Let me know if you want more bee time, I will be spending as much time there as possible either way, so I may sometimes take y’all with me.

Get more from Rev. Ganga Devi Braun in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

This weekend I did my best to tune out the noise and tune in to the needs and the pleasures of my intimate home life. I rooted into place more wholly than I have in a long while, and it has nourished me deeply. This is what I am sharing with you today.

On Saturday morning, I woke up achy and sore, not uncommon in this body that has been managing chronic pain and fatigue since I was five or six years old.

Just before 9am, I was preparing to draw myself a bath, when I was reminded that Saturday mornings is when we gather to tend to our neighborhood garden together. I had forgotten, as I always forget, and as always was grateful to be reminded. I put on pants, I coiled my hair up with a paintbrush, I put on my faded blue hat, and set off to the garden that lies two and a half blocks from my house.

After a nice meandering conversation on the back porch, and some sampling of strawberries plucked fresh from the ground, the task of the day was simple weeding, like last week, of the Dollarweed and Florida Betony that function as a living mulch, metabolizing the dry mulch, making it soil, and which periodically need clearing out to give the other plants we placed there on purpose a bit more of a chance to thrive. As I went, I pocketed the small glowing white tubers from the Florida Betony, anticipating the mild crunchy snack of them later once I had the chance to rinse them and my own hands from the soil of the day.

By the time were done, I was feeling the many documented benefits of having one’s hands in the soil. My body still hurt, yes, but my mind was clearer, and my heart wide open.

My two weeding companions these last two weeks were Donna, a friend of my mother’s who I’ve known my whole life and who has been the greatest source of village support in her weekly two hour playdate with my child, and Ani-la, a Tibetan Buddhist Nun of my mother’s lineage who moved to this area a few years back. We talked about the gardens of Donna’s Portuguese ancestors, childhoods marred by the mental health struggles of parents, and the grace that flows from setting boundaries and finding our mature authority in adulthood.

As we wrapped up, Donna headed out to the library where she’d donated a ton of art supplies for an art swap, and she was going to see what treasures she could find. Ani-la asked if I could give her a ride home. The subtle shame I had felt on choosing to drive dissolved, and strangely as we piled ourselves and the Collard Greens, Kale, Mint, and Mizuna that we had harvested into my electric car, I noticed that somehow the car had gained 10 miles worth of energy while we were gardening. Small strange miracles abound.

On the short drive to bring Ani-la home, we discussed the once beautiful, currently defunct garden in her community that was made for low-income seniors, a garden we had named the Wisdom Garden about 3 years back. It had been managed by someone paid by a USDA grant which was DOGE’d last year, and so the beds lay mostly empty and fallow now. I asked what it would take to get it up and running again, and imagined that when my own business is running well enough that I may have some greater resources of time and attention and energy and money, that I would love to somehow support its regeneration. She expressed prayers that my business reach the fullness of its potential.

I returned home to my child and husband, and after a time, I did take a bath. Later in the afternoon, when my mother took my son out on an adventure to local farmstands, garden supply stores, and the Italian ice joint opened up as a joyful service to the community by the owner of a local roofing company, my husband and I were both able to take a blessed nap together.

When we woke up, we put on our finest pajamas as a family and headed to the synagogue for a Pajama Havdalah where elders and children sang songs and ate cookies and honored the closing of Shabbat together as the first stars appeared. Rabbi Rose wore a unicorn onesie and pink heart barrettes in her hair. It was a very good day.

On Sunday, I woke up with some anxiety to get some work done, and was in a deep focus through the early morning and into 10 o’clock when our friend Allie came over with a mason jar of honey harvested by a beekeeper she and her partner Max met at last year’s Florida Permaculture Convergence. By all accounts, this beekeeper is a magical woman whose wisdom we will glean from when the time comes to welcome our own hive into our world. It felt amazing to receive this honey, pure sweet medicine. Later today, I will use some of it to make medicinal marshmallows for the cough and sore throat that is once again making its rounds.

Allie needed wifi and a quiet space to zoom in to her part of the opening proceedings of a weeklong series of virtual events co-hosted by the Design Science Studio and the Vision Train, honoring the sixth anniversary of both communities of visionary artists and changemakers working together across distance and difference for regenerative futures. I am so honored that Allie, a friend from preschool and high school first discovered these communities through my sharing of them in 2020, and now has become an integral member of the Vision Train’s team, as well as a core part of our neighborhood village life.

