We Will Do the Deep Work Because We Must

Grief and change and love and becoming. All of it together.

Welcome to The Living World, where we explore the wisdom in the web of life that connects us all. I am driven by visions of truly regenerative futures and committed to the cultural transformations that are required to get us there. Thank you for joining me as I remember myself as a living part of the living world and seek to live well within it.

I welcome you to become a paid subscriber, which grants you full community membership within EMUNAH. Membership includes access to six community events a month, including our Living World Salon this coming Sunday, office hours with Seth and me, Practical Wisdom Frameworks, embodiment and movement practices, and much more—always growing. This is a space for deep inquiry, shared learning, and resourcing ourselves for the transitions ahead. Join us as we build the relationships and practices that sustain us.

Every time a hurricane passes through, our oak canopy sheds many branches. About eight years ago we began making what we call the dragon’s nest, a continuously decaying circle of oak that has since made this little corner of the garden that much more fertile.

“Collapse now, and avoid the rush.”

I read this phrase yesterday, the title of an essay by John Michael Greer.

It has stuck with me like the scent of rain before a storm.

To those of us who see ourselves in it, it’s a little bit funny, and ringing with truth.

“Collapse now, avoid the rush” isn't a call to despair but an invitation—an opportunity to attune ourselves to the rhythms of change before we are forced to by crisis.

And isn’t that what the living world does? Trees release their leaves not just for winter, but in response to drought, sensing when to conserve energy for survival. Mycelial networks shift their nutrient flows in response to damage, sending resources to where they are most needed. Prairie dogs alter their burrow structures in anticipation of floods. The living world listens deeply, adapts before necessity demands it—this is the intelligence of life itself.

The etymology of collapse means to "slip together." What if, instead of fearing collapse as doom and death, we understood it as an unraveling of that which keeps us in the illusion of separation, and an call for us to move toward each other? What if collapse is not falling alone into despair, but slipping into deeper kinship, into the arms of community, into the weave of relationships that can hold us through change? To collapse well is to find those with whom we can navigate these shifting times, orienting together toward the potential present in every moment.

In his essay, Greer is quite clear:

In all likelihood you’ll be experiencing the next round of crises where you are right now, so the logical place to have your own personal collapse now, ahead of the rush, is right there, in the place where you live, with the people you know and the resources you have to hand.

I’m exploring the practical day-to-day experiments of this in a new publication devoted to neighborhood-to-bioregional scale villaging efforts called Neighborhood Produce. If you haven’t yet, I warmly welcome you to follow, we’ll be doing a call for submissions shortly as we’re eager to learn of the wide range of visions and scales that this work is taking all around the world.

I’ve been reflecting on how much I’ve been preparing for collapse, beginning a little more than ten years ago when my life shifted the weekend my grandfather died, while I was at the Radical Compassion Symposium at Naropa when I spent a semester there studying Tibetan translation.

That cool October weekend in Boulder, Vandana Shiva and Joanna Macy were keynote speakers, two of the strongest, clearest, wisest grandmothers of our time. That weekend, Joanna Macy gave me the language of The Great Turning, which I shared some about here in my essay The Waves Keep Coming. She gave me the tools of The Work that Reconnects which have been imprinted into every form of my work, subtle and obvious, ever since. And she planted the seeds of Living Systems Theory in my mind, which would become the foundational framing of my life’s work.

Vandana Shiva gave me a clear-eyed understanding of the forces seeking to strip the rights of nature and the ability of ordinary people to grow food and live in partnership with the living world. When I asked her about our generation's role, she told me simply:

You will do the deep work because you have no choice. It is the task of your generation to see humanity through this crisis.

Deep breath.

That was in 2014, more than a decade ago now.

My planetary grief and the grief of my grandfather’s death comingled in my being, both of which felt inextricably connected with a sense of responsibility and rising maturity. At 21, I was gaining directive for the kind of adult I was being called to become.

ganga__devi

A post shared by @ganga__devi

That experience shifted my academic work to focus on studying the ecological and social activism work of Buddhist women in the past, present, and future, and in internal, interpersonal, and institutional dimensions of change. My mother and grandmother are deeply respected leaders within their buddhist communities and every step of my thesis felt deeply personal. I wanted to understand my own positionality, responsibility, and what kind of lineage and legacy I could tap into as a white, multigenerational, socially and ecologically engaged Buddhist (& ultimately interspiritual) woman. Those patterns of inquiry still shape my work today. I wanted to locate myself within lineages of deep wisdom and application of that wisdom toward the healing of our world.

I began studying living systems theory, which, combined with my tendency to get quiet and sit in or near trees listening to the living world, an animate, living worldview began to set in. I began running thought experiments that changed my life forever, toward a worldview of regeneration, well before I knew there was a larger regenerative movement unfolding.

