A Flourishing Commons is...
for those who want to be inspired, for those who want to know that our existence on Earth matters, and for those who want to trust that there is always an essence to being human that is worth living for.
It is a vision for a new world: a place where we can be authentically human, a place we can feel more deeply, think more profoundly, and to live more open-heartedly. When we are our most authentic human self, we are also our most divine self. With the recognition of our sacredness, we create our most desired future.
To manifest this flourishing world, we need to unveil the pains of our collective traumas, share the poignant beauty of the world that exists eternally, and collectively heal through reflection, self-love, and conscious decision-making.
Flourishing is an ethic guided by non-judgment.
Unlike traditional ethics, the morality of flourishing is relational (Chris Cuomo, 1998). To flourish, we make autonomous choices in a world of imperfect systems. We acknowledge our commons, the common resources we share, the public spaces we gather in, the common essences that make us who we are as human beings. We flourish as individuals, but together, we form a flourishing commons.
Before we reach this state, we must acknowledge a tragedy…
The “tragedy of the commons” (William Forster Lloyd, 1833) reveals that individual actions of self-gain from shared resources would eventually destroy the well-being of a society’s commons. Undeniably, we are living this Tragedy, this paradigm fueled by oblivious and unhindered consumption.
Are we willing to reverse our Tragedy of the Commons? To do so, we need to understand the real reason behind the Tragedy. Like the Greek tragedies, our Tragedy is also one formed by a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fundamental flaw in this consumptive paradigm is the false belief that our commons can be commodified.
Our physical home on Earth (i.e., the land we live on, the air we breathe, the water that cleanses, and the food that nurtures), and our psycho-spiritual homes (i.e., our sense of self-worth and our dignity irrespective of our external wealth) have been commodified in error to give narrative to a false sense of scarcity.
A Flourishing Commons invites you to consider a paradigm shift to re-envision our world.
Imagine a world that fills your heart with love, a world where you feel unconditionally supported, and where you are free to be who were meant to be and speak your innermost voice of truth. How beautiful would that world be?
Now, in the world that you currently live in, do you feel disheartened by rising social and ecological problems? Do you feel oppressed by this world’s systemic challenges? Do you have to repress your true feelings because of political correctness, polarized beliefs, or people’s discomfort with differing opinions?
People have historically been shamed, controlled, and even killed for being themselves and speaking their truths, so there are plenty of reasons for any of us to have deep-seated fears of judgment, persecution, and social abandonment. Let's not make any more reasons to oppress each other.
The beautiful new world and the oppressive old world look irreconcilable, but perhaps, they are merely two points on a journey to return home.
Feelings of confusion, loneliness, despair, or apathy arise because of our collective amnesia to the true meaning of our common home. Since the essence of spirituality is to recognize that every element in the universe is interconnected, then both the good and the bad sides of society are also ways that we humans try to make home out of our lives on this planet. Each one of us plays a notable role in this making of the world.
How at home are each of us in our social roles?
More importantly, how at home are we purely as living entities? The Tragedy of our Commons is telling us that we may have neglected this primordial home of ours. It’s time to return to loving ourselves inherently as human beings. It’s time to re-envision the world with new narratives of what it means to live with purpose.
A flourishing commons starts with a paradigm shift of how to be in the world by:
Turning knowledge into wisdom
Not all bodies of knowledge are equal in our old paradigm. Some types of knowledge are institutionalized and granted validity while others survive on the sidelines through resistance and others get persecuted out of existence. Lurking beneath the mainstream paradigm of objective-scientific knowledge is a deep collective fear of not-knowing. This fear creates a desire to consume more knowledge and build defensiveness to preserve an existing illusion of certainty.
This paradigm of knowledge perpetuates insecurity and separateness. Alternatively, knowledge without insecurity is the willingness to break through existing perceptions of the world. We often need lived experience to successfully break through old perceptions, but as we are changed in the process of learning and understanding, we develop greater wisdom.
