In this personal essay, otherWise’s founding Weaver, Nicole Civita, reflects on her journey of belonging and making home. From being claimed by the Alaskan Muskeg to grounding her family in Vermont’s green hills, Nicole takes us on a journey of becoming of a place. For her, this is less about finding the perfect place than about learning how to be-long wherever you are, while being an active participant in the enlivenment of that place.  “It asks for attention, intention, agency and devotion. For repair and reciprocity”, Nicole continues. “It asks us to remain both permeable and protective. Rooted and moving.”

In this essay, otherWise community member Andrea Pitio shares observations about pre-determined ways of interacting and arranging our relationships: within humans, other species, and between humans and the more-than-human world. The codified and outdated ways of arranging our interactions is unravelling, and the author asks: what’s next?

Humans, despite all their advances, still require the same things to survive that all living things do: gas exchange, an appropriate temperature, the right amount of H2O, and matter that is compatible with our digestive system. If you alter the movement of just a few atoms, the molecules that make up what I call ‘Me’ quickly become something else entirely.” ‘I’ ‘die.’

One of my favorite units in Agroecology class was about the categories of interactions among species. There are six combinations of impacts. These categories are, of course, simplified –reductionist by design – but they still offer a useful frame to begin with:

•  Symbiosis (gain-gain) – An insect collects pollen to feed its young and, in doing so, aids the plants’ reproduction.
• Exploitation (gain-lose) – A rabbit munches on a dandelion. A hawk snatches the rabbit. A tapeworm absorbs nutrients in a dog’s gut.
• Commensalism (gain-neutral) – Remora fish attach to sharks, getting a free ride while the shark is unaffected (to the best of our current knowledge).
• Neutralism (neutral-neutral) – Two different species of fish coexist in a coral reef but don’t clearly influence each other’s well-being in either direction.
• Amensalism (neutral-lose) – Black walnut trees exude chemicals that inhibit some nearby plants’ growth. Insofar as some of those plants would never have posed a threat to the tree, the chemical’s influence provides little value to the walnut but harms them. Or, a human drives to the grocery store at night and runs over a newt. The particular human, unaware, is not directly affected.
• Competition (lose-lose) – If you plant cabbages only one foot apart, each one will be smaller than if you planted them two feet apart because they’re vying for the same nutrients. (Granted, the tighter spacing fits more plants in, but on an individual basis, each one is a little stunted.)

The totality of what transpires across this array of interactions is more complex than Western science (or language, even) could ever describe, but it’s an intriguing place to start.

Within a pre-modern empire, a majority of humans – at least 80% – would have directly procured their diets from their immediate surroundings. Zoomed all the way in to the individual scale, where a human ate the forage, crop, game, or livestock, the relationship between a human and their food source(s) would count as exploitation (so the conventional reasoning goes, conveniently ignoring the role of our excrement). More broadly, human efforts at food procurement (otherwise known as ecosystem stewardship) would likely have been symbiotic and supported diversity, abundance, and regeneration. Over time, the demands of empire – through taxes and debt – pushed communities into overdrive, with no option but to enact a relationship of exploitation with the land. Until recently, a significant feature of these overshoot systems was that the individual contributors within those groups still would have actively accessed calories and fluids directly from their environments on a regular basis. In this sense of direct relationship with more-than-human kin, most humans in 1800 AD were similar to those in 180,000 BC.

The term “technosphere” encompasses the infrastructure and technologies – and the formal institutions that rely upon them – that distinguish complicated, large-scale human civilizations from other forms of human society. Think feats of engineering, both ancient and modern: aqueducts, roads, cities, bridges, railways, plumbing, the power grid, data centers and cables, multistory buildings, vehicles and other machinery, appliances and devices. These transformed the nature of food, medicine, governance, trade, and communication. The technosphere’s orientation toward the biosphere is – and can only ever be – one of exploitation. The creation and maintenance of a technosphere requires that a human collective plunder its environment for metals and minerals, as well as for organic materials to support a ballooning workforce, far exceeding any near notions of honorable harvest. Coordination toward converting non-renewable, abiotic materials into infrastructure takes on a life of its own, and even without anyone explicitly choosing, extraction becomes the emergent phenomenon’s modus operandi. Long before contemporary capitalism and fossil fuels, civilizations’ endeavors were unleashing contaminants.

We could explore additional layers of interaction, especially as we consider different scales and types of civilizations. What percent of individuals provided food to the rest? How did the system treat the providers? What kind of aggregate impact did the receivers have on the world beyond the technosphere, not just as consumers, but also as laborers? Keeping with the theme of interaction categories, the relationship between rural farmers and the technosphere, which served as an intermediary between farming and urban citizens, would have qualified as exploitation, and particularly two subtypes. In a parasitic dynamic, one being keeps the other alive indefinitely while extracting material resources. This could be Feudalism (800s to 1400s AD), where lords exacted from serfs a share of the harvest, since the serfs performed this labor on land that the lord claimed. (The technosphere includes the institutions that arise from complicated, large-scale civilization – in this case, the concept of and ability to enforce land ownership.) The other relevant sub-type is parasitoid behavior, in which the being that gradually derives sustenance ends up killing its host, just not as quickly as a predator would its prey. This might best be exemplified by Chattel Slavery (1400s to 1800s AD), where slaves were commodities to be bought and sold as property, and maybe by earlier, less-market-based forms of forced labor. Enslaved people, often seen as more disposable, would have faced more life-threatening conditions that serfs.

What of the relationship between the technosphere and those who inhabit it? As much as any technosphere is utterly reliant on human labor for proliferation and repair, humans who lived in or near cities would have (whether voluntarily or not) devoted their days to specialized roles, distinct from the direct procurement of digestible molecules, while the technosphere facilitated the flows of resources that kept them hydrated and fed, and removed their waste. This interaction in which the parties are inextricably linked, is a subtype of symbiosis called obligate mutualism. An example of this occurs between fig wasps and figs (except where humans have intervened to breed figs that reproduce asexually). Fig flowers evolved to face inward into the future fruit. Only a female fig wasp can manage to enter, bringing pollen as she wriggles in and sometimes losing her antennae and wings. Once inside, she lays her eggs and dies, and the fig digests her. The fig and fig wasp need each other to survive and reproduce. Should one of these two species disappear from the picture, no other being – that we know of – is immediately available to serve as a substitute. For this reason, specialists tend to face a higher risk of extinction.

The modern global technosphere has reached a mind-blowing scale, with the mass of its non-renewable matter now surpassing the mass of living matter. (A visualization can be found here.) But what’s most remarkable about global industrial civilization might not be the “global” aspect but rather the “industrial” part. While about 10 million humans live as hunter-gatherers today and many more live as subsistence farmers, fossil fuels have profoundly transformed how a broad population of humans procure something to eat or drink.

