Building Resilient Relationships
The fragility, instability and unsustainability of our current social and economic systems is made very apparent in the pervasive wake of COVID-19. Many scientists and evolutionary thinkers see this virus as a harbinger of things to come. It may be just the tip of the iceberg in further upheavals on the way. In that sense, COVID may be a welcomed wake-up call, if we take it as such. Given the many signs and symptoms, we have much work to do. To begin, we take stock of ourselves, looking to unlearn assumptions we’ve made about life and our place in the web of interbeing. It has to do with implementing radical premises based in the understanding that we need each other, and we need to honor and respect Nature’s wisdom and intelligence. We need to reweave the fabric of our relationships with one another and with the Earth. Our innovative approaches must align with Natural systems that at their core, function cooperatively.
Everything---life, the universe, Nature---functions within intricate, interdependent, highly engaged relationships. As Paul Stamets said, “Relationship is the smallest possible unit of systems to evaluate.” Universal life forces naturally tend toward self-organizing, balanced and sustaining systems in a dynamic and evolutionary equilibrium. When the networks of interconnections are disrupted and start to unravel, chaos ensues. Being inherently resilient, when a system is off kilter the universal life forces operate to self-correct. Life-serving systems are naturally self-organizing, regenerative and reparative. There are scientific, religious, cultural and mythological explanations for what this underlying evolutionary, self-organizing and regenerative principle is. What it is and what to call it aren’t my topic. I want to explore the nature of resilience itself.
Now more than ever before, we must look to Nature for clues about how to engage and enhance resilience and the regenerative capabilities of life. The self-corrections in progress now are extensive and dramatic. They are impacting life with traumatic upheavals and devastating changes both environmentally as well as socially.
Our heretofore erroneous assumption that we are separate from life and the ecological systems on which we depend has brought us to our current global climate crises. We are on the brink of complete ecological collapse in many spheres. The Earth is struggling to regain balance in the face of human intervention and man-made unraveling of the interdependent relationships that sustain life. David Abram sums it up like this: “Climate change is the simple consequence of forgetting the holiness of this mysterium in which we’re bodily immersed.”
In the end, the Earth will take care of Herself. She will regenerate and evolve as She has always done. The issue at hand is whether human life will continue, as well as the many other life forms in peril. At this point, one life form goes extinct very 20 minutes of every day due to habitat destruction. (Zach Bush, MD, Intrinsic Health Series, The M Clinic, www.zachbushmd.com).
We are at an evolutionary crossroads. As Barbara Marx-Hubbard was fond of saying, “we are the face of evolution.” She noted in her ground-breaking work that life has come to a number of crisis points throughout Earth’s dramatic and varied history. When life is up against impending life-threatening conditions, evolution takes the helm. Evolution is inherently innovative. It is a whole, complex system of interrelated components, tendencies and abilities. As if by magic, the “mysterium” generates a novel approach to untoward circumstances and meets the challenges to adapt and survive.
We are at such a crisis point now, as we know. We’ve known what we need to do for at least 50 years. Some, such as seminal ecologist Rachel Carson, among others, have known it for much longer. In order to give evolution a chance to recover her bearings and aid in the regenerative process, it is incumbent upon humanity to shift the nature of our relationships.
Human relationship dynamics are at the center of what keeps the old machinery grinding away, destroying the very systems that sustain life. To allow innovative ideas, plans and reorganization to bubble up, we also need to shift the basis of our understanding of Nature and our place in it. We need to shift our responses to everything from one another, to our extractive compulsions, to our food sources and the soil in which our food is grown.
To build resilient relationships we need to delve into the causes of instable and unsustainable relationships first. We need to see what holds us back from connection and cooperation not only with one another, but also with the planet. Once that is clear and we have access to the values that truly matter to us, we can implement new, mutually inclusive ways of interacting and relating to one another. We are dreaming a new world into being that recognizes our inter-beingness with all of life and includes reverence for all life forms and ecological systems.
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