Joy and Value of Connection to Place and Community
Joy and Value of Connection to Place and Community
As a nearly fifty-year-old woman, I find myself in my middle-aged years living on the same plot of land on which I was raised, eight acres of mostly forested earth, with the Tucquan Creek running through. The Tucquan dumps into the Susquehanna River nearly three miles down creek from my home. Here I am surrounded by the dark waxy leaves of the rhododendron & mountain laurel, solid oak, wild holly, hemlock, tulip poplars, tasty birch, shedding sycamore, maple and a few willows my father planted before he died. We have our fair share of the aromatic honeysuckle, imposing stinging nettle, ubiquitous poison ivy, ferns, trailing pine and carpet like club moss scattered throughout the land. Even as I write the words of the native vegetation that surrounds my home, I feel a sense of warm belonging. The house is one we built when I was a kid, gathering stones out of the creek while my father did the masonry work to cover the house with the limestone of the River Hills of southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The house is personal, unique and has family history, but I have to confess that the land is what holds me to this place.
I wonder how we got so accustomed, as human beings, to being separated from the earth. How we can live surrounded by concrete, work in buildings with pumped in air, and practice habits of buying food wrapped in plastic from the grocery store, with little thought to how our lifestyles affect the living earth, which provides for us all of life. I’ve spent time living in cities, in Washington DC, where it was hard to find large swaths of the earth to touch. But it was possible. I found myself drawn to the city’s cemeteries, my daily running destinations, and the beautiful National Arboretum, sometimes even the Mall, where we could experience huge plots of grass surrounded by trees. But home, for me is where I can smell the rotting leaves from thousands of trees each autumn, and where I watch the snow bells pop up through the dirt and clay along the creek in early February.
As much as I dream of being a recluse in this idyllic spot I call home, I am involved in the lives of many people. I find that the community in which my family, a husband and two teenage children, lives and moves is also rooted in this connectedness to the earth.
My circles of friends create a web of folks who use their voices and their hands to protect our drinking water, to plant trees, to grow local foods, and buy locally raised meats. My human relationships lend support to me, and a sense of belonging to this world in a different way. A way in which we understand our interdependence.
A way in which we remind one another of our impact on one another and the earth as a whole. A way in which we know we are in this together and together we can create not only a sustainable future for generations to come, but we have committed that we will work for our shared and needed regenerative future.
I have had the honor of hearing the Dalai Lama speak a number of times. His recipe for world peace has become a mantra for my life, and goes something like this. You begin with being at peace in your own heart. Then you work to be at peace with every person with whom you come in contact. In so doing the peace moves outward. But world peace doesn’t come by jumping outside of yourself and deciding that you, as an individual, are going to change the world by something outside of yourself. It all starts in your own heart, the only thing you can control.
We, living in the world today, are in desperate need to regrow human connections with one another, and to the local environment in which we dwell. I am not suggesting we can’t travel the globe. But the work we do to build relationships at the local level, the work we do to regenerate the land within our local vicinity is the work that this generation must be about. It is the work of recovery from the exploitation of people and of land, often at the hands of the corporate minority, and often for the benefit of their increased wealth and power. We need to commit to building healthy communities, where we put aside greed and selfishness, while balancing self-care with other-acceptance and other-giving. Starting in our own hearts, in our own backyards, in our own neighborhoods. The delight in these relationships, and the joy in this work not only warm the heart, but restore our world.
I most value our local communities, where we acknowledge our symbiotic relationships to the earth and to one another.
I will spend the rest of my life working to restore and nurture these healthy relationships, beginning in my own body, on the land in my own community, and then extending out to everyone with whom I interact. I will strive to restore right relationships to the places of earth I touch, for the sake of creating a more loving, accepting, and enduring community for generations to come.
This goal and mission, I believe, is at the core of what it means to be human. And embracing humanity in this way is a great wealth we all have at our fingertips.
Bioregions and Regeneration | Honoring the Places Where We Live
Bioregions and Regeneration | Honoring the Places Where We Live
(Editor’s note: This conversation was recorded as part of the Communities for Future Online Summit, a response to the climate emergency. It is possible to purchase unlimited access to all the video interviews of the Summit here.)
Kosha Joubert | Daniel, I remember that last year after the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, you said that “we have to do the impossible because the probable is unthinkable.” And also you said that we need a “complete transformation of our human presence on the planet.” Those two phrases really stayed with me, and since then a lot has happened.
We’ve had more and more people speaking about climate change. We’ve had Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Take to the Streets; and Greta’s become the Time Person of the Year 2019. And, yet, in terms of climate action, we’re lagging frighteningly behind what would be needed in terms of a response, an adequate response.
Maybe I’d like to start just by asking you: how are you seeing these developments in the world at this moment? I also know that you’re an extremely loving father, with a very beautiful daughter, who’s growing into this world. So yeah, how is it for you? How do you experience this? What are your hopes and fears?
Daniel Wahl | Thank you so much for re-inviting me. It is wonderful to have this conversation with you. And starting with a big question, particularly bringing Lucia, my daughter, into my awareness. I think what we’ve seen over this year is that all the reports on how quickly climate change is advancing have been wrong; it’s even faster. The interacting feedback loops are so daunting, really, that when you look at the climate science, the “probable” looks grim. Therefore, we really need to live in that space of accepting that something is dying away.
Patterns need to break down in order to quickly respond, to rearrange our response to this in such a way that we still have a chance to create a viable future. I was at the [International] Reporting 3.0 Conference last June, where I had the pleasure of sharing a session with Nora Bateson. It’s a wonderful community that is trying to transform the business world from within, and bring all these transformative ideas to the business world, but it’s still running against the boundaries of that world that want to maintain its structures. Nora invited everybody, after two days of talking about transformative change, to say, “Look, we really need to ask ourselves every time we use that word, transformation: are we going to end up with caterpillars with wings or are we going to end up with butterflies?”
