Dispatch from Necessity
On necessity, belonging, and the shape of a mahasangha
Re-Weaving Amid Collapse: a WTR and Hospicing Modernity Offering
Next Session: Tuesday April 7, 1-2 pm EST | 10 am PST | 12 pm GMT - pay what feels good in your bones
More information about this series, here. Register to receive link, here.
A note: the ground under my feet is shifting, in beautiful ways. I am returning to the guard, to hold the harm — for water and our beautiful planet. This rhythm’d gathering will shift likely to a monthly offering. More to be shared soon.
🐉 🌊 🐉 🌊
天地玄黄
宇宙洪荒
Heaven and Earth are dark and yellow;
The Universe is vast and wild.
🐉 🌊 🐉 🌊
Life moves in curious ways. And if we allow it, wild ways.
Last week, I was invited by Keepers of the Water and Mikisew Cree First Nations to travel west to Edmonton, Alberta. In front of a room that was 90% Indigenous, of elders and chiefs from Nations, so close to the site of the tar sand wound, on so-called Canadian lands…I spoke my own savage tongue, and invited a centering for, with, and by, water.
Two days of testimony from Chiefs, elders, and community members from Cree, Dene, Inuvialuit and Métis. Of fish dying. Of water that runs green and brown from taps. From scientists, doctors…and me? Finding song in harmony with a Dene woman, patting out a heartbeat with 200 sets of hands: “grandmother, walk with me.”
Some of us are aware that something invisible, a pair of hands perhaps, between worlds, pulls the strings of our manequinn’d bodies. Telling us where to pray, where to gorge to excess, where to spill blood.
I have been wondering whether it is the hands of Necessity.
Necessity moves despite our desires and vision boards — and shifts conditions to shake up our habit patterns.
I have been asking, over and over: what is necessity calling for?
I’ve been asking this question in all the hallways and classrooms of my life. In small groups, in large groups, to the wind. And while an answer is never complete, one has really crystallized. It’s not even that surprising.
Necessity is calling for a reimagining of community.
It’s a sort of community we are still sensing through — for the communities we’ve built, hold the architecture of silence, allowing gurus and billionaires to hold Truth’s tongue until Necessity forces a gargantuan crack.
We are finding this new community, in fugitive moments that stretch into deep time, across species, and thresholds between the living and the dead.
I’ve been reflecting on access to community. In this capitalistic society, access to community — it often costs money. Not that money is inherently the problem, but it sure is a gatekeeper.
And…
Even when we do pay…
Who, or what parts of us, get left out of community,
and what happens in that semi-exile?
In the dark, how twisted we can become. And then shocked, when our internal fragmentation grows despite our ignoring — until it’s made manifest in a fit of rage, and something ugly spills out of our mouths to be seen. Like a crack in the universe of the too-good human.
What if the darkness needed to continue crystallizing until it had to be faced? A trouble, that inevitably took the shape of a monster, so that another force could be the hero. This story, repeated so quickly into a cancer, until someone finally saw the pattern…and asked: wait, what are we doing?
And so…in these times of ecocide, femicide, genocide - the many many sides and cides that we can make no potable cider from,
What kind of community would support what we need for these times?
Some prominent thinkers have started gesturing — not towards qualities missing in chosen pretend democratic leaders. They gesture towards the Earth, hands turned up to the heavens.
They point towards Minnesota, a faceless hive of people all working in their roles, inspiring one another1. Holding one another accountable too.
The next Buddha will not be a saviour. It will be a sangha2. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
But for many, spiritual practice and even sangha, has turned inwards towards the project of the individual3. In every group we walk into, there’s an unspoken prerequisite: a set of behaviours and conditions required before you may belong.
It’s interesting that mindfulness practice involves so much silence — and when we do speak, there are guidelines4. There is wisdom in the grounding and setting a container — but underneath that, are we afraid of what our sangha siblings might say?
And if they say something too harsh, are they cast out?
What happens when our containers, our sanghas, have an untold rule that not all of us is welcome? What gets left out, and where does it go?
