What is Relationship Ecology?

What is Relationship Ecology?

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.