“In Africa, they say that if one person gets sick, everybody is sick. The village or the tribe is seen as a huge tree with thousands of branches. When part of this living entity is diseased, there is a need to reexamine the whole tree. This is why when somebody is sick in the village, everybody is worried, it reminds everybody that there is something present that is potentially dangerous for all.” - Sobonfu Some, The Spirit of Intimacy
And so, here we are.
Drowning in the raging river of our times hurtling towards who knows where.
And none of us knows what to do about it. Our best efforts fail. Our victories are small. The sense of hopelessness is growing and, with it, a deep sense of anger.
We struggle inside our hearts and the struggle rages in the streets. We see the same problems in our home as we do in our boardrooms. Our movements for social change are no strangers to the way things have come to be with sexism in movements against racism and racism in movements against sexism. They too bear the thumb print of our times. Dysfunction everywhere.
What can come into focus in times like this, if we are willing to see it, are the ways that the problems we face as are mirrored in the ways we go about solving them.
A thread begins to appear.
Our approach to solving our problems has become invisible to us and so goes unquestioned.
But what if the approach we are using to contend with our challenges is actually an expression of the challenge with which we’re contending?
What I’m speaking about is our culture’s dogged insistence of going it alone. I’m speaking of the ragged individualism with with we approach all of our struggles and suggesting that these notions of self-sufficiency are not only not the cure, they are the syndrome that plagues us.
And I want to make the case for a radical re-orientation to the issues that plague us: village making.
*
Perhaps the most significant and vital win for the colonizer is the atomization of culture.
The breaking down of community into notions of nuclear family and the center of it all, the holy individual, the almighty Self at whose altar we, individually, worship. If there has been a central wound on the psyche of those of us who live in my corner of the world it has been this: the obliteration of the village and, worse, the obliteration of much capacity at all for village-mindedness.
Stated another way: globalization has not resulted in more togetherness. It has resulted in more individualization. It has created more highly niched communities of affinity and less communities of geography. Globalization is not, and has never been, a network of highly interconnected villages. It has, and will forever be, the end of villages.
This has affected us in ways we can’t even imagine.
So it's important to have a Plan B. But why is our Plan B to manage all of it on our own?
Jessa Crispin articulates how this cult of individualism and independence has fully infiltrated mainstream feminism in her book Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. What follows are a series of excerpts.
"Making feminism a universal pursuit might look like a good thing, or at the very least a neutral thing, but in truth it progresses, and I think accelerates, a process that has been detrimental to the feminist movement, and that is the change of focus from society to the individual. What was once collective action and a shared vision for how women might work and live in the world has become identity politics, a focus on individual history and achievement, and an unwillingness to share space with people with different opinions, worldviews, and histories. It has separated us out into smaller and smaller groups, until we are left all by ourselves, with our concern and our energy directed inward instead of outward..
So it's important to have a Plan B. But why is our Plan B to manage all of it on our own? To have to, as individuals, make out money, set up our homes, bear and raise children, cook our meals, develop and maintain a sense of style and taste, decide how we spend our free time, and on and on until we die. In the name of freedom, we broke out of communities and towns and tribes and created families and blood lineage. In the name of freedom, we broke out of families and blood lineage to create a nuclear household. In the name of freedom, we broke out of the nuclear households to become individuals. And yet, at no point along that way did we put serious consideration into creating a social equivalent of the support system those larger groups provided to us...
Now independence is hailed as a feminist virtue, The ability to stand on one's own, outside of family and men. And now we have all the freedom and independence we desire, like freedom to go bankrupt, to be socially isolated, to be homeless without any social support network, to labour all your life with nothing to show for it. As long as feminism is still infected with the Protestant economic determinist mindset - the idea that your station in life is determined by how virtuous you are or what you deserve - we'll continue to put our time and energy into breaking down social structures rather than creating new, more empathetic ones.
We've been cut off from traditions and rituals, from family and intergenerational connections, from communities and a sense of belonging. We saw these things as unpaid labor that we were forced to do, rather than something worth preserving. It is true that we were forced into these roles, but it's also true that these things have value and should be maintained. It goes beyond squabbling over who does the housework and childcare in a nuclear family, to the question of how do we feel like we belong somewhere?"
What we are left with are Facebook groups, online forums where we connect with people we might never meet in person.
What we are left with are beautiful festivals and gatherings in which good people gather for too short a period of time but that wake up in us the hunger for something more in our regular lives.
We are left with psychological practices of the ‘self-regulating’ of our nervous systems, a triage like practice that can pull people through an overwhelming crisis by pulling them ever deeper into themselves and by disconnecting and detaching from the world. Self-regulation is not the end all and be all. There are those in the field of psychology pointing at research that shows up how the jangled nervous systems of humans are best regulated with the presence and support of other humans, eye-contact, touch, listening, playing together, this sort of co-regulation seems to be more aligned with our neuro-biology. Self-regulation is deified because our culture deifies the Self and its independence. It’s deified because our culture worships heroes not villages. Self-regulation is seen as a sign of how incredibly strong and resilient we are. Self-regulation helps us survive but that doesn't mean it's healthy. It just keeps us from dying.
