 Patti Digh is recording the answers of readers to the question “What would you do today if you had just 37 days to live?” Some of these answers are masterful pieces of writing. I read them over, several times, and then I asked myself what I would do.
I know what I would not do: work, travel, or party. I’ve done enough of these things to realize they are substitutes to fill an empty space in us that is better filled with simpler, more generous, more thoughtful, instinctive, joyful and sensuous activities. As you can see from the graphic reproduced with yesterday’s article, I’m pretty organized (perhaps even anal) about what I do and intend to do with my time. As long as I believe I have more than 37 days, I will continue to do these things I now know I am meant to do, in a disciplined and well-paced manner: to play,
to love, to learn, to converse, to give (ideas, energy, knowledge, capacities), to be self-disciplined in maintaining my health and expanding my personal capacity, to write, to reflect, and to be attentive. This, I’ve finally come to understand, is who I am. Perhaps this is who we all are. When I study the behaviour of wild creatures, when I read about how the most knowledgeable and intelligent and admired people in the world live, when I listen to and read the advice of indigenous people, people connected to all-life-on-Earth, it seems to me that this is what they all do. It has just taken me, poor disconnected and confused civilized human, a lifetime to discover what they knew all along. Recently I’ve been focused on “love, conversation and community” as the means to make the world a better place and to find meaning and purpose to one’s life — to be of use, as my friend Dave Smith puts it. I try to be of use, every day, and to work towards creating what I call “working models” of a better way to live and make a living. Hence my recent passion for identifying and assisting in the creation of Natural Enterprises (self-managed places where people work together responsibly, sustainably, joyfully, and meaningfully) and Intentional Communities (self-managed places where people live together responsibly, sustainably, joyfully, and meaningfully). Natural Enterprises in a Natural Generosity Economy built around Natural Communities. And within these communities, I try to let-myself-change, to adapt and be more authentically myself, and to help others do the same. But if I had only 37 days to live I think I would suspend these important activities, these model-building and model-being projects. My father is not well, and he has been told that he may not have long to live. He has always been my model, and I am like him in many ways. He has, for the last year or so, been “setting his lands in order”, as Eliot puts it in The Waste Land just after he describes the thunder fable of the Upanishad: Datta, dayadhvam, damyata — giving, sympathy, self-control. The fact that these three ancient thunders parallel so closely my modern love, conversation, community mantra gives me pause. When I was younger and learning to write poetry my father stepped me through The Waste Land to explain what it meant. He taught me well. But when it is time to set one’s lands in order, it is also time, I think, to suspend love, conversation and community activities, in favour of quieter, more solitary pursuits. To try to jam a lifetime of such activities into a 37 day orgy of frenzied living, to the point of self-exhaustion, would I think be selfish, futile, and unfair to those left behind to pick of the pieces. Given only 37 days, there is not enough time to love. Not fairly anyway, for those who would then lose that love. When I started thinking about Patti’s question I thought at first I’d like to spend the time with all those I’ve come to love. But then I concluded that was self-centred and cruel. Love is a drug, after all, for better and for worse, and a co-addictive one. And I’m not really sure I know what love is, anyway, and to try to find out in 37 days strikes me as, at best, ungracious. The words of the Joni Mitchell song Amelia came to mind: Maybe I’ve never really loved
I guess that is the truth I’ve spent my whole life in clouds At icy altitudes This mingled retelling of the Icarus legend and the more modern legend of Amelia Earhart is, in a way, as much my soul song as Neil Young’s Will to Love, the song about a salmon swimming upstream through much hardship and danger to find the one he knows he’s meant to love. Idealists like me are, most of the time, all talk and no action. Give us what we say we really want and we wouldn’t know what to do with it. Too late anyway. With only 37 days there is no time for such addictions, or to find what I’ve “never really” been or done. Likewise, I wouldn’t travel to any of the faraway places on my list of places I’d like to see. Too far away for just a short visit, and besides, there are plenty