The Myth of Independence

What I have learned from my time at Canticle Farm

Independence is a myth. Separation is a delusion. In the ultimate, there is only belonging.

It’s been almost five-years since LiZhen and I moved into Canticle Farm, an intentional community in the heart of Oakland. We are a community of 13-ish homes and 45-ish people, countless animals and an abundance of fruit trees. We are intentionally diverse across every identity marker imaginable, with people with inherited wealth living alongside those who escaped violence in their home country and migrated here with little more than the clothes they carried. Formerly incarcerated organizers who now mentor youth share life with people who work in philanthropy. Babies about to be born are cared for by elders who have been leading revolutionary work for longer than their parents have been alive.

When we first moved in, we thought we might spend a few years learning what it was like to live in community and then perhaps move on to start our own little eco-village. But the longer we have lived here, the clearer it has become that this is where we are meant to be. It is where we want to raise our child. It is where I hope to take my last breath.

I didn’t expect it. I didn’t realize how deeply I would fall in love with this place and these people. It was not love at first sight. Unlike my relationship with LiZhen, there was no early period of overwhelming passion when it was obvious that I was falling deeply, deeply in love. I just woke up one day and realized what an incredible honor it is to be a member of this community. And every day since, that feeling has deepened.

In those first few years, LiZhen and I ate almost all of our meals outside in the sun. Having just moved out of a one-bedroom apartment with no access to the outdoors, it felt like a dream to step out our back door and into the connected backyards of eight properties who had torn down our fences, creating an oasis in the middle of the city.

There were days when I would sit outside sipping tea, sweetened with honey harvested from the bees on our land. As I sat there, I would watch those same bees hovering over the flowers of a nearby bush, gathering nectar.

And sometimes I would have these moments - as though I was staring into a crack in the Matrix - when I felt I could glimpse a depth of reality normally hidden beneath the veils of modernity.

Here, just inches away from me, was a bee drinking nectar from a flower in our backyard. It would carry that nectar back to a hive twenty yards away and transform it into honey. That honey would eventually be harvested and find its way into my tea.

For a brief moment, I could see the whole cycle right in my cup.

These moments happen often. Small, random moments where I feel like I touch into a deeply buried somatic memory of what it’s like to live in village. To be woven in community. To be deeply human. To belong.

One day, I came back from a long day of facilitation and I walked into the yard to harvest some greens for dinner. I bumped into another Canticle resident and said hello, ended up getting pulled into some games with the children playing in the play-structure behind our house, heard another group of Canticlers singing a song, ended up in deep conversation with another about how to bring healing to our world… And a simple task of harvesting some chard ended up taking close to an hour.

I have come to call it being “Canticle’d.”

Sometimes, walking across our land from one house to another is a 45-minute adventure.

Other times, I come home and find someone making art in our living room. Or randomly, a Canticler will walk into our house unannounced and just start making themselves some lunch. Not because they don’t have their own home. But… just because.

The last time we were grilling some food behind our house, we brought out about 10 plates even though there were only four of us there. And, by the end of dinner, our table was full and every plate had been used by Canticlers walking by. Our family meal, impromptu, became a village event.

There are probably 3-5 moments every day that someone enters our house unannounced. No knocking, no doorbell. Just walks right in. To borrow some flour, to use our laundry machine, to make coffee, to offer to take our kids to see the chickens, to bring us some fruits or simply to just hang out.

Take a look at our key rack. LiZhen and I only have one car. But our key rack has on any given day 5-6 car keys because of how many people regularly use our driveway.

As an introvert, one would think that I would hate this life. And if you had asked me five-years ago if I wanted to live in a house where people were constantly walking in throughout the day, I would have given a resounding “no.“

But as it turns out, I love it. I have never felt more grounded. More human. I am reminded constantly that our species is a communal one. We are meant to live in this kind of deep, interwoven relationship with one another. We are meant to belong to each other.

As Bonnie Wills, an elder I love once told me, “We are at our most powerful when we depend on one another.”

Multiple people use our laundry machine and our printer. They use our hose to water their plants. All the kids play on the play structure behind our house. At the same time, everyone watches our kid, we often find bags of produce outside our door that someone left us, and if LiZhen is out with our car and I need to go out, there is always a car I can borrow.

