The World Needs Billions of Villages

I want to say something plainly: one of the main purposes of establishing Soul Cultivation Now is to find a way to create strong Village Elders — and to inspire a movement for village-type community in local neighborhoods and local communities everywhere.

The world needs billions of villages.

Not metaphorical villages. Real ones. Human-scaled communities of 40 to 400 people — small enough to know each other, large enough to hold the full range of life. Birth and death. Grief and celebration. The young and the old. The neophyte arriving at the threshold and the elder who has crossed it many times before.

I know this is possible because I have lived it. In the 1980s, with four extraordinary women — Lisa Bregger, Jeanne Wetzal, Joanne Witte, and Sue Anderson — I co-created The Abalone Village in Ukiah, California. We gathered on the solstices and equinoxes. We held potluck work parties and weekend gatherings. We developed practices and shared ceremonies and wove seven years of real community together. When I moved north to Eureka, the impulse followed — a second village grew there.

The villages worked because they were small enough to be real and intentional enough to hold a center. That center was practice — ritual, ceremony, shared work, the turning of the seasonal wheel.

What is missing from modern life is not information. We have more information than any generation in history and we are more lost, more isolated, more depressed, more anxious than perhaps any people have ever been. What is missing is belonging. Witnessing. The experience of being known — really known — by a community that has seen you over time, across seasons, in your grief and your joy.

This cannot be delivered by a screen. It must be lived, in place, with people you can look in the eye.

Soul Cultivation Now is not trying to replace that. It is trying to inspire it — to give people the tools, the language, the practices, and the courage to begin forming villages wherever they are. A neighborhood. A faith community. A circle of parents. A group of elders who still have something to give. A few young people who feel the longing for initiation that no institution is offering them.

Forty to four hundred people. A seasonal calendar. A few committed elders. An openness to the sacred in ordinary life.

That is a village. That is what the world is starving for. And it is more possible than you think.

If you feel this call — if something in you recognizes what I am describing — I want to hear from you. Not to organize you into a program, but to think together about how this might take root where you are.

The Abalone Village taught me that when a few people say yes with their whole heart, a village becomes possible. The rest follows.