These emails, delivered Sunday late afternoon, weave personal story, inspiration from our programs, and tangible invitations to support you in being the man you want to be in the week ahead.
The etymology of the word saunter is interestingly, unknown. There’s an old story John Muir used to tell that the word means those walking towards the holy land and has thus come to mean “to be in reverie as we move.” Anyhow, let us saunter…
This week is going to be a personal one. It’s something I’ve wanted to write because often what I need Is revealed to me as I pull on these threads.
For the past decade of my life, I’ve watched a burning longing from so many for “real community” go desperately unfulfilled.
I’m sure you see it everywhere like I do. Perhaps you’ve felt it for yourself in the way I have. The longing to move to land and bring back the village. Or, the desire to have community in the city that isn’t just serving temporary needs but is actually “doing life together.”
There’s a beautiful and important recognition that’s burgeoned forth in these times: the nuclear family, the mortgage and the white picket-fence, “self-sufficiency”— these aren’t working.
So, we long for something different. We proclaim that our children will have it different. That we won’t be like our parents. That our family won’t be so dependent on the supermarket. That we’ll actually know—and maybe even love—our neighbors.
These days, it seems almost every young person I talk to (~under 40) is holding some variation of this vision.
And yet, if I’m honest, I sit here perplexed in how and why this vision only seems to grow more ineffable as the desire grows stronger. I’ve watched many failed attempts of mine to create community. I’ve witnessed many dozens of shared land + life projects end in dissolution. I’ve seen really good intentions and honest desire for a deep mutuality and collaboration result in broken relationships and ultimately a return back to something more self-contained.
So I ask: What is really going on here?
…..
By some great cosmic design—or perhaps a really good joke—I ended up moving to this land nearby to one of the —if not the—oldest intentional communities in the Southeast.
I arrived here, unbeknownst to the very existence of this place—or my proximity to it. I arrived here with my own grand visions of starting community and raising family and doing life together with my closest people.
Over the past seven years, the presence of this neighboring community has been a mirror, has been everything I’d “never let my community” become, and has been a teacher and good friend. And I know some of my most cherished people who live in this very community will read these words so I write with respect.
This community is a microcosm of everything beautiful and possible about being human. And it’s equally a microcosm for everything that’s incredibly dysfunctional about our culture and how we relate. Many, many, many people come from all over the world believing this place will finally be where they can belong to the village. Many, many, many people leave after a few months or a year, disappointed by their expectations and longing for more cohesion.
For those who have stayed, including some for multiple decades, there’s immense gratitude for this place on a good day. And on others days, there’s discontent and a longing for more shared mission and a wondering if they will even be here a decade from now.
As I’ve lived on this mountain, I’ve watched many peers—sometimes friends—join or help start land-based communities. I’ve watched people take on revolutionary visions with a lot of courage and inspiration. I’ve seen a multitude of different models of governance, land ownership, relational structures, etc. Both the average tenure of a participant and the average longevity of the bigger project are closer to how millennials move through the job market than they are a many generations land project.
So, in this light, what this community next door to me has accomplished is kind of unheard of. For over 30 years, people have found a way to live together, govern together, and take care of one another. There’s 130 folks there at present, doing some form of life together.
But the thing is: life down in that valley is not what you and I dream of when we talk about “community.”
What it actually takes to live rurally and off-grid and in wet, humid summers. What it means to belong alongside people you would never choose as a friend. What it means to be intimately interwoven with so many people’s personal process and emotional material. It’s not what everyone is aspiring towards when they talk about going back to the village.
So, if this community in some ways is a benchmark—the place that’s lasted longer than almost any other experiment that isn’t centered around religion—I ask again: what is really going on here?
…..
I’m a humble participant in this whole drama. I’ve watched many of my attempts at community-making fall by the waste side since I moved here. I’ve watched what first felt like an incompetence in conflict actually be more of an unwillingness on my part.
I’ve had big ruptures with people I thought would do life with us in our attempts to do life together. We’ve had people we love and enjoy as neighbors that we ultimately never became embedded with—although we thought we wanted it—who moved on to other places.
We’ve had close people interested in buying parcels on our land to build and do life together, and I haven’t been able to get to a full yes.
So, all of this I carry: the burning vision, the failed attempts, and most importantly: the honest recognition that maybe I think I want it—maybe we think we all want it—but at the place where vision meets action, we’re not ready. If we were, it would already be happening.
It’s in this grappling that in 2024, my parents moved onto the land with us. They were the first to actually land here. Amidst several attempts at “community” in the five years prior, they were the first to move here with no intention of moving away, alongside my wife and me.
While certainly different than living next door to my best friends, I had my own idealized version of this vision: Multi-generational living. Our kids knowing their grandparents daily. Our eventual support with their aging and dying.