I began reading and thinking and asking questions about what will provide real security in the face of collapse?

I know for many people the answer is hoarding: money, food, weapons. But knowing that it’s the hoarding of resources that got us here, that approach always seemed dead and dangerous to me.

True security, I sensed, was found in connection, in what we can give to others, in the networks of resilience and care that we can cultivate around us. I devoted myself to studying these patterns and exploring many different models, some contemporary, some historical, some rooted in the world of visionary futurism which had hardly been experimented with yet.

ganga__devi

A post shared by @ganga__devi

Then, eight years ago, my life collapsed and regenerated in it’s own way. My plans to move to India to visit many remarkable models of collective, “alternative” living and also to spend time with my father whom I hadn’t seen in years were flipped around when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he returned to the US for treatment, and ultimately, to die.

That was also the year I met and fell in love with

Seth Kaufmann

, the year I connected with a global community of deep change leaders, the year I learned of the larger Regenerative movement whose vernacular and worldview I had been taught by self-study and deep communion with the soil. Grief and change and love and becoming, all of it together.

Grief and change and love and becoming, all of it together.

And then five years ago we collectively entered a massive rite of passage. The chrysalis of COVID reshaped our relationships, our ways of gathering, our understanding of what it means to care for one another.

ganga__devi

A post shared by @ganga__devi

We were asked to adopt an ethic of care that felt counterintuitive, distance, isolation, masking, rendering the subtle cues of human connection that much harder to see, offer, interpret. The intensity of the stances we each took rooted in the divergent strategies which we each believed to be rooted in the principles of care and appropriate action of our worldview at the time created fissures in families and friendships and social contracts that many of us still suffer from today.

A playlist I made in the heart of covid- Beauty at the Beginning of the World:

And yet, in the restructuring of social groups and the trans-local connectivity and collaboration that zoom enables, many new relationships, organizations, partnerships, and connections were formed. 2020 marked the beginning of the Design Science Decade, called for half a century ago by Buckminster Fuller, and leaned into fully by those of us who seek to embody his legacy. Nearly all of my professional work these past 5 years has arisen out of connections made in that first year of the pandemic, and each of those partnerships has shaped me deeply in my orientation toward the future I am seeking to build in the soil of all that is collapsing.

So, ten years, eight years, five years. These markers reveal the subtle waves of my own collapse preparedness. Each time, the question has been the same: What will it take for us to create a more life affirming way of life for humanity within the earth?

Because I’ve studied The Great Turning, The Work that Reconnects, Transition Towns, Economies for Transition, so many different models and frameworks for creating a life affirming, regenerative world, I have leaned into the wisdom of this quote, attributed to Ram Dass,

“Whether this is the first day of the Apocalypse or the first day of the Golden Age, the work remains the same… to love each other and ease as much suffering as possible.”

And recently it’s becoming more and more embodied. I’ve been feeling this shift inward—a gravitational pull toward deeper relationship-building, toward more careful listening. It is not the urgency of endless output, but rather a quieter, more essential urgency: to attune myself, to listen so carefully that I can hear not only my own creative impulse but the pulse of the land, the movement of waters, the voices of those who tend the soil, who build, who nourish.

As always, I keep returning to Mary Oliver’s words, these ones more new to me, praising anything, praising it all, praising whatever we can bring ourselves to notice:

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

– Praying

What does it mean to collapse early, not in the sense of breaking down, but in the sense of orienting with clear eyes to what is already happening? To let go of the false structures that keep us running on fumes and instead root into the relationships that will carry us through? The world is shifting, the tides are turning, and our task is not to fight against it but to listen, to adapt, to connect, to tend, to nourish one another, to village.

As I sit with these questions, I am increasingly aware that the things I am doing now are the germination of seeds planted years ago—some ten years back, some eight, some five. Each moment of collapse awareness, each deep questioning of what real security looks like in a radically unstable and uncertain world, has led me here. And the answer that has always come, no matter how deeply I investigate it, is that security does not lie in accumulation or isolation. It is found in relationship—relationship with people and with the living world, which, of course, includes people. Real security is not something we can hoard; it is something we cultivate together, in reciprocity, in trust, in tending to the bonds that regenerate us.

This is part of why I am weaving together Neighborhood Produce, a space for collective nourishment, where stories of neighborhood scale villaging, of land-based collaboration, of bioregionalism, of food and care and interdependence can take shape. I’m not building this alone, it’s a space for contribution and collaboration and collective learning. I’ll be posting a call for contributions there very soon, and I hope you’ll join me in living the good questions there.

Let’s listen, and tend, and show up to the everyday together. Let’s create the structures that will hold us as we step into this necessary transformation.

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.

– Clarissa Pinkola Estes

A message we’ve etched on a recycled glass door in our garden. Photo of Thais Aquino taken by me on one of our last days of sheltering together in 2020.