They tell me that, we get just a few great loves in our lifetime. That it isn’t the length of love that defines how impactful a love is, but its depth, the way that we get pulled towards something with such a gravity, that it has the power to completely rearrange us from within.

As a relationship ecologist, I don’t often get seen as someone in love. I have been told that I’m so committed to the village that no one would be surprised if I committed to a non-romantic relationship that looked like two kingdoms coming together towards a shared purpose of strategically bridging two communities. Which, to be fair, is an idea I’ve entertained.

Yet neither the arranged marriages of the past that intended to unite two clans and modern conceptions of romantic love, where one is expected to meet all the needs once provided by a village, are options I want to be left with.

My heart knows that something else is possible, a kind of love that returns us to our birthright as beings of devotional stewardship of a relational ecosystem. The kind of relationality that centers on wholeness. Returning our spirit to the acceptance we’ve lost in the ancestral severances that had to cut our ties to land and our kin as a way to assimilate and survive.

Love, the kind that bends time, makes impossible possible, invigorates our senses to leap into the unknown, invites us to rearrange each molecular cell in our bodies. It is a love of such immense power and tension, that we can realize we now have the capacity to confront our woundedness with the courage to stay and be with the process of healing.

This last moon cycle, I was met by a love that rearranges.

One that came out of nowhere. One that settled comfortably into all the crevices and cracks left open by past loves. One that shook the entirety of my being and rearranged me within myself. I had all the pieces ready. What I had been waiting for was an earthquake of cosmic intent to lock each piece into its re-knowing of w-holy matrimony with self.

Prior to this love, I had settled on an agreement with myself that I would never choose to open my body to anyone unless I felt I was wholly accepted, where my sense-abilities would be heard, where my community body1 reflected to me the alignment I needed to trust in the synchronistic call of god playing a hand in the becoming of love.

I felt so steadfast in my intention that I told myself I was prepared to go years safe keeping the delicate flower of my vulnerability and the flickering candle of my tenderness, shielding them with a newfound sense that if I reaffirmed my belonging as a divine being and saw my offerings as sacred, I would be met when I fully understood this as true.

To ready myself for this journey, I packed my bag with the wisdom of my elders and ancestors. I held within me the teachings of partnership from earth-based traditions that speak to the purpose and calling of our lives requiring companionship to be in service to a village’s continuity. In Sobonfu Somé’s book The Spirit of Intimacy she describes the West African, Dagara tribe’s tradition of elders receiving the life purpose of a newly born infant from the spirit realm. Holding this information, the elders would offer to the emerging adult, when ready, a life partner to carry this purpose forward.

In this bag I carried on behalf of my longing for this kind of meeting, the poem Terry shared with me when I asked how to know if someone were right for you, in which he recited to me the last four verses of this poem at the peak of a mountain:

In this iron reign

I sing liberty

Where each receives from each

What each most wants to give

And where each awakes in each

What else would never be.

William Stafford

And what Nao expressed to me while peeling loquats, that only after reaching 74 years of age she sees that though we may always find love for another, there is a different kind of love, a truer kind of love she says. One that looks like meeting one who has received the same whisper of soul-direction from god.

This kind of love is not just about loving this kind of love is about arriving.

When we meet a love that rearranges, we’ve arrived at recognizing our own wholeness. We’ve deepened our trust with divinity’s guidance enough to let ourselves go so we may actually be seen in the true depth of our well for receiving and the untapped exuberance bubbling up as our spring gushing to give.

We cannot be rearranged unless we are willing to let it all go, dissolving all lines we thought we’d never cross, sinking into unknown territories that will reveal the chapters we hoped we’d left behind.

It is in our readiness to embrace the risk of not having it at all, that love comes to rearrange us. The more we cling to a version and vision of what our future is meant to look like, the less we open ourselves up to the possibilities of creation.

When we can touch the pulse of what has been fated by the stars, etched by our ancestral inheritances, constellating as the pain and experiences we’ve had, we will know when we’ve been met by a love that isn’t here to complete or fill us… but to rearrange us.

There’s a massive ocean between me and a love that has rearranged me.

He’s moving back to our homelands to start military conscription, a year of apartness, a future that will be defined by a place so different than my home in northern California. I don’t know what’s next, how we might dance in this space. It’s unclear if we’ll ever merge our lives or build a co-created life together as we wayfind through complexities like his recently ended nine+ year long relationship.

What I continue to trust is that we were meant to meet, to collaborate, to learn and to redefine love through knowing one another. It is the largeness of how unknown our future might be due to the constraints of our lives, where I have faith that if god has whispered the same purpose to us at birth, we will re-find each other again and again, wiser and more committed to the unfolding of discovering the call that brings us closer to the Beloved and our gifts to the village.

Amid my inner world being rearranged, I feel the allure of rearranging my outer life to align with this other, of translating the expansion in my body into a readiness for a constant accompaniment to this new love. What is both the gift and the difficulty of our sea of distance is a tempering that I am being offered, a recognition that this rearrangement within is not for myself but in service to life beyond me.

That this rearrangement is here to reflect to me my capacity for love, as love itself. It is not something that is constrained to this relationship, but rather a reflection of what I know is my potential to loving all of life when I remember how deeply I am loved, as a part of divinity and a wonder belonging to this world.

For a moment we get to be in this transience. A state of mesmerizing syncopation, awe in recognition of being met after all the times we’ve felt left. There is an impermanence to these moments and a timelessness.

Being caught in a love that rearranges, requires courage to surrender to the full rearranging. In the past, I’ve needed the secure markers of future vision alignment to feel I could buoy further into sense-making a relationship. To make sure that we would change alongside the same course and choose each other because of a myth that the present was a map for the future.

Yet all the digging, the researching, the diligent discernment does little when you are simply hit by love that asks us to give up all maps in pursuit of charting one’s own course. To feel the heart pieces scrambling to remain in ways they had once known intactness crying with relief in the stretch of a newer orientation towards trying.

And what I hope for me, for you, for us, in this trying; is to give ourselves to it. Not because at the end there’s a prize, or a relationship that continues until death do us part. But because we need to feel, we need to create, we need to remind ourselves that the purpose of life is not to stay comfortable but to fight for our aliveness.

When so much is trying to numb us, kills us, disembody us, extract from us, we get to melt into the hands of love so tender we are led to the feet of the goddess of the earth, our hearts breaking open with a cry only the ground can hold. When we give ourselves to love, we give ourselves to the rearrangement of everything we had been told to believe in, and we get to feel for ourselves what is worth living for.

March and April we had two relationship ecology sessions where we took a landscape view at some relationship queries in the field of relationship ecology. These are framework-y calls with the relationship ecology community that introduce possibilities beyond nuclear family-dom where two people are expected to meet all the needs a dynamic and layered village once did.

The next session is on May 16th 10-11:10 AM PST and it’s called: What kind of repair? From open heart surgery to grieving in solitude.

After this we’ll be announcing our new moon summer sessions for all paid subscribers! Thanks for joining in and being part of this budding network of relationship ecologists.

Read more

Why practice relationship ecology?

There are no roadmaps on the way to returning to village life, to community holding our relationships with reverence, allowing our relational worlds to be in service to feeding the whole. We more than ever are parceling out our little plot where we raise children, take care of elders, caretake for homes, in more and more isolated realities while the world around us wars and dives deeper into this war paradigm.

To sit with the discomfort of holding multiple truths in relationship is part of how we open our relationships to the ecology. To shift our understanding of relationships from mainstream expectations that freeze us in certain roles, means inviting in new ways of discerning trust and safety that can hold more complexity.

Relationship Ecology is our practice of returning to deep and intentional stewardship of our relationships as a land practice, in seeing that how we steward our relationships is how we’ll steward this earth.

We will be shifting towards monthly Relationship Ecology practice groups &

monthly new moon gatherings that will be offered to our community of paid subscribers

new moon gatherings will also be recorded and shared on the blog for paid subscribers, with all the zines/assets that are offered in these sessions.

the new moon gatherings introduce relationship ecology frameworks, while the practice groups offer a space to stretch a little into practicing these skills in real time.

to get a taste of what’s offered in the new moon gatherings I’ve attached a few of the zine pages below:

We are so grateful for your support and care of uplifting this blog and philosophy, and are looking forward to continuing to share and practice together!

I sometimes wonder what it feels to be a bee finding its way across the skies to the open expression of a flower in her brief and beautiful wakefulness of the moment. The feeling that surges through a bear when he senses the closeness of a hive, risking the attack of stings to relish in the sweet creamy liquid gold and the plump larvae hidden in all the delicate crevices diligently crafted by the workmanship of bee-nation.

What might it feel like after a season of rain and snow and the slow turning of the world permitting the sun to linger, just a little bit longer, offering winter a moment to shed its stiffness while the trees by the creek, softened by the sunshine, suck up water from their beds to intermingle with layers of sapwood, thickening with the nourishment of expanded sensitivity.

This living world is brimming with cross-creation, insemination of interspecies procreation, the lifeforce of each being in interwoven cooperation to feed a conspiracy of continual movement that re-re-redefines aliveness.

When I press myself against the pulse of our erotically culminating world, I am returned to the eros that foams at my surface, gravitating me towards mystery, curiosity, and a not knowing that spurs a courage formed in the basin of my sensing heart, to seek a space for creation to be known.

Attraction, I am terrified of what you do to me.

I am afraid of the force in which you present the source of my attention outside of me.

You are a snake charmer coaxing the shadow within me that I am utterly terrified of. A shadow that reveals my most desperate and unruly wildness, the sort of longing that causes atoms to split, explosions to rearrange an inner sanctuary that no longer holds peace in the face of the disruption that you reveal in the wake of your path.

Attraction, do with me what you will, and I will feel what you are truly presenting me to.

The sexuality of the dominating class of men who have directed prostitution rings, raged wars against the feminine, bombed the homes and schools of children and women situates itself as the pornographic authority for dictatorship in what we field as attraction.

Is it the power we are hungry for? Is it the challenge of owning and capturing? Is it the feeling of adrenaline, the distraction, the charge that engages our dopamine centers?

What is the attraction that returns me to this land? The kind that blends my body back into the hillsides. The feeling that has me thrumming with the movements of my ancestors, drawing me closer to their songs, their mountains, their people who welcome me home in surprise that this unseen influence has brought me to their front doors.

When we are drawn, does the calculus of possibilities need to be diagramed, edited or documented? Can we simply surrender to this draw, this closing of a gap, this beckoning ripening like a mosquito attracted to the flow of blood within our veins?

In this world, this culture, I grieve the danger of being an erotic being. My eros is my creativity, my feelings, the expressive force in which the storms and the howling winds in their ferocity clear out the staleness of accumulated grievances, returning us to the edge of death, the place where the orgasmic experience of aliveness is revealed in crescent slivers of revelation.

To fully claim our erotic nature is to no longer be afraid of her. It is to situate ourselves within the birthright of our sensual natures, to recognize that the stretching of boundaries, the leaning in closer that attraction provokes is forcing us to reckon with our restrained realities.

The mating dances of our times has us confused and misguided, shamed and misinterpreted when following the call of attraction. What if this call was never meant to require a direct response but a channel to power our transformation in devotion to the great mysteries our lives are meant to answer?

dancing with the creek and nanu

Attraction within the framework of my young adult days was simply a pathway towards sex. To experience attraction, only pointed towards one avenue of what was deemed a by-in-large, satisfactory experience. It was confusing when I had sex for the first time at 20 years old, and found the experience to be uncomfortable, painful, and isolating.

I figured that this was just how it was. I was too scared to vulnerably express both to my partner or to my friends that this was my experience. I was afraid that I would be cast away, unable to keep up with a culture that forced my authentic experience with the erotic to lay dormant.

Though I harbored within me the eros born from being a child of these sensually alive lands pulsing with the energy of creation, both I and the world around me, were parceled out into pieces, of value for only what could be extractable. A tangible penetrable, minimizing reality of what sex-as-we-know-it has become. Of land as grab-able, own-able, settle-able.

Rather, what I longed to feel was an evoking of our wildness, our curiosity, our pulling outwards into the coursing momentum of a sultry unknown that bridges worlds. So we may be as we are born to be, of the stars, of the galaxies, of this earthly body that stores memories of belonging to the dirt, the gods, a human constellation of a village of beloved kin.

Encountering eco-sexuality

When I was 27 years old, on my way to the coast by the Oregon and California border to meet my partner at the time, I was instead met by a breakup email from him. I had a choice then, to continue the backpacking journey that we had planned together, or to head home.

I decided to continue, too ashamed to head back defeated, having to explain myself to my friends. Rather, I felt I could remain in the grief without having to break the news for at least a week.

The pain I experienced on this trek was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. It was as if my insides were curdling outwards to the world, splitting me apart, wanting to run away from this home that had betrayed them. If my insides were on fire, what was outside me, was a misty sanctuary.

I had found this fern canyon on tumblr when I was only a high schooler. I remember feeling drawn to this place, like magic lived here, and voices from deep below could be heard. Indeed, this was a special place home to some of the last old growth redwood forest in the world. The ground was covered with redwood needles, soft, bouncy, smelling of wet earth, and I walked these pathways barefoot, tears falling from my face, feeling lost but somehow held.

I realized, I didn’t even care that I was no longer in a partnership, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be with this person. What was causing me to rupture inside was the recognition of how hard I had clung to this relationship like a life jacket buoyant to the possibilities I was too afraid to claim for myself. I saw how much I had clung to timelines, to projects, to trips, to people, stripping them from their essential presence and wrapping the descriptions they represented around me to clothe my trembling and naked worthlessness. It was a dire state.

I was at my lowest point.

When you have reached the state of absolute disrepair, where everything you thought you knew falls like scales from your eyes, all that is left is… surrender.

So I did all I could.

I got to my knees. In front of a massive redwood, so large I couldn’t even see where it begun to curve towards its other side. Lowering my head I expressed: my life is not my own anymore. I cannot be the director to this life. I do not know what I am doing. Please, I give my life to you spirit.

It was there that I shelved away any form of planning or future dreaming. I stopped looking to the future, I stopped expecting any kind of outcomes, relationships, friendships. I decided that I would go, a day at a time, into the mystery, into the release of my life to a power beyond me.

And, a year later I came back to this forest. This time, after a year of not knowing, my life had completely shifted. I was living out of my Subaru, learning about my own cultural ways for the first time, reckoning with the embedded supremacy culture I’d internalized and practiced as my own. From a lot of standards, I was a wreck, my possessions in cardboard boxes, untethered to a home, a job, a clear direction for literally anything. I was taking things moment to moment, not even certain where I’d sleep for a given evening.

I was headed to Oregon for a two-week martial arts camp, and I decided that I wanted to stop by the forest I had surrendered to a little over a year before to leave offerings and give thanks to the forest for offering me holding when I had come wounded, weakened, and in despair.

Though most of my external life felt shattered and confused, there was a strength in my spirit that had started to root in faith, in the unknown, in the spiraling circumstances of a life that had surrendered to the unfolding of mystery.

This time, the forest wasn’t cloaked in fog. The sun was out and as I walked on the padded mossy carpet and felt the nourishment of dappled sunlight filtering through the air, offering moments of warm embrace interspersed with the cool exhale of the shade. I was returning to the site of my surrender, the place where I let go of my wizened self, my masked persona, the way I wanted to be seen. I was here, back in the arms of the land that received me at my most destitute.

Feeling her happy and alive, gracious to receive me, I felt my senses light up knowing I could return and be received after showing the darkest least desirable shades of my inner world. It was as if love of immense proportions swaddled me in tender caresses spoken through thick humid air, chattering bird sounds, disappearing and reappearing spider webs, fallen logs melting into the humus of glorious life-giving decay.

Each step I took on the deer paths through the forest, was a partnering with the moment, a reintegration into the cast of nature beings that welcomed me as brethren, as cousin, as entangled in their lives. I was not outside of them but co-witnessing the moment as one.

It was here in gratitude carved out of grief that the love that radiates freely from the beings of the land lifted into the porous membrane of my heart through each wide-open receptacle of my body. Surging from the ground, passing through the whispering breeze, raining down on me as divinity from the skies, my being was electrified and brought to an orgasmic resonance with the brilliance of life gasping open into a movement so engulfed in feeling it filled out each corner of life.