And I’ll be straight up—two years into this experiment: it has been a fucking ride. I often find myself having an experience with my parents and wholly unsure if what I’m feeling is from childhood or if the same pattern is running still in this very moment. I find myself often closing down and withdrawing for weeks at a time. I’ve had many—and I mean many—screaming matches with my father.
If my mom and dad were anybody else, and we were trying to “do community,” none of us would still be here on this land together. The stuff we’re going through is the stuff I see ultimately impede the creation of the village so many of us long for. If these weren’t my parents, even at my best, I’d be hard pressed to show up to this level of conflict, repair, shared care, and growth in any relationship.
In many ways, we hold similar values, desires, and vision. In other ways, we don’t. And I find that when we’re talking about something as vital, vulnerable, and intimate as “home,” those places of misalignment seem to magnify.
But, the miracle is: we are all showing up for it. Tess and I aren’t going anywhere (even if I fantasize on hard days that we will). And if we did, we’d take them with us. I feel committed to doing life with mom and dad.
And this is the thread I want/need to pull on with you today. Last night we were having dinner with my parents, talking about a building project we’re starting on the land to be able to host more gatherings, welcome friends to stay for longer stretches, and increase resiliency as global instability rises. My dad was sharing his disappointment with the lack of commitment and cohesion he experiences with those around him.
My wife chimed in, as I stood at the sink washing dishes. She’d had a couple conversations this week with friends quite disenchanted with their experiences in community. “Everyone thinks they want community, but they’re actually just looking for a family.”
They’re looking for a family. They’re looking for ties that won’t be severed because someone goes bat-shit crazy in a conflict. They’re looking for a shared language and orientation and even ancestry. They’re looking for a loyalty that even the closest of friendships can hardly rival. They’re looking to know people as they were shaped by their worst moments—and their best.
And look, I don’t pretend any of those previous three sentences are the dominant expression of family in this day and age. But, this too, has me curious. I read recently that 38% of people have gone “no contact” with a close friend or family member (60% for Gen Z; 50% for millennials).
We are quite quick these days to sever threads that don’t feel “true to who we are.” Is there something important here? Perhaps. Could we have over-done it, as we tend to in our impassioned years of youth? Probably.
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When I’ve dreamt those many dreams about “community,” it was not this life I’m living now. It was a dynamic, delicious, vibrant freedom I longed for. It was a life other than the one I had known for all my years. It was life other than the way I was raised. It was a path away from this and towards an ideal future.
Life with mom and dad, it’s certainly not the mango-filled, ecstatic-dance, Costa Rican dream I carried for a decade. It’s gritty. It’s deep. At times, it’s inflamed. It is in no way moving away from that stuff that hurts that I don’t like. It’s bringing me closer.
As I’m deep in my own parenting journey, the patterns I’m trying to shift in my lineage from my own childhood are in front of me constantly. I see almost every single day in my dad what I am so scared to become in myself.
I once dreamed of a life beyond this muck. Right now, I’m waste-deep in everything I thought I wouldn’t want.
It’s way too soon to draw any conclusions, but I can say: this is objectively the closest to a non-nuclear-family community I’ve ever had. I can say: I cannot imagine raising our son out here without my parents. I can say: at the level of my nervous system, it actually feels quite right to be laying eyes on my parents every day—even if the conversation we have leaves me feeling disconnected, unseen, or longing for more.
I think when most of us talk about the village or community, we want to pretend it’s not these things. I think when people move to this community next door to us, they want to believe it will be everything other than what they’ve always known.
But the brutal truth is we cannot shed our inheritance. We come from generations of severed ties. We all come from people who once knew village—for millennia—and for one reason or another had to or chose to leave that village to come to the “free world.” Most of us come from people whose in-tact culture was destroyed by Empire. And now we, the inheritors and purveyors of empire, are looking to reconstruct culture. One where the village has a place.
What a task, bless our souls.
…..
I have one more piece, and then I’ll close with a personal story.
The etymology of village comes from the PIE root Weik meaning clan. Clan translates, through Latin roots, to offshoot or offspring. There’s a mighty good reason we’ve lived with and amongst our genetic family for over two million years as Homo Erectus and then Homo Sapiens.
And for those of you already going there in your mind, I am not about to claim that these dreams of making family of genetic strangers are unreachable and we’re better off giving in and moving in to our brother’s basement in the suburbs.
But, I am getting curious. There’s an evolutionary code—a part of life’s design—we’ve developed with for a really long time. No matter how much we think we want something different, we are not, in one or two generations, going to successfully achieve something that runs counter to what’s enabled us to survive for 100,000 generations.
And we’re at a time when 50% of millennials are going no contact with someone from this very design. It makes me ask: what is happening that has so many of us wanting to move away from the dark, tangled, roots of our life and towards the canopy where there’s the promise of sunshine and spaciousness and a calm breeze?