And so, the practice of village-making becomes an antidote to the troubled times we are in.
*
Derrick Jensen once interviewed Martín Prechtel, and asked him: “You’ve spoken a lot today about the importance of maintenance. How does that relate to the Tzutujil practice of building flimsy houses?”
Prechtel: “In the village, people used to build their houses out of traditional materials, using no iron or lumber or nails, but the houses were magnificent. Many were sewn together out of bark and fiber. Like the house of the body, the house that a person sleeps in must be very beautiful and sturdy, but not so sturdy that it won’t fall apart after a while. If your house doesn’t fall apart, then there will be no reason to renew it. And it is this renewability that makes something valuable. The maintenance gives it meaning.
The secret of village togetherness and happiness has always been the generosity of the people, but the key to that generosity is inefficiency and decay. Because our village huts were not built to last very long, they had to be regularly renewed. To do this, villagers came together, at least once a year, to work on somebody’s hut. When your house was falling down, you invited all the folks over. The little kids ran around messing up what everybody was doing. The young women brought the water. The young men carried the stones. The older men told everybody what to do, and the older women told the older men that they weren’t doing it right. Once the house was back together again, everyone ate together, praised the house, laughed, and cried. In a few days, they moved on to the next house. In this way, each family’s place in the village was reestablished and remembered. This is how it always was.
Then the missionaries and the businessmen and the politicians brought in tin and lumber and sturdy houses. Now the houses last, but the relationships don’t.
In some ways, crises bring communities together. Even nowadays, if there’s a flood, or if somebody is going to put a highway through a neighbourhood, people come together to solve the problem. Mayans don’t wait for a crisis to occur; they make a crisis. Their spirituality is based on choreographed disasters — otherwise known as rituals — in which everyone has to work together to remake their clothing, or each other’s houses, or the community, or the world. Everything has to be maintained because it was originally made so delicately that it eventually falls apart. It is the putting back together again, the renewing, that ultimately makes something strong. That is true of our houses, our language, our relationships.
It’s a fine balance, making something that is not so flimsy that it falls apart too soon, yet not so solid that it is permanent. It requires a sort of grace. We all want to make something that’s going to live beyond us, but that thing shouldn’t be a house, or some other physical object. It should be a village that can continue to maintain itself. That sort of constant renewal is the only permanence we should wish to attain.”
*
Once a year, the Q’eswachaka people of Peru build a rope bridge connecting two villages on either side of a canyon. If a permanent bridge were put in, it would mean one less important way for the community to come together. It would mean more speed, ease and convenience, but less village.
I was reading Wade Davis’ book The Wayfinders. In it, he speaks of the immense preparations that are made for the journey of the Kula ring from island to island in an ornate, intergenerational process of gift giving.
“Men from widely separated villages had to be coordinated. Gardens had to be planted simply to grow the food to be consumed during the preparations for the journey. There were taboos to enforce, ritual magic to perform, feasts to celebrate, supplies to secure and store for the journey. Fleets of canoes had to be built, new sails woven from pandanus leaves, outriggers polished and painted, paddles carved and ornate prows ritually cleanses and empowered to ward off all evil.”
What you are reading there is village-making in action. What you are reading there ‘all hands on deck’. What you are reading there is ‘everyone is needed to play their role.’ If any one of those roles is not played, the journey might not happen. If there are no roles to be played, there is no village.
Village is a made thing. And it must be constantly re-made. Village must be enacted and maintained.
*
The individualism is everywhere.
It’s in our privatized relationships and how that informs the ways we navigate conflict.
It’s in the way that we die, surrounded by fewer and fewer people instead of more and more.
It’s the way we view marriage as the wedding of two people for their own pleasure rather than as a village-making event and a marriage that exists to feed the community.
It’s the ways that parents are left to raise their kids with too little support and couples are left alone to save their own marriage from their worst demons on their own.
*
I recall being at a meditation retreat in Calgary and sitting with a friend’s sister as she struggled with her stressful thinking around parenting.
“I should be able to do better!” she said.
“At what?” I asked.
“Parenting. I should be able to do a better job at it all.”
“Better... or perfect?”
She became quiet and then, realizing the absurdity of it confessed, “Perfect.”
“Is that true, that you should be a perfect parent?” I asked.
She shook her head and we explored the consequences that this thought was having on her and how her world looked if she set that thought aside. And then we explored what else might be true.
“How about the thought, ‘I shouldn’t be able to do this all perfectly.’?”
