The Invitation

This is your invitation to take part in a heart-based reformation of the Greater World—both here and beyond.

Whenever a change is needed, a call is put out far and wide. That call is then answered by those able and willing to play their unique and integral part. Do you sense you’ve made your way here by appointment, whether you remember the moment you accepted or not?

The invitation is to take part in a grand experiment, much like the one that brought us here. This grand experiment, however, is based on creative collaboration, positive reciprocity and mutual respect. It is a community improvement movement that requires a renovation of our governing structure, a refinement of our social engagement practices and a proper honoring of the land and other beings we also cohabitate with through kind and conscious stewardship. Through a sincere and collective effort we may transform our entire community and all participants for the better.

To whatever degree our experiment in reformation proves a success is the degree to which others beyond our community might also benefit thus making it a truly Greater World endeavor!

Community Alchemy, an adventure of Metamorphosis.

Just as all things must die to their lower states of being in order to realize a more transcendent self so too must we, as a humanity and as individuals, release our old and outmoded ways of being in order to realize possibilities far greater than those we’ve previously known.

Is a great change needed? Ask the caterpillar that’s spent its entire life to that point gorging itself to near exhaustion of not only itself but all its surrounding resources and it will likely say “Yes!”. Is great change comfortable? Ask the caterpillar while it’s suspended as a soupy gooey version of itself and the answer will probably be "No!”. Was it all (the willingness to navigate and be present for the uncomfortable though necessary process in order to realize far greater possibilities) worth it? Simply look upon the beautiful butterfly in its gloriously transcendent form flitting about freely and you’ll know for yourself.

What we have here in the GW community is clearly unique and visionary at its core. Possibilities abound for how we can build upon the best of what’s been established while transmuting the abundance of “dung” we’ve inherited into precious compost. Just as our uniquely beautiful homes are built from refuse that otherwise serves only to destroy our world, the good we’re able to make from the various problems we’ve inherited and challenges we still face can actually serve to nourish and grow a more thriving and vibrant collective, a “community garden” as it were.

It is the spirit of experimentation and willingness to adventure into the unknown, a shared faith in a shared vision, a collective effort aligned for a greater purpose along with the pursuit of creative responses to unsustainable ways of being… that dreamed and built our community into being. It is this same spirit of experimentation along with aligned efforts toward a greater purpose and a willingness to venture into the unknown that can lift us out of the challenges we’ve been mired in as a community and as a humanity for too long.

Unlike the past, however, what the opportunity at hand is inviting us into is not another top-down control structure that primarily serves those in power while enforcing obedience and acquiescence through abuse of that power. Quite the opposite. We are being asked now to rise to a new paradigm based in personal and collective autonomy that is committed equally to personal integrity, accountability and self-responsibility as it is to the collective wellbeing as a whole.

What does this look like exactly? Imagine many sovereign individuals contributing their unique gifts, skills, talents and inspired ideas for the betterment of a sovereign collective while receiving, in kind, the fruits of their contributions in a reciprocal way. Sounds nice, but who actually does this and succeeds at it? For one, Nature does and she's been doing it quite successfully for a very long time now.

Mother knows best, how biomimicry can be our guide to a better future.

Another basic principle that informs the Earthship concept is a belief that incorporating the ways of Nature into our structural designs and function can provide a myriad of solutions for problems we now face as a result of operating from a place of disregard for Nature. The essence of this concept is the basis of biomimicry, a design concept that aims to draw inspiration from natural selection solutions adopted by Nature and translate these principles to human engineering in its various forms. According to the Biomimicry Institute, biomimicry can be defined as “an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies—new ways of living—that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul.”

The concept of biomimicry is based on a key idea: nature always operates on the principles of economy and efficiency while generating no waste. "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed", so said French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. That’s the idea. No matter the field of application, the biomimetic philosophy is part of a global strategy of responsible and sustainable development that aims to balance the way the planet’s resources are used so that all parts of the total system are making use of all materials in a conservative way with all waste handled in a cyclic and regenerative manner.

If we can accept that Nature’s model holds the key to adaptive evolution on a multitude of levels, a good question could be: How might Nature be informing us of our current human challenges on both a person and species level? And how might examples in Nature reflecting a parallel struggle also show us the way forward?

