Becoming Home
The Origin of Becoming Community: One Founder’s Journey to Connection and Kinship
I am a daughter of political refugees who were violently uprooted from their homeland, fleeing a CIA-led military dictatorship in so-called Chile. I was born in Tkaronto (aka Toronto), into a story of exile with family scattered across the globe. It’s no coincidence I’ve spent my life seeking a refuge for belonging, justice and peace, a place to call home. So what is ‘home’ and how does one know when you’ve arrived?
My search began many years ago for a place where I could deepen my relationship to land and learn to care for her in ways that felt generative and meaningful. A place to unlearn the stories that have been sold to me about consumption, ownership, success and progress. A place woven by a community of humans and more-than-humans whose relationships are transformational not merely transactional.
In my search I’ve come to understand that true healing and belonging cannot exist without the fundamental connections to nature and community. In 2017, my beloved family and I found kindred spirits in a group of humans who were also seeking a new way of being in the world.
In 2018 we found land and leapt towards the unknown: a high stakes, off-grid land project. A crazy, risky, “it will probably fail”, “that’s a lot of work”, “my parents won’t understand” type of land project. None of us had ever done this before, but we had visions, experience, strategies, and a healthy dose of fear.
We started like most projects do...with meetings. Holding circles of conversations, discerning our differences, finding alignments, common principles, and sometimes even consensus. Finally, in 2019 we purchased land, founded a not-for-profit that removed the capitalist model of land ownership by hacking legal and financial systems (more on that here), and became River Rising. Why? Because modernity is stealing our life force. Because anger at the system is only further fuelling the crisis. Because the more we have, the more we need and yet hungrier ghosts we become.
The first year we naively dragged our camping gear through kilometres of forest to reach the enchanted backwoods clearing crested on a river, off-grid and wilding with life. We established a seasonal camp for our group, 12 adults, 4 children and our brave friends, all of us traveling from the city whenever we could, as often as we could, and bringing all we thought we needed to “survive”. It took time to learn what was important and to practice attuning our attention to a forest teeming with relationships.
We were aware but unprepared for the onslaught of systems we had to solve in order to be there in a good way. We were babes in the woods with limited comforts and spotty phone signals, seeking solutions to our basic necessities: water, food, shelter, fire, warmth and mosquito netting! Our learning curves were steep and the land is a wise teacher with a wicked sense of humour. She guided us, humbled us, emboldened us and snickered at our ‘cidiot’ ways. Year 2, we slowed down our tempos to be with her rhythms and finally found consensus on one guiding principle: “When in doubt, come together”.
We’ve been so conditioned to fear our own vulnerability and praise power that our deepest work was to practice being together in both our beauty and our terror. Part of that practice is synching our frequencies by working together, chopping wood, clearing garbage, building shitters, and having difficult conversations, preferably not before coffee.
The year we invested and built a structure on the land that would finally hold us all in circle some irreconcilable differences arose among our members. After months of mediation one of our founding members chose to leave just before our 3 year threshold. It was painful, as change goes, but our commitment and heart-led compass never failed. Once the conflict found closure a recalibration occurred, our collective body rooted and we began to grow.
Through communication and repair we stayed with the trouble and danced it out while the river drank our tears and healed our wounds. It wasn’t the first hurt and it wouldn’t be the last but it revealed something deeply valuable. Our legal agreements were robust enough that one member leaving didn’t propel our project into debt or despair. And our bounty of relational processes made us stronger after the break, like a healthy bone regenerating itself with proper physiotherapy.
Rising to the surface were new ways of holding each other accountable, moving through rage while staying connected and practicing a quantum listening that brought the forest into our imaginations. We were coming alive through bold acts of resistance to the systems that had been teaching us that acquisition and competition were the way. We were building something real, something worth fighting for, we were unlearning colonized mindsets about grief, trauma, power and ownership.
But, we were still off-grid with limited access and wondering how to hack the zoning by-laws that restricted us to a 3 season property. There was one way, and after many spells of manifestation the adjoining farm property came up for sale. Through ingenious strategy, serendipitous timing, and the bravery and support of a dear friend and project partner, my family bought the neighbouring property that would allow our project to live into our seven-generations dream.
We are now on-grid, have legal road access, farm fields for food sovereignty projects, epic barns for community creation spaces, and a four season home. With every stage of this project we only seem to be expanding the scale and scope of our visions and adding more work to our load.
We aren’t farmers but we know how to get dirty and if there’s one thing we have it’s a community of hands and hearts aching to be in meaningful relationship with land, self and others. While the joy and reward of planting freedom gardens is delicious and obvious, the work of writing community policies, legal agreements and models of solidarity economics that imagine new systems and ways of being is a daunting attempt to choreograph chaos.
Yet manifestations continued and in 2022, we received a generous 2-year Strategic Innovation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for our proposal of Becoming Community, to research just and regenerative community models for healthy livable futures. Many of us were artists before we began this endeavour, and now we had clout and some money to experiment in between the lines of earth-work and art-work, culture-making and compost-making, human and more-than-human with wilding imagination. It’s now 2025, and as we bring our grant to a close we are finally ready to share our stories and learnings with the world.
Our nervous systems are still catching up with the scale of our manifesting and the exponentially growing task lists but we are bursting with aliveness. And yet, more and more questions emerge. The tension of building economies of mutuality and distributed leadership in the cracks of capitalism can be crazy-making.