When did the roots get so bad we want nothing to do with them? Or, have we just forgotten what they are and what they mean in a culture that sells “the good life NOW” in every Instagram post?
I believe the answer we’re seeking lives in these questions. If we can be humble to this recognition and limitation that for almost all of history, our family has been a given, we may just be able to approach this longing for village and community in a way where something actually gets born that lasts. And fulfills us in our bones.
I think of Stephen Jenkinson’s book Matrimony here (which whoosh: I weeped reading this book). He tells of the old rites that would happen between clans when two of their young people were to be wed. Years of courtship. Many, many councils amongst the elders of the clans. Elaborate gift giving rituals and offerings. Simply so one person could leave a clan and join another in service to matrimony, in service to culture.
And we, today, think we can go anywhere, anytime, and if we’re smiling enough at the meet and greet, we’ll have ourselves a village that cares for our children as much as we do. It’s just never been that way.
So again, I’m humbled. I’m humbled that my relationship with my parents, by all standards of the relational frameworks and practices I’ve studied this past decade, is incredibly dysfunctional. And yet, we’re in it. We love one another profoundly. We’re not going anywhere, and we are getting better. There’s a choice to stay, and it’s shaping me into who I am through the muck. Not in running away from it.
I see over and over again in my life: there’s what I think I want. If I’m honest, often as an escape from my inability to see and savor what I have. And then, there’s what’s actually here. And I’ve never gotten to where I want to be going without going deeper into what’s actually here.
…..
I’ll close with this story. This involves, also, someone who likely will read this post, and as such I approach it with due respect.
A brother and neighbor in my life recently reached towards me asking for more connection. I heard in him some disappointment that we are not spending more time together since they moved here, in good part to be close to us as a family.
I hear this feedback somewhat often from people in my life. And I think this pattern is a good reason why some of the good people who could have “done life with us” haven’t landed and stayed here.
I could get hard on myself here. Quite easily. Because, I see it.
I have a pretty firm grip on reality. I like what I like, and more often than not, I like things my way. I’m more protective with my energy than I’m not. Discerning to an extreme. When I’m not facilitating group space in Heart of Men, kicking it with my really close friends, or with my family, I love being alone. I care deeply for people, but I’m not super accommodating.
I’m acutely aware that this way of being is the very place where I’m most responsible for not having more “village” around us. There has been ample opportunity, and I end up choosing a more self-contained path.
In the case of this specific brother, it’s a real gift his family has landed close to us, and I believe our life will be better if they stick around. They’re awesome people.
But If I’m honest—both about this specific context and the times I’ve received similar reflection, I don’t actually know if I’m willing to give up my order of things for more relational interdependence. Sounds kind of crazy when I talk about how much I long for community, right? But, it’s the truth.
And I wonder how many of us are having this experience. As I wrote earlier: it’s not actually an incompetence to live as villagers; it’s an unwillingness. And I’m not sure that unwillingness is all bad.
I wonder if there’s a through-line here. I wonder if there’s something holy and important about the self-sovereignty we’ve cultivated in this modern era that isn’t just a maladaptive strategy to a sick culture. I wonder how that self-sovereignty could live within the context of a village where, historically, there wasn’t much sense of “self.”
I wonder if new possibilities for village, community, and family-making emerge if we stop trying to pretend we’re all about an egalitarian, consensus community and get more honest about where we really are. If we let the roots have their due voice before we pretend it’s all light and well in the top of the canopy.
I don’t have the answer. In the case of this specific brother, I want to grow. I want to test my hard edges. So, I am going to invest in more relationship and rhythm. I’m going to see if that can exist alongside how much I cherish my quiet, alone time when I have a window, which isn’t so often these days. I am going to run an experiment, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
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If there’s an inquiry this week, it’s this: What have you turned away from (for all the good reasons) that it’s only in re-turning towards that you will actually live into what you’re so deeply longing for?
Thank you for being here. Some of my favorite moments in these recents weeks are continuing to hear from you all on the way these saunters are moving in you. I love watching this newsletter organically emerge, take shape, and grow. Welcome to all the new folks who have joined in the past weeks.
Bless your fathers. Bless your fatherhood—in whatever way that comes through. Especially if you’ve made the brave choice to bring human life in. May you have a beautiful long day of sunshine as spring becomes summer on this very day.
I will see you soon,
Thomas
I am pumped to finally be able to say: the Inaugural Rites of Reunion gathering has landed. We will come together February 18th-22nd along the gorgeous Oak Creek in the desert of Arizona. Rachelle and I have been courting this vision of bringing together men and women for three years now, and it’s finally time. If this sparks for you, add these dates to your calendar, and we’ll be in touch about our first enrollment window later this summer.
