Collapsing communally- wild dreams of community in times of great transformation
  1. Find a tree
  2. Sit with your trunk against theirs. Breathe.
  3. Imagine this- what are your wildest, wettest, furriest dreams of community for these times?Â
There is a story on which Western modernity is built on. It touches everything. It’s a spell of sorts, a nightmare storied into existence, a deep-seated narrative that shapes our relationship with reality and in turn our socio-economic design (for more on this check out Stories for Life)
A story of separation in which
our mind is separate from (and superior to) the rest of our bodies.
we’re separate from (and superior/inferior to) others.
we’re separate from (and superior to) nature.
A story that celebrates hyper-individualism
self-made billionaires.
private lands.
exclusive offers.
selfish self-care.
a big. bigger. biggest car to extend the distance between us.
a new home on a red planet, millions of miles away from this one.
individual spend.
communal price.
Because whether we choose to story it this way or not, our true relationship to life is one of interdependence & interconnectedness. An entangled community; constantly exchanging & co-regulating. Nature doesn’t exist outside, it doesn’t reside in sustainability departments but within us. None of us is spared responsibility. Our bodies are our earth, earth is our body. We all belong to community of life and cannot escape the entangled consequences of ignoring our interdependence.
The word community contains original instructions for participating in life- together in service. Com-from latin, meaning together, munis- ready to be of service. Together, of service.Â
Earth’s wild dreams of community are everywhere:
Moss- survived 5 mass extinctions & has spread across all continents. A living practice of community, where resources are shared by design, with individual moss leafs distributing water across colonies.
Painted lady butterfly- its life a constant journey, traveling from Africa to Antarctica and back again, no individual will ever complete the entire journey. Instead, their great voyage spans across generations. Ancestral knowledge of up to 6 generations, in motion.
Hermit crabs- an orderly chaos of exchanging shells in which everyone gets the right shell for them. No hoarding, no first come first served. A conga line of crabs moving until everyone has a new, well-fitting home.
And what does community look like for us humans in a severed, collapsing world of our own making? In these times of mystery, of polycrisis, of the great unraveling, where there are no individual solutions or solid answers. Where we must feel our grief, rage, despair to find a way to keep moving towards our collective aliveness. How do we practice being in service to life, together? What does community mean to you in these times? Do you feel part of a community that replenishes you and sustains your capacity to be of service?
For me, the clues are in what my heart aches for. I am thirsty for community spaces where the truth of how we are really treating the world & the future can be spoken. Where we can story ourselves into different relationships to life, where we can tune into stories in which we’re not the main character but a channel of all that’s alive through us. Communities that nurture accountability and collective wisdom. Spaces to imagine and then practice weird, new shapes & freedoms. Where we re-learn to know the world through our guts, hearts, as well as our minds. Through our whole bodies and not even just our own bodies. I long for communities of wild, animal bodies that can hold our beauty as well as our messiness, our weird scents and our decay.
It’s through true community that we resource our courage, to tell the truth and to begin to uncover stories that re-entangle us back to living. Stories that drown out the dying story of separation. Sophie Strand talks about narrative dysbiosis in her book The Flowering Wand - the antibiotic, depleted, single-story narrative, that so many of us live by, cannot be antagonised into health or killed off completely. Instead, what’s needed is a replenishment with probiotic stories that can nurse cultures back to health and biodiversity. What if the communal effort of sharing fertile stories could crowd out the unhealthy, overgrowth of antibiotic stories into a corner?
Community and biodiversity of stories are our lifelines in these times. We cannot face the immense difficulty of this great transition without strong, living communities. Community is where our ability to feel the depth of pain necessary to move us into action and the ecstatic joy necessary to sustain it, are both resourced from. And we cannot move towards life-nourishing cultures without stories that help us imagine and connect with the possibility of these times.
There is work to be done. Deep, uncomfortable, communal work of telling the truth and letting go of what we might have imagined our lives to be. Our careers, travel plans, and identities built on acquiring stuff or our notions of success. Our capacity to unravel and begin to shed the story of separation is dependent on the strength of community- without its holding, we can’t let ourselves collapse. If we can’t hold on to our community, we will continue to hold on to the destructive stories that our modern life has been built on. What are your wildest, wettest, furriest dreams of community? Who is among you as you unravel? Who holds you? Who are you together with, in service?
Join our 1 day offering for courageous organisations
From September, we’re opening space for 5 courageous organisations to take part in a 1day nature-centered, climate action accelerator. This is for teams looking to make bolder moves, work with the big questions and discomfort of these times and participate in halting the destruction of our living world - today.
In service to life on earth. Find out more or email hello@becomingcrew.com to book a chat with Dan, Mark & Evva.