of beautiful, undiscovered places right here. My father thinks the wild animals have it right. When you know your time has come, your instinct and your responsibility is to go off by yourself, rest, contemplate, and be at peace with the world. And that’s what I would do. With 37 days left, I would go off into the forest near where I live, by myself, with a comfortable tent and a bed to sleep on, good walking shoes, practical clothing (as little as necessary), my guitar, vegan food, drinking water, pencils and paper. No electronic or communication equipment except a camera, and no books. I would compose and play and sing songs, and write poetry and a few stories. If I had any wisdom I wanted to impart I would do so in creative writing, through stories, not writings like this. I would invent games that could be played in the wild, without leaving a footprint. I would pay attention with all my senses and all my instincts and all my heart, and fall under the spell of the sensuous, Gaia’s spell. I would run and dance and swim. I would meditate, and I would fast. I would breathe deeply, and explore and learn and discoverthe miniature truths of the forest. I would sleep soundly. I would be nobody-but-myself. I would not count the days. Category: Being Human
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July 30, 2008
37 Days
July 29, 2008
Wordless
 Janet Fitch, the author of the novel White Oleander, writes in this month’s Vogue magazine (not available online) about her ten days of self-initiated silence, and the astonishing effect it had on her. She’d been thinking about a meditation retreat, but when her family wanted to go on a ski trip she wasn’t keen on, she decided this was her chance to try a week of simple silence without the chants and poses. She began by setting her phone to take messages instead of ringing, and telling callers she would not return calls until the end of the ten days. Then she began going for walks and just waving, instead of talking with, people she encountered who she knew. So far so good. But she discovered that she was filling the conversational space with reading. So she stopped reading. Writing, offline, was OK, as was listening to instrumental music, but no reading at all: no books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies. That’s when things really started to change. She found she was taking the time to pay attention, to restart things she had dropped, to discover new interests and talents, to cook well instead of indifferently. “It was the absolute attention I had read about in Zen texts: I had the time to perform each action with a perfect, slow gracefulness.” When I spend time in the forest, my heart rate initially leaps and then slows. My senses perk up, and when there is no stream of language messages coming into my brain, I begin to hear other sounds, languages with no words. I begin to sense with my other senses, including the subconscious. I become aware, of my body, of all-life-on-Earth, of what is real, here, now. What Glenn Parton calls “the machine in our heads” stops. I think it is important, in our rush to find meaning and purpose and direction, through love and conversation and community, through social discourse of all kinds, that we allow time, perhaps every day, to be wordless. But I think Janet was wrong to allow herself to keep writing. Although it’s creative, writing is still a conceptual process. Being completely wordless for a long period allows you to be a perceptual animal instead. To grasp, to learn with the senses instead of the brain. To be concrete not abstract. To be real. To live in the world, not in your head. For now, for awhile at least, I intend to spend my six hours of presence/reflective time each weekend wordlessly.No reading, writing, or listening to words. I’m going to practice being wild. Thanks to Cheryl for sending me an edited transcript of the article. Category: Let-Self-Change
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July 28, 2008
The Harmonics of Complexity: Silver Linings and Unintended Consequences
 Kathy Sierra, on Twitter, challenged us to identify the good things that sometimes come out of bad circumstances. In complex systems — social and ecological systems particularly — the number of variables is infinite, so there are no discernible causes and effects, no consequences, no predictability, just trillions of things affecting each other. It’s inevitable that something intended to have positive effects will have, or appear to have, negative effects, sooner or later. And vice versa. Every technology invented has had unintended consequences, and every malicious invention has had some silver lining. Fireworks, gunpowder. Nuclear power, nuclear bombs. Smallpox vaccine, population explosion. Antibiotics, virulent drug-resistant strains. Butterfly wing flap, tsunami. Internal combustion engine, global warming.
