This post's read time: 2 minutes
Dear friend,
On my mind is rhizomatic social growth – this idea that grassroots isn’t deep enough. For these trying times, facing violent challenges to human wellbeing, we need deep resilience. We need rhizomes – creeping rootstalks which grow underground and interconnect us to flourish. This is in opposition to, say, a seed bomb, which is fast, but shallow. As Danny tells me “a mile wide and an inch deep”.
A big part of this is how we align ourselves. Over the years I developed a concept of every person being a sum of their emotional vector forces. When those forces all pull relatively in unison, we feel purposeful and efficient. When we are pulled in many directions, anxiety and depression set in, burnout occurs, and generally bad shit happens.
This applies to pretty much any time a person must make a decision. One of my big issues with the rationalists is that rationality is kind of an artificial construct based on perspective and everyone’s perspective is different. A model like rhizomatic growth is all about getting us to communicate better and integrate ourselves into one another’s lives, to be willing to be interdependent.
New wave “Rationalism” doesn’t work unless we all have common goals and purposes to begin with (and, look around,. we clearly do not).
This screws us up in our love, too. Love is not absolute, if you believe this model, it is a complex mess of vectors pulling against each other. It is based on environment, evolution, predisposition, past current and future desired relationships.
You love a lot of different people, in a lot of complex ways, (or maybe very few people in very simple ways) and maybe the vectors line up to manifest as ultra-strong monogamous romantic love, or maybe they line up as polyamory, or most likely of all, as outside forces change your emotional vectors, you swing around between alignment and misalignment, and in different directions! It’s like the magnetic north of the earth swinging around.
Why can’t we confess that people fall in and out of love with each other, and that this is a complicated thing?
I think, maybe, we see this as an on-off switch, and this is a horrible model for human relationships. I don’t love you and then not love you – my love is more like a hurricane – we must probe it with the deepest intentions of understanding to even begin to understand how strong our love is, and where it might make landfall.
Ok, so I was going to tie this into DRJ and what I’ve been learning about going slow and starting small (kaizen) relationship building and alignment, and how all of these recent experiences is giving me a profound sense of optimism and synergy.
But, I’m out of time, until next time – my love!
<3 – B