I left this forest with many gifts, and a satisfaction that went beyond satiation for this moment in time. I was changed, reminded of my w-holiness, and reflected that the darkness I descended to was all part of the plan to break me open to feel the resonance of love I was born into.

I long to feel this awakened to the world. In my day to day this erotic recognition that these lands provided me is dulled down, dimmed in fear of being rejected. When I was given the permission to surrender to the depths of my despair and hurt I was able to trust in my belonging and give myself as my most open and receptive to this forest.

“When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.” – Audre Lorde

In fully feeling it all, even the uncomfortable, and to share in this feeling, is where we reveal the kind of intimacy that makes way for the erotic as opening to our power. The fullness, the intensity, the gradations of emotionality – to be sad and joyful at the same time, is to give ourselves to the complex layering of all of who we are.

What I had known as sex and attraction had required me to disassociate from my inner feeling, to cut off my cord to my inner knowing and to present a variation of attract ability that molded myself in the image of what I considered desirable and pleasurable.

Attraction as I had known it was not the electric feeling of being drawn towards, but rather the prize of worthiness that could only be doled out by humans governed by their own inner excitabilities and fallibilities in entrancement.

What eco-sexuality presented to me was a remembrance of the erotic as true permission. The wholeness of my body not separated from the wholeness of my spirit and the depth of my soul. In receiving me fully hollowed out, I was filled in with pure erotic expansion when I revisited the place of my surrender.

I wish for this in human love, and I hope, one day to experience this in relationship with another.

For now, this forest holds a special place in my heart, the kind of lover that changes me, shapes me, moves me towards learning how to receive others in their surrender, their hopelessness, and despair. Which, is, where many of us find ourselves in this time of great turning.

We’ve got practice groups, relationship ecology frameworks, zines & more!

We’d love to see you in our little community of practice :)

Subscribe now

For a few days now, I’ve been watching my friend Marcia practice taijiquan with her taiji teacher.1 Sometimes I follow a little bit, but as a beginner, I’m humbled by the deeper practice, devotion, and responsibility required to fully receive these teachings.

Her teacher has been generous with his presence and the sharing of the poetic basis in which taijiquan sprouts up from. He reminds us of the requirement to be in constant awareness to our gēn 根 root while in movement. Which like the root of this ancient movement, arises from deep within the natural wisdom of the earth.

Embedded in eastern philosophies, is the wisdom of yin yang. My teachers have taught me that a separation occurs when calling it yin and yang, while expressing it as yin yang, we bow to the wholeness of a concept that cannot be separable.

As the teacher shows me moves in the taijiquan form, he points out that before he moves forward, he first returns his energy back to the source foot. Recoiling before striking, harnessing before releasing. He speaks to the importance of returning to yin as naturally as, breathing in before the out breath, into yang.

yin yang

dark light

soft hard

feminine masculine

slow fast

inside outside

receptive active

There is a wholeness to these pairs, inseparable lovers creating the bounds to an array of nuance, pulsating possibilities, slipping in and out of kinds of being that inspire the polarity of the other.

They are at their essences… relationships. Contextual conversations that shift with the seasonality of what is needed based on the timing of the rhythms of the world, the essence that each brings, and the push and pull of relationality.

What we can learn from these balances, what we can learn from our differences in relationship, is a deepening into wholeness, each time we spread our wings to enfold the opposing forces that make what is here possible.

pain pleasure

grief joy

frustration relief

ease difficulty

conflict connection

Staying connected while not being pushed away

One of the concepts that I have learned while tagging along with these taijiquan teachers is 不丢不頂 bù diū bù dīng.

不丢不頂 bù diū bù dīng describes the art of remaining in constant connection, connection to our stem rooted in the ground, our connection to spirit, our connection to our inner feeling, never abandoning this connection even when being pushed or attacked by another.

Whilst this is happening, we are also not grasping hold of, or attaching ourselves, or holding onto the other person. If we are to do so, we’re easily able to be thrown off balance.

This principle within this movement practice speaks to me relationally as well. It is by trusting our interdependence, that we can know we may remain in connection with our root to earth, to spirit, to our inner feeling, and be able to attract and maintain connection without needing to grasp hold of it.

Truly, much easier said than done.

There is a subtlety to what it takes to remain in connection when someone is pushing us, stretching us, and at times attacking us. There is a reason why the great taijiquan masters are notorious for being hermits, tucked away, not eager to share their teachings with just about anyone.

It is a humbling reminder for me, that not everyone deserves our commitment to relationality. In a culture which sees the teacher and student in a hierarchy, the teaching hinges on the skill level of the teacher. In a worldview that sees the teacher and student in a relationship of reciprocity, the student holds equal responsibility for the quality of the teachings.

If we are willing to take responsibility for the quality of our experience in relationship, we might find that the relationships we find ourselves in are only as strong as our practice.

As this nation claims victimhood while perpetuating mass violence, many in this nation claim victimhood by being matched with lovers that we diagnosis, label, and disavow as perpetrators. We do not see the power we have to shape our relationships through our own showing up in dignity, integrity, and care for those around us.

Marcia sends me the notes from her Taijiquan teacher, originating from Yang Chengfu’s ten guiding principles. A line from the notes:

十要訣：虛領頂頸、沈肩墜肘、含胸拔背、松腰落胯、分虛實、上下相隨、內外相合、

Ten tricks: Lift the head and neck lightly, relax the shoulders and drop the elbows, tuck the chest and straighten the back, relax the waist and drop the hips, differentiate between what is solid and what is empty, bottom and top in alignment, inner and outer are united.

The inner emotive realm at odds with the outer expression of our societal faces

Now that I’m surrounded by families2, I’ve held witness to the raw and wild emotions of little children in my community. I’ve seen them fully dissolve into the experience of their emotional worlds, their bodies thrashing, their voices screeching, tears shed most often at the separation between them and the mama.

In a lot of ways, I feel myself in them. When I hear them crying for their mothers, I feel the ache of all that a mother represents. The infinite care, the holding of warmth and compassion, the home that welcomes even the most furious reaction with soothing.

My inner landscape is rife with emotions that don’t know where to go. How do I contend with this anger that rises to the surface like a hot simmering sweltering summer, scorching the land with its rage? Or the torrential downpour of grief soaking the landscape with its impenetrable liquid mass releasing itself from darkened clouds shuttering out the light?

When my insides house such elemental feelings, and I am no longer able to scream and cry as a child with a mama to hold me, I am left to my own tools and devices. Often imperfect, in teetering attempts to communicate, I wonder how I can channel the unattachment of the buddha and release my emotions into the mist.

These attempts to push away my emotions, to suppress them, come from all the ways we’ve been taught to see emotions as problems to solve. I have been told that I need to rid myself of their intensity, to handle them with a professional, or to simply not feel them.

Yet, is it not the case that, the suppression of forest fires leads to larger and more intense fires down the line?

The Japanese have a few sayings that resonate with this discrepancy I feel with what is in my inner realm and what I am “allowed” to express in the outer realm. Honne 本音 is one’s true voice and tatemae 建前, our outside face.3 What is in the inner realm rarely makes it out into the open, and for the most part our outside face, our tatemae is what is more often deemed socially respectable.

In our last relationship ecology practice group,4 I heard a theme from the group: a longing to show our naked faces. The ability to be with our naked faces requires not just the willingness to dive deeply into our emotional atmosphere and barre it for others to see, but a receptiveness that can witness this nakedness as precious, important, and worthy of slowing down for. Not all can notice a delicate flower blooming for just one night, infinitely subtle but nonetheless, a rare treasure generously bridging our connection to the divine.

accepting yin to better yield our yang, learning yang to better nourish our yin

I think many of us have learnt that it isn’t safe to show our naked faces, to speak our honne, whenever we so choose. In fact, those of us who want to live in community and be trauma aware of the pain points, know that active mines burrow into the grounds of our companions’ emotional landscapes, and have astutely learnt how to hold back from the childlike mode of expressing painful internal realms as immediate distress calls.

At the same time, we are also witnessing the impacts of emotions that have been pushed underground, sealing off the source that allows us to connect in vibrant multiplicities, bridging our hearts between one another through this language of connection.5

Understanding our emotions, accessing them, requires an inner tending that for most of us, is a hard-earned skill. Not only is there the difficulty of understanding what current we are experiencing, to communicate these emotions to another person, is a whole lot of dangerous territory in knowing how and when to express.

When did emoting become so suppressed? When did staying connected to our root whilst feeling the pain of others or staying in relation without controlling others become so rife with difficulty? Where are our cultural ways to help us express our inner worlds to community?

There is no cultural protocol to rely on in modernity.

We are witnessing on a massive scale, another reckoning of the patriarchy, revealing layer after layer of deep abuse to our women and children. How shielded and ignorant we are in ignoring the layers of harm that have held up this world.

I use the word we here purposely. It feels simple and easy to point my finger and release the blame, shielding myself from any responsibility. Yet I sense that there is always a part to own, a balance to create. It is in nourishing and supporting yin where yang is encouraged to find health, and it is in wielding yang and discriminately releasing yang where yin is in her dignity.

Where we receive, we transform, where we act, we practice falling back

Yin is the receptive, the feminine, the dark, the slow, the inside, the soft. When we come to yin, we are held, heard, received, rested, brought to the slowness our tiredness lays down its head for.

Yet to remain in this place is to become stagnant, to begin to overuse this softness, get lazy and complacent in this place of hiding. If we understand that balance is a return to our center, our core, our purpose, we must know that to move from yin to yang and yang to yin, is a constant re-centering and reminding of our true natures.

As a mortal human plagued with human woes, I have had my battles with jealousy. How deeply I struggle with the feelings of a wronged woman, the rage of my grandmother moving through me, lashing out at the men in my life for their wanderings, their desires, their being different to me.

Recently I witnessed someone I like deepen with another, and I felt the familiar edge of jealousy, slithering up my spine like a snake, bringing with her a cloud of despair.

Jealousy does not live alone, and soon I was crowded by a room filled with creatures whispering into my ears the disappointments I would soon face, the embarrassment I was about to be met by, the shame I was appointed to for feeling jealousy in the first place.

The instantaneous action I felt to gather intel, to scope out the scene, to control the scenario, leapt from a fear that any inaction would shutter out my opportunity to be in the kind of relationship I have been desperately longing for – romantic partnership that has eluded my grasp for far too long.

But I know this road all too well.

And it wasn’t him I wanted to choose; it was me.

My longings spoke of the possibilities of partnership, but underneath was a deeper search… for my center.

My bazi teacher Meng says, “Yin and yang don’t achieve balance through equal amounts. You only need a little bit of yang to create harmony. That is because yin is naturally responsive. Yin’s nature is to receive. To listen, to take in. Too much yang is dangerous to all, because yang does not like to respond. It’s not receiving input the way yin is.”

In my jealousy, I was urged to act without truly responding from a receptive heart. Rather than welcoming in all the emotions, inviting each of them into my living room,6 offering them tea, taking off their shoes, giving them a place to rest and be heard, I had wanted to immediately cut off connection.

It felt easier to reject the other, than to be vulnerable with the tender longings that were arising within me. It felt like a stretch to be still when all I wanted was to seek out cues that would help me determine whether I should stay or go. Yet I knew in surrendering to yin, yang would emerge in its natural state. Not forced, not grasping, not in controlling what could never be controlled.

So, this time I didn’t search on social media for clues, I didn’t set boundaries or send passive aggressive texts. I just went inwards. I was inside for a while, maybe a few days, riding the waves, watching the fires rage, settling into the wet earth that sunk me down into the fears of a child, the rejection of a mother.

And then, slowly like the rising sun, prickles of warmth began to spread like fireflies on a hot moist southern night. My longings released into presence, and I wandered into the possibilities that would indeed reveal a different kind of story for me and this love interest. And it was okay, and I was still whole, and when he texted me a few days later, I felt the presence of our friendship, alive and well.

A backdrop to the inner tending and outer practice that he knew nothing about.

Jealousy had blocked my view of connection, the realities of relationship when held up to scale and time, how expanded I felt when able to hold uncertainty with ease. When I did respond, it was having cultivated a deep well of yin, in which my expression sprouted from a softened center that could carry my love with vulnerability and care.

we’ve got four live relationship ecology offerings this month! join our growing ecosystem of practice <3.

tune in here

sharing with you all the monthly offerings for paid subscribers & contributors of this work for the next three months. not only are paid subscribers invited to join this community of practice, they will have access to visual graphics and notes that support each of these topics.

as much as i love to write and share in long form, i feel that structure, frameworks, and simple practices are the ways we can truly live into our relational values, and find more ecologically whole ways to relate to our web of relations.

these calls are going to introduce frameworks that will help us to sift through the patriarchal/nuclear familydom/ownership cultures in wayfinding towards villaging and kinship.

we will have some time to share our experiences, be witnessed, and to practice these ways of relating. if you’re interested in becoming a paid subscriber it is a $6/month or $66/year commitment <3. Or as foundational support at $333/year which includes a gift box of our community’s handmade goodies :).

Subscribe now

new moon monthly offerings

in a time of renewal, emptiness, and shadow we gather, offering our ecological inquires to the whole. sign ups at the bottom for paid subscribers!

Are we friends or are we lovers?

March 18th 5PM-6:10PM wednesday PST

Beyond labels, we enter the territory of widening circles of closeness. Rather than following the white rabbit of fantasy, we get to ask, what risk are we taking on together, and how do we choose who to change and be changed by?

Where are we situated in our ecology? What is the timing of our closeness?

April 15th 5PM-6:10PM wednesday PST

Where are we in the season of our life? What stage in the process are we in transformation? A bud cannot bloom without the warmth of a sun gaining closeness. In this session we’ll consider where we are within our ecological niche and begin to discern how to show up in relationship that reflects our natural p(l)ace.

What kind of repair? From open heart surgery to grieving in solitude.

May 16th 10AM-11:10AM saturday PST

Repair and mending whether a rip in our pants, a shattered lamp shade, a crack in the wall, all have a different process towards reconstitution. Sometimes relational repair happens in partnership, sometimes we’re left to do it alone, and if fate has it, we get the opportunity to bring our old stuff to new relationships. In this session we’ll parcel through what kinds of repair are possible, and discern where might we want to put our attention towards.

Relationship Ecology Practice Group

Relationship Ecology joins Loving University March 25th

Sign up for our intro to relationship ecology class here!

new moon offerings sign ups, and links!

Read more

Would a decision hold the same weight if it could not be received? If there was no-one close or important to us to receive our decisive action, would it still be considered worth uttering?

Are not our decisions the longings towards moving mountains, clearing waters, bringing forth to those who matter what is most alive in our hearts? If our decisions are just our own, how do we make sense of why we decision make?

It is in the context of a world of relations that decisions hold their weight. We may claim that our decisions are for ourselves, yet if there is nobody to push our decisions against, combine our decisive forces with, create the conditions that shape our decisions, our decisions would be nothing but sentiments of the heart.

In coming into the truth that decisions are a part of the reality of our entangled lives in relationship, may we be vulnerable about our longings for our decisions to be received by the village as sacred? To be seen for the gravity that our decisions represent is how we are recognized for the places in which we have outgrown ourselves, moved to take action and live the course of our lives with the insight we have now gained.

Yet, what I have witnessed within myself and in community, are the ways in which we still lack the trust and capacity to hold decisions as a shared reality that uplifts the decision maker in what their decision represents and brings in the needs of those who are impacted by the decision itself.

Too often I see us collapse when receiving impacts. We feel that if an impact is shared, we will not be able to, “get what we want,” and our decisions will be snatched from us, and it would serve us better to hide away our decisions, guarding them like a dragon might guard their eggs.

This dynamic maps onto many realities of our current world. The ways we have gravitated towards models of ownership over cooperation, domination over co-discernment, stonewalling and isolating over vulnerability and community process. It has for a long time, felt far easier to mark our territory than it has been to integrate the disturbance through a discerning dance of what is yours, what is mine, and what is ours.

A chance for decisions that land within the collective body

There’s are differences to the stages of decision-making that reflect the process in which a decision matures into good compost for the soil. It’s when a decision deeply lands and sticks within the collective body when we know we’ve heated up the compost pile enough for things to break down.