One of the interesting things about complex systems is that they tend towards temporary equilibrium states. Quantum states. Orbits. Most remarkably, Gaia, the collective work of all-life-on-Earth, modifying the atmosphere to moderate temperature on the surface below, so that life proliferates, becomes more diverse, and hence more resilient to catastrophic change. When things are going well, that’s good news — small negatives will tend to be overcome. But when things are going badly, it’s terrible news — when the car’s spinning out of control, slamming on the brakes won’t help. Inertia and momentum. A body in motion tends to remain in motion, even if that body is a country whose lunatic administration is deliberately bankrupting it. Even if that body is a planet heating up at an astronomical rate, such that melting glaciers expose dark earth that attracts even more of the sun’s warming rays. A body at rest tends to remain at rest. Politicians may have good (or bad) intentions to make changes, but they’re unlikely to make any that stick, unless changes in that direction were already underway. Ailing economies tend to stay sick, until something extreme like a war comes along to shake them out of their equilibrium, until some new equilibrium state, of motion or stasis, is found. Ice age. Hyperinflation. Extinction. And then whatever comes next. After us, the dragons... We are instinctively aware of this. We sense when things are stuck, or running amok, out of our control, for better, or for worse. For our first million years on Earth, we self-managed our numbers. We had just enough children to keep human population, net of those who were eaten, in the normal course of living every day, in a steady state. Always changing, but in balance. We knew it was good. And now, we know that those numbers are accelerating into an impossible-to-navigate curve. A normal curve. We know in our bones that our civilization, like every civilization before it, is nearing its spectacular end, and that there is nothing we can do to stop the skid. We know it’s bad. We hope, but we know better. Our behaviour betrays this knowledge. Acts of staggering violence and nihilism. Inuring ourselves against feeling. Massive hoarding. Eating our young, metaphorically for now, through our desperate theft of the world’s last resources, the ruination of our planet, the accumulation of monstrous debts, all to be left to our children. Look around, you’ll see the signs: 150,000 debt-ridden farmers in India have committed suicide in a decade. The media, who try to make this complexity simple, have no clue. They throw out random data, and leave it to us to make sense of it. Pattern-recognition is not their forte. But the normal curve, pictured above, the picture perhaps of oil production 1900-2100, or of human population 1900-2200, is just one of millions of normal curves that define the inertia and the momentum of all things, everywhere and always, connected by the complexity of all things. They are indifferent to our time, our place, our species. They have gone on for billions of years before we emerged from the cosmic soup, and will go on for billions more after we are gone. At the bottom and at the top of everycurve, there is a pause. We are catching our breath. Category: Complexity
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July 27, 2008
Saturday Links for the Week: July 26, 2008 (a day late)
 Valdis Krebs’ Twitter network map The Life You Save May Be Your Own: Jen Lemen, powerfully affected by her recent visit to Rwanda, is going through a huge, and moving, personal change, and she’s putting it all out there on her blog. Only nine sentences, so just go read this. Loving Where You Are: PS Pirro puts those of us claiming to seek the place “where we belong” in our place: “Loving where you are means relinquishing all those comforting contingency plans that spare you the work of local affection ñ those plans that allow you to leave half your life packed in boxes in the garage or the attic, half your heart tucked away, and half your imagination wandering the map in search of a better place. Loving where you are means calling your imagination home and putting it to work right where you are: learning the names of the people and trees and plants and birds and creeks and flowers, and letting them speak to your heart ñ your whole heart — and show you what needs to be done, right here, right now.” Wow. Audacity Yes, Change Hardly: A political expert writes to Joe Bageant about why the powers that be are quite happy at the prospect of an Obama victory: The underlying social change that led to the Obama [primary] victory is the unprecedented extent to which the narrative of popular consumer culture, and the media that drives it, has become the dominant influence on how Americans think, formulate their ideas and understand the world around them.
