Rooted in Relation, Moving in Murmuration

I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, and as I do, I can’t help but feel it speaking to a book that’s already been living in me - Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown. They come from different cultural lineages, but there’s a conversation happening between them. One of the core ideas that’s rising up as they speak to each other and to me is interdependence and decentralization.

At the heart of both books is a shared belief in the power of distributed leadership, mutual care, and trust built over time. Interdependence and decentralization aren’t just theoretical ideas - they’re necessary blueprints for how we survive and grow together.

In Emergent Strategy, brown turns to the natural world as teacher: starlings flying in murmuration, oak trees whose roots stretch and hold one another, and the intricate mycelial networks underfoot that pulse with intelligence and connection. These systems don’t rely on top-down control. They move and adapt through relationship - through trust. “Move at the speed of trust,” she writes, offering more than a quote - it’s a way of being. Resilience, she reminds us, doesn’t come from size or dominance. It comes from depth, connection, and responsiveness.

And then Yunkaporta steps into the conversation with his own rhythm.

In Sand Talk, he writes, “Nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things.” That’s not just a metaphor - it’s a worldview. His “Connectedness” protocol echoes and deepens brown’s invitation into mutual reliance. For him, sustainability begins in pairs - then in networks of pairs - and then in networks of networks. It’s relational thinking rooted in kinship. And it resists the fantasy that one person, one authority, can manage complexity. “Self-organizing systems,” he says, “cannot be designed or maintained by a single manager or external authority.” In fact, trying to impose a hierarchy often destroys them.

Reading and listening to both at the same time, I feel a shift. Not just in how I think about movement work or collaboration - but in how I place myself inside of it all. Both writers are asking us to reorient. To unlearn the dominance-default and relearn complexity as kinship. They’re asking us to trust in something slower, messier, and much more alive.

When I reflect on the spaces I’ve helped hold - story circles, creative collaborations, organizing with others—I think about how hard and beautiful it is to move at the speed of trust. How tension shows up when the urgency of timelines doesn’t match the pace of relationship. And how something opens up when we let the system breathe, when we stop forcing, and let new forms emerge.

These books don’t give us formulas. They give us invitations. To watch the ways fungi communicate underground. To see fire as both destruction and renewal. To understand that knowledge lives in between us, not just inside one person. And to build our systems not like machines—but like ecosystems.

So I keep listening.
And I keep learning how to let go.