04/10/2018
THOUGHTS ON TRIBE, ISOLATION, ADDICTION
For most of human history, we were tribal. We had daily human contact with a group of people who deeply valued our existence. We were our tribe. Its heartbeat was our heartbeat. We were one. We danced, ate, hunted, gathered, sang, drummed, cared for each other's children together.
As history progressed we broke up into clans, then large extended families, then large families, then small families, and now very often just a couple or often even living alone.
In recent centuries this fragmentation was partly driven by economic forces - the agents that would like to sell us more stuff are happier to be selling 20 washing machines to 20 people living alone than one to an extended family living together.
The yearning for tribe hasn't gone away, though. For many there is an inner emptiness they try to fill with one thing or another - work, food, alcohol, tv, drugs, s*x, the internet. Any of these can become an addiction - an obsessive, compulsive effort to meet basic human needs, but since they don't get fully met, more is needed.
Our deep and true tribal inner nature can get subsumed into, displaced by, projected onto political tribes, cultural tribes, often antagonistic tribes, going into a war of words or worse, just as our previous tribal existence had a shadow side when tribes fought over land and resources.
If we try to get all our needs met just by one other person in a relationship, we will find they can't all be and this usually leads to relationship conflict and breakups.
To the extent that we feel loved, connected, held, close to a number of people in our lives, our needs can be deeply met, a sense of separation or lack or loneliness can be healed, may not even arise.
Many people all over the world are realising that something deep has been lost in this fragmentation from tribe to, often, the level of more or less isolated individuals and are seeking and creating new communities to restore these connections.
These are some of the thoughts and feelings that have been fuelling my own search for - and desire to create - true community.
