The Metamodern Regenerative Village

A lighthouse village vision emerging from the hearth of our metamodern future ❤️‍🔥

Images by Ari Nazem

Heart Transmission + Strategic Video

I’ve been tending to a vision at the heart of my soul for nearly six years now: a metamodern regenerative village, or Lighthouse.

This essay, alongside the mythopoetic images created by Ari Nazem, is the first in an upcoming series that begins to illuminate the vision, its ontological ground, the soul-stirring behind it all, and the sensibilities that move my heart in devotion towards what’s always already here: Home.

Be sure to also check out the companion video below, which is different: a more fiery, practical, strategic version of the vision comes through, diving into the structures, protocols and capacities necessary to culture-build this village vision into being.

You can start with the writing or the video, but just know they cover different territory!

I’d love to hear how either or both land for you. What resonates? What doesn’t? If you feel called to be involved in helping co-create this collective dream together, reach out!

A dialogue with Marcelo Peterlini about the strategy behind the metamodern regenerative village vision — why most intentional communities fail, how we can build differently through smaller experiments, and what capacities are necessary to live in a new-and-ancient way together. We get into curation, decision-making beyond postmodern consensus, the sacred secular operating system, and why the lighthouse beams but doesn't knock on doors.

Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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The Arrival

Images by Ari Nazem

There’s a vision that is tattooed on my soul.

It came through in March 2020, on an island off the coast of Maine, where I was born and reborn, where the salt air still feels like the first breath I ever took. It arrived not as an idea but as a felt sense. A somatic knowing so complete that my body recognized it before my mind could name it. A homecoming to a place I’d never physically been.

I call it a metamodern regenerative village, or Lighthouse.

Metamodern because it’s creating something new — a cultural sensibility, an artistry, a way of being together that’s distinct from the hippie communes of the sixties and the hyper-individualism of modernity. Regenerative because it’s rooted in right relationship with life itself — with the land, with ecosystems, with each other, and with the evolutionary impulse of Source. Village because it carries the ancient-future timeless quality of humans deeply at home together. And lighthouse because that’s my heart song — the mythopoetic image that orients my soul.

The felt sense of being at home in village lives in the bones of my body. It’s not just a thought or daydream. It’s a phenomenological reality I (and we) can rest into in any moment.

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House, Home, Hearth

I sometimes talk about this vision in three words: House, Home, Hearth.

House is the physical village: the buildings, the land, the island. What you can see with your eyes and feel with your hands. Home is the felt sense of being at home: with each other, with ourselves, with our sense of deep purpose and our connection to wholeness. You can be Home without a house, and you can have a house without being Home. Hearth is the temple where Mystery burns. The fire that keeps us warm yet can also destroy what we hold most precious. The heart of this force (the very currents of Love itself) are sacred, ever-changing, and always burning.

I don’t see the temple and the hearth as separate. At the heart of the temple is the hearth: the actual fire we sit around, commune with, and are warmed by. And at the heart of the hearth is the temple. Because every time we gather around a fire together, breaking bread, sharing silence, looking into each other’s eyes, we are already inside the most sacred space there is. The fire doesn’t inherently care whether we call it a ceremony or a Tuesday night dinner. It just burns, and it gathers us.

My church, if you want to call it that, is sitting around a dining room table with a big pot of soup and a cozy fireplace. Kids drawing imaginal worlds in crayons. Maybe someone playing guitar. People cuddling and laughing and others deep in rich conversation. The hum of the village outside, stars above — the felt-sense of being loved by the universe. I know who made this mug because it was crafted by my friend. The table is wood from the land. Candles making everyone’s faces glow. It’s this very ordinary human experience…timeless, ancient, but expressing freshly each moment it unfolds.

As Ram Dass says, one day we’ll remember that all we’re doing for eternity is sitting around the fire.

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The Mission

The soul mission of this village is simple: create the most nourishing and catalyzing field for each person’s unique wholeness to blossom forth — and offer that blossoming as a home for others. I sometimes call this becoming a sourcekeeper.

When any one of us expresses our full potential and offers it to the world, it creates the conditions for others to do the same. That fullness ripples outward into the collective, and the collective has even more capacity, love and care to offer. Not only back to its members but out into the broader circles of the world.

This is not magic nor a science: it’s an art, emerging through devotion to right alignment, deep coherence and shared agreements. Arising as the lifework of collective soulmaking.

