Then, when I was 17, I fell utterly in love, and I became invulnerable, and let myself really feel again. I wrote about what I felt and it was, although incompetent, wonderful writing. My self expressed itself. I wrote poetry on the walls of tunnels with the pseudonym “SAM”, and young women were so moved by it that they wrote me love letters under the poems.

I saw myself then as a synergy, a complicity of my physical/sensuous (S), emotional (A, for analogic/resonant) and intellectual (M, for Kubrick’s monolith) selves. When I was in my most relaxed state I was also at my most aware. I was reconnected, open, raw. I was at once astonished and terrified. I was completely present.

And then, mostly through my own foolishness and idealism, I lost that love, and with it I lost everything. I lost myself. I went through a roller coaster decade during which I alternatively felt unbearable grief, brief joyful relief, and nothing at all. Finally, I froze over. I created a persona that could function in the terrible world, and for almost thirty years that comfortable persona took my place. Still, this persona, as successful as it was, sensed that there was something wrong, that it wasn’t me, that it was a fraud. It became anxious and easily angry.

drawing by hugh mcleod at gaping void

I was empty. A shell.

And then, slowly, over the last few years, I cracked open and something I’m not quite sure of emerged. It was a kind of child, reawakened, unfrozen, but still a bit numb. I was blocked by my stories, my myths, and the emotions of fear and anger those stories evoked. But I was determined to become real again, to reconnect, to be open and raw and let my heart be broken, to show my broken heart to the world.

I was and am drawn now to places that allow me at once to be broken and to heal, to get rid of all the gunk that has accumulated around me for decades, stuff that is not me at all. Those places I’m free to be broken and healed are wilderlands — forests and beaches where life existed, as it has for millions of years, without people, without being crowded and stressed and made anxious by the invasive species homo rapiens.

I am not at home in such places. I am not self-sufficient or knowledgeable of how to live in the forest or by the ocean, without the trappings of modern civilization. Yet I am drawn to these places, if a little fearfully, by something larger than myself, by this yearning to reconnect with all-life-on-Earth, what John Gray calls biophilia. And when I start to open myself to these places the real me begins to emerge again, this complex, damaged creature so full of grief, love, and loneliness. Lost for so many years, so long dead to the world.

And in these moments SAM awakens again, and I begin to begin to find again that stillness, that Zero Time, of infinite relaxation and awareness, when I become sensitive again to what is going on within, and what is going on without, and they become one current. And the fear and anxiety and anger subside and my senses become alert to these amazing things happening all around me and inside me that I had forgotten how to notice — the catch in a young woman’s voice, the astonishing colours of dusk, and the breath of lamplight and new-fallen snow, the scent of berries and of rain, the look within the look of faces of people that somehow I had forgotten how to see.

The humming resonance between me and some other creature, a resonance that makes us one, singing together, completely “I am you and you are me and we are altogether” connected.

The songs of birds, plaintive or joyful or, like me, now, responsive, a harmony, alive, breathing, there, here, this moment, this magical place. Shouting, tweeting, moaning, I love you.

This is what’s really important, this feeling, this connection. This knowing what is and what to do and who to be. This fullness and emptiness and being just a part. Present.

Raw. Nobody-but-myself. No body. Every body. Our self. One.

My initial thoughts on this were to focus attention on helping with the creation of new model communities that:

• are intentional (i.e. members have a shared purpose, vision and set of values),
• embody the principles of permaculture, unschooling and the transition movement, and
• incorporate Natural Enterprises (sustainable, responsible, joyful co-operative businesses where people do the work they’re meant to do).

Sheri prompted me to dig deeper and be more specific about what institutions such communities would contain. Joanna Macy’s book Coming Back to Life has the following list (the last six items are my own additions):

1. teach-ins and peer study groups
2. think tanks and Gaian learning institutions (where you would learn improvisation, story-telling, and some of the other critical life skills in the graphic above)
3. groups that would maintain measures of genuine well-being to replace GDP, stock markets, phony inflation & unemployment numbers as the gauges of our society’s health
4. consensus and conflict resolution services, to replace lawyers
5. non-violence ‘genuine defense’ institutions, to replace the military
6. renewable energy ‘transition’ co-ops
7. land trusts and conservancies, replacing land ownership with community stewardship
8. community-based co-ops for gardening/permaculture, CSA, tool-sharing, skills banks
9. community-based repair, recycling, composting and re-use programs
10. holistic health institutions based on self-management and prevention
11. local currencies and gift economy programs
12. unschooling (natural/self-directed learning)
13. collective, independent, non-commercial information sharing and communications media
14. clothing co-ops (like Mondragon’s)
15. community theatre
16. community-based scientific research, idea and innovation centres
17. facilitation ‘collaboratories’ (where skilled facilitators would help you resolve challenges both local and global)
18. well-being centres for personal growth, relationship management and self-learning
19. artist and crafts co-ops