As the technosphere grew larger and more complex, consuming more material and burning more energy, the increasing number of humans born into it have filtered into new, specialized niches. (Here we can see how in the United States, human activity has transformed.) Previously, most humans performed the physical labor of farming and the technosphere merely supported transport. Simple technologies like wheels and ramps relieved farmers of some exertion, whereas later machines became more sophisticated. Driven first by the flowing forces of wind and water, and then by combustion, they became active participants with their own metabolisms and much more significant roles. By one estimate, while the human labor force counted about 4 billion individuals, our fossil-fueled machinery does the work of 500 billion individuals. In outsourcing physical labor, we also let go of generations of cultural knowledge – skills for survival, preservation, and adaptation. Because of electricity, I don’t know how to preserve food, start a fire, light a candle, or make water safe to drink. Industrial powers originally shamed citizens into this kind of vulnerability, and some communities are still resisting it today. Tech was compromising us long before AI entered the scene.

As a result, across all socioeconomic classes, vast numbers of humans face the same general limitation: they don’t inhabit a biome that can meet their fundamental needs and/or they lack the materials and skills to derive that sustenance. If supply chains (the technosphere’s circulatory system) were to falter, a CEO in Tokyo, a refugee in Sudan, and an Amazon warehouse worker in Minnesota would all struggle to meet their basic needs. The nature of their difficulties might differ: One person might be surrounded by fertile soil, but unsure how to identify or encourage the growth of edible plants. Another might have those skills but find themselves in an area with a carrying capacity so low that resourcefulness cannot overcome it. They’d be trapped in a system where one must qualify for nutrients and fluids through often unrelated labor. Their diet – when supplied – would consist of food that someone else grew or raised, sometimes very far away. Like the fig wasp’s arrangement, this isn’t necessarily a comfortable one and may likely entail sacrifice and suffering.

However, the human-technosphere form of obligate mutualism is so unique that the most apt analogy might be a zoo compound and its inhabitants. Firstly, conventional ecology’s concept of species interactions like symbiosis involves two creatures whom we would recognize as alive, biotic. Conventionally, the technosphere is understood as abiotic, constructed of metals and minerals, although it can seem temporarily to be animated. Secondly, in species interactions, the actors are usually still responsible for pursuing their survival needs. The fig is still photosynthesizing and the wasp is still visiting flowers. Human members of civilizations now learn to do a dazzling array of tricks – we’re violinists, neurosurgeons, gymnasts, literal rocket scientists – in exchange for being fed, and the one thing we aren’t encouraged to learn is how to feed each other. We’re therefore closer to animals born into captivity. Our enclosures vary in luxuriousness but keep us all desperate for the pellet dispenser to remain functional and for our tricks to be deemed worthy of rations. Many mock billionaires for aspiring to live in space, without acknowledging that we already exist as a “species out of context”, in artificial conditions that are dramatically different from the ones in which we evolved (and from what any other species experiences). We’re even pressured to view ownership of a place for ourselves within the technosphere as the sole method of pursuing self-actualization, connection, and fulfillment, leading to a kind of civilizational Stockholm syndrome.

This obligate mutualism becomes worrisome when we recognize that every complex civilization, largely because of its technosphere and the activities that underpin it (resource depletion) and arise from it (ever-growing inequality), self-destructs. This industrial edition is particularly ephemeral. Self-described “recovering astrophysicist” Tom Murphy offers extensive explanations for why modernity is nearing its expiration date, including his posts “Can Modernity Last?” and “Evidence, Please?” It isn’t just capitalism that’s entering a terminal phase. The senescence of our technosphere means an unprecedented reversal of an unprecedented portion of humans engaging in blue-, pink- and white-collar work and then sourcing their most basic needs through (often) impersonal transactions. If a blight were to wipe out all fig trees in a region, the fig wasp is at least accustomed to navigating the living world and sourcing her needs from it. She would “merely” face the challenge of finding an alternative appropriate material for nourishment and egg-laying. We in the zoo will be losing our intermediary, thrusting us into an unfamiliar world and requiring of us (where possible and if we care to reduce suffering) direct human/more-than-human behaviors with which many of us, so far, have little experience.

The consequences of our technosphere’s activity are piling up. Over the past 50 years alone, insect numbers have fallen by at least 70%, and the same is true of wildlife overall, with industrial agriculture’s habitat seizure and poison chemicals largely driving both trends. Microplastics accumulate in our bodies, harming human health and inhibiting everything from bird migration to photosynthesis. Oceans are heating up and acidifying. Earth’s plants and soils are sequestering a smaller proportion of our annual carbon emissions than they used to. Between drought and floods, some areas have zero harvests left, and by 2050, disruption to the hydrological cycle will put half of food production at risk.

Sensing precarity, we want to know, “What’s going to happen [to me and my loved ones]?!” Authors such as Jared Diamond, Joseph Tainter, and, most recently, Luke Kemp have sought to answer this by analyzing the current era against the trajectories of previous complex human civilizations. Similar woes drove these empires’ rises and falls: soil erosion, deforestation (and the symptom, climate change), pollution, a widening wealth gap, and heightened risk of contagious disease. While these authors do impressive research in their fields – e.g., geography, anthropology, history, international relations – they rarely adopt an ecological lens. Intentionally or not, their failure to do so limits our ability to conceive of and analyze humans as we would any other lifeforms on Earth and causes them to miss some critical aspects of our present predicaments. This big miss may be due to a lack of creativity. It may be human exceptionalism – as if there could be no other legitimate basis for comparison except others within our one species. I think another influence might be at play: the desire to offer easy (or easier) but misleading answers to the question of what experiences lie ahead.

In his breakout 2025 book, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Kemp acknowledges our unparalleled lack of survival skills, the harrowing severity of ecological and climate disruption, and the high risk of wide-scale conflict. He also offers many right answers to the wrong questions. By this, I meant that if one cares to anticipate the broad strokes of “What’s going to happen?” the questions he addresses are not the most relevant ones to ask. Are humans, by nature, evil and greedy? No, most humans would behave pro-socially in a context that supports it. When Goliaths – Kemp’s shorthand for complex societies – collapsed in the past, did many humans suffer? Kemp asserts that the answer is no. His research seems to demonstrate that the top 1% faced personal decline while the 99% benefitted. And seemingly, we – the rank and file humans of late modernity – are meant to take some comfort from this finding.

