Your Name | Andrew Duff McCue |
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Email Address | andrew.mccue426@gmail.com |
Cohort Assignment | Hybrid In-Person/Online with Intensive in Lisbon, Fall-Winter 2024 |
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life? | 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. |
2. What role do you see as yours to play? | 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. |
3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above? | 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 |
4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are? | 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. |
5. And for professional growth? | Here I want to: |
6. What have you invested in to get you where you are? | 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 |
7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life? | 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 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. 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. |
8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it? | As I wrote above regarding the writings of Camus and Mauriac I view humans as divine beings capable of stewarding incredible flourishings of life. We are not a virus, nor are we the only gods on this planet. |
Date Created | August 25, 2024 |