Why I decided to live at an ecovillage
I had been involved in activism for a number of years.
I noticed a problem with the way I was interacting, and how the activism I was doing was draining me, instead of energizing me. No matter how much I did, it never felt like enough - I always felt guilty about everything I didn’t or couldn’t do. The responsibility for the world was on my shoulders, pushing me to go harder, but inevitably towards burnout, or towards giving up, and turning my back on helping out the world, or even ‘selling out’ - if you can’t beat them, join them. INTERVENTION NEEDED!!!
So I decided to make a shift from “Guilt Based Activism” to “Bliss Based Activism”; instead of doing things out of guilt, towards myself or others, I would do things that felt like they uplifted me, and others. I would accept that I could not do or change everything, but no matter how little, there was always something I COULD do; and I would do that, and let myself feel good about it, and not give up even though it felt like a small thing [metis Humming bird story - the big forest fire].
In Ottawa where I was living before I moved to the Lanark Ecovillage Project, I was involved with activism in my community around organized crime. It was affecting me personally, including having serious consequences on people I loved. I felt torn between ‘non-violent’ activism, and being brought back down the age-old road of the cycle of violence and ‘power over’.
The nuclear arms race of the cold war might be a good example of where the cycle of violence, and the arms race, leads. Someone slaps someone; the other one gets a stick; someone gets a knife; a gun; and then a bigger gun, etc, back and forth, trying to attain the most power, like a perverse dark humoured cartoon. Instead of working on the root communication and relationship issues, the seriousness of the situation escalates, until it is push-button nuclear, and somebody sneezes, and everybody dies.
So I could see that was where things were leading in the human trafficking situation in Sandy Hill, Ottawa, that I had gotten embroiled in - by escalating things, in power over, I was threatening the people who were doing these things, and they responded by escalating as well… and the consequences were more danger for myself, and them, and a lot of the bystanders and victims as well… in effect, in my poorly thought out approach, the actions I was taking were mostly harming my community, rather than helping it.
I reflected on how the root of most of the problems I’ve experienced in activism was based on unhealthy community and relationships; and that the solution to most of these, when you come right down to it, also seemed to be… creating healthy community and relationships.
In fact, in retrospect, a whole other avenue of non-violent warfare, that perhaps would make the nonviolent communications crowd proud, seemed to exist, that came out of network theory that I’d heard about in an Occupied Philosophers group.
In network theory, in a network you have nodes. The nodes with the most connections have ‘best alternative to no agreement’, and essentially become the top of a hierarchy - essentially they can get better deals because they have more choice and freedom; in fact they can become monopolies, and start dictating rules and agreements.
Rather than ‘attack’ these upper hierarchy nodes, which might be construed as a ‘people’s revolution against a far more well armed and resourced force’, network theory suggests that you can instead of trying to ‘disconnect’ the higher nodes connections aggressively, you can connect all the other little nods that are more isolated, in essence creating an alternative to the ‘elite’ nodes, and breaking the monopoly, as the other nodes become more connected, meet each others’ needs, and phase out the need for these ‘elite’ nodes; the network essentially routes around the bottleneck naturally, balancing out unequal power distributions. So in effect, while not eliminating these ‘elite nodes’, it forces them to reconsider their agreements’ reasonableness, or they have less leverage to use in negotations, so that relationships will be more balanced.
There is a metaphor with the transformation of a butterfly, and the necessary transformation of civilization that we are going to have to go through. At first, when the first imaginal cell form in the caterpillar, the cells which will eventually turn into the butterfly, they are attacked by the caterpillar cells as foreign. The imaginal cells form a tight group to help protect each other, and allow them to develop - and groups who want to transform society may imagine needing to create their own little clusters to allow them to develop.
Eventually, the imaginal cells in the butterfly clarify their form so much, that it is like the caterpillar cells realize what is going on; the rest of the caterpillar liquifies, and feeds into the imaginal cells - or perhaps in our society, you might suppose people will eventually get on board with what people who want to create transition to a better society, once they’ve clarified their vision enough.
So why did I join an eco-community?
“I can’t think myself into a new way of living, I have to live myself into a new way of thinking.”
If I want to model healthy community, I need to learn it and practice it for myself, first.
Everything stems from what I do for and within myself, first; be the change.
The rest follows, bit by bit.
