Dear Joe, I thank you for your transparency and sensitivity in sharing your thoughts, born of these immersions into "nested funding".

My sense, and really our sense in this local BLC community, is that we begin at the relational level, that the vital need right now is to develop deep communion with one another: to really listen to and come to know one another, listening together at the same time with our landscapes and watersheds and the plants, animals, stones, and all that dwell with us here.

We were not socialized as children to be cooperative and deeply communing. Out of this emerges deep trust of one another, and the opportunity for the miracle of what is needed to come. Perhaps that will be in the form of monetary funding, but there are many other forms of contribution and participation that are as much if not more valuable.

This may sound like a slow naïve approach, especially as collapse is surely already in our midst, and so it is a profound act of faith. But it seems to me this is the only way we can return to the non-monetized, gift economy way of life we have known for thousands of generations in harmony with life in this cosmos. I welcome your thoughts...