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Resilience Reflections

It’s taken me a long time to learn respect for the ways millions of people help each other to feed and shelter their families in resourceful ways.

I’m driven by the belief that the stories we tell about people and places can help change the world.

There’s no single right path and there’s a lot to be learned from people following different, even antithetical, paths to your own.

I see so much remarkable stuff happening in so many places, and meet so many focused, committed people, that I really believe that a new economy, a new culture, is possible, indeed it is already here.

Beliefs matter. So do stories. My inspiration often comes from the written word, and I’ve long been interested in writers who revel in the complexity of beliefs, understand how adept humans are at self-deception, but nevertheless provide a useful roadmap.

Anyone who farms experiences setbacks on a daily basis. That rate of failure and a willingness to try again seems teach a few practical lessons in being resilient.

In my work every day I’m trying to listen to Nature and intuit how to better fit into Her systems.

What keeps me going is the desire to put this accumulation of experience, however rude and mis-shapen it might be in parts, to good use, so that one less field becomes pavement, so that one less stream dries up, that one less meaningful cultural practice fades away in an urban slum, and so that one less barrel of oil is burned just because a way of life deems that burning as inevitable.

My greatest inspirations are William Shakespeare and Aldo Leopold. The key to moving hearts and minds no matter what your field of endeavor is good storytelling.

Resilience means having backup systems in place in case the primary systems we’ve come to depend on falter or disappear.

My biggest setback was being born white, male, middle class, and a citizen of the United States.

If you look at the world’s situation right now and feel a measure of grief, it doesn’t mean you’re sick, it means you’re decent. That feeling is why our species deserves to be saved.

What gives me hope is meeting and reading or hearing about all the people all over the world from so many cultures who are working in so many ways to help ecosystems recover…

Don’t forget to enjoy the world, even as you’re trying to change it for the better.

I somewhat slowly learned that I was more the conductor than the builder of the farm; more the gentle nudger & potential inspiration for my family and community than the task-master.