Milwaukee is often described as a city of sharp divides. Lines of race, economics, and politics run through its neighborhoods like fault lines that never rest.
Yet in community gardens, cultural festivals, and neighborhood projects, there has been evidence of something different: people tying themselves together in acts of shared creation.
This simple idea of connection, the making of life and community, is central to an ancient Japanese concept in Shinto called Musubi (産霊).
Musubi is not a deity in itself but a principle, the generative energy of existence. It is the power that brings things into being, the sacred act of tying, joining, or linking.
In the Shinto worldview, Musubi is both cosmic and personal. It is the force that causes the universe to unfold and the threads that bind people, nature, and spirit together. It is invoked in the names of powerful kami such as Takamimusubi, the High Creator, and Kamimusubi, the Sacred Musubi.
For the Japanese tradition, Musubi is not an abstract metaphor but a living reality. For Milwaukee, it may offer a lens to view its own struggles and possibilities.
A CITY OF TIES AND FRACTURES
Milwaukee’s identity has long been built from layers of connection. The city’s earliest foundations reflect immigrant arrivals — German, Polish, Italian — who brought industries, churches, and cultural life that shaped the region’s working-class character.
Later came the Great Migration of African Americans from the South, who added their strength to Milwaukee’s factories and neighborhoods even as they faced systemic discrimination. More recently, Latino communities and refugee groups from Southeast Asia, Burma, the Middle East, and Africa have carried their own traditions, languages, and energies into the city’s weave.
At the same time, Milwaukee has been ranked for decades as one of America’s most segregated cities. Racial and economic disparities define life chances in housing, schools, health care, and employment.
Current political polarization mirrors those divides. A city once defined by unions and progressive politics has become a microcosm of national battles, split between urban voters and suburban or rural blocs, often at bitter odds.
This is where Musubi’s meaning becomes urgent. The Shinto principle emphasizes not just connection but creation. It is the act of making new bonds, new life, and new futures.
Milwaukee cannot return to an imagined past of industrial prosperity or ethnic homogeneity. Its survival depends on generating ties across differences, binding together rather than cutting off.
MUSUBI IN LOCAL LIFE
The presence of Musubi can be glimpsed in community initiatives that focus on joining people together. Urban gardens on Milwaukee’s North Side bring neighbors into shared labor and shared harvests.
Interfaith dialogues between Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Buddhist groups cultivate relationships in a climate of suspicion and fear. Cultural festivals — from Mexican Fiesta to the annual Dragon Boat Festival — create spaces where heritage is preserved while bridges are built.
These are not always seen as spiritual acts, but they embody Musubi’s essence. The act of tending soil side by side, or marching together in celebration, creates new life. It ties communities across lines of race, religion, and class. It is generative, not destructive.
THE CITY AS A PROCESS OF BECOMING
Musubi also means becoming. In Shinto thought, existence is not static. Life is always unfolding, always growing. To live is to participate in creation.
Milwaukee itself is a story of becoming. Factories that once made beer, machinery, and tanneries have been demolished or repurposed, leaving behind vacancies but also new opportunities. Empty warehouses have become art studios, performing arts theaters, and small businesses. Neighborhoods once marked by decline now host immigrant restaurants, bilingual schools, and cultural centers. The city is being remade constantly, even if unevenly.
Immigrant families exemplify this process. Burmese refugees who settled in Milwaukee bring with them a tradition of resilience. Latino families continue to transform the South Side, with Spanish-language storefronts and murals reshaping the streetscape. These acts of settlement and growth are Musubi in motion. It is life being tied into the fabric of the city, making it new.
At the same time, forces of stagnation and resistance push back. Some cling to the idea of a Milwaukee that no longer exists, longing for ethnic uniformity or industrial might. Others exploit division for political gain, framing demographic change as a threat. The clash between becoming and resisting change defines much of the city’s political tension.
LOCAL STRUGGLE IN A NATIONAL MIRROR
Milwaukee does not exist apart from the rest of the country. National currents wash over the city, shaping its politics and its daily life. The rise of Trump and the MAGA movement has deepened polarization, turning questions of immigration, education, policing, and democracy itself into battle lines.
MAGA politics thrives on nostalgia, insisting that greatness lies in a mythical past that must be restored. It is a vision of unmaking — cutting ties, excluding, halting the process of becoming. This is sharply at odds with Musubi, which insists that life is always generating, always tying, always moving forward.
For Milwaukeeans, the national divide is not abstract. It appears in classrooms where teachers navigate culture war battles, in City Hall where debates over police budgets echo partisan talking points, and in neighborhoods where families worry about deportations or disenfranchisement. The struggle is not just over policy but over the city’s very capacity to tie together rather than unravel.
