Emergent Co-Being
Communities of Co-Created, Interdependent, and Shared Livelihoods
Long before life evolved into developing our thinking minds, that human brain we love to think of as the “pinnacle of life’s evolutionary process”, life was guided by a more primal, yet equally sophisticated, force — a sensing body.
Before even that, life survived and evolved through simple, random collisions and reactions. But as life’s evolutionary “guidance system” continued to get better and better at becoming aware of what it needed and acted accordingly to get that need fulfilled, life evolved to pass wisdom from generation to generation, through the body.
That sensing decision making process continued to evolve, and through it, a deep wisdom was passed down to each generation of beings — guiding life in its continued growth and development.
From a sensing body, life evolved a feeling heart, emotions.
First, imagine an ant sensing another ant’s trail of pheromones, naturally guiding its movement towards more a scrap of food or drop of honey. Or imagine a tree that senses a parasite attacking its system, unleashing a chemical into the air to warn other trees to put their defenses up.
Now, imagine a gazelle having the sensation of seeing a lion, then feeling an emotion of fear, and then naturally running the opposite direction for their life. Or imagine a dog that hears their owner pull up their car, feel overwhelming excitement, and sit at the door waiting and wagging their tail wildly.
From the first two examples to the second two, life’s decision making process evolved to have another level of complexity to it.
And as life continued to evolve from that sensing body and feeling heart, a thinking mind began to emerge and grow, eventually leading to our species coming into existence.
Thinking became an added level of our guiding operating system — a wisdom that flowed out from our sensations into our emotions and through our mind.
It’s all one interconnected system that flows through each other and is lost when separated.
This guiding operating system for each species of life, no matter the level of evolution, evolved to ensure that they continued, not only as an isolated species alone, but as a part of the interconnected, interdependent system that brought it into being and brings it nourishment.
For our species, humans evolved to be a deeply relational and communal species, specifically with other humans but just as importantly with all of life. We evolved to be able to understand complexity through our bodies, hearts, and minds to be a custodial, stewarding species for each other and all of life.
We could see and understand deep down, the role each part of earth played in the complex, interdependent, often fragile eco-system of life around us.
And within our communities, we evolved the sensing and feeling deep in our bodies to building deep, trusting, collaborative relationships. Bonds between people and to communities that allowed us to flourish and thrive as humans that cared for one another.
That truth still sits inside of us, all we need to do is listen, follow, and share our sensations and feelings as a life-regenerating, community and relationship building force.
But sadly, as we became obsessed with our thinking mind — this new tool of life’s continued evolution — something we especially idolized over the past centuries and millennia, we allowed it to take our beings over. We even propagated the thought that we were superior because of it — that our mind alone was a mandate from life’s evolution to rule, subjugate, and dominate.
And with that, we abandoned and left behind all the wisdom of our bodies and hearts that got us here.
As long as we as a species continue down this path, we are doomed for an extinction that brings much of life’s creation and evolution down with us.
But I know deep in my body and heart that that is not our’s or life’s future.
Life evolved to be resilient, adaptive, and interdependent. We evolved to be those same things. And that is what we are being called to rediscover today. It is naturally screaming at us each and every day. It pains us not to be on that path, and more and more people are waking up to it as they look around the world and feel something wrong.
Our bodies and hearts are telling us that we need healing, transformation, and liberation — of shifting our collective consciousness towards a more truthful, meaningful, and loving way of being — an alive and whole self, a nurturing and caring community, and a stewarded and regenerating planet.
Humanity’s true nature.
It’s right here inside of us — the wisdom and guidance we need.
And it isn’t something we need to invent or think up, it’s something we need to simply feel and remember.
The Ancient Wisdom Held in our Bodies
That guiding wisdom we are grasping for in the darkness — that wisdom held in our bodies and hearts — is the path to solving all our internal, interpersonal, and inter-community conflict; is the path to healing from our ancestral and individual pasts; is the path to approaching living, working, and being through relationship.
Ultimately allowing us to grow into interdependent collaboration and care that can birth the equitable, sustainable, and nurturing world we need.
The wisdom and truth to transform our communities, systems, and environments into this future is what our sensations and emotions are guiding us towards each and every day — something we’ve been conditioned to numb as our beliefs in individualism and separateness have taken over our beings.
