What if we were needed?

A love letter.

All images in this piece by Annie Bingham.

This week’s letter has emerged over several weeks. Given the length, you may find it easier to read on the website by clicking the title above. In the writing of it, I realized that this is important material for the book awaiting my attention. I would love to hear whether this piece makes sense to you. Does it stir the heart or read like an essay? If you are willing to support this gift-based work, you might consider leaving a comment or sharing this post outward.

I am beyond blessed—pressed upon, really—by the humans with whom I live in conversation.

K. Annie B.

, known around here as Annie, spreads her attention like fairy dust. She felt the urge to sprinkle this piece with illustrations. Oh, my! Also, she lent her eloquent voice to last Friday’s Sand River Community Farm Newsletter, bringing it to a new level. Take a look to see what the work looks and sounds like In Our Neighborhood. With thanks, Adam

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Sending these love letters out into the world means relinquishing control over where and how they make contact.  Occasionally, someone arrives at the Farm for one of our weekly events with some miles under their tires.  They’ve read these newsletters and would like to see if this place is the real deal.  Is the house in order, so to speak?  Usually, I wish I’d taken an extra hour to pick up and clean—such is the host’s burden.  But the mess in the corner might have the most important story to tell, and so this week’s letter will attempt to pull the curtain on the tragic gap between a heavy load of aspirations and the way things still, frustratingly, are.

 On a cool early-summer afternoon, during one of the public work days we call Farm frolics, a man in his mid-thirties joins us in the tomato patch.  It is almost supper time before I catch wind of the longings that brought him here.  He is an active student of the social forces we call money, land access and community, including a relational form known as Nonviolent Communication, or NVC¹. 

What do I need?

As far as formulas go, NVC offers a disruption to our unconsidered modes of speaking that can be illuminating for folks like me, raised in the modern West.  When negative emotions—think anger, resentment, jealousy, annoyance—whip your inner sea to whitecaps, the formula invites you to drop a line below the surface and plumb the depths for the needs that aren’t currently being met.  NVC provides a list of needs, including empathy, trust, meaning, shelter, food and so on. 

The formula goes something like this, “When I heard from Sally that you said X, I felt angry because I have a need to be trusted by people I love.”  If I had said, “I felt mistrusted,” I would have put you on the defensive by accusing you of an action you may not have known you undertook.  You didn’t cause my negative emotions, but inviting you to see them might help us learn how to cohabitate more peacefully and joyfully. 

My initial enthusiasm for the NVC model began to wane once I noticed that the folks practicing NVC had more met material needs than the world has ever known.  Nonviolent communication emerged in modern North America, after all.  A friend of mine, herself an NVC teacher, offered me a helpful reframe.  She said, “Imagine meeting your needs in the way you would a stranger, with your hand extended in greeting.”  “Meeting” suggests encounter or acquaintance as much as it does the satisfaction of desire.

Negative emotions can arise when we don’t get what we want; this will be familiar to anyone who spends time around children.  Picture two small humans with their hands on the same toy.  The adult on watch says, “We have to learn how to share.”  If becoming an adult involves learning that we get what we want most of the time, it seems mighty difficult to grow up under a growth-reliant economic order.  Endless desire makes good consumers, and good consumers keep the economy healthy.  The solution to the toy sharing dilemma for quite a while now has been to manufacture more toys.  Providing more of everything all the time becomes a strategy to keep the peace.  As a way of life, it bears the distinct fingerprint of the colonial project. 

I began to replace the term “meeting our needs” with something like “encountering the underlying fears and desires that inform and motivate our behavior.”  

From within a modern Western imagination, one root fear might be the ever-present possibility of un-belonging.  A person might simply run low on money, say the wrong thing, lose physical ability, gain weight, break out in acne, or fall into any one of an endless list of potholes to risk slipping into the position of an outsider.  Consider the emotional toll exacted by our fears of falling through the cracks–or not being invited to the next party.  Has human social life always entailed re-negotiating one’s belonging in every interaction? 

