The Fearless Heart

November 16 / 2021 Many people, even those who live fully within the exchange paradigm and don’t ever think about maternal gifting, prefer going to a farmers’ market, if one exists where they live, or to a local store, rather than to a supermarket. Sometimes they prefer it enough that they are even willing to pay more money. There is a reason for it.

October 27 / 2021 I [...] looked up economics, and discovered, with anguished relief, that scarcity was baked into the very definition of economics. The one I found at the time was “the study of the allocation of scarce resources.”

October 8 / 2021 In a position of structural power and leadership, I fully accept my responsibility, in general, to hear impacts of my actions on others with less power before saying anything about my own experience of the relationship and any impacts I may have absorbed within it.

September 28 / 2021 Finding our way back to flow means walking back, upstream and uphill. This is the path of nonviolence: walking towards in the face of powerlessness, walking towards in the face of separation, walking towards in the face of scarcity.

September 6 / 2021

(An edited excerpt from the “Resource Flow Systems” learning packet)

Our modern forms of engaging with resources are based on a deep-seated belief about human nature that is so pervasive that it almost never gets said explicitly: that we are only motivated by self-interest, narrowly defined, and that we won’t …

July 7 / 2021

For the last hundred years or so, significant portions of the population within so-called liberal democracies in the global north have known comfort, ease, and personal liberties that have been unprecedented since at least the patriarchal turn. It’s not a new phenomenon for some people within a stratified society to …

June 11 / 2021 In an oversimplified way, when flow is interrupted, we need to activate either the decision-making system or the conflict system.

April 11 / 2021 States are a patriarchal invention, not a natural given about humans. They were created early on within the establishment of patriarchal forms.

March 1 / 2021

Mourning is an act of softening. It supports us in softly closing the gap between what we want, envision, or long for, and what actually exists. In the absence of mourning, we are likely to try to do it with some degree of force: either by trying to force ourselves …

February 25 / 2021

In contemporary, patriarchal societies, mothering often leads to mothers giving up on their own needs, because of the lack of a communal context of togetherness and support. One of the results of this is that, as children, we don’t learn about the needs of others as an organic limit we …