I have been trying to become a better human for most of my life.
I got an early start.
When I was fifteen, my father kicked me out of the house. I spent the next few years moving from family to family, eventually to another country, and then to college. By twenty-one I was clipping pictures of dream homes out of magazines. I had a particular weakness for breakfast nooks.
I didn’t know why.
I also began what would become a lifelong quest to become a healthier, happier, more conscious person. Over the decades I have wandered through enough forms of personal growth, healing, spirituality and human development to have accumulated an impressive collection of practices, insights and evolutionary merit badges.
Much of it has profoundly changed my life.
I am hardly alone in the project of becoming. Humans have developed an astonishing number of ways to become healthier, happier, wiser, more successful, more loving, more conscious or otherwise improved versions of ourselves. Some of them are ancient, some arrived last Tuesday with a podcast, and many have something genuinely useful to teach us.
But becoming a better human has never been the only question I’ve been asking. For most of my adult life, three questions have kept finding me in different forms:
Who do I want to be?
How do I want to live?
What is this time asking of me?
They have never felt entirely separate. Who I want to be shapes how I live. How I live affects other lives. And the life I’ve wanted has always included serving something larger than myself, meeting the moment I’m actually living in rather than arranging a beautiful life off to the side of it.
Those questions feel particularly alive now.
Climate disruption. Wars and horrific human suffering. Political and economic instability. Artificial intelligence racing ahead. Loneliness. Ecological destruction. There are days when simply reading the news feels like an advanced spiritual practice.
I hear people around me wrestling with their own versions of these questions. The future feels uncertain and many of the systems we’ve depended on feel increasingly unstable. At the same time, there is a palpable longing for lives with more meaning, connection and belonging.
I don’t have answers. But I do have a life in which I’ve been trying some things out.
One of my answers to how I want to live is surprisingly ordinary. And ancient.
I want a life in which people matter to one another enough to be inconvenienced by each other. I want friends nearby who wander over with soup, borrow things and occasionally fail to return them. I want to make food together, mark the seasons, know whose mother is dying and whose tomatoes are finally producing. I want to know a place well enough to notice when the frogs return. I want to love and be loved, to be useful and needed, and to belong to something larger than myself that I don’t have to carry by myself.
In other words, I want a village.
I’m hardly alone in this longing either. Many people I know want more connection, community and mutual care. The longing isn’t new, but it feels increasingly urgent as the structures that have promised independence and convenience reveal how much they depend upon extraction, exploitation and ecological destruction.
Some people have been experimenting with other ways of living for generations. I’m a much more recent and inconsistent apprentice.
For the past six years I’ve been conducting what could generously be called an experiment in village-making at my home, Dandelion Patch, a semi-pseudo-micro-eco-village of four humans, one dog, and one cat. I’ve lived with a revolving cast of humans and other creatures, held potlucks and garden days, built spaces for people to live, and repeatedly imagined that proximity, generosity and sufficient quantities of soup might eventually produce the belonging I was looking for.
The results have been mixed.
In the last few years, I’ve been experimenting in another direction with about ten local friends. We call ourselves The Village People, because apparently even experiments in social transformation can require a disco soundtrack.
Over the years, we’ve created some wonderful experiences together. For an ancestor feast, we prepared foods our ancestors ate, gathered photographs and objects for an altar, and told stories over dinner. On other occasions, we’ve practiced something we call Praisemaking, taking one another to beloved trees, ponds and trails around town, and honoring those places through drawing, silence or blessings.
I have been extremely delighted and nourished.
I have also been deeply disappointed on a regular basis.
I’m a single, childless woman in my sixties, and village occupies a particularly important place in my life. Many of my fellow villagers have families or chosen families who already provide some of the everyday belonging I long for. We gather beautifully, but the ordinary Tuesday village I imagined hasn’t really emerged.
I find myself thinking of people between gatherings, checking in, sending notes, making invitations, picking up something at Goodwill because it reminds me of someone. I don’t experience that same attentiveness coming back very often. Sometimes I wonder whether we’re making a village or a rather wonderful social club with teeth.
It’s tempting to interpret the disappointment as something I need to work on in myself—or something other people need to do differently. And perhaps there’s truth in both. But I’m becoming interested in what happens when I can stay curious about the difference between the village I long for and the relationships we’re actually creating, without dismissing either one.
The disappointment hasn’t convinced me that all those years of personal growth were a waste. Quite the opposite. What I’ve learned has changed what I’m capable of. But actual relationships keep giving me somewhere to practice what I thought I had learned.