However, Kemp appears to underplay the unsustainable violence behind any technosphere and the inevitability of its decay, already underway. In so doing, he allows readers (and perhaps himself) to conclude that there’s some possibility of net-positive change on the horizon for a majority of the humans alive today. Supposedly, if we can skim the “Goliath” essence off the top of a complex civilization, then the rest can be ours to keep. Kemp indicates that the greening of capitalist industrialism could stop at socialist industrialism, but doesn’t examine too closely the material demands of preserving any industrial order whatsoever. Granted, there’ve been plenty of revolutions that upended power structures within human societies. But insofar as the complex civilizations persisted, the relationship between the manmade, non-renewable world and the world beyond remained one of depletion. (Parts of the “natural” world – such as North American grasslands and the Amazon – are likewise “manmade” in a sense, but their human allies shaped them generatively, with a focus on nurturing their biotic kin). Every enhanced layer of technosphere has come at a cost to the biosphere, and even when improvements for the humans within it didn’t distinctly exacerbate this harmful relationship, they usually didn’t alleviate the ongoing encroachment either, as we can see in the Great Acceleration that proceeded alongside modern progressive victories. Readers, energy-blind and desiring relief, have little incentive to scrutinize Kemp’s assurances.

Further, Kemp appears to miss a critical distinction between humans past and humans present that becomes very apparent when we bring the lens of ecological interactions and molecular flows to the comparisons of cursed Goliaths. Today, in many cases, humans appear to have been pulled into obligate mutualism. Thanks to both active campaigns and unplanned developments, such as enclosure, schooling, and industrialization, many (if not most) of us do not have the access or ability to pursue and meet the majority of our fundamental organismic survival needs independently of the malignant technosphere. This distinction makes a real difference! Kemp’s observation that the 99% benefitted from prior collapses appears insensible to the fact that all of our ancestors — whether from the Bronze Age (collapsed around 1200 BCE), Ancient Rome (collapsed by 476 CE), Han Dynasty (220 CE), Mayan Empire (900 CE) — were alike in a way that excludes us. They were not fully locked into obligate mutualism because they still had the skills and access necessary to make a living directly from their immediate biosphere. Peasant farmers under the empires of old could continue as peasant farmers without kings or lords. Many ancient village dwellers would have still had family members (and larger extended families) somewhat nearby who were farmers or shepherds. At the very least, urbanites could have likely walked to clean drinking water outside the city in a matter of days. (What New York City or Shanghai resident can do that?) There were still many unconquered or semi-autonomous societies living beyond the reaches of the empire. Contemporary human constituents have since primarily surrendered sustenance to the technosphere in lieu of deriving their ingestible molecules directly from the land through their own labor. The fossil-fueled build-out of our modern technosphere and its influence on our cultures and capacities have altered the proportion of humans who possess the skills and resources that would enable them to actually experience this civilization’s collapse as an unequivocal improvement. (Perhaps the more likely someone is to have heard of Kemp’s book, the less ready they should be to take comfort in it.)

Here’s where I see wiggle room: Certain humans have the financial security that confers access to land and time to develop skills, and they have some immunity to the paralyzing force of social stigma. Although they might remain entangled with the technosphere, the dynamic can shift from obligate mutualism to basic symbiosis, where they act sometimes as Receivers but also sometimes as Sourcers, and meet needs (their own or others’!) through various relationships beyond employment and transaction. They can develop spare capacity and refine replicable approaches. Their efforts in the present could produce shareable sustenance. And as the technosphere becomes unable to meet an increasing number of community members’ needs, those who’ve had the privilege to stray beyond the zoo and practice feeding themselves can contribute to community survival and wellbeing while honoring the valuable insights from those whose time and energy the technosphere exploited the most, until its demise. Compassion and solidarity, like molecular flows, are not without limits, yet they seem not to be fixed or zero-sum, either. Even under conditions of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), it is likely that compassion and solidarity can be nurtured and amplified until there’s more than enough to share. We can embrace the community and connection that will support everyone through hard times. As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write, we can work toward “a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind… A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.”

Ecology has one more relevant lesson, which is that “nature” – including humans’ cognition and behavior – operates on its own sometimes-mysterious timetable and not according to anyone’s preferences. This applies even to the powerful and stubborn barriers to responsive action that are “just in our heads.” Many individuals could integrate awareness of Normal’s impermanence into their paradigms and adjust their daily routines to position themselves and their communities for better outcomes – yet they don’t. This might partially be contextual. Modernity has presided for entire lifetimes, so it seems to be eternal, and it decay is so gradual – or perhaps so far removed from the confines of the technosphere – as to be imperceptible. However, I suspect that social factors drive things. As social creatures, humans look to each other for cues and to culture for inspiration. Someone may see the flaws in the dominant narrative and have leisure time, but if the only examples available are extreme, they’ll conclude that collapse-responsiveness is all-or-nothing and therefore beyond their reach. Or even if they understand that humbler efforts can make a difference, the prospect of diverting time away from favorite hobbies and familiar social circles and toward activities with which they’ve never before identified can feel intimidating and isolating. On top of that, if in making time for building resilience, they abandon some traditional markers of success, they might have to contend with others’ judgment. These scenarios would all lead a person to let our culture’s myth of progress continue guiding their decisions, and illusion-informed choices are more likely to meet with disappointment and regret. It might only be when familiar livelihood strategies are nearer to obsolescence that alternatives can possibly take hold. But we can try to nudge the needle by addressing what keeps people stuck: Offer approachable examples that resonate with those who still have some time, space, or energy to act, and nurture a collective that can offer consistency, support, and belonging, and unlock new synergies so that entering into this relationship feels more like a gain than a loss.

As the zoo malfunctions more profoundly, we can expect conditions to grow more desperate. (Granted, even its days of functioning properly just meant inflicting most of the doom on external humans and other species.) Late-stage capitalism might demand more labor hours from citizens who previously would’ve had the time for collapse-responsive organizing. Natural disasters might force more humans to relocate to places with a minimal carrying capacity compared to their hometowns, eliminating any option but obligate mutualism. For example, as drought-stricken Iran has become inhospitable to agriculture, farmers have moved to the capital city (and it too now faces a water crisis). Moreover, the technosphere’s relentless campaign of material extraction, proceeding every day in the background, will destroy more of our one planet. It might absorb or erase some of the few remaining human societies that still live independently of it, and destabilize the climate and devastate food webs enough to decimate much of our would-be food sources.

In the meantime, those of us who are able to squeeze under the zoo’s fence have little to lose by scooting and scouting beyond it.

I keep returning to the truth that many of us are still here because of the care and creativity that never made headlines. Because of the insignificant decisions that are made every day: to share food, to warn another, to adapt, to move carefully, to hide, even to remember. We are here because of imaginative acts that made survival possible under conditions that were never meant to sustain us.

I almost didn’t write this.

Some things feel too tender, too heavy to touch while the world is burning. But that tension kept pressing on my chest, asking to be named. So I took a page from Audre Lorde and decided against swallowing the silence or the truth.

I feel like a hypocrite.

I’m sitting here, planning this cycle about creativity and care, while people are being murdered, families are being torn apart, others are living in absolute fear that at any moment they too could fall victim to a system that outwardly and proudly shows it disdain for you and those who look like you, love like you, or move through the world in ways it has deemed disposable.

I feel like a hyprocrite because at any moment, this could be me. It could be my husband. Or it could be both of us.

