Together — building communities
The essential, as I call it here, might be different for each of us. But also maybe not.
I am passionate about intentional communities, eco-villages and modern tribes. I’d love to see how much better and more sustainable a life we can achieve, as a group not an individual, by building our houses together.
I’d like to try and make an energy efficient sustainable compound for example. One that houses people in such a way that it brings the maximum amount of long time wellness to the maximum amount of people, with the minimum budget possible of course. Bioclimatics baby!
A problem I see with some of the bigger eco-housing and sustainable real estate experiments we get nowadays is that they are in fact enormous enterprises with fantastic budgets and teams and studies. So not only do they only focus on the technical solutions for sustainability, they’re also sort of losing the essential. They fall into the oh so very very common trap of gadget shopping.
Capitalism is there, ready to serve us with as many world-saving high-tech gadgets we could ask for. Consumption, always more consumption.
A living complex that goes beyond that consumption trap is what I’m looking for. And by that I don’t mean we have to go overboard on hippie yoga pavilions and all sing kumbaya while holding hands at dawn every morning. Once is enough :)
What I mean is finding those particular elements of technology and science that help us on our way to becoming better humans and leave the rest of the fluff out. The more fluff we can recognize as fluff and leave out, the better off we’ll be. And the better we will be able to focus on the essential.
The essential, as I call it here, might be different for each of us. That’s why I love working on home design. But there’s a lot of commonalities, elements that are inherently human, that all of us share as a species. Like the thrill fresh morning air gives us. Or how we don’t like being confined into closed quarters (which we are now unfortunately all forced to do more and more). Or the need for prospect and refuge.
For all of these to be present in our lives they need to get included in the thoughts and inner explorations we have at the very beginning, before we even know what exactly it is we want to build. We first need to find out what sort of people we want to be.
Finding the essential but subtle ways that make us human can be seen as too big an endeavor. But it can also be seen as a beautiful game, like a dance around a hidden truth. A dance between the individual and the group, between the particular and the general, science and soul, between you and me.
Come, it’ll be fun.
Love as always,
Jo
Thank you for reading this. Sharing is caring!
PS. What I’ve been reading:
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And a timely essay by Charles Eisenstein about the nature of community and economy today (the juicy bit is at the end, when he talks about Interconnectedness)
In other words, the answer to the threat of centralized totalitarianism is to build community: traditional place-based community as well as online community.
Central Bank Digital Currencies
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