Ending up with butterflies means daring to let go of caterpillars, all the patterns that really don’t serve anymore. I think all of us—individually in our own lives and culturally in our communities and wider—we’re all at different levels of letting go of old patterns. I believe it is in community that we can repattern our being so our doing can be truly transformational. I’m personally in a glocal dilemma: how do I continue to engage in the conversation that we need to have globally and the weaving of networks globally to support each other and show solidarity and knowledge exchange, while at the same time, not allow that to distract too much energy from all the deep work that we now have to do in our bioregions.
I’ve really grown into feeling that the locus of focus, and where the real change is going to happen, is where communities in a region start to work with the givens of that region. The redesign of human presence on Earth must move away from the straight lines of national boundaries and outdated maps reflective of colonization, and instead, come back to a biophysical map, like that wonderful Robert Szucs map of all the river systems of the world, where each river is a different color.
That’s a pattern of nature. How do we fit ourselves, as human beings, back into that kind of patterning, so our presence is that of a healing keystone species in the ecosystem that we inhabit? It’s a massive question, and there are a 150 objections that it’s never going to happen to people in the cities, etc. But we really need to let go of all those patterns and have these conversations about repatterning the future in the present through place-based loving again.
We do this by sourcing our solutions from the opportunities and the limitations of the place, and listening to the ancient wisdom of how people have lived in that place over millennia before modernity sidelined their patterns as “primitive.” At the same time, we understand that we’ve meddled with the system to the point that we can’t just stop using modern technology. That genie is out of the box. So, how do we wisely use technology? When it is appropriate. And we don’t use technology that we don’t need, even if we can make a business out of it, because that’s not the point anymore.
Kosha | Now I have this strange image in my head about these caterpillars with wings trying to fly versus butterflies flying! Can you just speak about the difference between the patterns that we need to let go of and maybe the knowledge systems or patterns that we need to reconnect to? How do we know which ones?
Daniel | Exactly, that’s the deep wisdom. In my book, I have this obsession with living the questions. I probably write that sentence more than anything else in that book. It is about shifting away from the permanence of solutions, which is an illusion because the world is constantly changing and the juice is really in living the question and understanding that every solution we do implement is just helping us ask better questions, but it will never be final. We’ll never get there. We will always have to adapt, learn, transform, change, grow, evolve. That’s what life is about. Creating conditions conducive to life means being sensitive to which patterns serve the health and wholeness and vitality, resilience and adaptability of that larger system that isn’t just the context of us, but that we are actually expressions of.
At the moment, maybe degenerate expressions of that are destroying our health, but because of it, we can also reintegrate in wiser ways. So, what patterns to keep? What patterns to reenergize? And what patterns to let go of? There are people repatterning the future in the present. There are people living different ways of interacting with each other, having a different understanding of the connection between nature and humanity, self and world, theory and practice. And understanding that my attitude—my state of being—actually has causal agency in the world everywhere. Living that as a community is repatterning the future in a way that we might, at some point, realize is much more potent than our current scientific frameworks dare us understand.
Kosha | So I hear that you’re inviting us to our sensitivity, to our witnessing capacity, and to watch the world so carefully that we learn to distinguish which patterns are supporting life and which patterns are not, and dismantle the second. Perfect, beautiful. And you said that community is a crucial ingredient in us developing our capacity.
I would love to know why you feel that living in community makes it easier for us to transform behaviors? In what way could community be a hindrance? And in what way could community be a support in changing our patterns and behaviors?
Daniel | Regenerative development starts with personal development, and community is the perfect place in which you can invite the trust and the network to help you—to give you a mirror of whether you’re staying true to your intention. This is ancient knowledge. The Buddha said that the sangha is critical to the path; that’s what the sangha is about. Of course, in this day and age, we find can these communities virtually, but there is something about embodied connection that increases that. So I think that wherever we are, we need to build that community to help each other repattern. And in doing so, I think we will create a lot more meaningful worlds that might not need so many ways of anesthetizing, as we currently have.
In a similar way, that’s our relationship to the wider community of life, and the universe as a whole. It’s this multiple identity across scales in time that we all have as the process of Life—of 3.8 billion years on this planet evolving, making Earth richer and more abundant and more capable of creating conditions for more life to flourish and evolve. That gives us the ancient dimension.
At the same time, an intentional community like the ecovillage Findhorn, on that bioregional Moray shire in Northern Scotland, is also a “planet.” It’s just a part of one, but it’s a whole, too. I think that understanding this nested wholeness, both in temporal and spatial dimensions, is something that gives us agency in a different way. We can change the world by changing the moment, by changing the relationship we’re in—at every second coming back to: “Am I doing this to serve the whole and in that process serve myself, to heal the whole and in that process heal myself, to give in order to receive?” I’m just reframing ancient wisdom traditions, but I think that’s part of recollecting some of the wisdom of the past to ask those questions: How do I serve? Who am I obliged to? Where am I going? Those are key questions and community can help us find 21st-century answers.
Kosha | Yes, I love this image of nested wholeness both temporally and spatially. Creating real change in the moment that spreads out….
Daniel | Because that means that this conversation—us here right now—has agency in the known universe; even right now, not when people are listening to it or reading it, but right now, and it has agency beyond us, too. Because, yes, we are two, but we’re also the whole universe. We’re shifting pattern in an interconnected whole. For me, there’s a scientific theory behind this; all the wisdom traditions of the world recognize this way of thinking in their own frames. And for me, that’s where the hope is.
To “do the impossible, because the probable is unthinkable” is only limited by our current frame of what reality is all about. If we dare to understand that our way of being in the moment and with each other and in relationship, actually matters—that it literally brings forth a different world—then we can work miracles. And I think we’re at a moment where Life is asking us to remember that. It’s the only way out of this situation.
Kosha | It’s beautiful. You’re inviting us to come completely present in the smallest, and aware of the biggest scale. So yes, it’s like opening. I also feel just how myths and stories like Harry Potter, and wormholes, help to prepare us for the magical possibility that is deeply human and deeply real, and lives in each one of us. So, just to deepen this love for place, let’s also speak of Majorca and your love for the place that you live. And I think Lucia is now two, is that right?
