Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
But as each climate disaster brings our current system closer to collapse, we have an overriding obligation to future generations, and to life itself, to shine a directional beacon through the darkness of our times to a potentially brighter future—and to help lay down a trail toward it.
As we navigate the path ahead of us, there’s a long list of goals and tasks on our list to strengthen our community, support our friends and neighbors, and create a thriving space where our crops and the people around us can flourish and benefit from the resilience we are contributing.
There is an end to this culture of self-harm. It will not be comfortable, I’m sure. But it will not be an end of the world.
I celebrate the fact that I am no more than “stuff,” as I’m not just any pile of atoms, but a unique one capable of experiencing emotion, enjoyment, love, awe, and all the rest. I get to revel in a marvelous world of other unique creatures.
Paradigm shift means a deep change in the values, beliefs, goals and function of an existing system.
In this Frankly, Nate follows up the recent Reality Roundtable on poverty with a wider perspective on the different types of “wealth” in our society that go beyond the material.
I asked Cara what the group’s shift to a focus on young people had brought to the group. She said: “It helped us to view every aspect of the town from a young person’s perspective. Taking an approach focused on integrating their needs opened up many new doors and generated more interest in what we do.”
There’s so much at stake, so much to lose, but if Howard Zinn were with us today, I suspect he would look at the rise of bold and visionary organizing, led by generations of young leaders, and tell us that change, on a planet in deep distress, is coming soon.
We first need to listen to the world, listen to the voices we’ve suppressed, listen to reality. As Machado says, “Do the dishes”, meaning tend to and take care of the physical bodies enmeshed and entangled with modernity.
It’s okay to let go of the free will illusion. Nothing big changes. The universe will not stop. Just breathe.
It takes a certain type of corporate culture to keep on doing things in the face of mounting evidence that they are the wrong things to do. A corporate culture, in other words, with “no reasonable doubt”, in the memorable phrase of the management academic Charles Handy.
Georgia Woods, one of the founders of Grow Heathrow told me that the project “brought the ‘yes’ of Transition together with the need for resistance, linking the yes and the no”.
