As we prepare our hollow for spring, including turning over the garden and planting seeds, I am once again seeing that my role in aiding the sustainability of the hollow’s natural community is very small. In terms of changes, I only need to plant a few trees, remove vines during winter and be careful to take as little of the hollow for my own purposes as needed, so that the natural community can thrive through its own flow of good works in the Earthly river of life.

The Earth is a vast network of natural communities like our hollow sustainably flowing through imaginable eons of time. In the same way, human families and communities can sustain ourselves through loving each other in our daily actions.

A necessary part of sustainability is that parents care of their children and the community supports young families. For me, my journey toward the feminine helped me see that as a man, I had a role to be a helpmate to my wife in caring for her children. Likewise, as a community member, loving my neighbors means caring for young families and seeking a community that supports the Earthly flow of life into eternity.

In traditional patriarchy, which has held sway for millennia in most of what is called civilization, this is reversed in an unsustainable way of life. The woman, already tasked with caring for her children, is supposed to serve her husband and the children to obey them. This creates a society where isolated male egos determine the direction of the community and larger society and where many women seek to become more like patriarchal men. Rather than communities supporting all families as needed we are divided into haves and have-nots with a privileged group of ethno-religious (or ethno-philosophical) puritans, violent men and money-chasers destroying natural and human resources through vain glory displays of consumption and millennia of wars fueled by traditional hatreds and misuse of power-over-others.

Just as larger societies can be unsustainable, our families can be unsustainable when one or both parents do not love each other and their children in daily actions. It is in this hard reality that I see negative consequences carry through, creating harsh poetic justice like Shakespearean tragedies where parents suffer the consequences of our mistakes, whether we consciously recognize our culpability or not.

In my own experience, I have witnessed the evolution of intergenerational abusive families that, as time passed, turned out to be unsustainable, much to everyone’s suffering. In one family, the children of an abusive puritan Grandmother were abused in their marriages or became abusive. Another child died young. As her children’s abusive families went through tragedy and upheaval, including addictions, injuries, physical and mental illnesses and early deaths, she continued to play games, pitting her abused daughter against her abusive son.

Marriages broke up. Families frayed and became estranged. All of her children and three grandchildren died before her. Though she remained unrepentant of the harm she had done, her family life was filled with suffering and she, too, eventually suffered greatly. The surviving families splintered into physically and emotionally distant units, connected only by their DNA.

In other instances, heavy-handed puritan parents had children who defiantly and unrepentantly rebelled through decades of alcoholism and addictions, causing their parents to suffer and, in some cases, experience the ultimate revenge of dying with the belief that their unrepentant children would be condemned by their deity. In the same way, I’ve witnessed children of abusive thinkers or addicted partiers repeat the chaos of their childhood and then react into sober puritanism, causing their parents to suffer through estrangement and accusations of ungodliness from their children. The cultural icons of our societies—puritan religion verses skeptical thinkers and wild partiers—are weapons in these families’ internal wars against each other, much to everyone’s loss.

Since I am a stepfather in a family culture very different from my original one, I’ve learned what works in my original family can be counterproductive in my chosen one. I can say that I can’t count all the mistake’s I’ve made as a partner and stepfather because I have yet to stop making them. All I have to offer is my love for our family and my new learning each day.

In addition to our own failings, when we see other family members failing the family, there are limits to what can be done. Knowing that in a family what goes around comes around with a great power, I receive both a faith that conscientious, thoughtful love will return and a warning that whatever mistakes are made will also return.

Of all the webs of life where what goes around comes around, it is in the family that this principle is most evident. Narcissists and abusers may try to use their egos to callous themselves to others, but they still suffer the consequences of their actions with their families. In the personal world, words are rarely necessary. Events around us speak their truth without us needing to comment.

My dear mother-in-law, who I knew as a model of serenity, quiet devotion and joy, probably understood this dynamic more than most others I have known. Her simple faith made her a joy to be with; her many years in our home are fondly remembered by all. In times of trouble and joy—which almost always happen together—emulating her faith in conscientious love is a high peak for a skeptical thinker like me to climb.