And yet, here I am, writing about care and creativity as survival literacies.

I watch as the news breaks that my brothers and sisters across several Caribbean islands will now be faced with a visa ban beginning in a few short weeks. Just so. With the stroke of a pen. With language that is as cold as the temperature outside my window. Bureaucratic and violently indifferent. And for a few minutes, I think to myself “wha would ‘appen if they returned the favour?”. What if borders hardened in both directions just to show that we will not accept dehumanization in such a way? What if movement, something that is already so uneven and policed, became even more cruel? What would that look like?

And then something else settles in.

This isn’t new. Many moons ago Martin Carter, the Guyanese poet and political activist, wrote:

“This is the dark time, my love. It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears. It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery. Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.”

None of this is new, nor is it the exception. What we are witnessing and living through is an intensification. A more glaring revealing of sorts. These are the dark times continued.

Borders have always been used as tools of sorting. Visas have always been instruments of control. I’ve always wanted a blue passport, but more specifically, a US passport. Not because I wanted to live in the USA but because I wanted the privilege that the US passport allows. Do you know how many countries you can travel to without a visa? Without harassment? Simply because you have a US passport? How that small blue book can mean the difference between ease and suspicion, acceptance and refusal. How it can determine whether your body is read as neutral or threatening before you even open your mouth? How you’re treated as less than simply because of the color and country of your passport?

I’ve always been acutely aware of what passports do. Of what borders do. Of how movement is a privilege that is unevenly distributed along the fault lines of race, empire and a cruel history. And so when I hear about visa bans, I don’t just hear policy. I hear the echo of older logics that decide who is worthy of mobility and who must remain contained. Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican novelist, critic, philospher and essayist, reminds us that the modern world is organized around “the overrepresentation of Man as if it were the human itself.” Forget the fact that many of these countries who heavily scrutinize citizens of “less-developed” countries are only able to be as “powerful” and as well-resourced as they are because of the very resources they’ve managed to extract from said countries.

And so I ask myself, honestly, “who am I to write about care and creativity right now?”

Because, to me, care and creativity feel painfully small in this moment. It feels almost insulting in the face of state-sanctioned violence and systemic cruelty. If I am being honest, there is a part of me that wants to abandon the language altogether. To reach for something sharper and louder. Something that feels proportionate to the harm.

And yet, they both keep insisting. Care and creativity. They keep coming back to me and they are asking me to consider them in this particular moment, at this particular time in history. I don’t think they are either solutions or even soft distractions. Nor do I think of them as a way to bypass the rightful grief and anger that one is inclined to feel. I consider them more as orientations.

I keep returning to the truth that many of us are still here because of the care and creativity that never made headlines. Because of the insignificant decisions that are made every day: to share food, to warn another, to adapt, to move carefully, to hide, even to remember. We are here because of imaginative acts that made survival possible under conditions that were never meant to sustain us. Like this present moment for me.

I suppose care, in this sense, is a refusal to allow cruelty to be the only organizing force in our lives. To meet that cruelty with tenderness. And creativity, at least the kind I am speaking of, is in our responsiveness. Its in making something livable out of what we have been handed. About staying with the trouble.

This is where the Creative Care cycle begins.

There is no certainty here. I am just sitting in and with the discomfort and contradictions (because really, the larger question is why am I CHOOSING to remain in a place that does not want me here?). And with the uneasy knowing that something is unraveling and something else has not yet fully taken form. I am sure, in some way, you feel it too. That we are living at multiple edges all at once – ecological, spiritual, emotional, political and everything in-between.

The “re” in reVillaging isn’t really a return. It can’t be. It is a restoration, a restory-ing: a slow, fumbling, necessary practice of remembering how to human together — in place, with purpose, within limits. Even when we cannot return to a specific land, we can still become placed, learning to be of a place without claiming it, allowing places, over time, to claim us. reVillaging begins in ordinary neighborhoods, through shared labor and care, as an imperfect, relational way of binding lives across difference in a world shaped by rupture.

This is part 4 of a 4-part essay on reVillaging. Read part 1-3 here.

Imagine the earth as a snow globe, shaken so violently that nearly everything has come loose. Beings, lineages, lifeways – suspended, tossed, rearranged. Cultures cleaved from the contexts of their creation. Languages that lack the descriptive capacity to cover current (or, in the case of English, all) contexts. As the push and pull of migrations multiply, double back, branch, and compound, lives get lived in patterns that would have been somewhere between improbable and impossible just a few generations ago.

We need not bother debating whether these movements are uniformly bad or good; they simply are (and are probably some of both). Yet, within a global economy that brings bodies, beings, and substances to wherever they can be made most profitable, these shifts also cannot be understood as natural or neutral. Imperial imaginaries paired with exosomatic energy and transportation technologies propelled so much movement with so little regard for the consequences of rapid recontextualization. The impact isn’t just one of jostling and displacement. There is real hurt, real fear, too. Our lives unfold in the wake of so much wounding – of each other, of the Earth’s body.

We have to learn how to stop causing harm through our daily lives, even and especially as we live within these wounds. Healing is always partial, never fully restorative, and often happens alongside new onslaughts. But the process proves we are capable of imperfect change. And so, if we can learn to love what has been compromised – if we can honor the broken, the displaced, the impure – we might preserve the possibility of living in ways that hurt less.

Contemporary philosopher Alexis Shotwell argues against purism of all kinds because she views it as:

“one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair. This world deserves better.”

Aspiring villagers would be wise to keep perfectionism or purity politics out of their dreamings and doings. There simply aren’t pure places, perfect people here – if ever there were. But there might be complementary kinds of wear, breaks that pair well, and contaminations that create new forms.

In the ongoing aftermath of a centuries-long shake-up, an upheaval that has become, in many ways, a shake-down (a systemic extraction of labor, land, and life masked as progress), “returning to the land” is rarely as simple as it sounds. The land may be stolen, fenced, paved, or poisoned. The memory of the land may be faint, fractured, or severed. And for many, returning to ancestral land is neither safe nor legally possible. It might not even be desired. That place might now be occupied or soon sit beneath the salty waters of rising seas.
What can be returned to is not a specific place but a way of being: to live as those who begin in belonging and who be-long to each other.

Be-longing, then, won’t be attained via purity or property.

It is not a matter of who belongs where or what belongs to whom.

Be-longing – the deep desire to exist so that others may exist beyond the curving horizon – is an ethic of presence. A perennial practice of relational reverence. Care that exceeds inheritance by honoring the overlapping cycles and sweeps of time.

Be-longing might be a way of returning rearranged. And learning to dwell in that rearrangement with integrity.

Not all villagers were born to the places they will tend. Many arrive through rupture – by displacement, not descent. The village, as we imagine and enact it now, must make room for those who come not from a lineage of belonging to a particular place, but who carry or are learning into a lineage of longing, refusal, and survival.

