Anna Swisher

We are living in an epic moment:

the future of our children depends on

our capacity to build a better way, to live in harmony with each other and with the natural world.  We need the village.  No one of us can do it alone.  It's time to move away from competition, and into collaboration.  It's time to sit together, dream together, dance together, pray together.  It's time to find compassion and understanding in our hearts, to share our resources, to respond to the needs of others.  We need to find ways to build resilience, so that together we can respond to the challenges we face.  We need to tell our stories, and we need to write new ones.  We need to meet at the central hearth to fan the flames of our hearts.  Bring your children, bring your elders.  Bring your gifts and your sorrows.  I will meet you there.  We are stronger together.  

​

If we are willing to look and listen, nature can teach us how to live in harmony and abundance.  Indigenous and Earth-based cultures offer inspiring models of community and village life, and there are many contemporary movements taking place that intend to bring us closer to each other, closer to the land we live on that sustains us, and into more intimate and sustainable relationship with our resources.  I am blessed and honored to carry inspiration and teaching from many traditions, lineages, teachers, and communities, that guide and inform my efforts to weave the fabric of community back into our modern culture and enhance our ability to live a thriving, abundant, and meaningful life.  Community building bridges my professional work and my personal life, and is a central and essential thread of creating and living a new way forward.  

​

The longing for community is so apparent.  We all seek to be understood and supported, to feel deep connection and belonging.  Paul Born writes that Deep Community is built on four pillars: sharing our stories, taking the time to enjoy one another, taking care of one another, and working together to create a better world.  This is the kind of community I am interested in fostering, and is the basis of the social fabric that I am devoted to tending.  It is this way of being together that promotes the kind of care, support, and activism that is being called for now, in a time of great uncertainty.  We need to be resilient.  We are stronger together. 

​

My belief in the power of community fundamentally informs who I am and what I do.  My intention is to help bring contemporary culture into more contact with a deeply rooted sense of community, and to be an active agent of village building and cultural regeneration.  May this page serve as a place of inspiration.  I intend to share some of the community resources, projects, initiatives, teachings, and programs, that support the health of community, in hopes that you will find something to nourish your own needs for connection, support, and inspiration.  

​

I encourage you to be inspired, and to share your ideas.  I'd love to hear from you.  I invite you to share your longings, your sorrows, your passions, your laments, your deep desires, your ideas for collaboration, contribution, resource sharing; anything to support the gathering of the tribes.  

 

We are stronger together.