Don't Be Cynical; Be A Miracle
📺 Listen to this episode on Youtube!
Surprise! A rogue WEWS springs from the ether! ⚡
(I forgot to hit send on this @ 6:30pm last night 😆... so here it is, albeit a bit refracted in space-time!) 🌀
Wednesday Weirding... Hmm... It says nothing about weekly... 💡
I actually like the idea of making the WEWS intermittent from now on. Wednesdays, but not every Wednesday. After all, intermittent rewards keep us more attentive than consistent rewards, don't they? 🪝... Enjoy!
Remember: Be as Remedy, Not as Malady
I know everything is unraveling because nothing but nihilism is making sense.
If decay and collapse are inevitable, the only logical outlet for these consuming feelings of betrayal, futility, abandonment, shame—is to harm the world back. Is to destroy before being destroyed.
Here's the thing, though:
I'm over here systematically stitching the world back together again. 🪡
It's not flashy work made for social media. It’s more focused on results.
(And, as an aside: Why are so much of our lives today constructed around performing on screen media for one another? Like we're all condemned to a relentless, collective purgatory of acting out our personas in a terrible mutual middle school play?)
What I do is glorious work, but subtle. It is the mundane realm of choosing to see reality and engage with it meaningfully. 👁️
You, me, and all living beings are entitled to one thing alone in this life: to participate in the meaning-making. (I intensively do.)
You might start with rightfully placing yourself within the systems encompassing you. This is something I teach about; I emphasize an ecological lens that situates us in the patterning of living systems. I’ve taught this historically in the several-year-running Denver social permaculture course, and today with Living Systems Institute's Agents of Habitat curriculum.
Rightfully placing yourself in the systems encompassing you means locating yourself in the political and social systems, too. This is something I’ve practiced in as a social justice activist and collective organizer since my teens.
This further includes locating yourself within systems of belief, and enculturation.
So, where to begin in such a complex web of systems?
I’ve come to believe that one of the keys that unlocks our liberation from suffering is to realize that we belong to life as a system—in all its grand, multiplicitous expression. That Life is a home, and home base, for us. And that, through the transmutational process of meaning-making, ALL of this life—our history, legacies of suffering, etc.—can come together, can make sense, in a more harmonious way. 🌈
Only if wisdom is married with new forms, meaning: more intelligent structures.
These more intelligent structures can manifest at any level. As new cooperative projects and social programs. Or as new ways of being together—new, reclaimed culture. Or even: at the scale of how you show up to your choices and relationships today.
From this vantage point, belonging, not marginalization, breeds mutual aid. Spreads and makes real that more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
We help one another as if we are, because we are, kin—awakening one another to the ways and means to share a rewarding world of connection and solidarity.
This sounds like a utopia, perhaps. But it’s because few are willing to cross a simple, innate threshold. Few are willing undertake the invariably hard but essential work of meaning making.
Could all the harms you've ever done, and were done to you, be integrated?
Could all the patterns be understood, accepted, integrated, and thus transcended?
If everything is "caused" (another way of saying karma) then, yes.
If we see through to the root causes, we can circumvent automatic processes. We can overcome ignorance. When constrained by reality, disciplined by the uncovering of truth: the work of meaning-making is the work of overcoming ignorance.
Flooded with information (much of it junk) and faced with a polycrisis of collapse fueled by a hubristic mythos that's only lashing out in greater aggression before its imminent death... These are not ideal conditions to get right with life in, and to sensemake in.
On the other hand, the necessity to do so is high in these times. Survival urges alone might accidentally align you with a viable path. The most gutsy choice might be the right one. 🫵
Collaborating with our aliveness brings consonance. Maybe we put our faith in that now. 🌱
With the stakes never higher, maybe new recruits to a more holistic order are indeed ready to fall in, and turn out. 🥾
Remember, it's simple and Fractal: to make sense is survival, and it is who you are. This time we’re in is no different, despite its overwhelming complexity. 💫
Only the blade of a well honed mind can slice through, and organize things well, in a way that births new possibilities entirely. 🔪
While civilization starts melting down around us in its unmitigated confusion and completely unprocessed emotions... I've got files 🗄️ (inner and outer) full of more elegant solutions, and I’ve cultivated the heart to carry out thoughtfully greater good with grit and grace. ❤️🔥
I am a steward and midwife to many purpose-driven community-led organizations. This niche is how to understand the unique medicine I offer my beloved communities. So a great deal of my personal energy is spent in service—now to half a dozen good good ventures at a time.