The cliché image of going to your neighbor’s house to borrow some sugar barely scratches the surface of what community could be like.

And it is the greatest honor, gift and privilege of my life. For us, community is not some abstract idea. The thing that so many of us strive for and try to hard to build into our work, our nonprofits and our movements is a daily, lived reality.

This actually brings up mixed emotions. Huge amounts of celebration for what I have, but also equal amounts of grief to know how rare this gift is - knowing that this abundance should be a given for every person across the globe.

How is it that this birthright of community and belonging has become seemingly impossible for so many of us? How painful is it to realize that we have strayed so far from what it means to be human and have bought into the delusion of “independence?” As if our strength is in a false reality that we are alone.

As I wrote about a while ago in my piece, My retirement plan is the end of capitalism, “The myth of independence is a euphemism for isolation. They want us to be “independent” of relationships with each other and the earth, and dependent on multinational corporations and the state.”

So on this “Independence Day,” I want to remind us that our greatest opportunities for thriving comes not from building mega-mansions with yards so large and fences so tall that we are not able to see our neighbors. It is, as I have learned from my time at Canticle, in tearing down those walls and allowing our communities in – into our homes, into our lives and into our hearts.

The Measure of Community

Overtime, I’ve realized that one of the most important metrics of the depth of community is in how many of our needs can be met by it. How interdependent can we actually be in practice?

“Community” is not a binary where you are either in it or you are not. I’ve had community before living here. And yet there are depths of community that I have found at Canticle that I have not experienced anywhere else. Since living here, I have realized that the more we live in deep dependence of one another, the more liberated we can be. The more we rely on each other to meet our needs, the less we need to rely on the state and the capitalist system.

People cut each other’s hair here. There are people who can help me hem my clothes. Our child is over two-years old and so far, all of our childcare needs have been 100% met by the community.

Many of my needs for food are met by weekly community meals that are served on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays, as well as our weekly food distribution program that gives out fresh produce and dried goods to our community and neighbors – not to mention the produce and fruits grown on the land. There are also the regular messages on our group thread like, “I baked some cookies, come get some now,” or “Just got back from an event and have tons of leftovers in the communal fridge!” or “I made too much soup if you want a bowl.”

Our needs for political education as well as personal growth are met here. One member just got back from spending months in Palestine and shared a report back. Another was just inside a detention center working with detained youth and shared their stories. We host regular workshops and other opportunities for growth, including a weekly practice night where we engage in nonviolent communication practice, healing and conflict modalities, practices in the gift economy and more.

The artwork for a Zine I am working on with some friends was done by a Canticler. This is the same person who often watches our kid, painted the murals in our community and did the plastering in our home office.

Several years ago, I went through one of the hardest conflicts of my entire life. And it was largely this community that held me through it: holding a fire circle for me to tell my story and Canticle elders guiding me through the conflict.

Needs for entertainment? Check. Regular game nights, song circles, plays and performances that are hosted on the land and watching the World Cup in our community room.

Needs for space to host events? Check. I have hosted countless work-related events on the land. These events, as well as events that I have hosted away from Canticle are often catered by Canticlers.

Needs for spiritual practice? Check. We host weekly Buddhist Sangha on Wednesdays and Liturgy on Sundays.

Needs for community and relationship? Check. Check. Check.

Sometimes money exchanges hands for some of these needs to get met, and even when we pay each other, we are helping that person get part of their financial needs met so that they do not need to sell their time and attention on the market to get paid. It keeps the circulation of resources, including financial, close to home. A payment made to a community member for childcare never touches a multi-national credit card company.

The Value of Interdependence

I don’t want to romanticize our time at Canticle. In this community, we are in no shortage of conflicts. Like, who is blocking the driveway? Who left the dishes out in the community room? Where did our compost bin go? Whose laundry is still in our dryer? Where is our Tupperware?

Sometimes, it feels like we are 45-people who live right on top of each other! Many of us come from different cultures, and some of us literally speak different languages and cannot communicate directly. We have all experienced trauma.

But the experiment of living at Canticle has also made me see how much our ability to live interpedently is a practice of nonviolence.