The most important result of this process has been the steady and consistent depoliticization of American society, to an extent that we can make the case that we are living at the dawn of the post political age. Do Not Go Gently: Cassandra explores the subject we all, in the final analysis, fear most, when it gets close to home. Our turn is coming. Discovering Patti Griffin: Karen Crone introduces us to a remarkable new singer-songwriter, Patti Griffin, who reconnects us to our childhood. Harrison Owen on Where Open Space is Going: Geoff and Viv recorded Harrison Owen’s latest speech about how the world is self-organizing and uncontrollable at OSonOS. Preparing for a Post-Carbon Future: Rob Hopkins suggests some significant but worthwhile lifestyle changes:
Hire an Organic Gardener: A brilliant example of Natural Enterprise is planting and maintaining an organic garden for homeowners in their own yard. The Suicide Kit: There are many people in the world wanting to end their lives because of great and chronic physical or mental suffering. Some of them, apparently, have been buying veterinary euthanasia drugs (notably pentobarbital) from Mexico — the peacefulness and effectiveness of which I’ve observed personally. Of course, it is illegal to buy these drugs; no dignity in death for humankind. Exit International, the organization educating people how to end their own lives peacefully, has published a book The Peaceful Pill Handbook, that is sold out internationally, but will soon be available in e-book form. It is banned from sale in Australia. Watch for this issue to heat up in coming months. Mapping Your Networks: Valdis Krebs has mapped his twitter network, in the graphic above. Mine would be more complex, I think, and would have to capture my f2f, IM/VoIP, blog and Second Life networks. My Gravitational Community (including all of these networks) listed at right has 70 people in 8 networks (a network map would show all the connections between them, which are considerable). My Blogroll has several hundred people in some 30 networks, with even more connections. It would be interesting to see the whole map. I suspect it would show that most of my networks are well connected internally with each other (cliquish?) and that, while men on the whole have more connections, women have more diverse connections. It’s been interesting to see my twitter readers ‘talking’ to each other across my networks, making new and unexpected connections. On it, both John McCain and the newly hawkish Barack Obama ó the guy who threatens to invade Pakistan ó kneel in photo-op piety in the Church of Political Pragmatism as the TV cameras roll. They utter Mark Twainís war prayer ó ìO Lord lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fireî ó as Third World children with missing limbs peer numbly at them through the window.
The Atrocity of Cluster Bombs and Bush’s Refusal to Stop Using Them: Another great editorial from Bob Koehler shows that cluster bombs have one purpose — to intimidate, maim and kill civilians. Yet Bush won’t sign the treaty calling for an end to their use. Was There a Red Flag Signaling Bear Stearns’ Troubles?: An interesting employee satisfaction survey suggests something was very wrong with Bear Stearns a year before its collapse from reckless lending practices. Anyone looking at Lehman Brothers?
Three Thoughts for the Week: From Umberto Eco as quoted in the New Yorker in 1995: “I don’t even have an E-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.”
Chris Corrigan on the future of technology: “Web 2.0 is relationship technology. IT is being replaced by RT” and from Seth Godin (thanks to Sarah Thring for the link) on what makes the Internet so hard for corporations to understand:
“This is the first mass marketing medium ever that isn’t supported by ads. If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn’t please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make you (the marketer) happy. That’s the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers. But the Net is different. It wasn’t invented by business people, and it doesn’t exist to help your company make money. It’sentirely possible it could be used that way, but it doesn’t owe you anything.”
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July 25, 2008
Friday Flashback: The Next War of Independence: Natural Community, Natural Enterprise, Natural Economy
| A short article from last year, that generated a fair bit of buzz, reproduced in its entirety:
For those of us who do not live in the US, the situation is hardly better. The corporate oligopolies own or control most of the industry, land and resources in most of the world’s struggling nations and many affluent nations, and anti-democratic ‘free’ trade agreements subvert domestic laws to the ‘right’ of global corporate oligopolies to freedom from regulation or restriction of trade in any signatory nation, regardless of the social and environmental damage that ‘right’ brings with it. As a consequence, the systems that govern us are not governed in our interest:
The US war of independence was fought against an elite occupying force imposing its will on the majority. The only differences today are that the occupation is global, and that the means of control are more technologically advanced and pervasive. So how could we take back our land, our resources, our civil freedoms, our democracy, our economic and education systems? The first step, I think, is to realize that we still have the power, if we have the will to exercise it. This world is too vast and complex for any group to control it, and even its human systems cannot be controlled by any elite without the acquiescence of the large majority. The second step is to realize that Bucky was right: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” We won’t win zoning battles or economic control battles or electoral system battles or proportionate representation battles in the courts or the election campaigns or the markets that are controlled by the elite. We must instead walk away from these corrupt and dysfunctional systems and build new ones, responsive and responsible and sustainable alternatives that others can look at and say “yes, that works much better”. So here is what we need to do:
We do not need them. That is the power we have that they do not. All it takes is a willingness to use it. I think it’s just a matter of time. I believe more and more of us are realizing what we have lost, including our independence. It is human nature to want to be independent, to be self-sufficient, to seek meaningful community, and if necessary to fight for these things. We’ve done without them long enough. It’s time to build a new model, a betterway of living. We need to be free. Category: Building a Community-Based Society
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July 23, 2008
The Politics of Conversation
 Four years ago I read and reviewed Keith Johnstone’s book Impro, in which he explains how pervasive dominance and submission behaviours are in human interactions. He describes an example of physical dominance and submission (status displays) in our encounters with strangers: Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It’s straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they’re equal, both move aside. If they both think they’re dominant (or if one isn’t paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and muttering apologies. But this doesn’t happen if you meet a frail or half-blind person: You move aside for them. It’s only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember doing it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and gently moved me out of the way — it still rankles. Old people tend to cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately ‘not notice’ others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously exchanging status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping aside.