There are times when we speak decisions into the ether and it brings us a personal sense of security to release, but we might find that others in the collective body still feel tension, confusion, or unease. It’s possible that even after a decision is made, we don’t experience the peace we expect to after our boundaries have been named.

What often goes unspoken is that our decisions are never just our own. They touch upon those around us, and as relational beings, we long for our decisions to land not just for our own protection and agency but also to be nourishment for the whole.

It is a foundational belief in relationship ecology that we all offer to the ecology a potent and special kind of being that is only ours to offer and access. A blue jay has an offering completely different to a fern, yet both belong and are integral to the whole. It is in coming closer to resonance with what this offering is, where we begin to make decisions that coalesce with our sacred calling, trusting that it will feed and nourish the whole regardless of how it might be received in the beginning of a process.

The more we recognize our decisions as part of an integrated and flowing collection of experiences that dynamically upend and feed one another, the more we begin to hold decisions from a process orientation rather than a frozen and stagnant statement that reflects an unmoving expression to all situations and all possibilities.

When we bridge the understanding that our decisions are expressions of our sacred offerings to the world and the recognition that decisions are mutable, relational, and in mutuality, we arrive at the table not with a set, perfect, and clear decision but a presence and trust in the collective to hold the answers within our embodied yeses and nos.

Rather than reach for the perfection of the right decisive action that’ll meet all our needs, we have trust in the collaborative togetherness that’ll reveal the right decision through the commitment to staying with ourselves and encouraging the other to stay with themselves. Surrendering to the knowing that decisions which land in the collective body will compost into good soil, helps us recognize our part in co-discerning for community wellness over instinctual self-preservation.

resiliency in relationship requires acceptance of the constancy of impacts

When we are in panic1 our response to situations of great overwhelm is to go with whatever strategy we’re most comfortable with in attempts to immediately meet our needs. That could look like stepping out of relationship to take much needed space to regulate our nervous system or expressing angrily in attempts to receive attention and understanding.

Our well-versed protectors rise to the occasion when we feel backed against a wall.

Yet, these protective mechanisms, work to meet our immediate needs, but do they lead towards expanding our capacity for collaboration, growth, and connection down the line?

In our dreams of a renewed future that looks like village, models of shared land stewardship, schools that are not priming us into accepting carceral and militarized systems; we are faced with the question of who and what can genuinely evoke these alternative realities into being?

Is it our political leaders? Our economic systems? The state, or the federal government? Who do we turn to when we long for change? Is it true that we can take care of our own, and if so, why do so many of our visionary collectives and communities dissolve and disintegrate?

One sad but salient reality I often sit with is, how few of us have been nurtured to relate in relationships as adults. We have been given boatloads of stories of what love looks like: sacrifice, submission, people pleasing, self-betrayal.

We do not witness on a family scale, a community level, or a global political level, the ability to meet impacts on the other with the capacity to uphold these impacts as the key towards truth. When a hurt or impact is named, we witness how quickly this is dominated by power that fears what might get in the way of the train hurdling towards its destination.

The inconvenience of slowing down to tend to discontent is quite cumbersome when we’d prefer to find safety in the certainty of an isolated perspective. Inviting in impact, not fearing our impacts or the impacts of others, cultivates relationships that can endure, last, and be resilient in the face of the many seismic impacts of our current political and ecological reality.

If we as a continent, a nation, a community, a household can slow down to integrate what those of small island nations, houseless communities, children, elders, those at the edges, our parents who seem outdated, are saying, what world might we create?

If we invite the world around us to be part of our decision making, no longer seeing our absolute autonomy and race towards success as the only path towards belonging, might we partner with the pain, find wisdom in the impact, and grow trust in living outside of the echo chamber of our own mind?

以其不爭，故天下莫能與之爭。

Because he does not compete, the world cannot compete with him.

Chapter 66, Dao De Jing, Li-Young Lee and Yun Wang translation.

What looks to be in the way of lumbering towards certainty is perhaps, the answer. When difficulty arises and dashes our plans, this perhaps is not the enemy but the solution.

Making decisions for others; instant ease, distancing relatives

I learnt this past year what it means to try and make decisions that are “my own” when deciding whether to leave a community. I had been frustrated and upset with the community I was a part of for a variety of reasons, and I felt it was in my best interest to leave.

On the surface, I had my reasons for all the ways I wasn’t seen, the ways I felt undervalued, the moments where it seemed like the values of the community didn’t meet my expectations. Hidden under all these layers of resentment, assumption, and frustration, was a tiny voice expressing how little they felt they belonged, how afraid they were to show their neediness and vulnerability, and how sad they were to step away.

It was, in a lot of ways easier for me to conceptualize claiming my own autonomy and freedom by stepping away and making my own decision than it was to come raw and honest with the pain I carried in my heart.

But by choosing to walk away and base my decision on leaving on behalf of the voices on the surface; I wasn’t giving people the opportunity to genuinely meet me. I was orchestrating a complex symphony of trying to get my needs met through the strategy I felt most comfortable with.

The strategy that gives us the sense of the most control often feels to be the safest. It is the tried-and-true plan, it meets us in our urgency, and the immediacy of relieving our responsibility to hearing the other. When we set out with the clarity of what needs to happen for things to work out how we want them to, our body relaxes, our nervous system feels at ease, we find instantaneous relief at the clarity of what the future holds.

However, because this clarity is uninformed by those impacted by our decision, the result of the decision, in my experience, never hits on a deeper level. Part of it, is that there are deeper needs of belonging hidden beneath the immediacy of safety, comfort, and ease. When we make decisions that relieve our surface needs and not what drives the pain inlaid in our decisions, we get to move on, but not to heal these deeper wounds.

Rewriting old patterns through integrating the impact held up by others

Having withdrawn from communities when getting too close to my unbelonging wound, I had a lot of experience with tapping out and silencing my needs as a strategy to preserve my nervous system and hide from vulnerability.

This time around, I got to experience something different. The deeper we go in taking on shared risk, intimacy, and commitment, our most painful wounds start to surface. It is not a matter of who2 instigates our wounds, it’s a matter of when.

This time, two people in the community, started to express to me the impact that me wanting to leave the community was having on them. At first it felt annoying, it was like they were thwarting my plans by demanding to be seen in their hurt and frustration with my decision. They expressed how it would change their lives to see me go, how it would change their relationship with me, how scared they felt by the sudden departure I was proposing to take.

At first, I was defensive, how could they not see the hurt I was experiencing? Wasn’t it my right to do what I wanted to do with my commitments?

Yet they kept reiterating how confusing it was to receive a decision like, leaving the community, because it wasn’t nuanced, it wasn’t clear, it didn’t acknowledge the agreements I made when joining the community.

And then they started asking me questions like: is this decision coming from your child or adult self? Do you see the difference between expressing your emotions and genuinely being vulnerable? If you were to partner with us in asking the community to meet your needs, what would that look like?

This process of discerning how to be with this decision of whether I should leave the community started to stretch out over the course of days, weeks, then months. At first, I felt anger towards them because I saw no other way to respond to this pain, so how could they expect anything else?

But what began as a decision to leave the community started to reveal a different story. That what was happening was I was beginning to encroach the depth that my darkest, most painful community rupture had formed within my body and spirit. I started to soften to the recognition that the decision was more of a reaction to the fear of feeling the pain of these past experiences than it was about being the “right” decision for me.

By being with this tangle of emotional sifting, they supported me to stay with the intensity, making smaller decisions that cleared me up to discern even further.

I stepped back from the weekly meetings and found within me what felt like a genuine contribution to the community. I stepped off the group chat and realized I had the opportunity to feel belonging outside of the false pretense of belonging that the chat had offered me. I left the teams and stepped up to support the plaster efforts of a house being built, committed another year to continuing to build for the community as a separate organization, and began to invite in projects that wove my home into the community ecosystem even though I had moved 8 miles away.

What I had declared as leaving the community was my attempt to be with the truth that I was coming into a deeper recognition of maturation within myself that the community had supported me in actualizing. But when I sat with this truth alone, I felt my only option was to separate and sever because I couldn’t imagine a possibility of integrating my new self into the community because it required vulnerability to be seen in my change and even scarier, the possibility of rejection for those changes. Of course I couldn’t imagine this alone, it wasn’t mine to do alone because it required the participation of others!

Resonating within me was Malidome Somé saying, “conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.” And in a live system and ecology, as we stick with community for longer, our deeper wounding will undoubtedly begin to surface, asking for more healing.

Recently, the two people who’d expressed the impact of my decision on them, shared with me that they felt home with me, and felt that I was integral to their family. I knew it was a big deal for them to share this, and I knew that they felt this with me because they trusted I would slow down enough to integrate their experience into my decision-making process.

When I would get into a mode of determination to make a change “for myself,” I noticed that I would lean on decisions that would immediately empower me in a sense of autonomy but hide the deeper needs that would make me vulnerable to admitting to the relational needs I was too scared to name I need.

So, as a placeholder, my learnt self-preservation within domination culture, that expects freedom and satisfaction from believing only I know what is best for me rises to the occasion.

Perhaps it is our trauma of having loss our communities and our fear of the grief inherent to relationships that has us veering towards stories that verify the decision-making process of one. It isn’t a bad choice; it just doesn’t lead towards the collective integration of creating good soil for our mutual growth and deepening.

I don’t want healing that only supports my own pathway to surviving capitalism. I want healing that cultivates the ground for all our children to grow up in an ecosystem that doesn’t require them to conform in order to be loved.

The being into family, asks who we are accountable to creating good soil with

In a culture that doesn’t know family outside of nuclear familydom norms, the cultivation of spirit kin is one of the radical acts of being into family-hood that attempts to weave tighter threads of togetherness.

By making ourselves vulnerable to the impacts we have on each other, we welcome the grand opportunity that this offers to us in seeing that having impact is a sign that we matter! We easily default into the punitive narrative that impacting others is a reflection of our badness, and requires “doing time,” to clean our slate.

When we recognize that fielding the emotional impact others express has little to do with our moral legitimacy, and everything to do with the other’s longing to belong in relationship to us, we can live in the in-between zone where creative nuance and the practice of co-discernment live.

It is when we invite in all the ingredients, the dying excrement, the porousness necessary to heat up the living organic matter, the literal mess and gunk of it all, to sit, aerate, and transform in front of our eyes, where personal decisions fall away from their seat of importance and we recognize the futility in designing our lives, and the sacred mundanity to being loved through the mess.

In living with the messiness in community, we don’t get to have the clean decisive narrative that our set decisions get to curate. Rather, we must wait to see what must be added and balanced for the compost pile to fully evolve into good soil. It is a practice of sitting with the discomfort and allowing relationship to evoke our actions, where we discover the endless possibilities available to us when co-discernment becomes a practice we can trust.

To make good soil in this lifetime, I know I must transform the traumas I’ve inherited and co-created. I want to be accountable to what’s possible when taking seriously the work of building structures that house movement. The kind of movement that knows how to cycle and die well, naturally and with dignity for all, the kind of movement that knows life is at each stage, and can gently transform with the slow ease of the cycles of the land.

Thank you all for reading, this was a meaty one, and again as usual has enlivened within me many pathways and tendrils of further elaboration. Rishi and I will be offering two more practice groups this month, and we would love to see you there, sharing with us your relational inquires in a space curious about how we might cultivate the kinds of kinship that can create worlds of renewed possibilities.

There is something fascinating to me about the rise of hook-up culture in modernity. The long, drawn-out era of courtship, community selection of mate ship, and sex after marriage has faded out of fashion.

In college I took an anthropology class where I learnt about the cultural protocols that aboriginal groups practiced, in which structurally embedded forms of limiting contact through male/female separation, totem practices that distinguished appropriate partners, and abstinence before and after rituals restrained the sexual possibilities within the culture.

Perhaps the phrase “restrained the sexual possibilities,” is a reflection of my own conditioning in a culture that has both made sex taboo and perverted it in a way that has enlarged our imaginations to obsess over its significance.

Sex is indeed a potent and powerful practice, one that instigates life, facilitates connection, and drives billions of dollars in industries promising the possibility of becoming more sexually attractive.

I am a proponent of sex, and have supported sexual encounters in my community ecosystem (more on that another day), and I am troubled by the ways we have lost any kind of system of making sacred this act that can acknowledge the depth in which sex cords our relations, creates significant shifts within ourselves, and might require the wielding of eldership, community ritual, and containment within a cultural context.

Even more so, I feel that the popularity of hook-up culture has made us blind to the subtleties in relationality that lead towards kinship. In seeking the hook-up, we indulge in the headlines of the other and formulate grandiose narratives that match our appetites all while the Soul in the other which moves at the pace of geological time1 is unable to be known because the hook-up overrides the yearlong reality that trust requires, when we rush to indulge in our intrigue.

It is a sour time for those who have questions about the marriage arrangements of modernity and feel the loss of ancient cultural wisdom that could help steer these waters of love and attraction. Yet still, what hook-up culture tells me, is that we are hungry for relationship. The hook-up is not to be frowned upon, to be thrown out, to be dismissed or shamed. It is to be wondered with, recognized as a desire to be seen, a thirst for depth in relating, and a lust for building a fire of longing for belonging, and the seeking of presence, rest, and play.

Yet I don’t know if the arc of modern-day hook-up culture satisfies the truth of these longings, with its drive to seek out refuge in the body comfort of another’s human form. What is chased after, is in the dimension of the spiritual, the Soul.

The fire of longing is not of flesh but of purpose.

What would it look like to see who we pursue as lovers as what our spirits have once known as kin? Bred of the same soils, companions to the mystery of our destiny, here to hold us in the rituals of life and the transformation of our Soul calling itself into its initiation of adulthood.

The expectations of what are hidden beneath the “casualness” of the hook-up reveals that our intention to bind are related to fulfilling the greatest commitments we hope to make in our lifetimes. Children, home, family, belonging, purpose, and worth. When we have lost faith in the mystery in which these pieces might reveal themselves, the hook-up offers a caffeine boost towards making good progress on these basics of humanhood that we’ve been robbed of.

I feel grief with the ways the hook-up have filled the void that the knowing of kinship once offered. I have experienced the transformation of relations I’ve hooked up with into kin. And these experiences have helped me see that attraction in modernity is a trickster, one that can be partnered with or made a fool of.

The attraction we felt, the desire to deepen, and the hook-up looking like the only way towards closeness, was our attempt to wayfind towards radical belonging with relations beyond what the nuclear family system allows.

When there has been such a loss of cultural protocol providing us with a structure to belong to one another outside of hierarchical relationship norms2, hooking up attempts to bridge our isolation with the promise of sharing a bed. We have not found ways to sleep side by side without the sexual implications of what that might mean or the relational steps it takes to feel safety in that place of much needed human to human warming.

These roles of kinship, where our indigenous ways of being siblings, sleeping side by side, companions to the mundanity of life have been severed. In family systems uprooted from the village, our sibling relationships are rife with conflict and irreparable dispute. We live across vast oceans from each other, physically or spiritually. Kinship is not a well-known practice, and yet it is deep within the memory of our humanness.

What would it look like to witness our attraction, our sexual intrigue, through the lens of seeking out kin? How might that soften and slow our expectations of a perfect, box ticking, lover into the loving desire to witness the steady changing growth of a creature transforming through the seasons?

The power of claiming the authoring of kinship means rerouting our energy towards the quiet meandering journey of the sacred mundanity in the everyday. The hook-up activates the instantaneous closeness fueled by the hormonal whirlwind of attachment technologies, often leaving us shattered by the promise of what could have been.

Was that the heartbreak of having been deeply loved? Or the heartbreak of the brokenness of a culture that leaves little room for the closeness of a beloved that claims no title to our lives but merely the presence of having witnessed our journey’s winding pathway into a deeper form of self-love?

What kinship offers is the cultivation of our Soul path through the companionship of mornings over coffee together, witnessing conflicts that wreck our entire sense of security, tender hugs that lead nowhere sexual but remind us of the vulnerable bodies that hold together this vibrant and painful living in visceral beholding to the divine.

