I read a piece from another garden-writer this morning; she wrote about community centralized, and decentralized. She wrote about managing things, and giving up on managing things. Like her, I like to manage things; I need to recognize that, count it as a gift, yet not as an answer to everything. If you would like to read her piece, and maybe subscribe to her Substack, you can find it here:
I like to get things done. I need to trust a more organic, social, shared, and consensual approach to “getting things done.”
I need to remember that community is not about tasks and getting things done; community is about human beings, relationships, and life itself. Oh, my task orientation is sputtering with a million justifications of itself, but eventually, it must bow to this truth. Hopefully the bow is graceful instead of grasping. We shall see.
My inner and the outer worlds are shifting in tandem. It is a bit unsettling, as growth and realization always are. It leaves me feeling woozy in time and space; ensures I pay attention and step purposely onto solid ground.
Many of us are feeling world-woozy right now, I think. Our nation has moved from a model of democracy to a flailing kakistocracy in under two years of the current regime. Corruption rules. Ignorance is lauded. Science is disregarded. Education is no longer something to seek and be proud of. Women, girls, people of color, and anyone with a different opinion, are losing their rights, and some their very lives. Meanwhile, other autocrats from other countries manipulate our country into doing their will, and artificial intelligence infiltrates the world’s systems unchecked.
The human world is in flux. The natural world goes on being natural, goes on finding ways and spaces to live and thrive despite out extractive, destructive, systems. The world will go on long after the animals now populating it have become fossils. That includes us. That said, we are not all fossils yet; we are living beings, human beings, creative beings, communal beings.
I am praying this morning that our steps, our visions, our actions and words and prayers, become very intentional now. May we imagine a human-world worthy of this beautiful planet we live on. May we have the courage to see that every human system of power and governance is made by human beings, and can thus be unmade and/or remade. None of it is real or inevitable. Patriarchy is a human construct. All economies are human constructs. Governments, militaries, religions, food-systems, school systems, medical systems, social systems; all created and managed by human beings who, like me, can get caught up in tasks, processes, and power-holding.
May our sight come clear. May we see through our own blind-spots. May we become fully realized human beings. May we have courage and love one another. May it be so.