Shortly thereafter I read and reviewed Peter Collett’s The Book of Tells that teaches you to read status displays in body language, and specifically these six displays:
The picture above (selected randomly off the net), for example, includes several dominant displays (sitting very straight, turning away, arms raised or extended, sitting slouched back with legs extended, sitting at end of table) and several submissive displays (slouching forward attentively, sitting in middle of long side of table, sitting with legs drawn up beneath chair). Collett includes, in addition to body, hand, eye and face signals, some examples of spoken signals of dominance and submission:
In my review of Impro, I lamented: “What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures — communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is — a primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the breeding — and what it isn’t — a license to take an unfair share of wealth and power?” Since then I have been speaking about the importance of Love, Conversation and Community, and specifically the integration of the three: Facilitating non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer conversations among people in community (i.e. with shared passions, shared objectives, or shared problems) who care about each other and their community. Today I asked myself: Are these status displays, and our apparent unconscious need to make them, interfering with communication, and undermining the achievement of consensus, collaboration and non-hierarchical problem-solving?
Since our bodies are always ’saying’ much more than our words, even if we monitor and try to extinguish (as facilitators) more obvious dominance behaviours (bullying) and submissive behaviours (wallflowers), there is almost nothing we can do to reduce non-verbal signals. Yes, we can create circles and get rid of tables, but you will still see a ton of such displays, in posture, eye, face, hand signals and tone of voice. The courses I have taken in facilitation don’t teach you to recognize or try to alleviate such behaviours, perhaps because it would be an impossible task. I know I am prone to slouch back, legs extended, hands on head with elbows out like antlers, a multiple dominance display. It must be very confusing to others when I try consciously to speak in an inviting, questioning, open-minded way while making such an aggressive non-verbal display! Likewise I have witnessed people speak passionately and articulately about something, but leave the audience unimpressed because their body language betrays a lack of self-confidence in what they’re saying. In particular I have watched a woman speak in a soft voice (raising her voice slightly at the end of each phrase) and be completely ignored and discounted, while a man a few minutes later, speaking in a soft, measured voice, said the same thing and was hailed as brilliant, everyone scribbling down what he said word for word. So what do you think: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as conversationalists, to suppress power displays and displays of submission, so that listeners focus on what is being said, not how it is said or by whom? Last Saturday I mentioned an article by Andrew Campbell that retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on ‘Dead Language’ vs ‘Live Language’ and how power politics in conversation ‘deadens’ the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. Language in conversation, the article explains, is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for. This is a second, more explicit ‘abuse of power’ in conversation. You know how it works: There are amazingly effective conversation-killers that those uncomfortable with change can use to stomp it out in a way that is almost impossible to defend against. “We tried that last year and it was a disaster.” “If we allowed people to do that, we’d have chaos on our hands, costs would soar and productivity would fall.” “We’d need to get the authority to do that from x and for reason y that would be almost impossible to get.” Andrew’s article provides more examples. This raises a second question: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as listeners, to challenge and reject ‘dead language’ that stifles energy, innovation, courage and other collective qualities of a group necessary to bring about change? I am very good at imagining possibilities (and throwing them out for consideration) and for gently (and not so gently) provoking people to want to change (themselves), prodding them to intend to act. I think these capacities are helpful in conversations in community. Maybe I’m meant to do these things in conversations, rather than being a ‘neutral’ facilitator. But since my imagined possibilities and provocations often produce these hostile dominance displays and ‘dead language’ responses, if I really want my ideas to get traction, I think I need to learn how to deal with thesebehaviours. What’s your experience? Category: Conversation
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July 22, 2008
Three Mini Book Reviews: The Back of the Napkin, Landscape & Memory, and Edible Forest Gardens