I feel only respect and love for the hook-up as the societal rite of passage that helped me reckon with the emptiness that these fantasies of modernity promise in withholding us from the search of our village birthright. As I awaken to the deeper wisdom and insight that attraction points to, I welcome it as the hand of the goddess bringing me back into the life we’ve been destined for where the rituals our kin call us into become the fodder for our passion to live a purposeful life.

This purpose, in relationship ecology, is only felt in our connection to being of service to the whole. It is in deeply fulfilling our role within the ecosystem, where the satisfaction of wholeness is understood.

Is kinship not our return to wholeness? Is attraction not seeing in the other a reflection of the exiled parts of ourselves? The parts that were once dismissed, suppressed, unseen, and unacknowledged. That this other we feel so drawn to represents these parts so freely in their expression of self.

The light we witness in those we feel attraction for might tempt us to grasp hold onto an identity they represent and claim it for our wholeness. We cast our nets of promise to the other in hopes of capturing this light that had been denied to our children within.

Yet what kinship offers is an opportunity to expand our fabric of self to a collection of relations. To enjoy what is evoked in the attraction might just be all that is needed to seed a connection rooted in spacious unfolding.

The subtle sensual nature of the land brings us pleasure when we take root and slow things down. The thunderstorm requires a reframe of beauty to appreciate its potency and power. Our sicknesses and injuries are scorned until we find messages hidden between the pain.

The hook-up promises radical, throttling, hormonal adrenaline that serves up the experience of falling in love.

The kind of love the land asks of us, requires patience, quietude, humility, and reverence. It is the land which knows how to meet us in our darkest grief, our most painful and shameful thoughts, receiving the literal excrement and decay of our bodies.

I believe that I am called into kinship ties to learn to love like the land. I am being asked to be a brother, a sister, an auntie, an uncle, a father, a mother, a child and a grandparent as humanity once knew whole family systems, village life, and belonging not out of Capital success but in a grounded knowing that we belong to this world and the world belongs to us. In belonging, love circulates, and we can trust in the return of this love merely because we are.

As kin harm and oppress kin in these times, what we are being called into is learning how to show up in a deeper practice and recognition of the work of kinship. That attraction as a pathway points to the places where we long to belong to ourselves and the world, as relative, as remembrance, as a w(holy) initiative in exploring relationship with the curiosity and patience needed to renew our disconnection to relating with the depth of the land.

More on healing our wounds in non-blood familial relations soon… I am headed on an ancestral trip mixing four families of spirit kin with blood kin and there will be much reflection from that I hope to be sharing soon!

Rishi and I will be offering Relationship Ecology practice groups up until April this year, with an update as to what’s next after that. It’s going to be a pretty awesome opportunity to navigate your *live* relationship dynamics in community with a relationship ecology lens, so if I were you, I would sign up as soon as you can!

Hello dear subscribers of Relationship Ecology!

Rishi & Kylie have something exciting to share — we’ll be hosting our first relationship ecology practice group for those of you who are wanting to deepen with this work live.

We’ll be holding an online practice space Monday Feb 9th at 5PM PST.

This is indeed an offering for our paid subscribers on either of

our individual substacks as well as to our relationship ecology paid subscribers.

​Come become kin with the world around us as we practice villaging and grow our capacity to lean on relationships instead of systems of domination.

​We will embody and engage with our live relational dynamics and situations through the frame of relationship ecology, opening space to reflect and to encounter ourselves.

​Our hope is to dance with and transmute these active dynamics with the aim of growing together towards collective healing.

​This might be for you if you:

• ​want to witness and be witnessed in your relational world

• ​share an intention to grow collective capacity to liberate ourselves from dominating forces

• ​feel excited by the following words: eco-sexuality, villaging, relationship ecology, and kinship

• ​wish to be supported in vulnerability around relational process

Hope to see you there! The invite link will be revealed to those who subscribe in financial support of our community <3.

Read more

The second/third growth forests in this region speak to me of the realities of this lifetime. Growing up in this time of great turning1 I might never taste the ancient and new way of relating to each other, yet it doesn’t mean I can’t still be participating in the way-making of those pathways.

This blog is an altar in devotion to the gods of relationship. Seeing the possibilities and potentialities of relational work to aid in healing ancestral pain, and the interpersonal–systemic2 conflicts of the world. Relationship work is not the only avenue to cultivate change in the world, but it is one of them, and a potent one at that. Our relations shape our reality, and if we want to participate in the doula-ship of a new world, we can harness our relational change to transform our day to day lives, in turn impacting the ecologies all around us.

Relationship Ecology is more than a cute way to connect nature to our relational webs. It is a direct response to the earth calling for a relational rehaul, a recognition of her hurt, an invitation to face our shadows. And what has become clearer to me overtime, is the recognition that expanding our notion of shared risk and inviting relationship to take this on with us, is like learning to prescribe fire to our forests in need of a clearing.

Taking on shared risk with relations is growing our skillset to navigate crisis. It is working out our muscles so when we arrive at uncertainty, we know what to do. When we have tools to tend, repair, collaborate, and reconstruct3, we house within ourselves the future world we are breathing into being.

When looking at a nation that is actively harming its own kin, we must have the courage to look at the parts of ourselves that take to strategies of dehumanization, control, and oppression when scared.

“What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be,” –James Baldwin.

What this post is talking about, is the path towards planetary healing that requires our inner work and interpersonal work. And only when we take on shared risk, can we begin to confront, see, and integrate our shadows, our monsters, our inner cops.

Relationships solely founded on feelings, give us the illusion of wellness. But when we recognize them as reflections on a water surface, wavering and dissipating when the water roughens, we might find our way to the hard-earned place of relationships that vulnerability, trust, and conflict construct.

Being human once meant kinship, interbeing with a fabric we knew ourselves to be a part of. Knowing that our backs were protected by relations ready to defend, able to make amends, and welcome us back with ceremony. To enter the level of depth that these relationships of kinship offer, we must be willing to take on shared risk. Shared risk is the practice space, the arena of discovery, the place where wounding will take place but is also the gateway to thresholds of intimacy: where descending deepens our belonging, safety, comfort, creativity, autonomy, and play… with the world around us.

Shared risk, a dangerous opportunity

I have gotten a lot from integrating the term shared risk into my relational vocabulary. When I gather up all the ways shared risk is present in my relationships, I can understand the depth we are swimming in. Sometimes, we dive too deep without the proper equipment, or the practice of holding our breath. Sometimes, we explore the depths and learn the depth we can navigate, and the pacing of descent possible.

Many of us seek out relationships thinking they can be anchors of safety for us. We might gravitate towards people who promise us a possibility of what we want in our lives. This is not something to feel shame about, it is simply our souls seeking out healing and wholeness through relating with the other.4

When we can recognize that our yearnings for creating home, building a co-created life, collaborating on vision together, eroticism, are very much ways to meet our needs for safety, belonging, and connection, we can release the other as the key to these goals. Rather, these longings provide for us, valuable practice spaces where we may journey down into the thresholds of intimacy, enlivening the warrior of love we house within us.

Gil Gomes Lead says, “safe spaces do not exist. Safe spaces are controlled spaces. There’s always an element of risk.” It is this element of risk that is ever present in relationship and is the white rabbit leading us into the dark unknown of these thresholds of intimacy.

What feels to me to be the biggest distinction between our human constructed reality and nature, is our relationship to control. In nature, nothing is controlled, everything flows in an embodied response to all that is around us, constantly creating impacts that lead to the next. In our human constructed cities and sites of conflict, we enact our will over each other and the environment, breeding safety in a type of certainty that can never be met.

I often hear in community this concept of crisis5 from the Chinese phrase 危机 weiji. In Chinese, characters don’t usually appear on their own. It is in pairing where their meaning is made. 危 wei when paired with 险 xian, is 危险weixian dangerous, and 机 ji when paired with 会 hui, is 机会 jihui meaning opportunity.

It is within crisis that there is both the possibilities of danger and opportunity, depending on what partnering of characters is available. It is within crisis where who and how we partner determines a collapse into danger or a rising to the opportunity at hand.

What Relationship Ecology aspires to is regaining our reverence for shared risk. Here, the distinction is in the word shared. We often take risks in relationship. Whether that looks like sharing vulnerably from our heart, our longing, our desires, or even our traumas,6 taking the step to sharing the risk, requires a whole lot of work, reverence, humility, and practice.

Taking on shared risk is not an endeavor for the light of heart. Stepping into shared risk means challenging our very notion of safety as constructed by the capitalist regimes at large. It requires a descent into the unknown, an odyssey into dangerous territory that has the potential to hurt us so bad that we are burnt to ashes, only able to rise again as a phoenix with a defiant heart choosing to love again after death.

To heal one’s wounds, to reveal one’s scar tissue, and yet to return to love is the passkey for descension through these thresholds of intimacy.

In this blog post, we’ll be exploring together four thresholds of intimacy. There is so much more I want to share on this topic, like the complexity of giving and receiving within these arenas when enculturated by capitalist exchange culture, but the focus of this post is to invite us into looking at our relationships through the lens of shared risk, rather than feeling.

It is easy to feel a sense of closeness when things always feel light and easeful. Yet if we haven’t taken on shared risk and conflict, that closeness can easily dissipate. These thresholds are places where we reinforce relationship through navigating uncertainty, and choosing again and again, to show up, naked to love.

Cattails Comix

So, are you ready to descend into exploring these thresholds?

The thresholds of belonging through shared community

Each one of us living in modernity has a belonging wound. From the beginning of our lives, we have been oriented to a culture of competition, scarcity, and extraction. We have been enculturated to see our value in exceling, dominating, controlling, and putting others down. This is how the US treats countries with little power and agency, bullying them in giving away their access to water, land, their languages, their cultural ways.

It is this domination of indigenous lifeways within this country and in lands all over the world, where we have misinterpreted belonging as privatization. If we have ownership, we feel we belong. Yet if those who have access to most of the world’s resources truly felt belonging, would they continue to be hungry for more?

When we belong, we know we matter. We know that our decisions, our relationships, our transformations, our dreams, our livelihoods matter to the people around us. We know that support is there when we seek it, we know that regardless of what we do, there are people rooting for us, praying for us, thinking of us.

To create communities that have this level of fortification; to hold us in our belonging, we must wade into deeper territory. The barista at our local café we see each day, may provide us familiarity, comfort, and connection, but they are not going to reinforce our belonging within a wider web.

What is required for deepening our threshold of intimacy through shared community, is to take on the risk of weaving a web of interconnected community. One where the layers of connection and nodes of knowing each other buoy us into a messy relationality that doesn’t allow for anyone to sever without impacting the whole.

We entangle, knowing that when conflict arises, our relations will keep us enfolded in the dynamic, and our shared community becomes the container that reinforces our return to relationship. When we return to relationships, changed, and ready for repair, our sense of belonging grows, enforcing our self-trust in our capacities to withstand the necessary rite-of-passage that conflict presents.

I have often heard people saying, “I will never date anyone in community,” while I often say, “I will only date someone in community.” For me, I see the power of communing intimately with someone who is beholden to relations I am beholden to. I recognize that the belonging I seek returns me to belonging to the whole.

What we’ve been so deprived of is a knowing that we are integral to this fabric of life, that the village remembers us, that our kin want to welcome us home. When we grow shared community, when our friends know our families, when our partners are friends with our roommates, when the children see our friends as aunties, when we date our friends’ best friend, we are called into reverence, slowness, recognition of w(holy) matrimony.

It is a threshold that requires us to step into discernment, integrity, and walking with purpose. It is quicker, faster, cleaner, and less risky to build relations of shared interest that don’t overlap. When we interweave, the risk of pain, discomfort, and our deepest belonging wounds heighten. The beast of unbelonging we had thought we had tamed in our presentable boxes of identity, lurches into action.

A shared community constructs foundations of intertwined root systems. These root systems know when to transport medicine to the places calling for help,7 and when we slowly grow trust through weaving our nets of relations, we can call upon this support to remind us that we matter. In mattering, and being reminded of this, we may heal.

The thresholds of safety and comfort through living together

There will be a day where I will write a much longer thorough piece on this threshold. Living together is extremely complex. And the way I see living together, is in sharing the material risk of taking on a home, car, food, livelihood costs with those I’m living with. Living together has many thresholds beyond just sharing space together.

Sharing space is one threshold, another is financial intimacy8, and another is cultivating systems of support within our households that allow people to emergently change their needs whilst retaining closeness to the home. An example of this, is within the traditional models of renter/owner, if someone wants to leave on a long trip, they usually are responsible for finding a subletter to take on their room when they are away.

However, if a group sharing a home wants to take on supporting this transition, knowing that whoever lives in the home will impact those in the home the most, they won’t see this decision as a responsibility of the person leaving, but rather as something to take on for the entirety of the household. Both in inviting in someone who can grow and benefit from the space, and in allowing the person who’s leaving to be held in mutual support, creating a culture that reinforces belonging.

When we live together, our capacities for rest, comfort, and safety, rely heavily on the cultivated holding of the household. When we think back to our homes of origin, many of us didn’t feel a sense of safety or comfort in our home spaces. It is in this threshold where we can push on the edges of what creates this safety and comfort. Is it our ability to shape the home space itself? Or is it the relational fluidity between the people in the home?

There are infinite ways to experiment, and multiple dimensions of learning ourselves through the process of living with others. I often feel like this work is a portal, an opening into thresholds of intimacy beyond living together. And it is a good place to begin.

The thresholds of creativity and autonomy through collaborating on Vision

If you’ve made it this far, I have no doubts that within you is the harboring of Vision. Vision with a capital V, is what our world is constructed from. The Vision of those who believe food is medicine, each being is sacred, that lives should not be unjustly taken, that the earth is a living breathing being, these Visions fight the nightmares of limited beliefs of a scarcity minded, take-all approach that believes one lifetime is all there is.

When we connect to Vision, we are situating ourselves as the w(holy) inheritors of both the earth and the heavens. We give ourselves to purpose, to life outside our own, to transmuting the traumas for a future we can give to our grandchildren.

It is in these Visionary realms where we can exercise creativity and passion, we connect with those who long to transform our schools, our workplaces, our food systems, our governing bodies. It is also a place for collaboration, bringing together community… and conflict.

We might share radical Visions of village with our loved ones, but the route to this place together may be rocky. To name the number of failed projects I’ve undertaken to collaborate on Vision, would be embarrassing to name, but there’s likely been dozens of iterations of falling apart, disintegration, or outright severance of relationship.

Perhaps what I can offer from my own failures, is the invitation to center how the Vision lives within your own life. How it expands or shrinks depending on the collaboration, or the roles we take on within collaboration. Does it lead towards movement, flow, synchronicity? Or does it stagnate, lie dormant, feel oppressed by the collaboration?

When we can move together in Vision whilst remaining creative and autonomous, we deepen in our trust of the universal law of right place, and right timing.

To enter the threshold of collaborating on Vision, is a practice of self-intimacy, of cultivating relationships that allow us to be seen and heard in our expressions of creativity and autonomy. Allowing the relationship itself to be the Vision, is to release the goal and center the relationship when conflict emerges. Slowing down when things are not working and tending to the heart of things, seeds the soil for creative expression and the autonomy of when a group of souls are called to do their work in service of its piece within the collective Vision.

It is a risky endeavor, to invite in collaboration of Vision. But it is a threshold of intimacy that houses the important practice of staying centered in what you are uniquely here to do, while recognizing one’s work is always in connection to the service of a larger interconnected ecosystem.

The threshold of play through sexual and erotic intimacy

When I was younger, sexual intimacy was deeply rooted in a desire for validation, connection, and being wanted. It was an arena in my life where I exercised manipulative tactics to manifest experiences that confirmed my desirability and gave me peak moments of being seen.

After many years of sexual experimentation, what I have been reckoning with is that deep emotional vulnerability often uses sexuality as a mask. That to reveal one’s sexual self, is to make seen our childhood wounding, our relationship to being loved, and the strategies we use to prevent ourselves from abandonment.

It is in this reframe where I have begun to tread much more tenderly in the arena of sexual and erotic intimacy, and veer on the edges of eco-sexuality and community eros. These are two concepts I hope to share in future times, as I am still in-process of verbalizing them.

What is becoming clearer for me, is the importance of decentering sexuality as pure penetrative, hetero-normative sex. Sexuality and eros is the pleasure in light streaming through the windows illuminating the magical dust particles dancing in the atmosphere. It is the channel that runs through the top of my head down the passageway at the base of my yoni, energizing me with the guidance of the heavens and the holding of the earth.