I was pleased to envision her conducting the train from my cozy office which I’ve designed to feel a bit like a luxurious train car from ages past, complete with a curtained daybed, a space that is full of altars and art supplies and reminders to go slow in the form of a snail magnifying glass and a brass tortoise tape dispenser. The altar that is my desk is one of my favorite places in the world, and it is a gratifying experience of intimacy-via-solitude to welcome a friend to spend an afternoon from that perch. And if my office is a train car, it is one that has been parked in the midst of a jungle garden for long enough that the Giant Crinum Lily, richly purple and green and just outside, is often taller than the windows themselves.

I spent a few minutes tidying for her and made us both frothy mugs of cacao. Her arrival pleasantly reoriented me back to the dimension of reality beyond the screen, and I felt the dead leaves of the garden beckoning to me to finally tending to the plants that had been shocked back to their roots by a sudden frost a few months ago.

I brought my child outside and spent the next four hours tending to the winter garden, guided by the green buds of new life beginning to show up on the branches of trees that for the last many weeks have looked entirely dead.

Since the frost I had been craving the task of relieving our plants of their dead leaves and branches, seeing what the light would show me in the garden with less obstruction, making space for the new life to emerge. We were told to wait till after the Ides of March to do this deathwork, and finally the day had come. So I spent Sunday pruning bushes, loppering trees, sweeping pavers, and neatly clipping the large unruly branches into wands for a tidy-ish pile we could more easily move.

It was deeply satisfying.

Moreso, was the satisfaction of the mirror Allie and I served in each other that day. Normally I am the one sitting at my desk, looking out to the back garden, doing the work of supporting the planet’s regeneration through the worlds and lives that the digital realm serves as a portal to. I often look out to the garden, and long for the days where the garden under the oaks is my only domain, where the rest of the world can fall away and I can be wholly present to the place that I call home. Allie and her partner Max help us with garden work, help us tend this land, and often I sit at my desk, watching them do their work, and feel a tinge of fraud when my days are more inside than outside.

But seeing her in there, with her candle lit, in joyful facilitative dialogue, meditation, and deep listening to folks around the world, I felt her as a beautiful mirror of myself in the work I deeply love, and felt tremendous appreciation of our interwoven experiences. I remembered that it is all the living world. The trees and the fish and the birds and the soil and the glass of the windows and of the computer screen and the beeswax of the candles and the minerals of our batteries and the electricity that flows through the home to make miracles possible every day and the intelligence that is our interface with it all.

All of this is the living world.

Allie wrapped up as I settled back inside the dining room for a visioning session of what the future of that room could be, enchanting it even deeper as an extension of the garden that the large french windows invite it to be.

Within an hour my child would ask for a tea party in the garden, and he, myself, my husband, and my mother would all go out to his picnic table in the garden, newly swept, where we enjoyed mizuna salad from the community garden, potato salad, tuna salad, and garden mint tea sweetened with the honey that Allie had brought over that morning.

By late afternoon, our child asked to take a bike ride, and he and my husband were out long enough for me to nap on the daybed in my office, wake up, and watch an episode of Outlander while making dinner and cleaning the kitchen.

It was a beautiful weekend. Through social and solitary gardening, I became more deeply rooted into place. I feel greater reciprocity with the living world to which I belong. I feel greater grounding into the reality that I am able to shape, where I am with what I have.

I write this for myself as much as for you, for the reminder that such days, such neighborhoods, such families, such rhythms of reciprocity do still exist. We can choose them any time.

This garden is stewarded by a man and a woman I have known my whole life.

Many years ago, the woman received the message from something beyond her that that plot was to become a Garden of Eden. She didn’t know what that meant exactly, or how much work it would take, or what would be needed. But she trusted the message, and knew that if she began with trust, that miracles would flow.

She and her beloved bought the vacant lot next to their home and got to work.

He is a master carpenter, she is an energy healer1 and animal communicator.

Together, they gave structure to life:

Rows of Mysore raspberries, with their strange and beautiful black fruit.
A strawberry fruit tree planted in memory of her sister.
A towering mulberry, casting its generous shade.
A small, sweet persimmon tree.
Beds of arugula, mizuna, kale.