Far too many Indigenous peoples – a vibrantly varied category often held together via rootedness and relationality – have been murdered upon or removed from ancestral grounds. And yet, many continue to hold and enact cosmologies that remember the land as kin, not property. These living and ever-evolving traditions, while targeted for erasure, persist without resorting to domination; they are carried forward through care and commitment. Importantly, these cultures and peoples rarely demand superiority. They entreat the rest of us to remember that there are many ways to live in right relation – and that there are some very popular, very terminal ways not to.

That said, indigeneity should not be homogenized, idealized, or synonomized with purity. It need not get cast as a static or superior identity category. Rather, indigeneity indicates the possibility that one has cultural validation and lived experience of entanglement and many more ways of relating, a much nearer memory of reciprocity, access to currently non-dominant ways of knowing and being, or acculturation within longer-storied cosmo-visions. It also often accompanies experiences of historical and ongoing trauma, which means that indigenous people walk many different routes through genocide and in pursuit of continuance. In the village, Indigenous elders may share or protect medicines and wisdoms. Indigenous youth may revive languages on the brink of loss, evolve those vocabularies, and use them to enrich others.

Similarly, diaspora does not necessarily (or only) mean disconnection. It means carrying fragments of places and their cultures inside the body, wounds and wisdoms from other soils and settings. In the village, diasporic villagers may plant seeds from ancestral ecosystems beside native perennials. They may bring rhythms that refuse colonial time, rituals that ask the gods and spirits of other places to introduce them to the spirits where they are. Whether their relocations were pushed, pulled, or forced, whether they happened generations ago or within living memory, migrants bring lineal and lived experiences of adaptation without assimilation.

At the same time, neither settler status nor assimilated inheritance need be regarded as an intergenerational sentence. Privileges and punishments for past wrongs can be commuted in community. The descendants of settlers may pursue return through the release of resources, acts of systemic sedition, rebalancing, and repair. Instead of policing the sanctioned boundaries of either the state or of a so-called normal life, settlers and more recently assimilated people may be well positioned to reverse enclosures of land, resist alienation of labor, and destabilize supremacies. And in so doing, they may open space for their ancestors to come near and offer their perspectives. Their accountable presence might help healing happen. And the experiences of fugitives from privilege might be just what’s needed to uncover the unsanctioned sacred.

A village cannot be a purity project because the land does not express or sustain purity. Land and life form through endless combining.

A wide and wild diversity of threads and weavers cannot weaken or spoil the fabric of village life. The variety is what makes the fabric strong and supple, what allows it to stretch. A village that can extend sanctuary without erasure, that can survive together without demanding sameness, seem likely to be a village with better than even odds of resisting or diverging from the recent histories of extraction and enclosure. Of returning.

The “re” in reVillaging isn’t really a return. It can’t be. But it might be a restoration, a restory-ing. A slow, fumbling, necessary, wondrous, annoying, rewarding, and sometimes painful process of remembering how to human together – in place, with purpose, within limits. It is a recovery of capacities long exiled by modernity
and made invisible by systems that depend on our disconnection.

Even if we cannot always return to a specific place, we can still become placed. Placedness is not the same as rootedness – it is compatible with but does not require lineage, permanence, or a singular origin. It is a lived practice of attuning to the life around us, of finding ways to be of a place without claiming it – of allowing a place (or several), over time, to claim the person. Placedness allows for light landings and layered arrivals. It invites us to dwell – not as owners, not even as natives, but as careful participants in the more-than-human weavings that sustain a place.

Dougald Hine advises us to “look for the dropped threads, the moments earlier in the story that have something to tell us.” ReVillaging involves picking up some of those threads again: to savor the smell of fresh earth after a rain, to feel the rhythm of a scythe’s sweep in your ligaments, to chase the satisfaction of mending a shared fence or to sit with an ailing child who is not your own progeny.

reVillaging is an invitation to reimagine how we meet our needs together, as humans and as multi-species kin within living places. It’s a call to slowly reassemble the forgotten know-how of village life – those practical, relational, and metabolic skills that help communities endure and adapt, even when the world around them is unraveling. It can begin in the most ordinary places; in the neighborhood where you already live, with the people you didn’t choose but might learn to cherish. It is not utopian. It is messy, mundane, material. It is about slowly plaiting a cord strong enough to bind lives across difference. It is a way of being-in-relation that must be practiced, again and again. reVillaging invites us to share labor and risk, to co-create culture and infrastructure, to endure and even be energized by tension, to attune to seasons, to metabolize conflict, to show up instead of opting out. To need and be needed.

This will not be easy because we are not practiced at it. Most of us come from lineages interrupted by displacement, isolation, extraction, and forced assimilation into dominant systems. Even when our bodies remember what was once possible, our minds flinch. Our habits resist. We crave comfort, convenience, privacy, and control. We feel entitled to autonomy. We are acculturated to expect escape routes. And yet, something deeper in us – maybe ancestral – knows that life was never meant to be lived this way.

So we improvise a lot. Bumble it a little. And practice again.

Our rehearsals keep us close, connecting. We gather around food, around fires, around work and rest. We build slowly. We fumble into shared rhythms. We imagine what it means to be reVillagers: imperfect, defiant, loving people committed to creating diverse, interconnected pockets of survival as a way through this end of endings.

reVillaging calls for a slow, simmering restoration of cultural thickness – the kind that melds bits of memory and meaning into shared offerings and observances. For those with relatively intact lineages, this might look like continuing or reviving ancestral practices, and perhaps sharing them selectively in circles of solidarity. But it might also mean rendering new rituals out of shared struggle, mutual noticing, and honest desire.

This is part III of a 4-part essay on reVillaging. Read part II here.

In parallel, otherWise advisor and community member Greg Nelson is in the process of developing a reSkilling Taxonomy that identifies and organizes the nuts‑and‑bolts skills commonly needed in a low-tech village. The taxonomy is organized into layers: what most people can do, what some people specialize in, and what a few carry between places when needed. It can be used to inventory real capacities in a community – who can cook for a crowd, fix a pump, butcher an animal, teach first aid – grouped by basic, advanced, and mobile skill levels so nothing essential depends on just one person. Or it can serve as a framework for organizing knowledge or creating a syllabus for an informal School of reSkilling.

Ethics and Energetics of the Village

Villages are made of people, dwellings, and doings – a combination that generates a kind of energy that seems to have the power to create culture and ethics. Patterns that propel. These ethics do not descend as doctrines from above; they are not the exclusive province of philosophers, lawyers, judges, or experts. They emerge as pulses from below and within, from the felt experiences of effort and care, and from the cycles of life, death, decay and rearranged becoming. The rhythms of a reVillaged life are ethical not because they conform to doctrine, but because they restore a coherence between what matters and how we move.