Daniel | Yes, where Lucia is growing up and hugging trees and tasting soil…. I look back at nine years on Majorca now; I came here because after having lived at Findhorn and having been focused on community scale as the main locus of focus, I sort of realized that yes, that is critical, but for it to really be regenerative and feasible in repatterning, it has to go beyond one community trying it out. It has to be organized at a bioregional scale, and Majorca was tempting because it was an island and, therefore, a very well-defined bioregion.
I ran an Ecovillage Design Education here at the very beginning in 2011, with Gaia Education, and that really catalyzed a community out of which lots of things grew. For example, there’s an organization now called PermaMed, which was pretty much a seed idea that came out of that course, and they’re doing wonderful work in capacity-building of local people here.
There’s 16 million tourists coming here every year; 85 percent of the economy is dependent on tourism. It is people’s livelihoods, and the entire system is fundamentally dependent on it. If you want to turn that caterpillar into a butterfly, you have to engage with the caterpillar, and the caterpillar is tourism. I’ve realized that this whole conversation here is about what would regenerative tourism look like, and is it even possible? Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world—with massive climate impacts and environmental impacts and social impacts and inequality impacts. You could say the whole proposition is inequality because not everybody has the luxury of being able to travel; it’s only the lucky 10 percent.
But the good old permaculture adage—”in the problem lies the solution”—applies here. If you want to shift this place, you have to engage with the industries and community to say: can we use tourism as a way of re-regionalizing production and consumption, re-regionalizing energy sovereignty, food sovereignty, water sovereignty, educational sovereignty to really be able to provide basic human needs in a climate-unstable world and build for something that might happen in 20 or 30 years. We don’t know when it will happen, but to use tourism as the catalytic change agent.
I’ve been writing curriculum on bioregional education and on all these things, so how do I apply it? There’s a wonderful community that I’m connected with here that I’m reengaging with now that I’ve made this commitment to make a home here, and it’s difficult because I’m also very much globally connected through my advocacy work, and you can’t do everything.
I think Majorca has the potential of becoming a lighthouse of regional regeneration at the scale of a city of half a million in a region of a million, and that tourism will be transformed in the process. It’s engaging with the patriarchs of these tourism empires that have exported a model of tourism that is degenerative and destructive to the world. All-inclusive mass tourism was invented here. And to reengage with these patriarchs to say, your families have become billionaires on the beauty of this island, and now you’ve also affected lots of beautiful places all over the world where you have your hotels. Instead, you could actually become your own producer and customer by investing in renewable energy, in local organic food production, in local electric transport systems that are public transport systems, and begin to give back to the host communities where your businesses are, but also to build climate resilience for these communities and future-proof your business. That’s my pitch.
You got me sidetracked there a little bit, but I think that it’s very much related to: how do we build future-proof communities and how do we use the dying system—the system we need to hospice—as a catalyst for the system we’re wanting to midwife rather than to just deny it or resist it or fight it. To work with it, work with that energy. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’ll tell you next year.
Again, the important thing is I’m a foreigner here as well. So this has to be a story that involves the Majorcans centrally, but it also has to invite everybody into a conversation.
Kosha | Yes, and I think that this question of indigenous versus foreigner, and what is the contribution of each to systems change is also very interesting.
Daniel | For me, Life is a regenerative community. It’s a planetary process. It’s not you and me. It’s not one species against the other, or one national block against the other. Really connect with the understanding that, first and foremost, life is a planetary process; you have more cells in you and on you that are nonhuman. You’re a walking ecosystem, I’m a walking ecosystem.
The minute we start understanding these frames and how they connect to the planetary, it becomes a bit ridiculous to say by surname or passport, “you are out and you’re in.” We all need to be re-indigenized to place—whether some of our ancestors have been in that place or not—because even most indigenous people have lost some of that connection. So yes, I think re-indigenization is part of healing our relationship with the earth, of redesigning our human presence on Earth.
Kosha | I’m wondering, because we’re coming to the end of our conversation here—firstly, it’s really lovely to listen to you—and there are quite a few things that we could end with, but I would love to go back to the global viewpoint. And your book on regeneration really brings wonderful examples of the collaborative work that is being done in the world as we replicate solutions across the globe.
Daniel | I have a huge hope that more and more grassroots movements of people and local actors are waking up to this sort of skillful means to use the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a platform to leverage change that, so far, hasn’t 
happened because different sectors haven’t talked to each other and haven’t had the international support. So, to really bring the funding. And also to support the new UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which is really what we need to do rapidly to have a chance of reversing global warming over the next 20, 30, 40 years.
That will open up opportunities for people in agroforestry and analog forestry, in permaculture, in organic or regenerative agriculture to really set up regional regeneration projects—both as viable businesses to create local food security, and to really look into how regions are going to change under the climate patterns we’re already committed to, and how we begin to adapt to that by planting different species and all that kind of work. I think it’s really vital that we connect with these global stories like the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and the SDGs.
When I made the decision to become a father at this time in this world, I had to ask myself: “Is this fair?” Is it fair to be born into this world? If you listen to Greta and that generation say: You’re stealing our future. We don’t have a future. For you, it might be okay if you’re in your 50s to be talking about the end of the world being near, but we’ve just got all our life ahead of us. This year, my 103-year-old grandmother died, and she really taught me that quality isn’t measured in quantities.
And so, my relationship to my daughter is about what I can do now, and I think that’s also this deeper invitation that Joanna Macy speaks of so often. That, ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether we are going to make it or not; what matters is how we relate to each other right now. That’s the best chance that whatever comes out will be positive.
We need to embrace uncertainty. We need to fall in love with death as a way to create plentiful life, as Greta said. So, loving my daughter is about how I relate to her right now, right in the present. Giving her that context of love in which to unfold her essence, her uniqueness, her beauty to teach me every day so much, and not to get hung up about whether she’s going to live to 12, 18, 50, or 85. Because for all of us, it’s about quality, it’s not about quantity. Let’s not get confused in measuring everything about that we have a right to persist. We don’t, but we have an opportunity to relate, and that’s what love is all about, and that’s ultimately what it’s all about. I love you.
