A queen prepares to leave her modern-day castle to travel the world, but, before she leaves, she grants you the keys and tells you the palace is yours to do with as you wish. Well, almost.
Source: Angel_nt/iStockphoto
“There is just one exception,” the queen decrees. “Do not use my keys to unlock the door to the castle’s ancient basement dungeon!”
For a time, you follow this order, but, in your quieter moments, you can’t shake the feeling that something important lies hidden from you. You find yourself caught with a choice between the ignorance you are living with and the feeling that behind this door lives something you have not yet named but is of great significance. At last, you decide to place the key in the dungeon lock and push the door ajar.
The World as It Was
We see the world anthropologists tell us humanity lived in for almost all of our two hundred thousand year history on this planet. In this world, humans are born into villages welcoming them as children, guiding them through the turbulent waters of adolescence, and teaching them to engage in the sacred work of connecting with and replenishing our planet. This was a world that remembered humans were born for each other: People experienced security in each other’s arms and discovered value in the loving gazes of those around them (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021)
.In each of this world’s many villages, when the pain of a catastrophic loss fell into anyone’s life, the community ground to a halt, interrupting many lives. Its villagers gently guided those suffering to a comforting knowledge: “Trauma and loss are our deep encounters with an essential experience of being human. These encounters allow us to be shaped by life instead of defeated or destroyed by it.” (Weller, 2015)
Each village was a safe haven for its members to turn to, welcomed and comforted, whenever they were frightened, wounded, or in danger. Each was the secure base its members boldly ventured out from to experience the world with a sense of wonder. In short, these were places satisfying our innate longing for secure attachments.
Surprised and amazed, we close this downstairs door and look around at the world we currently live in.
Alive in a Strange, Alternate Universe
We are alive in a strange, alternate universe where a single consumer culture has spread like wildfire. It insists we survive on our own: “Find security by building your individual pile of wealth. Create value using the measuring sticks of what you alone accomplish and what you alone possess.” We see a world encouraging narcissistic self-absorption, trading in innate longings for relationships for the promised spoils of individual triumph.
It is a world that has lost its balance between personal ambition and collective responsibility, and it has taken us all into shared suffering. Loneliness is an epidemic. We are exhausted and overwhelmed. Too often, we feel anxious or depressed. And we fear for our future, witnessing global losses ranging from the collapse of ecosystems to the destruction of biodiversity to the existential threat of global warming (De Vos, 2022)
Bridging Two Worlds
We have seen the world both as it once was and as it now is. We can’t forget what we witnessed.
You and I are called to bring the world once hidden behind the basement door into our modern world. The time is now to embrace our relational natures and welcome our innate capacity to birth socially vibrant subcultures — intentional communities; micro-cultures of connection — within the larger consumer culture. Each of us can create our modern versions of the lost world we briefly encountered on the other side of the door.
This column will be your guide on this journey.
