Ernest 

What you have is not dependent on who you kin. But who you kin can grow the way you love. And the way we love is the way we provide everything for everyone. 

Hype. Hype hype hype. Brilliant. Better than I imagined. I have been anticipating these words breathlessly all day. My favorite part of the liturgy. They flood my soul with light, just as my body is bathed in beams refracted through stained glass scenes of Ruth & Naomi, Abu Bakr & Ali, Gandhi & Charlie Andrews, and the Four Friends of the Jataka Tales. 

I stand at the altar in my simple white tunic. I’m usually a pretty unique dresser (cowboy chic, dandyland, fop till you drop; I’ve coined various terms for my style). I’m not entirely sure what led me to go so plain for this moment. A reaction against the opulence formerly associated with the old world’s analog of this ceremony? An understated contrast to the no less than three fits I have planned for the afterparty? A way to aesthetically match the simple beauty of the vows being made and the life being built? 

My four soon-to-be kin and I hold hands in a circle, surrounded by a wider circle of our poiesis party. Our poetic party, as the celebrant called them a minute ago. Our groomsfolk and bridesfolk, as my parents call us (they insist that these are actually progressive, hip terms, for their generation at least). And that wider circle is bounded by an even wider circle of our friends, kin, and neighbors. I can see each person’s face clearly, thanks to the design of this sanctuary. As a 165-centimeter-tall person (a short king, as I believe my grandparents’ elders would have called me), I’ve always appreciated the commune-era design of this holy space—the floor of the circular room slopes gently downward, allowing just about all to see what’s happening on the platform at the bottom. Ezekiel takes an apron from a groomswoman, ties it around their waist, walks over to me, and begins the footwashing ritual. 

Ezekiel 

Adelphopoeisis. We are all kin-making collectively today, but in this part of the rite we acknowledge and symbolize the individual strands that comprise the tapestry. It seems fitting to begin with Ernest, perhaps because of how much of a fixture he is in this place. He spends as much time here as anyone. He chose this commune for his sojourn for two main reasons—music and ministry. Songwriting, production, performance, theology, pastoral care, liturgy. He found a neat opportunity to apprentice in this chapel with someone who does all these things and more. 

As I finish washing his feet, he takes the apron from me and moves over to my childhood bestie. Amena and I grew up here. We played in the children’s crèche together, did self-directed education in the same cohort, and stayed in touch while we did our sojourn years apart. She went to Brazil and apprenticed with a rainforest restoration ecology team based down there. I went to Korea with the Decentralization Outfit, a group that supports communes in reorganizing their production and distribution systems so as to become more locally- and self-reliant. My specialization eventually became designing local power grids specific to an area’s natural resources. I found a town there that has a similar topography and ecology to ours (rolling hills, deep stream valleys), and helped them draft, pass, and begin work on a project for setting up the town lake up to be a solar reservoir. I loved the year away, but I always knew I was going to come back to this town with its slightly cheesy post-revolutionary name (much better than the long-dead-white-ruler name it used to have) and its peculiar people, all of whom seem to be in attendance today. 

Solidaria is a sneakily somewhat popular choice of place for young people doing their sojourn. Even before the revolution, it was a great town for twenty-somethings. World-renowned university, plenty of start-ups, a vibrant downtown plaza, hip music and arts scenes, and city, town, and country feels all within about 30 minutes of each other (by car—now we have the air trains, of course, so make that more like 10 minutes). I’m so happy that these things brought the rest of us here. Not least this tall lad with gentle eyes who slides the washbasin under my feet now. 

Taj 

I chuckle to myself as I look at Ezekiel’s feet. I haven’t seen adult feet in a while. Baby feet, I see a dozen a day. Dozen—an archaic unit of measurement, I know. It’s poetic to me. Sort of how elder Pat goes into Victorian English for the finales of their orations. Anyway, this washing ritual is the most familiar part of the rite so far for me. I wash feet, hands, bums, and everything in between all day in the neonatal wing. I would say I never get tired of it, but that’s not true. I never get tired of the little sweet potatoes themselves. Some days, when I still need a little more baby time, I leave the hospital, eat at the canteen, and then go spend another half hour at the nursery. That’s strictly for cuddles and kisses though. Nothing medical or menial. 

I’m resisting the urge to go console the tiny pumpkin crying in the ninth row right now. 