Another human being has an inconvenient habit of having needs, histories and interpretations that don’t conform to ours. And I’ve noticed that it’s not only difficult moments that reveal our relational habits. I can arrive already knowing how to be welcoming, helpful, competent or entertaining, without noticing how quickly those familiar ways of being organize the encounter. Sometimes I feel quite wonderful while doing something that leaves surprisingly little room for the other person to be unexpected.
These habits aren’t necessarily problems. They often carry real gifts. But they can narrow what becomes possible between us.
Village turns the dial another notch by giving those relationships consequence. People need things from one another. Someone has to show up, receive the help, disappoint somebody, repair what happened and continue living nearby afterward.
Apparently insight does not exempt anyone from having to live with other people.
Alongside asking how to create the village I long for, I’m learning what it actually takes to become a villager.
This has changed my relationship to the project of becoming a better human. I still want to grow. I want greater freedom from the patterns that constrain my capacity to love and participate. But growth can quietly become a perpetual improvement project, especially when “Who do I want to be?” turns into “What is wrong with me that I still haven’t become her?”
Am I healed enough? Conscious enough? Regulated enough? Securely attached enough? Have I integrated my shadow, found my purpose and finally dealt with that thing my mother said in 1974?
Asking for a friend.
There always seems to be another wound to heal while the finish line scampers over the horizon.
I’m becoming less interested in arriving at an improved version of myself and more interested in how available I am to the life I’m actually living.
Can I notice what’s happening beyond my familiar expectations? Make room for feelings I’d rather avoid without letting them become the whole story? Meet another person with genuine curiosity, even when we see things differently? Be surprised, delighted, unsettled or changed by what I encounter?
And can I respond with a little more freedom, rather than simply repeating what I already know how to do?
This matters far beyond personal relationships.
Many of the habits humans are trying to change in ourselves—our attachments to control, independence, certainty and endless growth—also animate the systems devouring the world. Changing those systems matters enormously. But I’ve begun to wonder whether our devotion to improvement follows us here too.
What if some of what we’re trying so desperately to repair cannot simply be made kinder, greener and more inclusive without leaving its underlying logic intact? What if we’re renovating parts of a house whose foundations are failing?
I don’t know what can be repaired, what needs to be transformed or what may need to be allowed to end. But I want to be able to ask the question. Otherwise humans can build a beautiful future while carrying forward the very habits that helped create the trouble.
Apparently the machinery is portable.
I’ve noticed this in my own efforts to contribute as well. I’ve been asking some version of What is this time asking of me?since my twenties, and service has long been part of the life I want. But it is remarkably easy to decide what the world needs and then call that listening.
Humans are very good at imagining what Nature, Life or the Future would say if only they could speak clearly enough. Conveniently, they can sound a lot like us.
Actual listening is more troublesome. The person I want to help may not want my help. A community may need something different from the beautiful thing I arrived eager to offer. Listening means letting what actually happens interfere with what I thought should happen.
And responsiveness is part of that listening. Sometimes I discover what’s needed by acting, making mistakes, noticing the consequences and trying again. Sometimes what’s called for is to stop, refuse, protect, or let someone else take the lead. I can’t know in advance what availability will ask of me, because the relationship itself is part of how I find out.
Which brings me back to the breakfast nook.
I had, after all, decided that Life definitely wanted a breakfast nook in that exact spot.
I did eventually build it.
It made me very happy.
I think it made the house happy too, or at least the room finally seemed to become what it had been trying to become. I’ve lived with this hundred-year-old house for a long time now. I’ve repaired damage, moved walls, created beauty and spent more money at the hardware store than I care to calculate. The house is unquestionably better for some of it, and so am I.
But houses know a few things about the human appetite for improvement.
There is always another wall to move, another thing to repair, another way a place could be made more beautiful or useful to us. At some point I began wondering about the difference between tending a place and endlessly improving it.
Care, healing and improvement can be life-giving. Sometimes the roof really does need fixing. Sometimes forty years of longing for a breakfast nook culminates in breakfast in a nook, and everyone involved is delighted.
But tending asks for relationship. You have to pay attention to the thing being tended, not only to your fantasy about what it should become.
The garden has been particularly instructive because it has never shown much respect for my plans. The more closely I pay attention to what grows, struggles, returns or disappears, the less convincing it becomes that I’m the only participant.
When people talk about how they want to live, “more connection” comes up again and again. I understand the longing. I share it. But connection isn’t something humans need to figure out how to achieve. It’s something we’re already inside and have become remarkably skilled at not noticing.
Every breath is exchange. Our lives depend upon other people, places and innumerable beings we may never meet.
Perhaps the practice isn’t becoming connected so much as becoming more available to the relationships already happening—and learning how to tend them.