Kosha | Thank you, Daniel.
Safe Houses | Giving Refuge
Safe Houses | Giving Refuge
“…a new story ‘waystation’ for people….We envision a network of such places developing around the country and around the world; permaculture centers, coworking spaces, social enterprise incubators, places of healing, art, and music… places to start walking a different path.” – Charles Eisenstein, Seppi’s Place
Author’s note: This essay was finalized before the global pandemic reached so many of us directly. At a time like this, the network of ‘safe houses’, envisioned here, continues to emerge and thrive. For we are the network. A safe house is a place, yes – but more essentially it is a community. People everywhere are using Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, phone and text to create ‘safe spaces’ to meet and share. This invisible network will carry us through this time for it is resilient, decentralized, warm-hearted, and motivated by love.
Safe houses have a long and venerable past as places of refuge for survivors of domestic violence, people escaping enslavement on the Underground Railroad, Jews during the Holocaust, and for refugees of all kinds throughout history. Now humanity faces something we have never faced before—environmental planetary breakdown—and all humans are in need of a safe house. We have a collective need for places to speak and be witnessed, to receive understanding, healing, deep conversation, connection, refuge. And all over the world, modern-day safe houses arise to fill that need.
They are found everywhere—in cities, towns, villages, on mountains, and near rivers. They are in small apartments and large houses, in forest cabins, beach cottages, desert dwellings, city skyscrapers, thatched huts, round houses, suburban condos. Each place offers hope, meaning, and true sanctuary. Lives are mended here, and hearts given peace. Here, women with kind eyes and strong hearts midwife souls. Men of gentle being and wise spirit gather others in sacred community. When we visit these places, we feel we have re-entered the web of existence.
Modern-day safe houses comprise a worldwide wisdom body, though each part has no full knowledge of the whole. This is the essence of their brilliance, and their generative wealth. Safe houses are decentralized and self-replicating. There are few towns without one, though these places are often not apparent. Safe houses rarely have signs, are generally not churches or temples, print few brochures, do not proselytize. Yet pilgrims continue to show up at these places. I have discovered safe houses through writers’ gatherings; people often find them through word of mouth, friends, colleagues, community events, farmer’s markets, social media, the internet. People all over the world will continue to find them, and to gather.
Historically, informal places for healing, restoration, teaching, and political action have played a vital role in times of deep change. When economic and political systems collapse, personal connections and private gatherings become even more crucial. I am thinking here of Ireland, and the ways in which my Irish ancestors—during centuries of colonization, famine, and poverty—used their domestic spaces to pass on their language, music, storytelling, history, and culture in cottages, hedge schools, fields, and barns. They offered learning for the mind and, equally important, sustenance for heart and soul. These spaces are a primary reason the Irish culture is so vibrant and alive today.
There is one safe house where, for decades, I have been taught and healed. Inevitably I arrive in need of clarity, in the swirl of daily work and activity; here, the sacred reasserts itself and I am quieted and opened. At this safe house lives a medicine woman of wise mind and heart who midwives souls. After my time with her community, I stand more whole, once again able to love the world in all its gleaming beauty and tattered need. Then I return to my home on an ordinary street with lovely neighbors and a hidden creek, and I become the woman with the kind eyes and wild heart who welcomes others. My home, too, has become a safe house, part of the web.
At my safe house, I offer creative writing circles in my living room. Over twenty years, the community of hundreds who have written with me and listened to each other’s work has become a lifeline for renewed meaning and hope. I see these kinds of spaces all around me, held by healers, teachers, writers, cooks, artists, ritual leaders, and others who gather in circles devoted to movement, painting, political action, poetry, collage, study, singing, and prayer. They provide vital space to be witnessed, to grieve the state of the earth, and to take tangible action. Many work on behalf of the planet by providing protection for seeds, plants, trees, rivers, oceans, mountains, forests, or the endangered animals of our world.
There are many safe houses in the town where I live, and likely in the town where you live, too. Some of these safe houses I know, a few more I will someday find, most I will never know. But we are all part of an interlinking web of safe houses. Some of you reading this may recognize yourselves. Perhaps there is a safe house where you go for healing, connection, conversation, or creativity. Maybe you have a safe house or are on your way to creating one. You are a part of this living web. Your safe house does not have to write a grant, establish a foundation, build a building, or launch a website, though you may do any or all of these things. It simply needs to offer refuge and deep listening. Those of us who are part of this web carry this sanctuary wherever we go. We offer it where we are. As writer and healer Deena Metzger once wrote: “Be and provide sanctuary.”
The global forces hurtling us toward possible extinction can make us feel powerless. Offering a safe house, or participating in one, is active work that makes healing and restoration possible. If you feel the call, find a safe house near you. Follow what you love: art, books, political action, philosophy, poetry, dance, yoga, meditation, or simply talking. Find a circle that offers true sanctuary. And if you don’t find one, begin it yourself.
The network of safe houses will continue to expand as modern institutions unravel and can no longer sustain themselves. In our time of collapse and upheaval, humans everywhere are teaching each other how to live outside the dominant culture, for we are creating our own. We have learned how to heal, how to tell the stories, how to hold and honor grief, how to carry beauty, how to love the earth. The web of safe houses likely will be a large part of what carries us through.
Finding a safe house often leads to finding another, perhaps in your town, or in a city across the planet. Each safe house is a gleaming thread of the planetary web, and like any web, when one part is lost or destroyed we naturally go about rebuilding and reweaving. From this foundation we can begin anew, in concert with all beings and with the guidance of the earth.
When you walk into a safe house, you are warmly greeted. You feel you are part of the whole. “Yes, this is the place,” someone smiles at the door. “Welcome.”
Fragile Gold
Fragile Gold
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay. – Robert Frost
There are many forms of currency—and the critical ones needed now to build a regenerative planetary era are the currencies of attention and response to the ephemeral and fragile nature of complex living systems, so that we might use our material resources to understand, protect, and restore them. Biodiversity is a required condition for survival, and so among the greatest forms of wealth. This is an unprecedented moment in the great cosmic drama, when a single species has so interfered with the structure and functioning of Earth, Gaia, Eden, that the glorious and lyrical era of the Cenozoic—the last 65 million years of emergent creativity—has all but ceased its stunning fluorescence.
