Early this morning, the quiet outside my window was suddenly broken. A group of crows erupted all at once from the trees. No visible leader. No debate. One call, and the whole group shifted at once. Watching them, I was struck by how seamlessly they responded as a whole.

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Not chaos. Not rigid hierarchy.Just a synchronous response to what was happening around them—and to each other.

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It made me wonder where and how we’ve lost some of that ease. Because right now, many of us are living in a different rhythm and it feels incredibly difficult to move together even when there seems to be so much longing to feel that sense of shared belonging and care.

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The pace.
The polarization.
The constant pull to do something.

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There’s pressure. To be able to look after yourself. To know where you stand. To take action.

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We’re awash in agency—opinions, declarations, decisions, decrees. The emphasis is on autonomy, on standing firmly in what is ours. And yet, so many of us feel unmoored.

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Agency without communion—without a felt sense of what we share—begins to fracture. Action taken in a fragmented field loses coherence. It can start to feel like one of those old arcade games where the balls ricochet endlessly, full of motion but going nowhere.

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When we talk about polarization, we often focus on the sharp edges of difference. But underneath that is something quieter and more consequential: the loss of a lived sense of what we hold in common. Communion is the unspoken sharing of common ground—an exchange that happens not just intellectually, but relationally. It’s the experience of being with, not being right. While communion means stopping and checking in and even circling around something less directly, it isn’t passivity or a retreat. In living systems, it’s how intelligence forms.

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A school of fish doesn’t appoint a strategist before it turns. Each fish is exquisitely sensitive to shifts in the water—the flicker of movement, a change in pressure. They circle, re-orient, and gather information. And then, when direction clarifies, they move—together. That circling isn’t a weakness because it takes time. It’s collective wisdom and instinctual, it leads us to move in synch with each other and our environment without thinking.
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Agency is our capacity to choose, it is our will and our ability to influence the direction of our lives. It is a powerful and necessary human gift. Many of us have been trained—by culture, by work, by necessity—to prize independence. To make things happen. To drive forward. To fix, decide, implement.
That capacity matters. We need it. And yet agency on its own can become brittle. When the world is changing faster than any one person can track, action without collective sensing can pull us further off course.

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What is needed now isn’t less agency, but a rebalancing. A remembering that humans, like other social beings, are designed not only to act on the world—but to move with it.  And that nature has a way of rebalancing itself without our effort - both the nature within our bodies and outside them in the natural environment.
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Agency and communion.
Not either/or.
A rhythm.
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If you feel the tension between speaking up and staying in a relationship… between pushing forward and waiting for a signal that it’s time to move… you’re not alone.
Across time and cultures, humans have practiced listening together. Sitting in circles. Sharing stories. Pausing long enough to remember what binds us before deciding what to do next.

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In many places, that rhythm has been disrupted. By speed. By technology. By the belief that immediate action, efficiency and productivity is always the highest good.
But the capacity to be aware and in tune with that rhythm is still there.

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Perhaps the invitation now is simple: to strengthen our ability to sense together again. To create spaces where connection is not a byproduct, but the purpose. Where stories are shared not to persuade, but to understand. Where we can feel with deeper awareness what is at play before we step into motion.

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Like the crows in the trees—alert, responsive, attuned.
Independent, yet somehow instinctively moving together.

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