How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community

by Mia Birdsong

In Liberty and Freedom, David Hackett Fischer explains that the word free is derived from the Indo-European friya, which means “beloved.” Friend also shares this common root with freedom. A free person was someone who was “joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.”11 Freedom was the idea that together we can ensure that we all have the things we need—love, food, shelter, safety. The way I’ve come to understand it, freedom is both an individual and collective endeavor—a multilayered process, not a static state of being. Being free is, in part, achieved through being connected.

Desmond Tutu’s explanation of the South African concept of Ubuntu. He said, “It is to say, my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours. We belong in a bundle of life. We say a person is a person through other persons. It is not I think therefore I am. It says rather: I am human because I belong, I participate, and I share.”12

The American Dream is white supremacy culture bound up with capitalism and patriarchy. In addition to espousing a belief that white people are superior to people of color, white supremacy is also a culture of rigidity, efficiency, more-is-better, ignorance-is-bliss, scarcity hoarding, binaries, and toxic individualism.

For humans, the idea that we would do labor or give up resources without direct benefit requires having faith that the universe will attend to our generosity. Our culture of winning, getting ahead, and zero-sum gains does not support this kind of mind-set. It’s more than the idea of self-sacrifice as a practice you benefit from because it makes you feel righteous or earns you points with your god. It’s also about recognizing that our collective survival depends on understanding that there is enough for all of us and we don’t need to hoard resources at the expense of others

This is a question I want to ask myself and my own community more—what conditions make us feel full and fed? Creating community is creating culture—practice, ritual, social norms. What does that creation need to look like so we are not just filled up when we are depleted but live a life that is less depleting?

We get to the future we want by practicing it now.