permaculture

[lbsaltzman@aol.com]

http://carolynbaker.net








BUILDING CIRCLES OF COMMUNITY: "LONE RANGERS" CANNOT SURVIVE COLLAPSE, By 
Carolyn Baker









Saturday, 28 July 2007








The inexorable reality is that any community that does not process feelings 
and build trust by doing so...is NOT, I repeat, NOT sustainable.

A treasure trove of information pertaining to preparation for collapse can be 
found on the internet and in libraries throughout the world. Earlier this 
year I reviewed Mick Winter's book on preparing for Peak Oil and have since 
posted on my site Stan Goff's piece on "35 Ways To Prepare For Peak Oil" My 
own article, "What To Do, What To Do?" addresses preparation for collapse 
from yet another perspective. Websites such as Matt Savinar's Life After The 
Oil Crash, Energy Bulletin, and Post-Carbon Institute offer ongoing 
suggestions for preparation as well. Yet the one topic which receives almost 
no attention is the notion of how individuals create community in the face of 
the collapse of civilization. This is curious since, in my opinion, all 
individuals raised in the culture of empire are deeply wounded emotionally 
and spiritually and have little experience of living harmoniously in 
community. In fact, more often than not, people who are preparing for 
collapse tell me that their experiences with attempting to create and 
maintain community have been disappointing at best and disastrous at worst, 
so it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out why so few people address 
the topic

[snip - picture of a circle of chairs]

Much talk of ecovillages and intentional communities abounds among collapse 
watchers, and in many of such venues that have actually been created, a 
significant amount of time is devoted to community building-sometimes a 
minimum of three hours per day. One may wonder how anything else can get done 
when people sit in community circles that many hours. Who plants and weeds 
the garden? Who cooks? Who washes dishes and empties garbage into the compost?

What many communities have discovered is that community building requires so 
much time that its members must have "sprung themselves" from the system to 
such an extent that they have the time required to devote three or four hours 
per day to sitting in a circle and processing feelings and making decisions 
about the community's well being. What does not work well, experience tells 
us, is a community in which people share residence but are still chained to a 
system in which they must commute to exhausting jobs, return to their groovy 
ecovillage, and have little or no time or energy left to do the emotional 
work necessary to sustain it.

The reader may be bristling with skepticism about this and inwardly 
protesting that he/she has little interest in "touch-feely" stuff like 
"processing feelings." One may just want to live comfortably in his/her head 
in a safe space with friends or family and detach entirely from empire doing 
work for the community and living sustainably. The inexorable reality, 
however, is that any community that does not process feelings and build trust 
by doing so or simply holds long meetings about "mission statements", 
division of labor, community logistics, or budgets, without addressing 
emotional issues is NOT, I repeat, NOT sustainable. The Lone Ranger is 
over-so over, and cooperation and heartfelt communication will be as 
essential as food and water in a post-collapse world.

I recently had the opportunity in a retreat setting to sit in such a circle, 
not because I am a member of an ecovillage or intentional community but 
because I am in the process of relocating and wanted to practice community 
building with other folks in transition. At first I felt absolutely 
overwhelmed with the amount of emotional work that needs to be done in order 
for community members to bond and build trust with each other. 

At the conclusion of the retreat, however, I felt less pessimistic and 
realized that it is not only possible for community members to consistently 
do such work together, but that when they do, they successfully break through 
their internalized culture of empire and experience and sustain the 
connectedness that empire renders utterly impossible. I'm not talking about 
momentary feel-good experiences where everyone holds hands and dances around 
the world, nor am I talking about everyone agreeing about everything. I'm 
talking about the kind of profound, intimate joining that natural cultures of 
indigenous traditions were able to experience and sustain and which allowed 
them to survive and thrive. And while circles of community building do not 
guarantee survival in the face of collapse, they are remarkably effective in 
facilitating the navigation of collapse.

What is more, every tribe, every community must develop skills for resolving 
conflict. Conflict will and should arise. Its absence is, in my opinion, a 
frightening red flag signaling glaring dysfunction and seething cauldrons of 
unspoken feelings and truths that need to be told. All indigenous cultures at 
their highpoints skillfully navigated conflict-in fact welcomed it as a 
barometer of their community's health. They also developed ever-more creative 
skills for addressing it compassionately and assertively.

So what actually happens in a circle? To begin answering that question it's 
important to understand that a community circle must be leaderless. 
Individuals may take turns facilitating them, but everyone in the group must 
be a leader. Facilitation simply means bringing up a topic or restating one 
that is already on the front burner and making sure that the group adheres to 
already-agreed-upon groundrules. Such groundrules include a commitment to 
stay in the group until the issue is resolved or until the group decides to 
take a break or decides to adjourn until a later time. For purposes of 
safety, everyone needs to agree to stay in the circle and not flee so that 
when someone is working on an issue with the group, they are not abandoned by 
anyone and know that space is being held for them by other group members. At 
all times, the group practices deep listening and compassionate 
truth-telling. When one person is speaking, the rest of the group listens 
attentively and stays present with the speaker. Likewise, when one speaks, 
one does so non-judgmentally using "I" statements, speaking as much as 
possible from a place of feeling rather than intellect or thinking. Perhaps 
most importantly, each person is accountable and takes responsibility for 
his/her part in whatever concerns or complaints he/she verbalizes. Deep 
listening and processing may involve other factors, but these are some of the 
most fundamental.

In facing collapse it is important to develop skills that will be useful in 
navigating it. We hear a great deal about learning permaculture, organic 
gardening, woodworking, composting, catching rainwater, and utilizing 
alternative energy sources, but the two skills without which communities 
cannot be created or sustained, deep listening and compassionate 
truthtelling, are rarely discussed.

As I have stated repeatedly, I do not know how collapse will play out. It may 
culminate in instantaneous nuclear annihilation, sudden economic devastation, 
or some other form of civilization plunging blatantly off a cliff. It may 
also unfold more slowly with consequences equally as dire. Therefore, it is 
important not to embrace the illusion that skills provide magic bullets of 
survival. Who knows who if any of us will survive no matter what we know or 
have experienced?

With every passing day it becomes clearer to me that as civilization 
continues to self-destruct, I need to discern how I prefer to spend my time 
and energy-and with whom. What I least want to do is mimic the culture of 
empire by rationally focusing on logistics and losing sight of humanity. I 
know that I cannot survive alone, and even if I have learned no skills 
whatsoever, I need my fellow earthlings in order to navigate collapse. 
Moreover, even if I have learned every skill imaginable, if I and my 
companions in collapse cannot deeply listen to each other and speak our truth 
with compassion, none of us will survive, and even if we did, an internally 
vacuous emotional domain would render survival nothing less than absurd.





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