And all around, brown’s savory, its spicy, fragrant leaves scenting the pathways like an herbal welcome mat.

And still, the bulk of the land, until quite recently, was a big pile of mulch.

For years, nearly two-thirds of the lot was an open rectangle of wood chips untouched. It wasn’t neglected, or forgotten, but waiting.

One large rectangle attracting insects and fungal spores and microbes to slowly, season by season, break down the wood chips into good soil. One large rectangle of pure potential. Time and life were steadily preparing the ground.

This is now our community garden.

Mulch is a Patient Prayer

When the idea was first proposed, it truly did strike everyone as a divinely orchestrated miracle.

We were in the early days of figuring out our neighborhood villaging vision. The land of my own home is covered in oaks and we’ve focused on planting native species. This gives nourishment and habitat to countless species of Florida wildlife, but yields very little with which we can feed ourselves and our neighbors. Other visions and plans had fallen through, shifting shape with the changes that come with evolving lives and relationships. But we kept weaving the web of relationship, rekindling old friendships, getting to know neighbors we hadn’t yet introduced ourselves to.

The day we reconnected with Kumari and Kumara, the stewards of this garden, they were literally praying for support. Kumara had experienced multiple heart surgeries in recent years, and Kumari was concerned that in trying to do it all—in his carpentry business and in the garden—his health would suffer more.

What happened next is what happens in good soil: unexpected, fruitful emergence.

We realized that their garden plot was literally preparing itself for us. The mulch on this plot was rescued organic matter, ”waste” from trees trimmed away from power lines by the utility company, turned by time and fungi into fertility. For a while now, both our families had been requesting that the mulch be deposited on our lots to help build soil rather than brought to the county dump. In both cases, this had been going on for years. In both cases, it began before we knew what exactly we’d be planting.

Slowly, over the years, the soil was being prepared even when it looked empty. You can feel it when you stand on the ground there, a bounce beneath your heels that doesn’t exist in the adjacent sandy soil where only grass grows. When you bend down and brush away a layer of the mulch you see dark, rich soil with white lines of mycelium like lightning strikes, connecting life to life. You can smell it. This is the nature of soil work. It requires time and patience and slow decomposition. The reward is rich and multisensory, but you have to bring yourself low to take it in.

This kind of fertility requires non-attachment and trust in the unfolding of time.

This is the foundation of life affirming futures.

Nine Years of Compost

At the same time this plot of land was slowly being prepared, so were we.

Over the past nine years, Seth and I have been engaged in a deep process of composting—breaking down cultural patterns, belief systems, and ways of being that don’t serve the world we know we’re here to help cultivate. It’s been a long arc of grief and re-patterning, spiritual practice and somatic learning, slow turning toward what’s actually needed for the future we believe in.

From the outside, it’s probably looked quite quiet.

A lot of time in this small temple cottage we call home.
A lot of sitting in the garden. A lot of late night creative sessions.

A lot of time enrolled in the best institutions we could find to shape us into the teachers and leaders life kept telling us we were becoming.
A lot of 1:1 conversations with elders and mentors who were shaping the foundations of our lives, our work, our characters.

No paid marketing.
Very few public launches.

But beneath the surface, the soil was forming. The microbes were active.
The deep work was happening.

When Seth and I met, it was New Year’s Eve, nine years ago. We both knew that the world would change dramatically in 2017, and we felt the shockwaves of just how toxic the leadership in every field you can imagine had become.

The year before we met, we were both being flown around the country as teachers and speakers. Seth had just been featured on an A&E TV show that has reached tens of millions of people. Within a week of meeting, Seth was teaching at Yoga Journal Live, and a feature on him came out in Yoga Magazine. I had just represented North America at a peace conference in South Korea and was facilitating workshops for climate activists and innovators in halls of power. We were each expanding rapidly in our respective paths.

But when we found each other, we didn’t try to capitalize on that momentum.

We didn’t rush to become a “power couple.”
We didn’t monetize our relationship.
We didn’t go all in on building a brand.

Instead, we slowed all the way down.

Our second date was Seth driving 90 minutes to join me for a permaculture internship day where we quite literally dug into the soil, building an in-ground compost system side-by-side.

