Something in you recognizes this as familiar. The hard weather expected, the community rebuilding, improvised materials — and someone cooking through it. It feels right that someone wrote down "this is how we do things here." While I can say for sure, as a Filipino, that there are endless arguments, I'm equally certain this wasn't designed from a theory. You have been in rooms like this — a neighborhood cleanup that turned into a potluck, a block party that saved a business, a toolshed where the only rule ever needed was "leave things better than you found them." You know what it feels like.
So why does it feel so far away?
When Everest College students organized the first debt strike, they weren't refusing to pay a debt they'd freely incurred. They were refusing to pay for a credential the school had fraudulently represented as valuable — taking federal student loan money, promising employer networks and career placement, and delivering nothing. The Department of Education had a process for cancellation in cases of fraud. It had processed almost none of the claims.
The students who became the Corinthian 15 were mostly working-class people of color, many of them the first in their families to attend college. Latonya Suggs had $63,000 in debt from a two-year criminal justice program. Makenzie Vasquez had $30,000 from a medical assistant certificate she'd had to drop out of when she couldn't make the payments. They had been sold a dream and received, as Vasquez put it, a nightmare. When they found each other — through a Facebook page, then a coffee shop meeting, then contact with the Debt Collective — they called themselves the Everest Avengers. They understood that the law was technically on their side through an obscure Higher Education Act provision called Borrower Defense to Repayment, but the Department of Education had never created an application for it. The Debt Collective worked with lawyers to design one and published it. Applications rolled in by the thousands.
The debt strike forced the issue over seven years, through three administrations, through the Trump years when Borrower Defense was effectively halted and applications went unprocessed. In 2022 the Biden administration canceled $5.8 billion in debt for 560,000 former Corinthian students — the largest single loan discharge in Education Department history. The Department called it a decision. It was an organizing victory.
The wizard finds the others. Sometimes one person — Erin at the edge of the hedgerow at dusk, the cook who learned the knife and took it elsewhere, the neighbor who has been in their own logged forest. Sometimes a small room — a meeting in a church basement that has refused for sixty years to disappear, a reading group in someone's kitchen, a community garden where the receipt is the dirt under three or four sets of fingernails. The form does not matter. What matters is that the sight does not have to be carried alone. You bring the shard to the room. The room helps you read it. The room helps you keep reading it when the storm tries to blow you past.
If you have ever lost someone dear to you, you know how grief moves and transforms in the body and never really leaves. Each grief is different but they share a common frequency. The ache. The sharp pain in the chest. The fog around the head that makes it hard to see or hear what people are saying. The lead-heaviness. The tension of a field before a thunderstorm. Sometimes it is the storm, welling up and bursting forth in a cry, or sobs, or rage, or art, or poetry. Some animals are drawn to people grieving and offer comfort, and if you have had this happen to you you know it is unmistakable. If you track, you may find yourself doing just that for the forest. It is unbearable because it was not meant to be borne by one person. If you find yourself holding this grief for the land, find others before it consumes you.
One of the practices in that community was a speaking circle.
Most of us are Neo. We have made descents — some chosen, some not. We have come back changed. And we have arrived at the threshold to find it unmanned, the village dispersed, no one who knew we were coming or could name what we had brought back.
So we have had to find each other.
The grief rituals, the tracking mornings, the birding walks, the land stewardship days, the ceremonies — these are all practices of the return. Not only the individual's return from their own underworld. The community's ongoing return to itself, through the repeated practice of gathering, attending, grieving, praising, weaving.
The Tzutujil refused corrugated metal roofing when it became available — not out of conservatism but from a completely lucid understanding of what they would lose. The traditional thatched roof needed to be repaired every year. The community gathered to do it. Neighbors came. Some thatched, some cooked, some fed children, some argued about the right way. Nobody called it community building. It was roofing. But through the roofing, the web of relationship was rewoven. The obligations were renewed. The community updated its knowledge of itself — who was strong this year, who needed help, who had learned something new. That is what the refusal protected.
People gathered in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan — and then in parks and squares in over nine hundred cities across the world — and did something simple and strange: they tried to govern themselves in public, without leaders, without a party, without a platform of demands, in real time and in the open air.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri watched, and wrote. Their response — Declaration, published in 2012 — argued that the movements of 2011 had discovered something previous left politics had missed: that the multitude doesn't need to seize state power, it needs to exodus from the subjective identities the system has prepared for it. The indebted. The mediatized. The securitized. The represented. These movements were, in H&N's formulation, poor in demands but rich in forms. They didn't know exactly what they wanted — but they had discovered how to want together. The people's mic, the general assembly, the working groups: forms of collective intelligence that the movement generated before it knew what it would govern.
With each other.
The herd of centaurs — each one carrying what the underworld gave them, each one bringing it back to a community that was waiting, each one in relation to the others through the field, each one contributing to the governance that holds the field open, each one feeding the flowering that is the point of all of it. And now: each one in conversation with the machine intelligence that carries the synthesized center, each one the oblique angle, the rupture, the thing the corpus could not have produced — bringing it to the table, letting it connect, letting it produce.
The doors had been locked behind the last guest. The lights had been turned down to the after-hours level — bright enough to count, dim enough to talk. A few regulars were at the bar, the way regulars stay after hours when the room belongs to them as much as to anyone. The staff who were still around were clocked out, shift drinks in hand, sitting in among the regulars — which is the commons before any of us would have called it that. I was behind the bar, polishing glasses. There was a conversation going.
Come find us. The us is real — the people who have been walking this terrain in their actual towns, in their actual lives, before you opened the book and while you were reading it and after you put it down. We are not hidden. We are not somewhere else. We are in the room you are in, in the next coffee shop over, in the civic league nobody told you about, on the porch of the house that has been here longer than the developers, in the kitchen of the cooperative that does not advertise. Come find us is not a metaphor and it is not just a metaphor. It is both, the way real instructions usually are.