In blathering to Patti the other day I tried to articulate the possible reasons for this:

• they are more interesting than most people (perhaps I think so because I’m currently infatuated with play and they’re so much better at that than humans)
• they’re more authentic, more accepting, more elegant, more fit, more fun, less judgemental, less needy, less expectant, less moody, more attentive to everything, more graceful, more ‘present’
• they are comforting
• they don’t insist on conversation…you can enjoy their company wordlessly
• they are more beautiful, mostly, than humans

Of course, they don’t converse very well, at least not using spoken language. That doesn’t prevent them from communicating effectively, though, if you pay attention.

That might seem to be reason enough for what some see as my misanthropy. After all, instead of having to put up with people’s expectations, pre-judgements, and mostly uninteresting conversations, you can instead spend your time with beautiful creatures who (seem to) enjoy your attention and companionship even if you are ugly and incoherent.

But I confess there may be another reason on top of all these. I am, at heart, lazy. I don’t like to work hard, and my observations of nature suggest to me that this isn’t unusual among wild creatures, or particularly shameful. The delightful moments I spend with wild creatures are easy, carefree times.
At the same time, I can listen to the human conversation in the next room without the requirement of contributing to it, and observe people without being distracted by what I am going to say to them.

Yet I do love conversation with, and the company of, some people. I have a tendency to browse crowds for people with certain capacities — five in particular: 

1. exceptional intelligence, 
2. great emotional strength (and self-knowledge), 
3. deep emotional sensitivity (and perceptiveness), 
4. articulateness (extraordinary ability to communicate or self-express orally, in writing, or non-verbally through art or some other medium), and 
5. great imagination (or creativity).

When I find people with some of these qualities, I tend to corner them (or dance them outside) for one-on-one conversations. When I don’t find anyone with these qualities, I get discouraged and seek out any (resident-or-nearby) non-humans (the family pets, or the birds outside). So, put simply, I tend to love the company of (a) a few extraordinarily profound and stimulating humans and (b) most wilder creatures, thanks to their innate presence and grace.

At an earlier stage of life I would have added exceptional physical beauty to the list of qualities above. I’m still very much attracted to such people, but I’ve discovered (limited data, I confess) that they rarely seem to have any of the other five qualities (possibly because they don’t need them). As a result, I’ve found it more amusing to observe them from a distance than to try to engage them in conversation. I imagine they would make wonderful sexual partners, but I expect I’m too lazy to find out.

I have often said that we love who we imagine others to be, and not who they really are, because, after all, we can never really know who other people are (my recently-divorced friends in particular tell me this). So it is possible that I am subconsciously exaggerating (or even inventing) the qualities of people who I find lovable, and under-estimating those qualities in people I do not, and imagining wilder creatures to be more complex, present and graceful than they really are. I suspect I am not alone in this, and that while other people’s “top 5 desired qualities” lists undoubtedly vary (great bod, good sense of humour, attentiveness, generosity, appreciation and good personal hygiene would probably be on many), most people probably imagine the objects of their affection to be other, and more, than who they really are. How else can we explain the desire of so many women to “improve” their men (make them more who they imagined them to be before they got to know them better), and the propensity of so many men to avoid any meaningful conversation with their partners that might shatter their illusions?

The lessons for me, I think, are obvious. I need to be more open to the qualities of every human I meet, less judgemental (though I am getting better at this, except when my usually-accurate instincts get in the way), more attentive, and less carried away by my imagination. If I were to do this, I might find almost everyone lovable, and that would certainly make me more appreciative, more positive, more optimistic, better company (for most), and more present. I might possibly learn to be humble, or even graceful.

I am going to practice this. Perhaps it is the approaching winter, but of late I am more preoccupied with the search to find the place where I belong (I am starting to believe it is even more important to find this place than to find the people I belong with), and settle down with whatever lovable people I can find there or attract to that place. If I really want to create a Natural Intentional Community it may be time for me to just start, instead of being preoccupied with its ideals and principles and purpose.

The people in the Gravitational Community list in the right sidebar are mostly people I can imagine living in community with. I can picture what their (your) chosen roles might be, based on what each of them (you) do so well, and seem to love doing. I can imagine nothing more joyful, or more important, than us doing this together, purposefully, collaboratively, lovingly, helping each other out to be who we really are, to be who we are intended to be, showing the world that there is a better way.

My wild animal friends seem to have figured this all out. Start with finding the right place, the place you belong. Then find the right fellow-creatures to love and live with and make a living with, and herd them to that place. The rest — what to do, how to get along, how and who to be — is all collectively self-managed, and should work itself out naturally.
Worth a try, anyway.

