Being entangled

Invitation ~

“Place your hand over your heart, or on the earth, or on something that has known weather. Pause for a few moments, until your body says move on.”

🌿 What We’ve Been Taught

The world we inhabit reflects to us that we are individuals, owners, consumers, and actors. We’re taught to see and think of ourselves as separate from one another. Within this system, it is not at all guaranteed that our needs will be met.

Our actions are turned into equations. We must always be seeking the correct path, so we’ll be allowed to eat, rest, and belong. We are told we must behave properly for our needs to be met, and the standards for that behavior live outside of ourselves.

We’ve been taught:

to think of relationships as responsibilities,
to turn mutuality into performance,
to treat land as something to be owned,
to translate labor into value,
to convert love into transaction.

🌱 What Interdependence Really Is

Very few people today live in full alignment with our interdependence. This isn't because we're failing.
It's because the systems we live within sever us from the truth that we can't exist outside of relationship.

It can be hard to even imagine what it would feel like to fully live as entangled beings. And when we do try to imagine it, what often arises is fear.

We remember many failed attempts.
Failed communes.
Failed collectives.
Failed utopias.
Communism. Socialism.
Experiments in shared living that ended in rupture, disillusionment, or harm.

These memories whisper:

“Interdependence is dangerous.”
“People can’t be trusted.”
“You’ll lose yourself.”
“Don’t try again.”

But these outcomes are not proof that interdependence doesn’t work. They are proof of how deeply distorted our ability to see and relate to each other as we are has become.

Interdependence is not agreement. It is not harmony. It doesn’t mean we see the world the same way, or share the same urgency.

Interdependence is not sameness. It's the practice of staying present and caring, person to person, through difference.

It means holding the reality of our different experiences, needs, and perspectives.
It means caring for each other as we are, not as we wish each other to be.
It means resisting the impulse to fix, convert, or educate each other into alignment.

To live interdependently is to honor that each person is sovereign in their own life. Each is a subject, not an object in our story. Each is looking out from a different face, with different emotions, memories, and meanings, even in the same moment.

It's quite profound to truly realize this, and honestly, it seems to me that most people don't ever really grasp this: others are not simply objects in our life. The way we perceive them is very often not at all the way they perceive themselves.

I value relationships with people who grasp this intuitively. I no longer feel called to explain it. If a person doesn't already get this, it doesn't really work to try to explain it anyway.

🫱 A Personal Story:

What It Looks Like When We Try

My husband and I would love to live in community. We've both lived in spiritual communities when we were younger. Now that we've raised our children and had enough of suburban American life, we want to again find, or form, a community where we feel we belong, and where we can live interdependently with others.

We met two others who also wanted this. Together, began taking steps towards purchasing land and building a home together, with the idea that we would then invite others to join us.

The dream was beautiful. It resonated with all of us. The vision of living in community and shared resourcing felt true and thrilling.

But as we moved from dream to logistics, something shifted.

When we began exploring how we would make decisions together, and what clear, practical agreements might look like, we discovered the ways we diverged in how we saw the world, and in what we each needed.

At that point, the dream could have softened to make room for the real.

Instead, something else happened.

The two others entered what I call fixing mode: a well-meaning attempt to get us to change how we were relating so that the dream could still work. They tried to show us ways we needed to adapt, think differently, or show up in ways that would work for them.

But that’s not what interdependence calls for.

Interdependence doesn't begin with fixing. It begins with seeing and hearing. It begins with each person naming clearly what they need, what they see, and where they are.

From there, the group can stand together in reality.

From there, the question becomes:

“Can we co-create a path that honors everyone’s needs?”

If that’s not possible,
then the practice becomes:

“Can we release each other with clarity and care, without trying to force change or demand compromise that erodes anyone's sovereignty?”

Interdependence does not mean everyone gets their way. But it also doesn't mean that some people decide what others need to become.

Each person is sovereign. And the group’s coherence must be shaped from that truth.

In a community of care the way I mean it, when someone isn't feeling cared for, the question becomes, can this group give this person what they need?

That question deserves to be explored by the group. It is a breach of sovereignty to respond with: ‘That’s your issue. You need to grow.’

Whether that’s true or not is beside the point. It's a simple matter of looking squarely at whether everyone's needs can be met or not. If not, it's not failure to decide that living in community isn't a good idea.

This is why communities that are successfully living interdependently have a long process of mutual co-sensing before new members are welcomed.

✨ Shared vision is not enough.
✨ It is shared practice, grounded in plural seeing and knowing, and mutual respect, that allows interdependence to live.

~ Invitation:

Reflect on whether you have shared a dream with someone else, and whether that dream collapsed at the level of divergent needs or perspectives?

What might have shifted if no one tried to fix or convince the others?

Many of us carry residues, both hope and harm, from previous human attempts at systemic care. Capitalism isolates us and ensures some win while many lose. Socialism often fits us into roles and slowly erodes sovereignty. Communism, in many experiments, has enforced sameness and obedience to preserve cohesion.

Interdependence, as I practice and imagine it, is not a perfected system. It is a relational practice field where divergence is not a threat, and care is not conditional on roles or ideological alignment.

These questions are not here to judge, but to wonder together.

✴️ What are the patterns in all these systems (capitalism, socialism, communism) that make it hard to honor sovereignty and collective care at once?

✴️ What happens when the desire for equality becomes a pressure for sameness?

✴️ In capitalism, worth is determined by productivity. In communism, worth is often assigned by collective needs.
What would it mean to recognize worth in relation, not in output or ideology?

And here are some invitations to personal reflection.

✴️ Where in my life am I pretending to be independent, even when I am not?

✴️ Where do I feel pulled to change someone else, instead of relating to them as they are?

✴️ What relationships in my life feel mutual, alive, and nourishing? What makes them feel thay way?

🌀 Reflection Questions

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