A Romp Through the Fields
From Despair to Prayer to Project Management
Last week was hard.
Like many across the country and across the world, I spent much of last Tuesday unable to shake off the sense of dread engendered by Trump’s insane threat to commit genocide. He did not carry it out and so, like many across the country and across the world, I finally walked back into the rhythms and tasks of day-to-day life.
We walked back in, but we will never be the same. Something unthinkable became thinkable. The man with the power to unleash the world’s greatest arsenal of nuclear weapons threatened to annihilate a people at 8pm on April 7, 2026 and nobody stopped him. I’m relieved that he backed down, but I’m haunted by the fact that we might otherwise have been down to the military disobeying orders.
For me it’s become a final letting go of a world I still clung to, despite knowing better, a world where somehow there were systems and people that would keep things from going completely off the rails. There aren’t. Those systems and people don’t exist. We’re on our own here.
I don’t mean that we should now stockpile cans and guns and prepare for the collapse of civilization, whatever that means. I mean simply that it’s time to shoulder our full responsibility for building something better.
Doing that is the opposite of dramatic. It is long, slow, frustrating, and often boring. And yet, viewed rightly, it is also exciting and beautiful. Most of all it is freeing and empowering if only we see and take hold of our power.
We have more power than we usually realize.
The Relational Field
In order to see that, we have to change how we understand the world we’re in. That’s what most of what I’ve written over the last six months has been about.
One of the key ideas has been to think in terms of networks, focusing less on the nodes, the individual organizations, and more on the connections between them that transform nodes into a network. But independent responses from two friends to my last post pointed to something about those networks that had never really occurred to me, something beyond both nodes and connections.
Thinking about the organizations her co-op works with, Drisana “dru” McDaniel wondered if the most important outcome is not the training they do, but the networks they foster, especially beyond the organizations themselves through participants’ involvement in “multiple systems at once—organizations, communities, relationships.”
The real question feels like: what happens between those spaces? What happens if we actually lean into those overlaps instead of assuming the work has to live inside any single organization?
That echos something Jason Ferenczi emailed me the day before. In a recent conversation, a mutual friend, Pedro Portela, asserted “that a network isn’t the nodes, it is the space around all that is happening.” Reframing that, Jason wrote that a “network isn’t a cluster of organizations potentially collaborating ... but rather the relational field between, amongst, and around the humans there.”
Not the nodes, not even the connections, but the field in, around, and between them.
What’s distinctive about a field in physics is that it exists everywhere. If you’ve ever held a magnet up to a piece of paper scattered with iron filings, the magnet doesn’t just create forces at some points and not others; it happens everywhere. And while the strength of the field decreases as you move away from the source, the magnet’s influence can play out across much larger distances, mediated by objects that it does directly affect.
What does it mean to bring the concept of fields to human networks and to the socio-ecological systems in which we participate?
Here’s one way to think about it.
Organizations aren’t connected: people are. Sometimes those relationships are sufficiently embedded in organizational roles that the connections remain as people come and go. Other times a person’s departure means the loss of the connection. But even though organizations sometimes structure themselves to take advantage, it’s still always people that do the connecting and create the network. Mapping out organizational networks with dots and lines abstracts that away and makes it easy to forget.
More than that, those people move. I’m not talking about moving out of a role or from one organization to another. I’m talking about the fact that, unlike dots on a network map, the people move from place to place and role to role all the time. They’re at their desk on the phone in the morning with someone from another organization. Around noon they’re with a friend ordering lunch. After work, they’re with other parents at their kid’s game or hanging out with friends at a brewery or volunteering at a local shelter. What we see in a network diagram is a static snapshot of something intensely dynamic that fills the space between and outside the organizations.
That’s one thing happening in the spaces between. But there’s more than just people.
All those “empty” spaces are actually filled with infrastructure. Places like restaurants and schools and breweries. Transportation networks like roads and sidewalks and buses. Power and communication infrastructure. Laws and institutions. Massive amounts of physical and social infrastructure that enable everything we do. That space is far from empty and what is there has a profound impact on everything that happens.
And there’s more still.
Everything I’ve talked about exists within a culture and a set of beliefs that tell us what is important and what can be ignored, what is attractive and what to avoid, what is and what is not, what can be and what cannot.
In other words, not only are all those in-between spaces not empty, there is no point within them that isn’t absolutely packed with relational influences. Even when those influences are absences, the absences have meaning and power. Where do the buses not go? Who are the people not included? What are the steps we’re not permitted? What are the ideas we lack words to express?
Thinking in terms of fields helps us see how everything is connected and can affect everything else.