In our modern, industrial, materialist society, a poetry of ideas (and music!) alone may have the power to evoke in human consciousness the psychic energy needed to ignite the new axial age; to, as Thomas Berry says, “reinvent the human at the species level”; to become a mutually enhancing presence within the community of life systems. Another way of identifying or naming the power sufficient to trigger rapid restructuring of both the immense physical and psychic human interrelationship, is the experiential cosmology of what David Bohm called, the “undivided wholeness” of being. It is a state of full bodily engagement and spiritual/emotional connection to the natural world, more frequently experienced in primordial, indigenous cultures. To experience such abundance only requires surrendering to the great gift economy of Earth, where no living being takes more than it needs without being rebalanced into the stupendous web of life.
With the emergent gifts of our creativity and imagination, we are born with a capacity to freely roam among the galaxies, through eons of time, and into the unfathomable eyes and hearts of loved ones. Meadows of flowers, seashores, streams, and countless other forms of common wealth, for tens of millions of years, have been abundantly available for all living beings.
Frost’s exquisite poem, with a gentle yet compact ferocity, expresses the knife edge upon which we balance between death and life—between the dullness of “day” and the ecstatic mystery of “dawn”—between disintegration and becoming. In an Old Cosmology, “Eden sank to grief” when we became like God by taking a forbidden fruit—the knowledge of good and evil. But in a New Cosmology of an astonishingly creative, evolving Universe, we now can understand that the real forbidden fruit is not knowing the difference!
All wealth is derivative of Earth—most of all, values and wisdom. They are among the most recent emergent properties of our Universe’s 13.8 billion years of inexpressibly glorious creativity, complexification of matter and energy, and deepening of consciousness.
And material wealth—most of all, money—is only an idea of value mainly owing to the “Earth deficit”: the uncompensated or unreciprocated extraction of resources too often used exclusively or ultimately to obtain economic, social, or political dominance.
Frost’s poem begins, “Nature’s first green is gold”—not the shining element overvalued as money—but the far greater value toward which the Universe and Life continually move—BEAUTY! That “leaf subsides to leaf” is the grief and loss that is the ultimate cost of cosmogenesis, the gift of dying supernovas—stardust that becomes a planet that births oceans that birth living cells that become love, poetry, and music. Fragile Gold is a simple tribute to the power of beauty to transform historical trauma and to evoke the cultural currency and urgency needed to turn an industrial, acquisitive, exploitative economy into a new planetary era of radical sharing.
The music, like the poem, is relatively uncomplicated, yet deceptively capable of evoking a continual deepening of perception, understanding, and insight. It isn’t necessary to know what Frost meant, or how the music arose as it did; only to experience the flow of meaning and sound, allowing yourself—as in the moment of slipping into a cool stream on a hot day—to get wet, to be fulfilled and know you are alive.
Our gifts are most surely needed, first in the crucible of our own desire and passion, where they gain power and attraction that draws others; and then—without looking back—given freely, both in the moment, and in careful, just, sustained generosity, to the world.
The world is where we are, and despite ten thousand years of tolerating a domination system of mutual exploitation and self-interest, we have somehow managed, in some measure, to learn to love. And if love is extravagant, selfless concern and action, it has emerged within a Universe of staggering creativity, complexity, and beauty—but also of danger and loss. Our responsibility is to use our great gift of intelligent compassion to help our species recognize the emptiness of affluence, the injustice of poverty, and the incomparable capacity of creativity and beauty to be the basis for a new economy in a new planetary era.
Wrestling with Wealth and Class
Wrestling with Wealth and Class
It was one of those big fundraising dinners. Honoring a major donor, charging who-knows how much a plate to bring in more money and put the event squarely on the radar of the local high society. This time it was my grandparents who were the major donors, and I was sitting at a big circular table with my cousins who had gathered to celebrate and support our beloved grandparents. It was one of those tables with the white cloth, artfully folded napkins, and more sizes of forks than I really knew what to do with. I felt an uncomfortable, but not unfamiliar, combination of gratitude, guilt, pride, and shame.
My grandparents are incredible. Perfectly imperfect products of their time motivated by love of family and search for security and belonging amongst a society that was completely alien to their own immigrant parents. Their rise to wealth had something to do with my grandma working two jobs to help my grandfather through med school; something to do with my grandfather becoming a cardiologist in South Florida as Medicare made the profession more profitable; something to do with my grandparents betting it all to buy some real estate just before a boom; something to do with my grandmother managing that real estate epically; and something to do with more real estate and a skillful navigation of stock and bond markets. And all this happened during a time when folks didn’t want them living on their block because they were Jewish.
The story also has do with the fact that passing as white afforded them some opportunities. It has to do with the growth of the American economy, generally, which in turn has to do with rules about who was able to participate where and when; the foundations laid by slavery; the attacks on organized labor; the development of convoluted financial markets; the wars and policies created to maintain the value of the American dollar; and the relentless extraction of life force from people and planet that weave themselves into the story of the American dream and the growth of the American economy that created the possibility for my grandparents’ investments to grow.
Everything’s connected.
I love my grandparents. I’m grateful for them. I’m impressed and amazed by them. They have given me material security inside an economy that preys on insecurity. This security has created respite from the constant water-treading that characterizes most lives inside capitalism, and that respite has provided the space for me to focus on my integrity, my love, and my gifts.
That’s where this familiar swirl of gratitude, guilt, pride, shame, and responsibility comes from. But as I sat at that table with my cousins, the whole thing hit another gear.
The crowd watched a video celebrating my grandparents. It focused mostly on the collection of Latin American art that they had recently pledged to a museum. We heard them share about their journey into collecting, their resonance with artists, and their love for each other as the video took us around a home populated by pieces from artists like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Wilfredo Lam.
