For me this pillar began on the land, in the years of the farmers’ markets and the Real Food Network, when a few of us moved in together to try community itself. We were a bunch of mammals, that’s what we identified ourselves as, and we had the compost right and the water right and the beds planted in succession, and the one piece of ground still waiting for our study was the ground between us. I remember saying it out loud in those years: look at all the human damage that’s coming up. And I’m projecting his project. And I’m hurt, and he’s hurt, and she’s jealous. Through the study of Syntropy, which the School of Syntropy pillar holds, I had already learned to read a field by what the soil is doing beneath the plants, and when that same reading turned inward and then sideways into the way we were relating, it gave me the picture that has carried me for ten years, each of us as the farmland our community grows on. What grows between people grows out of what each of us is carrying in our own ground, and when a feeling waits in silence for long enough that ground goes bare, and life leaves a place the way it leaves bare soil, and you can feel it leave.

The first practice I found there is something that I call speaking on behalf of ourselves, speaking on behalf of my own feelings. In those co-living years I caught myself telling my own hurt in the second person, you get hurt when someone walks past your work in silence, and it took me a while to see that I had taken my personal vulnerable experience and used the word you so that I don’t have to be in direct connection with the real feelings of it. Speaking on my own behalf brings the hurt back into my body as I feel, and from there it is simply mine to carry and to share, because nobody can ever argue with how you feel, that feeling is unique to your experience. I’m still in that training. I’m still speaking on behalf of others some days, and the catching of it is the practice, as much in my own house as in any circle I sit in.

Much of what we have been handed as relationship runs on contract, I will be this for you so that you will be that for me, and the moment one of us feels something outside the agreement the feeling gets read as a breach. What I call feeling-based relating starts from a law I keep returning to, and it is a law for a reason: feelings are not contracts. A feeling arrives because it performs a function with purpose, and the work in relation land is to question the function together. What is her jealousy showing her? What is my hurt asking me to turn toward? What is this whole household growing toward, and at whose pace? Those are the questions I walk a farm with, where I ask who is nurturing who into the next succession, and they are the questions I walk a home with, and the beautiful thing is that the answers come in the same order, soil first. We are feeling-based creatures, full stop, no questions asked, and relating by feeling begins with one person willing to say, in the first person, what is really going on for them.

Sovereignty sits in this pillar as the ground I tend first, because I lose my sovereignty in the moment of putting somebody under me or putting myself under somebody else, and both moves happen in a heartbeat when a feeling is still looking for somewhere to land. In permaculture the zone closest to the house is zone zero, the one you walk through a dozen times a day, and in human ecology that zone is the internal landscape, which is why what is tended there filters from zone zero of our human internal landscape to our patio, to our garden, to our community, to our bioregion. The writing here follows that order. EcoSophy Innerstudy Nature gives you the first journey to walk, a self-guided innerstudy in the wisdom of the Earth herself, and Radical Human Ecology lays out the ground the whole study stands on, from the Cartesian schooling so many of us grew up inside to the three principles that hold the Wananga of Love together.