Hallucinations of Normalcy
If you’re just wandering over, welcome — the conversation is getting interesting. Back in July, our steadfast literary helmsman Taylor Reed took a break from work to welcome a new baby to the world, and in his absence I started a five-part series revolving around work, land use, culture, institutions, and stories. When Taylor returned, he began writing responses to some of those essays. Yeah, it’s getting wild.
His first response was interesting enough to inspire me to talk back. No one wants to see this conversation devolve into a bad Facebook thread, but for now, I think there’s an interesting crossroads worth lingering at. Amanda Kik weighed in with some essential comments on this essay too, and I hope she can find the time and space to produce a full essay on those ideas.
Taylor’s initial argument is worth reading in full. To give a grossly oversimplified version, he says that we ignore the role of the home-place in favor of the community institution at our peril. So, Taylor, that was by design: I intended to focus on community-scale work, and the role of non-profit institutions, because that’s the most generative space for my thinking, and where not many others are looking. I hoped to sidestep the din of conversation around the “family farm” or individual action, and instead contribute to the quieter talk around how community-scale change happens.
That doesn’t get me out of hot water though.
Taylor’s argument is clear:
The home is the most powerful venue for this transformative work, the spot where those crucial and rooted functions happen most naturally.
He then advocates for uplifting and giving weight to
…the education, relationships, development and systems that flow out of households, amongst family and friends, and in work that isn’t tied to a paycheck or organizational ethos, but simply flows from values held without formal organizing frameworks…
He then sharpens the stick and twists:
Households don’t need “outdoor music festivals, folk schools, nature centers, eco-villages, community gardens, retreat centers, camps, and farmer training programs” to flourish. They don’t require those partnerships to convey ecological education, offer safe space, and deepen connection to the natural world. They likely benefit deeply from those, but don’t need them.
On the flip side, those venues will only be as resilient as the supporting members they’re comprised of and maintained by, and members’ resiliency is tied to their “first places” first. Those spots are where the bulk of the work needs to happen and where the rest of the shifting settles well from, if it is to settle well.
Is this true? Obviously, yeah, it’s factual, in the sense that we can find and describe a flourishing household that has never visited an institution on that list, and we can document the failure of many such institutions, providing evidence that they failed because they couldn’t attract these kinds of household members.
It’s factual, sure, but it’s unsatisfying. I’m wary of this thin space between “benefit deeply” and “need,” and I’m suspicious of any narratives at all about what people “need” — Abraham Maslow’s answer to that question turned eighty this year. That old trope sits uneasily inside our American culture of belittling, condemning, and ignoring the large share of us in poverty, so I think we’d benefit from conversations about dignity and shared humanity, rather than another debate where the poor once again have to defend their right to exist, much less chew bubblegum or drink or beer.
Closer to the larger point, I fail to see a version of the world where people become paragons of right living in the incubation chamber of their own home, and only then emerge, fully formed, ready to provide resiliency to these community projects. I was and am shaped by my participation in my home life, as well as by regular participation in broad community life — music festivals, retreats, camps, classes of all kinds, and other gatherings of friends and strangers, including foundational institutions like school and church. I’d find it hard to assign causality to one bucket of experiences or the other. And really, that’s the point: one big “BOTH/AND” that intertwines the many ways we become ourselves and come into the relationships with the world that uplift us and define our lives.
I’ll come back to that. Digression: I’m grateful for Taylor’s explanation of “post-development theory” as a way to both broaden and deepen my thinking on non-profit industrial complexes. I’ve got some more reading to do.
He was just distracting me while he climbed to the top rope for the finishing splash:
Non-profits and land-based projects have to be bolstered by households that value the same work in and amongst their neighborhoods — households tied into ecological and human communities. As adrienne maree brown points out in Emergent Strategy — this is where the patterns gain momentum and scale outward like fractals. It’s not something we watch happen. It’s something we help facilitate. Brad wants to strengthen land-based networks, through collaboration and conversation. This “home-work” helps too. Our networks of land-based projects will never be as relevant or operate as effectively as we want unless we’re first working to embody grounded visions at home.