Christy Tucker took great notes from the recorded discussion and the backchanneling of participants.

My top 10 takeaways:

1. Communities are the basis for change, and what they need more than anything now is excellent stewardship. Facilitators, please stand up.
2. The great value of networks is that they enable groups of people to organize, collaborate, do the work each is best at, and share the work needed to bring about the change, and then show others its value.
3. Change has to start with an identified need, not with a good idea. Generally, we only change when we must. Listen for needs.
4. We need to create safe places to explore and work on bold ideas. Skunkworks can often accomplish more than large amounts of funding.
5. Change, like great research, begins with asking important questions, and provoking respondents to self-change instead of trying to persuade or impose it.
6. To bring about change, be prepared to work with people, listen and understand what works and what is important for them, and engage them in ways they see value in and relate to. And be totally, brutally honest about what you don’t know, aren’t sure about, or difficulties in the path of desired change. And stay open to other ideas and concerns.
7. If you want to accomplish great change, give up the idea of getting the credit for it.
8. Experiment. The best, profound changes come from masses of iterative learning and exploration of possibilities.
9. Create the starting conditions for momentum, enthusiasm, sufficient resources, the right people, and don’t worry about outcomes.
10. Make it easy. When you make it easier to change, to do the right thing, it will succeed more quickly and profoundly than if it requires a lot of work from every person.

PS: I’ve switched to a Mac today, and it doesn’t seem to support my my blog on the ancient creaky Radio Userland platform, so if I’m down for a fewdays, bear with me.

So it was interesting that, on his final day on the campaign trail, that was also what President Obama was telling his closest advisors — his concern that expectations were so high and the challenges so great that he was bound to disappoint. And the morning after his victory, Garrison Keillor, in his advice to Obama, wrote that he would inevitably disappoint his supporters, and not to let it get him down. The pathological Bush was a self-declared master at lowering expectations, though somehow he still managed to disappoint us all, again and again.

I wonder to what extent this fear of disappointing drives me, and others. My desire to live simply, without responsibilities or possessions, to practice instead of intending and aspiring, my interest in polyamorism — are these all ways to hedge my bets if I fail to live up to others’ expectations, and my own?

The new way of damning a subordinate in the workplace, instead of calling them a fuck-up, is to tell them (and others) they disappointed you. On the surface it seems politer, but it’s really a nasty and cowardly way of trying to make them feel guilty and keeping them in wage slavery. I’ve never told anyone I was disappointed with them, though I’ve been tempted.

Same thing in many people’s “second job” as a family member, or as a team member in a recreational activity. Tell a mate they “let you down”, or give ‘em that sigh and disappointed look, and it gets them to do what you want far more effectively than yelling, arguing, or even crying.

What is it about us that we are always rising to others’ expectations? Is some of our anxiety because we think they expect more of us than they really do? Is it really our own unreasonable expectations we’re trying to live up to?

Or is it just society’s way of getting us to conform, to obey, to do what others want, to make us everybody-else?

I’ve noticed, in many people who communicate in writing (IM, e-mail, Second Life text, and even real letters) a great anxiety about meeting in person (if they haven’t previously), and an even greater anxiety about speaking on the telephone (or VoIP). As writers, do we set a standard of communication we can’t hope to live up to in real-time? Is that space, that silence on the line, just too unbearable to contemplate, an admission of not really knowing what to say?

As I’ve aged I’ve become a bit ornery about others’ expectations of me, and of others (“the government”, business “leaders”, “society”). We should know better than to expect much of people and institutions. Most of us really are doing the best we can, even we slackers. Most people don’t have the skills, the capacities, the resources or the time to do better than they do now, every day. Most people are ignorant, and distracted by personal challenges and sorrows, and unimaginative, and incompetent, and under these circumstances it’s remarkable that they do for us, and for themselves, as much as they do.

My hope for others, now, is that they will simply be more authentically themselves. That’s hard, and a lifetime challenge, but it’s possible for everyone and, I think, a worthy pursuit. I do not expect it of them; I just do my best to help them get started on that journey, and wish them well. I do expect this of myself, but I have the good fortune to have learned, at last, who I am, so becoming nobody-but-myself is now just a matter of practice. If people expect me to be something more, or different, they will be disappointed. That is their business, not mine.

This is, of course, easy to say. The look, and the expression, of disappointment, of having let someone down, yet again, is still hard for me to take. But I’m learning to recognize it for what it is, and I try, now, to tell people I cannot and will not live up to others’ expectations of me, and I refuse to feel badly when others are disappointed in me or feel I have let them down. I usually pave the way for this by being brutally honest with people, from the moment I meet them, and declaring what I will and will not do, for them or for their cause, whatever it may be.

