Four Premises of the Village Principles
Premise #1 I Live In a Village.
The village is here and now.
"I live in a village" is an axiom of this teaching. I always live in a village. The village is latent around me.
Through axiomatic assumption that my village is here and now, I will recognize it if it is here, or call in its first iteration immediately.
Premise #2 The Village is Iterating and Reiterating
The village is an ongoing experiment, each iteration is sacred, cycles of iterations are playing out all the time. I am doing the same thing all the time, slightly differently, and I am doing it with roughly the same people, while they're constantly changing and swapping out.
This is simply the way of things. It seems very polyamory/nonmonogamy, oh so edgy, but it happens again and again even in families giving it their very best try to be nuclear families.
My sister lives with me for three months. I live with a parent or a partner's parent. I take in my kid's best friend so often it's like they live here. My coworker goes through a breakup and spends some weeks. I take in foster kids or offer respite care. My best friends move away, my new best friends move into their house. My roommates get new jobs far away and I get new roommates.
Life circumstances keep my village constantly in flux, it is always an iteration, always a reiteration, and transition is as natural as connection.
I transition out of relationship without leaving connection. I transition the logistics of relationships without rupture to the connection or the need for repair. There is no crime here; I am in an iteration which has a beginning I'm committed to seeing as beautiful, a middle I can enjoy, and an end I may or may not be able to predict.
I can let the unpredictability be jarring and painful, but I can also simply lump the unpredictability in with all the rest of what's painful about a transition, and stop it from getting in the way of all that's beautiful about a transition. I can be willing to earnestly grieve, without saying “something is wrong here.”
The idea that transition means rupture creates rupture where I might have ongoing peace and acceptance of this iteration of change, of the end of an iteration I have loved.
It is the idea of the nuclear family that has my mind so fixated on stagnant relationship as a definition for success. The same people who want a six year old to sit still for seven hours each day want me to pick one person to live with and build life with, and want me to keep an "appropriate" distance from everyone else.
It doesn't happen! It's not realistic! Reality diverges from this paradigm far more often than it aligns with it. Yet, something in me has been trained to believe in it, trained to use it as a definition for success. Something in me marks it as failure when life takes its simple course, revealing desires or circumstances that necessitate more space or time than I planned for, a sooner "end" to this iteration.
Premise #3 Practices Make Patterns, Patterns Make Life
How do I use the energy in the system? That's a practice.
Practices are neutral—they’re what I do when I'm doing the best I know how.
This is what girds my understanding of here and now practices of relating:
Good practices of relating are not "good" in a moral sense, they are good in the way a complete circuit is good, and an incomplete circuit is "bad." In a good circuit, the light comes on because electricity flows. In a bad circuit, electricity does not flow, or flows somewhere other than the light.
Patterns in relationships are the reliable results of certain practices. I do the practices because they are what I know how to do, unless and until I learn a new way TO DO what they achieve.
Generative systems are a result of generative practices, and they produce generative patterns of relating.
Generative patterns of relating result in relational nuance. They allow me to rest in connection exactly as it's showing how it wants to be. They allow connections to grow relationships organically and easefully.
Generative patterns fuel a peaceful life which is delightfully and deliciously of service to others without martyrdom or overwhelm.
Ultimately, I am a relational being driven in every way toward connection and interdependence, delighting in serving and being with others.
I was meant to learn generative practices of love, ways of being with myself, ways of understanding my experience, ways of reconciling my humanity with the machinations of the cosmos. I was meant to learn them because I cannot know them unless and until I learn them.
Premise #4 I Practice Love and Entropy
I do not plan for enmity, for war, for threat, or for destruction. I do not develop or refine skills of enmity, of war, of active protection. I do not destroy what I dislike, I starve it of all attention.
What is worthy of my attention receives loving attention. What is not worthy of my attention receives no attention and leaves my life via the effortless practice of entropy.
Loving my loved ones means wanting them to have loving experiences, and my commitment to staying in my locus of control means that I can only offer them loving experiences of me. I can't change how the world treats them, but I can make sure they have a loving experience of ME every time we interact.
My attention is the prerequisite for all my experiences.
It cannot be emphasized enough.
My attention is the prerequisite for ALL my experiences.
I cannot have an experience of something which does not have my attention.
When I keep my attention on love (real LOVE, the embodied tone, not the shiny "positive thinking" drivel) I exclusively have experiences of love.
When I keep my attention on love, I starve all that is not love, and end my experience of anything I can't bring myself to love.