All four of my new kin have been so supportive of infant care as my primary and my tertiary. The bulk of my work and play. But our primary collective affinity point is music, which is my secondary. I write and produce, mostly folk and funk, sometimes folk-funk. I just finished mixing and mastering an album for the band that’ll be playing our afterparty. No one has ever arranged a stankier harp part—trust and believe. 

The five of us signed up for a branch year program designed to help post-sojourn folks find and form affinity groups. While Ernest is the only one of us who wants to make music as his primary way of adding abundance to his community, we all live and breathe it. Amena is a writer-producer just like me. As old-world as it is, I have to suppress the urge to say “better than me.” So many generations later and we’re still trying to untangle competition from our wiring. As I imagine it functioned for the ancestors, it whispers to me, This is how you’ll be accepted. Respected. Provisioned. Secured. Which is wild, because I’ve never not been any of those things. I’ve never not been receiving any of those gifts. This intrusive scarcity thought is like the appendices that we finally bioengineered away—why is it still around when it serves no purpose? 

Anyway, three of us write and produce, but no one in Solidaria can put on a hoedown, ballroom dance night, or symphony without Iris singing & fiddling, bowing, or first-chairing, respectively. And Iris doesn’t play or sing themself, but they are a huge music buff. They’re a natural anthropologist and historian. I had not had my first cup of tea this morning before they had given me and Amena the last installment of their comprehensive history of genepoeisis, which they’ve been compiling throughout our pregeneic period. I give thanks for memories as recent as this and as old as our meeting as I share a loving look with them across the circle. 

Iris 

The amount of love that Taj can convey with a single look is staggering. As he does daily, seemingly without trying, he reassures me now that the love I will never lack, the love that will keep me from lack, is the only love I truly want. 

Elders have explained it to me many times, but it’s still hard for me to conceive of how romantic love and/or material need were two such prevalent reasons for kin-making before the crisis. Music has been more than enough to keep us continually reorienting toward each other, becoming a conduit for the development of our love for one another. Ezekiel and Taj are together romantically—and they are precious, to be sure, often to the point where I want to squeeze their cheeks into oblivion. (“Abolish cute aggression, the last vestige of the age of domination” is a half-joking, half-serious refrain among our generation.) But their connection is no stronger or more beautiful than that between any other two of us, or between the five of us collectively. It’s just different. 

And one of the vows we made last week was to integrate any romantic relationships into our shared life together, rather than subordinating the latter to the former. Amena is ace, so it’s not as much of an issue for her. Ernest and I are poly. I’m currently partnerless and vibing. Ernest is with a few cuties right now. We like them. They’ve come to a couple of our folk sings. We like them a lot more than Aspen. We all tried so hard to vibe with them, but they came from a primitivist commune, and we’re all futurists. Like, fully automated luxury gay space futurists. I actually learned a lot from their foraging and husbandry wisdom. But alas, I need my air trains, immersive tech, and raves. That might’ve been the second tensest issue of our pre-kin years. The first was the big work decision faced by the lovely lady currently interlacing her garden-roughened fingers with mine. 

Amena 

We’ve come to the end of the ceremony. We’re all kneeling down, and as many people as can squeeze in around us are reaching out for the laying on of hands. I feel all kinds of different textures, different grips. One gentle squeeze. I peek and it’s Belinda, my junior. Some are praying for us, some are speaking benedictions over us, some are whispering affirmations, some are silently setting intentions for us. She simply beams at me. 

Okay, I’ll admit this is cute. And powerful. And more than worthwhile. To be frank, I was the last to see the appeal of today. Not of making these goons my kin—I was actually the first to propose it to the group. The appeal of the formal rites, rather. I’m not really one for spirituality, rituals, or one-time symbolic representations of commitments that are actually forged in mundane, ordinary, everyday choices. Maybe that’s because my family still epigenetically carries some generational pain from church harm. Maybe I just fail to see the appeal of most things I can trace back to the old world, given the stories my grandparents have passed down from their elders about the crisis. 

However, there’s one thing from the old world that I can see the appeal of, and it’s why I almost didn’t make it to this altar. Last year, when I received that invitation to join the Belém Commune, I must admit that much of what excited me could be described, in essence, as the lure of centralization. The idea of having all or most of the world’s best rainforest restoration resources, workers, and decision-making power in one place. Belém isn’t a headquarters in the old sense, but it is certainly a center of attention and a locus of information. 

