This story in the bible keeps coming to my mind. There was a crowd of thousands of hungry people and no food. The need was overwhelming to the disciples. A small boy offered up his five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus took them, and with gratitude, broke them up, and gave them to his disciples who gave them out to everyone until everyone had eaten and there were plenty of leftovers.
I also keep thinking of philosopher Charles Esienstien’s book, Sacred Economics where he proposes that our capitalistic/Growth society is coming to an end and that the new way will be a Gift Economy. (I highly recommend the book or at least his 12 min summary of it you can find free online, or you can read his interview with HuffPost or others for more practical explanations of how the Gift Economy could work.) I want to believe that’s true. I want to believe it into being.
Edo said, “We have all been given a gift, the gift of life, what we do with it is our gift back.”
As I see others now, in this new crisis, freely offer up their gifts, it inspires me to do the same.
This website summarizes what I’ve been learning and thinking about for a while now. I made most of it last year but updated a little bit since COVID-19 hit. This is what I have to offer right now.
I’m calling the concept The Terroir of Camelot (or maybe it should be Camelot & Terroir?). It’s basically my point of view on how to make deeply beautiful & resilient places. I speak of it mostly in terms of the scale of making a town but it applies to nearly all scales including your own home. I think it’s incredibly important for us as a society to think about these things right now.
We are all in shock and disbelief at the current pandemic. I don’t mean to minimize it... It is a serious problem... But scientists have been warning us that this would happen for quite some time now. And they say this is only a dress rehearsal—this is a pandemic with a virus that kills less than 1% of the world and epidemiologists (specifically, Amesh Adalja at Johns Hopkins) say this is a lesson for us on how to deal with a virus with 60% mortality.
And you know what else scientists have been waving red flags about? Climate change. It’s actually imperative that we turn a corner here and make enormous changes in the way we think and live.
I know these can be nearly impossible problems for us to comprehend and so our default is to not listen and just pay attention to those smaller things in front of us that we can control. But I hope the upside of this current crisis is that we wake up enough to take an honest, unflinching look at where we are going and not freak out but say “oh, shit” enough to actually inspire us to change our ways.
So, I for one, am going to start talking out loud about the things that I feel most passionate about contributing in the world, whether or not I find a way to monetize it. I want to give my little loaves and fish with gratitude and hope that it contributes to abundantly meeting overwhelming need.
I’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback on my website! I’d love to hear from you about how you’re thinking about any of this but also any pushback you might have that could sharpen my thinking on making deeply beautiful, resilient places.