- ⛏️ I serve as co-executive director of Living Systems Institute, a community nonprofit promoting a restoration of living systems knowledge and practice, mainly among suburban residents, so we become more beneficial presences in our ecosystems and communities.
- 🌌 I also am helping midwife the formal launch (birth) of Cosmos.coop, a global platform for visionaries, artists, and creatives—grounded in cooperative practice—poised to accelerate the “composting” of the failing capitalist paradigm into more robustly living, caring cultures. We are raising money and memberships soon—sign up here to stay in touch with it.
- I am also helping give birth to several other ventures:
- 🚲 One whose mission is to urgently conquer the treacherous, tired old car-centric paradigm in our transportation system—through simply better designs.
- 👐 One whose mission is to offer high quality, money-no-barrier psychedelic ceremonies for people’s liberation, through a pay-it-forward model inspired by the Buddhist tradition of dāna (generosity).
- 🔥 …And I haven’t even mentioned Fractal Praxis yet! Which has a major new creative production already underway since releasing the weekly WEWS, and which, as a whole, is dedicated to providing the seed of a transcendental, inclusive framework for a fractally liberated living culture.
All of the above arises through me and flows from me because my life is filled with meaning.
More than a decade ago I chose to commit to the path of meaning-making, and I’ve subjected myself—in every respect—to the truth.
Meaning abounds, and I pour from this abundance. 🫗
I am enmeshed with solutions and spreading them. I am no different from solutions, and solution-making. 🕸️
With my one life as an offering to our collective goodness, I play a key role as a facet in the gem of many different holistic solutions all around us that could come forth, if they were given attention and energy from us! Like a plant striving for sunlight and water in an increasingly caustic environment.
If I’m carrying all the above (having mastered certain methods over decades of devotional effort), then surely, you can allocate a sliver of your life-energy to become at least one facet in at least one good, sound thing.
Making It Make Sense
...And you get to discern and decide what that will be.
It is from your original thinking, your autonomy and interconnectedness, that the sense of the “good thing” and your role in it, arises.
That's meaning-making. That’s living a complete life. And that's engagement with reality.
And it's the seed that is the kingdom.
It's the skeleton key unlocking all doors. 🔑
As things seem to unravel, you could work to spot the patterns playing out. You could make more meaning, too. Your meaning is your contribution to the whole.
Opting out of struggling legacy myths, and participating in distributed meaning-making en masse—would entail a whole slew of different actions and structures.
Some of it would look simple and ancient, like feeding our neighbors.
Some of it would look new, like enlivening art and innovative collectives reflecting the unique issues of this moment.
The point is: participating in life this way is to reach the level of this game that makes it infinite; the level on which we’ll meet each other, and can achieve even more together.
Do something that stands for something. Make statements through your acts.
Choose the more whole parts of yourself to feed, focus on, and amplify.
Choose to pretend that your dreams have meanings, and are worth trusting and following in real life.
Follow the intelligence encoded via emotions, sensations, and synchronicities in your life… meaning that’s there for the harvesting, depending on how you’re viewing it. Try different ways of viewing it on for size.
Choose congruence and the courageous path of reducing cognitive dissonance through audacious, arduous study. Seek the truth and pay the tolls to get to it.
Choose to have faith that the world and you were meant to find one another and fit together, like a perfect puzzle piece.
You could do any of these, and more.
Just make sure to not do what I tell you; rather, let my words stimulate your own calling and yearning to come to the forefront and influence what you do next.
This is a way requiring sacrifices, but it means you can completely own your life and its legacy and ensure its goodness all around.
Reunion and true collaboration with the living world means being a part of something bigger.
So I hope, and pray, that the sacrifices made from the meaning-centered lifestyle are the right ones.
You must relinquish your inherited idea that you are the individual hero against an inert backdrop (the world).
Instead you must recognize: The world is ALIVE and because it is, you are too.
And play the game of co-creation, not conquest.
The ultimate payoff is your life becoming a harmonious and wise reflection of the whole: The Gift, re-cycling. There’s no great men of history here. There’s only intelligent patterns working to heal the whole scene.
And you must ask yourself “Am I sponsoring the right potentials with my attention?”
Welcome to my world, baby. The ceiling is the sky.
☁️