Soil work is death work, and that year, we helped hospice my father. We spent time with Ram Dass in Maui. We held grief. We built trust in what was emerging between us and within us.

And while it wasn’t flashy, what we were doing was preparing the soil.

Together, we sought out the best teachers we could find. Carefully, intentionally, we found the mentors and schools that would help us become who we were becoming, without a clear image or goal we were moving toward other than spiritual maturity, ethical leadership, effective embodiment of the values we hold most sacred.

We apprenticed ourselves to practices that demanded accountability, embodiment, integrity, and inner maturity. We learned what it meant to hold space for people’s deep work—somatic, spiritual, sexual, and systemic—and to do so in a way that is truly regenerative.

And while all this was happening, we began supporting a small circle of 1:1 clients. We offered a few intimate courses. We said no to growth for growth’s sake. We trusted the depth. We trusted the soil.

Out of that, EMUNAH ΛCΛDEMY emerged—our virtual home for multidimensional learning and community transformation.

For the last five years, EMUNAH has grown to be a place where the core principles of living well in right relationship—with oneself, with others, and with the living world—could take root. Where embodiment, emotional honesty, and spiritual presence are not abstractions, but the soil of daily life.

We’ve been refining frameworks. Testing language. Living the practices.
And now, what was once mulch has become good soil.

This past year has felt like that first year of gardening where you’re testing the soil, experimenting, seeing what takes, what thrives, what won’t work.

And this coming year is the year we take what we’ve learned and we plant, in earnest, with the confidence that we can feed our community, and feed them well with the fruit of our work.

This year is the next phase of a garden that is designed to be perennial, long-growing, something rooted in the trust we’ve built, and the soil we’ve tended.

The parallels between our garden of EMUNAH and our community garden (literally called, years ago by Kumari, Aruna) are striking. This last year too was a time of experimenting, finding what thrives and what needs more support, testing planting methods, setting up irrigation flows, and learning the rhythm that actually meets the community’s needs and desires.

Some things didn’t take in the last planting season, and we’ve learned from that. Exactly the same with business. You try, you observe, you learn, you adjust.

Most of all, you check in with your community.

Connecting with my neighbors and this growing digital community alike has been the most nourishing part of my life this year. I have incredibly deep confidence in what we can accomplish together when we invest in the ground that holds us together.

Where the Garden Grows Online

The digital village we are convening and cultivating this year is one that we have envisioned and steadily worked toward for all of these years.

It’s called BeginWithin, and it’s designed to minimize overwhelm, be an antidote to brain-rot, deepen the relationships you have with yourself, your loved ones, and the living world to which you belong, and help you shape a life in which you can truly thrive, multidimensionally, nourished and guided by the core values that make you, you.

We want it to be a community of peers who understand that the change we long for in the world around us is systemic in nature, and that we too are living systems, and that the repatterning begins within ourselves.

We know this is possible, because in a survey we did of our community last year, 74% of you affirmed that:

There is deep wisdom, will, and longing here amongst us to carve our paths, and to do so not through a codependent community, and not in isolation, but rather, through interdependent solitude.

And we know this is possible because we are doing it. With very little marketing, really just relationship based connection and a few mentions of it online, we have nine brilliant, creative participants registered so far who we are eager to co-create with this year.

Registration is open through January 10th (and frankly most online sign ups happen the day after registration closes, so we are eager to check in on January 11th to see who will be growing with us this coming year).

What we’re cultivating in BeginWithin is rooted in the same soil as our neighborhood garden. It’s a community where inner work and outer relationship are not separate—where what we learn inside ourselves is meant to be lived in our homes, our neighborhoods, our partnerships, our workplaces.

Every Saturday, we gather on the land. We share a short meditation. We check in. We mulch and weed and water and seed. We reflect together.

And now, thanks to the beautiful orchestration of this moment, our dear friend and neighbor Allie2—who leads much of the work in the physical garden—will also be tending the digital garden of BeginWithin. Holding sessions, creating structure, offering presence.

The relationship between our neighborhood garden and our digital garden isn’t a metaphor, it’s a relationship between two living systems that mutually inform one another’s becoming.

