Relationship is regenerating!
2025-03-10
The lovely little writing group I mentioned back around 2024-12-18 had another meeting where we had 15 minutes to write something, with the prompt “Imagined self, imagined community, imagined world…weaving a better place with our imagination and intention”. We were invited to write about our imagined role in our imagined world, and what can change in the next five or ten years. Again, I found this challenge stimulating. We read aloud what we had written to the others present. One outcome of this was the suggestion that I do an audio version and make that available alongside my writing. And, for sure, I have enjoyed, over long-term engagement in parenting, reading aloud to my children. Proper actors are much better than me, though!
Here is what I wrote. The title above I made up just after writing, and now I've also added links.
Against all the odds, people have begun to recognise that we have been duped into a disconnected, individualistic world. There is a growing sense that the whole “modern” economic world sucks away relationship, breaks connections, so that we all consume more.
And so, starting in intentional communities, eco-villages, writing groups, and many other places, we have become aware of the need to regenerate relationships, and relationship in general. That's why the word “weaving” has suddenly started to pop up in different places. We are taking on being in the loom, perhaps being the shuttle touching both sides, weaving us into a collective fabric.
I'm being drawn into this already in two ways.
For decades, I've had a vision of how to bring people together, to thrive, to flourish in each other's company. I'm working on this, writing about this, connecting with as many as I can about this, towards making it a reality. I imagine a time when it is simple, safe, trustable, to reach out with our needs, superficial or deep, and to reclaim the relationship which has been eviscerated from the “marketplace” — where the only measure of value is dead currency. Fiat. Flat. An untethered single thread.
And how do we deepen relationship once we have found each other? I call it “ontological commoning”, to be obscure in the service of uniqueness 
- Tell the old stories.
- Unpick the stories and unpack the belief systems.
- Examine the belief systems: what are the parts, what are the relationships.
It's only, I conjecture, when we have let go of the old stories (we will always have had different stories) and got underneath the belief systems (we will always believe different things) that we get down to what we hold as real.
And it is this, what we hold as real, where we can more easily listen to each other. My role is to develop the theory and practice of this. To research with others – action research – to find in practice what works. To spell out what we mean by an ontology commons.
I imagine it seeping into our very culture. We are becoming commoners, commoning the commons of our shared world, which we are rebuilding, re-relating, in common. We can then tell new stories which bring us together and touch many more.