What Do We Share?

“Things cannot continue as they have.”

This thought has been rattling around my brain the last few months.

Those with mammon wielding it like the sword their ancestors wielded as they slaughtered indigenous peoples with the backing of God Himself in full confidence that their genocide was warranted. And not just warranted, salvific. 

Who’s God? 

My God?

It is from such a taking, and a knowing that our American system of relating, owning, exchanging at the expense of the other was birthed. 

Ours is a system born of robbery and false presuppositions, and an extended belief in a lie that the wealth I have is mine and I built it. I earned it. 

It is mine. 

The mine that lives in the DNA of America, it feels to me, has separated us—I don’t know all the layers of the separation. 

I know I feel my skin and the eyes that gaze and see a history of a color long despised.

We need new stories.

I know I feel the distance between the debtor and the lender and the money meant to heal becomes a whip used to force surrender.

Why do we live this way?

I feel the fences that we build, and the barriers we create—barriers of entry, barriers of participation, barriers of access to schools, to neighborhoods, to capital… barriers of being, of existing as we were made to exist. 

These barriers are racial, economic, intellectual, emotional, and more…they are physical and metaphysical and they separate us.

We live in a moment of unprecedented connectivity and absolute transcendental loneliness. 

I am alone. 

And we cannot shake the feeling of it. We cannot because we were born into a system built upon separation. Property lines, interest rates, pay me, or I’ll kill you. Not physically, but it’s the threat we all live with. Pay on time, or die. Pay on time, or feel the hands of global capitalism wrap around your neck until your hands are cold and you have nothing left. 

I feel these hands on my shoulders.

I say this as capitalist. I’ve not run out of hope.

We go along with it, though.

Yet deep deep within me, there is a knocking, a hum, a whisper:

“Things cannot continue as they have.”

The money that separates us, the identities that separate us, the ideologies that separate us, the property lines that separate us—they are all imagined. Yet this undefined imaginary beast wreaks devastating havoc on us all, 

…on me…

I’m tired. I’m so tired of the world as it is, and I know I’m not alone in that. Things must be different. There must be a better world waiting to be birthed. A world beyond war, and taking, and debt, and separation. 

I’ve caught glimpses of it. We all have. We feel it.

There is not one path to where we want to go, but it’s there we must head. 

It will be slow, because the imagined beast lives in the hearts of most, blinding us to a better way, trapping us, forcing us to run a race we never quite consented to. 

We go along with it, though.

New forces are needed to push back, and they are coming. 

Forces of love and anti-separation. 

Forces of sharing and mutuality. 

Forces of holding the commons in common—the water, the land, the energy—we are not owners of them, but holders, the beholders of them. 

They are not commodities to sold, they are a part of us as we are a part of them. 

How do we shift toward sharing?

Toward belonging?

These thoughts, and these questions led me to build a small house in my small backyard, and then to form an organization that built small houses in backyards. 

A small small way to gently push against the forces of separation. 

For when you share the land you formally called “yours”, you inevitably shift toward seeing said land as “ours”.

ADUs will not solve our deep separation problem, nor will any “new” thing, not that ADUs are even a new thing. 

There lies before us the opportunity for ADUs to counter in a small way the forces of separation, and continue the ancient conversation of how we all move forward together, how we restore what’s been broken, how we bring about the world we all hope for. 

A year ago when I started Coram Houses the mission was simple—break cycles of injustice through creative affordable housing. 

ADUs we’re a way to break cycles. 

Cycles of eviction, cycles of separation, cycles of uneven wealth generation, cycles of death. 

The hope was to incentivize the creation of ADUs for the purpose of safe, stable affordable housing and the knitting together of neighbors.

In one year, we’ve nearly built 5 ADUs, with more on the way. And we have tripped, and fallen, and apologized, and tried again, over and over. I imagine there is much more falling to do.

Only time will tell if our work is truly anti-separation work, unjust cycle breaking work. I hope it is. It feels like a good step, and yet I know, only time will tell.