Building many stories, living and loving many stories, creating new stories that include imaginative possibilities for new communities, beyond our current limiting profit first principles, I am part of a growing conversation around the need for system change and the desire to design communities that can nurture and house all of us comfortably alongside each other, as we share this life sustaining planet we exist within together.
You and me are stories, stories that we have been told and stories that we have told ourselves.
When we meet someone new, we share our stories with them, and they do the same with us.
These stories are based within spaces, physical spaces, spaces that our homes sit upon, public spaces that we share with each other, and in the spaces within ourselves, the spaces within my body, the spaces within your body.
Some stories I hold in my heart, some stories I hold in my head, others in my body and in my imagination.
Some spaces I hold for me, some spaces I hold for you.
Designing communities that serve the people they are built for, while respecting and supporting all the life that may make its home here too, starts with;
Noticing.
Accommodating.
Understanding.
Sharing.
I see the core aspects of designing a global community for our species, and building my own personal internal community, starting using these same four steps, as the way will find our way out of this troubled, dominance based present, towards a settled egalitarian future.
Discounting the myths of utopias of Eden and Elysium and more, it seems that creating communities can be difficult, and we humans have often struggled to design and manage them well.
The hurt and pain that so many of us carry, as individuals and as communities of shared principles, are all around us on this planet.
The blood that we shed as a species is visible and obvious and present currently in so many big and small communities.
My energy moves towards discovering ways me and you can communicate, learn, understand and accommodate each other.
Finding the common factor to be our capacity for feeling and acknowledging the pain we carry, validating and acknowledging the pain others carry, and finding the courage to hold and share and heal our collective pain, I believe we can use nonviolence as a practice and reduce the harm we do to ourselves, to each other and to the soils that feed and house us.
Nonviolence is what I chose to do. Imagine it, model it, build it, become it.