Building a future we all want to live in – generous, joyful, and brimming with life.

I have spent much of my professional time up to this point learning about the issues at stake, the common language, tensions, fault lines, and opportunities that come up in the discussions of how to build a liveable future. I am now seeking how to get my hands into the (metaphorical and literal) soil. It is time to shift from engaging my curiosity first and foremost to more directly building new projects, systems, initiatives. From studying/analysing to directly supporting and doing.

I hope my contribution is in bringing together the puzzle pieces needed to for thoughtful, deeply impactful projects to launch, take root, or expand. However, I am also drawn to the role of providing/holding space for the individuals or groups doing this work to shelter, recharge, draw courage and resources along their journey.

I want to get closer to power - specifically the kind of power that makes things happen (power to rather than power over), in order to materialize/enact/embody the visions and values of a generous, joyful, and life-filled future.

I hope to do this in a way that retains appropriate humility and grounding so that I may act as a conduit or catalyst – a bridge between the paradigms we hope to compost or hospice (and have to in order to preserve life on this planet) and those we hope to shepherd into being

Growth in my confidence. To stop waiting around for someone else to tell me what to do and to get stuck in to the big questions, problems, and opportunities I my path.
The courage to change my thoughts, actions, and habits to match my values. I still have a strongly negative internal voice that constantly breaks me down for not being successful enough by the criteria of a worldview I know creates more death, misery and isolation than joy or flourishing life. I want to transform my relationship to this voice, and use that transformation to change my way of being in the world to better match my values. I want to resolve the disparity between these stated values and the implied values that drive my internal narrative and judgments.
Specifically, I hope this helps me translate vision/awareness into action as I have the feeling of being trapped in a state of high awareness but low actual change.

Here I want to:
A) Build the discipline and tools that build muscle memory for effective project development
B) Get a lot better at generating or cultivating mutually beneficial and effective stakeholder relationships
C) Gain influence over the flows of capital/resources so that they flow more towards regenerative and equitable uses. I do not identify either with the "change from within" crowd (I am wary of my own tendencies to adapt to whatever culture or group I am a part of) or with the "burn it down from without" crowd. Rather I want to find ways to weave together the insights/values/vision of those "outside" the current system with the resources of those within the current system.

So far, I have invested a lot in learning by doing - joining teams of people doing what I want to learn to do and who know more about a given topic than me so that I can deploy my curiosity in an applied way.

I have invested a lot free time in courses and books
I have invested relationship capital to cultivate a network of people learning about themselves and their role in a life giving economy together.
I uprooted my life to move across the atlantic to get closer to the kinds of work I want to do, the kind of knowledge I want to gain, and the ways of living that I think are more in line with a world I want to live in.

I followed a religion degree in university where I came across Emmanuel Levinas' book the Intersubjectivity of Time whose core thesis was that the sheer acknowledgment that time precedes us and proceeds from us carries in it the tacit implication that there are a multitude of others to whom we owe some sort of responsibility whether in gratitude or honor of what came before or as a form of care for what comes after us.

I learned to love food and drink and to cook from my father, who also strongly reinforced my intellectual curiosity
I gained an appreciation of plants, gardening, and energy healing from my mother
Weaving these together with Michael Pollan, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporter, Manda Scott, David R Montgomery and Anna Biklé, Rebecca Solnit, Charles Eisenstein, Ursula K LeGuin, and Rutger Bregman has given me a sense of world full of life where everything has a life and spirit of its own that is shaped by its lineage, its place in time and space, and its relationships with other beings.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the debate between Albert Camus and Francois Mauriac at the liberation of France over what to do with collaborators: Punish or Forgive. I was intrigued by the idea of two men from very different backgrounds and ages (30 yr old algerian resistant and existentialist vs a bourgeois, 70 yr old, catholic, possibly closeted gay french man from Bordeaux) but with the same humanist impulses clashing over this fraught moment in France's political history. Ultimately what I took from studying the two was a profound appreciation of the sanctity of life in opposition to the machinations of ideology which too often consumes human and other lives in service of itself. Mauriac wrote in his Cahier Noir during the occupation that "we are those who oppose machiavelli. Those who espouse that kind of disdain of other humans seek only to manipulate and abuse others, for it is not possible to use a quasi-divine being as a coarse instrument for coarse ends. We are those who believe that humans escape from the law of eat or be eaten and in fact, if in the course of human history–in a brief moment in time and space– there was a single act of charity, this "law of the jungle" this unending chain of eat or be eaten will have been broken forever.
In short - that life is more sacred than any political or religious ideology that seeks to use life of all kinds in order to increase its own power.

Corey Doctorow, Raj Patel, Naomi Klein, Helena Norberg Hodge, Vandana Shiva among others have shaped my engagement with food systems. A common thread that has animated my life from loving to eat, to learning to cook with my father, to learning where food comes from, what the effects of terroir or meroir are, to how the composition of the soil changes the nutrient content, texture, and flavor of the food produced in a given place. These teachers also taught me how thoughtlessly cruel, destructive and unhealthy the dominant industrial food system is - not for lack of appropriate knowledge but rather as a result of the deeply held values and beliefs that have built and govern the international economic order. I now believe strongly that any discussion of regeneration or equity has to involve changes in land and water ownership/use rights.

I aspire to learn to better cultivate my relationship with plants in particular through some combination of : gardening, cooking, plant medicine, ethnobotany, homeopathy, and/or even forms of nature-based ritual practice.

As I wrote above regarding the writings of Camus and Mauriac I view humans as divine beings capable of stewarding incredible flourishings of life.
Each living being (and I view mountains, rivers, oceans, etc as living as well) brings a genius to this world, a way of being. I imagine that humans' particular genius is that of gardener/shepherd. Done well, these roles shelter support and cultivate vast explosions of life. When appropriated within an extractive ideology like industrial shareholder capitalism, the shadow side of this genius comes out and life is made to look like a factory and is increasingly impoverished and killed.

We are not a virus, nor are we the only gods on this planet.
I am routinely humbled by the depth and richness of each individual's lived experience, and I have to believe that much more good can be done by activating ourselves together.