Where modern moral codes often separate belief from behavior, ethics from economy, village ethics are inseparable from the processes of life-making-life-making-life. They lose a little something when put on paper. But they really seem to make sense when we’re in the thing together, pacing our labor to match both the light and our bodily limits, concerned for the good of the whole. The rhythms of a reVillaged life are ethical because they restore a coherence between what matters and how we move. The values are vows expressed and renewed daily through presence and participation. And they thrum in the intergenerational tension between remembering and remaking – between respect for time-tested ways and contextually responsive adaptation. While some concepts might need to be clarified and a few even represented in words or symbols, the aim of restoring alignment between what matters and how we move ought to obviate the need for constant codification. Relational rigor and cultural commitments might be what we need to get out from under regulatory ridiculousness and bureaucratic banality.

In the era of endings, many institutions that once shaped and expressed various kinds of collective ethics (e.g., schools, churches, governments, professions) have crumbled or calcified. And without those institutions scaffolding social order, competing ideologies, identity performances, and desperate bids for certainty vie for our allegiance. But reVillagers sense that there is neither rescue nor relief to be had through righteous alignment or ideological purity. They are more interested in what animates than what is asserted.

By doing less overall – and more of what matters – labor becomes enlivening. Not always romantic, not always a source of joy – but real, rhythmic, and undeniably worthwhile. We learn again to cook with what is at hand, to fix what can be mended, to rest when the light wanes. Yes, even in a village that requires direct and coordinated labor on schedules other than our own, our work ethics must be paired with rest ethics.

These ethics, like the ecosystems within which they circulate, are also plural. A reVillaged place, let alone world, will not be one of perfect agreement or shared ideology. At present, it seems that so much of our attention gets siphoned into symbolic battles, which means that there is far less of it to devote to shared life. One way to counter this is to engage not from ideology, but inquiry, by being in query. Indeed, this is a good bit of what we at otherWise mean when we say we are living the questions that protect what is still possible. The work of reVillaging allows us to live the questions, not just pose or discuss them.

And while we must hone our capacity to cooperate without requiring sameness, we have to avoid slipping into some kind of naïve pluralism. There are postures, quite popular ones, of authoritarian domination, supremacist or eugenicist control, or conspiratorially justified violence that are simply incompatible with reverence, with life-making. They mimic the village but aim to wield power over it, not to share power within it. Thus, in discerning who to reVillage with, we must learn to distinguish those disoriented by collapse from those comfortable harming others to gain the upper hand. We must leave a little space for people to see the fallacy of their favored supremacies and cut them way back, but if those supremacies aren’t composted before they set seed, the whole pile is likely to sprout another generation of the same bad ideas.

Cultural Texture & Ritual

When modernity tried to split the world into spirit and substance – and again when it cleaved the self into mind and body – neither the land nor the villagers were capable of complete compliance. A living place, just like a living being, is both body and prayer, matter and mystery. In digging and protecting a spring, in making or sharpening a blade, gathering or steeping herbs, we can also be tending ruptured cosmologies. And in some places, ancestral memories still carry ways of weaving the sacred and the everyday, even through imposed monotheism or colonizing creeds.

More than the sum of shared labor and ecological intimacy, village life is textured with patterns, sounds, gestures, and meanings that arise from lived particularity and that help us feel who we are together. The songs we hum while digging, the garments we wear into town, the way we greet each other at dawn, the foods we ferment, the griefs we name aloud, the stories we return to each winter. These make us recognizably connected to each other – and perhaps cherished – in ways that can’t be easily weaponized on a grand scale.

This kind of culture is more concerned with collective continuance than consensus. Citizen Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys White defines collective continuance as a “society’s overall adaptive capacity to maintain its members’ cultural integrity, health, economic vitality, and political order into the future and avoid having its members experience preventable harms.” Societies – or even villages – that prioritize collective continuance are “organized in ways that are suitable for adjusting to potential changes, learning from the past, and mobilizing members… to tackle hard problems.” For White, collective capacities are generated through relationships of responsibility and reciprocity when qualities like trustworthiness and redundancy are present.

And yet, in modern life, we’ve lost these qualities along with much of the through-line that allows us to learn from the past and connect it through the volatile present to our hopes for the future. We snag rituals from traditions we barely know. We consume our way through holidays drained of meaning and decorated in consumption. In our most secular spaces, we feel embarrassed when someone dares to speak about sacred conditions or wonders about the mysteries of aliveness. And when we are made dull by an entirely obvious existence, we seek diversion (and even meaning) in that which has been made consumable for markets, curated for social media, or pitched to keep power where it’s already been hoarded.

reVillaging calls for a slow, simmering restoration of cultural thickness – the kind that melds bits of memory and meaning into shared offerings and observances. For those with relatively intact lineages, this might look like continuing or reviving ancestral practices, and perhaps sharing them selectively in circles of solidarity. But it might also mean rendering new rituals out of shared struggle, mutual noticing, and honest desire.

Ritual here need not be pageant or spectacle. Indeed, it should not be. Malidoma Somé counsels that, “Ritual is called for because our soul communicates things to us that the body translates as need, or want, or absence. So we enter into ritual in order to respond to the call of the soul.” Ritual may be how we make sense of what we cannot control. It is how we signal to one another that something matters – a birth, a storm, a harvest, a departure. Rituals can remind us we belong not just to each other, but to something larger: a place, a story, a planet, a cosmos. They can begin simply as repetition imbued with attention.

In a reVillaged world, of providentially skilled people, enlivening labor, and ritualized soul tending, the texture of life thickens and the sacred can’t slip away. We wear what we’ve mended, treasuring all the lives woven into that garment. We cook with what we’ve grown, grateful for lives nourishing our own. We speak in words shaped by weather, by watershed, by the winding history of the land and those who’ve loved it. These are all ways to conjure meaning and survival in a time when much of what we’ve known is coming undone. These practices angle us toward return, back into the spiral.

reSkilling presents paths of practice that point the way toward return. But we can’t go the distance if we don’t loosen the modern grip on mastery, control, and closure. In [Part 4] reTurning, we begin again – not by fixing the broken world, but by turning toward each other and letting go of terminal stories.

reVillaging, as we have now seen and will continue to explore, is more material than ideological, more need-based than vision-driven, more grounded than ethereal or conceptual. While reVillaging irreducibly includes the interpersonal, aesthetic, spiritual, and metaphorical, it typically begins as a material praxis.

This is part II of a 4-part essay on reVillaging. Read part I here.

A village is how we humans and non-humans live together. The scope and range of a group of people is determined by the availability of energetic input. In revillaging, we consider the essential needs of our communities and lost skills needed to meet them with a grounded, realistic view of our entanglement with the Earth and in the midst of a wounded planet, and fractured culture.

Join our upcoming reVillaging cycle December 2025 – January 2026 for three online circles.

I sense my ancestors in my aching. Ancient ones with names I cannot know. Ancestors who lived my longings.

