I’m one of the co-founders of the intentional community currently called the Rainforest Lab. I’ve lived on these 5 acres for 5 years. Last year we began the sometimes beautiful and sometimes tense process of co-creating systems to support us in embodying a radically nonviolent consciousness and lifestyle. The constitution documenting these systems contains a set of principles each member of the community can use as a compass in decision-making.
Our constitution says this on the principle of Attunement:
Life is bigger than ourselves, and we want to see the way life flows clearly in everything we do.
•We view the community as having a soul and purpose of its own, which is cultivated from our collective purpose
•We have a commitment to ourselves and to the community to inquire into our personal calling to see if and how it resonates with the collective purpose
The consciousness and culture of how we live is the primary “product” we are offering to the world
This principle of attunement seems to be asking me to enjoy and value the inquiry into my purpose and the collective purpose. I find myself wondering, “Why am I here? Why am I alive? Why on this land? Why this community? Why are we here together?”
In a community where we hold a commitment to this type of inquiry I find that attunement is a sort of improvisational group dance taking place on many levels. Perhaps our community’s purpose is this dance. I’m in this dance when I surrender to the possibility that we will fail to fulfill, or even clarify, our individual and collective purpose, and then still try.
Having just read part of a journal I was writing when I first moved out here at the age of 22, I’m feeling tender. I’m appreciating my younger self’s inquiry into their personal calling, even though I doubt they would have named it that. Seeing how many of their dreams from that time have not come to fruition, I’m appreciating their resilience.
That appreciation expands when I think about the changes over the years in this community’s mission, vision, name, and composition of members. There’s a sense for me that we have been practicing the dance of attunement since before we consciously chose it as a principle. If we were unconsciously practicing it on these 5 acres, I wonder if we have been unconsciously practicing it as a species or a planet for a long, long time. I wonder if that’s our purpose.
