How to be a villager. (ramble #26)

Okay, so the last couple days, I thought I was writing this as a Groundswell. I had it all ready to go, and as I was proofreading, it occurred to me that this piece does not have the markings of a GARMI Groundswell but rather those of a GARMI Ramble. So here it is: my accidental Ramble: “How to be a villager. (ramble #26).”

For those that are new here, Rambles have always been the core of GARMI. Here’s a bit about them and how they’re different from the column I added last year called “The GARMI Groundswell,” which is usually what you’d be getting on a Wednesday like today were it not for my otherwise-inspired cerebrum.

• The weekly Wednesday Groundswell: solutions-focused commentary on current events that’s honest about the crises we’re experiencing, while also showcasing the ways in which more and more everyday people are rising up together.

• Monthly Rambles: in-depth essays exploring the ways in which our personal, political, and planetary healing are one and the same, and our thriving futures are deeply and deliciously intertwined.

If you were looking forward to some news commentary today — I know so much is going on in the world — don’t be too disappointed. While today isn’t a Groundswell, it’s a big picture idea that applies to current events. We’re about to dig into a topic feels like a North Star on how to navigate intensifying geopolitics and domestic crackdowns — drawing from a key way that people have always cared for each other and risen up together, both in the quotidian and in crisis.

Today, I want to talk about a skill that I think is going to save us all: the practice of being a villager. A friend resurfaced the term “villager” for me a few months ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it. So much so that today, I have decided to force these thoughts (lovingly) upon you, my dearest nerds!

I’ll never forget how, years ago as I traveled back to LA, I got a text from my roommate offering to pick me up from the airport. I was new to LA then, but I clocked it as a big deal: someone — someone who is not my parent or my sibling or my partner — would brave traffic — LAX traffic, no less — for me? My first instinct was shock, confusion: Wait what? Really? Why would you do that? Then: What a delight. Not an Uber. Not a Lyft. A person — someone who knows me — just saying, “I’ll get you.”

I think a lot of us actually know this feeling of everyday care. We crave it. We’re good at it when we have the space for it. The problem isn’t that we’ve forgotten how to show up for each other — it’s that the demands of surviving in this economy make it so hard to actually do so. The rising cost of living, the overwork, the subscription services that have commodified what communities used to just... do for each other. All so we can work more? So we can consume more content and more products? So we can pay the rising bills that cover our diminishing basic needs and afford the apps that replace the neighbors?

We know how to be villagers. We’re just being squeezed out of the time and space to practice that knowledge.

And I think we’re hungry — so freakin’ hungry — for that time and space. For the reclamation of this mindset. For its normalization. For a reminder that villagerism (I made that up, don’t you like it?) is not only possible but necessary.

Public goods are being rolled back, the economic squeeze is real, climate grief is real. Underneath all of it, there’s a loneliness crisis so significant that the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory about it in 2023, treating social disconnection as a public health emergency. Systems are designed to isolate us, and we’re feeling the psychosomatic affects of that isolation deeply. (I can speak for, at least, the tenor of America.)

We all know the ways in which connection has been so commodified: wellness is a product or service, community is sold back to us as a premium subscription, third spaces are scarce. All the while, the attacks on our basic needs and our public goods (healthcare, affordable housing, nutritious food, robust education, clean air and water) are accelerating. The vibe is very “pull yourself up by the bootstraps while the oligarchy hacks those straps right off your boots.”

This can all sound very depressing indeed until you remember that people have never actually waited for institutions to save them. Though we may participate in extractive systems — after all, hermits aside, most of us live under them — we simultaneously find ways to defy them. People have always, always, taken care of ourselves. (We got us.)

Let’s first be clear: villages are not ancient history. They are not a romanticized past. Most of the world still lives this way. Tight-knit communities built around interdependence, shared resources, collective care, and proximity are not a lost art. They’re a living reality for billions of people — both in cities and in literal villages — right now. What we’re talking about today isn’t recovering something extinct. It’s recovering something that was taken from some of us, bolstering something that’s under attack. Maybe more than anything it’s a remembering, an amplifying, a centering of something we already know but must uplift vigorously to navigate the way forward from this moment in time.