In a world of narratives that feed insecurity and unworthiness, we make a difference by turning knowledge into wisdom.
Tending to our inner and outer nature
As the ancient hermetic saying goes, “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…” Although ancient wisdom reveals that our inner and outer worlds mirror each, conventional problem-solving approaches to social issues ignore the fact that we are co-creators of the world. By treating world conflicts as “problems”, we unknowingly treat ourselves as problems too. We then constantly miss the mark, like a dog chasing its own tail.
While environmental activism aims to change our outer landscapes, our inner landscapes resist the change because of our collective programming to make problems, engage in identity politics, and see parts of the world as separate. Human expertise and responsibilities are separated into disciplines and professions tied to different social statuses and legal implications.
For instance, the work of physical world-building are reserved for certain individuals (e.g., architects, landscape architects, urban planners, politicians) but the work of Earth stewardship and social visioning is meant for everyone. Similarly, the work of health keepers are reserved for certain professions (e.g., doctors, therapists), but the work of self-awareness is meant for everyone.
A flourishing world needs more everyday people to embody the archetypes of stewards, healers, and visionaries to tend to our inner and outer natures.
But will we choose to use identities as defenses for hierarchies and insecurities, or will we open our hearts toward collective flourishing by sharing and accepting each other's gifts to the world regardless of our titles?
Transmuting pain into beauty
Tending our inner nature means taking care of unkempt emotions and beliefs. However, human civilization has a long history of aversion towards emotions. So, we will generally avoid painful emotions and displace them with a pursuit for idealized happiness. Nevertheless, repressed emotions don’t disappear. Instead, they foster nihilism and aggression. A social world that endorses narratives of scarcity, not-belonging, and unworthiness is deeply wounded. The pain of this wound lives in our collective unconscious.
We heal by witnessing pain with empathy. In-between suffering and healing are poignant moments of awareness, reminding us that there is beauty in learning to be human again. To heal our society’s greatest wounds, this beauty inevitably must be greater than society itself.
Found in our own nature is a faith that we must choose in, to flourish.
Returning to the inherent value of life
Lastly, we need a paradigm shift in the way we see value.
Money, as its intended usage as a medium for barter, has no value. It is humanity’s psychological confusion over our own value that has made money a scapegoat for our collective fear of not-enough and our distrust in life's process. We have devalued our lovability, workforce and creative energy, and right to be at home in this world through all kinds of commodity markets (e.g., dating, labour, housing, etc.).
Commodification is a way of seeing the world by devaluing the inherent value of people, things, places, experiences, and energy. It is a coping mechanism for a base-line scarcity mindset. Commodification has no correlation to usefulness. As long as we cannot see an item’s intrinsic worth (e.g., a drawing, an essay, a flower, a house, a course, a piece of technology, clothing), we can create a commodity out of it.
To avoid attachments to a commodified world, some people turn to sacrifice as a spiritual principle. But flourishing cannot be achieved through self-sacrifice. The process of flourish is also a process of learning how to be grateful. Gratitude cannot exist without the awareness of abundance.
So, to heal ourselves and our world, to bring about desired change at personal and social levels, we need to know how to love and value ourselves.
As human beings we are always students and teachers of life, whether we take on the social titles of “student” or “teacher.”
One of the biggest lessons in life that I’ve been “involuntarily” enrolled in just by being alive is the learning of how to relate with people. A major component of this continuous life lesson is the mastering of being my own true self within the pressures of collectivity in order to contribute as my own best self for the collective.
I want to believe that we, human beings, are all of an equal essence—of magnificence and potentiality.
This belief is necessary as a flourishing individual. How else can I be my best self otherwise? How else could I see the potential in others? But if everyone is equal, what then becomes the role of the educator who teaches other people?
