Common Good Collective

“The Guest House” By Jalaluddin Rumi

“Every morning a new arrival.” Such is being human, Rumi says. Being embodied, enfleshed, subject to sickness and euphoria, to pain and ecstasy. It is always only from our flesh that we move and work to be better neighbors, lovers, and friends.

The Guest House
By Jalaluddin Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

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Reader, Structure Of Belonging, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

A Japanese Tradition of Considering Others

One of the beautiful things about an abundant community is — as we share ourselves with and listen to each other — we are reminded that our struggles are, in fact, not universal. Opened to the possibility of a new story, we can reorient our efforts towards the common good.

We’re at the end of 2020, and though some reports seem promising, there is still no vaccine. Yet I look at what’s going on in Japan, and I look at what’s going on in the United States—two starkly different realities on what normal looks like now.

How did it become like this?

The Unsung, Imperfect, Abolitionist

The failure of societies and neighborhoods land on bodies. Disproportionately, they land on Black bodies, and we have seen that suffering repeated over and over as it regards policing. I this powerful first-person narrative, the author points us toward building a new world from the pieces of the one torn apart by brutality.

Sometimes, an answer is not an answer to everyone. Sometimes, whether something is an answer depends, like seeing a blue or gold dress or hearing yanny or laurel in that auditory illusion. Or like when Black people are finally allowed in token numbers to receive a few of the laurels we hear we should always aspire toward and are told to rest on them, told to be content with the illusion of how far we have come. Sometimes, an answer is a Rorschach test, and what you see and hear is more about the context you acknowledge than what is actually presented to you.

Building Capacity By Building Intimacy

“Friendships and conversations are the way we build capacity,” says “Roving Listener” and Common Good Collective muse DeAmon Harges in the video highlighted below. It is easy not to notice this. The totalizing economy wants you to believe that bigger and quicker and louder is better, that you need more people and more money and more land to build even more capacity. And if you believe that, you’ll never have enough “capacity,” which is a notoriously slippery word used by consultants rather than neighbors anyway.

And then you walk through a holiday in a pandemic, and where there might have been a crowded house there is a sparse table, with perhaps just one friend. And a few hours later, you have been called back into yourself by the power of listening and of being heard, while you were speaking in your soft voice.

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Reader, Structure Of Belonging, The Abundant Community Permalink

LearningTree: Building Capacity Their Way

The “Roving Listener” offers us a seat at a living room concert with a most interesting guest list. The event is small, but even through the electronic tubes it is plain to see that the connections are powerful.