Weekly Seeds | December 01, 2024 | Not Another Marketing Email About Being Grateful

Feeling ungrateful for all these grateful emails

I find the corporate Thanksgiving emails so cringeworthy. Maybe it's because they always end with a coupon code to get me to buy more stuff, and maybe because on a conceptual wheel-of-consent level they feels like the wrong dynamic altogether. I purchased a thing from you, company, because I needed a service / product to meet my needs, and now you, company, are making it about you and about how I'm meeting your needs. 

I wish we would flip the script on these email and have more customers share appreciation emails with the companies that service them best. I would personally appreciate SoundBoks for their amazing customer service, my favorite DJs for connecting me with the universe, my local mango farmers, and HUMP! film fest who’ve normalized watching porn with my friends in the past 10 years. Thanks!

Too many mangos, or- on living in community

Speaking of mangos. There is a Hawaiian kids’ book in my house that brings to life the community-life I desire. In this book, two kids are given a task by their grandpa ”there are too many mangoes for our little family. Take some down the road and share with our neighbors”. The kids walk down their street with an overflowing wagon of mangos and return with a similarly overflowing wagon, but this time- filled with gifts from their neighbors: banana bread, papayas, jam, flowers, and bananas.

I love this book so much, because it touches on abundance, community care, collaboration, trust, and connection, all values and mindsets that I want to live by. I also love this book because it highlights how NATURAL it is to share resources- there are literally too many mangoes for one family to eat! 

Trust and trustworthiness in community living

I spent Thanksgiving with my kids, co-parents, mother in law, and a dozen community members. I love feeling the webs of connection, belonging and care that I feel when I’m in a community. It feels like a big exhale. 

When I look at my community, I recognize how much work we’ve collectively put in to get to this moment of love- hours of sharing deeply, moving through uncomfortable conversations, and showing up for repair.

"Communities sustain life — not nuclear families, or the “couple”, and certainly not the rugged individualist. There is no better place to learn the art of loving than in community… Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals “who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, and make other’s conditions our own." - bell hooks, All About Love

When I moved here and set to co-create a loving community, I set a single success metric as my guiding principle. We would know that we built a healthy community if people felt safe to speak up when someone hurt them and if people felt safe to hear that they hurt other people. When these to conditions happen together, there is safety, trust, and love. Go deeper on trust with Brené Brown.

The spreadsheets at the core of healthy community living

The Bay Area has long been a crucible for experimental lifestyles, from cooperative houses to tiny home villages. On 12/14-15, the local communities are coming together for a 2-day sharing and learning conference at the Community Living Wisdom Exchange conference. Check out the inspiring schedule here, the event description here, and purchase your ticket here! Inspiring: the conference offers on-site childcare (in addition to snacks and food).

Recognizing Chosen Family

Back to Thanksgiving, in addition to my community, my Mother In Law attended our Friendsgiving Dinner. I feel lucky that we’re able to be out with to our family about who we love and how we love them (minus the sex parties) and I recognize that not everyone has the same experience. 

Many "chosen families" are hidden during holiday seasons. There’s a song by an Israeli singer, called “weekends and holidays” about the pain and loneliness that “the other women” feels when he lover, a married man, spends the weekends and holidays with his family. Esther Perel touches on this pain in Mating in Captivity.

"I think of Beth, quietly attending the funeral of her mother's thirty-year secret partner, I think of Roxana, who disguised herself as a nurse so that she could visit her lover in the ER after he had a heart attack. And I think of Kathy, who wrote to me that she found out that her long-term married boyfriend had died only when she read it in the local paper." - Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity

Exclusion is experienced not only in “under the table” relationships. Also in Kitchen Table Poly relationships there are people and connections that are left out in key social moments. The “holiday family portrait” is one of these moments- where the people who participate are chosen not based on who we care about, but who our “default world” will accept as normal.

Plura and Modern Family Institute are partnering on offering an alternative to the holiday family portrait. If you are in the Bay Area, you’re invited to enjoy a studio photoshoot with your Chosen Family. Join us on 12/8 with your expanded family, polycule, partycule, triad, co-parents, besties, and celebrate the meaningful connection you share. The professional photographs will be delivered to you and will not be shared publicly unless you really want us to. Sign up (it’s free!) here.

Note: This newsletter represents my personal opinions and thoughts. I understand I may have unexamined views and I appreciate when people point them out so that I am made aware and can start thinking about them. When I make mistakes I am committed to learning about my impact on others and repairing. 

Contact me anytime: noa@heyplura.com