Repair, Part 2
If separation from the rest of nature is the root of the trinity of disconnection and despair, the other branches of the trinity spring forth from that separation. One of the most persistent in our Western US cultures is the concept of “rugged individualism,” closely tied to the “bootstrapping” and “self-made man” stories of wealth creation in the first 13 colonies.
The general idea here is that we can and should be able to go it alone. That it is noble and righteous to go it alone. That the West was settled by individuals who virtuously went it alone.
Here’s the problem, though: It’s completely untrue.
We are fundamentally not alone, and we never have been. Even our own bodies are not lone individuals. We are actually made up of more non-human cells than we are human cells. Only one out of every 10 cells in our body is actually a human cell. The rest belong to an astounding diversity of other creatures, a cacophony of microbes who live inside and on our bodies. We have worms in our intestines and mites living on our eyelashes. Our gut microbiome is a literal ecosystem living inside our bodies that boasts over a trillion individual beings from over 5,000 different species! Scientists are just beginning to understand how vitally important this internal diversity is for our overall health.
The incredibly complex ecosystem of our own bodies of course exists within the mind-blowing interconnected ecosystems of the planet. Every bit of everything we’ve ever used to feed, clothe, or house ourselves comes from beings outside of ourselves. Even our bodies themselves will return to the earth when we die thanks to the myriad of decomposers releasing our essential elements back to the soil. These are just the facts.
Even if it was possible to ignore the community of beings literally living in our insides and the community of non-human beings with whom we share the planet, we can’t deny that we humans exist in human communities, and we always have. We rely on family, friends and neighbors to raise us as children, to care for us as elders, to tend to us when we are sick, to help us when we get stuck somewhere or when a disaster strikes. We work together to build connective infrastructure. In modern times, we have cell phones and internet and baffling supply chains plopping a literal world of consumer goods on our doorsteps. Many of us live in communities with emergency services, sewage systems, and water treatment plants. We can thank collaboration for the collective good every time we flush our toilets.
“The self-improvement mantras we encounter every day rely on recasting inequality as personal excuses.” -Tara McMullin
We in the rugged individualist West are notorious for forgetting that our hardscrabble farms and ranches are steeped in socialist federal government handouts. The feds literally gave many of our ancestors land forcibly taken from Native Americans through the Homestead Act, but that history has been conveniently forgotten as the land has passed down through generations who have built wealth on its back. Now, private property rights form the basis for our laws, land ethic, and cultural stories as something the current owner rightfully earned through their hard work. Our agriculture would not exist without an extensive network of dams on rivers built with federal government money; ranching functions through grazing allotments on publicly-owned land paid for by the taxes of faraway urban folks who will never set foot in these beautiful places we get to be in every day. We did not build the highways,interstates, and railroads bringing our products into and out of our communities ourselves, nor the electrical grid that makes our modern lives possible, but we benefit from these things nonetheless.
The dissonance between our mythology and our reality has made us delusional and dangerous.
But it gets worse. It’s also made us excruciatingly lonely.
Our culture gaslights us when it tells us that in order to be virtuous and successful, to prove our worth, we should be able to survive and thrive alone. Since it is literally impossible to be alone, let alone to survive alone, no one can ever truly prove themselves worthy in the eyes of this culture. What then are we unworthy of? Of successfully belonging WITHIN the culture! That literally makes no sense. How are we supposed to prove we belong by being consistently isolated?
And yet, our disconnection from the rest of nature and the myth of self-sufficiency makes us feel alone when we are anything but alone. More and more of us are feeling the despair that comes from loneliness. We are groping in the increasingly polarized virtual sphere for a sense of community, or worse, we are withering in our shelters unable to find the motivation to continue to try.
Again, the first step to repair is accepting the truth. We cannot survive alone. We have never survived alone, and we will never survive alone. Repair is mending—it’s stitching together individual threads to form something stronger and more beautiful and functional in its deliberate interconnection. Permaculturist and artist Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo) refers to all of us as “strands in the basket.” She says that your air, your food, your health, your relatives all make up other strands in your basket. Everything we do to strengthen our collective basket creates more strength for all of us.
We can actively participate in this mending. We can mend our internal relationship with the myths of bootstrapping and rugged individualism through curiously exploring where these myths persist within the garden of our psyches and continuing to weed them out, reorienting ourselves toward remembering that we do not need to try to go it alone to be virtuous and worthy of love and belonging. We can witness the threads of interconnection weaving throughout our communities (human and other-than-human) and find ways of adding more strands to that basket. And we can orient our imaginations toward how our communities will look, feel, taste, sound, and smell as we repair them to reflect our intimate cultural engagement with our interconnectedness as we come to know ourselves as thoroughly belonging within and to this world.
Invitations for practices to try:
Bond with your microbes! How might you find ways to actively acknowledge and relate with the incredible diversity of beings who live in and on you? Perhaps you could learn more about them, about their likes and dislikes. Notice how your guts feel when you eat certain foods, or when you drink a glass of water. Move your hands over your body and consider how many different beings you might be coming into contact with. Consider using the word “we” instead of “I” to refer to yourself. What changes when you reorient your perspective to remember that you are a house for so many other creatures?
Strands in the basket. Spend a few minutes outside, and notice how the creatures you encounter are interacting with each other. In what ways does each being you notice participate in the basket of your community? You are also always participating within this world. How is your being interwoven into the basket?
Lineage and place-making. Who has shaped you? Name the ancestors, beings, and teachers in your mind or draw them out like tree rings if you wish. Who has shaped the land you are on? Practice engaging your open-hearted curiosity to learn more about the history of the land you live on. What was it like before colonization? What plants and animals existed there? Were there other human cultures living there? What were they doing? Did the water move differently through the land? What changes has the land gone through so far? What changes is it experiencing now?
Soil:
Yong, Ed. I Contain Multitudes. Harper Collins, 2016.
Swentzell, Roxanne. Living Earth 2019. Video: Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, 2019.
McMullin, Tara. “Hope Beyond Rugged Individualism.” What Works.
Pike Greenwood, Annie. We Sagebrush Folks. Book published 1938. Links to PBS resources about it.
Reisner, Mark. Cadillac Desert. Viking Press, 1986.
Scott, A.O. “Wallace Stegner and the Conflicted Soul of the West.” New York Times, June 20, 2020.
Baiman, Rachel. “Self Made Man.” Song, Bandcamp Jan 24, 2023.
