trees older than us

by Matt Jorgensen

In the unseen realms, within each of us, there’s a place where everything that has happened, or will happen, is already known. 

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Joysong Collective 2033

The first thing you hear is the chanting. Then crying. And finally the voice of a child, or maybe it’s a grown adult, stuttering through a story that’s never been spoken aloud. The storyteller’s body is contorted with the sheer vulnerability of the moment, seemingly held together by the steadfast faces forming a circle around the candle-lit room. 

Joysong Collective 2023

Before a single desk or office chair, we potted bonsai trees and redwoods in the sunny atrium of the new space. We knew our rooted friends would grow with us, anchor us in their slower tones, and, importantly, beckon us towards life beyond any one of us. We partnered with Milky Way Radio to place electrodes on their leaves, creating a ‘singing forest’ of ambient music from their pulsing biochemical rhythms. And we knelt in humble gratitude to be in co-creation with the living earth. 

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[2033] The droughts are bad again this year, and fire regularly spots the laguna on the east side of town. They say cheap desalination (thanks to nuclear fusion) has ‘solved our water problem,’ but, as we watch thousands of birds circle the orange sky, we know that this is no time for the trance of techno-optimism. 

So every week, we tell water stories. We sing water songs. The elders, of first peoples and new peoples alike, join hands and lead us in prayer for the land and her healing. We dance, read poetry, and share visions– we call it a Church of Everyday Aliveness.

Our Center has become a pulsing, energetic hub– for remembering our deepest truths, mundane and earth-shattering alike– right on Main Street, between a Rite-Aid and a cookie shop. A beacon not just of how to ‘drop out,’ but of how the longings of our hearts and spirits might meet the messy, material reality of being a human in this time of endings and renewal.  

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[2023] We began with just three agreements: 

• To trust our felt sense of alignment and aliveness, 

• To take whatever arises as the path, and 

• To know that (seen or unseen) we are not alone. 

Two of our first inquiry cohorts chose to explore ‘right livelihood,’ but from two very different perspectives:

The healers collective included somatic practitioners, shamans, herbalists, kundalini yogis, psychedelic elders, body-workers, ayurvedic nutritionists, and even a couple of clinical psychotherapists. To a person, these healers felt the tension between the purest expression of their healing work and what ‘the market’ would validate or pay them for. At the center of their year-long community inquiry practice was ‘how do I sustainably care for myself on the material plane, while offering my deepest gifts to the world.’  

The entrepreneur collective included bioengineers, community-wealth activists, web3 founders, clean energy technologists, a ‘foodie of the future’ growing meat in jars, psychedelic therapy company leaders, and a product accessibility manager from Wikipedia. To a person, the entrepreneurs felt that the urgent work they were doing to ‘save the world’ meant that they had no time to attend to their own burnout, their quiet longings, their fears and night sweats. The inquiry at the center of their ‘Decelerator Bootcamp’ was “how do I come more fully alive and aligned within myself, so that my enterprise can truly serve all life.”  

In both cases, the inquiries began with time spent in solitude. We knew that we needed to be with ourselves first, slowing down enough for some of the grief, joy, and revelation to start bubbling up. Participants chose the modality or tradition they knew, or felt called to– some chose to fast out on the land, others went into silent meditation retreat or plant medicine circle.  

And then they returned to the warm embrace of a Joysong Council to be witnessed in their rawness and encouraged in beginning the real work of integration. 

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[2033]Every week, dozens of Joysong circles meet in the ‘beehive’ chambers of the Center. Plant-filled hexagonal rooms of various sizes, with zafus and tea-tables for embodied meetings and hologram projectors for virtual convening. Each circle of 6-12 people comes together by way of a potent strand of their life’s inquiry: how to work as an artist or healer or lawyer, how to consciously grow an enterprise, how to parent or die or support a family. 

Even ten years ago, we wrote our first ‘official’ business plan for the Center’s commercial lease application using chatGPT. So we knew that our inquiries into ‘right livelihood’ wouldn’t have much to do with the basic mechanics of ‘how to make money,’ just as our inquiries into ‘good parenting’ wouldn’t have much to do with the basic nutrition guidelines of how to feed a baby. 

Now, most of us have a fully personalized AI companion. So we can ask, and immediately get an answer to: “given my medical and family history, what should I eat for the months leading up to giving birth” or “what’s a good marketing plan for my somatic therapy business, or the book that I’m writing.”  

Facts and figures mostly matter in terms of how they come alive (or don’t) within each of us. 

What we practice, in our circles and sub-collectives, is basically “how do I decide which option, fact, approach, is true for me right now?” This qualitative, subjective practice is at-once imminently practical and deeply spiritual. And, damn, does it benefit from community. 

For some people, the real answer to “what’s a good marketing plan?” is “you’ve been hating this business since you inherited it 30 years ago and you need to face the terror of shutting it down.” For others, it is “have your AI design and deliver blah blah blah customer outreach campaign.” 

So we work and support each other on all levels. The backbone of the Joysong Collective is a loose network of integrative practitioners helping our spirits interface with the material plane. Lawyers who hold medicine circles, financiers who support dream work, coaches and consultants and teachers and healers bridging the old paradigm with the new/ancient ones. 

Our community-directed Endowment has grown into a substantial resource, not a pile of cash, but a living, breathing flow of energy and reciprocity. We have purchased the Center’s building, adjacent parking lot, and a derelict lot on the square into a perpetual stewardship trust. We’ve built new community gardens, spaces for our overflowing farmers markets and an outdoor amphitheater for free outdoor concerts and events. Our Endowment also supports speaker series and podcasts, donation-based healing programs, sabbaticals for life transitions and basic incomes for those serving the community with healing, joy, and beauty. 

Many new businesses, guilds and projects that have formed here over the past decade give a portion of their annual resource flow to the endowment, so our capacity continues to grow. 

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[2023] On one level, we knew where this was all headed. On another, we had no idea. 

So we simply let ourselves trust the beauty of our visions and the power of our intentions. And we put one foot in front of the other.