For many reading this website the short game is already lost for at least four to ten years. The Nurturance Community is part of the developmental long game that could occupy us who are living now in a multi-generational mission of good while preparing the way for our loved future generations. This is a slightly longer Post and while I believe the reading is worth a couple of your minutes, future posts will shrink back to normal.

The Nurturance Community is that improvised network of protection that gathers intuitively to protect a unique bonded relationship serving as the life balm for the most far reaching loss event we humans ever experience: birth.  In being born the infant moves from a unified experience where all needs are met to a state where the chord is cut and for a shocking moment you are on your own even before you know you are you. Of course you bond with the first warm responsive connection you make for your life depends on it and this thing called ‘life’ wants you and your body to survive both as a physical and spiritual event.   You could call the first Nurturance Community gathered around the sacred bond the “egg of faith”.  Your future capacity for trust and faith are shaped in their first  renditions in this extended community.  Grandmothers and wise surviving  indigenous cultures have always known and protected this knowledge and built their politics of community accordingly.  We, in this era, seem for be forgetting our ancestor’s wisdom and are flirting with a painful disaster.  We are discovering that  Humpty Dumpty was more that just a clever rhyme. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”.  

Putting children back together again is even harder.  We all only get one shot at childhood.  The concept of every child under the age of seven should designated Citizen-of-the-World is a mission statement for this project. Initially it sounds crazy and impossible but when you take the cathedral builder approach to that mission it can work. Priority One of this Mission in the “new dream” of a better world says every political decision made from today into the future should explicitly hold young infants and children and their Nurturance systems as the first tier priority for resource and support.  Such a mission and priorities are the good mission/dream that might even save our nation and species.  

Rare is the honest, kind, parent I have met that doesn’t have some regrets regarding the rearing of their  children. Nurturance Community, always imperfect, requires a devoted network larger than a couple of parents and it quite frankly is always better when it draws on the whole  village.   Every child who gets into deep trouble should be felt as the responsibility of the village, the community and the world.   Nurturance Community and the supporting structures of that community are always the first casualty of war,  recession, depression, genetics, disease, misguided rules, ruthless economies, and frivolous politicians such as we are looking at right now.   So there is so much work to be done and wrongs to be righted. 

Click Below to read deeper regarding the four characteristics of Nurturance Community. Otherwise onward.