A friend of mine worked in Haiti for a while, where she met and married a Haitian man.  They moved back to the States to raise a family, as it would be more materially easeful here.  He found life here terribly lonely and fell into a deep depression.  One evening he explained to me, “I’ve never had to make friends before.”  Back in Haiti his family’s house saw a steady stream of visitors, each of whom knew his entire, unfiltered story.  Un-belonging didn’t become a fear-based motivator for him until he upgraded his material position. 

Once unmet needs have been identified, Nonviolent Communication suggests we formulate a request for the person whose behavior prompts our discontent.  Requests are meant to offer creative, non-coercive paths toward improved emotional and relational health. 

For example, “When I heard from Sally that you said X, I felt angry because I have a need to be trusted by people I love.  Would you be willing to talk with me directly next time you are concerned about my ability to remember important details?”

This is where NVC gets really interesting, even profound.  Requests are not demands.  You can tell something is actually a request if the person receiving it knows in their body that their good standing with you doesn’t hinge on them saying yes.  I use the phrase “would you be willing to?” rather than “can you?” or “do you want to?”  Willingness isn’t a test for preference, but for resistance.  In practice, I regularly remind people that no is the best answer if it is the honest one.  Ideally, a “no” begets a process of creative, shared wayfinding.  Needs may be encountered and then asked to remain unsatisfied.  

Operating a Farm where the food doesn’t generate income means making a lot of requests.  Request-making replaces paying and purchasing.  The first requests I made when I considered moving here three years ago were to the collection of nonhumans who had been getting along quite well without us for the two decades this place sat quiet.  Would you be willing to host human life again?  Gatherings, even?  I got a clear yes, but the No Trespassing sign at the end of the driveway required half a million dollars to remove.  The nonhumans who make home here never agreed to be put up for sale.  The Farm’s tagline–”This food is offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason”--that came from them.  That’s how they roll.  Practicing non-coercive, consensual relations with other humans might help us to hear a “no” again from the land.  Or at least it might help us remember to ask.  Back to that Farm Frolic dinner table conversation. 

The visitor-from-afar tells me a story about an NVC teacher whose books I read several years back.  She² differentiates between power over and power with, suggesting that healthy power isn’t a zero-sum game—as in, it doesn’t have to be taken from someone else.  This teacher has begun to experiment with deeper application of the NVC practices by allowing money to move between members of a group on the basis of needs and requests.  Each person in the group identifies three income levels: baseline, ideal, and dream level.  The group then allows money to flow, like water, to the low spot, as it might within a healthy marriage or family.

As I listen intently to this man’s story, I begin to notice something.  Finally, I interrupt him to ask for clarification.  “Is the dream income level the highest or the lowest?”  He looks at me as if I have two noses. 

By whom am I needed?

Around the time I began employing the NVC formula—observation, feeling, need, request—to my social interactions, I stumbled upon an interview with a man named Stephen Jenkinson.  Sometimes a single question can change the course of a life.  He asked, “What if we were needed more than we were needy?” 

What if having unmet needs isn’t a problem to be solved, but an ecological condition that ensures ongoing human belonging?  What if the work of growing up begins by asking how we were meant to become a shelter for others?  What if we were needed more than we were needy? 

Do I make or ask for money?

My mother loves to share my writing with her friends.  One day she called me, clearly upset.  A friend of hers had just realized that I ask people for money by posting a personal stipend request.  This person was a bit horrified by the prospect that an ivy-league educated man would reduce himself to asking people for money. 

In the society that raised me, money and power are nearly synonyms.  As the sayings go, money is the root of all evil and power corrupts.  In the face of such fatalistic social memes, consider the following, refreshing distinction from Starhawk’s book The Empowerment Manual³.  Unearned power is inherited, and usually structural.  The word privilege makes a decent substitute here.  

