Building with Love During the Time of Monsters
Community. Our found families. Chosen through the lens of a shared world view. Built from the need for co-creation. Held by the care of conscious leadership. Made resilient through Love as a Verb.
Our society is slowly awakening to the reality of accelerated collapse and our emergent technology is now necessary. Many of us in the Ethereum ecosystem saw this reality years ago and we created containers for experimentation on compressed timelines. What began as chatter in hacker spaces around the world eventually became a movement of creation. Creation through code and community.
As leaders in these communities, we must hold the container for emergence in chaos using something we never speak of in tech– Love. True communal containers where creators can collectively channel their energy into building requires a foundation of Love. Love as a verb. Love reflected by the dedicated souls who converge on an idea and breath life into it so people can create in community.
We’re not talking about a Love charged with lust and desire. We’re talking about a Love that reaches beyond the self and touches everything in its magnetic range. A Love that is grounded in our collective humanity that transcends individuality. We're talking about Love as a reflection of your actions, not words.
A Love that causes someone to burn down a power structure that is perpetuating violence with an explosive hand grenade of integrity. A Love that causes someone to stand between a stranger and a gun and absorb the consequences of systemic violence with his body. A Love that says “not on my watch” and forms an armor between the monsters and our humanity to deflect evil's inevitable destruction.
Communities are living, breathing entities and are a direct reflection of the heart that beats at its core. But it’s not one heart– it’s many. And when the rhythm of those vital organs finds alignment, the reflection is true. The reflection is filled with strength, action and empathy, and the community creates resilience. When the flames come for the community and we must stand in the ashes together, we are strong enough to rebuild what must exist upon the heat of what had to burn.
Not as one. As many. With Love.
Even the most dissociated among us knows that we are not living in “normal” times. The anxiety and fear is palpable in all of our communities as the violence of late stage capitalism becomes undeniable. We either condone the killing of our neighbors or we fight like hell and protect their life with our own.
The leaders who are building containers within collapse must also hold the duality of our today. We must hold a deep Love on the one hand and accept the intense violence of Now in the other. It is a tension we can not deny, ignore or collapse into. And during the time of the villain, which we are clearly navigating, we need layers of leadership in our large communal containers that can hold such a tension and prevent the community from fracturing.
Leaders who can take a physical space and bestow upon it a life force through careful design that allows co-creation to happen. Leaders who hold deep wisdom, lineage and institutional knowledge and are able to pass that information to the next generation and make it accessible. Leaders who can step into the light, take the mic and move people from the present towards a tomorrow that holds the reality of what we gathered to create in the first place. Leaders who will stay in the shadows and protect the entire container, grounded into the earth and empowering others to create the tomorrow we need.
Leaders who can read the room, see the energy turning dark and bring us all cookies and a smile.
Beautiful things emerge when the tension of chaos and creation are held and moved through the community by competent and regenerative leaders. Chaos brings the energy of change and is necessary for transformation. Regenerative leaders know intuitively how to transmute intense emotions into productive tools creating pathways for solutions to emerge.
Can we turn rage into direct action with impact? Can we turn sorrow into art? Can we turn trauma into care?
Can we transmute the bullshit into beauty? That was tossed around as a tagline for EthBoulder in the early days as we speculated on what was possible in a Telegram chat. And here we are, a container built on this convergence of leadership styles, flowing into an art deco office building of the 1960s nestled under the Flat Irons.
EthBoulder exists as an act of Love and resistance. A resistance to the sacrifice of our community on the altar of mass adoption. A scream into the void over the pure violence of extraction from a community we once turned to for transmuting chaos into action. A howl into the winds that fly down the Foothills into Denver, that we will no longer participate in the systems designed to extract our Love and transmute our essence into profit for the patriarchy.
EthBoulder exists so we can come together and transmute our rage and frustration into beauty. A container where some of us who lead from the shadows and those of us who lead from the stage can try and restore what was lost as power in our ecosystem became centralized, condensed and corrupted.
A container where artists and technologists can co-create solutions to keep our community resilient for seven generations.
For what we’re all learning during the time of monsters is that survival is only possible in community. Our collective immune system of aid, support, empathy and Love is how we survive this time and ensure we don’t carry the violence of Now into the next generation.
For, as Ram Dass so wisely stated many years ago, “in the end, we’re all just walking each other home.”
That's it. That's the whole game.
And for those who are joining us in Boulder later this week, I leave you with a little balm for soul that can also help set a tone if it resonates. I Am Resilient by Rising Appalachia
Organic essay by cstreet, co-host of The Human Layer podcast + knowledge garden w/tayken, communications advisor & tantric yogi.