It is pure play, childish wonder, inhibition of sound, movement, and tears.

To invite another into this form of intimacy, is different than practicing the rote memorization of porn-infused-sex-as-we-know-it. It is an invitation asking to be understood, seen, revered as sacred, coming to the temple, as offering, as god and goddess wrapped by a fleshy, vulnerable membrane powered by a beating heart.

When recognized in this way, the risk of sexuality and erotic intimacy, is in the reveling of our wholeness at every moment of the day. Sexuality and eroticism don’t begin when we take off our clothes, it begins when we accept the nakedness of being true to our senses, of following the whiffs of inspiration, the feelings our bodies need to release.

This in concert with another, is a risky endeavor. When shared as a risk, can redefine our love for ourselves and the erotic spirit flowing through the life force around us.

An ending, for now, a question of what you intend to risk

I’ll admit, this is a chunky blog post. After Partner as a State of Being received such a huge outpouring of love and recognition, I knew that I needed to follow it up with this post on the thresholds of intimacy, and taking on shared risk.

I feel so much grief with the world daily. Sometimes it feels utterly crippling, the internal pain I experience, in recognition of the deep disconnection we have to the village, to our bodies, to each other, to the land.

Relationship Ecology is how I cope, how I make sense of change-making in a micro way, in a relational way. We were once wounded in relationship, in this life and in the echoes of the ancestors we come from, we were betrayed, put down, ostracized, cast out, and demonized. It is in relationship that we must find ways to hold these hurt selves and be sung to by relations of kinship.

I sometimes wonder, if the second or third growth forests know that they are carrying the grief of total decimation of their ancestors. I wonder, what inspires them to still grow, to call out to us and ask us humans to participate in their tending.

I wonder, if we can learn to see ourselves as these forests. Rising from ruination, in recognition of being an in-between species, tasked with an inheritance that was never ours to choose, yet has become our destiny to learn to hold.

When we take on risk with others, we walk ourselves into a dangerous opportunity. The outcome will never be what we planned for, but isn’t this life meant to be for living? Does it have to concretely amount to a permanent structure to have meaning? Or can we be satisfied with the living itself, the humbling of walking our beasts’ home, the knowing that our growth reverberates past our own lives into the breath of the children we’ll never see grow old.

For the thresholds of intimacy go deeper than we’ll ever be witness to. As we bring light to the descent into these thresholds, we carve our names into the stone, encouraging others to know that others have healed from wounds so painful like our own.

Are you willing to take on a risk with another? To grasp the hand of the unknown and a companion. To descend together, to risk, belonging to more and more of this world, and this beautiful unraveling.

The wu xing, 五行, known in the west as the five elements reminds of the cyclical way transformation occurs. For life to continue, it shares with us a process, a turn of the wheel, one state of being that leads to another.

The cycle starts as wood, the plant life that bursts through the earth to create fuel, food, the cellular body of the land. When that wood dries, dies, and breaks off, it is transmuted by fire, which needs this source to burn, incinerate, carbonize into the gifts of heat and light. The residue released by this action, gathers, accumulates, and adds to the layers of processed life, sediment, soil, creating the basis of the grounds, the mountains, the foundations. And as each layer of earth builds, these particles pressurize, crystalize, and liquidize into ore, metals, minerals, that can be shaped, melded, and welded into beauty. When the metal releases form, softens, loosens, water emerges, springing out from the ground, falling from the sky. Wetting the land for growth once again of wood.

When I sink into the lessons of these cycles, elements, phases, and seasons of nature and time, I recognize the requirement for new vocabulary that can describe relationships with enough spaciousness to be with the transformative changes all living beings undertake.

In our current reality of naming and labeling relationships, there is little room for change, and we brace ourselves for the friction that undergoing transformation means. When we know that change is on its way, we cannot help but splinter off or hold on with an iron grip, breaking off partnership or stagnating into set roles. Unable to see the opportunity to be in a practice of partnership that recognizes what we most need during transformational moments is to be witnessed in relationship.

This is why, recognizing partnership as a state of being in relationship, as a verb, an action, a modality of practice, rather than as a static label, grows our capacity for more complexity to support us in our relational fields.

The domination of nuclear family coupledom makes our relational fields small. It privatizes, hoards, draws lines in the sand, ostracizes, excludes, isolates, and freezes people. People who hold the wisdom of our ancestral remembrances, people who are trying to overcome trauma inherited from oppressive dynamics, people who are in… their process of transformation.

We have such a tiny reservoir of forgiveness when we find our safety within a small unit of one other. It only makes sense to me that in a culture that uplifts partnership as the ultimate strategy for getting most of our needs met, the emphasis is on finding the “right” partner, rather than increasing our ability to be in partnership with the world and each other.

But that’s why Relationship Ecology exists. We can take on a different perspective on relationships, one that understands the necessity of returning to our humanity’s birthright of the village. Relationship Ecology asks us to seek out belonging within larger and larger nets of relations. In this work, we begin to realize that the issue isn’t just with who we’re in relationship with, but how we are relating to intimacy and showing up to our relationships as active partners.

me and oona, shot by Camilla

Seeing people outside of romantic pairing as fields to practice partnership is, inherently divergent from the norm. Many of our relationships in modernity are either romantic partners, power-over/under relationships, or parentified relations. This dynamic lives not just in our human peer relationships. In our relations with animals, children, the land, our plant relatives, and objects in our lives, we rarely practice partnership. We choose more often than not to dominate and subjugate those we feel we can control with our will power.

Partnership requires a whole lot of different skills. It is a relational practice of meeting the other in mutual wholeness. It is more than closeness. It is showing up in recognition of the mystery of the other, recognizing that to co-hold, collaborate, and mutually care for one another there must be a willingness to change and transform oneself in a dynamic call and response with those we partner with.

To actively be in partnership is a moment-to-moment commitment, of staying with what arises within the relationship, and allowing it to move us. When we see partnership as an active state of being, we recognize that the commitment is to presence, being with the changes rather than the illusion of partner as a role we’re looking to for fulfilment.

What partnership requires is commitment. When the commitment is to a person, we can easily feel afraid and angry when that person changes. If the commitment is to the spirit of relating, a surrendering to the power of partnership to change and transform us, we can begin to touch upon a trust in life that recognizes what’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is yours, is not a burden… but a freedom in seeing clearly the nature of life.

Commitment not as forever, but as nature commits to integrating and being moved

What exactly is commitment? In this over-culture we create binding agreements through complex documents that hold the power to instigate law, legislation, legality, through the carceral state. Without much consent, we have given ourselves to the protection of governmental systems that are still colonizing, torturing, and oppressing people with violence.

Commitment in domination cultures requires a punitive punishing body to enforce itself. In this form of commitment, we might meet our needs for safety and security, but our needs for connection, love, and reciprocity are severed.

It might require a whole lifetime to unlearn commitment as a form of shackling, tying down, and trapping. These words are used to describe the commitment of marriage, the commitment of work, the commitment of parenthood.

What we are conditioned to believe, is that commitment is a burden, weighing our aliveness down, forcing us to be in subservience to the will power of others. Commitment can look sacrificial, self-abandoning, and forced. When we are disconnected from the commitment of nature, we are vulnerable to the scarcity fueled capitalist system that reinforces a fear that makes trusting the state easier than trusting our human kin.

It is in light of this reality, where the action of partnership, can guide us towards a devotional commitment to the pathway of interdependence, family beyond blood, and village life. Like the morning star, this kind of commitment is like a bright steady presence coaxing us into possibilities of beyond.

A few years ago, our late elder in community, Uncle Bob shared with me stories of Anpao Wichahpi1, also known as Venus or the morning star. I remember him describe her as a goddess, one that without fail in the darkest of nights showed up in presence. She was the first star visible in the night sky, and the last one left shining.

It was a surprise to me to find out that after Bob had passed, he had gifted me the name of Anpao Wichahpi. In a period of my life where I had little stability, was in deep emotional and physical pain, I would wake up each winter morning and pray to Anpao Wichahpi. I would practice morning qigong I learned in China and focus my gaze on her as the sun slowly rose and she would gracefully fade into obscurity.

There is something anchoring to me about the steadfastness of the nature beings we’re surrounded by. The mountains that always turn green after the rains, Anpao Wichahpi brightening as the darkness grows, the waning and waxing of the moon, the birds and their flight patterns. They are cyclical patterns, ones that are unique to each nature being, one’s that are integral to the possibility of each moment. The full moon gives way to the new moon, and all the phases in between.

It is in recognizing our phases where we become whole. It is in offering these phases to partnership, where we invite in the magic of integration and the potent medicine of being moved.

Each morning that I showed up in reverence to Anpao Wichahpi, I slowly became changed by my relationship with her. My awareness of the elongations of the days heightened, and I became attuned to the sky in a way I never expected. I found myself deepening in my prayer practice, and my ability to be still and receptive to a quieter world. I came open, consistent, and with curiosity, and I was met with the gift of becoming a piece of who I was giving myself to.

Partnership as a world building practice

Being in partnership with beings outside of human and romantic ones has completely transformed my core. There is something about romantic partnership that easily divulges into the dynamic of the other as a resource, one to syphon off when we are hungry, tired, or in need.

Yet the distinction between resource versus partner, has to do with whether we are seeking someone or some being to fill a particular role we’ve created, or instead if we are actively responding as partners, curious and open to being shaped by the other.

When we see the other as a resource to meet our needs or fill in a role, we don’t see their needs as relevant to our decision making. We only extract what we want and need, sometimes giving back, but not necessarily giving ourselves to the change that the other is undergoing.

What would it look like to give ourselves to listening to what we see as the “resource” of the rivers, the lakes, the forests? If we were truly to listen, to genuinely partner, to give ourselves to the requests of these beings, we might realize we cannot with integrity access what we’ve enjoyed before, in the face of recognizing our impact on the other. It is preventing ourselves from feeling the fear of losing what we have had, where we close ourselves off to the opportunity of being changed in ways that open us up to worlds we might never have imagined.

When I was 22 years old, I made a commitment to my cat companion August. I spoke to her, expressing my deep regret for the ways I’d been treating her for much of her life up until that point. I wasn’t treating her as a partner, but rather treating her like a pet. My needs, my whims, my control were dictating her life, and I saw the way that it was causing rupture in our relationship.

I had to ask myself, what would it take to truly partner with August? To be moved by her needs, to humble myself in recognition of our interlocked livelihoods that would no longer prioritize my desires over hers. But rather to ask, in what ways can I allow the emergence of her life be a guide for me in mine?

Over the years she has guided me down a path where I have had to make hard decisions to integrate her needs. To slow down, to consider the options, to see her steadfastness as limitations that support me to question whether my at-whim-desires are coming from a place of childhood fear or alignment.

When I committed myself to partnering with August, with my parents, with my home, with the land communities I went to, and with creative collaborators, I began to recognize the potential for partnership as a world building possibility that can carve out an entirely new entity rooted in interdependent living.

Isolation defaults to the structures and safety nets that capitalism provides. Isolation gives us the illusion that we have control over our destiny. Isolation feels safe because it allows us to remain within our story of what is real, true, and possible.

Rather, partnering exposes us, enculturating us to another reality, where we are confronted by perspectives that shake our notion of our singular sense of the world. If we inherently believe that our freedom relies on our autonomy and agency of choice, partnering is only a burden.

If we believe in the inevitable integration, insemination, and infection of all living beings in dynamic dance with itself, leaning into partnership is a form of understanding ourselves through the reflective gaze of another. It is being in practice with perspectives across difference, and seeing the gift of having more minds to construct the whole.

Although control provides a pathway through uncertainty, its frigid rigidity, crumbles in the face of change, and the pressures of emergence. Control, within a capitalist regime, can get far fast, but in chaos, control resorts to domineering others.

Rather, uncertainty is only all of life. And true partnership is the ultimate practice in uncertainty. Only time can tell, if someone can show up w-holy as a partner. If they can commit to being changed by what is exposed within the dance of partnership and return with an impression of the other’s fingerprint, deepened by the touch of another’s broken heart.

Octavia Butler reminds us: “All that you touch you change, all that you change changes you, the only lasting truth is change.”

I oftentimes think of partnership as the temple in which I get changed by. That there are people in my life who demand me to look deeply inside. Not in a confrontational or accusatory way. But in the ways that they love me, so fiercely, that they get frustrated with me, triggered by me, and brought to their knees by our relationship. It’s because relationships that require commitment as a baseline recognition of the immense offering that being kin provides, are the kinds of relationships required to transcend systems that are separating families, building caste systems, and destroying the places that feed all of life.

If we are unable to learn how to trust one another, support one another, communicate with one another, how do we expect to fight with love in the face of the destruction of our mother, the earth?

All I know is that I hope to partner with so much of life. I want to partner with the mothers and fathers, to the babies and the little ox boys2, I want to partner with the ocean and the rains, to the rivers, the large oak amidst concrete. I want to partner with what is here in front of me, what is here all around me, what is quiet and sensual below me.

I want to partner with uncertainty, mystery, and with spirit. I want to learn to be a partner more than I want to be in a singular stable partnership. I want to live and know I can show up as a partner wherever I find myself, so I may find security within myself to confront the difficulties, changes, and chaos of these times with the trust that by giving myself to showing up in commitment, I may become a reflection of all that feeds and nourishes my life.

For our live monthly offerings, come join in to practice relationship ecology in community!

In complex relational webs where many people are living, working, and in process together, I have been asking myself, what does it take to attune to the needs of the web as a form of caring for the whole?

Is there a way to witness what is happening in communities, relational ecosystems, and villages from the lens of mystery? To give ourselves to the faith that what is hard in the moment for us as an individual, is part of a larger movement towards transformation, group belonging, and initiation?

Part of these questions come from the ways my mind and body can begin to dig myself into a hole of individual obsession. My needs, my preferences, my path and moment in time requiring the full attention of the people around me. When I get into this place, I am not only inadvertently cutting myself off from the source in which I am tied to, I am disconnecting myself from what I truly long for: knowing that I am participating in a gift to this source, that is integral and connected to those around me.

It is in the holding of both, this tender balance of my belonging within the web and my integrity as a unique and separate part of this web, that creates a tension keeping each strand taut yet connected.

When thinking of this complex yet dynamic structure of the web, and knowing that what is happening globally is impacting what is happening interpersonally, the question that has been emerging is: what kinds of feelers do I need to grow in order to attune to the waves of this historical moment of multi-poly-crises to better navigate my relational web’s own iteration of multi-poly-crises?

So, I started to study spider webs

I have been watching videos of BBC spider footage1 and muting the narration from the David Attenborough type British man describing what he sees. The accompanying monologue I grew up with, no longer holds the same charm and I get frustrated by the narration interpreting the spider’s moods, projecting onto the spider the (in my opinion) domineering survival of the fittest Darwinian2 motivations.

Yet it’s hard to deny that with the film technology we’re currently blessed by, we have incredible access to stellar footage. The use of lights, huge macro lenses, incredible tracking technology to meet the natural world where they’re at, is an epic way to witness the non-human world.

Animals have always been an interesting study for me. Our late spirit uncle, Bob used to be who I would immediately call after an encounter with a bear, fox, or spider. When Bob and I would talk about animals, we would revel in their divinity, their godliness, their mystery. It was not about understanding them completely, it was about learning the cultural stories associated with them, the embodied messages we received from them, and enjoying their expressions of aliveness.

The steadfastness animals have in living into their wholeness in relationality with all that’s around them, gave us insight into our own expectations and preoccupations with our human conflicts. They would reveal to us at times the protective violence of a bear, the long view witnessed by the eagle, the safe havens created by the mole.

When I watch this intimate capturing of the spider, wounding up their thin silky threads with hooks at the bottom of their feet, I feel awe, the presence of god, and an absolute recognition that this is a teacher, one who reveals their lessons to those who humble themselves to their wisdom.

So, I watch, and I wonder. At times the spider web is unseeable. When the sunlight dips away, the web is cast into the backdrop. Only when the glimmer of light shows itself, does the web again reveal.