Earned social power, by contrast, emerges when someone takes on responsibility and sees it through in service to the whole—the neighborhood, the community or the culture.  Earned social power accumulates in the person who displays, again and again, a capacity to place the health of the collective ahead of their own fears and desires.  The person who shares their toys, so to speak, or increases the fertility of the relational field.

A person with healthy social power experiences security only to the degree that her neighbors feel grateful for her.  They feel grateful because they see the fingerprint of her generosity everywhere they look.  Those neighbors might be humans and nonhumans.  In a healthy culture elders are honored because they have given more of their lives away.  Starhawk is hinting at the possibility of something we might call servant leadership. 

I began to wonder how things would change if we stopped telling our young people to “earn a living” and began imploring them to figure out how they are needed.  We could teach them to earn trust and gratitude rather than money.  

We might begin to notice an inverse relationship between self-reliance and belonging. 

The verb we choose to describe money’s movement drastically modifies its meaning.  The same could be said for power.  “Making” and “earning” money suggest spontaneous emergence through human activity or ingenuity.  We can make money by claiming title to a piece of land, clearing the forest, selling the timber, clearing the stumps and planting a commodity crop.  In fact, the word earn has its roots in the grain field at harvest time.  We can make money by paving the field over and charging for parking.  We can make money by outfitting our fishing boat with larger, more efficient nets.

I heard radical environmental activist Derrick Jensen speak back in my early twenties.  He said, “We can have hot showers or we can have wild salmon, but we can’t have both.”  Sometimes a single question can change the course of a life.  The question:  What if he was right?

The problem with money is not that it exists, but rather that we have allowed ourselves to imagine it unlimited and thereby inconsequential.  Ecologies are relational webs of limit and consequence.  Cutting down a single tree or catching a netful of fish sets off a chain of consequences that could be described in depth by any person living in intimate relationship with a particular place.  The term indigenous is fraught, and for good reason.  For our purposes, let’s substitute “a person who locates themselves by the consequence of their life.”  If asked to identify themselves, such a person might begin with the dwindling salmon rather than the hot showers.    

To strike it rich…is something that has only become possible during the past century.  Before mass industries sprang up, it was virtually unknown for a man to alter his material circumstances by his efforts alone.  He couldn’t make money; it was granted him by a monarch or a war lord, or it came in the form of booty, or it was taken out of the earth or conquered territory….It took the Krupps [Hitler’s main munitions manufacturers] eight generations, starting in the sixteenth century, to obtain great wealth.  By comparison Rockefeller did it in about forty years.⁴

Every year, at the ivy league college I attended, the corporate recruiters paid a visit.  All interested students were granted interviews.  Those who answered the questions correctly might be offered salaried jobs starting at eighty thousand dollars.  I didn’t throw my hat in the ring.  Given the way I speak, my lack of college loans, and my appearance, there were plenty of other doors I could open.  Access to material sustenance wasn’t one of my root fears.  Let’s be honest: access in general wasn’t one of my root fears.  I may have been terribly depressed back then, but I wasn’t worried about starving or freezing to death.  If you see yourself in any of these descriptions, there might be specific ways in which people like us are needed in a time of ecological and social unraveling.  There might be specific risks waiting for us to take first. 

If we circle back to our NVC formula, the negative emotions—think secrecy, shame, envy—that gather around these money questions—who has it, how much, how did they get it and are they going to share it—should clue us in to some deeply un-met needs.  To these fears and desires, could we imagine extending a hand, in greeting?  Our painful relationship with money might amount to the stone cover on the empty tomb of our earthly belonging. 

What shall we do with our privileges?

Voluntary impoverishment has proven the least popular of the three phrases I use as substitutes for the overly-formulaic term gift economy.  I guess the other two—reckless generosity and radical hospitality—don’t sound quite as sad, or demanding.  I hear from people that the word impoverishment implies misery.  That’s simply not what I have found over the past six years of attempting to disrobe myself of the coercive power granted me by the specifics of my birth.  I have found the work to be deeply humbling and immensely joyful in turn.    