That is our intention for our community of practice this year, that those who join us in BeginWithin see the actual fabric of their daily and weekly lives nourished, grown, shaped toward something more life affirming, more beautiful, more connected this year.

That we develop how we live better, together.

That this effects steady, deep, real systemic change in all dimensions of our lives.

A Living Invitation

BeginWithin is for those who are ready to slow down and deepen. It’s for you if you know we don’t need more hustle or experiences of intensity, we need more integration, coherence, and steadiness in our world. It’s for you if you’re no longer interested in asking “how can I fix myself?” but “how can I live more fully in alignment with what I already know to be true?”

This year, BeginWithin will be a place where we are honest about what’s working and what isn’t. Where we share with one another what’s helping us thrive, what kind of connection and transformation is possible in our lives when we grow at the pace of our own integration.

Every new moon we will share frameworks, embodiment practices, and methods for remembering and translating your own wisdom into your daily life not as a solo journey, but as a form of collective regeneration.

Throughout each month there will be a few different invitations to co-created virtual gatherings to support gentle integration. I know I personally will aim to join most of these calls from the garden, or with a piece of art I’m working on in my hands. This is an experiment in enriching our daily existence, not taking us away from it.

We are approaching this year as a beta experiment, because we want to iterate and develop what an online community that actually nourishes your offline life looks like.

We also are excited to create opportunities for the BeginWithin community to share their own wisdom, experiment with workshops or games or new facilitation styles or offerings they want to share with the community, even if they’re raw. We deeply believe that when we live our wisdom out loud, it gives others permission to do the same.

As Ram Dass said to us the last time we sat with him,

Within the containment of a gentle, steady, yearlong community of practice, we are ready to bring heart-centered change into our world through the unique and limitless potential held within each of our lives.

I wrote this, slowly, in the darkest days of the year, doing deep internal soil-work with myself. Like the savory herbs scenting the pathways and edges of the garden, I feel this next phase in the air, even before my feet have landed within it. I see the soil work we have done, and I know that now it’s time to plant together.

If you’ve been doing your own quiet composting, if you’re feeling ready to tend something new in your life with the support of others, I hope you’ll join us.

Learn More

🌱
We begin in the soil.
We begin within.
We begin together.

—
with care, always,
Ganga

I’ve often dreamed of living in or near an orchard, of waking up to the slow rhythms of a place where chickens and goats and cows are part of the fabric of daily life. I don’t just want them for their eggs, milk, or manure—I want to be in relationship with them, to care for them as they care for me, my family, and the land.

My home is full of anything and everything my husband and I have from our ancestors, and we use them all the time. Old wooden kitchen tools from my grandmothers, fine china my great grandfather bought just before the depression, textiles from the old country, really old books.

And yet, I know there’s an entire world of people who, upon hearing these things, would assume I’m part of the Christian tradwife homesteading movement that’s been sweeping the internet in recent years.

But that’s not me, and it’s not a lot of other people I know who have a deep longing to live slowly, close to the earth, deeply rooted in relationship with more than just humans. In this distorted media climate, I think a lot of us have gotten disoriented. Now that we’re facing an increasingly alarming authoritarian regime, and an anti-constitutional coup by billionare oligarchs, I think many of us are actually finding the ground again.

The Troubling Aesthetic of Homesteading

My friend recently wrote an essay asking: Do conservatives now own the back-to-the-land dream? In it, she wrestles with the realization that her own vision of pastoral life—one that includes gardens, fruit trees, and free-range children—mirrors the cottagecore aesthetics and tradwife fantasies being peddled on social media. She asked herself,

“Is this really my dream or have the conservative-infused social media tradwife and cottagecore trends infiltrated my brain and hijacked my psyche?

How and when did this become my fantasy? And why?

I’ve been obsessing about this. Is this “ideal life” truly mine or is it what the algorithm has served me? And is this a benign algorithm or is it the result media propaganda that wants to keep women stuck in the home.“

I feel that tension too—not so much in wondering whether my longing for land-based life is truly mine (it’s been so consistently present in my life that I don’t doubt that), but in recognizing how this longing has been commodified, politicized, and filtered through an Instagram-perfect, whitewashed, often very specifically Christian lens.

