Humanize the Earth!

Presence

Have you ever met someone for the first time and felt you’d known them forever? I had an experience like that this past weekend meeting Karen. Here’s a post of hers from February about presense that describes very much how I experienced her, and me with her. Karen and I had a really great phone call today about my last post, and through her questions, I decided that what I’m really looking for is clarity, from myself and from R.

So I called R and we had a great conversation about, “What do you want?” for each of us.
And the answers have to be honest, recognizing both that our respective wants may not be compatible and that the mere expression of the want is not an ultimatum. The mere incompatibilty does not necessarily result in the breaking of the relationship.

What the heck were we waiting for? Yes, our answers are quite different. Now we ask ourselves a few more questions. How does “What I want” translate into daily life.

• How do we want to be together?
• How much time?
• By ourselves and/or with other people?
• What about exclusivity?

Do you have more to add? I see this not as a be-all and end-all list, but as the start of an ongoing process of continually deciding if and how we want to be together.

So thanks very much, Karen! I am more present when with you than I am oftentimes.

relationship counseling?

If you’ve had relationship counseling, I want to hear from you.  I’m interested in both experiences with professionals (people that say they work as counselors) and others (friends, family, coaches, clergy, etc).

I’m feeling the need for some outside help and am not sure where to turn.

air + water + sunlight = soil + oxygen

I started composting a couple of years ago. I wasn’t a gardener at the time, but it just seemed to make sense. Why send organic matter to the landfill when I could do something else with it. Seemed better than recycling!

When I moved into the HUB Housing Cooperative last spring, the composting effort immediately and drastically expanded. It went from one person and one bin to 8 people and 4 bins!

The more I tended the compost, the more I had an emotional connection to the soil we were creating. And I wanted to grow more plants specifically for the purpose of composting them! It felt to me like converting sunlight into soil.

I didn’t really fully understand the process until last night when I watched Upward Spiral by Paul Krafel. This is a 50-minute self-made film where he shows how bedrock left by glaciers is converted into soil by the process of life! This is the upward spiral. Life create soil just as it requires soil. And the more life there is, the more soil is created, thus leading to more life.

So of course the point is metaphorical about the power of each of us to help humanity move up the upward spiral, but the point I’m so excited about today is the equation in this post’s title.

air + water + sunlight = soil + oxygen

This also comes from Paul Krafel, from the very first issue of his free quarterly newsletter that’s been going for more than 10 years!

What he’s saying (crudely) is that photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun and creates a physical solid (leaves and all plant life) and oxygen. This plant life then either drops as leaves and flowers or dies and drops as the whole thing, decays and creates soil. So far we’re just talking about compost, but here comes the cool part!

When leaves fall, they obstruct the flow of water. This obstruction causes the water to flow slower. A slower flow drops solid matter from the flow to create more soil. The more soil there is, the slower the water runs off and the more plants grow. This is the upwards spiral again!

This whole exploration, and timely email yesterday from a friend suggesting a green roof for the co-op, has me totally excited to plant vegetation on our roof and work on (at least) partial de-paving of our courtyard, to minimize run-off, thus benefiting the whole ecosystem and planet!

Can you tell I’m excited?

Added a few hours later: By the way, the idea of slowing down the water to increase interactions between particles the eventually become soil and thus leads to more vegetation sounds remarkably similar to the idea that slowing down the flow of traffic leads to more interactions between human beings and thus more life to our cities.  Ideally even bikes will feel too fast.

blogs, attention and working in public 3

o/net is a black hole - what we write is lost - sure, someone might stumble upon it, but there’s no good way to see what Kim has been thinking about all along - the old stuff is incredibly hard to find

a blog has a history - it shows you over time in a way that’s more or less permanent - sure you can always edit your stuff, but there’s a strong value in the blogosphere that we don’t edit stuff - we post again if things have changed

plus, we own our own space and it’ll never be sold - I blog at tedernst.com and you can be sure to find me there forever, even if I stop blogging, my old stuff will be there

blogs link to each other, if they’re thinking strategically - when you write something cool, Kim, I’ll link to it and write about it - my friends find you - can’t really do that with o/net b/c the tools suck - when I link to your blog, it’s easy for you to see that link and thus have a sense of how your post resonated wtih someone else

since I promote my own blog in my email sig, and so do my friends, we cross-polinate - friends read across links

google and other search engines also like links - and what we’re collectively talking about will be elevated in search results - doesn’t work with o/net since we’re all on the same domain

do a search for “wealth” and the another one for “bondage” - notice how high http://wealthbondage.com shows up on both - that’s because of links - blogs create their own audience

also, what happens when this place goes away or gets sold or I get banned? you’ll find me at my blog - how will I find you? I really, really, really don’t want to be dependent on this space

Check out Candidia’s post today

2006.06.21: fixed long link that was messing with formatting

new Chicago Co-op website

The Chicago Co-op website is finally up. If simply want to follow along with the news about what’s happening the in Chicago housing cooperative and intentional communities scene or write about such events, then the blog is for you: http://www.chicagocoop.net/blog/. Check out the invitation for the Chicago Cooperatives and Communities Gathering on July 8th at Stone Soup.
If you’d like to help organize information about cooperatives and communities or simply get more information, then the wiki is for you: http://www.chicagocoop.net/wiki

I also welcome general design advice or offers of help. For example, should the blog be on the Chicago Co-op home page, with the wiki somehow linked from there, perhaps with different categories linked seperately? How should we best unify the styles of the two parts of the site? Thanks!

More on organizing The World We Want

Phil writes at The World We Want a whole bunch of reasons all this work gets easier when it’s not just a one-off, but part of an on-going, national series.

self-help

Had a really good conversation with David Braden this afternoon.  Check out his Self-Help Corporation.  The idea is that there are un-used human capacities in any community, especially economically poor communities.  A self-help corporation helps get that capacity into use, and provides for the needs of it’s worker/shareholders with it’s own outputs.  And since those outputs don’t need to be converted to money and profit, basic needs can be met very inexpensively, leaving surplus to benefit the whole community.

I’m excited to meet David face to face at the omidyar.net members conference in Chicago in July.  Join us!

My 5 year plan

Last August I made myself a two-step, 5-year plan to quit my job entirely. Step 1 is to find a way (or ways) to make some money so I can feel confident dropping to part-time at my job (knowing that I might lose it entirely in the discussion process). Step 2 is to use the extra time freed up to continue those passions that also make money from time to time and be able to quit entirely. In the last few months I’ve been feeling more confident about the direction I’m going, having oppotunities come up to gain experience opening space at the o/net July conf and at WikiSym in Denmark in July.

In the last month I wrote my first useful computer program in a long, long, time, which gave me an amazing feeling that this is not simply an intention, I now have evidence that it can be a reality. Sure, no money yet, but no rush, I’ve got 5 years.

And in the last week it became clear that 5 years is too long. Without deliberation, I have now shortened the plan to 3-4 years. Rich Henry suggested a book to me on Wednesday (yesterday) called Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, by Gregg Levoy. I read the first hundred pages or so on the train this evening.

That’s where I’m at.

The new CTA Pink Line begins June 25th

I live near the California Pink Line station and am excited for increased service!

Open Space and Open Source toward The World We Want

There’s some good stuff percolating over at The World We Want. Check out: Building Communities Worth Having