Regenerative Community and Culture

To regenerate is to give new life and energy, to revitalize, understand, and renew an original place of natural energy and beauty, with the interconnected ways of humans, animals, and plants. Beyond sustaining whatever is normal at this moment, we urge ourselves deeper into relationships of balance and harmony, recreating a better way of life for all.

As our small family farmer-growers with the tight communities they created in the 1970s—the old ways of tiny solar homesteads, hippie weed, and landrace cultivars—die off and the Elders disappear, and as the cannabis economy darkens with more difficulties for small farmers, what can we learn before they go? Remember the Back-to-the-Land life of living in harmony with each other and nature, eating what we grow, smoking what our friends or we offered and sharing music and food in circles on the hills and the beaches? All regenerative, in harmony with nature. What will take its place as the commodification of culture and wild places is normalized?

Looking beyond the hustle of the green economy, can we regenerate our communities? Yes! The community we build reflects our values. From where does our food come? What friends do we cultivate? Let’s ask these questions.

How do we manage our pure watersheds? Where does our waste end up? Some Eternal authority does not give humans domination or even stewardship. We are here as visitors to this realm of Earth and beauty. Every choice—to drink from clean tap water instead of using water in a plastic bottle, to eat eggs from your neighbor’s chickens rather than cheap corporate eggs from unknown sources, and when offered to smoke a bowl of, what? You can ask how it was grown.

These moments happen all the time. Our opportunity is to create regenerative community as we live with loving attention to our relationships with nature, plant medicine, the sun, the water, and the land. In fact, regeneration is not a single act; it is an ongoing process, a commitment, as time moves in the arc of life and change, renewing over and over into the future.

We are in the 6th Mass Extinction of this planet, driven by human presumption, consumption, and error. The millions of animals and plants disappearing are mirrored by our human illness and isolation as we become merely survivors. Yet instead, we can thrive! That is regeneration, making anew what has been violated or destroyed. Recreate and rebuild our unique culture with mindful community as we respect those who want to teach and share, to help regrow trust and continuity of the circle of life. Let’s regenerate healthy soil and respect the mycelium and connection with nature that wants to help us.

I want to stand with you in this regeneration of our communities’ mindful participants and mutual respect. That is the old way, and the new way is of ‘thrival’, of regeneration, and of aliveness.

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Feature photo credit: Ann Brigit Waters