Commoning Food Sovereignty Workbook

Chapter Four: Our Relationships with Centering on Wholeness

Read about how Western culture has caused the multiple threats to survival of life on Earth. Access Chapter Three here.

Read about the different perspectives on how we might relate to food.  Access Chapter Two here.

We all have eating food in common. Food keeps us alive, growing, becoming. It brings pleasure, relationships, creativity, celebrations, sharing, remembering loved ones, and connecting with the sacred.

Yet, we take food so for granted that we do not remember its nature. We participate in a very complicated food web and depend upon other life for our own. The ways we obtain the food we need from other life we call our food system.

The direction of the current global corporate food system causes the need for the Commoning Food Sovereignty Workbook, written for people wanting to transform our food system, people who want their community to survive the great harms the global corporate food system inflicts on people, other life, and the Earth. We need a sustainable food system, one that meets the needs of the hungry, protects the right to grow food, preserves cultural diversity, and restores our wholeness with the Earth and all life. Throughout this workbook, we will highlight the deep changes needed in our Western beliefs and views for a commoned food system to emerge, a transformation already in process, which local examples will highlight.

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Commoning Food Sovereignty Workbook Overview

Viewing food as a commons rather than a commodity allows us to address the inabilities of the current food regime to provide food for those who cannot afford the market price point. A commons defines a shared management of an essential resource to ensure equitably shared access and use by the community that manages the resource.

The Commoning Food Sovereignty Workbook will deepen the community understanding of a local commons food system within the greater Ypsi-Ann Arbor community, grounded in the past and present and opening to the future.

Before acting in the world, we need to move away from behaving like privileged white educated western people. Blacks have made a great effort to explain all the ways we discriminate against them, even if we should view ourselves as their allies. Paulo Freire described what white privileged people who want to ally with the oppressed must understand. When we join liberation struggles, we generally act like colonizers. Oppression does not cease by just wishing it away. We do not stop acting like an oppressor just by acknowledging our privileges.

Freire describes what he calls the marks of an oppressor, behaviors of privileged white people wanting to free others of oppression. Looking backward, I see these marks within my social change work and in the social change work of other white privileged people.

White privileged people believe we must lead the social transformation. We believe we hold the revolutionary wisdom and vision that we must bestow upon the oppressed and fully expect them to follow our lead. As a result, we act for the oppressed rather than with them in the struggle. Unsurprisingly, we find it hard to relinquish power to others.

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Bessie the cow here, your Earth Interbeing messenger.

Well, actually, you already live within the Earth Interbeing. We have never separated from you, and you haven’t ever separated from us except in your mind. How could you be apart from the whole of Creation? You may deny the spirit, but that never meant that the spirit denies you. You just don’t feel like you belong because your beliefs in exceptionalism and denial of the sacred make you want to have power over us and to take what does not belong to you.

We see you play the Imperium game in your mind, a delusion that unfortunately has real consequences to the wellbeing of the Earth Interbeing because your behavior does harm us, as you have observed. You play the Imperium game to win but get entangled within all its rules. The Imperium masters keep changing the rules to their advantage when they see you gaining on them. Our culture has only one rule, to care for the Earth Interbeing, the one rule you do not allow yourselves to follow because that would make you an immediate loser in the Imperial game. Go figure.

You understand perhaps the importance of healing your deluded beliefs, cutting back on consumerism, dialing back your anger, and quieting your fears so that you can begin to see where you live. You live with us even though you don’t know us. We understand how you must feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Right now, you likely feel like a visitor with us, just passing through until you get back home to the Imperium. Some, however, may decide to settle down here, which we want you to do, so let me make some suggestions on how to get along with everyone.

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The I Ching teaches us what is important in life. It gives us insights into the fundamental issues of our lives and instructs us on how we can nourish the virtues necessary to connect with the spirit and to manifest its ways within our lives and in the world. You can access Louise’s I Ching hexagram essays at wayofhumanity.net.

We asked the I Ching what it wanted to share in its fourth Meat, Complicity and Thou reading. We received from the I Ching Hexagram 12 with moving line in the 4^th and 5^th places. This appears below, using Louise’s hexagram essay.

Hexagram 12 – Drawing Apart

Image: The hexagram represents a time of disintegration, marking the 7^th month in the Chinese calendar (August to September). The Book of Changes holds that the union of spirit and Earth produces life. When the season for growth has ended, autumnal decline sets in, an unstoppable withdrawal of the conditions for growth.

This seasonal change illustrates the hexagram image of the Creative and Earth Interbeing moving apart, numbing all things. In such a time within the world, confusion and disorder prevail. Those lacking a spiritual path dominate others harshly.

When selfishness and hostility increase, the ways of the spirit decline. The life-destroying forces prosper and oppress all. In this disadvantaged time, the selfish and powerful increasingly produce more dangers as they willingly harm others for self-benefit without limits, creating ever greater imbalances and marginalizing the wise. The declining human devotion to the spirit makes it difficult to discern the path toward restoring harmony and balance.

Self-cherishing and hostility disrupt the flow of life and sever our communion with the sacred and Earth Interbeing. When we value wealth, power over others, materialism, and indulgence more than the spirit, we become an object among objects and subject to external influences . We suffer and cause the suffering of others. Mistrust prevails in community life. The influence of the sage dwindles within the world.

Those who benefit from domination and exploitation of others and the Earth resist and deny the sacred. When entangled with what harms, the false dominates and the real departs. Wisdom has no influence over those whose unchecked self-cherishing and willingness to seriously harm the Earth Interbeing degrades the conditions upon which all life depends.

When the destructive forces of oppression block sages from benefiting all, they do not allow themselves to be turned from their principles. If conditions prevent them from exerting their influence within the world, sages retreat. While waiting, they further develop their spiritual being and preserve the spiritual path. By not yielding to what harms, they succeed. When the times change, the path forward reemerges.   Read more.

by louise

When I considered writing for Meat, Complicity, and Thou, I nearly rejected the idea because I feared how others would react to me proposing the spiritual path as the means to overcome the Imperium. I saw you rolling your eyes for my foolishness, pitying my deluded state. Others would surely dismiss me as a serious social change agent for I obviously have stumbled off the edge. Some might get angry with me for disrespecting their beliefs or criticizing their strategies to reform the Imperium. However, I decided to share my beliefs. While I do not expect everyone to share my worldview,  l cannot let my fear of others rejecting me keep me from doing what I need to do.

In truth, I had no option. My fear for the Earth Interbeing trivialized my fear of abandonment. To not do MCT would have only deepened my complicity in conforming to the expectations of the Imperial culture. We have no control over what arises in our experience, but we have complete responsibility for how we respond.

Fear comes in many forms, some which save our lives. However, knowing the Imperium’s  endangerment of the Earth Interbeing stands front and center of my fears. The Imperium manipulates and controls us by playing our fears like a virtuoso. We have internalized the myth of our exceptionalism and the denial of the sacred Earth Interbeing to the degree that we consider it not only normal but the truth. Each of us have our own root fears that the Imperial culture stimulates if we think about tampering with its roots. I have the primal fear of abandonment. Can you name yours?       Read more