I think it would be interesting to visualize how such communities, working from a kind of ‘blueprint’ that would be adapted to suit local needs and preferences, could be entirely self-organized. This would require a lot of learning (and relearning) how to do things for ourselves that we have come to rely on governments, professionals, corporations, ‘experts’ and foreign workers to do for us. We are, most of us, so used to having things designed and organized for us that we have lost the essential skills to do this for ourselves.

That’s why I think we need good working models, that show others how and why each of these institutions works. Equally important, they would demonstrate the co-operative form of collective work self-organization, as contrasted with the modern hierarchical command-and-control form of top-down work organization. It takes practice to learn to make decisions with others, instead of (as we have been trained to do) making decisions for others or acting on decisions others have made for us.

Likewise, most of us expect jobs to be designed and created by others, that we can then try to fit ourselves to, rather than creating our own — self-employment is considered too difficult, too stressful, and too much of a commitment for most. We need to learn (that was one objective of my book Finding the Sweet Spot) that sustainable entrepreneurship is not difficult or stressful, provided we don’t try to do it all alone.

One purpose of my novel/film will be to create a vision of how such communities could be formed, and operate, and how much better they would be, by every measure, than the wasteful and toxic industrial systems we rely on today. If you read the list of 19 community elements above, you probably think creating a community with these elements is hopelessly idealistic. My objective is to work with others to create models that will show such communities are entirely possible.

What do you think? Can you imagine a community with these 19 elements, working effectively, sustainably, responsibly, joyfully? How big could it get before it started to come apart, get disconnected? Can you envision the world after the collapse of civilization, with a human population only 10% of the size of today’s, starting over and building a community-based society that looks like this? Or do you think it’s in our nature to create hierarchy, hoard power and wealth, wage war, and grow until we’re stopped by some outside force?

In my thinking about activism, I keep reassuring myself that people will listen when they’re ready, and that by working with those who are ready to initiate change, we are more likely to make a difference collaboratively than in isolation. What I want to understand better, though, is what motivates others to do what they do, and believe what they believe. If I understand this, I hope, I’ll be able to find and recognize others who are ready to work with me to do the radical work that must be done to make the world a better place.

Much has been written about what humans need, physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. I’m more interested in the moment in what people want, and specifically, what we want from others (rather than from ourselves and our environment). We are, after all, inherently social creatures, and that quality has proven to be a tremendous evolutionary success. In my recent article on empathy, I identified forty emotional needs, of which these 26 were “needs from others”:

What we want from others, I think, is what we believe, if we get them, will fulfill the above needs. In my observation, most of us particularly want six things from others, which map very well to the three lists above:

• In order to meet our security needs, we want authority, control, and knowledge
• In order to meet our belonging needs, we want purpose (what Dave Smith calls “to be of use”)
• In order to meet our self-esteem needs, we want attention and appreciation

These are the six means to the 26 ends of fulfilling our needs from others. By giving these things to others, authentically, we are most likely get people to learn, understand and appreciate what we want them to, in order for them to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Let’s look a bit at the motivations for these six wants.

We desire attention and appreciation because we cannot know ourselves well without the context of seeing ourselves as others see us. Their perspective, and our conversations, are essential to understanding who we are and what we believe, and, more importantly, why we are here. In my experience (and this is a somewhat dangerous and changing generalization) most men seem to crave attention more than appreciation, while most women seem to want appreciation more than ‘mere’ attention. I think this probably has more to do with cultural conditioning than biology. It’s a cliche that ‘women give sex (attentive) to get love (appreciative), and men give love to get sex’. And both genders want lots of both attention and appreciation.

When we get attention it tells us “what I think and feel matters” and “what I say and believe is important”. When we get appreciation it tells us “what I do has value” and “what I say and believe makes sense”. We get these assurances through others — no amount of solitary rationalization is sufficient to do this (which is perhaps why some unappreciated artists suffer so much).