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” -Ilya Prigogine

To be precise about what kind of wholeness I mean: this isn’t a pre-tragic fantasy wholeness. The kind that hasn’t yet met suffering and therefore can’t include it. It’s gesturing towards post-tragic. A wholeness that has walked through the ashes and found that the fire was also love, which beacons our most fierce care.

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The Collective Dream

This is certainly not my vision alone. It’s coming through me in a particular flavor and with a particular vow, but I experience it as a collective dream: one that lives in the hearts of thousands of people who share this longing. I’m stewarding the part of the mandala that is mine to serve. In some ways, I feel this as one of God’s dream for humanity. I don’t say that lightly.

I sense what eros longs for, even more than the arrival, is the journey. The deep pull toward becoming that which it desires to be. It’s very much like falling in love. Like courtship. A cosmic game of cat and mouse. The longing itself is the feeling of Home: right here and yet just out of reach, but also arriving in the reaching itself. It feels Soul has enraptured me in its desires, using me as a vessel in its mysterious chess game to birth its dreams moment-by-moment.

The vision feels already complete. Tt’s here and now in my heart, in Our Heart, in the future we’re communing with. And also: it’s definitely not yet here. In many ways, it doesn’t matter whether the mythopoetic version ever comes to be. It’s more about falling in love with it as a possibility and allowing the longing to move our souls, to move our bodies, to move our beings in a particular motion that seems to have a destination it’s always already arriving at.

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What This Is — and Isn’t

Here’s what this village is not.

It’s not a commune where everyone dissolves into undifferentiated collectivism. It’s not modern co-housing where people technically share land but live in separate worlds. And it’s not an ecovillage escape born from contempt for modernity or the savior complex of being the enlightened ones who’ve figured it all out.

What it is: a village where meta-shamans find home at the edges, making offerings and serving invisible wholes. Where monastics retreat into the woods. Where community weavers pour life-force into the beating heart of the village, working with visitors, tending the hearth of abundance. Where farmers cultivate the land in deep relationship with the soil. Where every archetype has its place, and where wholeness itself shape-shifts in dynamic flow to serve the unfolding needs of reality’s play.

The metamodern move is sometimes putting the we before yourself and simultaneously knowing that your individual unfolding is an intricate, intimate part of that wholeness. There’s no formula for this. It is an art form. A culture. A way of being. That’s why this is a years-and-decades-long vision — you can’t learn this at a weekend workshop. We’re all still learning this, together.

I see the village as concentric circles of belonging. At the center: those devoted to living on the land, year-round, in the thick of it. Around that: seasonal residents who come for extended periods. Then visitors who come for retreats, ceremonies, offerings. There might be a bed & breakfast, agricultural operations, schools, a temple and church, a co-working hub, markets, an apprenticeship program designed to support soul development. And of course: the beating heart of the sacred hearth at the center of it all.

Our metamodern sensibility sees indigenous, traditional, modern and postmodern ways of being as holons of a larger whole that can create together what no one expression can birth on their own. This is more about wise weaving than reinventing.

Forty to 150 people, at first. Intergenerational. Land-based, perhaps literally on an island, maybe even in Maine (where the vision first came through, where I was born) or even on the Azores Islands, where my ancestors are from. Time will tell, inshallah.

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The Sacred Architecture

Something I don’t often share: the lighthouse iconography carries a distinctly Christian current. Not in the way most people mean that word, as I don’t identify as Christian in human form. But my soul knows itself as part of this lineage. Christ Consciousness, perhaps. Maybe this lighthouse vision is the cross I’m taking up for this lifetime.

I experience the lighthouse as a subtle body. The light beaming from the top is the third-eye’s all-seeing soul. The golden warmth of the hearth inside is the heart chakra. The island it’s held by is the root: ground, body, earth. The cosmos above are the crown. And the ocean surrounding it all is boundless, timeless awakened wholeness. The entire mythopoetic organism is toroidal — energy flowing through and around itself, endlessly, evolving into ever-cohering expressions of love.

There’s a tattoo I’m going to get. It already lives on my soul. It’s the image I return to whenever I feel contracted, the wholeness that welcomes me home in the arms of love: a newborn child, a toddler, a woman and a man sitting around the fire inside the lighthouse. Every night before I go to bed, I kiss all my tattoos — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 — and then I rub the spot on my right ribs where this image lives, and hug myself. Whenever I lose my way, I close my eyes and return to it, and it returns me home.

