneapolis and New York give those words additional texture.
A new beginning does not necessarily arrive fully formed.
It may become visible through what we learn to recognize, what we practise, and what those practices make possible in relationship.
At a critical juncture, this matters enormously.
Small differences can be amplified. What we recognize influences what we practise; what we repeatedly practise strengthens capacities and patterns of relationship; and what becomes sufficiently established can help shape culture and the structures through which tomorrow unfolds.
This is how seemingly small differences can become consequential—not necessarily because anyone designed the outcome in advance, but because what receives attention, practice and reinforcement can enter a positive feedback loop.
Minneapolis invited us into healing.
New York widened the inquiry toward the Oneness of Humanity.
Compassion Games carries compassion into daily practice.
And Angkor will gather another diverse circle around inner renewal and collective action.
We cannot know what will emerge.
But perhaps that is precisely why the inquiry matters:
How might we become more capable of recognizing what is already alive among us, learning across our differences, and participating more consciously and coherently in the flourishing of the Whole?
Perhaps the future will not be shaped only by the answers we devise.
It may also be shaped by the quality of inquiry we learn to hold together, the capacities we cultivate through that inquiry, and the relationships through which our answers continue to evolve.
Joan Zhao
SunHub Inc. — In Co-Creation
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