When I looked away from the screen, I saw the catering team standing at the edges of the massive room, watching along with us; they were about 95 percent Latinx.
One of Diego Rivera’s paintings came up on the screen. Rivera was a communist whose work critiqued capitalism and the ruling class. He said that “the role of the artist is that of a foot soldier of the revolution.” A revolution to change the exact social-political-economic reality that we were all sitting in at that very moment.
The painful irony of the moment didn’t seem to escape much of the catering team. I saw sadness, horror, and confusion. I saw it trapped behind the reality that there was nowhere for it to be expressed, and that when the video ended, these folks would be clearing the plates.
I felt as resentful of capitalism as Rivera did. I longed to connect with the catering team because it seemed like they were seeing the same reality as me, but here I was, with five different silver forks in front of me.
I walked out of the room and got a drink. A few I think.
In some ways I’m always sitting at that table. Torn between worlds. Longing to belong. Always struggling to navigate all the things I inherited: the money, the karma, the love, the possibility, the heart, the values, the society, my place in it, all of it.
A few months ago I turned 30, which meant I received access to a trust that had been established in my name. It’s been passively invested in a fund indexed to the American economy, which includes companies like Amazon, Exxon, and Lockheed Martin. Up until recently, I could avoid really looking at all this. It was out of my power to change. But now it isn’t.
When Trump was elected, I was watching the results with my housemates and my partner at the time. All of our hearts dropped. Fear. Despair. Whisperings of internment camps. Within months, the S&P 500 went up, and my grandparents congratulated me on the benefits of my “Trump dividend.”
Part of me wants to give it all away. The other part is afraid. I know that this economic system we live in doesn’t take care of those without money, so I am afraid to release my position. But the more folks are afraid to release our positions, the more the system continues to exploit and destroy.
Right now, I’m just trying to lean in deeper, and more authentically. I’m using some of the money to sustain me as I work in solidarity so I can focus on the impact of my actions, as opposed to whether I will be able to make money from them in the short term. Trying to be generous with the loved ones close to me, while also desegregating who’s close to me. I’m learning more about exactly what options are out there for me to move the money into economies that are aligned with my values. And I’m feeling into how I can leverage the fact I have access to spaces of money and privilege to help reorganize wealth far beyond the modest sum over which I have direct agency.
I’m scared to share all this. I’m afraid of how it will change how you see me and relate to me—especially the folks that I’ve been organizing in solidarity with for years. Will you see me as a whiny trust fund baby? Will you judge me for how I’m approaching my situation? Will you stop seeing the value of my heart, mind, and contributions, and only see me as someone who could give money? Will you avoid what comes up inside you when you hear this story and avoid me? Will you be afraid of giving me feedback and slowly disconnect? Will you give harsh feedback that doesn’t hold me in the dignity of my messy process of learning to be human? Will folks who might otherwise want to work with me not want to engage or trust me because of my class-position?
I know the stories I’ve told myself about people with money. The judgments I’ve placed on them in order to cope with my own unresolved feelings. I assume people will project some of those things on me; and some of the criticisms will be right. But I’m choosing to stop hiding this part of myself. Praying that I will be received for the love and integrity I am trying to bring to the path I’ve been given.
The reason I’m writing this is pretty simple: I know I am not alone.
I know there is a growing movement of folks with access to wealth that are feeling these things and asking these questions. There is a growing movement from folks who don’t have the same access to money asking those of us that do to get real and show up for the urgencies of our times. And one of the reasons folks with wealth are not responding to the full extent of our power and love is that we are trapped in old patterns that we are reluctant to speak openly about.
We fear not having enough. We fear rejection and exclusion. We fear being manipulated. We feel guilt and shame. The simple fact we have wealth shaped the contours of our experience, which in turn shapes to whom and how we connect, as well as what we believe. And we’ve got all kinds of feelings about that, too.
The deepest irony is that many of us fear that if we start talking about all this openly, we will be rejected and judged by the folks of other classes that we long to connect with, and this fear causes us to collapse, hide, and participate in the very behaviors that we are being called upon to transcend.
It’s a rat’s nest of potential energy. Hiding from it is letting it fester and become toxic to our bodies and our global community. These patterns of thought, feeling, and relating have been inculcated in us for generations, reinforced by our society, preying on our fears and traumas, and they will not unwind themselves unless we welcome them into the light and invite them to transform. And we can’t wait until if feels all safe and warm and fuzzy. Yes, we need to tend to ourselves and our vulnerabilities, but we also need to show up. Now. And if there isn’t a place where we feel safe exploring and unwinding this stuff, then we need to make one.
We may feel fear. But without fear there is no such thing as courage.
We may not know. But without the unknown, nothing new can emerge.
Two Poems by Diane Kendig
Two Poems by Diane Kendig
Affirmation
This week, it’s the basics.
I believe in sleep
which I could not sustain
and finally did.
I believe in the friend
who supported me
like a cantilever
hanging over my grief,
the one man who stood
stolid as a Doric column.
Then too food, as always,
the beignet with sweet potato,
the salmon unfolding like silk
against my tongue.
I cannot yet bury the mattock,
nor the hand ax,
but those ashes on the shelf,
I believe I can bury them now,
rest in the peace he gave us.
In the Time of Judges
— from The Book of Ruth 1:1
Before judges Berzon, Fletcher, and Tashima,
Sarah appeared from Justice to explain that children
concentrated in camps as juice is concentrated by squeezing
did not need soap nor diapers nor blankets nor any tools
of warmth nor comfort nor hygiene nor health,
and the three, used to hearings, tried to hear any mercy
in her strained speech. Their faces were strained, stretched
at what they heard, then fell, falling out of DOJ’s senselessness.
And Judge Wallace Tashima, interred in camps as a child,
had a face that could not believe its ears, and Fletcher said,
“Inconceivable,” as Berzon noted it all seemed like ancient history,
say Old Testament, say, of Biblical proportions.
Sarah once chose dog sitting over showing up to reunite children
separated from parents and in private practice argued that children
who ingested lead could not have brain injury. She won that one.