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The Research

This village vision isn’t coming from nowhere.

For seven years, I’ve traveled the world as something like an immersive anthropologist of intentional community, visiting, living in, and apprenticing with dozens of transformational communities across the globe. I helped start one in Bali called Nuanu. I made a list of over a hundred communities that went mini-viral, with people still emailing me about it years later. And I grew up inside modernism’s best attempt at village — a small private school where every teacher knew every student, an island community where everyone gathered for Thursday night picnics and daily social connection, a boarding school campus, a small film production company that operated as a family.

In many ways, I know this experience in my bones. And I want to co-create the metamodern version of it: the developmental expressions, cultural worldview and inner & outer aesthetics that feel alive for my soul, married with the ancient, universal experience of being humans together deeply at home.

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The Soul Vow

Everything I do in my life right now feels in service of this vision. Literally everything.

I gave my vow to this mission in 2020. I sense I’m in a 10-year apprenticeship cycle — about halfway through. Even if someone handed me several million dollars and a piece of land, I wouldn’t take it. The soil isn’t ready yet.

In some ways I feel enslaved to this vision, and I mean that. If I tried to go off course, I believe life would find some clever way to redirect me. The karmic consequences of not doing this work are almost immediate.

I’m calling in 3-4 people whose souls are tattooed with this same image. Not just people who say Yes to the vision. That is in abundance. People for whom this is their unique soul work. Ari Nazem, who created the images for this article, is one of those people.

I imagine another co-source will be my partner, the woman I’ll start a family with. When I sense into having children, the thing I feel most is how to protect them and love them and give them the most beautiful life I can imagine. I want my children to be born in the womb of this mythopoetic garden.

After initiating this village with a group of co-sourcekeepers, I could see us eventually open-sourcing everything — all the learnings, structures, cultural codes. Maybe coming full-circle to my original craft and creating a documentary, something like The Biggest Little Farm but for a metamodern village. When I’m 45, 50, maybe I travel to other communities starting their own projects — each sourced in the uniqueness of those sourcekeepers, but running on a similar open-sourced structure and cultural code. As my mentor calls it, a sacred secular operating system, of sorts.

But it’s really important we do one thing right. One thing well. And trust that the wisdom ripples out, versus half-assing something and becoming Instagram famous while the whole thing is actually a mess in real life.

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The Shadow

The whole lighthouse image is a bit like guru yoga, a projection onto an imaginal god with these divine qualities of wholeness and home and perfection. Which happens to be deep medicine for the Enneagram One structure ;-)

I can see my own shadow and attachment system sometimes grab onto it as if it’s something outside of me that will bring me a fulfillment being longed for. The work of noticing that, allowing it, but also decoupling. The dojo of being with the karma entangled in the vision and trying to clean it while naming it so it doesn’t come out sideways. That’s ongoing.

It’s like awakening. You can awaken to true nature and see the whole game is empty. There’s no one to awaken because we’re all already Buddha. And yet from that place, a wellspring of compassion arises to help all forms of us come to live that directly. The village is similar. From the place of feeling an overflowing fullness, the impulse to invite others in, like a lighthouse — not as a demand or a necessity, but as a desire of the deep heart — keeps moving me forward.

The truth is: it doesn’t even matter if there’s an “arrival.” The alignment itself has already brought so much goodness and truth and beauty into being. The very act of coming home to alignment is the journey home. That’s the essence of sourcekeeping: getting there by being here, as John Churchill says.

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Welcome Home

This image: a newborn child, a toddler, a woman and a man around the fire inside the glowing lighthouse. The pulsing island beneath them. The golden hearth warming them. The light beaming out into the velvety dark. The luminous stars above. The ocean of loving awareness holding it all.

At the center of the hearth, the fire. At the center of the fire, a mystery. At the center of the mystery: this, just This.

Welcome home, friends.

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Other articles I've written that illuminate facets of the Lighthouse vision:
-A Vow to Soul
-Post-Healing Intentional Communities
-Temple and Village: Transmission as Relationship
-Transformational Communities
-Sourcekeepers Guild
-What (the heck) is Metamodernism?
-Illuminating Our Journey as Boulder Lighthouse Collective
-Mapping the Magic of PachaMama
-The End of Coaching

Images by Ari Nazem