When they reinforce silence in the face of abuse, and re-inforce territories owned by hungry ghosts…does a deity feast on these unintegrated parts?
Perhaps our sanghas are too small and lopsided to contain the totality well.
A recent experience sticks out like a thorn: a new potential sangha member, infuriated that we would dare bring a land acknowledgement, some floppy politicized empty statement, into spiritual practice.
Leave your woke toxicity outside of practice. This is a neutral land.
But I’m afraid “neutral” no longer exists in an increasingly polarized terrain.
So out we go, to find another sangha, only to find new rules and regulations, to have access to something that is so fundamentally human: to belong.
Those people over there suffering?
That is not our role, to choose sides5.
I resist this. No, I defy this. I want to crack this open so wide, so we can hold more suffering: what does it mean to build a mahasangha?
Perhaps the best we can do is to hold lovingly firm against abuse, offer harm water, and leave the door open to fellowship.
A container or community cannot be everything to everyone, but I have a sense we can find a deeper stretch too.
What would it mean to build a community that is not two sides of a coin, but a sphere? A heart — the shape of the world?
What will it take to un-flatten reality?
And so, what do we orient towards in our gatherings? Necessity can take many faces.
And there is a beauty in shared practice: we can arrive at practice with vastly different intentions and motivations — but still be in living practice with one another, lending our bodies and ears and hearts to a wider field of consciousness that witnesses, with-nesses6, the trouble it means to be human, alive, and pulsating in these times.
What I’m interested in, is how we grow more inclusive, and accountable, while naming that this holds real risk. Inclusivity is not just a warm hug - it also has teeth, and as my partner knows, sometimes can come in the shape of a cactus.
How do we expand our ecology to include the desert, the cactus, the frozen, the hurricane,
without risking total annihilation?
When is it the right time to let go of the safety of the shore,
to again take to the oceans not for any guarantee,
but out of necessity?
What if the collapse is actually wise?
What would it mean to cooperate with what’s collapsing in us, and rise tenderly together in love?
Times are changing. Containers are shifting. Out of necessity, they — we need to. Necessity simplifies things so that wide open fields of choice narrow to fewer viable options.
Could clarity follow this deity of Necessity?
The questions when we choose to arrive, can be simple:
What is trembling in you that feels outcast, impossible to say in community?
Where are you tender and feeling alone?
What is quietly whispering in your blood that belongs to community?
and finally, my favourite…
Who and to what and where do we need to pray, and dance, and sing?
These questions are not for me or any individual to answer. They are answers for us to answer with the way we live out our lives, relationally, through a mahasangha that answers the poly-prophecies of the ancients.
A polycrisis, answered by
an embodied answer
to a poly-prophecy,
perhaps a mahasangha.
🪷🪷🪷
Hope to see you soon.
🐜 Yours in the compost,
張家敏 (Jessica)
Here I am referencing V, who recently sat alongside Bayo Akomolafe, Tara Brach, Pat McCabe, Gabor Maté, and Matthew Remski, in their shared talk on “The Architecture of Silence,” a collective multi-perspective response to the shock as it relates to Deepak Chopra and the Epstein files.
This Substack post by Liz Bucar citing Rebecca Solnit also points towards this. She in turn, is quoting Thich Nhat Hanh.
Here, I am grateful for Matthew Remski’s insight that spiritual practice blossomed in a time when western progressives were deeply exhausted by the many fights they were losing. “We can’t win this out here — perhaps I can do the work, inside.”
Here I am referencing the practice of dharma share as it is practiced in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh and Plum Village. My partner and I co-facilitate a sangha here in Guelph following this lineage.
Here I reference the silence that has come about since the rhythm of many revelations that have broken our hearts: Chogyal Trungpa, Palestine/Israel, Deepak Chopra — and the many spiritual leaders who have refused to name painful ugly truths out of fear of making people uncomfortable, and losing their followers and community. If we fear losing our community, is it true community?
I picked up this term from Yoruba trickster, Bayo Akomolafe.