 The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam “Visual thinking means taking innate advantage of our ability to see, with our eyes and our mind’s eye, in order to discover ideas, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and share those ideas with others in a way that they simply ‘get’” This book is a brilliant elaboration on Bill Buxton’s idea of sketching, with a catch. The brilliance is in the simplicity and elegance of the model:
This may seem a bit cryptic, but a single read through the book and this is all you need to use this powerful technique for both solving (or at least coming to grips with) problems, and getting buy-in for your solution. The catch? The drawings in the book are simple but beautiful. Doing this well takes lots of practice, both in conveying your meaning graphically (the expressions on your stick men, and their poses, are critical to the audience’s appreciation and understanding), and in using this technique to solve seemingly intractable problems. I intend to try it, but I’m so poor at drawing that it will take me a long time to get my sketches right. Fortunately, I’m really good at imagining possibilities, so my only problem with the technique will be my artwork. Really recommended. If the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor and allegory, where measurement not memory is the absolute arbiter of value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction. At the heart of this book is the stubborn belief that this is not, in fact, the whole story.
Many of the stories he tells are rooted in his own ancestors’ stories, and the book is intensely personal. He takes us through millennia of passion for nature and place, and our apparent fear and loathing of it. But right up to modern times this ambivalent relationship and “being-a-part ness” still resonates, he says: The designation of the suburban yard as the cure for the afflictions of city life marks the greensward as a remnant of the old pastoral dream, even though its goatherds and threshers have been replaced by tanks of pesticide and industrial strength mowing machines.
I was not impressed by his arguments, which seem somewhat nostalgic to me, in this age of relentless and ruthless ecocide. But he is an amazing story-teller, and teller of the stories and lessons of history, and the book is compelling even when it is not persuasive. Even more compelling are the stunning artworks which run through the whole book, such as the one above, that argue much more powerfully than words the inseparability of human spirituality from our love of and roots in nature. The book is an armchair visit to a vast science and history museum, and its stories of human altruism, savagery and struggle to live within and without nature, rootless and yet inexorably drawn to place, to home, stay with you a long time.
What is most remarkable about this exhaustive and practical course in temperate climate (zones 4-7) permaculture is that only about 40 of its over 1000 pages are about the work of planting and maintaining an “edible forest garden” (”a perennial polyculture of multipurpose [native] plants”); the rest is understanding what to plant, when, and why. The whole idea of these gardens is to enable you to harvest an abundance of varied foodstuffs with almost no maintenance. The theory takes up the whole first volume and needs every page. The challenge, you see, is that even what we might perceive as ‘wilderness’ is in fact nothing of the sort. Humans, right back to First Nations thousands of years ago, have utterly altered the vegetation that now looks so wild and ‘natural’. On top of that, climate change has, since the ice ages, been continuously changing what grows where. In order to allow nature to provide you, effortlessly year after year, a harvest of abundance, you first need to discover what naturally grew and what naturally will grow where you live. You need to study the botanical history of your home. Then, since it cannot be quickly ‘restored’ to natural, sustainable state (succession goes through many long intermediary stages and can take centuries to achieve equilibrium), you need to be smart enough to plan for a 20-30 year ‘hurry-up succession’ that will chivy the process along. You have to plant in stages, knowing that early stages are just preparing the soil, the ecosystem and the ground cover and canopy for later stages, and that some of the first things you plant won’t be around at the end of the succession at all if you’ve done your job right. This takes serious knowledge and study, a lot of patience and relearning what our ancestors learned as a matter of course. It’s in many ways a course in what Derrick Jensen has called “listening to the land”. There probably isn’t anything you could learn that would be more important, for your soul, for your community, for your resilience in the coming age of climate change and other disasters that will require us all to become much more self-sufficient than we are today. Start now, and when cascading economic, social and ecological catastrophes hit us in the 2030s and bring existing food production and other systems to their knees, you’ll be ready to gather the fruits ofyour labour. Category: Activism: What You Can Do
