Build What You Want to Belong To
The systems around us are bending and breaking. Things not built for mutual flourishing are running into the limits of extraction. Systems built for the many to accrue wealth and power to the few are showing themselves to be brittle and tempestuous under stress.
Resilience in the face of these storms is not born of greater will, but deeper connection.
To meet this moment, we are building a commons that bends toward people and their boldest dreams. Scarcity needs us separate, dis-membered. Because alone, solutions feel hard and heavy. Together, we can build the futures we are dreaming.
Look around: nearly everything a fully flourishing world requires already exists. Someone has already grown food differently, moved money differently, held grief, taught the children, tended the water — somewhere, in small examples, the better world is not far off, it is already here.
Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.
All around the world, humans are gathering in communities and collectives to re-member ways of living, leading, and being in right-relationship with one another and the ecosystems that sustain and support our collective flourishing.
Where these ideas have taken root independently around the world, the remarkable coherence among and across them suggests a field is forming. New models are being re-membered everywhere. We now have the ability to build a commons that connects these efforts so that tiny experiments, made up of the boldest ideas, can turn into a tsunami of progress, one ripple at a time.
This system is operating exactly as designed — which means it can be designed otherwise.
That many systems have dis-membered us from connection and mutual flourishing, means we can re-member our way into a bolder, more flourishing future.
Re-membering looks like this. An idea, ungated, gathers its people. Ideas find people who need them. People who find each other through shared ideas become a field. And a field that can see itself — its words, its gifts, its places, its many intelligences — can find its way to dreaming new futures into being, and building what we want to belong to. No platform can do this.
Nothing that invites persistence for its own sake can hold a collective vision like a commons can. Every body of work, offering its medicine in its own voice, with the ideas themselves acting as the connective tissue: ever easier to find the others.