I loved my sojourn there and quickly became a promising young scientist in the work they were doing. While my intention was always to branch out in the place of my rooting down, the sojourn year disrupted that dream a bit (as it is of course in part designed to do). The year ended with several internal and external developments still in flux (another intentional part of the design), and if there’s one thing that my kin know throws me out of kilter, it’s leaving any t’s uncrossed and any i’s undotted. So I left with a divided heart, and for the next while, everything in my life was oriented towards getting back. Even my budding relationships with these folks kneeling beside me. It got to the point where I was fairly set on either bringing them with me, or leaving the group and going alone. 

I was psyched when I got the invitation to go back. It was actually addressed to all of us, which was thoughtful on Belém’s part. My companions celebrated effusively with me, but it was clear that they did so knowing that they’d have a chance to share their full reactions and opinions later. So we put together a deliberation council. Us, my three parents, Elder Pat, Belinda and Festus (my two juniors), and two other friends. The proceedings opened formally with the traditional disavowal of isolated, privatized living and decision-making, and then we opened up discussion. The deliberations took three sessions across as many days. Not exactly scintillating stuff. But we’ve all been in long, drawn-out people’s assemblies that take forever to hear everyone out and reach consensus. So It wasn’t hard to transfer those skills to this kind of setting. 

Taj was initially in favor of going, at least for a few years. He loves Solidaria but thought that we would all benefit deeply from experiencing the culture and beauty of Belém.

Ezekiel (naturally, given his work) and Iris appealed to me to take the more decentralizing path of finding ways to apply my ecological skills and passion in or near our locale. They argued that this is what the ecologists would have to do in the long run anyway; distribute the processes and science outward across the world. We’re not in a rainforest biome here, of course, but as they pointed out, we certainly have monocultural land that needs to be restored to biodiversity. We have farmland that needs to be converted to permaculture. And the world commune has distributed the technology for small-scale greenhouses that can easily raise out-of-biome flora. They were sure that the Solidaria assembly would greenlight me to organize a rainforest greenhouse project here. 

Ernest’s pitch was for us to continue branching here, but for the group to give me their blessing to spend a few months in Belém at a time. Long enough to cross and dot the immediate t’s and i’s. He agreed with Ezekiel and Iris’s perspective in a long-term sense, but as someone who’s worked on big music festivals and at renowned studios, he gets it—sometimes you need to be where the action is (or at least a particular kind of action) before you can bring that action elsewhere. 

At certain points, the discussion got…heated is not the right word—they got freighted at points. Belinda is quite dependent on me. She came to Solidaria from one of the holdout communes (wait, that’s not the word. states? principalities? yeah, I think that’s it) when she was eight years old. Had dealt with abuse, neglect, and ultimately abandonment. She went through oikopoeisis and was welcomed into the crèche, of course, and eventually adopted by some friends of mine, who later asked me if I’d be willing to serve as non-parental elder for her. I eventually found some old books at the library from my great-grandparents’ day about something called attachment theory, which helped me understand how to care for her. We’ve made a ton of progress together, but the idea of my leaving was earth-shattering for her at first. She’s about as emotionally self-aware as a twelve-year-old can be, but she’s so analytically brilliant that she initially conveyed most of her concerns as logistical or ethical ones. It took a full two days for her (and us) to identify the emotional undercurrents. 

There were other points of tension in the discussions, of course. But we listened to understand, not to respond, and we saw each piece of the puzzle represented by each person’s perspective. Our synthesis was that I would make kin with the others, then put together a team to get a Solidaria rainforest greenhouse off the ground, then go do a stint in Belém. And then come back with the resolution and training necessary to launch me as the first facilitator (rotating, of course) of the Solidaria Ecology Council. 

Career deliberations, partner vibe deficits, attack threats from holdouts—we’ve been through a good bit in our affinity years. “But through solidarity and generosity, we made it through.” What the elders always say about the cosmopoeisis (the world-making, as my generation calls it) applies just as well to our genepoeisis. But we made it to the chapel, and today we make each other kin.

As I look out at the assembly, there are only three faces missing. With all the family ties we have, we’ve got quite a list of ancestral homes to visit, but I’ll surely be introducing my family to my grandparents soon. Not least because the air train will get us there in a third of the time it used to take.