I also want to be clear: I’m not flattening village life into a utopia. It has its own hierarchies, its own limitations, its own hardships. I’m actually not even talking about literal villages. And so I’m not saying that we should dissolve cities and somehow engineer tiny villages out of hundreds of millions of metropolitan dwellers. No. I am a city girl myself, thank you very much.

What I’m reaching for is the logic of villagerism.

The village works not because everyone is self-sufficient. It works because everyone is usefully dependent on each other. The farm or the garden feeds people because someone tends it. The kids are safe because multiple adults are watching them. Someone has a skill you don’t, and you have a skill they need, and that exchange isn’t charity or debt, it’s just how things function. Interdependence isn’t a weakness; it’s the whole architecture.

And proximity is core infrastructure. Knowing the people around you — your neighbors, your local growers, your elders, the kids on your block — your presentness, your engagement in that world around you, that’s a literal safety net.

It follows that with a mindset like this, with social infrastructure like this, mutual aid isn’t a crisis response but a baseline. You share before someone has to ask. You check in before someone breaks. And someone does the same for you.

Just typing these words, reminding myself of how we thrive when we can surrender to our natural craving for cooperation — it makes my breath come easier, lifts the tightness that too often descends in my chest when I stray too far from my inner villager.

Yes, my DNA is from a collectivist culture. But once in America, my mom and I were rarely able to immerse in that culture beyond our own home: for most of my life, we were a little island of our own in a very white suburban town, no family or same-culture family friends anywhere in the state. On top of that, as many of you know, I lost my dad when I was eleven. And I don’t have siblings. What I learned, therefore, was hyper-independence. With the privilege of newly-built financial security, my mom and I got very, very good at doing it alone. And as I grew up, the more that daily needs got commodified, the more I could do all by myself.

In college — that always too brief, always so electric period of time — something shifted. I didn’t have language for it then, but I was a good villager in college. We all kind of were: borrowing each other’s stuff, feeding each other, showing up, building little rituals. But I don’t know how much I consciously did these things. I just followed the lead of my friends, tentative and curious and excited about the ways in which our lives seemed to tangle up with each other. My hyper-independence still led the way, but sometimes my inner villager sashayed forward instead to take her place at the helm of my mind.

It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles as an adult that this inner villager started to permanently establish herself. I’d seen glimmers of her my whole life, but after moving to LA she stepped into the light. As I learn to let her guide me, it feels like a return to my gut instinct, a quenching of a deep thirst for the self-permission and societal validation to move away from hyper-independence and towards not co-dependence (the other extreme), but towards interdependence, where you are you and you are also we — at the same time.

The airport pickups from LAX are a real unlock, y’all.

It of course looks like the big things: being together for birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, moments of grief. The ceremonies that mark a life.

But more than anything it looks like the everyday things: A spare couch, when there’s nowhere else to go. A ride to work or a co-working morning. A Tuesday evening walking buddy. A meal swap. A tool share. A community fridge. A neighborhood meet-up. A group text that exists for ordinary activities. A neighbor whose name you actually know.

It’s the community resilience things: The community self-defense trainings, the Know Your Rights workshops, the shared ride to a protest, the grocery distribution, the free clinics, the locally-run disaster relief.

It’s more than human: The hummingbird that visits the plumeria outside my living room window, the birds that are definitely talking shit about me in the mornings, the humongous spider that nearly fell on my head the other day (who I chased around my couch until I could trap in a jar and take firmly outside), and the crickets on the sidewalk outside that I have to remind myself are not cockroaches.

It’s oiling each other’s hair on a Friday night. It’s running errands together. It’s shared streaming platform accounts and rebelliously expanded subscription family plans. It’s the “what part are you at” texts that fire back and forth when you’re reading the same book on opposite coasts. It’s knowledge sharing about the important stuff: safety, finances, health, current events, spirituality. It’s “I made extra” and “do you want some guavas” and “want to carpool?"