It all starts with that relational truth beginning in our sensing bodies, going through our feeling hearts, and flowing out through our thinking minds.
Our logical brain alone is lost. It can’t by itself fully comprehend complexity and practice emergence — an awareness, intuition, and creative ingenuity that goes so much deeper than rationality and logic.
We’ve all felt it one time or another in our lives.
Those moments when our truth can’t be contained and comes flowing out of us naturally. You might’ve felt it when a passion or love feels like it takes over your being. It’s such a deep alignment that touches you to our core.
That is a moment of wisdom, as our bodies, hearts, and minds align and our truth comes from our embodied sensations, into our felt emotions, and out through our creative thoughts.
You might’ve experienced when you felt a sense of purpose or meaning, or when a passion or love took root, or maybe an inspiration or creativity or awareness emerged out of nowhere. It is that exact moment when clarity of awareness and resolve calls to shape our future.
It is also how humans evolved to be able to handle complexity and deal with ambiguous unknowns, exponential impact, and interconnected eco-systems.
All of this is us touching into our deepest beings.
An expression of our gifts and creative energies towards what we know to be meaningful and purposeful in our bodies — emergent work that brings the world we are yearning for into being, both individually and collectively.
This clarity and direction always transcends the individual and works to bring a oneness into the world. It stems from an awareness of ourselves inside and a part of the interconnected, continually evolving ecosystem of life.
It is an untapped wisdom innately inside each of us, that can be our teaching and guiding force to be in trusting, interdependent relationship if we let it.
This is the wisdom of a child that our society so quickly domesticates and strips us our youth. That natural intuition to be curious and wonder, to experiment and share, to invite and welcome — long before we’ve fully internalized that command to never talk to strangers or always fit in and follow the rules.
But no matter how far we’ve strayed and gotten lost, this way to be is still there inside us. It always has been and always will be, held deep in our bodies and hearts. We just need to quiet the noise that our individualized, afraid, and ashamed mind too loudly drowns out.
It’s sitting there, waiting to be awakened, in our connection with our sensing bodies, and feeling hearts, guiding us to heal towards a place of relationship, care, and regeneration with ourselves, each other, and all of life.
The Ancestral Wisdom Held in our Indigenous Communities
This truth held in our bodies and feelings has guided us to build collaborative relationships, communal systems, and our needed sense of security and belonging for tens of thousands of years.
It is just waiting to be unlocked and activated inside and between us. And the path to guide us there is in our indigenous communities and cultures — wisdom that will not only guide our connection back to our bodies and hearts, but also towards each other and the equitable, regenerative, and communal systems we are needing today.
Inside indigenous cultures, rituals, stories, economic structures, governance models, production systems, or simply put — ways to be, live, and work together — is the consciousness shift and collective transformation we need.
It’s the path to shifting from the transactional into the relational; from individualism into interdependence; from extraction into nurturance; from scarcity into abundance; from competition into collaboration.
Economic systems that didn’t start with a premise based in scarcity and rational self-interest, but rather in regeneration and reciprocity. Embodied through traditions like the potlatch — a gift giving feast held by the indigenous communities of the Salish Coast, or my place of birth in the Pacific Northwest.
Through gifting and supporting each other — trusting in our natural reciprocity — we become a part of something grander, a “greater we” that expands the self to include others as part of our own self/we interest.
Respect, wealth, and support comes from your openness to give and care for one another, not the amount of resources you can accumulate and hoard. Leadership is not a title claimed, but rather a role earned, served, and then passed on. Power that was never saved or used over, but always flowing and used with.
These are all the same qualities that our communities, organizations, and systems are needing, and often already trying, to embrace today.
Furthermore, this shift from consuming to gifting, from extraction to regeneration, from separateness to interconnectedness — naturally leads to a deeper, reciprocal relationship with all our sources of livelihood and life.
It can open our eyes and guide our hearts and bodies to understand the complex interdependence of life’s ecosystems around us. It can imbue us with a sacred awareness to steward and serve.
Through these cultures, time can shift from linear to cyclical. Relatonal flows between death and decomposition to rebirth and life can become integral to how we live. We can grow from worrying about making a profit today to making sure we have our needs met in a way that sustains our sources of livelihood for generations and generations to come.