We desire authority and control because we believe that it will give us comfort, freedom and security. Authority can be bought (with money and/or influence) or it can be earned. Unfortunately, earned authority usually comes with a catch — responsibility. If you’re rich and powerful you can wield authority irresponsibly, but the rest of us have to accept responsibility before we are given commensurate authority — and often we get caught, stuck with the responsibility but not the authority.

Authority can give us some control, but less than we might think. People are remarkably adept at ignoring decisions and instructions from authorities when they don’t think they’re optimal. Bullies and sociopaths are expert at controlling other people, but it’s usually coercive, manipulative, and resented, and rarely sustainable. With authority can come wealth (and vice versa), which can buy a measure of freedom and security. But for the most part, the only thing we can really control is ourselves (and there are some arguments, well hashed-out in these pages, that our bodies control our minds, not the other way around).

We desire knowledge for the same reasons — comfort, freedom and security. Unfortunately, most of what we are offered today is not knowledge, because it is unactionable and useless — it does not enable us to increase either our capacities or our competencies. The only means to achieve these is practice, and our modern frenetic society provides us with neither the time nor the process to practice effectively. Instead, we are forced to buy into a civilization that is fragile, overextended and dependent on others we don’t know. Paradoxically, our knowledge of this lack of self-sufficiency, capacity and competency actually reduces our sense of security.

We desire a sense of purpose because it gives our life meaning and direction and enables us, through a shared meaning and values, to belong to our communities. We instinctively give to and share with others, because it’s a bonding activity.

When I think of all the relationships in my life, I recognize the extent to which my interactions with others are mutually motivated by these six wants, and the 26 needs that underlie them. I can see how salespeople, seducers and sociopaths learn to cater expertly to these wants (by both satisying them, and instilling fear that we don’t have enough of them) in order to get what they want and need from us in return. And I see how gullible most of us are to these ruses, in our almost indiscriminate hunger for these six things.
What we have created as a result is a dreadful scarcity of these six things. We live in an attention-deficit society, and we are bombarded with propaganda telling us that if we don’t buy X or do Y we won’t be beautiful enough, strong enough, smart enough, interesting enough or anything else enough to be appreciated.

We have pyramidal hierarchies where authority and wealth are hoarded at the top and meted out stingily to others. We are bombarded with terrible news and cynical lies that persuade us that everything is out of control, to the point we need to arm ourselves with guns and duct tape to protect ourselves. And we have to cede control over everything — what we eat, where and how our clothes are made, where and how we live — just to keep a job, to keep what Derrick Jensen calls “the fear of never having enough” at bay.

We have a firehose of information, but we don’t have any of the essential knowledge that allowed humans in previous generations and other cultures to life a healthy and decent life — how to grow our own good food, how to fix things, how to prevent illness and accident and self-diagnose and (for most illnesses) self-heal when we are sick.

We have no sense of our purpose because we are too busy doing what we must to think about why we are here at all, or about what the world really needs (in place of whatever junk commodity or overhyped service our employer has us offering sixty hours a week to customers as dumbed and numbed as we are), or even about what we love doing or are uniquely good at doing that would, if it were known and applied, allow us to be of use effectively, and learn what we’re meant to do and hence why we’re here.

I have always been blessed with exquisitely good fortune, and I now have a surfeit of all six things (or, in the case of the security-driven wants, their most useful surrogates — financial independence, self-control and self-knowledge). But I recognize that these are not things I can give to others to enable them to join me in my activist pursuits. And now, what I most want from others that I do not have is the companionship of those who have, by fortune or hard work, reached the same place that I have, and who are able and willing to dedicate themselves, with that terrible knowledge, to doing what we must do to make the world a better place.

Our journey is the nine-step one above that I have been showing on this blog for months now — the reconnection, action, and reflection steps that will tell us where we have come from, where we are, and what we must do now.

Joanna Macy would have us believe this is a journey that anyone can take, if they have courage. But I’m not sure. If your life is preoccupied with the needs of the moment, and driven by a terrible lack of time/attention, appreciation, authority/independence, self-control, self-knowledge, and understanding of your true purpose, how can you possibly have the presence of mind to pursue, or even see the value and urgency of, this journey?

I guess this is my way of saying that, perhaps arrogantly, I’m still feeling very much too far ahead. I’m impatient to find those who are with me, ready — not to follow me but to journey with me, as peers, as collaborators, as radicals determined to take back the Earth from those who have stolen and desolated it, and return it to the collective stewardship of all-life-on-Earth.

Not that I’m looking for attention or appreciation, you understand.