Villagerism looks like favors, even when they’re inconvenient. Because that’s actually what endears us to each other — not just the breezy stuff, but the moments where we choose each other. And in doing so over and over, favors dissolve from distinct phenomena and diffuse into an interwoven everyday flow of life.

But you know what I, personally, have learned about being a villager? It’s that providing care is only half of the whole. What makes a system reciprocal is to also receive care. This is where I stumble most often, and where I know I must open myself further to survive and thrive in a world on fire.

I’m learning that a big part of being a villager is: “Can I come over and do laundry?” “Can you bring some paneer on your way over?” “Can I borrow your swiffer?” “Can you help me hang my gallery wall?” “Do you have something I can wear tonight?” “I need to dance, will you go with me?” “Can you bring back that book for me from India?” “Thanks for listening.”

It’s asking the trees to breathe with me and the soil to catch my tears, it’s requesting to hold a best friend’s baby close so I can revel in the miracle of life, it’s letting care caress me back.

Part of being a villager is asking for a ride from the airport.

What I mean to say, in short, is that the village is not a place. It’s a practice. And it’s available to us in urban apartments, in friend groups, in long distance phone calls, in online communities, and so on. We can build villages wherever we are through these intentional, repeated, low-stakes acts of showing up for others and letting others show up for us.

You can be a part of multiple villages: your physical village of immediate surroundings and neighborhood, your emotional village that may include people far away that are close to your heart, your spiritual or intellectual village that may include plants and people and ideas currently on this earth or somewhere in the beyond.

Now, five years into my Los Angeles chapter of life, at a time when the heated energy of the world fills life with uncertainty, I am so grateful to those that have inspired me and taught me how to be a villager. I swear I feel my inner child healing, rejoicing. I feel cracked open and lit up.

Isolated people are easier to control. They’re easier to exhaust. They’re easier to keep from organizing. When we’re each managing our own crises in our own silo, we don’t have the relational trust or muscle required to act collectively. I have gone through this firsthand.

When we build webs of care, we’re also building the infrastructure of resistance. When we share resources, when we keep our needs inside the collective rather than outsourcing them to a marketplace, we’re doing something that’s radical in today’s mainstream culture. In many ways, the horrors of this political moment are creating a necessity to reinvigorate village mentality where it’s been lost, to build it where it never existed, and to deepen it where it’s always been. Climate resilience, mutual aid, and collective empowerment all start here. In the village.

adrienne maree brown writes in Emergent Strategy about how small, fractal acts of care and connection scale into movements. Yes, the mutual aid chapter, the tenant union, the local coalition against data centers or Big Oil — and also this practice is how our own healing, our own joy, our own strength multiplies. It’s how we build movements for liberation — personally, politically, planetarily.

In sharing how my mom and I got good at operating in a little silo in white suburbia, I mentioned our nascent financial stability as a key player in the hyper-independence I used to embody. I mentioned that because I don’t know how we would’ve survived without community and without financial stability. There’s something to be said for the connection between financial privilege and hyper-independence, just as there’s something to be said for how so many people lean on each other not out of choice but out of necessity. There are different ways to survive in this world under each of our circumstances. But what I’ve learned is that stability — financial or otherwise — comes and goes. The skill of being a villager endures. Not even a billion dollars and an apocalypse bunker can substitute for the muscle of connecting, engaging, villaging. (In my opinion, this is why every tech CEO comes across as anti-human and deeply disconnected from lifeforce. What will you do in your bunker down there all by yourself, dearest broligarch?)

As extractive systems become increasingly unstable, as the veil continues to get pulled back, the village is how we hold each other through it. It’s how we survive. How we’ve always survived. And it’s how we build the kind of lives — full of wellness and reciprocity and genuine presence — that remind us what we’re actually fighting for.

That’s how to be a villager.

“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.” — adrienne maree brown, “Living Through the Unveiling” 2017