Hello Dear Community,

A few years ago, scientists using a new imaging technique found something that had been hiding in plain sight inside the human body: a vast, fluid-filled network of connective tissue running between our organs, cushioning them, carrying signals, keeping everything in communication. It had never been mapped before, partly because it was everywhere; too ordinary and too diffuse to notice until someone finally looked closely enough.

So much of what sustains us works the same way. The relationships that hold a community together, the everyday exchanges of care that ask for nothing in return, rarely call attention to themselves. But when they’re missing, everything grows brittle and lifeless. This issue is an invitation to notice the connections we don't always see, and the caring that moves through them.

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The Growing Edge: Making Invisible Connectors Visible

​The Interstitium is a community of practice founded by Jenn Brandel, Ariel Brooks, and Christine Lai, growing out of Brandel's Radiolab episode and Orion essay that borrowed the biological term "interstitium" (from the newly-mapped connective tissue between organs) as a metaphor for the often-invisible relational work that holds communities, movements, and organizations together. They call the practitioners who do this bridging work "interstitionaries": people who weave relationships, move information, and enable the flow of resources, trust, and meaning across otherwise fragmented systems, tending the health of the whole rather than any single institution or outcome. ​

After the essay sparked over 700 people responding: "This is me," the three co-founders built out frameworks, working groups, regional gatherings, and an online hub called the Atlas of the Living Interstitium: a field guide profiling circulators and bridge-builders, with a glossary for naming work that usually goes unseen and unvalued. Their own latest newsletter reflects that infrastructure in action: working groups are producing tools like interstitionary metaphors and gathering games, and the "Illuminators" group is running a three-tiered call for member-submitted profiles to build out a more global, varied set of examples of what interstitionary work looks like.

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Insight & Inspiration: Vulnerability as a Path to Strength

For nearly a century, US Forest Service policy after the catastrophic 1910 "Big Blowup" fires enforced total fire suppression across Western coniferous forests, overriding the Indigenous practice of controlled "cultural burning" that had long kept these ecosystems healthy. Without periodic burns to thin fuel loads and reduce insect infestation, forests grew overcrowded, and trees competing for water became vulnerable to disease and pine beetle predation. As told by a Fetzer Institute’s Case Study, this was the backdrop when, in August 2020, the Cameron Peak Fire tore through Northern Colorado's forests and reached Drala Mountain Center, a meditation retreat center located on 600 acres in the Rockies.

Recognizing that treating symptoms such as pine beetle infestations wouldn't heal the deeper imbalance, Michael Gayner (then Drala's Executive Director and now President and CEO of the GCC) partnered in 2018 with the Fort Collins Conservation District to pursue holistic ecosystem restoration rather than piecemeal fixes. The approach was based on establishing a healthy ecosystem; mitigating the threat of fire was a natural byproduct. Due to decades of fire suppression, the forests on the Drala land and throughout the area, were overcrowded, diminishing biodiversity, leaving trees competing for water and vulnerable to fire and insects. The costs were real: 70% of the trees on the site had to come down, and some on staff resisted, grieving trees they'd come to know as friends. However, that work proved decisive. When the Cameron Peaks Fire finally reached the property, it met a healthy forest which allowed firefighters to contain it and anchor a defensive line that stopped the northern arm of the fire, protecting communities to the east, including the forest itself.

The story offers a compelling parallel for compassion practice: that lasting resilience, whether in a forest or a human community, comes from tending the system with care over time, even when that care asks us to let go of something in service of the greater whole.

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News You Can Use: Why Kindness Helps the Helper

Why does helping others leave the helper better off too? A new review in Current Directions in Psychological Science argues that kindness toward others, even strangers, borrows a neural system that evolved to bond parents to their offspring. This resolves a puzzle in prior research: caring for a declining loved one can raise a caregiver's mortality risk, while volunteering and giving tend to extend life. The difference, the authors argue, is that giving itself is protective; it's witnessing a loved one's suffering that takes the toll. The same brain circuitry that makes caregiving feel rewarding, and dampens self-protective instincts, activates whether we're comforting a partner or donating to a stranger.

The evidence goes beyond correlation: randomized studies show that assigned acts of kindness reliably lower depression, anxiety, and loneliness, while also reducing blood pressure and inflammation, sometimes even when people's stress levels don't change. The authors' key insight is that prosocial acts build meaning and purpose more reliably than happiness, echoing parenting research, where more daily stress often coexists with more purpose and longer life. The takeaway: wellbeing may depend less on what feels good, and more on what makes us feel needed.

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Have You Read It? The Compassionate Life

Marc Ian Barasch, known for earlier books on healing and recovery, turns his attention here to compassion, arguing that kindness, empathy, altruism, forgiveness, and reconciliation together represent humanity's best chance of surviving a world fractured by violence and division. Drawing on science, religion, psychology, and theology alongside his own experiences trying to live compassionately, Barasch moves fluidly between big-picture reflection and grounded reporting. He profiles figures like the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela as models of principled kindness, but also lesser-known people, including someone who donated a kidney to a stranger and a hospice volunteer he describes as radiating warmth. He also recounts his own experiences living among Denver's homeless as part of a Zen Peacemaker practice, visiting HeartMath researcher Doc Childre, and speaking with Father Thomas Keating, all while examining how compassion shows up (or fails to) in the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Rwandan genocide.

A year after its publication, Barasch founded the Green World Campaign, planting millions of trees and spreading regenerative agriculture across three continents to restore degraded land and support communities on the front lines of climate change; compassion translated directly into ecological repair.

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Let’s Practice!

This week, notice the invisible connectors around you. Who makes things flow, brings people together, shares information, or quietly makes others feel cared for?

Choose one of those people, including perhaps yourself, and take a moment to acknowledge the connection they help sustain.

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Save the Date! Weaving Community

Wednesday, 26th August 2026
10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm UK / 7pm SAST / 10:30pm IST
Online & Free
​Register here​

How do we build spaces where relationships flourish and collective healing can happen? Join us for a conversation with Tasneem Behardien, founder of Cape Town Stitch to Resist, exploring how shared spaces, creativity, and storytelling help us cultivate belonging, resilience, and the relational foundation that transforms the world around us.

This is the second session in our series Connectors: The Essential Toolkit, which is part of our flagship Connectors Program and open to all. Hope to see you there!

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A Question for You Where in your own life have you been the interstitium, the connective tissue nobody named, holding something together without credit? What did that cost you, and what did it give you?

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The health of the whole depends on the care flowing through its parts. As you go into your week, we invite you to carry this spirit of connection with you, whether by reaching out to an "interstitionary" in your life, engaging in a small act of kindness, or joining us for our upcoming conversation. Together, we are weaving something resilient, compassionate, and deeply alive.

With gratitude,
Fabiana
Editor, Coming Home

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