7 years into River Rising, our members can likely all agree that we don’t have the answers and we don’t always know the way, but we are doing our best. Our visions and ethos are mostly aligned, but we have not always agreed. If anything, we agree to disagree and continue coming together nonetheless. So the questions arise: What does coming together look like when our world is in the throws of an epic meltdown, when chaos is reigning, when systems are failing, and empires are crumbling at our feet? How can we hack our own colonized imaginations to dream otherwise? How do we build another world without replicating the brokenness that governs our daily lives. Is this a seemingly delusional task? There has to be another way.
Through our time on land we have witnessed and understood that everything is relational. With trees and turtles, beavers and bears, moss and mosquitoes, we are continually choreographing communities of kinship and dancing in languages we have yet to understand. We try our best to let our hearts be our compass. We try to lead with promiscuous care, but hopefully not the smothering mothering or heroic saviour kind of care. We are committed to being with the unknown, the grief, the rage, the difference, the trauma and the tension, while also re-wilding joy, grace, creativity and vulnerability. Maybe we have to lose our way in order to find another way. And so as a practice, we dance together in the not knowing, both literally and metaphorically. Whether planned or spontaneous, it happens in the forest, in the garden, after meetings, under the stars, all alone or all together. As a dancer, this is definitely my pleasure in the darkness. Dancing my prayers into the wounds of humanity.
As River Rising, we also have a practice of coming together for a weekend deep dive 4 times a year. When we come together in the forest or at the river, there is a special kind of rhythm to our relationing. Here, time is not linear, the mundane becomes mystical, nature becomes a sanctuary beckoning our attention, and you wouldn’t believe what raccoons become when night falls. So if we think it’s the proverbial “I” who is showing up to the meeting, or moving through the landscape enacting our ‘free will’ in the forest, we may be mistaken. There are unseen forces and tricksters at work who have other plans indeed. When we think we are ‘shaking it out to’ get the city stick off our skin, maybe we are actually the ones being shaken by the earth beneath our feet. When we take that deep breath to regulate our nervous systems, maybe we are the ones being breathed by the trees, our inhale propelled by their world-making exhale. When our grief spills into the river maybe its not just our own grief but an entanglement of kin and ancestors raging from injustice.
The point I’m getting to is best made by the story of one particular August day, when 11 of us were all preparing for a River Rising Members’ meeting to discuss the important organizational tasks at hand. Gathering our wits after lunch, we meandered the trail to our beloved dome in the forest where such mid-summer meetings occurred. But on this day, the trees had another plan in mind. As we arrived one by one to the meeting place, our bodies instead surrendered to the horizontalism of the cedar deck outside the dome. One by one, our bodies succumbed to the force of gravity in a collective choreographic installation you might title “Loitering at the doorway of doing”. And without a word, without any legible gestures, we all simultaneously fell into the trance of a more-than-human encounter. In that time, which could have been minutes or hours, we allowed ourselves to be undone. We hitched a ride on the photosynthetic matterings of the trees as we launched into radical rest pose that felt like the most potent form of resistance to whatever it was we thought we ‘needed’ to accomplish.
We were silent, but somehow channeling ancient reservoirs of knowledge. We were prostrated in some unspoken reverence to the wisdom of the insects in their processional asymmetries. We were blinded by the atomic glare of the sun mapping new worlds through the cartography of the tree tops. Our practical ‘meeting’ minds wandered far enough that our hearts were able to sneak out from under its will. And somewhere between mineral earth, cedar deck, strewn bodies in deadman’s pose and the mop tops of maples and oaks, our heartbeats beatboxed into sacred geometries of deep peaceful rest.
In that mythical space/time continuum, as our hearts slipped through the cracks of cedar, our attention spiralled into the spaces of the useless. In the process we became otherwise. We broke our pattern of the designated circle, broke our expectations of lists and tasks, missions and mandates, problems and priorities. Instead we lay frivolously in our uselessness, spilling from the ticking clock of linear chronos time into a critical moment of mythical kairos time. We broke the logic of what might be a ‘proper’ or ‘effective’ meeting where we seek ‘solutions’ to our problems. Instead we allowed ourselves to investigate the thrills of sensation, of being done by rather than doing, of quantum listening rather than speaking.
These somatic diversions and illegible tangents were not part of our regularly scheduled plan of activities. But maybe they should be. Scheduling meanderings of ‘not doing’ as essential parts of our to do lists, just might be the medicine this forest doctor ordered. This sensorial improvisation was just what we needed to unwind the hypercritical unconscious voice of modernity lurking as issues in our tissues.
It was the most memorable ‘meeting’ I have ever had. We came out of our group trance with wind songs whistling in our ears feeling rested, connected, and somehow understood. The remainder of the day was a breeze, our bodies transitioning into physical labour that needed less words, less coordination. We were in group flow, our attentions rooted and at ease. My mind was quiet, my body felt connected and my heart was open and listening. In that brief encounter I understood what becoming community with the kin of the forest might reveal if we nurtured the practice. What might we learn if we slowed down enough to let the trees run our meetings once in a while?
As our project unfolds I am still learning what it means to thrive in community, to love and be loved, to co-create, co-lead and co-habit. It’s a lifelong journey on an inter-generational timeline. Through it I think I’m finally understanding what if feels like to be ‘home’, a deep peaceful belonging in my spirit and my bones. After half a century of a nomadic nature I can truly say I have found the place where I want to be buried. I never imagined I’d feel so grateful to the ground that will compost me. Maybe my ancestral story of exile can finally be re-written.
-Ayelen Liberona
Co-Founder, Becoming Community
Co-Founder & Villager, River Rising