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ôtsôtot Tîengûun 🤝

Planning, Budgeting, Investment, Financials

Beliefs​

  • The best plan is a living document, not a stone tablet. A community's plans and budgets must be flexible and constantly revisited, as needs and conditions change. To treat a plan as sacred and unchangeable is a form of tyranny.
  • A healthy community has many arguments. Disagreement is not a sign of failure, but a sign of engagement. Silence and the absence of dissent are the true warnings of a society in decline. A meeting that ends without a decision is more successful than a decision made without consensus.
  • "Fairness" is not about everyone getting the same thing. Fairness is about everyone getting what they need to thrive. True equity requires acknowledging different needs and circumstances.
  • Transparency is a form of trust. All communal ledgers, resource lists, and meeting notes should be open, not to police each other, but to foster a culture of shared responsibility and knowledge.
  • Always plan to meet and revisit decisions after consensus: The true measure of a decision is how it is implemented and how it feels the next day. A good consensus includes a plan for checking in and making adjustments.
  • A healthy community has "soft edges." It should be easy for newcomers to join and for members to leave without penalty, ensuring all association is voluntary.
  • Facilitation is a temporary burden, not a permanent role. To prevent the rise of soft hierarchies, all facilitator duties should be rotated regularly among all willing and capable members of the community.
  • The health of the weave is measured by its quietest thread. A community is only as strong as its ability to hear and value the contributions of its most marginalized or shy members.

Appearance​

Tîengûun is a deity of process, and their manifestation is a subtle, rising tide in the affairs of people. One feels their presence first not as a figure, but as a change in the dynamics of a group. When Tîengûun draws near, disjointed arguments begin to find a common rhythm, selfish impulses soften into a willingness to listen, and the chaotic noise of a crowd starts to coalesce into the productive murmur of a great assembly. When they finally take a visible form, it is awe-inspiring not for its power, but for its complexity. Tîengûun appears as a vast, semi-translucent being that is simultaneously a loom, a map, and a meeting in session. Their body has a central, stable core of calm, focused energy, but their periphery is a constant, humming motion of countless hands. These are not their own hands, but ghostly, overlapping images of every hand in the community: the calloused hand of the follower of Îfêstôs, the ink-stained hand of Suluswutî’s scholar, the gentle hand of the Bostet-sworn caregiver. The hands are engaged in the endless work of the collective: they weave glowing threads of connection on a vast, spectral loom that forms Tîengûun’s shifting "body"; they pass resources—glowing orbs of light representing food, tools, or aid—from one to another in a seamless flow of mutual support; they cast votes with stones of light; and they are raised to seek recognition to speak. Tîengûun’s "skin," if it can be called that, resembles a living cartographical chart or a mind map. Lines of light, like trade routes or lines of affinity, shift and redraw themselves across their form as new connections are made and new plans are agreed upon. Watching them is like seeing the entire social and economic life of a community visualized in real-time. Their head is the least distinct part of their form, often appearing as a sphere of woven light, a physical representation of a "hive mind" or collective consciousness. It has no single face, for to give it one would be to give the community a single ruler. Instead, one might see fleeting, superimposed images of the community's members as they speak or are listened to, their faces momentarily becoming part of the godhead before receding back into the whole. The voice of Tîengûun is the ultimate expression of their nature. It is a polyvocal hum that contains every voice from the meeting. It is the sound of a dozen different arguments being gently braided into a single, strong cord of consensus. It is the quiet rustle of a thousand distributed ledgers balancing themselves. To listen to Tîengûun is to hear disagreement, debate, and dissonance not as destructive noise, but as the necessary, creative friction from which a truly resilient agreement is forged. To be in Tîengûun’s presence is to feel profoundly part of something larger than yourself, without feeling diminished. It is the feeling of being a vital, necessary node in a great, intelligent network. They are not the will of the people, but the process by which that will discovers itself.

Manifestations​

They are found in meetings that are going smoothly, estimations that are found to be exact, an idea that appears in multiple people's heads simultaneously each one enhancing the other's, a perfectly executed secret handshake, a grabbed handful of items that ends up being precisely how many were needed, a perfectly orchestrated plan, a noticing of an issue with a budget.