Harmony Horizons

My niece came into the house the other day wearing a long, flowing skirt and a T-shirt that said, “The Hippies Were Right”.  She is twenty-three and never saw one, but I laughed and assured her that we were – about quite a number of things.

For example, the nature of freedom and community.

A good community is a group of people where everyone is accepted and supported while being held responsible for his/her own life and growth.  He or she is supportive to others, lending a helping hand where it is needed without tanking another person’s struggles and growth potential away from them.  In this way everyone can grow and nobody is allowed to get away with harming others.  Not a traditional tribe, but a transformation of the tribe to a new paradigm which is somewhat cumbersome in its inclusiveness, but ever so liberating and potentially transformational for its members.  To work, it requires maturity from its members and provision for the welfare of people such as children who don’t have their full power, as well as a collective process that calls to account anyone who is stepping off a good path.

When I was twenty-three, this community was probably a physical place.  I came out of that time with a permanent bias toward multiple family households and other forms of communal living.  Now, most of us belong to multiple overlapping communities.  My family has belonged to religious communities, home school communities, work collectives of various sorts, etc.  I once convinced the women’s section of a large emergency medicine organization to adopt consensus decision-making rules.

I have also been influenced for life by the ideas about money and economic order that were/are part of the paradigm shift that came out of that time and way of thinking.  The global economy has, unfortunately, gone straight down several of the slippery slopes that were current predictions in the talk of the day!  Money was understood as another form of energy exchange as necessarily tied to value and to right living as was barter.

There are other examples, but I am going somewhere with all of this!  I have lately discovered where all of that kind of thinking has gone.  It is alive and well in the collective ethic of the business models of some groups of young entrepreneurs.  It has been synthesized, and additions and subtractions have occurred.  I am not sure the folks on the other side of the information age generation gap have self-consciously picked it up – but I think so!

You know who I am talking about.  They have grown up with computers and the internet as part of the assumed background landscape rather than a new set of skills to be mastered.  They have brought about the simultaneous decentralization of everything and a new collective consciousness.  At the exact same time that we are experiencing increasing levels of intrusiveness into every aspect of our lives and economic reordering that is alarming at best, these entrepreneurs are applying to their businesses principles about alternate economic models, the energy of money, and the nature of community and personal responsibility.  Their understanding is international.  They are serious about prosperity for all who want to make the journey. (See my link to wealthandharmony.org).

I like it!  Fascinating way to help transform the global society!  I think it is important to continue to learn and grow, and I am all about sustainable living and prosperity.  I believe I’m in!  How about you?