My research on how poignant landscapes can influence an ethics of flourishing has helped me form a philosophy. At the start of my studies, I believed that my research would result in some sort of guidebook that could instruct landscape architects on how to design poignant landscapes, or at least explain to them how poignant landscapes could help landscape architecture. But eventually, I learned that what is considered poignant is dependent on each person’s view of the world.
If I see the world as poignant, I can invite others into this way of seeing, but people have the choice to take this path or not. Accordingly, I cannot determine what constitutes good landscape design for a profession. I can only open up a new potentiality for seeing landscapes in more meaningful ways.
To translate this understanding into education, I turn to the metaphor of cultivating soil.
Spiritually responsible teachers are not responsible for disseminating a particular kind of knowledge, for that would be like growing a monoculture, which we know is not environmentally healthy. Because everyone is equally unique and has the potential to bloom in the greatest of ways, the teacher provides the soil for students to grow. What comes out of this metaphorical garden is the collective result of each student’s self-flourishing.
Just as each student holds their own seed of potentiality, it makes sense to me that each teacher teaches what is most aligned to their unique gift in the world. Otherwise, we could just use robots to deliver course material over and over again (or alternatively, we could just become robots). So, I ask myself, what is unique to me?
For me, the value of learning is less so about the information detained in the mind but more about how experiences have changed me.
As a student that “grew” out of studio-based learning (in architecture and landscape architecture) my foundation to higher-education has been experiential. Despite remembering how my undergraduate classmates had dubbed the conditions of architecture school as “archi-torture,” my fondest memories of university education are the ones that stressed me out the most at the time: the time-limited charrette exercises which professors had warned as having high-failure rates (although I passed them all).
The reason I so appreciated this experience was because we were engaged with what we were doing, allowed to be creative, and put into a position to believe in ourselves even for only several hours. Information-based courses, the kind that I was exposed to when I returned to graduate school as a student and teaching assistant (in the liberal arts) was foreign to me.
When I looked into the eyes of my peers and students, I was reminded of eco-philosopher David Abram’s assertation in his book The Spell of the Sensuous (1997) that language could either “speak to the world” or “deaden that life” we have been given. So much is spoken in higher education, but how much of it speaks to life and how much has deadened life? Because of this contrast between my experiences in educational systems, I understand the potentialities of how life-affirming education can be.
I want to see the twinkle in people’s eyes!
To affirm life, we need to be in the world fully engaged and we need to feel connected to each other.
While my research explored human belongingness, particularly, belonging that can be felt in landscape experiences, learning to relate with people as a social being is also about learning to belong despite social narratives that say otherwise. Therefore, the essence of being a spiritual teacher is to learn belongingness and to showcase this life lesson to students.
Together, student and teacher, through whatever common interests we share about the world, learn to relate to the world in mutual and reciprocal ways. Together, through the exchange of teaching and learning, student and teacher emerge out into the world with a greater sense of security to be ourselves, as we contribute to society, to nature, and to life in general.
At the core of my interests is a commitment to hold space for the world’s beauty and pain as a process of collective healing. My teaching and learning medium is our personal relationships with landscapes found in various forms: archetypal, experiential, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. This relationship transcends the boundaries of institutionalized disciplines and departments.
So, despite any apprehension people may have about what purpose they must take on, I believe that those committed as students of life will be inspired to join me in this endeavour.
Nothing in our inherent humanness prescribes a hierarchy of worthiness, yet we have learned to judge ourselves and others through our human stories of history and culture. These patterns of judgment plague our social systems in the narratives our minds create about what it means to belong, what it means to be successful, and what it means to be a good person. Let us heal these patterns of pain by retelling our human stories of belonging in nature.
Please share a moving experience from your life that involves the beauty of nature—whether that be an evocative landscape you’ve encountered, a moment of connectedness with another being, or an unforgettable testament to your sacred human nature.
May these heart-felt stories inspire each of us here to realize our unconditional worthiness to belong wherever we are and help us embody our empowerment to be our most authentic selves.
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Hello, welcome, and thank you for being here.
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With love,
Van Thi