Category Archives: Interconnectedness

Coercion, Shaming, Mulberry Trees, and Babies

In 2020, when Emma Quayle and I started vagabonding in earnest, one of our criteria for what we wanted our next steps to be as we journeyed further was “unmasking the impact of patriarchy and allowing us to experience first-hand the intensity of its manifestation.”

Material Risk Sharing for a Livable Future

I want to speak of the difference between “no exit” and “trap”. No exit is organic and part of life, born of the reality of being social animals.

Liberation for All: How We Can Talk Differently about Power and Privilege

For the most part, almost everywhere and every time, I have found conversations across power differences repeatedly unsuccessful.

From Exchange to Gifting Part Two: Beyond the Exchange/Gift Binary

Many people, even those who live fully within the exchange paradigm and don’t ever think about maternal gifting, prefer going to a farmers’ market, if one exists where they live, or to a local store, rather than to a supermarket. Sometimes they prefer it enough that they are even willing to pay more money. There is a reason for it.

Every Tree Wants to Make a Forest: Choice, Togetherness, and the Maternal Gift Economy

Finding our way back to flow means walking back, upstream and uphill. This is the path of nonviolence: walking towards in the face of powerlessness, walking towards in the face of separation, walking towards in the face of scarcity.

As Things Get Worse

For the last hundred years or so, significant portions of the population within so-called liberal democracies in the global north have known comfort, ease, and personal liberties that have been unprecedented since at least the patriarchal turn. It’s not a new phenomenon for some people within a stratified society to …

The Practice of Mourning Challenges: an Example from a Visit to Israel

Mourning is an act of softening. It supports us in softly closing the gap between what we want, envision, or long for, and what actually exists. In the absence of mourning, we are likely to try to do it with some degree of force: either by trying to force ourselves …

How Children Learn About Others’ Needs

In contemporary, patriarchal societies, mothering often leads to mothers giving up on their own needs, because of the lack of a communal context of togetherness and support. One of the results of this is that, as children, we don’t learn about the needs of others as an organic limit we …

Needs Choreography and Mutual Influencing: Decoding the Flow of Interdependence

“I would like to end this conversation now and focus elsewhere. Is there anything else you want to share before I do that?” This is a simple question, so simple you may wonder why I would start a blog post with it. I chose to start with it, because it …

Apart and Together: Reengaging with the Full Range of Our Emotions

“There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.” – R. D. Laing

The appearance of the current Coronavirus, and the major disruptions that both the pandemic and the responses to …

The Fearless Heart

Inspiration and tools for creating the future we want. Courage to live it now.