In dominant culture, the more “successful” you become, the more you isolate yourself from others. You live in a bigger house, with a bigger yard and a bigger fence father away from your neighbors. You have a bigger car, a bigger office, you go on more private vacations, you have more space between you and the person sitting next to you on the plane.

Here, our proximity to each other means that we are always being impacted by each other. And as much as that can become a source of conflict, it is also a huge gift. Our proximity to each other means that it is inevitable that we will have day-to-day conflicts. It is inevitable that we will bump into each other’s traumas, witness each other in our panic zones, get to know each other’s shadows.

And because we live in such an interwoven ecosystem of relationships, one person acting out of line impacts an entire ecosystem. Each conflict is feedback to the system about how healthy our ecosystem is, and it is on all of us to ensure that conflicts are resolved.

Modernity doesn’t build ecosystems. It builds square houses and fences and private offices and cubicles so we don’t have to engage with each other. We are often times not close enough to rub each other in the wrong way, which means we are not close enough to offer feedback and information about what’s not working. So conflicts build up into resentment.

An “ecosystem,” by nature, is interdependent. It is constantly sharing information and feedback and working to find homeostasis – health and balance. In fact, that is another key measure of the depth of a community: how freely is information and feedback flowing? It is a sign of health and vibrance and life within a system.

Because everyone is talking to everyone, the localized ecosystem has shared, collective wisdom about what is happening within that system. Forests are constantly reallocating resources, changing chemistry and recruiting others in response to a localized disease or virus.

In human communities, if one person is acting out of line, starting conflicts everywhere and pissing people off, the collective organism will mobilize to heal it.

Again, I don’t want to romanticize Canticle and give off the impression that this is what always happens here. It’s not. We have conflicts that have gone unresolved for years, there are people who don’t talk to each other much and feedback stagnates and becomes gossip.

Despite living in closer proximity to each other than anywhere else I’ve lived, we all grew up in modernity and have been deeply conditioned by it. In many ways, the vision and potential of Canticle is still very much aspirational.

And… the attempts that many of us here make to remember what it means to be part of a living ecosystem is truly beautiful (and often frustrating) to experience.

The Importance of Localism

All of this is only possible because of our physical proximity to each other.

In 2026, so much of our world is online. Our meetings are online, we date online, we do our shopping online. So many of our needs are met there. And I don’t want to undermine the access that has created for so many people, including many marginalized peoples.

And… I also want to be real about the limitations. When we go online, we do create more access. And we also lose something.

In the natural world, ecosystems are always localized. Yes, the insects in Northern California breath the oxygen created in the Amazon. But the organisms in a local ecosystem are dependent on each other in a different way.

But the experiment of Canticle Farm could never happen if it were not in-person. Community can deepen beyond a certain extent only when we are able to bump into each other – literally and figuratively. And the closer we are in proximity, the more opportunities there are for us to bump into each other and to be impacted by one another. Geography does matter, and I can see the importance of it now that I live in community.

This is another outgrowth of modernity. Because every skill has become so specialized, and because of mass production and the centralization of distribution, we have to travel so far to meet our needs.

We visit friends on the north side of town to meet our needs for connection, then drive to a park up the hill to meet our need for nature. Then we need to go to the west side of town to pick up our kids from childcare, the south side of town to get our groceries, drive out of town to visit the doctor, the next town over to buy a new phone, downtown to enjoy nightlife, then back home to the east side of town to rest.

By then, we are exhausted and broke. We need to rely on a car or public transportation to get around, and at each stop we need to spend money.

Again, living at Canticle is probably the biggest privilege of my life. I am so grateful to everyone here, especially our founders/elders Anne and Terry. But I grieve how few people get to experience this kind of community. My vision for Canticle is not for us to keep growing so that more and more people can move in. My vision is for there to be 10,000 communities like Canticle where people can live out their own experiments.

And it is already happening. Not because of Canticle, but because the earth’s collective wisdom is guiding us in this direction. Our ancestors are whispering in our ears, telling us to remember.

In the last 10-15 years, I have witnessed the blossoming of countless intentional and land-based communities around the country and around the world. Some are homes with 2-3 people, while others are larger than Canticle.

What if we could get more and more of our needs met by those we live with? What possibilities could that provide us?

Would that allow us to spend less time in the Matrix, and more time sipping tea and noticing the bees?

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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