This current case, she says, she will fight about no more, but look
to her own safety and that of her family which we must presume
will have blankets and hygiene tools, and lo, especially the family pet.
Two Poems by Ellen Waterson
Two Poems by Ellen Waterson
The Making of a Riverkeeper
Summer hatch on the Deschutes as it flows
through town: hordes of six-pack abs, pasties,
and thongs astride monster floaties; swarms, dizzy
on tokes and beer, adrift in garish vinyl lounges.
Boom boxes, F-bombs, and barking mutts pepper
the banks. Cans, flip flops, and tubes of sun block
tumble in the drink. Otters flee to den, kingfisher
to limb, fingerlings freeze, noses into the current,
until the crazies leave.
But a child, tied to his parents’ floating play,
tunes out the rowdies, dreams into the water
as cool liquid ribbons through his fingers. He feels
the pull of the current, smells the dank muddy,
breathes in a tiny midge and sneezes. He spies a gosling
safe in the reeds, tells the anxious goose; imagines yellow-
eyed dragons, riverteeth bared, laired in glistening caverns.
On his parents go, noisy and slow. But this quick,
young imagination runs the rapids ahead, needles
through canyons, spins in unknown eddies, stitches water
with white foam, pens early lines of a story dedicated
to the Deschutes’ forever startled to life on this day,
in this place, within the embrace of this very river.
Life Is Uncertain
All he wants, when surveying the windrows, the fresh bales,
when nursing purpled nail and blistered palm, is to know she’ll
be waiting for him at home in the evening and he can ask her,
Do you remember when … ?
last February’s record-breaking snow buckled
the barn roof, the melt flooding the fields and filling
the daylight basement? How he joked he had to swim to bed,
wear irrigation boots to shoot pool.
when the Pandora moth carcasses were so thick
last June they piled up like snow drifts under the streetlights
in town, the wings and antennae like frail dusky ferns
on the pavement.
or in August, when the swallows suddenly left, their acrobatics
and tart chirps no longer spicing the evening, their empty mud-daub
nests like featureless faces mouthing no, no? How bereft he was,
rattled, to see them go. No sign of them since or now.
or when the greasy smoke from the forest fires never lifted all fall,
the water in the swollen reservoirs and nursing rivers recruited until dry,
the sun an angry orange coming and going in the sky, throwing bloody
flames when eclipsed by the moon? How he’d shuddered at the sudden
darkness and cold.
or when the Pioneer stopped serving dessert, not even fudge cake.
How, without dessert, without anything sweet, the way the world
was going to hell in a hand basket, he didn’t know what to eat first.
He wasn’t joking anymore.
All he wants when surveying another season is to know she’ll
be waiting for him at home in the evening and he can ask her,
Do you remember when we couldn’t have said any of this?
She’ll take his calloused hand in hers and nod and say she does.
Blaxit
Blaxit
he wants us all
gone from Amerikkka
purge all 52
Main Streets there’s a
main street in every
state your name for the record and
your color state your
color me paranoid color me
afraid of civil war
I would gladly leave this country
voluntarily than stay and be forced to leave this earth
if all the colored people
black and brown go
back where we came from it will
be a pretty bleak bland
picture BLAXIT
all spices are coming with us along with
sweet potatoes / peanuts / mac’n cheese / ribs
all greens are coming also watermelon / peaches / mangos,
all berries / coconut/ pineapple/ avos
pears can stay coffee will come and all manner of liquor and whiskey
we harvest chocolate so it’s coming
gone by sundown
goners we will be if we stay
I don’t have a country but no
matter I will find something
you-all will have
no music it’s
coming with us jazz
and rap and soul and be-bop and
blues always blues
you all can have country
western and classical
we’re taking Beyonce, Toni Morrison,
Oprah, Rihanna you
can have Kanye
Wakanda is us
all black inventions will come like
ice cream / peanut butter
potato chips / guitars
traffic lights / elevators
refrigerators / lawn mowers
baby buggys
we’ll take all living poets of color from
the beat period on
Pete Seeger was wrong: this land IS your land
enriched by OUR blood /sweat / tears
Two Poems by Joy McDowell
Two Poems by Joy McDowell
Those Shoes
Three hours inside
the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum.
….Those shoes. The faces and stories.
A long walk across the mall
….underlines my fortunate life.
Grief nibbles at my eyes.
Then a weekend in Miami.
….A niece appears in the opera,
….The Passenger, a moving work
about Auschwitz and the fear
of a former guard who believes
she has seen one of her inmates
on board a ship bound for Brazil.
….Arias spill the misery and torture
….of that brutal slaughter place.
On the stage, the revolving set
alternates between white ship scenes
….and a color worse than somber
for the filthy camp barracks.
….Bonds develop among inmates.
….Callous indifference directs guards.
Then I am back poolside
at my resort eating fruit and
….watching healthy bodies swim.
The air is balmy, the sounds happy,
only inside my head does it remain
….dark and dim.
From an orchestra of organized
horror the sweet sting of a violin
….needles my mind.
In the Dark
Homeless kids pass midnight
on worn couches, do homework
in out-of-gas cars, search a kitchen
for food and don’t have a shower.
Homeless kids don’t take
vacations. A night at the Mission
doesn’t count. They wait in bushes
while their mother begs.
These kids keep changing schools.
Babies wear saturated diapers.
Good kids lie to cover
for drugged-out dads.
Their world doesn’t rely on wrist watches
or calendars and they can only imagine
a bad day getting better, so they
push anger into mouse corners.
Homeless kids have at least one friend
who is a police officer. Homeless kids
help damaged parents. They sleep light
and recognize bad noises.
True Health | What if the Virus is the Medicine?
True Health | What if the Virus is the Medicine?
The emerging pandemic is already a watershed of the early 21st century: things won’t ever be the same. Yet for all that the havoc that the virus is wreaking, directly and indirectly, it may also be part of the bitter medicine the global body needs.
How could adding another crisis to an already crisis-ridden planet possibly be medicinal?