When I watch the creation of this woven architecture, I wonder: what are the woven infrastructures embedded in our social ecosystems that are invisible to the eye? When are they revealed, made visible through our felt experience of them tugging and pulling at our hearts and minds?

Perceiving a glimmer of the spider web, is like coming into awareness of the unescapable reality of our relational webs, that cannot be shielded from the impact of our movements. An earthquake that rumbles through the land, is like a judgement, a misunderstanding, a lack of insight, a need to discharge energy, and it moves through a community like a wave.

The relational web is sensitive. When a dyad is under duress, it shakes and moves the strings around it. When a foundational member has a longing to distance for a period, the rest of the relations feel stretched. Angela3 once astutely observed, “the resourcing always needs to come from somewhere.” In other words, when one part of the web is incapacitated, things cannot happen as they were or resourcing needs to come elsewhere.

So, where does this resourcing come from?

Taking on the loose threads

In the video, I watched as a neighboring spider came across one of the threads onto the web. The original spinner immediately ran over and cut the thread swinging back to the other side. Now with their web severed, they began collecting each loose thread, balling them back into their hands, eating them, to begin the process anew.

This is a lesson of vitality that spider shows me.

When webs are made up of the regurgitated insight of past rupture, might we wander into the inner knowing that spider nudges us towards?

This week, I am preparing for my first semi-permeable, live, witnessed conflict mediated by an elder. There will be about 14 witnesses watching me and another, resurface our past relationship that has spanned several years in and out of friendship, lover-ship, and collaboration.

Part of the intentionality around semi-permeability, is our nod to the web. A recognition that what has transpired within our dyad, what some might see as our intimate not-for-public-relationship, has in actuality deeply impacted the whole.

That our dissatisfaction with each other, our collaboration and love for one another, our trauma responses, our pains have reverberated into the bodies and psyches of all that is around us. And these movements pulsating from the pain of the relationship have changed our surroundings just as much as they’ve changed us.

This live conflict, follows an over 4 year long relationship, in which I’ve written about our ending in the past. At about 1.5 years after this ending we are now engaged in a process spurred into action when we more intensely began to live and work in the same community again.

What this process has been stirring within me has felt like an excavation of my deepest wounds. At times, I hurdle the pain towards others, or direct that towards myself.4 I have felt alone in this process at times, wondering if anyone can see this tiny part of the ecosystem screaming for help.

Yet when I take a step back and tune into Source, I am struck by the incredibility of this moment in time. That despite what I often impatiently perceive as the “slowness” of this process, is actually the recognition of how deep this process is, and the work I need to do to deepen my awareness of what this process is asking of me.

And to sit with my discomfort, my unease, all the feelings that arise in this process, is what the web is calling from me. That the gift from the web is to be challenged, stretched, reminded of our entanglement, and the pace of our nervous system in connection to the proximity we have to systems of support.

Popular culture tries to tell us that a good friend is one that validates and supports our every decision. Relationship ecology asks us if we’re willing to test our relational health through the depth of the path our relationships forge within us.

Two of my elders often remind me, we attract those we are meant to heal with. And so, if we are attracting those who point to our gaping wounds, magnifying our pain, retracing our steps to the homes we felt abandoned by, might we grow our capacities to see what these realms of attraction hold for us with seriousness and commitment?

Learning from spider

Right after a big community rupture, I got a tattoo on my arm of a spider weaving a net of roses, leaves, and sticky threads of entangled relations. On the body of the spider is the character 易 a pictograph depicting the sun on top and water/clouds on the bottom. This character, yi, is a symbol of change, like clouds moving across the sun.

I often don’t understand why I get the tattoos I get until years after I’ve been etched by the ink. I just knew that after this community rupture, I needed to humble myself to the wisdom of this creature, and become a student of their work.

There has been a way in which I’ve expected the web to hold me like a child in its arms. Where I have given to get, and gotten without understanding the depth of what I’ve received.

There are ways I have pulled at the threads of the web to garner support, recognition, and attention. There are ways I have severed, torn, and twisted the threads in a thrashing to receive belonging and care.

But the maker of a web is one we all get to play. The maker of a web notices each tear, each separation, each loose party. The maker of a web chooses where to weave, when to weave, and at what point to abandon the web for another.

Attuning to the web of relations is not just about recognizing our impacts to each other. It is recognizing we have creation within us, we are not bystanders to the life we want to live. It is cultivating feelers that stretch out beyond ourselves not because we need to consider others, but because the world around us is yearning to inform us of what we are part of, intrinsic to, in a cosmic dance with.

We open ourselves to being the spider when we are ready to dance with change. To partner with the happenings around us, the poly-crises of our time. To be moved by the people in our lives, and to turn towards what is being evoked, birthed, and restored when we feel the collapse, intensity, and heaviness of our times.

In seeing the w(holiness) of all the uncomfortable and inconvenient truths laid out by the death in our lives, the pains we carry, to recognize all the gaps in capacity, we might contact a larger mystery that brings us to our knees, making sense of these happenings through the incomprehensible powerlessness and undeniable power of our role within these times.

And it starts first with feeling.

Investigating the stories that bring the storm clouds in. Seeing the value in the hurts we carry. Witnessing the individual parts as reflections of a collective yearning, loss, and discovery.

To attune to the web means growing the feelers that sense beyond the words that are said, the tone that is used, the story we feel is true. Attuning to the web requires us to sense a deeper purpose that are feelings are pointing to, a greater mystery in which our frustrations are guiding us into, a larger ecosystem in which the dreams we dream are too narrow for the insight the web has in store for us.

Interdependence is a practice, and the spider reminds us — it’s a sticky one.

In a world where care can feel like a sparse resource, the dream of finding “the one” evokes a fantastical reverie, in which one is promised lightness and ease. If only, the right person could arrive, and we can relax into fully being seen, held, and resourced for the rest of our days.

This mindset is one I have been grappling with for much of my life and is one I see many of my peers grappling with. As I deepen with values of village and relationship ecology, I am reckoning with a reality I’ve been scared until now to name.

Which is this: that modern romance is a function that enforces Domination culture, rooted in a scarcity minded economic system, that privatizes care and resources, hides violence from the collective, and then expresses itself as the modern “privileges” of coupledom.

When we are swimming in a sea of culture built on oppression, accepting we have inherited vestiges that burrow deep into our psyches, bodies, and nervous systems iterating what has been offered to us, we might grow our awareness and start having choice around what cultural norms we seed for the future.

In this blog post, I will be challenging some of the notions of modern romance and connecting the dots between the culture of Domination and the culture of Romanticization. More and more, I am recognizing that how we culturally see romance is imbued with subtle forms of ownership, entitlement to resources, and the disintegration of village life.

Is the allure of romance really the allure of privatization? The promise of security reinforced by a powerful narrative based in the fear of being left alone to fend for ourselves? Is modern romance only possible due to the few and far between options for our care being either: support from the State or support by our complex and often disparate nuclear families?

At the heart of it, each one of us longs for care, support, love, and generosity. What I have found, is how easy it can be to default into ideals of romance as the strategy to meeting these longings. Yet, the opportunity to creatively return ourselves to the wholeness of village life, is an act of defiant lovemaking to the spirit of our humanity. Our inherent ecology, our belonging to the whole, our sacred inheritance of living in ever widening circles of love.

Privatization of care and “my person”

Our system for health, education, and housing in the Western context is hugely dependent on one’s life inheritance. Whether someone was raised in a neighborhood that had no access to fresh foods or were barred from educational opportunities due to a school’s opinions on mental divergences, our country is one where care is contextual.

The basic physical needs for our bodies to feel safe, whole, and able to rest, is not guaranteed by community, the state, or our families. We are required to perform productivity to receive the support we need.

Sometimes this performance looks like, westernizing or assimilating ourselves, compartmentalizing our parts to become acceptable by community, or claiming alliance to certain kinds of ideals of “freedom” and “self-agency,” that allow us to live in an isolated autonomous mode of taking care of our “own.”

Our care has become privatized and systematized, hirable, exportable, industrialized, and depersonalized. In this reality, our romantic partner, our nuclear system, has become a gateway towards what care we can afford, participate in, and access.

It makes sense to me that, the gravity of finding, “my person,” is the one holdout against the terrifying reality of navigating this system alone. The perception that one person can make or break our future standard of living, is rooted in the devastating reality of a system forcibly removing us from cohesive units of care.

When the allure of finding “my person,” is functioning as our strategy to finding safety, we find ourselves seeking out power rather than partnership, and certainty rather than the capacity for mutual change and growth.

The privatization of relationships, including claiming ownership of land and partner, is essential to cultivating siloed nuclear units, where we have the “rights” to dictate what happens or doesn’t within these spaces.

Safety has turned into control and protection from the chaos and natural order of the changeable realities of life, leaving little room for the mysteries of spirit, and the sensual pleasures of being alive in an infinitely transforming world.

The violence of romance claiming the rights to intimacy

There is a quiet violence in the way we’ve normalized the separation of all things. We have become agents who perpetuate divides that do not exist in nature. Fence lines that give us the illusion of separation while the soil below is teeming with the conversations between trees on either side of the fence.

When we separate and compartmentalize ourselves, our field of view begins to narrow. We trust fewer people, unable to access intimacy outside of those who we label as partners. In popular culture it has become a subversive expectation, that when one holds the title of romantic partner, they are immediately prioritized, made important, promoted to director in our lives,1 while all other relationships get deprioritized.

And, what of all the partners before this one? Do they not receive the titles, the accolades, the well-wrought appreciation of paving the road before ever seeing where it’d go? In modern romance culture, we cast away the past and give ourselves to the redefining of what could be.

It is in the root of the word romance itself, stemming from the Latin word romanicus, which means of the Roman style, to be of Rome.

To be of Rome is to be an ancient conqueror, an imperialist prototype that seized, enveloped, and took culture, renaming it as their own.

Nestled within the formula of romance is the justification of claiming and being claimed. It is a dance that requires a price of worthiness, of what can be ours, if we display the right cards.

Why I wonder, are we satisfied with this modern-day swan dance?

A moment for romantic sobriety, and enfolding the village into our love decisions

I’ll be honest, this blog post has been difficult for me to write. While I write it, I feel the shining light of what I name, illuminating my shadows, my past, all the ways romance has brought me into a version of myself I feel ill about.

There is a part of me that questions if my judgements around romance have been created from a place of spite. Romance has always triggered in me a kind of inauthenticity that has felt like proving myself, people pleasing, and creating an illusion of who I am.

So, perhaps it’s easier for me to make connections between the systemic hell hole we’re collectively digging ourselves into, and a place in which I struggle immensely.

Yet one of the key insights that relationship ecology supports me in, is recognizing that the macro always plays into the micro. That this phenomenon of romance has only taken the floor of public consciousness within the last few generations, rising from a newfound agency in choosing our partners.

This coinciding with the loss of village life, community ties, obligations to our families of origin, global imperialist regimes, I can only understand romance as a function of all the impacts of our times. Claiming its title as the proprietor of love and belonging within a fractured ecosystem, it tries to mitigate the gaping hole we inherit from a disconnection to the whole.

“Extended families were mutual-aid societies, and clans were bundles of extended families, and villages were the amalgam of family-mediated belonging to a given piece of holy ground, bound by stories, ancestral memory, and a willingness to live for and, sometimes, die for the same kinds of things,” Stephen Jenkinson.

Perhaps, it is the villager within me, that calls for more. That says romance is not enough and is tired of the charade of what it has looked like for me and my peers. It is the part of me that wants my spirit family to get involved with my love life, to have their opinions aired around who and what is compatible for me. To recognize that their livelihoods depend on the partner I journey with, and whoever I date will impact their day to day lives. Romance takes on an approach of “us against the world,” and what relationship ecology calls for is, what services the whole.

To service the whole is different from placating our families of origin. Rather, it is holding hands with the collective system we need to thrive in and our own inner light that illuminates our way.

When we see romantic potentials not as a boat to ferry us away into a new reality, but as an enfolding piece of what already exists within our ecosystem, how might we move more gently, more intentionally, and with greater heed to what already exists?

Putting down romance for the journey

In romance, the beginning phase poses the biggest promise. In a journey, the beginning has us confront the abyss.

In romance, we showcase our potential. In a journey, we reveal our level of practice.

In romance, when we confront our shadows it marks the end of the romance, in a journey when the storm brews and breaks loose, that marks the true beginning.

In romance, the gaps and the obscurities enliven mystery and an allure of what might be. In a journey, when we are left without company, it means we are both choosing to walk a different path.

I pray to put down romance for the sake of love. If I am to love myself and the other at the same time, I must recognize how deep the promise of a nuclear family utopia is built on privatized land and lineage, forcing us to grasp on to romantic outcomes that minimize the epic view of the journey now.

It is in romance where we seek the illusion of privatization, seek out partnership to rewrite our past, rely heavily on the dominant system to meet our needs in the absence of village life.

When we surrender ourselves to a journey, we might find ourselves gathering different companions to survive along the way. Each one, spectacular and important, are testaments to how we arrived where we are right now.

Might we recognize the fullness of what brought us here, and feel ourselves strung up in a web of relations. In the stickiness of this web, the inability to separate the tendrils, mark stark lines of separation, becomes a humbling reminder of the mysteries of relationship. The ways where the simplicities of nuclear family realities might just be a bit too tired for those who long to bring back the reverence for a life that knows no borders. Only luscious yet harsh landscapes that require many companions to make the days ahead.

Is it presumptuous of me to express, that it is within our processing of relationships that we get to touch in with God?

Whether we use God, spirit, creator, goddess, deity, the divine, the great mystery or mama earth, what I’m speaking to here is the incredible experience of touching in with the much larger fabric of the cosmic order in which we are all entangled in, when fumbling and finding our way within our many dynamic relationships.

There are a set of regulations we subconsciously subscribe to when we set afoot onto the stage of dominant cultural norms where we are beholden to relationship hierarchy. We are asked to know what we “mean to each other,” and perform tactical displays of love that announce our commitment, piety, and underlying it all, what we expect in return.

It is the finding of what we are to one another that exposes our relationship angst. I have often heard the phrase, “we are finding our relationship shape,” when relationship unease is imminent, and I have felt curiosity around whether it is even possible to define a shape that helps us make sense of what is an appropriate kind of care to offer one another.

It is in these expressions of finding our relationship form or shape, that I peek into the ways our society has tried to suppress and vilify relational nothingness.

Nothingness, or similarly Emptiness, can be a terrifying reality when there is a preferability towards what is knowable. Its embrace threatening for some, yet expansive for others.

Meister Eckhart, a German Catholic priest, expressed nothingness as akin to God. He was accused of having views that threatened the Catholic order yet garnered many devout followers during his time as well.

God is a being beyond being

And a nothingness beyond being.

God is nothing. No thing.

God is nothingness.

And yet God is something.

–Meister Eckhart

In the Daoist text by Lao Tzu,

The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends.

Having grown up in the Chinese Christian church, finding my way towards Daoism later in life, I am so fascinated by the similarities of nothingness and emptiness, that appear both in Christian mysticism but also in Daoist thought.

In both quotes, I see the ways in which emptiness and nothingness, are shaped by absence, of pointing around these intangible concepts as a way of coming close to sensing truth.

When it comes to relationship, it can feel comforting to define what we are to each other.

When we create shape, name shape, or define the construction of a relationship, we can get the feeling that we are on a path, that we are close to a sort of stability that can assure us of what the future holds. However, our obsession with shape can become a hinderance to our awareness of what isn’t happening, or what is unseen and unspoken.

It is the intangible, the unseeable that nothingness, and emptiness represent.

Relational nothingness is the gap in-between the words. Relational nothingness is the absence that longs for presence. Relational nothingness is the elephant that is cowering in the corner. Relational nothingness encompasses the whole, and it is this nothingness that creates form in a relationship.

So, how do we use relational nothingness to bring to life our relationships? How do we feel the presence of God when being with our relational messes? And, how to we trust the form that is created by making sense of the emptiness rather than chasing the form itself?

When relationships drift, when relationships stagnate, when we feel a block towards connection, when we start to feel things shifting, our discomfort oftentimes arises out of a fear and lack of clarity of “what we are” and “who we are to each other.”

