the generations returning to the land, called by a deep longing sowed by old stories that took root, they save the seeds of something that could sustain us all.
our children still remember the city, and translate, like immigrant’s children, their fluency so agile that you might even mistake them for country people after just a few years’ immersion. the elders here know better, but welcome their enthusiasm kindly and gladly teach what was for so long rejected. it seems when they sense a true devotion to reviving a life bonded to place, the sharing economy of community appears. it is staggeringly abundant.
the next generation that is born in relationship to soil, they may well be unrecognisably integrated save for a certain accent, and if we have shared stories and skills with the slow, deep and generous urgency that the times call for, we may yet mend the ties to the past before it unravels irrevocably.
can the city exist only as long as it can extract from the country? is a model of reciprocity even possible? maybe, maybe, but like the mothering that births and raises citizens, (or workers, or consumers) the countryside and its countryfolk are rendered invisible. our economy blinds us to the value of anything that is not a market itself but only a resource supporting one. it must, as exploiting cheapened resources and labours for increasing profit is the game.
so my mothering body is like the countryside, and when we reunite we pull each other close in mutual recognition. yes. we are essential. in another economy, another story, one that we will tell as we live it, what is essential is valued as such. the microbial soil and air and water, the plants, the animals we are and live amongst, all of life, living.
what are the skills that support life? this is the question we must answer before the economy, that story of our material life, can alter into a life-supporting one. for now, how we live is overlaid on the strange, disembodied, disconnected actions of a life premised on scarcity, that must compete, that must beat out the other for a piece of it, working hard or buying one’s way, inventing needs to sell to, perhaps innovating, discovering new markets. we all know, uncomfortably now, the appropriation that the discoverer enacts. so this economy makes us uneasy, for as we succeed we find we have become the coloniser. even the revolutionary proves a worse king than the last. if we thrive in this model, it is at the expense of so many and so much. the premise of infinite profit rots from the inside, because by winning, someone always loses.
as we are all interconnected in life, so we are never immune to what befalls any one of us. like toxins sprayed on a single crop in the landscape, poisons to kill a single pest, the nature of infinite exchange is that any toxin eventually poisons us all. the world is vast, but the machine is so big now, there is nowhere left to extract, to overpower, to beat. our great economic success is ultimately our greatest failure, though some feel it first and more acutely than others. what an economy, that takes from life until it dies. do we know life intimately enough, as we disassociate from the violence of this story, even to recognise the throes?
but you are feeling it as i am. in feeling deeply, as painful as that is, we reconnect. in answering that question for ourselves, what is life-supporting? and then, increasingly, in community, across experience and difference, we answer with another story. it sounds a little like a very old one our great-grandparents must’ve told our grandparents as children. we recognise it, like a garment long stored away somewhere in the far reaches. we can patch it together, fit it to our new shape.
in collaboration, now, in community, in relationship to the living being we are living within, we can replace a pattern of domination with a pattern of reciprocity, of meeting the needs of all. what will we stitch together now, to create the strong bonds from past to future, to get us all there? what old, heritage seeds will we sow? it is in our hands, now. in slow, deep and generous urgency, we begin.
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