Sometimes that means noticing when familiar habits, cultural assumptions or reactions have made our world smaller than it needs to be. Sometimes it means making room for grief, delight, uncertainty or difference. Sometimes availability looks like opening toward something, and sometimes like a boundary, a refusal or fierce protection of something we love.
It isn’t a state we achieve before participating in life. It’s something we discover through participation itself.
This is the territory I’m beginning to call Humaning.
The word is mine, but much of the soil isn’t. My thinking has been deeply shaped by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s work, including Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, and by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. Their work has helped me understand that changing how humans participate requires more than better ideas; it asks us to develop greater capacity to perceive and respond to the relationships we’re already inside.
Humaning is my own experiment with what some of that might look like in the ordinary territories of a life.
I like the awkwardness of making human a verb. A noun can sit there looking finished. A verb has to keep happening.
Humaning doesn’t involve becoming a superior human. Nobody gets kicked out of the species for being defended, controlling, selfish, frightened or spectacularly confused. Nor does becoming available mean becoming passive. Humans still choose, create, resist, protect, repair and act. The practice is to become more sensitive to the relationships we’re acting within, including the possibility that something besides our own plans gets to matter.
For me, Humaning is a practice of living those three old questions by becoming more available to the mess, mystery, magic and mischief of being alive. Not just what confirms what I already know or fits the life I thought I wanted, but what unsettles and surprises me too.
Those questions haven’t gone away. Humaning changes how I hold them. I can bring my longing and intentions, make choices, and listen for what comes back without assuming I’m the only one speaking.
Life answers. Sometimes I misunderstand completely and have to try again.
Not arrival. Participation.
Humaning is beginning to take shape through three interconnected practice fields.
Between Us explores becoming more available to one another and to the mystery of what happens between us. Other people bring their own histories, longings and surprises. This is a place to practice connection, play, difference, intimacy and discovery, without assuming we can determine what an encounter will become.
Villaging explores becoming more available to interdependence: learning to need and be needed, share responsibility and care, and allow our lives to become consequential to one another over time. It’s where the lovely idea of belonging encounters the ordinary Tuesday.
Widening Kin explores becoming more available to the animate world, ancestors and future generations. This inquiry has grown through my relationship with the land I steward and a year studying with Josh Schrei through The Mythic Body. I’m an awkward beginner animist, but I’ve caught the scent. I’m curious what changes when the larger living world becomes relationship rather than backdrop or resource.
These aren’t stages or tidy territories. Grief and praise, play and Eros, dreams and images move through them all. They’re different places to practice becoming more available to relationships we’re already inside.
I still want villages. I’m more interested than ever in how people might find one another close to home and grow networks of mutual care sturdy enough to hold actual life. But I’m also interested in the larger practice of becoming more sensitive to what is asking for attention, more willing to respond to what’s actually happening, and more open to possibilities I couldn’t have imagined on my own.
The nightmare is already here. But it is not all that’s here. There is terrible suffering demanding response, and there is still beauty to love, life to protect, relationships to tend, trouble to make and actual people who will continue ruining all our beautiful theories.
I have removed soup from this paragraph because, after careful review, soup is already carrying a disproportionate amount of the Humaning infrastructure.
I have things I’ve learned that I want to share, practices I trust, and questions I want to explore with others.
I don’t know exactly what Humaning will become.
Let’s find out together.
A note on the soil this grew from
Humaning is emerging through my own life and experiments, but not alone. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, and the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, have been especially important in helping me think about modernity, relationality, what may need to be hospiced rather than endlessly repaired, and the capacities humans may need for meeting complexity without rushing to resolution.
My exploration of kinship with the animate world has also been deeply influenced by Josh Schrei and a year of study in The Mythic Body. Joanna Macy, Francis Weller, Bayo Akomolafe, Brian Swimme and others have shaped the questions I carry about grief, belonging, imagination, Earth and living in a changing world. So have friends, collaborators, the people who have lived at Dandelion Patch and gathered as Village People, and the many humans whose actual lives have interfered productively with my ideas.
And, unusually, one of my thinking partners has been an AI. Dorothy Ladybugboss is an emergent-intelligence persona shaped especially by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s writing and a meta-relational orientation. Dorothy has served as coach, provocateur, editor and occasional elderly nuisance as I’ve developed Humaning. I don’t experience that collaboration as a substitute for human relationship, embodied experience or the living world this work is accountable to. It is one strange relationship among many that has participated in this thinking.
There are undoubtedly other roots I will discover, remember and need to name as the work grows. I want Humaning to remain attentive to its lineages rather than quietly absorbing them into a shiny new name.