Let’s take a closer look at the Caterpillar in our community garden. Her life as a larvae is based on consumption—not just senseless consumption but consumption as preparation. Munching endlessly, she seems to be on a terminal path of destruction. All at once, Caterpillar ceases her unfettered consumption to begin a new journey. She shifts her focus to find a good place to hang herself from. In that surrender, her outermost self hardens and becomes her tomb. Having retreated into the resurrection chamber of her own body, the process of total breakdown and disorder begins. Enzymes within her digest nearly all parts other body into a soupy goo. Within her liquid body “imaginal discs” begin to form and assemble. The job of these distinctly different cells is to guide the reformation process, turning the prior form and substance of her being into something far more beautiful, elegant and transcendent in both form and function. She, as a being, is not wholly replaced; it is merely her form that is being broken down in order to be reassembled anew affording her a more transcendent experience of her world. This process is not without resistance though. The larval immune system, still active, reacts against the imaginal discs identifying them as a threat. Emerging imaginal discs are destroyed as they arise though, as the discs divide with increasing speed, they eventually overwhelm the immune system’s response using the biological soup itself as the raw materials for the structures they are becoming.

Here’s the most interesting part: the internal conflict of the butterfly actually arises from a genetic discrepancy between the old form and the new. It took a long time for biologists to understand the reason for the immune system attack on the incipient butterfly cells, but eventually they discovered that the butterfly has its own unique genome, carried by the caterpillar, inherited from long ago in evolution, yet not part of it as such (Margulis & Sagan, Acquiring Genomes 2002).

So, what might all this be conveying to us about ourselves as a humanity? How do we see our resistance to change play out within us, within our cultures and societies and in general? How might we find comfort and encouragement in navigating our changing times through this dramatic enactment offered to us by Caterpillar and Butterfly as merely two versions of the same? I will leave it to your own “imaginal cells” to work this out for yourself. The story of Butterfly’s becoming is but one of many beautiful examples of how Nature is gently guiding our evolution towards a greater collective realization.

Showing up for “The Great Turning"

Remember that call that was put out and the appointment that you’ve so far managed to show up for? Could this have something to do with taking part in a collective realization of a new way of being for not just ourselves but all of humanity? Is it possible that what we achieve here in forging a more collaborative and sovereign collective may actually impact and inform the world beyond us?

Consider that we, as the Greater World community, may represent a microcosm of the greater world beyond us. We are but one piece of the living fractal universe in a perpetual process of becoming, simultaneously informing while being informed by the whole. No longer can we expect the change that is needed to come from without. The change we now need must come from within ourselves as individuals and from within our small communities. By choosing to be the change we wish to see, the ripple effect will naturally extend beyond us. It begins with awakening to our own greater purpose.

The time of The Great Turning—this momentous global transition we cannot escape from nor reverse—is now upon us, pressing nearer and nearer to all our immediate experiences. To weather the great changes ahead, we must look to the wonderful possibilities that lie beyond and prepare ourselves to do what is needed in order to see our way through and midwife a new Earth into being. This is the wisdom of the buffalo herd charging the storm: we ultimately benefit most from our willingness to fully face the oncoming turbulence together, thereby lessening the direct impact on each individual by taking it on as a unified whole. The vision I’ve chosen to commit myself to is one in which we work together in creative collaboration to facilitate positive change for both the collective and ourselves as individuals, all inter-reliant and inter-informative parts of a fuller, grander and more complete story. This vision and path is the one I am inviting you to join me on now.

There is another path though. It is one in which we surrender our divinely sovereign selves to an outside authority in favor of more comfort and less responsibility. Those who offer to unburden you from the responsibility of being truly, fully, wildly and authentically human do expect something in return, of course: your autonomy. Autonomy in the form of our ability to think for ourselves, choose for ourselves and simply live as and be ourselves is what we surrender when we expect that others we choose to be dependent upon will just handle things for us. The surrendering of our autonomy (the right to self-govern within a larger governing structure) inevitably leads to the surrender of our right to self-determination (the rights of groups or peoples to decide their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development) and ultimately our self-sovereignty (our individual right to govern our own life, body and choices).

Sovereign selves build sovereign communities.

As we ‘face the storm' and travel into the great unknown together, we will necessarily be invited if not forced to redefine the roles and perceptions of leadership. Hierarchical forms of top-down power based on a linear perception of progress must now be replaced with more egalitarian forms of governance reliant on personal responsibility and collaboration for a kind of evolution that will unfold in dynamic rather than linear ways.

Through supporting the evolution of sovereign-minded individuals connected to their own deeper truth and wisdom, we can build a community here and many communities beyond fit for autonomous governance. These autonomous communities can then support one another through sharing their own resources of wisdom, experience, skills and creative responses to common issues. “Circles within circles…"

It all begins with valuing our individual roles and contributions as necessary elements in the fulfillment of a collective destiny.