Finding Each other: Rich Good's Episode

By Sandy Glanfield

There’s a story that has threaded its way through both Rich Good’s work and ours at Reboot the Future for many years.

The story of Imaginal Cells.

Rich often tells it through a simple, tender moment. Reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to his daughter, “again and again”, and beginning to wonder what was really happening inside that cocoon. How something entirely new could emerge from what looked like dissolution.

Inside the chrysalis, imaginal cells begin to appear. They recognise each other. They connect. They carry a different blueprint. And slowly, together, they create something new.

It’s a story that both Rich and Reboot have held in different ways.

At Reboot, we’ve often spoken about the “frequency” that helps imaginal cells find each other. For us, that frequency is the Golden Rule. To treat others and the planet as we would wish to be treated. It’s something we recognise in each other. In moments of care, fairness, truth. It’s how we find each other and begin to build something different.

Listening to Rich on the podcast, I found myself returning to a part of the story Reboot highlighted in their video (Link here)

That the old cells don’t simply disappear.

They resist.

They fight to survive.

And I can’t help but feel that in our world right now. In the pull towards old ways of being. Greed. Extraction. Division. Systems that feel like they are holding on tightly, even as something else is trying to emerge.

Rich names this so gently. He wonders if what we are living through is exactly this moment. The old way beginning fighting to survive, while, all over the world, people are looking to find each other.

Communicating. Connecting. Building something new.

And perhaps that’s where this episode lands most powerfully for me.

A call for more of us to show up with an open heart.

That’s what sits at the centre of Rich’s work with Humility, Kindness and Love. Not just the need for compassion, but for people willing to embody it. To live it. To bring it into their relationships, their work, their everyday interactions.

I’ve seen this in Rich over the years.

At the Eden Project, he was part of creating spaces for people to share stories, to connect, to care more deeply for the natural world. But what always struck me was how he moved through those spaces.

Like a pollinator.

Moving between people with ease and attention. Speaking to leaders, to volunteers, to those behind the tills, to the cleaners. Knowing names. Remembering stories. Making each person feel seen.

As if no one was more or less important than anyone else.

As if every connection mattered.

As if this, too, was part of building the new.

I think it is.

This is how imaginal cells work in practice.

Not as an abstract idea, but as thousands of small, human moments. Of choosing to see each other. To listen. To care. To act from a place that recognises our shared humanity.

It can feel small.

But perhaps this is exactly how something new begins.

So I find myself wondering.

If more of us were willing to show up like this. With open hearts. With a belief that we can find each other.

What might become possible?