Chapter 1, Part 2:

She imagined herself and her co-creators as archetypal characters, like she was dreaming a play without yet knowing who would play the parts, or how the story would weave together. She imagined:

 Noel:  a property owner with a modest yard, with a full-time job outside of the collective, who has dedicated (and continues to dedicate) a significant amount of time to her emotional and spiritual development. Noel was a truth-seeker and a change-maker. She was in a process of ever more conscious co-creation and co-evolution with others and with the universe. She was living in her authentic self from a place of love, and had healed many of her past traumas, and she had a working process for continual healing and the maintenance of personal balance while in motion. She saw her herself as making change by embodying the change, creating space, and giving permission for others to step into their authentic selves as well. She has no desire to control, is a clear communicator, and has no desire to lead at all, but rather to move with others in a direction. Her natural role is that of leader within this collective. She is a natural healer, peacemaker, and empath who has developed her own self-healing tools. She understands herself and that she is constantly evolving. She understands that everyone else is as well, and this fuels her compassion and hope. She listens and hears – she looks and sees. And, she articulates and translates well the goals, needs, and ideas of other individuals within the collective to each other, and is good at helping everyone stay together on the same page. Noel brings her self-aware authentic self, her articulation, her non-hierarchical leadership, some property that she has never considered hers, and a burning desire to help move society forward towards a symbiotic relationship with this earth and a new level of human consciousness. Her real talents are her broad vision and perspective as well as her ability to hold space, give permission, and catalyze change.

Jackson: a property owner with a modest yard, who has taken permaculture design courses, and has designed a couple of projects. Jackson may not know everything there is to know about permaculture, but he does have a good idea of where to start. And, what’s more, he has some connections to permaculturists who have been consulting, teaching classes, and designing for years. He has done some deep personal work and has a solid meditation and self-care/healing process and practice in his own life. He is a changemaker who seeks to help people see that they really do have the power to change themselves by taking a hard look at what they are doing and working systemically to make improvements. He is interested in the top-level design process for permaculture more so than the implementation, and he has a good understanding of how to work with computers to coordinate projects. He has another job now, but also has an interest in transitioning out of it. He also has a broad base of knowledge of plant based diet and nutrition, which would help in designing the projects to connect in a useful way and ensure the projects are yielding not only a variety of foods, but foods that would theoretically allow for members of the collective to thrive without having to go outside of the collective unit.

Millie: a property owner with an extensive garden in a large yard, who knows a lot about plants and growing things and is also interested in building sustainable community.

Ellie: previous owner of a landscaping company, and hobby-herbalist, interested in healing herself and bringing plant medicines to the world.

Isaac: a human of many talents, who was good at understanding systems, and could build and implement pretty much any design …

Each of these initial members could ultimately help fold in more members, and membership in the collective would be sure to grow, and Noel figured those archetypal characters would become clearer with time. She realized as she was thinking about it that, no matter the skillets and abilities of the individual members, they would all need to share some fundamental values, a certain type of vision of the future, and a level of self-actualization and self-awareness appropriate to the endeavor. There would have to be some core characteristics shared by all members of the collective:

(But first, Noel quickly disclaimers herself in her head: “None of this speaks to the specific beliefs or practices of the members, and that is also an important point – for this collective is not designed to carry with it any set belief structure – no specific teacher or guru – for it is not about control, and must be built in part on the understanding that every individual will have their own, completely unique, way of interacting with the universe and understanding what is.”)

We know that we do not live in a mechanistic, Newtonian universe. We understand that this model for understanding our reality is very useful in many circumstances, and we are not abandoning that or saying it is wrong. What we are saying is that this model is not enough to describe what we know about how the universe works. Evolutionary biology, quantum physics, and eons of religions and spiritual practices point to a different model of the universe. The universe can be modeled as a non-locally connected, constantly evolving, organism. It is a massive complex adaptive system, made up of many smaller component complex adaptive systems. Life is not meaningless: life is evolution. We do not “understand” consciousness, yet each of us experience it and know it well. As humans, we are here to evolve and create greater and greater symbiosis for evolutionary growth. We are ready to move beyond our individual egos and to understand ourselves, and to feel ourselves, as integral parts of the system in which we exist. We are ready to move past duality – to take on and embody the fact that there is no plain right and wrong, or up and down, or black and white, and that all is relative, and all is rich with complexity. This does not mean that there is no moral compass, this is to say we are finding our moral compass in a new way. What this all means is that there are possibilities, humans can change, we can be better, and we can learn from our mistakes both individually and collectively.

