What is a "we"?

So, I talk with nature.

Walking alone in the woods recently at Lassen volcanic park, the woods seemed to say to me, "well, do you have an intention for today?" Humm, I thought. "How about, how am I doing?"

The woods looked back at me, reflecting in their gaze my intense individuality. Looking at life from an ecological and cross-cultural, historal position, this modern western individualism is... strange.

"We are a we," they said. "To ask how I am doing, ask, how are we doing?"

I began to wonder, and have been wondering ever since, who the we is, who the we might be.

A standard we is a nuclear family. But I'm sceptical about the nuclear family. This needs its own post.

The ways of the we

Returning to Berkeley after 10 weeks away, visiting family and friends, being in retreats and camps and the wilderness, it felt shocking to "grab" dinner at Wholefoods, alone, eating out of a little cardboard box, food grown perhaps by underpaid immigrants, prepared by brown skinned people, sold to white me at the Wholefoods premium, they profit. I eat alone among other people eating alone with laptops or newspapers. We are tribe-less, atomic consumers.

Tribe-less Atomic Consumers

How might we describe this? You're self responsible. You earn money and use it to get dinner, housing, clothing, your car. You live quite privately. Your life is your own affair. You make social arrangements privately. There is no place where you can just go, to just be with people.

A family I teach recently moved into a new development of 80 houses. There was no one place for people to gather together. "There are two stores," said the father when I asked about it.

To meet our needs, we shop, we use technology, we medicate.

Some of the downsides: my 86 year old neighbour, Roger, hadn't spoken to anybody for two weeks when I met him on the street. Nuclear families struggle. Widows and widowers can struggle. Single people can be lonely, couples can be unsupported. Folks use a fair bit of porn, it seems. Each household has its own dishwasher, set of tools etc - lots of Stuff. We each buy our food in its plastic wrappers, etc etc - I could go on but you Know This Picture. And it sucks. We each drive our private cars out of the driveway on to the big concrete roads and freeways that dominate our public space and kill our planet. And eventually us. Bye bye.


Temporary, partial tribes

I've lived and loved in a few tribes since arriving in California 4 years ago. The Stepping Stones Project is a beautiful multi-generational tribe who gather around the project of youth initiation. They aim to be, a "village" as much as an organization. Gosh when I arrived, a recent immigrant from a big British family, these people became by uncles and aunts, brothers sisters and cousins, and it was beautiful.

Until my work in the world changed, I lost devotion to the project, and had a conflict with the ED.

So people go in and out of that tribe, in different rhythms, basically depending on whether it is part of their work in the world right now.


The Ecology of Leadership Program at the Permaculture Center in Bolinas, the Regenerative Design Institute, made a beautiful little "village" for the 10 month duration of the program, and a little while afterwards. But in the end, the village was pop-up, baseless in the long term, organised around a short term program.



Family tribes

I am in a big family. We enter through birth or marriage, and we leave through death. We come together around weddings, funerals, major birthdays, Christmases and Easter. We are all, pretty much, equally a part of it. We track each others lives and stories over the long term. We support one another emotionally, practically, financially. We share Stuff; family gifts and wounds, inheritance, shadow and healing potential, should we choose to go there. It's deep and important.

And, we mainly get together and sit, talk, eat and drink, and go on walks.

We kind of... don't do any other ways of relating so much, and....... humm.... there's potential for more... intimacy, connection, depth, fun. Alcohol and food seem to take some of the place of that.

And, the family web has in it the struggles of the nuclear family.


Utopian Tribes I might imagine...

Ok this is its own blog post.