Learning to say no may be the most important, and liberating, lesson of our lives.

It is in our nature to seek attention and appreciation, and the quid quo pro for that is usually offering something to others in return, and raising their expectations in the process. So many people are looking for someone to lead them out of their particular situation of anguish, hopelessness, despair, loneliness, or constant struggle. The best we can do for them, and ourselves, is to help them to help themselves, and to realize that they have to help themselves. That is the ultimate generosity, and it can be given with no strings attached.

So if you feel, dear readers, friends, colleagues, loved ones, that I have disappointed you, let you down, failed to live up to your expectations, then I apologize — not for that failure, but for having given you somehow the impression that I had accepted or could ever offer to do more than share my thoughts, ideas, knowledge, love, and, most precious, time with you.

I am, after all, just the space through which stuff passes, a part of the unfathomably complex dance of all-life-on-Earth, learning to improvise which of that passing-through stuff to touch, and which to just let go. “Ah, I know how I can make this better, or clearer, or more interesting, or more useful, or more innovative, or more fun — there!” Just being the space, and touchingthe right stuff in just the right way as it passes through.

I hope some of that stuff is yours.

There was a business “track” at the recent Bioneers By the Bay conference, but at the business sessions there was a shadow of skepticism. The very words “business” and “enterprise” have (thanks to Enron, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Koch, the banks, Halliburton, Bush and the rest of the corporatist gang) acquired an unsavoury connotation of greed, indifference, and rapaciousness. At one of my interviews about my book Finding the Sweet Spot, the interviewer asked me if “Natural Enterprise” wasn’t an oxymoron.

So perhaps the first thing we need to do is show people (not tell them) that enterprise is not only not necessarily evil, it is essential to effective human society — it is how we self-organize to get stuff done. We can do that by creating working models of a Natural Economy, an alternative to the modern Industrial Economy, an alternative that is responsive, responsible, sustainable, healthy and useful in enhancing the well-being of all of us.

As I’ve written before, we can’t create that Natural Economy top-down, or mandate it by legislation. We need to build it bottom-up, and then let it slowly replace the Industrial Economy as people opt out of corporatism and opt into a self-managed, durable model of how to make a living together. As Bucky Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

My previous articles have been a bit abstract, however, so I thought this time I would try to move beyond just principles towards actions, steps that we can take to prepare ourselves for the collapse of the Industrial Economy and to be ready to build one that works better from its ashes. It’s never too early to start that process.

This is a rough first draft. I hope to recruit some of the leading thinkers on Natural Enterprise (like John Abrams) and on Natural Economy (like Herman Daly and Richard Douthwaite) to help me with this. But in the meantime, here is what I’m thinking:

