How Do Sustainable, Interdependent, Life-Giving Systems Work?
Claire L. Evans is a brilliant lady and bandleader. Her band is called YACHT, which is short for Young Americans Challenging High Technology.
Evans wrote a new article where she challenges high technology. It’s called, “The word for web is forest—What trees tell us about the internet,” and it is sublime reading. Here’s a small sample:
The life of a forest is many lives, entwined. It’s also intergenerational. The eldest trees—having survived storms, droughts, ravenous insects, and the damage wrought by capitalism and colonialism—serve as the central hubs of the wood wide web. They are the strongest, the most resource-rich, with taproots stretching far beneath the earth. Suzanne Simard calls these elders “Mother Trees,” as do many indigenous people.
…like a struggling forest, the web is no longer healthy. It has been wounded and depleted in the pursuit of profit. Going online today is not an invigorating walk through a green woodland—it’s rush-hour traffic alongside a freeway median of diseased trees, littered with the detritus of late capitalism. If we want to repair this damage, we must look to the wisdom of the forest and listen to ecologists like Simard when they tell us just how sustainable, interdependent, life-giving systems work.
Are You Always the Hero of Your Journey? Don’t Be
My friend Tom Asacker is the philosopher/poet of corporate America. He wants to help us step out of our fabricated stories and into our true power.
"Your self-story is not you," Tom says during this podcast conversation with Jennifer H. Carey. He also says that we are conditioned by our upbringings to learn how to be safe, productive, and respected—and that this leads us to unconsciously separate ourselves from the reality of oneness and community.
Vulnerability Isn’t Comfortable
Do you know the deep reservoir of faith that most business owners and operators bring to the job every day? Faith in themselves. Faith in their team members. And an unwavering faith in the product or service being sold.
Entrepreneurs don’t just believe in themselves; they believe in their solutions. That belief is what sustains them while making a pitch for funding and receiving yet another rejection. This is what keeps them going when others don’t believe in their ideas (or at least not yet).
At the same time, people who start and run businesses are human, and therefore they must navigate the pain of failure in order to endure. Too often this work is done in isolation or not at all. Because vulnerability isn’t normal for over-achievers and big believers, nor is it comfortable. Yet, vulnerability and the suffering behind it can make a person more real and easier to relate to, more humble and likable.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that "a single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities,” and he’s correct. My message to myself and fellow travelers: Keep the dream alive.
Lagniappe
What’s in a name? If we’re talking about the Washington Redskins, the answer is simple—bias and overtly racist thinking are in the name. Same with Squaw Valley, the famous resort near Lake Tahoe. So, Squaw Valley is no more.
“I’m not a man who comes at politics from a political background,” Matthew McConaughey says. “I’m a statesman-philosopher, folk-singing poet.”
Terry Tempest Williams said the push to protect Bears Ears changed her life. “It has been a redefining of what kinship means,” she said.
Elon Musk is moving all of Tesla to Austin and he wants to create “an ecological paradise” at the company’s new manufacturing plant and headquarters.
"Democrats have to prove that the government can deliver for people. If they don’t, authoritarianism wins." -Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic
Austin companies are hiring. Through September, more than 150 companies announced the addition of 20,840 jobs in the area, according to data from the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.
We Can Work It Out
To connect with people in today’s marketplace, don’t just state your offer. Cast a spell. If you need help, let me know.
Thanks for being here now.