Beyond aesthetics, there’s the history of the word homesteading itself. The Homestead Act of 1862, which granted settlers land in exchange for “improving” it, was an explicit tool of Indigenous displacement and land theft. The homesteading ideal—this vision of an independent nuclear family staking out its own self-sufficient plot—was never about living in harmony with the land. It was about privatizing it.

That’s why I don’t resonate with homesteading as a concept. I’m not trying to carve out my own isolated, self-sufficient world. What I want is to village.

I want fresh eggs and veggies, and I want my child to grow up with relationships to many different species. I want the joy of gathering ingredients straight from the land. But I don’t have to do it all myself. I don’t want to wake up at 5 a.m. to take care of animals if I’m being totally honest. I’d rather wake up at 5 a.m. to write essays for my Substack, like I’m doing right now.

That’s the difference between homesteading and villaging.

We don’t all have to do everything. That’s the myth of self-sufficiency, and it’s one that homesteading often reinforces—the idea that resilience means being able to handle every single task alone (or within a family unit that only grows by endless sequential pregnancies).

Villaging, on the other hand, is about shared responsibility, about creating networks of reciprocity where we each contribute in ways that align with our gifts, needs, and rhythms.

And yet, in the curated world of social media homesteading, the reality of many different forms of labor is often erased.

We hear it all the time: It takes a village to raise a child. But where is the village?

Since becoming a mother, I have seen this question as an outcry—especially in online mothering spaces. There is real grief, real exhaustion, real rage. Because stewarding the lives of children is an impossible task to do alone, and yet, so many of us are expected to do exactly that. Even I, with an incredibly present partner, an intergenerational household, and deeply involved in-laws less than an hour away, have still felt lonely, depleted, and aching for deeper support in the more than two years since my child was born.

And yet, the women who are selling the tradwife homesteading fantasy online—the ones presenting an image of graceful, effortless motherhood on the land—are often the most exhausted of all. Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, the reigning tradwife queen (whose husband’s family is billionaires btw), has spoken about being bedridden for days with exhaustion. This is not normal. It is not okay. And it is not how things have to be.

And the reproductive rights being systematically stripped away in this country make this issue even more urgent as millions of people find themselves in forced pregnancies with ever diminishing social safety nets. Outrageously, the political implications of the tradwife influence machine contributes to the election of officials that support these policies, leaving the people they’ve influenced with fantasies, no real road map to fulfill them, and policies that directly undermine the viability of the lives that so many people understandably long for.

These women are not actually self-sufficient. They are not living off the land—they are living off their influence. They aren’t surviving by milking cows and churning butter; they are surviving by selling an image of milking cows and churning butter.

But this is where the real harm of the myth lies: there is no such thing as total self-sufficiency. There is only interdependence. And when that interdependence is denied or erased, it doesn’t disappear—it just becomes invisible labor, unpaid labor, exhausted labor. The labor of women, of mothers, of the land itself.

And this isn’t just about money. It’s about which labor is valued, and which labor is expected to be done for free. It’s something my husband and I are actively working to address in how we structure our household and finances—something we’ll share more about in our joint publication, . Because if we want a regenerative future, we have to regenerate the way we value labor, care, and contribution.

This is why villaging matters. Not as a nostalgic dream, not as an aesthetic, but as a response to the real needs of our time. Because the truth is, no one can—or should—do this alone.

Villaging as an Ancestral Practice of Interdependence

Unlike homesteading, villaging is not about independence—it’s about interdependence. It’s about weaving networks of care, regenerating the commons, and recognizing that resilience doesn’t come from doing everything alone but from being in deep relationship with land and people.

A few years ago, my mother bought the lot next to our home—not to develop, but to prevent it from being overbuilt in a way that would have worsened neighborhood flooding for older homes, like ours, during hurricanes and the rainy season. It was going to become an apartment complex. Instead, it’s now a paradise for native species.

Over the last seven years, we’ve rewilded it, planting hundreds of native species and restoring habitat. What was once just an empty lot where people sometimes dumped old rugs and other trash has quietly become a commons for the living world. Neighbors find peace there. Birds and insects make homes. We’ve had many beloved friends contribute art made from the land. This weekend, it will begin to be the place where we gather for community meetings.