These cultures had stories passed down that remembered and reinforced the sacredness of each and every part of life’s complex interdependent ecosystem, even the parts we couldn’t understand. And even beyond just the parts themselves, these stories helped us understand, see, and feel, the relationships between all the parts.
They became and embraced the awareness that these relationships and patterns play out through this interconnected web of cyclical relationships over and over again. That the life that nourishes our bodies today, is nourished by our bodies tomorrow. They recognized the deep importance and role that each and every piece of life plays in the ecosystems that sustain us. The extinction of one species is the extinction of all species — a cascading spiral that destabilizes the interdependent flow of relationships into an unimaginable loss.
When we lose that understanding, we lose everything.
“But why should I mourn at the untimely fate of my people? Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see…
At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.
Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds.”
Chief Seathl “Seattle” Speech of 1854
So here we are today, finding ourselves with converging meta-crises all around us — an inevitable conclusion of that disconnect from our bodies and ancestors.
An individual separateness that has led to a culture of extraction, competition, and the slow deterioration of our relationships, communities, and ecosystems.
The first step to healing this separateness and regenerating our lives and world, is by remembering how to be in relationship and community with each other. It is using the wisdom of our bodies and ancestors to guide us back to living in interdependence with our bodies, each other, and all of life.
This isn’t going backwards. It’s going forwards. And will guide us to steward a new age of humanity that brings all of our ancient wisdom into how we make and use the technology and tools we have today.
The individual and collective consciousness shift we are being called to find, all starts with healing ourselves through deep, regenerative, and nurturing communities.
In fact, we can’t actually heal ourselves whole, until we are in relationship in community. That is our whole being’s — our body’s, heart’s, and mind’s — natural habitat. And until we bring that back into our lives, the larger systemic and environmental transformation won’t be able to emerge.
The growth and awareness we are needing today can only come to be through community. Communities are our practice space to heal and nurture each other, and consequently, heal and nurture our entire planet. It’s the first fracture to be healed in our collective rehabilitation.
As much as you could try to heal a lion towards “fully being” while in captivity, they won’t truly be alive and whole, until they are back with their pride.
So that is the first truth we must realize today, to cultivate sustainable, regenerative, and caring communities — webs of interdependent relationships — that support and nurture each other’s livelihoods.
Communities of Co-Created Livelihoods —
Taking Responsibilities for Ourselves
Community is a term now that gets tossed around all over the place. It is commoditized and sold. Nowadays, companies craving your dollar, are stooping to trying to “sell you belonging”.
It’s all a farce.
For a community to truly be a place where interdependence and support can emerge, it must take the leap into something beyond emotional and relational care, and into the co-creation of each other’s livelihoods.
Only by expanding our sense of self, and incorporating others well-being and livelihoods into our own, can we reach back into ourselves and true community.
That is what it means to be in community as a human, and therefore to live fully as a human — to be in a web of interdependent relationships that support each of us and our livelihood needs. As these webs become intrinsically interconnected, that co-creation and collective generation is a natural realization.
We evolved to need to need each other to meet our needs.
It is also the call that I believe community needs to rise up to today — to openly approach livelihood in a co-creative way where the collective takes responsibility for supporting each individual in taking responsibility for their own livelihood — a “we” that guides the full expression of each “me”.
It is a step of support, care, and trust, that if we hold each individual to understand, develop, and express our gifts towards work we find to be meaningful, we will naturally go down a path that creates value and livelihood for ourselves and each other.
This community of co-created livelihoods can then work to generate and flow livelihood resources, energy, and care into the community.
In bringing this theoretical discussion into the pragmatic, we can view livelihood in two main categories. Work indirectly meeting livelihood needs and work directly meeting livelihood needs.
The first is work that produces the ability to use resources to meet those livelihood needs.
Maybe a job or the creation and offering of a product or service that brings in resources to pay for shelter, food, clothing, etc.
The latter is work that produces products or services that directly meet livelihood needs directly — farming, crafting, building, etc.
This co-creating community of care that guides the discovery and unleashing of each individual’s authentic and natural creative potential, naturally cultivates a deep sense of belonging, accountability, and individual and collective responsibility.