Let’s go back to that conversation at the Frolic supper table about those three levels of income.  The man sitting across the table from me carried many of the same social markers I do.  He described a scenario in which the practice of Nonviolent Communication was being applied to money.  The people in the group identified three income request levels—baseline, middle and dream—and allowed money to flow, like water, to the lowest spot. 

Without thinking, I opened my mouth and asked him whether the dream level was the highest or lowest amount in dollars.

It wasn’t until I heard his story that I became acquainted with a bone-deep longing to be cured of my dependence upon coercive, non-relational power to stay alive.  I long to know the families who plant, harvest and dry the black tea that I drink, to cook a meal for them.  To become an agent of their sustenance.  One alternative to that unlikely scenario: I could court relationships with plants who grow here, asking them to lend their vigor and vitality to my morning cup.

When I look through the $3881 I spent last year—my personal stay-alive strategy—I see a list of invitations to trade transaction for relationship.  I see a mild addiction to caffeine in the form of organic black tea.  I see a search for elders in the form of purchased books.  I see an education category that includes driving to speak at conferences about this work.  I see a cell phone that tethers me to far-flung beloveds while also enabling my reluctance to knock on neighbor’s doors.  Fittingly, most of the money I spent went toward the automobile and its ongoing invitation to placelessness. 

A couple of months ago, my used Honda Fit, given to me as a gift by my parents, became undrivable.  My neighbors, with whom I actively practice this sort of creative, non-coercive and untracked gift exchange, suggested that I share their vehicle rather than seek out another car.  Each time I make a request to use theirs, I can feel the emotional weight of it.  I can feel my atrophied worthiness muscles creaking into gear.  And I can feel my longing to ensure that they are being sustained—my gratefulness. Yes, I will buy tanks of gas and contribute financially to the maintenance of their vehicles, but more fundamentally these neighbors have increased the fertility of our relational field by offering to share their toys with me.  I will drive less in the upcoming year if I can stay faithful to the limitation of becoming a full-fledged car borrower.  I will surely stop by neighbors’ houses more often in search of companionship.  I can guarantee you it won’t be all misery.

When I look through my personal budget, I see an endless list of securities not described there.  I don’t pay for food because the nonhumans who I live alongside don’t charge money for their bodies.  I don’t pay rent because I live in a two hundred square foot cabin I built for thirty thousand dollars of bread-sales-profit back in 2018.  I don’t pay rent because a neighbor purchased this Farm for half a million dollars and handed the title to me as a gift.  I’ve since gifted the title to a non-profit organization, on whose board I serve.  I don’t know if I could ever satisfactorily defend or justify my efforts to make medicine from the privilege I’ve been granted.  Given all that’s at stake, I’m not sure defending and justifying ourselves is what’s called for.  We don’t have to be better or worse than each other to be worthy of the work ahead.  

If we keep plumbing the depths for our unmet needs, I have a hunch we will eventually find our way not to fairness or even justice, but to generosity.  Perhaps the deepest expression of our humanity is our longing to be known as generous in our relations—with nonhumans and humans, dead, alive, and not yet born.  Perhaps our humanness will emerge only by learning how we were meant to make shelter for others and then being granted a glimpse of the shelter made by our lives.  Ecologically speaking, this cultural recovery may take generations.  The societal forces into which I was born conspire against humanness, even preclude it.  

If you see yourself in any of these longings, perhaps there are specific risks waiting for us to take together.  From what I’ve seen, the work won’t be all misery.  Not at all.  It may even prove joyful. 

Thank you for your interest,

Adam

1. This book is a good place to start.

2. Explore Miki Kashtan’s work at her website.

3. The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups

4. From Money and the Soul’s Desires, a book by Stephen Jenkinson that has greatly influenced my journey.