I could tell that it made sense intellectually but not emotionally. And so I offered her some thoughts, “For most of human history, children were raised by villages, not parents. Dozens of others were actively involved, every single day, in the rearing of children. They lived in much safer communities where there was no fear of being hit by a car or being kidnapped. Children had plenty of uninterrupted time in nature, playing. That’s not how it is anymore. We live in an age of the nuclear family where childcare can be hard to come by. It’s too much for two parents to handle. No wonder parents lose their mind. And you live in a culture that doesn’t value the work women and mothers have traditionally done. It’s seen as a drain on the economy not a gift to it. And we live in a time of such insane expectations where women should be able to do it all, be super moms, have successful careers, be in amazing shape and have a rich social life. It’s madness!”
She was trying to be the entire village to her little ones.
And, when individuals try to be the entire village, it turns them into ashes.
*
I was speaking with my friend Ian about monogamy versus polyamory.
He pointed out that while they seem to be opposites (closed relationships vs. open) that no one questioning the lack of village around either. As we lounged in our friend Natasha’s living room he pointed out the lyrics of the hit song Home: ‘home is whenever I’m with you.’ He reminded me of the words of an elder with whom we both study when he addressed the women in the room one day and asked them to raise their hands if they’d ever had a man mistake them for home. And almost all of the women did.
“So,” Ian pointed out. “What if the reason we seek home in a partner is because we lack a home in a culture? What if the lack of village is at the root of our quest to find ‘the One’ who might save us from our loneliness?”
Ian’s upcoming film The Healing of Love, focuses on a small community in Portugal called Tamera.
In their community, they hold regular forums in which people come together to wrestle through their learnings about love. Every day, they engage in practical experiments on the nature of love. Conflicts within relationships are shared in these daily, public forums, people gathered and sitting in circle with each other. And so, your personal struggles with your partner and their struggles with you create the opportunity for the village to appear. If everyone showed up and said, “I’m fine. I don’t need help.” or, “I’ve got no opinions,” then nothing would happen.
But in the coming together, village is made and the more village there is, the less loneliness there is and the less searching for and clinging to ‘the One.’
*
I recall hearing about about one indigenous community where, when you were about to become Chief you were taken to a special hut outside the village and made to sit in it and stay awake for two days to reflect on your particular faults, failings and weaknesses. You were about to be entrusted with greater responsibility for your people and a small slip from you could have very real consequences for your people.
But you weren’t left to figure out your weaknesses on your own. Over the two days, people would come to the hut and tell you what they saw in you. They would remind you of the moments in which you had behaved less than beautifully, other than honourably and lacked generosity and discernment. Again and again, you’d hear it from people until it was impossible not to see.
You weren’t to respond to anyone. You were only to listen. You were given the cabin so that you could have your temporary privacy and not need to engage anyone. You were given the courtesy of having space to reflect and work through any defensiveness that might arise.
This wasn’t punishment. This was the deepest form of love the village could practice for itself, to ensure that the new leader began their work self-aware and humble and to ensure that the people knew they had been heard.
My friend Randy Jones recounted how his teacher Malidoma Some, in his initiation into elderhood, spent three days naked in the village square of his Dagara tribe as everyone came up and recounted his failings and mistakes to him to reduce his ego and teaching humility. During the three days, other Elders took the him away several times a day to completely wash them in ash, a protective mechanism in order that he wasn’t destroyed by the process.
You were not left on your own to figure out your weaknesses.
And everyone in the community was made to know that their words were needed.
*
Much of what we see in the field of personal growth is a response to a crisis, a form of triage. It’s not a sign of the good health of our culture.
I recall being at an event called The Art of Mentoring a few years ago in Ontario. I was speaking with Mark Morey, who was acting as the guiding force of the event in the background. Somehow the topic of Non-Violent Communication (NVC) arose in our conversation. NVC is a philosophy and practice of speaking in a way that returns us to what’s alive for us and guides us towards healing. It’s often used in conflict resolution as a way to help people find their way back towards one another. It’s a kind of active listening and speaking based on how we’re feeling and what we see is needed more than our opinions about who and what the other person is. Reading Marshall Rosenberg’s seminal book on this changed my life.
“But you know that’s not peacemaking,” Mark said.
I recall being struck by that. “Peacemaking is the singing, eating and dancing together. It’s the ceremonies done together. It’s the story telling and making things with your hands together. It’s the building of a culture and the education of how to be a good human so that these kinds of conflicts might never emerge.”
I sat with it. NVC was a tool of triage. It was something most often used in a crisis.
I realized the same thing about The Work of Byron Katie, which has been dear to my heart. This process of questioning my stressful thoughts is the result of living in a culture that is so deeply out of touch with the natural world. There are cultures where the kinds of modern depression, anxieties, crippling self-doubt and neuroses do not exist. But, if you are born into a culture based in essentialism and the notion that there is only one possible truth, then you will need a path of inward mindfulness and contemplation.
