what is open mutualism?
an invitation to participate in a New England wisdom cooperative and give back to live on Earth.
dear friend,
i write you 12 days after saying farewell to MAPLE, during which i’ve returned home, celebrated Shabbat with a dear friend, received Reiki I & II attunements, connected with the kiddos at Warwick Community School, meditated at Quaker Meeting at Mount Toby, played ultimate frisbee & started coaching, enjoyed lovely dinners and spiritual readings with my grandparents & friends, joined a group of Morris dancers and sang English folk songs over nachos, salvaged a gluten-free chocolate muffin experiment, and genuinely enjoyed this wild process of being alive.
today is March 29th as I write this, and a blanket of snow was just draped over the landscape of my brother’s home. in the stillness between moments of play with my nephew, I pause to reflect and wonder about the path forward and how we might walk it together:
how do we practice community & responsibility in the digital age? how do we re-animate the world? and how do we coordinate our efforts at the appropriate scale?
here then, are a few thoughts from a weekend of reading, meditation, and connection; and an invitation to participate in a small New England wisdom cooperative that’s asking these questions, mapping resources, and seeding projects together. (to become a contributor, email rivr.ston3@gmail.com)
i want to begin by sharing this episode of the Emerald, a podcast that melds music and thinkers across time into one immersive soundscape and journey of mind.
it takes the ideas from last week’s writing on how our energy and attention shapes the world further by exploring the traditional and modern understanding of the words “Law” and “Order”, as written briefly here:
In the modern world, words like 'law' and 'order' carry with them a good deal of sociocultural baggage, and are often associated with restriction, burden, and arbitrarily imposed rules. Yet historically, tradition after tradition sees an innate, artful order to the natural world and views the Law of the Land as something vibrant and alive, present in the breath and in the waters and in the endless cycling of the clouds. In this living vision of Law, nature unfolds along particular patterns and pulses, and the task of the human being is to understand what it means to align to this inherent pattern….At the heart of this Law is a responsibility to give back to the living web of which we are a part, and the understanding that in the very act of being alive, we owe debts to the larger cycle of creation…traditional visions of Law remind us that our responsibility to nature is not burdensome. In fact, to align to the larger web of life alleviates a great modern burden — the burden of isolation.
I. how do we practice community & responsibility in the digital age?
I’m reading Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, in which he presents a society of Echinoderm-like lifeforms that strikes a deep, deep cord with the world we see today (in fact, multiple parts of the first 100 pages have rocked me to the point of tears this week, but I want to share this excerpt on the tension between the individual and community in particular):
this book was written in 1936, yet i can’t stop the chills when i read these lines:
“the ideology of super-tribes exercised absolute power over all individual minds under their sway…criticism was met either by blind rage or not heard at all. Persons who in the intimate community of their small native tribe were capable of great mutual insight and sympathy might suddenly, in response to tribal symbols, be transformed into vessels of crazy intolerance and hate directed against national or class enemies.”
we feel this in the currents of our mass media, see the manipulation of mind happening before our eyes…so what do we do this time? how do we live in true community, and coordinate action at the appropriate scale and time?
A Way of Practice: Open Mutualism
my friend Will Szal recently introduced me to something called Open Mutualism that is exciting to me, though i’m just beginning to scratch the surface. Will writes:
“One way to describe it is an ontology and epistemology grounded in encounter-based (see the work of David Abram, _The Spell of the Sensuous_, 1997) as opposed to right-based framework for relating with non-human entities. In practical terms—how does a community relate to its watershed? Does a framework for right-relationship emerge from federal environmental protections, or from the community’s direct relationship with the living river herself?
Mutualism itself refers to a timeless practice of cooperation and care; the "open” widens this frame beyond the human-to-human dynamic to include all of our relationships; removing the assumed separation between “us” and “nature” that has been baked into so much of our culture and economic models.
Sara Horowitz writes, “Mutualism is really just another word for a simple truth: citizens can join together to solve their own problems, even the most intractable ones".2
"This mutualist instinct is as old as humanity, and just as durable. It’s how the earliest Americans met their most essential needs; how the labor movement transformed the American economy by building the first safety net for workers in the 1910s and 1920s; how the New Deal enshrined that safety net in the middle of the American century; and how a remarkable coalition of mutualist organizations galvanized the civil rights movement by building power over the course of decades. Over the years mutualist institutions have taken many forms, and have been called many things—cooperatives, unions, religious groups, communes, mutual aid societies, mutuals, kibbutzim, tontines, fraternal societies, women’s organizations, trade associations—but they all spring from a common impulse: if neither government nor market forces are solving a problem that you and the people in your community share, why not solve it yourself?"
a chance to take stock
as our government strips away funding from crucial services and dismantles environmental protections, we’re faced with the opportunity to take stock of our essential resources and needs and work towards meeting them ourselves. Horowitz continues:
“when we break down the safety net into component parts, it’s a set of solutions to human needs—universal health care, education and jobs training, affordable quality food, clean drinking water, unemployment insurance, the protection of workers from exploitation...
The pathway for activists, foundation leaders, think tankers, and elected officials is to take their cues from the robust local communities rich with networks of community groups who have the “job” of delivering the next safety net infrastructure of health care, child and eldercare, training, and food delivery…”
introducing: the bioregion
the open mutualist frame adds another principle to this equation of care: grounding our focus in the bioregion — expanding our awareness to the flows of energy and nutrients that make up our local, interconnected region of life:
Bioregionalism is not a “return” to a more essential form of social life or State of Nature. Rather it is the assertion that the spatial and temporal boundaries for our regenerative paradigm already exist. They emerge from the land itself in the form of watersheds, soil series, and wind currents. People typically understand what is east, what is west of them, but know very little about what is upstream and what is downstream of them.
Undualling, at the heart of regeneration is the fertile ground to grow sovereign bioregional regenerative economies, which must navigate the water which flows downstream, and be accountable to them. Regenerative economies cycle value as they cycle energy and nutrients. They are defined by the “sheds'' of energy, nutrients, life, and activity which constitute a bioregion.3
Regeneration here is described by the Regen Foundation as, “Actions that increase the capacity, viability, and vitality of both the agent and system being acted within or upon.“
Framed in relation to humans and the planet, regeneration are those actions and processes which bring both human and the world which sustains us into greater capacity and vitality, in a reciprocal fashion. Regeneration posits that individual / communal well being emerges through environmental stewardship. It is the opposite of extraction.4
as we come into alignment with these natural patterns and build relationships of care with the people around us, may we find that our capacity to solve problems and meet our needs is far greater than we once thought it was.
The revolution, when it comes, will start where it always has: with people. Specifically, with groups of like-minded people, yoked together by shared geography, a shared community, a shared economic stake, or a shared belief who come together to try to solve an intractable problem that government or markets either can’t or won’t solve for them. Profound change will come when we individually stop waiting, and collectively start building.
— Sarah Horowitz
remember the great compassion that is your strength.
we can do this together.
let’s do our best today.
all the love,
river
Recommended further reading:
Ibid.
beautiful. so good to meet you here. I find resonance in the things you are speaking about + the way you speak them. good to know you were at maple, too. blessings
nice to read ya