They lived in ways and worlds that haven’t been, cannot be, depicted in movies made when moderns attempt to imagine distant pasts. Lives of love and struggle. Making and mystery. Connection and limitation. Their feet knew the riverbed the way my wrists know a steering wheel, the way my fingertips move over this keyboard. They read the clouds and the air (its thinness, thickness, or movement), the way I read tone in a text message. They gathered around a fire the way my family gathers around a television.

Though long dead, they remain present and protect a pattern that could still show us a way to live through an end of endings. And sometimes, when I notice that I need a kind help I don’t know how to ask for, they move near.

I feel them when I’m bereft. When I once again look at real estate listings elsewhere, hoping for home, they wince. When I swallow the shame of not knowing our neighbors’ names, they sigh. They’ve been sighing for so long, but still not letting go. Perhaps they, too, have to be where they are. Which may mean to be where I am, where all their descendants are.

Their presence – neither question nor answer, neither admonition nor encouragement – encourages me to keep trying to find the unimaginable possible. To rearrange. To move nearer.

Making Home, Together Again

Village life feels like a fantasy. But it is memory. Hazy and partial, but once real. A longing for context passed down through blood and bone, through stories whispered across generations, sometimes named and sometimes unnamed. It may ache in our bodies before it forms in our minds. And when it does find language, it often comes in the form of a question:

– Where are the people I can rely upon as everything frays? The ones who need me, too.

– How can I be the river and not be able the reach the river?

– What will happen when we must once again live by sunlight, firelight, and mitochondrial heat?

The honest answer: Most of us don’t know. We haven’t been shown. We have little lived (and almost no sustained) experience of this. We’ve only known cultures that reward autonomy, mobility, and control. We move awkwardly, guarded, and yet impossibly fast through enclosed landscapes, navigating our local hills and valleys by global positioning system, making sure we are authorized to be where we are.

Our lives, subsidized by barrels of oil and made tolerable by microliters of dopamine, are energized by concentrated and fossilized sunlight, not by the diffuse light and heat that departed the sun eight minutes earlier or is stored in plants that recently soaked up some of those rays.

We’ve been socialized in societies that centralize competition, thin cooperation into transaction, and treat need as weakness. And so we scroll for answers, beg with landlords or mortgage brokers for a house that we’ll try to turn into home, and pine for a community that surely must exist somewhere else. We tend to romanticize both the city and the countryside – letting our minds focus on the opposing wonders of each, pushing their considerable downsides off the edges of our daydreams. We ridicule suburbs, with their subdivisions and homeowners associations – tortured substitutes for something we surely once knew. We might even research intentional communities to ease the pain of enduring all this unintentional but defended disconnection.

The internet (or at least the corners of it that get presented to me) is increasingly full of laments for the village  observations about the mismatch between our longings and our actions, and musings about why we struggle to make the Village manifest – sometimes despite our showing up for it again and again.

So many of us say we want a village; know we need a village.
But do we actually want to be villagers? Do enough of us want it enough to try? And if so, how do we find folks around us who are also willing to hazard their hope and help on each other? Where might we start?

reVillaging is the effort to live these questions. Not by returning to a fixed, specific, or nostalgic past, but by practicing relational arrangements that make shared survival and sufficiency possible again. The urge to reVillage will be regarded by some as a romantic retreat, but those who are serious about it must approach the effort as a necessary (non-optional) reorganization. But how do we start? Not with a strategic plan. Instead, reVillaging might be approached as a series of rehearsals – all improvisational and intergenerational – for post-imperial life in the ruins of separability.

Arrangements that Aren’t (re)Villaging

Negation is not an especially generous way to introduce a concept. And yet, because so many of us have felt the longing for the lost village, chances are that readers have already gotten excited about (or even tried) one or more alternatives to now-normative arrangements that fall a little – or a lot – short. So before we feel into what reVillaging might be, it seems helpful to touch on some of the things that it is not – especially because each of the attempts below gets some of the facts and feelings right, but stops short of honoring interdependence and or recognizing that we exist within and because of relations.

Villaging is not homesteading. It is not merely individual or familial resilience (though it can offer those benefits, too). It is not rugged self-sufficiency wrapped in aesthetics of natural living. Homesteading, for all its throwback charm, too often reproduces settler logics and expansionary pioneer claims – ownership, autonomy, inheritance, purity, protection. It puts the family at the center of land use and access, often to the exclusion of others and without regard for the peoples and beings that once called that place home.

It is also not just clusters of privately-held family farms or small businesses operating and competing primarily within the market economy. While they can be locally-rooted and even interdependent in some ways, these models still replicate the very dynamics we are trying to transform – privatized land tenure, market dependency, and scarcity-driven competition dressed up as sustainability. Family farming, at least as it has been structured and idealized in the United States, has proven itself to be a fairly terrible way to organize agriculture, though a highly effective way to hold stolen land and promote urbanization.

Nor is it some kind of trad-wife resurgence, idealizing subservient homemaking, perfected decor, or performative hosting – a plasticized version of hospitality as we’ve known it under capitalism and patriarchy. Villaging is not the privatized labor of women making beauty and care inside isolated domestic units while their husbands continue earning income in extractive enterprises, and the world churns or burns around them.

It is also not sustainable urbanism, though it may share some goals and can actually happen within cities. Where sustainable urbanism seeks to retrofit the city within existing governance and economic systems, reVillaging grows beneath and beyond them. It doesn’t start with design standards, emissions targets, or offsets elsewhere. It starts with relationships, with skill-sharing, food swaps, rain barrels, co-parenting arrangements, and seasonal rhythms. It measures success not in kilowatt reductions but in shared compost piles, in mended clothes, in the number of neighbors who know how to save seeds and cook for a crowd – and in how much time folks have to do so. And yet, it bears noting that reVillaging is not necessarily or exclusively a rural pursuit. As we will see in Part 2, reVillaging does require direct access to and unmediated, conscious relations with land. But it is a mistake to imagine that there isn’t land beneath and between the concrete and steel of modern cities. Both the spirit and the practices of reVillaging adapt to edge spaces, city gardens, abandoned lots, and neighborhood networks.

Intentional Communities: Close, but Not Quite

Intentional community? Closer, perhaps. But reVillaging doesn’t require – and probably won’t happen if the predicates are – a strict shared ideology, a mission statement, a retreat from the world, or even a purchase agreement. An intentional community is often expected to spring from the words we agree to; a village forms from shared life-making in place and reverence for relationships. (Note that this is not meant to be a study in strict opposites. Some “intentional” communities function more or less like villages, others more or less like cults, and still others more or less like dreams that turn into nightmares. Some intentional communities might even be subsets of villages.)

