Hello again. Welcome back. This session, I want to talk about something that has been on my mind for a while, that was illustrated, and heightened, and nuanced, and deepened in this Dharamsala experience. I might call it a question I’ve been living — it’s been running through conversations I’ve had for On Being; it has been running through other kinds of interactions and observations I make in my life as I encounter the generative landscape of people and projects in our world. I’m curious about how to activate connective tissue, and communal momentum, and shared learning, and cross-pollination, and accompaniment, which we obviously need if all of this is to meet what is before us in this century.

One way that I often formulate this question I’m living in my head is: How can those of us committed to orienting in this way start to function like the ecosystem the world needs us to be? I have to say, in the last year, the word “ecosystem” comes up everywhere in my conversations and reading and learning. Whether it is the forest ecologist, Suzanne Simard, who’s taught science and taught all of us how forests are communities of mutuality and reciprocity — that they are wired for wisdom and care. Or the botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer, describing the demonstrable intelligence of plants.

A lot of this learning is coming to us through science and what we’re really learning is how vitality functions in the natural world. But I think what we’re learning is how vitality functions. And it stands in some contrast to what we understood or were operating from — the big “we,” I mean, humanity in the last couple hundred years — into the way our intelligence was applied and our industry was applied in modernity to create individual agency and institutions that are really structured around separation and strength.

To circle back to the conversation we’re having in these sessions, I think this is one of the reasons that the notion of “oneness” falls flat. It seems diminishing a vitality and diversity and that productive, necessary conflict. And even, I think, our corollaries to this in the world as it’s structured, which would be things like collaboration and partnering. In the context of enterprises that function so separately, these things get really hard. They feel unnecessarily hard and they often falter or fail.

So — I have been collecting words and phrases and images for a while: details from what is coming out through science; the functional qualities of how an ecosystem acts. And I want to share them with you. They’ve come from conversations with people like Robin and Suzanne. I’ve gathered a lot of new, wonderful, exciting words from a book I’ve been reading called Ways of Being by James Bridle, which brings our ecology of technology into the mix.

This is all so much more alive for me now since Dharamsala, because it was really on display in and among these young humans I met there. Perhaps this is true of every human generation; but perhaps it is accelerated in a time like ours where our challenges are so existential. It’s almost like they possess instincts and knowledge in their bodies that are fundamentally different from what is in the bodies of their parents and grandparents to know and to act on. And we learn in two ways. Sometimes we learn by truly discovering something new. But sometimes — and this is true of this science of ecosystem — we learn something that we’ve known forever. And maybe it’s expressed in our words, like that idea of compassion and the womb; maybe it’s held in metaphors. But then we discover it, we learn it for the first time with consciousness. And I think we’re getting conscious about vitality and ecosystem, although we have been immersed in it —part of it — forever.

The invitation for you is to think and act alongside me in this, and I am now going to share what feels to me like a thrilling list of qualities of ecosystem. I’m going to invite you to perhaps latch onto one of these words, and interrogate it and walk around with it and practice it. How does it translate into, how does it transmute relationships, collaborations, projects?

So here’s the list — these are qualities of functioning ecosystem: Entanglement. Reciprocity. Tributaries. Dying. Composting. Regeneration. Mutation. Underground life support. Nutrient cycling and recycling. Circulation and exchange. Hierarchy is present, and it works alongside reciprocity and mutuality. Also: Absorption. Detoxification. Photosynthesis. Biodiversity. I have to say that the word “biodiversity” strikes me as so much more interesting and alive and dynamic than the word “diversity.” Also: Germination. Flowering. Recombination. Efflorescence — isn’t that a beautiful one? And: Endosymbiosis — that is a scientific word for evolved collaboration and life together.

So first of all, enjoy this list. Take one of these words — walk around with it, practice it. How does it translate and transmute the way we’re already doing things that we call collaboration and partnering?

I want to share with you something that Robin Wall Kimmerer, the botanist, has said to me in terms of really getting close to one of these ideas. She talked about, she has photosynthesis envy. And she described that as, “the ability to take these non-living elements of the world, air and light and water, and turn them into food that can then be shared with the whole rest of the world. To turn them into medicine that is medicine for people and trees and for soil.” She said, “We cannot even approach the kind of creativity that they have.”

I think finally, what this all brings home to me is, again, the smallness of the notion of “oneness.” The way we use it too simplistically — or “unity” — is that there’s no drama to it. Human drama underlies everything, and it was alive and well Dharamsala. And I am back home and it is alive and well here in my family, in my workplace.

The point is not that we are supposed to tame vitality — but I do think we’re called to make it more conscious, and also to create relationships and structures in which vitality and tension and conflict can be held and worked with creatively and organically. And that’s another way to talk about what we’re learning and what I saw in Dharamsala: that when we are working organically, community is dynamic. We’re set up both to have real clarity about our gifts, our offerings and roles, and to support each other very dynamically, rather than have our interests, our identities, our vitality set at odds.

In closing, I want to offer you this beautiful list again: Entanglement. Reciprocity. Tributaries. Dying. Composting. Regeneration. Mutation. Underground life support. Nutrient cycling and recycling. Circulation and exchange. Hierarchy and mutuality. Absorption. Detoxification. Photosynthesis. Biodiversity. Germination. Flowering. Efflorescence. Recombination. Endosymbiosis.

I’ll see you next time.