It is in these moments, where we are given an opportunity to welcome relational nothingness. The moment in which our relationships enter a complete and utter question mark of formlessness, is the moment where we are given the opportunity to serve not the ideal form of relationship but rather, to serve the relationship itself.

To name truths that might be scary to name, might not serve the continuation of a certain kind of form, but will feed the relationship in understanding itself.

Relationship Ecology is the practice of seeing communities, and relationships as part of an ecosystem. By seeing communities as an ecosystem, moments of conflict are not personality errors, but rather, signals that communicate a weak point in the community ecosystem asking for support.

I remember one community project where tensions between relationships began to rise, and conflict between me and each person in the project started to emerge.

There was a moment in which one person in the circle left the project, and I too felt the urge to leave. However, I felt that if I left, the relational work that we were really there to do, more so than the work of actualizing the “dream,” would be lost in stepping away.

Sometimes, community systems don’t have the support necessary to hold all the dynamics that arise. Cultures where conflict is seen as a matter of personality between two people, rather than signifiers of distress within the system, seem to feel content with ignoring the relational nothingness that grows and looms in size, suffocating connection.

The dynamic of a surrounding community denying proximity and power to engaging with dyadic conflict, is all too common. Communities that fall apart due to untended to conflict, are like systems that ignore the slow drip of venom that seep into the blood flow, paralyzing our capacity to grow, transform, and change together.

The Western world has an obsession with what can be seen. “What you see is what you get.” Yet, it is in the cosmologies of mystic wisdom traditions, where I can trace our roots to a time where the unseen was not only acknowledged but paid homage to.

Prayer to the spirits of the land, the beings of the waters, the ancestors. They are not seeable, but they influence the forms, and physical plane in which we find our limits in.

When we make space for the unseen dynamics within relationship, we welcome relational nothingness. We acknowledge that we might not need to know what is the “problem” to ask, what is truly present here?

Three years ago, me and a friend explored a romantic relationship with one another. At the time, I kept feeling this strangeness when we would engage in our romantic energy with one another. It was so difficult to name what was there, but all I could sense was a feeling of siblinghood with him. At the time, we didn’t have the support necessary to acknowledge our siblinghood as a possibility. We had no models for siblinghood across non-blood related, male/female relations. The form felt unattainable.

Yet over time, we persevered with naming this discomfort. We went in and out of relationship, uncertain of how to do much but to name what was not lining up. Recently, as our relational system, our community, began to grow in strength and connection, we were given the opportunity to see that through acknowledging what was not present we could weave together what was.

It required a whole community of people to reinforce their commitment to each one of us, our dyadic dynamic, and our mutual courage to name the relational nothingness present that has allowed us to celebrate the form of siblinghood that is now blossoming between us.

The absence of certain forms can be a profound gift if we trust the creative will that Spirit has imbued in the epic diversity of possibilities within the natural world. It is Relationship Ecology’s vision to recognize the deep violence of separation that the nuclear family paradigm relies on to subsidize and exploit the land and its people to fund these realities that perform an “ideal form” of intimacy.

To find our way towards ecologically whole, diverse, and abundant communities, we must find the courage to embrace relational nothingness as a key that unlocks our relational potential.

When we see the value of what is not seen, and we give it our attention, we might find pathways within our relationships that deepen our intimacy. When we see the absence of, as tools that allow us to access truth, we can let go of conceived notions of relationship and embrace what is honestly being offered to us.

If we were to place God as a man in the sky rather than as nothingness, we lose the possibility of feeling God in all beings. When we name the Dao as a road rather than as an unnamable force of all liveness, we relegate ourselves to control over synchronicity.

If we release our relationships from form and welcome what is unspoken to speak, we get to dance with the energies that are here rather than the future confines of what we hope they can be. And it is this practice where we find that surprise makes form a gift, not a mold to prove our worthiness to.

A dying sunflower… going to seed.

Recently, I have been feeling how my twenties were a hazardous torrential whirlwind of figuring things out. The arena of relationships, a messy collision course of missed marks and worst-case scenarios enhanced by the continual necessity of cutting people out.

Somehow, survival looked like tossing people to the curb. Of declaring those who are worthy of love, and those who aren’t. In my twenties, my mind got used to using white-out pens to erase the lives of those who couldn’t match my tempo. The harshness of this technique was reflected in those around me, who were quick to sever, and diligent with sweeping away traces of a relationship gone haywire.

Severance is not outside the realm of nature. But its harshness and often, inability to treat all parties with dignity during its course, is a form of relational divorce. Of dismissing the shared work required for any project to flourish. Of choosing division and separation rather than reconnection and repair. Severance has become a well walked road.

What I long for is the ability to live and die well. A life lived in fear of relationships that’ll turn on us when things sour, creates the conditions for a scary living. Yet the reality of relationships is the reality of the world around us. All things end, and all things find new forms to be in.

Yet this society has not found its peace with death. It is something we hide from, dismiss, and ignore, in our obsession to prolong life as we know it. When we run from an aspect of what is true, we run from the gifts that this aspect of life… death (in this case), offers to us.

What if death meant, to be laid to rest in a way that honors the life that had been lived, while creating the space to grieve the release of the previous way of being? How might that change the way we meet our relationships when death of a way of being is imminent?

It has been my experience in my twenties, that death in relationships crept into unspoken denial, resentment fatigued stagnation creating anemic oxygen starved ferments, or vicious chain saw hacking of the tree we had once committed to tend and to love.

When it came to the inevitable change in relationships, the somatic expectation of my body, was to prepare itself for the shock of incoming severance. Though we might not want to admit it, or take responsibility for it, when a friendship ends abruptly, the impacts are felt.

This year, my 31st, I spoke a prayer to the waters: I hope to have the foresight to recognize when a relationship is changing, and to neither control nor ignore its presence. I hope to have relationships that no longer rely on dismissal, severance, or exiting as a strategy to safety. I am committed to, and ready for relationships that have the capacity to be for a lifetime.

It felt scary to say these words. For one, in the past, I’ve used the “forever timeline” to express my longing for stability. Ironically, this attachment to stability as the basis for a desire for long-term relationships is exactly what has prevented me from actualizing deep committed relationships that span the course of many years.

For this prayer of relationships that span a lifetime, or what Miki Kashtan calls, “no exit relationships,” we will adamantly be required to have a reverence for instability. When we become steadfast devotees to the dying process, there emerges the process of living life and death well.

In other words, when we get comfortable with the truth that whoever we get into relationship with, will no longer be the same person we initially met, we get to face the transformative potential of stretching within relationship to meet the other’s and our own changes.

In the past living experiments I have tried, I held onto the belief that things would grow in the same trajectory, of more of what we already had. Like the stock market, the trajectory could only go upwards, an arrow steadily climbing to heights that fortify a story that projects a kind of safety reliant on a future where we can be certain about how things will look.

This fear of uncertainty is at the heart of our inability to name the end. It is in our love for what has been, and our fear of an unknown future, where we hold on until it is too painful to keep reliving the story of what was.

Earlier this year, I was noticing disconnect with a good friend. We kept trying to meet each other in ways we had in the past, but it kept falling short of our expectations. When we finally got to the point of naming that things were ending, we were given the opportunity to cry together. It was a release that allowed me to honor the beauty of the relationship. It also gave me the permission to accept that the relationship as I knew it, was in the past, and I could no longer expect that from our relationship. It gave us the fertility to start anew.

Recently, I have been in a practice of naming endings from the beginning. To be in this practice means to boldly recognize the agency we have in how we hold our endings. It has allowed me to recognize that it isn’t about controlling or preventing change from happening, but to meet the change with containment that points to and ritualizes the shifting of the seasons.

To name the ending at the beginning is to intentionally create the space to notice the closing of stories, ways of being, and transitions before we are impacted by these changes.

For example, my current co-living experiment has created explicit time-bound containers for transition times, as well as a time-bound container for living together. It isn’t that we will necessarily disband after the container, it is that we are intentionally recognizing that by living together we will be changed, and that whatever we set as our agreements from the beginning, will need another moment of reevaluation as we evolve.

This allows for us to be explicit with naming what has ended as a whole group rather than as individuals where one person no longer see the relationship as “working” and chooses by themselves to step away. So often, these relationships end unilaterally, where one person separates without any sort of co-discernment.

If we want to live into the kind of world in which we have choice and agency to decide our fate, our relationships can become our greatest practice field. So much of our society is moving in the direction of control and power by a select few, and it can feel disempowering to believe that this is all we can expect in our lives.

Yet, our relationships are the foundational structures in which all life flourishes from. The relationships that we have grown up experiencing, do not have to be the blueprint in which we are beholden to.

Rather, we can direct our flow towards changing our practices with our beloved relationships by naming the reality of future changes and creating the culture of how we want to respond when that time comes.

It takes work, capacity, and commitment to be courageous enough to name the end at the beginning. As I continue to rotate with this planet amongst all the beings around me, I feel clearer than ever, that to be bonded for a lifetime requires the kind of ferocity towards the purpose of moving at the pace of togetherness in which we can renew our relationships death after death after death.

I long to share my boundaries like nature shares her boundaries. In flux, in cycles, in seasons, in tides. I arrive at her edges and limits with awe, at the base of a cliff I see that her boundary is not impossible to cross, but requires tenderness, curiosity, and slow determination to find a path up to level.

In comparison, the boundaries spoken by me and my peers feel like fences, unmovable in the eyes of the human as god. Irretractable like poured concrete over the ground, suffocating the creative spirit of a plain wide open, vast and hungry for seeds.

Our bodies, soft and bound to the sustenance of the living beings around it, requires clear resolute nourishment. Each organ, a finely tuned instrument, cannot function without breath, liquid, salt, and fuel, and cannot go far out of its usual rhythms. The limits of what can be stretched and contracted vary in specificity, timing, and breadth.

The body teaches me, that there are tangible limits. The body teaches me I can learn to stretch my limits through practice. The body teaches me, there are times I crash down into the depths of grief where I can seem wide open to some and shuttered away to others.

Our bodies have needs, and when pushed past its capacities will begin to resist.

So, if we agree that boundaries and limits exist regardless of if we recognize they are there at all, when we live in community, what might be our responsibility to recognize and take action on behalf of our limits and boundaries? And what is our responsibility to the limits and boundaries of others?

When our boundaries are seasonal and subject to constant change, how reasonable is it to ask each other to know clearly our boundaries?

And can we truly know our limits and boundaries until we meet them?

from sanctuary to co-stewardship — a learning of limits and boundaries

One of the big lessons that came clear as I edged-walked this last year, is my inability to hold sanctuary space for others in massive life transitions. I opened my home to receive the landing of people leaving their homes, attempting big break ups, returning to relationships, going from a year of camping to a shelter, and recovering from illness.

In this process, I received quite a lot of feedback. Not all of it has been positive, and it moves me to share some of my learnings, as I continue to experiment with these live-in-laboratories of sharing life as an attempt to bridge the gap between the stark individualism of the global north, and our collective yearning to live amongst family.

When anyone has lived with me for the past year and a half, they have been stepping into a dynamic of me being in a legal ownership position. I have made the intentional decision to step away from rent models and have purposely made it a relational process as to how to be in reciprocity for those who choose to stay here. (Much more here that I’ll talk about on a later date).

Before moving forth, I want to invite the awareness that talking about home ownership can bring up our traumas and discomforts living in a colonized, capitalist, patriarchal reality. In sharing this, I invite critique, feedback, and your discomfort. And I want to hold that these systems need to be met by consciously engaging with them, rather than shrugging off our proximity to forms of ownership and land privilege.

So, I invite a few breaths. A deep resounding sigh. There might be some stuff here that is triggering, and I ask for slowness, for both of us, before proceeding.

When anyone has stayed in this house, I hold legal title to with my parents, they are taking on a risk with me.

The risk is one of deep intimacy, of seeing one another in our patterning, of cohabitating and revealing who we are at the familial level not at the level of selecting what to show to community. It is a baring of self and isn’t always pretty. The risk is also one of material quality too, where one or both people are contributing material resources that take their attention from giving to other sources.

In my longings for community that can be co-stewarded, co-held, and co-created with others, I have seen people coming from big life transitions and thought to myself, wow this is perfect. This person is in a big life transition and is ready to leap into this project with me.

The vision of co-stewardship of home has meant, forming a project guided by the needs of the individuals in the project and the home which is by extension, land itself. To open ourselves up to this dynamic dance of evaluating the many varied needs of these beings, is to use this information to create processes and agreements that overtime grow enough trust to move us in the direction of co-creating life together.

In the beginning phase, when people first engage with this project, the story of co-stewardship can feel like a romantic, exciting, and fun endeavor. A way to distract from the pains of transition. I’ve been asked in this beginning chapter if the land could be bought from me, if they could rent the neighboring property with me, be in a land project together, co-steward, and be available for the needs of the home.

What is the sobering reality that I continue to face in this project of sharing my resource to home, is the extremely large capacity that is necessary for people to feel a sense of fulfillment and belonging within a space.

Having lived out these experiences over the course of a 7.5 year period, I have started to recognize that the foundational work and skill required to name and request needs is absolutely necessary when working in proximity to our different ownership and class privileges. Dynamics around money and class can easily lead to a breakdown in relationship, trust, and genuine co-holding. This is amplified further by my more recent approach of not asking for a “fair” exchange, and instead asking people to relate relationally to what they feel is in capacity for themselves to offer.

I remember one instance, when someone who stayed with me and I engaged with a conversation around money for their time in the house. They wanted to know, what was the dollar amount that I needed to feel good. Though I could understand their confusion and frustration around not receiving a clear amount from the beginning, I felt them place me into a role of being the one to provide the clarity of “right amount” for them. Rather than seeing this conversation as a way to hear each other’s needs and discern together how to come into alignment, we replayed the societally expected dance of finding a clear dollar amount that masks our true needs.

This dance, is not a wrong one. But what I have slowly come into acceptance around, is the opportunity to be with this house in explicit experimentation. To challenge the housing system from a relational lens. And in this process, I have learnt, the difference between co-stewardship and the holding of sanctuary.

In a culture where most of our experience of home is in a renter/landlord-owner dynamic or parent/child dynamic, co-stewarding is an unfamiliar and challenging experience for all. Whether we recognize it or not, when we step into co-stewardship opportunities, we will struggle with autonomy and agency because of the oppressive nature of the status quo renter/landlord, parent/child dynamics.

This last week, I got to have one of the most cathartic experiences of closure with one of the people who came to the home when they were going through a relationship transition. It was a little over a year ago, when they took the leap of faith to question whether they could live without their partner, and needed in their words, “a gravitational planet that could take me out of my habits.”

At the time, I was in a unique moment of wanting to host again. I had a difficult experience hosting people immediately after receiving my home from a previous co-op (much longer story I’ll attend to here at some point) and decided to do some self-reflection and close my doors for three months.

Sitting at the altar one day after being alone for three months, I told spirit, “I am ready for somebody to live with me again.” A minute and thirty seconds later, someone who I had been out of contact for 2 years called asking, is there a place you have for me to live?

I was in this moment, available for this experience. I wasn’t looking to create anything specific; I was just open and available. It allowed me to receive this person without expectations. Each time they expressed a desire to co-hold a project with me, I told them to wait a week to see if that desire was still present before moving forward.

Because I was healing from an overexpansion and overstretch of my limits from the previous experience of opening up towards the dream of co-stewardship, I could now hold this person with the containment they needed.

I had in mind from my previous experience, the clarity of what I couldn’t offer, and at that point, clarity around where I was planning to go. I had for a short moment a view of my limits and boundaries, pulled into focus by a process that had forced me to reckon with my participation with fantasies that took me out of my true depth.

There are times in which we see no cliff until we arrive at its base. When we reach a barrier, we are given new options.

Before we know it, the tides catch up to our feet. But someone with a consistent eye tuned into the tiny shifts of the waters, can move in syncopation with a wet edge.

What I feel is the responsibility of the community and not just the individual, is to be in this process of learning our boundaries and limits in relation to each other. So often, I hear us expecting those who have the access, or the one who is in “charge,” to hold the line and make sure all parties are safe and cared for.

However, to expect the holding of home from specific people rather than all parties, is to ask for sanctuary. What is fascinating to me about sanctuary, is that it exists in the context of a violent world. The word sanctuary traces its etymology to a place in which a fugitive is immune to arrest. Sanctuary is a concept born from a punitive system, in which we fear the condemnation of a system that has the ability to “wrong” us.