When a group decides to form an intentional community, the first act is often to draft a charter: a document that lists values, outlines governance, and paints a picture of the future. The charter becomes the centerpiece of meetings, the reference point for votes, the banner under which fundraising is pursued. It is a story that must first take root before any practice can sprout. The language is often precise, the structure administrative and process-oriented: a board or leaders are elected, bylaws are ratified, committees are appointed. Decision‑making concentrates in a small circle, and the health of the whole hinges on the health of that circle. If the board stalls, the budget freezes; if the committee dissolves, the garden goes untended. This kind of community resembles a single‑stem plant – strong in one direction, vulnerable if that stem snaps. Alternatively, decision-making requires consensus, and achieving complete agreement takes up a ton of time. This kind of community becomes a thicket that’s difficult to move within and crowds out diversity.

Among reVillagers (who might not even know to call themselves that), the opening move is different. The first question is not “What mission shall we proclaim?” but something like: Who knows how to build a greenhouse? To catch rainwater? To inoculate a mushroom log? To stitch a wound? To support a teen with anxiety? A new mother with mastitis? To preserve the harvest? To rig up power and radio communications to keep us connected?” In each case, the answer requires skill and care – immediate engagement of the hands, the senses, the body.

This contrast doesn’t mean that the village is held together purely by the practical and the material. It’s also the product of deep desire. It is energized by both longing (often expressed in exasperation: this isn’t it), and cheerful submission to our unavoidable need for each other.

reVillaging is kindled on questions:

– What if making home wasn’t a private act, but a shared one?
– What if oikos – the ancient root of both ecology and economy – could be reclaimed not as a site of consumption, but of care, co-creation, and collective aliveness?
– What if we could remember enough to make something different?

And it is stoked by the shared willingness to try. Thus, we might think of reVillaging as unintentional but tended community.

Community Cut Off: a story of stalled intentions and fractured faith

The vision was compelling. A group of friends, disillusioned with corporate life and hungry for community, pooled their resources to purchase a few acres just outside a quiet town. They gathered around kitchen tables and in long, excited Zoom calls, drafting a mission and vision that shimmered with hopeful words: regenerative living, shared governance, co-housing. Diagrams were drawn, land informally parceled out, working groups formed. A Slack channel was created for each subcommittee.

For a time, the energy was electric. Conversations flowed about co-housing models and consensus processes. Someone designed a logo. Someone else set up a fundraising page. Another enrolled in a permaculture course and began learning CAD software so he could draw up a landscape design. They created a Google Drive folder titled “Shared Dream.” But on the land itself, little had begun.

One family moved in and built some raised beds, but they were bright with dandelions and strangled in bindweed before anything was harvestable. Another discouraged gardening, saying the crops would just be eaten by the deer and the neighbor’s goats, who kept getting in through a hole in the fence. (Whose job was it to fix that?) And unprecedented July rains came heavy and fast, water pooled against the house, seeping into the old foundation.

A meeting was called. While everyone remained civil and solutions-oriented, the tension was palpable. As concerns about the water damage were raised, someone claimed it wasn’t everyone’s responsibility – it should be a facilities committee task. But the committee hadn’t met in weeks. Someone else obliquely blamed the family in residence for not digging trenches to redirect the water. Attempting to diffuse that conflict and suggested bringing in a contractor. But this violated the group’s principle of self-sufficiency. During the long meeting someone repeatedly corrected the language another person used to describe the storm, asking for more inclusive metaphors. Another spoke of “re-centering the land’s voice” but didn’t want to speak to the neighbor whose goats kept escaping through the shared fence and couldn’t imagine asking those neighbors for help. The conversation spiraled. Nothing was resolved.

By winter, fractures had widened. Some members started talking about the project in the past tense. One family left, citing health reasons. Another withdrew, citing micro-aggressions and emotional labor fatigue. A third said her new partner wasn’t ready to settle down in the middle of nowhere. In her final meeting, she insisted on getting her money back so she could invest in a cloud-seeding start-up her best friend was founding. The rest drifted into silence. The newsletter stopped and more requests for buy outs rolled in. They had built a beautiful map. But no one had started walking the road.

What Obscures the Village?

The village described is an emergent property that forms as place-based care, shared effort and labor, and the metabolic rhythms of land are tended together. This lattice forms within the growing garden when the conditions and relations are right. Much like the organic intermingling of a Three Sisters planting, it is not built or engineered. Many of our earnest attempts at community falter not for lack of desire but because of the orientations we’ve inherited – stories, structures, and habits that have shaped our sense of what is normal, desirable, or even possible. These orientations are the cumulative sediment of modernity ‑ coloniality, a worldview that promised safety and comfort through separation, extraction, and control. Some of these orientations are enshrined in policy and economics; others have settled into our instincts. All of them make it harder to recognize the village and to move in ways that support its return.

1. The Spell of Separation
The story that we are solitary actors, standing apart from the land, from each other, from the creatures that share our breath. This shows up in privatization and property regimes that treat land as a commodity, turning access to soil and sustenance into terms of exclusion.

2. The Mirage of More
The belief that more production, more consumption, and more growth will bring security or improvement. This is what makes global supply chains seem sensible even when they starve local resilience.

3. The Imperative of Individualism
The deep-seated (often unstated) notion that the self exists outside of and prior to relationship. This self is entitled to unlimited autonomy and continuous affirmation. When difficulty arises, the reflex is exit: surely the problem is them, not me. Village life withers where individuality is treated as something to be defended and offered elsewhere, rather than something to be shaped within relationship.

4. The Negation of Need
The pervasive encouragement to go after what we want instead of acknowledging what we need. The message that needing others is a sign of weakness, that being strong means being self-sufficient, rising above.

5. The Costs of Comfort
The bright glow of a screen, the background hum of central heating, the fully stocked pantry, the constant Wi-Fi signal – all of these comforts are sustained by systems of extraction far beyond our doorsteps. As they keep us from discomfort, they also obscure the interdependence that makes village life possible.

6. The Fantasy of Fixing
The impulse to write a policy, launch a startup, or commit to DEI practices and believe that the hole is firmly patched, all while the deeper fracture remains.

7. The Grasp of Goodness
The drive to be the “good one,” to perform personal virtue while leaving intact the very structures that cause harm, often to those who are not you. This is closely tied to a resistance to shared struggle: when care becomes a burden rather than a blessing, we retreat into curated individualism, and the communal goes untended.

Together, these orientations form a translucent architecture of exclusion – a firmly cemented fence that constrains, without gates to connect. They are the fences we didn’t mean to build. Fences that try to hold back the force of our need for each other, but can’t actually eliminate it. Naming what constrains helps us to see through these obscuring orientations and sense the many worlds that are just beyond our present angle of perception. Worlds in which we organize around the meeting of shared needs — for clean water and air, enough nourishment, warmth (clothing and shelter), and connection. In which the collaborative and ongoing meeting of these needs serves as substrate for our creativity and concentrates our desires. For if we center what we all need, we might open up to less familiar, even less scripted forms of relation.

In Part 2: reGrounding , we explore how place is never just the backdrop to life but a source and. shaping force – a sacred sage we learn with and within. Read it here.