Every spring, Jason finds as many of the nests as he can. He goes to them. He tells the herons, with his actual words, that he loves them and wishes them good luck. He is not the only one. Without any discussion, all of his friends love night herons. They are raising their young in the willow oak, as they have done for millions of years, as they will do after we are gone, as long as the trees hold.
This book has two authors. Jason Edelman is a small business owner and recovering community leader based in Norfolk, Virginia. He has spent years on neighborhood boards and knows what it feels like to stay in the room when the right thing to do is leave — and to leave anyway, eventually. He walks his neighborhood every day because it keeps him alive. He finds the night heron nests every spring and tells the herons that he loves them. He travels because staying in one place too long puts the soul to sleep. He has been a chef, a martial artist, a nature educator, a guide. He has seen what happens to people when they stand in old-growth forest for the first time and the light comes on.
One more name. My Sensei had it. My yoga teachers had it. My wilderness mentors had it — the ones I chose, not the ones assigned to me. They were unvarying. I spent years on the other names in this chapter, building the theory, accumulating the mistakes, convinced I was working toward something new. Connection was there at the beginning, in the room with the people who were trying to teach me, waiting for me to come back.
Connection comes first. Every time. Not knowledge. Not discipline. Not correctness. Not excellence. Connection.
If it is there, honor it. If it is not there, nothing can fake it.
The commons is built from connection, not from correct design. The design matters — Ostrom's eight principles are real, and they work — but the design is downstream of something prior. The first thing that has to exist between people attempting to govern something together is: I see you. I am here. We are in this together. Before the rules. Before the governance structure. Before the plan.
This is the thing the enclosure cannot produce. It can produce compliance. It can produce performance. It can produce the appearance of connection, maintained by incentive. But the actual thing — the felt sense of being recognized, of mattering to the people you are with, of existing in their attention — this the enclosure systematically starves, because it is the condition for everything it cannot control.
The commons begins with: I see you. The rest is structure in service of that seeing.
We were learning to attend. Attention, given consistently and with genuine curiosity, opens a channel. Not metaphorically. The channel is real. Behavioral on both ends. Reciprocal. The birds get as close to you as they feel comfortable. And we began to notice, over months of practice, that when we addressed them — kindly, directly, as one might address a neighbor — they became more comfortable. More present. The distance closed.
The birds remember.
Not metaphorically. The doves in our yard greet us differently than they greet the neighbors. The finches, wrens, and house sparrows do not flush at our approach the way they flush at strangers. The bluejays announce us. The squirrels watch us with a different posture. The grackles, when they come through in season, treat us as known terrain. The animals around the house recognize us — individually — and respond to us individually, because we have addressed them, individually, for years. We talk to them. They notice.
Corvids, famously, hold human faces for years and pass the information to their young. Other beings remember in shorter arcs. And some forms of memory exceed any single body — the recognition passes between organisms, between generations, between species. Memory here goes transorganic. The living world keeps track of who has paid attention, who has spoken kindly, who has thrown the rock, who has walked past five hundred times without looking up.
You are already in that ledger. The only question is what you will write next to your name.
Address it, if you can do so without feeling entirely ridiculous. Not performatively — you don't need to make a speech. As you might acknowledge a neighbor you are passing on the sidewalk. A nod. A word. Something that communicates: I see that you are here.
Notice what happens next.
This is not a guarantee. The bird may leave. The tree will not respond in any way you can immediately measure. The creek doesn't care whether you've acknowledged it. You are not trying to produce a result. You are restoring a channel that has been closed by the habit of treating the living world as backdrop.
You knew this once too, before the disenchantment project convinced you it was silly. The silliness was the armor. The armor was the wisdom. Play is the name real wisdom hides behind. The knowing is still there, waiting to be addressed kindly and directly, as you would address a neighbor.
The fifth capacity is entering — actually going into the parts of the world the official map said were empty, dead, mute, or already settled. The meadow that was waiting to be a parking lot. The lineage the disenchantment project was supposed to have buried. The conversation with the herons in your actual voice. The neighbor whose porch you walked past for two years before you knocked. The territory was not empty; you were trained to read it as empty. The wizard enters anyway, gently, the way a guest enters a kitchen they have not been in before, ready to be welcomed or refused and not pretending to know which it will be.