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 …
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 …
“Each of us lives in and through an immense movement of the hands of other people. The hands of other people lift us from the womb. The hands of other people grow the food we eat, weave the clothes we wear, and build the shelters we inhabit. The hands of …
In September of last year, I posted the first part of this piece in response to an article questioning the potential of personal practices like mindfulness to transform, or even challenge, the existing social and economic structures of our social world. I explored three deep questions I have about why …
A little over a year ago I wrote a piece about how humans, historically, have broken off from the flow of energy and resources that the web of life both nurtures and relies on through the mechanisms of exchange and accumulation. I also included in that piece a range of …
In August 2018, at the end of one of the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) retreats, the retreat team sat in the center of the circle and began to engage in a fully transparent process for distributing the money that people who participated contributed. I have now participated in such processes …
Embracing the consciousness of togetherness, of caring for the whole, of interdependence, is immensely challenging in cultures that are not based on these values, regardless of where we are positioned on the power map of the world. Most especially, I find that those of us living in modern settings are …
“Life is arranged to care for all that lives through an endless interdependent flow of energy and resources.”
After years of thinking, reading, writing, talking, teaching, feeling, and communing, that simple sentence came to me in a session I was leading about money at a nine-day intensive training in Chile. …
In last week’s piece, I wrote about what I might do in the world if I had a lot of access to resources while having the same values, sensibilities, and beliefs that I have now.
In answering that question, I skipped over the major issue that values, sensibilities, and beliefs …
In my last post I spoke about the immense challenges inherent in experimenting with a gift economy within the current economic structure. In this post, I look at how experimenting with the full gift economy can only take place from a position of privilege, and what, ultimately, we can do …