The tragedy of the commons was never that people shared resources—it was that the commons were systematically stolen. The real tragedy is enclosure: the privatization of land, water, and wealth that were once collectively held and tended. The commons didn’t collapse because communities mismanaged them; they were stripped from communities through force, law, and economic coercion. And yet, for most of human history, people have successfully managed commons—forests, fisheries, pastures, irrigation systems—through shared stewardship and mutual care. A return to the commons is not just a nostalgic ideal; it is a necessary, practical, and time-tested way forward.

In another part of our neighborhood, just a block away, we’re starting a chicken coop co-op. One of our neighbors has lifelong experience with animal care, and many of us are coming together—offering time, money, and energy—to support a shared flock. Yes, everyone is eager to have fresh, pastured eggs that don’t cost $16 a dozen (that’s a real thing and I do recommend reading ’s publication for a recent essay on exactly this topic). But it’s more than the eggs. It’s about creating small, cooperative economies, about learning to share resources in a way that benefits everyone.

And this is just the beginning. Some neighbors have sun-drenched yards perfect for growing fruit trees and other produce; others (like me) have deep shade more accommodating to herbs. Some have well-established mango and papaya trees; others grow lush gardens of greens and cabbages and melons. Some bake, some make art, and some retired, trusted neighbors are happy to spend time with children so that we parents can work to pay our bills. Slowly, we’re going to learn to trade, to share, to build a decentralized food and care system that is rooted in place and reciprocity. Those who have the resources will help with startup costs of some of these projects. I intend to create business structures around this co-op so that we can truly effectively resource one another in all the ways that matter.

This is what villaging looks like. A well-being economy, woven from the gifts and capacities of the whole community.

Interdependent Solitude

Years ago, before I was married and before I had a child, someone asked me what I most wanted, if I could be given absolutely anything out of life.

“Interdependent solitude,” I answered.

That still feels like the heart of what I’m building.

In my marriage, my partner and I hold a vow inspired by Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: to be guardians of each other’s solitude. It’s this foundation that allows us to write, to create, to build our own projects while raising a child and cultivating community.

This, to me, is a key dimension of villaging. The balance of interdependence and solitude. The ability to be alone without being isolated. The ability to belong without losing oneself. A village is not a codependent tangle, nor a collective where the individual disappears. It is a web of relationships that holds space for both togetherness and sovereignty.

Yesterday, I made little pots of tulsi and lemon balm—herbs that have saved my life this past year, steadying me through waves of anxiety, dread, and panic. They’re part of my personal medicine, and I potted them up as small mental health herbal growing care kits for my friends and neighbors. A few days ago, I was gifted a wild-crafted sourdough starter, alive with the yeasts of my own bioregion. If I am to keep it alive, I’ll produce more than my own family can eat, and therefore will have to give the excess to others. These small exchanges, these acts of tending and sharing, are a microcosm of what we all can create as we steadily build the world that is rising up from the soil as the towers of the toxic systems that “rule“ us crumble.

Bioregionalism: Belonging to Place

Just this week, wrote another essay, this one called Becoming Bioregional: The Only Way Forward. In it, she writes:

“Bioregionalism is the pathway towards becoming a place-based person like all our ancestors once were… It’s about feeling a sense of responsibility to that place—a place that scales from individual to family to neighborhood to community to ecoregion to the whole Planet and includes the more-than-human world.”

This is what I want. Not just to live somewhere, but to belong to it.

Bioregionalism is not just about knowing the names of plants and watersheds (though that’s part of it). It’s about living in a way that regenerates the relationships that sustain life.

Gary Snyder puts it simply:

“Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”

I am digging in, here, in the place where I am. Restoring soil. Planting seeds. Learning the flows of water. Co-stewarding land, food, and care. Practicing the slow work of regenerating the commons.

(PS, check out The Great Simplification’s recent roundtable on the topic here.)

Villaging as a Path Forward

Villaging is not an aesthetic. It is not a nostalgic retreat. It is not about curating a perfect life.

It is a practice. A process. A lived commitment.

It is a radical assertion that we do not have to do this alone. That we can create economies of care instead of extraction. That we can regenerate the land rather than deplete it. That we can belong to place, and to each other, without losing ourselves.

So I ask you:

• What does villaging look like in your life?

• How are you weaving interdependence and solitude?

• How are you regenerating the commons where you are?

Let’s weave this conversation together. Let’s find ways—wherever we are—to village.