The poverty of our times isn’t that we don’t believe in ourselves. It’s that we have to. This culture turns us into ghosts.
*
Stephen Jenkinson was interviewed by Utne magazine and spoke on grief: “Grief is not a burden for the individual to bear. These days too many people try to do the witnessing alone, sitting in their living rooms watching social justice documentaries. They end up immobilized by guilt or despair. That’s not what’s called for. If you’ve got a village, the village has got to carry the realization of what is so individuals are not paralyzed by it.”
I know so many good people who struggle in their life not because of something terrible that happened, though, surely, there’s that too, but because of all the things that never happened.
When I was in my teens, I got a some deodorant, a razor and shaving cream from an uncle. That was the closest thing that I got to any sort of initiation into adulthood.
I know many women who got home one day to find a box of tampons on their bed. No note. No conversation just this silent acknowledgement that something had happened.
I know many who didn’t even get this.
In most traditional cultures, this would never happen. The abandoning of the young to figure it out for themselves, to allow them to keep being a child and never to give them the chance to be a real, mature, adult human would be considered dangerous in the extreme to the survival of the village and so, they would come together to practice human making.
There were elaborate and ornate rituals and ceremonies, handed down from generation to generation designed to initiate the young into their adulthood. Some last a year or more. Not only was this not left to the parents, the parents weren’t allowed to participate. The burden of this work was taken from them by a community that cared enough to do so. These events were village-making events in which the older men and women would come together to ensure that life had a chance to continue.
Most of us in this culture are left utterly on our own to figure out what it means to be a human being in this world at this time, born into the body we are born into. I know so many good people who struggle in their life not because of something terrible that happened, though, surely, there’s that too, but because of all the things that never happened.
We struggle because we don’t know why humans are in this world or what our purpose might be. In many traditional cultures, you’d be the last one to know about your purpose. Everyone would have ascertained this long before you caught wind of what your particular constellation of gifts and nature might be and you would have been fostered into it by elders in your community.
You would have been raised to know the purpose of being human, of being a man or woman or other gender, of being you. You would have been on receiving end of all of this not the generating end. And the culture wouldn’t have known its purpose in giving you and your gifts a job. And the culture would have relied on you giving your gifts. Your purpose wouldn’t have been abstract. It would have been tethered to your people, your land and your time.
When the initiations stopped, another opportunity for the village to appear vanished and the possibility of the village continuing began its rapid roll down the deforested and strip-mined mountain of modern culture.
*
I was visiting Killaloe, Ontario in the Summer of 2016 to lead a workshop. The local coordinators picked me up and drove me to the venue and told me a bit about the area.
“If you mention that you need help, people will show up to help you. No questions asked. It just sort of happens here.”
I saw quietly for a few minutes as we made our way along the gravel road into town.
“I bet,” I ventured. “That you would get very careful about what help you ask for.”
They both nodded and continued driving.
“How about you leave something for someone else?”
The elder I studied with spoke of a young man being brought to his home by a friend. The young man lived in a small, indigenous community nearby and spent much of his time there bragging about all of the traditional skills he was an expert in. Finally, the elder leaned forward and said, “How about you leave something for someone else?”
What the young man, in his quest for self-sufficiency, had missed was the cost to the community of his not needing anyone.
This deeply moved me Tad thank you.
I am wondering now about how I build for permanence these days and what the costs are to village. A friend of mine one told me about an event where he was supposed to show a group how to make a fire with a bow drill. The friction fire can be an incredible feet to learn and do and can also get really effortless eventually. On this occasion everything went wrong and as he was sweating in his own misery of not getting more than a little smoke and then having a part break and having to start over the group began to really get engaged. He tried again and now the group began singing a song he had shared for them to sing even louder and as if their singing might actually be part of this working out. Then he started to calm and after a long while he made an ember, a little glowing coal. Soon after with song and the help of people around blowing the flame to life they had a fire. He laughed when he told me. He didn’t expect that. He thought he was failing them and as he told me he began remembering all of the others on other occasions who, by his perfect “show” walked away as if them being there and him being there was nothing.
"Now the houses last, but the relationships don’t." This sums up the atomization of our current predicament. *deep breath* *another deep breath*
This morning as I drove my son to school, we passed a woman on the side of the road. She appeared to be "on drugs" (at 8:30am), terrified eyes bugging out of her head, swinging her arms at something that I couldn't see. I shed some tears for her, but I kept driving. So did everyone else. We all had somewhere to be.
Then, on the way home, I passed the gory carcass of a dead possum, bloodied and shattered on the side of the road. Dozens of cars just drove right over it.
I recall the many times I have stopped to bury roadkill, to say prayers and speak "I'm sorries" over the beautiful furry body, to shed tears at the loss and the waste.
Today, I just drove on by.