And that expands our possibilities for power.
Power for Change
In his profound work on nonviolence and spirituality, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Walter Wink writes that intercessory prayer “visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current contradictory forces. It infuses the air of a time yet to be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present.”
The point is not to bring some god to the rescue. Rather, it is
the politics of hope. Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs. The future is not closed. There are fields of forces whose interactions are somewhat predictable. But how they will interact is not. Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors, who call out of the future the longed-for new present.
In other words, because of the ways our communities and worlds are interconnected, we have far more power for change than we imagine. That power of course is more collective than individual; we have to join with others. As David LaMotte notes, “It is not naive to think you can change the world, it is naive to think you could be in the world and not change it, but that change happens in community.” Change comes from movements and movements are collective.
That played out dramatically yesterday when Viktor Orbán was swept out of power in the latest parliamentary election in Hungary. Many are justifiably elated at this sign that a global shift toward authoritarianism is not inevitable. I celebrate with them. And I am heartened at what it means for our prospects for change in the United States.
But I’m also feeling uneasy. As glad as I am for the possibility that we are swinging away from authoritarianism, what I really want is for us to get off the swing. That requires more than movement for change, it requires thinking about how we build the cultural, social, political, and operational infrastructure that can ground us in a new state, one with staying power.
Staying Power
Another thing that happened this past week was the triumphant conclusion with last Friday’s splashdown of the Artemis II mission to the moon. Like millions of others, my wife and I were infected by the joy of the astronauts and the thousands of their team members who made the journey possible. It offered a deeply heartening contrast to much of the news of the week.
Underneath the joy and the celebration of a job incredibly well done, though, was a darker thought: I do not believe we could start and successfully manage such a project and conclude such a mission today. Our government is actively destroying its capacity to do that.
It’s not just the federal government and it’s not just the last 467 days. The destruction being wrought by the Trump administration is the latest result of a project that has been carried out over at least the last five decades. It is fostered by an ideology that arose through conservative opposition to the New Deal in the 1940s, and has resulted in a progressive hollowing out of our civic infrastructure at every level. Certainly there are still pockets of strength and competence, but as a country overall our civic infrastructure is in dire shape.
To rebuild will require more than hiring competent people. And it will require more than just reweaving the social bonds of our communities, although that too is critical. It will also require rebuilding the civic competence of our people.
I don’t mean knowing the difference between local, state, and federal governments or understanding the three branches and how ideas are transformed into laws, important though they may be. I mean understanding how things actually get done.
The Artemis II program took years of painstaking planning and management. Yet I would argue that it was actually a relatively simple project in that technical and project management competence was largely all that was needed to get it done. Most of what we face will be much harder because it involves the far greater complexity of people, politics, nature, and technology all intertwined. Most of us have little experience with or knowledge of how to do that well.
Since the competence required is ours, building it needs to be grounded in our own lives.
You can’t understand what’s needed for congress to work if you can’t understand your local county commission or school board. You won’t understand what’s required to implement a national program if you have never had even a glimpse of what it takes to pass and then implement a new local policy. Even that is probably out of reach if you haven’t participated at some level in accomplishing something challenging in your club or church or neighborhood association.
And if you have no clue about any of this, it’s hard to participate meaningfully in a democracy. It doesn’t need everyone. But it does need a lot of us together with ways that we can share that knowledge more broadly.
This feels a bit like a turning point in what I’m doing here.
It’s been 17 months since I shifted the focus of this newsletter and almost exactly a year that I’ve been actively wrestling with the idea of a community as an network and ecosystem. In that time I’ve come to a much deeper understanding of the larger environment in which our efforts need to operate. I expect some of that will continue.
But I think now it’s time to focus more on practical questions about those efforts. Learning how to get things done and learning how things get done requires learning about how to structure decision-making, how to lead in ways that draw in different perspectives, how to get a project from idea to outcome. It’s not rocket science; it’s harder than that. But it’s also no great mystery — there are many wise people we can learn from and many opportunities to practice.
I’m not sure just how I’ll approach that here, but it feels like my next direction.
More next time.
Afterthoughts
The World Is Ending, And That’s OK. The world is ending, but we have survived the ends of worlds before. This echoes much of what I wrote last time, but so much more powerfully, beautifully, and personally.
The Pure Joy of Joy. I have a tendency toward the dark and too often focus on the ways the work ahead will be “long, slow, frustrating, and often boring.” That’s not not true. But the opposite is also true and this essay is a gorgeous celebration of the ways that Artemis II and public figures like Mamdani bring joy to their competence and hard work.
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