The boundaries and limits of the cliffs and the tides
and stories of messy sanctuary and finding our collective edge
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.
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