I have nothing against sanctuary. It is that I recognize its necessity in the context of a violent system. And in the experiment of my home, it is when I was fully able to recognize the difference between co-stewardship and sanctuary, that I began to see where to place my boundaries and limits.

The boundaries of the land, show me a divine beauty in having limitations. Limits make clear what cannot grow, exist, or thrive and makes way for what does. It is knowing that a desert is both a death trap and oasis depending on who you are. The land’s boundaries aren’t controlling, but a thriving that makes it impossible for certain realities to live and exist in.

The pain of home, the need for housing, the insane number of homes standing empty, the severance of connection to land that once gave us skills and community to create our own homes, creates the conditions for a longing within myself to try and push against my discomfort with sharing resources.

Yet each time I am reminded by how entrenched I am with the formations of capital, with the safety of ownership, and with the clarity of exchange. I am grounded by my limitations, and require tender support to abide by them. If my relationships require of me absolute clarity and self-discipline to know my boundaries, I will most definitely struggle in defining them.

Rather, these limits and boundaries that are here change based on the closeness of relations. The softness in which we are met with. The openness in which we are received.

What I hope for within community is to see boundaries and limits like the cliffs and the tides. When the tide comes to the base of the cliff, she takes a piece of the cliff with her, but doesn’t topple the cliff completely.

There is a gradualness to discovering the boundaries of nature. The tide doesn’t immediately withdraw, but lowers itself over the course of a moon cycle.

And while fences can offer an illusion of clear separation and protection, the cliff stands tall, requiring a climb or a fall to recognize its gravity.

If I am to be true, I know that my body follows the limits and the boundaries of the cliffs and the tides. When I sink into the cycles of my moon time, I know that my limits stretch and contract like the wood frame of a home. What I hope for in this shared living, is a trust that my seismic movements can be withstood by the mutual sharing of each of our lapses in sensing our own edges.

These past 12 months I committed to a year of celibacy both unintentionally, and with intent. It became clear to me after my last few relationships, that I could not stop myself from having sex that I did not want to have, and often was using sex as a proxy to meet my masked needs.

Around this time, I also began formulating a commitment to myself around honesty. That I would practice being honest with myself and, when possible, with others. It was a recognition that surfaced when I began to see that trust and intimacy are born from a capacity to seek, speak, and process kindly the truth.

In this time, I got to slow down enough to recognize a pattern of fawning to men and performing pleasure as a gateway towards closeness. And in doing so I was trapping myself in dynamics that I was growing weary of. It reflected in me the lack of true partnership in my relationships and rather, a consistent brew of antagonism, mistrust and expectation.

When I would self-betray because I felt that sex was the only way I could feel intimacy from my sexual partners, I would leave feeling tired, empty and longing for connection. I felt myself reenacting generations of trauma, a listless attempt to soothe the masculine into speaking to the heart.

I am learning that the intimacy of the body can create an illusion of intimacy of the heart. In the chaos of the hormones, the inherited beliefs, and excitement, we can divulge our greatest wounds before they’re ready to be held with tender care. We feel that the depth we cultivated can begin with the shedding of our clothes.

This has been the inherited belief system that I have received from years of being conditioned within a patriarchal world view. I have been told that sex isn’t sex unless there’s penetration, and variations of the phrase, “what are we even doing together if we aren’t having sex,” when I have reached towards connection with men.

My lesbian and queer friends are so perplexed by these retellings, which have helped me deepen my inner knowing that I do not have to accept these stories as the truth.

This past year I began an experiment where I started to devalue the physical act of sex itself as a form of value or intimacy and instead, began to value more the intimacy of knowing.

So often, my sexual experiences relied on my ability to disconnect with my body. To use my body sacrificially to ensure my safety, my place of rest, my protection, and my care. Instead, the intimacy of knowing is a commitment to slowing down enough so I may keep the connection between my spirit and my body intact.

It has meant a validation of my deep longings for connection and partnership whilst not feeling open or ready for physical intimacy. It has meant exploring sexually whilst holding strong boundaries around non-platonic touch.

It has led me towards a life of abundant partnership and intimacy outside of the field of sexual touch. It has taught me that community can take on shared risk with me, and that coupledom is not the only place in which family can be created.

In this opening towards love outside of classical romantic love, I have been grieving the masculine. Recently, I have felt the strength to listen to my feelings of attraction and allowing for her to have voice.

When someone who I felt a mutual feeling of attraction with asked to be sexually intimate, I said no, and offered an alternative form of sexual intimacy. To explore the energy that was coming up, and to ask the energy what was there.

In that container, he shared many stories that came up for him around what he perceived in me as a rejection. What he was asking of me physically was not actually a rooted request from his true desires of connection, acceptance, and closeness but were regurgitated lines from a patriarchal norm that tells men that certain “sexual favors” reflect a man’s worthiness.

In hearing those stories, I felt the stark distance between us. I heard in my mind my teacher, who tells me that the work of this time is to slowly close the divides that exist in all of us. Between me and him, a looming wall stood, the patriarchal colonial white supremacist system that lives, alive and well in our most intimate spheres.

Though we both shared the values and vision of a liberated world, we were caught in the expectations of the roles we were born in.

At the end of our container together, when I was about ready to close, he expressed his strong desire to be sexually intimate again. I asked him to sit with that energy and ask what message that energy had for him. At first, he responded with many words trying to explain what he wanted to do with this energy. I requested for him to take a pause with explaining, and simply just sit and keep asking the energy, “what are you here to show me.”

I told him to just ask and see if he could get a response. No need to construct a response, just wait and see if it appears.

After about five minutes, he was still and sitting there. And he finally said, it is telling me that I am accepted and loved. I told him, I felt the same message from the energy as well. It for him, was in his words, one of the greatest orgasms of his life.

This, I have some contradictory feelings on because, the term orgasm, still references a highly capitalist/patriarchal way of orienting to sexual intimacy in which the outcome or result is revered above the process. And it has been part of our ongoing dynamic in which that “result” or “aspect” of our connection has led him to seeing me as a conduit for that release, feeling, or in his words, orgasm.

When we are seen as functions to creating a feeling or release for another, we are in other terms being objectified into a role of responsibility. His non-judgmental, clear connection with his sexual energy was in my perception his connection and awareness of spirit, the divine, god’s love. His projection of me as the conduit to this connection was placing the responsibility on me, to reconnect him with that essence.

Often, women are placed in roles of mother rather than partner. In partnership, we recognize that we can do our best to support one another in meeting our needs, in mothering, we are responsible for ensuring that the acute needs are met for a baby/child’s development.

Part of my year of celibacy is releasing myself from the role of mothering. In different relationships in my life, I have taken on the role of mother. I have two partnerships in which we are actively engaging with this archetype. Part of this dynamic is the fact that I hold access to resources that recreate dynamics in which I have the agency to support one’s physical safety and sense of home.

What is my healing journey is recognizing that I have choice in saying no to responding to moments of crisis and pain that my beloveds are moving through. That my longing for partnership is showing me a way forward in which I show love by giving people the opportunity to cultivate their own connection to source by having boundaries around what I can offer them during times of need.

There is something empowering about asking to be met when there is the capacity to hold oneself in clarity and intentionality. It brings me deeper into my own clarity, and my own fortification around what it means to love through a patriarchal conditioning that tries to wear me down into a disembodied form of servitude.

As I heal this wound that has led me to believe that disassociating myself to make room for the needs of others is love, I step into a masculinity that I am being asked to evoke within myself. It is a masculinity of structure, of integral wholeness, of clarity and resolve. It isn’t domination or control, but instead is the foundation of a house, the arch of a bridge, the steadfastness of the mountains.

I grieve the scared masculine that has shamed me into this shape of servitude. So afraid of the feminine and her deep well of receptivity, the scared masculine manipulates through shaming the desires for connection and care by making belonging and worthiness about ones ability to control and dominate another’s sexual agency.

When I reconnected with this man and had a connective time opening up the container to explore sexual energy, at the end of the call he resorted to telling me what he wanted to do to me. Without curiosity around what sexual intimacy meant for me, he continued to monologue about his desire to do what I had offered to him, focusing on the “orgasm” part and not mentioning the entire process of attunement I had offered him by deeply listening and accepting his experience.

I have been continuing to grieve this experience, feeling exhausted and tired by the continual efforts I have made to desexualize intimacy in hopes of finding forms of partnership that can make sacred the physical action of sex by recognizing first, the inherited actions that disconnect us from our true intent.

As always, I return to prayer.

I pray for the masculine that knows rigidity as the form that lays the foundation for the movements and flows of water. I pray for the masculine that does not dismiss itself or hide its presence but instead integrates and makes clear its desires without manipulation or deception. I pray for the masculine to find itself again, to recognize that there is enough love present within itself, to be shared with others rather than extracted from others.

And I know that I have my part to play within this puzzle. I cannot blame men for this inheritance, as I know I am interdependent to their struggles. What I know is mine to do, is to stay as within the confines of my limitations. To trust that speaking out my boundaries is in part, the only way through.

Boundaries, as I’ll write in my next piece, is a complex reality within the realms of relationship ecology. Stay tuned for the next relationship ecology post: The boundaries and limits of the cliffs and the tides.

for me, this image represents the lineages of blood that women inherit. it is referencing the menstruation blood that ties us to cycles that cannot conform to the rigidity of patriarchal productivity.

Many thanks to the various indigenous teachings about the medicine wheel and the wisdom of widening circles as spoken by Rilke,

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not ever complete the last one,

but I give myself to it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

to bring to you an expression of a relationship ecology form that tells a story of what I do in the world.

In this context, “do” is less about a what you are, and more about the embodied expressions of life through the seasons, spirals, and cycles. When “do” is a label or identification of a person’s value, we ignore the real beauty, complexity, and depth that permeates our do as the action of being alive.

There is a deep foundational element to the way I hold what we do as the pursuit of ones destiny, also known as our soul work. This ancient, enduring tradition is not the same as a superhero destiny where one person is meant to save the world. It is the recognition that all of us have been named as purposeful in the dance of life.

We each have a part in the play, and as we reclaim modernity as composting material, we nourish a future that gets bored by celebrating the best and is instead, fascinated by the gift of the specific.

The specific points to our unique contribution, our piece of the puzzle. It is the combination of what we didn’t inherit as well as what we did. The specific points to our heartbreaks, the disconnections we’ve faced, the natural impulse to reckon with our greatest pains. It is in our own healing journey, our longings, where we begin our way back home.

In the map I drew of my work, I have three circles enfolding each other. The inner circle is the foundational work I do with my intimate relationships. This in some ways, is my most important work. It is through this work that everything else sprouts out from.

In the inner realm, I wrote: truth and mirrors, shared practice, ritual and ceremony, and lastly feeling. Although they all sit in different quadrants, I see this as more of a spiral rather than a stark seasonal project. For example, in the widening circle after the center, there is the circle that represents the offerings to the village & the learning and practices for these offerings.

In the spiritual/winter quadrant, I have storytelling. In the mental/spring quadrant I have developing co-learning labs. In the physical/summer quadrant I have giving and receiving. In the emotional/fall quadrant I have temple, sanctuary, and rest. Of course I am not resting everyday in the fall. What I mean when I say each circle is a spiral, is that I recognize that transformation comes through an arc of change.

For a tree to grow, it requires each season. For the elements to complete a cycle, they must move from the growth of wood, to the expression of fire, to the accumulation of earth, the refinement of mental, into the grief of water for the growth of wood to emerge again.

So each reverberating out circle has within itself, its own cycle. If you are listening to this audio, I encourage you to take a look at the visual component. It is much easier to understand visually.

Recently, when people have been asking me what I “do?” I’ve been thinking about this image. Rather than getting defensive, I’ve started to engage people in a dialogue of seeing our “doing” as a much more interesting form of intimacy.

To close, I’d love to see your version of this form. If you’d like to email me what you create you can do so at cattailscomix@gmail.com

Thank you!

Relationship ecology has officially transitioned to substack! This shift, like the maturing of a plant, is a moment where we’re sending tendrils of possibility out into the ether. A video component, audio companionship, more collaborations… This isn’t just a transition onto another hosting site, but a curiosity around expanding what relationship ecology as a platform for media, can offer to community.

As a welcome to you, in this new home for this work, we are starting with the simple question of: what is relationship ecology? There have been many seeds planted around what this means, and it’s been an honor to process them through this blog that began January of 2023.

There are many of those who resonate with relationship ecology and define what it means in their own ways. I am grateful for everyone who has found us, perhaps through a longing to be activated in alignment to an ecological wholeness.

Relationship ecology is the work of longing towards the truth of our interconnected reality by practicing and seeing this truth in our relational webs.

So, as we often do in relationship ecology, we turn towards the beings who speak not in words but in their commitment to being wholly themselves.

What is relationship ecology? Asks the small sprout in the garden.

I already know that my life is destined to be in relationship with those around me, and what I’ve been born to do, the little sprout says.

So simple? I respond, not knowing what to do with my hands.

One cannot change the destiny of being an earthly being born into its role, says the sprout. My destiny is not to be a star and will never be. Yet, I play a sacred role, one that is just for me, and if I am just as I am, I support all that is around me.

If I am born with a destiny, even a role… what am I to do with all the voices that tell me I must produce the most, excel the furthest, find a partner, a good job, a single-family house, and have children all before I turn 30?

The sprout stays quiet, shifting into their soft attunement with the winds.

I stay anxious, not knowing how to be, how to feel, how to belong to all this chaos and destruction, technological growth spurts, and relationship boxes of what romantic love is supposed to look like.

So, I turn around and pull out my laptop, an instrument filled with minerals and rock forms, layers of melted ore that have assembled into an intelligent being available for my use and often, negligence of its sacred origins.

And I write, what is relationship ecology?

A few words sputter out: seeking ecological wholeness in relationships all around.

Wholeness? What a concept to contemplate.

So often I am told that wholeness comes from within. That we all have the responsibility as individuals to get right with ourselves, healed and whole and only then, are we able to show ourselves to others. Yet, when I look to the beings of the land, I feel that a different kind of wholeness reveals itself. That wholeness is a landscape. Wholeness is in an ecology. That wholeness can be reflected in an individual being but cannot be known in isolation to the relationships that this being is part of.

There is no separation between our relationships and ourselves. There is no separation between the land and the beings of the land. There are functions we play, there are roles we embody, there are distinctions between each other, but only by seeing our lives through the lens of a larger ecosystem, can we truly begin to touch upon who we are through the context of what’s around.

For those who can deeply feel the truth that we are an ecosystem, there is grief when we recognize that our modernized society has been designed to separate us from our ecosystem natures. We are socialized to take comfort as a sign of success, accumulation as a marker of wealth, and self-promotion as the way towards survival. Our mental constructs, our cultural norms, reveal patterns of right and wrong, blame and shame, accusation and scapegoating, all forms of saying that there are parts of the system that must be exterminated, and do not belong.

Yet in an ecosystem, there is simply flow. No being is more relevant or important than the other. They require each other. They support each other without contracts or lawyers. They transform, grow, die, and compost into… life.

What the spiritual essence of relationship ecology is a trust and surrender to the w(holy) ecosystem. This, in our traumatized, violent, human-centered world, requires active participation to meet and expect the disconnected and disembodied self, as a reflection of a society addicted to unsustainable growth.

So, what this blog explores and looks at, are how relationships can become practice grounds for unlearning separation that puppeteers as safety. How relationships can be our practice of surrender to the flow when we are dead set on replicating the control humans project on nature itself.

We want to offer and play with frameworks that bring us into our agency as beings of change who have a natural inclination towards creating village, relational webs, and seeing self as a reflection of the ecosystem wholeness.

Here we ask, can our relationships contribute to the cultivation of a healthy ecology within ourselves and in union with the landscape of the broader non-human community?

Can we cultivate relational wisdom that has the capacity to welcome the changes, seasonality, and flows that are inherent within a natural ecology?

And can we begin to unhook ourselves from the systems that are destroying our environment through finding our needs met more and more by our relational webs?

All these questions are welcome, and arrive at the door of relationship ecology.