What follows is a flowing community where problems are naturally addressed through the support of individual agency. As needs arise, those who find filling them meaningful, will naturally step up to put their gifts and energies towards addressing that need.
This is what true belonging and community can unlock — that deeper level of co-creation that expands livelihood needs beyond the individual and into the collective.
As a community draws more and more energy, from their bodies and ancestral traditions, a culture takes root and emerges that guides and amplifies co-creation and collaboration in all directions.
Collaborative crews can naturally coalesce around aligned values, need, and creative energies. A deep sense of both autonomous agency and collective coherence encourages experimentation, failure, and reflection as we are all held and hold each other.
With each expanding concentric ring of relational security and belonging, the individuals, crews, and community, feel safe and courageous enough to boldly experiment and bring forth our deepest hopes and dreams.
Our hopes and dreams then expand into deeper interdependence with each other — all cycling back into nourishment for ourselves and community.
We then further expand that sense of self to include more and more, eventually growing to a need to regenerate and nurture the entire ecosystem keeping this flowing of life moving forward as a sacred responsibility of our selves and our relationships.
Interdependent Livelihoods —
Taking Responsibility for Each Other and the Collective
This sense of interdependence becomes the crux of the community culture we are yearning and needing to rediscover and rebirth into the world.
It is making visible and nurturing a community’s web of relationships as a web of flows — guiding resources, energy, and care towards appreciative gratitude and livelihood needs.
As our sense of security shifts from a personal security on one’s own shoulders — fulfilled through the accumulating and hoarding of power and resources — into a relational security put on all of a community’s shoulders, we gift abundance to each other and co-create web of reciprocal, communal, flowing care.
When any individual is feeling abundant, they share that abundance with the community and those in need, with full trust in reciprocity when the time inevitably arises down the road when they are feeling scarce. This opens us up to lean on others to share what they have and care for our needs — an act that actually deepens relationships, not weakens them.
This creates cascading feedback loops that deepen our feelings of nurturance and belonging.
And beyond the flows addressing livelihood needs, the intra-community flows towards appreciative gratitude have a profound impact on what comes to have value in the community.
When I choose to flow my excess resources in gratitude towards someone else, whatever it was in gratitude for, becomes livelihood generating work. This allows us to properly value the often-invisible “care work” of our communities.
Just like that, the support of these flows towards gratitude, ends up supporting the work that we value — and in that act, culture is created.
If I feel mentored by someone sharing their wisdom with me, or held by someone holding space for me, or cared for by someone welcoming me into their home, I flow gifts towards them creating value in what I found meaning and valuable in receiving.
This shifts a power structure from a hierarchical “power-over model” based on accumulated resources into a “power-with model” where individuals gain respect through how much they can give away and put into their relationships.
This leads to a deepening and reshaping of the community as we all continually ask ourselves to explore and express how we can better care, nurture, and support one another.
Shared Livelihoods —
Taking Responsibility for the Broader “We” (All of Life)
Beyond just the co-generating of livelihood into, and the intra-community flows of livelihood within, any community embracing interdependence within, will naturally realize the interdependence beyond.
This next level is crucial, as livelihood needs to flow through and beyond a community, and into the broader systems of humanity and nature to fully remember our place as not just stewards of human systems, but also the broader ecosystem of life.
This outward sharing of livelihood and care begins with other aligned communities, especially the indigenous and oppressed communities who haven’t had the spaciousness that privilege and power affords many of us.
They not only are the ones that have been marginalized and persecuted throughout our history, but obviously also hold the truths and wisdom that can further ripple this transformational work into the world.
And for us coming from undeserved, inherited power and privilege, this is also part of the generational healing that goes beyond our individual bodies and personal somas and into the collective bodies and cultural somas.
This is the natural expansion of the sense of self and beyond.
Taking responsibility of your personal ecosystem, grows into taking responsibility of your relational ecosystem, then your communal ecosystem, then your local ecosystem, then regional ecosystem, and then the global ecosystem.
And as one naturally puts humans into their place as a part of life, as life, not above it or separate, it all ends up blending into the caring for this unimaginably complex ecosystem that encompasses all of life on earth.
That is the interdependence we are needing to find today. That is our hope.
