A Village Navigates a Suicide Threat

When someone escalates to hurling the words “I feel suicidal” as a grenade into the space, what does the village do?

Do you diagnose, analyse the Kamikaze pilot mid-descent, apply a theory—This is your Gremlin—and step back from the fire?

Do you summon your Rescuer, armoured in good intentions, so you don’t have to feel the raw animal fear in your own chest?

Do you become the Victim, with shrapnel in your nervous system, where your mixed-emotion-fueled-helplessness and powerlessness feels like the truth?

Do you bargain—softly, urgently—inviting a false adaptive promise that the other won’t hurt themselves, a fragile treaty written and glued with fear?

Or do you let your Gremlin take the wheel, speaking from high ground and certainty:

This isn’t me!

This is her stuff.

When Mari arrived for our Possibility Team shared meal, the Barn was already warm with voices, connection and community. She slipped instead toward the piano.

I saw it.

A small divergence.

A note out of key.

I said nothing.

I did not offer the mirror that might have sounded like: “Mari, I know you long for connection, and I see you choosing solitude, playing the piano.” “What is happening for you about that?”

I withheld the weight of witnessing.

I set my knowing down, quietly, as if silence were kinder than truth.

Later—in the space where we Catch the First Hook, listening slows and meanings and reflection surface, as we viewed each frame of our village-produced movie, I learned she had been newly un-homed, unmoored from the place she slept. She was playing music to survive her dislocation, and attempt a landing.

Melissa owns her contribution to Mari going up the emotional arousal staircase, which began when Mari announced she had decided to stay the night. 

I went straight into ‘what is needed practically?’ mode. Into my Hurry Up driver from 122 ways to create low drama in Building Love that Lasts, as I offered a sleeping space. I feel sad I didn’t inquire nor acknowledge that Mari was feeling something. I feel sad because I missed the opportunity to hold a discovery listening space with Mari for her to find what she was feeling and ask for what she wanted. At the end of the next day Mari silently left our event.

Two days later Mari messaged in a couple of Telegram groups that she was suicidal and calling an ambulance. After her hospital visit Mari reached out to Gabriela. 

Subsequently Gabriela phoned me for spaceholder coaching. She was scared and found the edge of her competence hearing suicide in Mari’s voice message. I wondered how I could restore dignity for Mari and what we as a village could learn from Mari’s “I am calling the ambulance, I am suicidal” grenade. 

“How could I do this?”

Ubuntu philosophy and process is increasingly recognized and embraced in other parts of the world as a powerful tool for promoting social cohesion, empathy, and compassion. It is  centered on interconnectedness and shared humanity, summarized by the phrase “I am because we are,” meaning an individual’s identity and well-being are tied to their community’s. It emphasizes compassion, mutual respect, collaboration, and communal harmony, contrasting with Western individualism, by prioritizing the collective good, forgiveness, and restorative justice, and influenced leaders like Nelson Mandela.

The two Chinese symbols for crisis are danger and opportunity. I began viewing this crisis as an issue for the Village, not the individual. We have had two recent suicides in our village: Dan Palmer and Martin Smith. I didn’t want a third.

I used this event as an opportunity and called Mari and our Mangawhai Possibility Team community around the fire, albeit a Zoom call fire with a mihi whakatau, a formal but less ceremonial Māori welcome, like a simplified pōwhiri with The Land’s purpose song. 

The Land, contexted in Radical Responsibility, is a place that grows people, through a foundation of principle-based, feelings-focused, Adult collaborative interactions and skill building, so that all beings are nourished, healed, and abundantly resourced to bring their gifts to the world. 

In the Zoom call I introduced Eric Berne’s 3 rules of communication, particularly focusing on the third rule of communication Ulterior Transactions, that is Low Drama communication, where the outcome is determined by the hidden level message. In any communication there is a stimulus and a response. I invited Mari and everyone to draw a staircase. I wanted to scrutinise frame by frame our Village film footage one transaction at a time.

What you see in this recording is Mari vulnerably revealing nearly 100 steps that eventually escalated 72 hours later to an emergency call to the ambulance. In the last 30 minutes we each drew an emotional arousal staircase of a recent Low Drama and discovered what happens when step 1 and above is bypassed. 

Our team is experimenting with asking “ Are you on step 1” as an early intervention that has the potential to prevent further escalation.

There has been evolution and transformation of The Land since this call. Our new declaration: The Land is an Archan Initiation Centre, centred around the next culture Nature School, next culture initiation and transformational training spaces, supported by next culture Syntropic Food Forest.