1. A Natural Economy must be community-based: It must comprise Natural Enterprises that are responsive to specific local needs, and the citizens of the community who are at once the producers (the members of these Natural Enterprises) and the consumers (those who use what the Natural Enterprises produce) — to the point the distinction between producer and consumer disappears. The community provides for its own needs, and a million such communities, self-managed and connected, comprise a new economy.
2. A Natural Economy must begin with working models: We need to start small-scale to show what works, why it works, and why it’s better than the current economy, and so we can learn from our mistakes while they’re small and simple to correct. So we need to establish some Natural Economic Community (NEC) Zones that we can study and show off. This will be difficult because these NEC Zones will be competing with the existing economy and will be seen as a threat to vested interests. We will need to start in places where the local authorities are motivated to sponsor and nourish a radically different economic model (i.e. where the authorities are either enlightened or desperate enough to try something new).
3. The building-block for the Natural Economy must be the Cooperative: Co-ops are a form of enterprise that are neither profit-obsessed nor charitable. They are a form of community-based, collective ownership. Both the NECs and the Natural Enterprises within them should be set up as cooperatives. As not-for-profit entities, any income they receive in excess of expenses is redistributed to their members in an equitable manner (described in point 7 below). So they have no “profits” and hence pay no taxes. All decisions of these communities and enterprises are made collectively by their members, by consensus, and all members are responsible and liable for the actions of their community and its enterprises.
4. The infrastructure needed to provide essentials for each community must be created and owned by the community: Cooperative Natural Enterprises that are collectively owned by all members of the community must provide the following essential infrastructure, goods and services to everyone in the community:
• Local, renewable energy
• Education, based on an unschooling model, with learning coaches and facilitators not ‘teachers’
• Health services, based on principles of self-managed health and illness prevention
• Green building, based on toxin-free and cradle-to-cradle principles
• Finance, based on the credit union model, investing the wealth and resources of the community in the community
• Food, based on the 100-mile diet and the provision of organic foods grown in accordance with bioregional, sustainable, permaculture methods
• Telecommunications, recognizing such utilities as a necessity of modern life
• Transportation, stressing shared and public transportation over ‘private’ vehicle ownership, and walkways and bikeways over motorways
• Innovation, drawing together the minds and imaginations of the community to address unique community problems
5. The property (land) of each community must be held in perpetuity by the community in trust: The community as a whole must be entrusted as stewards of the land, and the trusteeship must specify that they are responsible for ensuring the land remains undamaged, undepleted and unencumbered for use by future generations. Any natural resources used must be regenerated.
6. The communities and Natural Enterprises must be size-limited: No community or enterprise can be permitted to grow to a size greater than that which would allow knowledgeable consensual decisions to be made by all of its members.
7. Each community must have full financial and political autonomy: The community must not receive money (or benefits) from or pay money (or benefits) to outside interests or governments. It should maintain its own local community currency. It should levy a duty on imported products and services sufficient to (a) encourage the production of such products and services locally, to the extent reasonably practical, and (b) fully “cost” these products and services to include, charge and offset/remediate social and environmental costs and the replacement costs of non-renewable resources. This full costing should also apply to products and services produced within the community. The community should also levy a wealth tax on members whose wealth, other than that deeded to the community for its collective use, exceeds a certain number of times the median wealth of the community.It should decide how to distribute any excess of its revenue over its expenses (i.e. among its own disadvantaged members, to other communities, and/or to ‘national’ authorities for services provided to many communities, as described in point 8 below). Each citizen must decide for herself to what extent to volunteer labour to other communities or nations (volunteer work, peacekeeping work etc.)
8. In a Natural Economy, the only role of the federal/state government is regulation and peacekeeping: In such an economy, many of the roles of federal, state, provincial and municipal governments are no longer required. If the majority of communities switch to this model, the current bloated national and regional governments need only coordinate inter-community regulation, distribution and peace-keeping, and become much smaller, agencies instead of institutions.
9. A Natural Economy must be a Gift Economy: If we insist on keeping score, on not giving anything unless we receive something of value in return, we will never make the transition to a Natural Economy until none of us has anything left to lose. This transition depends completely on our generosity — on our willingness to give more than our share without the expectation of compensation, in the interest of the greater good of all life on Earth.
10. Natural Communities must be connected: The autonomy described in point 7 above does not imply isolation. It is essential that the communities making up a Natural Economy be sharing knowledge and ideas and collaborating on projects that are beyond the capacity and resources of any one community to provide. Natural Communities are the nodes in the network that is a Natural Economy. (Likewise, Natural Enterprises are the nodes in the network that is a Natural Community, and they too need to be connected together and to Natural Enterprises with similar missions in other Natural Communities. In this way they create the ‘virtuous cycle’ shown in green in the chart above).

I know it sounds naive to believe this would be allowed to happen, and it’s quite possible that it won’t be allowed to happen until the Industrial Economy cracks wide open (what we’ve witnessed so far this year is just the beginning). But this doesn’t preclude us from establishing some semi-autonomous Natural Communities now, in areas that are relatively enlightened, progressive and self-sufficient, connecting them together in an experimental network, and using them as a laboratory and proving ground for this new Natural Economy.

If we don’t start with such experiments now, we’ll have a much harder, and more error-prone, time of it when our Industrial Economy collapses. At present we are utterly dependent on this economy (and heavily on foreign corporations) for most of the essentials of living listed in point 4 above. If we fail to become more self-sufficient in producing these essentials locally, there will be a great deal of suffering and even loss of life when the economy collapses, and we have to learn in a hurry or perish.

It would be, and will be, a huge error to take a neo-survivalist position (that we must or somehow will learn to do these things for ourselves in secured, isolated homes). The resigned position of the religious fundamentalists (that the Rapture will spare us from catastrophe through divine intervention) is even worse. But to succeed, we not only have to overcome the extremism of the neo-survivalists and fundamentalists, but also the business-is-necessarily-evil skeptics and the power-brokers who will never cede economic or political power without a fight to the bitter end.

But perhaps the biggest enemy in this struggle is ourselves — our propensity to wait until we have no choice but to change, and to doubt that such a change will ever be possible, and our poverty of imagination to conceive, and then realize,a better way to live and make a living.