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July 21, 2008
Memorandum to All Employees
 Delivered By HandTo all employees: Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees’ time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means. A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee’s work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal. Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee’s calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others’ time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive ‘telephone tag’ our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company. Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:
Because e-mail and voice-mail have been used for so many things for so long, it will take some practice to wean ourselves off these sub-optimal technologies, and they will continue to be available for communications with those outside the company. You may be surprised to learn that e-mail has only been the principal medium for business communications for ten years. You will, we believe, find itliberating to be able to go home each day, and come in each day, with nothing in your inbox. Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom! Respectfully yours, The Management 
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July 19, 2008
Saturday Links for the Week: July 19, 2008
 Photo from birdstar.org, one of the amazing shots from the Bond brothers of SW Ontario. Disparity, Poverty and Environmental Health: I’m reading HervÈ Kempf’s How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (review next week). His message, from France, is essentially the same as Ian Welsh’s in his new article There Was a Class War. The Rich Won. The message, and the messages that naturally flow from it, are:
You know which I believe. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. A Plague of Economic Locusts: Andrew Leonard at HTWW adds up the factors that have caused me recently to liquidate most of my investments. Favourite quote: “Faith-based economics seems like an unsound management philosophy, for those of us without the power to part the Red Sea and make a getaway from a falling dollar, rising oil prices, and insolvent banks”. Booking Time for Real-Time Chat: Google now allows you to put a badge, like the one below, on your blog to indicate if you’re available for an IM/VoIP chat via GMail/GTalk. You don’t even have to have a GMail account to ping me. Problem is, I’m not available for such chats very often. So before I put the badge on my sidebar, I need to add to it a Google Calendar showing my ‘conversation office hours’, the times when I will be available. Ideally, it would be interactive, allowing readers to say what they want to chat about, so I can invite others to join in. May take awhile for me to set up.
Imagine, blogs as a medium for real-time conversations! Thanks to Theresa Purcell for the link. Manipulative Language, and the Abuse of Power in Conversation: Andrew Campbell retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on Dead Language vs Live Language and how power politics in conversation ‘deadens’ the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. I’m learning how to listen more attentively to conversations, their nuances, what is said and implied and unspoken, unconsciously conveyed. Now I’m discovering I must also learn to observe the way in which language in conversation is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.
Why Is It Called a “Retreat”?: Evelyn Rodriguez writes about the need to turn off the noise from external sources, and to withdraw to our true selves, to rediscover them, to find our true bearings, our centre, before reconnecting with others, in order not to become too much Everybody-Else. Games for Change: If we’re going to spend time playing video games, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place? Thanks to Graham Clark (who also supplied the quote in the thought for the week below) for the link. This is the World Now: Another delightful miniature in words and images by Pohangina Pete. The world now does not make sense. Thought for the Week: variously ascribed to Al Rogers or Eric Hoffer: In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
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A Symbol for Gaia:
July 18, 2008
Join Me September 28-October 1 in BC
 Bowen Island by Richard Smith I‘m going to be on Bowen Island, near Vancouver BC, September 28 through October 1, for an Art of Hosting event. The program teaches several interactive meeting and facilitation technique skills — World CafÈ, Circle, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry — and it would be great to have the chance to meet with as many of you as possible while learning something new and useful (and inexpensively!) together at the same time. Please look at the invitation, and if you decide to go, let Chris and me know ASAP — it’s not a large venue, though it is astonishingly beautiful. Hope to see you there! PS: If you can’t make that, I’ll be in San Jose September 23-25 for KMWorld & Intranets, Quebec City August 8, Montreal September 18 andVancouver September 26-27. Let me know if you’re available for a meetup! |
