Below are the bits that especially resonate. I'm working with a couple of different places that are wanting this type of community but I've grown up in a cult and lives in a commune and I know the difficulties that arise with power structures and limbic resonance that lead groups astray. How do we actually do this without imploding?!
you’ve lived long enough outside the dominant culture’s assumptions to know that its support structures were never built for you. You stopped waiting for someone to come save you a long time ago — if you ever started.
You know that family is something you build, not something you’re born into.
You’re a builder. Not necessarily of structures — though maybe that too — but of systems, of culture, of the conditions that allow people to function well together.
You are also willing to be honest about your shadow. You’ve done enough of your own work to know where you go when you’re scared, when you’re overwhelmed, when your nervous system is running the show instead of your judgment. You’re not done with that work. Nobody is. But you’re in active relationship with it rather than pretending it isn’t there. And you can work alongside the shadow aspects of others without flinching or fleeing.
And there will be a fire at the end of the day, and conversation that can’t be found in a coffee shop, and food you grew with people you trust, and the particular quality of exhaustion that comes from work that actually matters
You understand — or are open to understanding — that the land is a third party in this agreement. That it has wants and needs specific to its particular soils, waters, and history. That listening to those requirements is not romanticism. It is the most practical thing we can do.
We are building family where biology failed to deliver it. We are building tribe where culture forgot how. We are coming together to support each other in the ways that the dominant culture reserves for blood relatives — because we know, as neurodivergents and queerdos and people who fell through the gaps of every system designed to hold us, that no one is coming to save us.
I'm curious about what and where your community is!
I'm glad it landed. What drew you to it?
Below are the bits that especially resonate. I'm working with a couple of different places that are wanting this type of community but I've grown up in a cult and lives in a commune and I know the difficulties that arise with power structures and limbic resonance that lead groups astray. How do we actually do this without imploding?!
you’ve lived long enough outside the dominant culture’s assumptions to know that its support structures were never built for you. You stopped waiting for someone to come save you a long time ago — if you ever started.
You know that family is something you build, not something you’re born into.
You’re a builder. Not necessarily of structures — though maybe that too — but of systems, of culture, of the conditions that allow people to function well together.
You are also willing to be honest about your shadow. You’ve done enough of your own work to know where you go when you’re scared, when you’re overwhelmed, when your nervous system is running the show instead of your judgment. You’re not done with that work. Nobody is. But you’re in active relationship with it rather than pretending it isn’t there. And you can work alongside the shadow aspects of others without flinching or fleeing.
And there will be a fire at the end of the day, and conversation that can’t be found in a coffee shop, and food you grew with people you trust, and the particular quality of exhaustion that comes from work that actually matters
You understand — or are open to understanding — that the land is a third party in this agreement. That it has wants and needs specific to its particular soils, waters, and history. That listening to those requirements is not romanticism. It is the most practical thing we can do.
We are building family where biology failed to deliver it. We are building tribe where culture forgot how. We are coming together to support each other in the ways that the dominant culture reserves for blood relatives — because we know, as neurodivergents and queerdos and people who fell through the gaps of every system designed to hold us, that no one is coming to save us.