We build progress narratives and seek to create, then enforce, feedback loops that will lead our selves and our species and our planet to regenerative and healing virtuous cycles. We understand that in doing so what we are doing is finding, breaking, and reversing a multitude of vicious cycles in play at this place and time on earth individually as well as collectively across multiple levels and layers of society. We understand that this is not anyone’s “fault” and that this place we find ourselves in is a step in our individual and collective evolutionary journeys. We understand that our systems here are coming under severe strain and that the way to move through this time is to ensure that we understand that we must find new solutions, and that while we can build on and incorporate what we have learned, the cycles must stop – we, as individuals, and collectively at various levels, must work towards learning from history so that it actually stops repeating itself. And, although we are at a tenuous point in our evolution as a species, and we have much damage to heal, we do believe that we can do it. We have hope in ourselves and in humanity. We have hope, and we look at open eyes at the state of the world and the current state of humanity and what we have done in our collective slumber fueled by consumerism, addiction, distraction, and massive-scale cognitive dissonance. We do not expect to be “perfect,” and we do not expect to become “healed,” or for life to become “easy” or “blissful” always. We know we will make mistakes, and we know these are lessons and a necessary part of our process. We live to keep healing and evolving, and we are willing and ready to consistently put in the work that it takes to do so. And we are ready to set aside all blame – of self and of others – to forgive and to love. To choose love and trust over fear and suspicion.

Our understanding of our selves and our place on this planet and in this universe informs how we want to live and how we want to interact with each other. We believe that it is time to move on from our current understanding of wealth in general, and of personal property in particular. We find value in healing and in evolution. We find value in co-creating with each other and with this planet and this universe. We seek to improve ourselves and to help ourselves in service to the whole. We understand that when we form smaller groups, or collectives, that they are always a part of a larger collective, and that we always must respect and understand our relationship to that larger whole. We must therefore always seek to help, rather than to take from or to use, that larger system as we build resilience within our smaller, more local, collectives. We understand that moving away from property ownership as presently established, and moving away from an economy based on accumulation of material wealth, are not going to happen overnight – and they are not going to come from some larger top-down plan, or new economic structure. They must emerge from the bottom – and part of the reason for this is that one thing the new structure must not have at all is a top-down, imposed structure. This is what we ultimately must move past.

In our current times, material wealth accumulation is impossible for a multitude and extreme for a few. Even though some individuals and groups thereof have amassed giant piles of material wealth, the basic needs of many are not being met. We believe  that the new measure of the wealth of a community, or a species, is not by how much a few of them have, and it is not by adding up what they all have, but it is by the level of needs that are being met for everyone. Now, we have had ideas about ways to work on the inequity of wealth distribution many times. And we have a lot of good ideas from all that work, but we do not have some perfect and implementable system. Why? Because the problems are interconnected and complex and to come up with one would simply be impossible. But one thing is clear, in order to move on from this system the ways in which our basic needs are being met must change. Since near-global capitalism, and global commodification will never work to change this, we have to do something different. And, whatever we do has to also be able to co-exist with the larger systems in place. The idea is not to change the system from within the system (which doesn’t really work for such fundamental shifts), and the idea is not to come up with a sparkling new system and implement it. Instead, the idea is to incorporate some parts of the system while growing a replacement system from the ground up through healing and trust building and likely through facing much adversity.

Collectivism is a way forward that seems to be emerging somewhat naturally due to the pressures of our system. Collectivism means resource sharing and putting all intention towards the collective good. Ultimately, it would break down private ownership. This would not mean there is no ownership. Small level collectives would have use of certain things and materials – they would “own them”, in a sense. But it would be understood more like a resource allocation of what is needed for that small collective to do what it needs to do as a part of the larger collective…

Noel realized she was out on a bit of a tangent and reigned her thoughts in a little. Back to what the members of the collective would need to fundamentally have in common:

We do not have interest in ownership, possession, or control. We have no interest in the accumulation of material wealth. We are not interested in continual growth in the sense of number of members, or of land/resources, or of money. We are not interested in merely being sustainable. We want to be regenerative and evolutionary in our collective endeavors. We see a reasonable step to take in this direction is to have more of our basic needs met without reliance on the larger economic structures of society, and without the need for things to be transported over great distances. A starting point to this is to build a collective that has its basic needs for food met without economic engagement, or without the need for money at all. When we set out on this journey together, we will respect all our individual needs and journeys, while fully committing to our co-creative journey together. We will work to communicate fully, to bring our authentic selves to all we do, and to trust each other fully. We understand that we will hurt each other, make mistakes, and have disagreements – and we all agree to work through these things nonviolently, and with empathy. We understand that challenges make us stronger, and we are not interested in pride or ego. We understand that we are fully investing in this collective vision and what may grow or evolve from it together, and that no one of us could do any of this alone.

She thought that was a pretty decent start, at any rate. Next would come the interest gathering phase. Noel would have to reach out to those she knew might be interested in joining her in this endeavor of starting a seed collective. She knew her next step would be reaching out to her friends and connections to start to find those who shared this dream and were ready to work to bring it to life, such that the collective grow out of a co-creative process, naturally evolving into what it needed to be with work, laughter, leadership, shared vision, trust, and love.