MUSUBI’S RELEVANCE TODAY
To view Milwaukee through Musubi is not to impose a foreign faith, but to borrow the concept of creation as sacred, connection as vital. In this frame, civic life becomes a process of weaving, and politics is judged not by how effectively it tears apart but by how powerfully it generates new life.
At a time when national rhetoric rewards division, Musubi offers another measure. It asks, are we binding or breaking? Are we allowing life to grow, or sever it?
Milwaukee’s reality shows both possibilities at once. It embodies the fractures of America, segregation, poverty, political rancor, and distrust. But it also reveals how connection and becoming remain possible, even under strain. Musubi, as an idea, makes visible what is at stake.
THE DANGERS OF UNMAKING
Nationally, the politics of division has become a tool of power. Trump’s rhetoric and the MAGA movement encourage suspicion of institutions, hostility toward immigrants, and rejection of democratic norms. At its core, this is a politics of unmaking. It cleaves the ties between communities, delegitimizes cooperation, and presents change as a threat rather than an opportunity.
For Milwaukee, this posture is not theoretical. The city has been at the center of voter suppression debates, with restrictions falling hardest on minority neighborhoods. It has seen heated arguments over immigration enforcement, with families living under the fear of separation. Federal budget fights ripple through the local economy, shaping schools, social services, and infrastructure.
Musubi frames these challenges in spiritual terms. A society that chooses to unmake, that resists tying and creating, works against the grain of life itself. Just as in Shinto mythology, the cosmos comes into being through acts of Musubi, so local communities can only thrive through acts of creation and connection. To pull apart those bonds is to resist existence itself.
SMALL ACTS, LARGE STAKES
The counterweight to unmaking is not found in abstract slogans but in local, often small, acts of tying together. Neighborhood cleanup projects in Milwaukee, led by youth groups and block associations, reclaim spaces once abandoned. Food pantries and mutual aid networks provide not only sustenance but solidarity. Churches, mosques, and temples engage in outreach that crosses lines of faith and culture.
These acts matter because they accumulate. Musubi is not a single dramatic gesture but a continuous process. Just as life itself renews with each birth, social bonds renew with each effort to connect. Even when national politics feels corrosive, these local practices demonstrate that becoming is still possible.
A CITY AS A MIRROR OF AMERICA
Milwaukee illustrates the national dilemma. It is a place where deep fractures coexist with powerful movements of creation. The country at large faces the same question, whether to embrace becoming, with all its uncertainty and diversity, or to retreat into division and false nostalgia.
Musubi does not offer a political program, but it offers a measure. Policies and rhetoric can be judged by whether they tie or sever, whether they generate new life or choke it off. By this measure, authoritarian tendencies — the silencing of dissent, the demonization of minorities, the undermining of democratic institutions — appear not only politically dangerous but spiritually corrosive. They oppose the fundamental current of life.
THE SACREDNESS OF BECOMING
Cities, like people, are never finished. They unfold, they struggle, they transform. Milwaukee’s history proves that change is unavoidable, but how that change is lived remains a choice. Musubi reminds us that becoming is sacred, that the act of creation is itself divine.
In this sense, Milwaukee’s immigrant families planting roots, activists building coalitions, and artists transforming abandoned spaces are engaged in spiritual work, whether they call it that or not. They are participating in Musubi, bringing new life into being, tying together strands that once seemed broken.
This stands in sharp contrast to voices calling for exclusion, rollback, or restoration of a fixed past that only ever existed in the fog of childhood memories. Musubi suggests that such a path is illusory. Life cannot be reversed or frozen. It can only move forward through the continual work of tying and creating.
A VISION FOR MILWAUKEE AND BEYOND
If Milwaukee’s divisions are stark, its possibilities are just as real. The city can be understood not just as a collection of neighborhoods but as a living process, one where each connection strengthens the whole. To frame civic life through Musubi is to see that every partnership, every bridge across lines of difference, is not political but sacred.
This perspective also casts the stakes of national politics in sharper relief. America, like Milwaukee, is at a crossroads – unmaking through division, or becoming through connection. The energy of Musubi suggests that the latter is not just preferable but necessary for life to continue.
In Milwaukee, the choice appears daily. Do neighborhoods retreat into isolation or work across boundaries? Do leaders pit groups against each other or foster shared futures? Do citizens accept division as destiny or insist on connection as possibility?
Milwaukee’s story is America’s story. It is torn by the same national conflicts, pressured by the same politics of fracture. But it also holds the same possibilities. Musubi offers no escape from conflict, but it offers clarity. The sacred act is not to divide but to join, not to halt but to create. In the face of authoritarian nostalgia, Musubi insists on the holiness of becoming.
© Photo
Cora Yalbrin (via Photo AI), and Yanisa C., Barbaux Nathan, Toby Howard (via Shutterstock)