Before we explore that question, we want to be clear: our intent is not to downplay the severity or minimize the importance of lives lost to this disease. Behind the mortality figures lie very real pain and grief, and these numbers, often discussed so casually, are personal, representing the potential loss of our parents, elders, teachers, dance companions, grandmothers or immune-compromised friends. Already, our hearts are breaking for the physical distance with our aging parents until we know if we’re infected. There’s not only a risk of losing beloveds in this time, but having to do so from afar. Our hearts are breaking for those who may die or suffer alone, without the touch of their loved ones. We honor death as a sacred passage, but we do not minimize death, suffering or sickness in the slightest. We pray that each one who transitions from this virus (as from the many other deadly diseases, accidents, overdoses, murders, suicides, mass shootings, and on and on) be met with on the other side by unexpected blessing, connection, peace.
Neither are the economic implications to be taken lightly. Many in this country have already seen massive impact, and the recession has only begun. As always, those closest to the edge will be hit hardest. For some, a month sequestered in beauty could be a vacation. Others have a few months before financial panic sets in. And for others living paycheck to paycheck or gig to gig, there is a great immediacy of struggle. The economic ‘side effects’ of this coronavirus could be catastrophic.
And yet.
For many in our world, the pre-coronavirus status quo was already catastrophic –indeed, for many species and many peoples, the world has already ended. We are in the midst of a crisis of unprecedented magnitude: the choice for humanity is change or die. No one said change would be easy. (Neither is dying.) And incremental change is not enough. It will take radical change to shift our current, calamitous trajectory away from massive environmental devastation, famine, energy crises, war and refugee crises, increasingly authoritarian regimes and escalating inequalities.
What is unsustainable cannot persist, by definition, and we are starting to see this play out.
What hope is there, then? There is the hope that breakdown will become, or coexist with, breakthrough.
There is the hope that what is dying is the caterpillar of immature humanity in order that the metamorphosis yields a stunning emergence. That whatever survives this collective initiation process will be truer, more heart-connected, resilient and generative.
We are entering the chrysalis. There’s no instruction manual for what happens next. But we can learn some things from observing nature (thank you Megan Toben for some of this biological info). For one thing, the chrysalis stage is preceded by a feeding frenzy in which the caterpillar massively overconsumes (sound familiar? We’ve been there for decades). Then its tissues melt into a virtually undifferentiated goo. What remain separate are so-called imaginal cells, which link together and become the template from which the goo reorganizes itself into a butterfly. Does the caterpillar overconsume strategically, or out of blind instinct? Does it know what’s coming and trust in the process, or does it feel like it’s dying? We don’t know. It’s natural to resist radical, painful change. But ultimately there’s little choice but to surrender to it. We can practice welcoming the circumstances that force us away from dysfunctional old patterns, be they economic or personal. We have that opportunity now.
Let’s return to a crucial word, initiation. On an individual level, initiations are those processes or rituals by which one reaches a new state of being and corresponding social status: from girl to woman, from layperson to clergy, and so on. Initiations can be deliberate or spontaneous, as in the case of the archetypal shamanic initiation, which comes by way of a healing crisis. To paraphrase Michael Meade, initiations are events that pull us deeper into life than we would otherwise go. They vary widely from culture to culture and individual to individual, but two characteristics they share are intensity and transformation. They bring us face to face with life and with death; they always involve an element of dying or shedding so that the new can be born.
Most all of us have undergone initiations of one sort of another, from the death of a parent to the birth of a child. Many have experienced initiation in the form of a crisis or trial by fire. Those of us who have gone through more deliberate, ritualized forms of initiation can state unequivocally: the process is not fun, comfortable or predictable. You may well feel like you’re going nuts. You may not know who you are anymore. You don’t get to choose which parts of you die, or even to know ahead of time. One of the overriding feelings is of uncertainty: you don’t know where you’re going, only that there’s no going back. And there’s no way of knowing how long the transformation will take.
It can help to remember that the initiatory chrysalis phase is a sacred time, set apart from normal life. That it has its own demands and its own logic. That it cannot be rushed, only surrendered to. That it may be painful, but also, ultimately, healing.
Imagine what happens when an entire society finds itself in the midst of a critical initiation. Except you don’t have to imagine: it’s already happening, or starting to. It looks like chaos, a meltdown. We’re in a moment of collective, global-level crisis and uncertainty that has little precedent in living memory. The economic machine–the source of our financial needs and also a system that profits from disease, divorce, crime and tragedy–is faced with a dramatic slow-down. We are all facing the cessation of non-essential activities. There is opportunity here, if we claim it.
This is a sacred time.
However, unlike a traditional rite of passage ceremony, there’s no priest or elder with wisdom born of experience holding the ritual container, tracking everything seen and unseen. Instead, all at once there are millions of personal quests inside one enormous initiatory chrysalis. And yet, look closely: amid the goo, you may start to notice imaginal cells appearing. Pockets of people who are aligned with something they may not fully understand, in receipt of a vision or pieces of one, beaming out their signal to say: let’s try something different.
This is an opportunity to loosen our grip on old and familiar ways. Those ways worked for as long as they did, and they got us here, for better and for worse. They seem unlikely to carry us much further. What if we’re instead being asked to feel our way forward, from the heart, without benefit of certainty–which, when concentrated, quickly becomes toxic? No one has all the answers in this or any other time. Right now the questions may be more valuable.
What if we honor this time with sacred respect?
What if we take the time to listen for the boundaries and limits of our Earth mother?
What is truly important?
How can we receive the bitter medicine of the moment deep into our cells and let it align us with latent possibility?
How can we, with the support of the unseen, serve as midwives to all that is dying here and all that is being born?
With these questions resounding, let us s l o w d o w n and listen. For the echo back from the unseen, for whisperings from the depths of our souls and from the heart of the mystery that–no less so in times of crisis–embraces us all.
Initiation of the Butterfly
Both moths and butterflies belong to the Lepidoptera family, meaning that their magnificent, detailed wings are comprised of hundreds of tiny scales, visible only at extreme magnification.
Images | Shutterstock