I agree that land-based projects need to consider the home-place. I’d also note that almost all of them do, from a folk school’s expectation that you practice your folk arts at home, to a nature center using their interpretive trail system to help you identify plants that you’d also find at home, to community gardens that would expect you to eat and preserve at home what came from their soil, to farmer training programs that might expect you to grow something at home. Even in the case of camps, retreats, and festivals, there’s a sense that you are taking something away with you, even if it’s just a feeling of rest and connection.
I’d like to use the quote from Emergent Strategy he’s referring to — “And this may be the most important element to understand — that what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system,” — as a way to zoom out and address the bigger picture, home- or community-scale notwithstanding.
Interestingly enough, Adrienne Maree Brown is actually talking here about movement work. I’ll quote some key passages from the preceding paragraphs, but please — GO GET THIS BOOK AND READ IT. None of these quotes can capture the full picture.
…what I saw clearly was that, at a local level, we — Americans — don’t know how to do democracy. We don’t know how to make decisions together, how to create generative compromises, how to advance policies that center justice.
shortly after:
It was and is devastatingly clear to me that until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally, we won’t be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally.
she then dives directly into organizational culture:
This awareness led me to look at organizations more critically. So many of our organizations working for social change are structured in ways that reflect the status quo. We have singular charismatic leaders, top down structures, money-driven programs, destructive methods of engaging conflict, unsustainable work cultures, and little to no impact on the issues at hand. This makes sense; it’s the water we’re swimming in. But it creates patterns.
As Amanda commented to me when reading the draft of this essay, we may be so tied to some old patterns that if we don’t clearly and unequivocally define what we mean, we might start to hallucinate. We might see, as our goal for this work: a single family home, surrounded by some acreage, with a well-kept garden, a scattering of chickens, some old but well-tended apple trees, a barn or a hoop house, a well-stacked firewood pile, maybe some clothes hanging on the clothesline. We might start to picture an able-bodied hard-working heteronormative and neurotypical couple finishing up the farm chores just before dinner. Maybe a few heteronormative and neurotypical kids playing and learning and listening attentively to dad teach some of the old ways. Maybe grandma and grandpa are visiting. Mom and grandma, in most varieties of this very old hallucination, take on the bulk of the cooking and cleaning.
Unless we are actively, rigorously describing and then cultivating thousands of divergent ideas of what this work looks like, we risk uplifting a model that doesn’t serve most of the people in our community anymore. Can we imagine, describe, scale, and evolve ideas of home places that are not single-family homes? Or places that don’t have land at all? Places that require neither a mortgage nor a landlord? Places that don’t require that you reconcile with, much less suffer under, an abusive parent? That don’t produce a happy farm at the expense of an isolated single mom up the road? That share the good work among lots of adults of differing abilities and body types, instead of a married couple — further ensuring that the things we value — including our relationships with each other — get the time they deserve? Places that, despite the endless list of physically and mentally demanding chores (simple living is never simple), create a sense of belonging and deep welcome for a person who lives with chronic illness, autism, mental illness, or other disabilities? Places that can uplift values like good governance, community care, and ways of creating generative compromise that center justice?
In other words, what stories are we telling that impact how we view this work? And how do those stories impact our sense of how we define the work to begin with? Most importantly, how do these stories create space for more people to live inside—create belonging for those not tied to a nuclear family, a partnership, some acreage to care for? (And, yeah, for those who do have those things too.)
What Taylor and I agree on, I’m sure, is that this work must be, at the core, relational. Work done in your home place is work done in relation to the plants, animals, microscopic beasties and fungi in that place, as well as in relation to the history of that place, the economy and culture acting upon you and the rest of that place.
And, yes, more: we’re dependent on very messy human relationships too — all sorts of them. No matter the arena — single-family units, intimate friend groups, looser associations of both kith and kin, along with formal organizing frameworks and institutions of all kinds — there are versions of this work that are dark, lonely, alienating, abusive, toxic, and life-depleting, just as there are versions that enact love, compassion, care, and a host of strong and generative values.
I can’t picture a way forward that doesn’t involve the deep and difficult work of getting a lot better about our relationships with each other. I can picture, though, a whole lot of ways that involve our “first places” and “grounded visions at home” being inexorably intertwined with the work of hundreds of neighbors on shared ground.
What do you see?
