musings of an itinerant lover

Spending the last week at the Rainbow Mansion I’ve had a lot of conversations about the Choza, but also about community development in general.  Tonight we were chatting with Raven Zachary who stopped by for a few minutes and he also asked the question “What is the intersection of everybody in this house.”  Robbie and Jessy both gave far more intelligent answers than I would have, but it got me thinking about what keeps a community together and what keeps any given community alive.  Clearly it is multi-factorial and I certainly wouldn’t be able to address all the facets of this very complex question, but one thing really stood out for me.  It seems to me that one of the essential requirements for the survival of a community is the extent to which it is outward looking.

One of the main reasons that I am so excited about the Choza is the extent to which our conversations have focused on serving the needs of our local community and recognizing that to accurately understand those needs its essential that we integrate with them.  Given that we’re a community of people that are commited to pursuing our passion and life’s work it seems appropriate that we are commited to collectively contribute to the well-being and prosperity of Concepcion/Mastatal/Zapaton.

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Ok…so I have failed MISERABLY in writing 2 blog posts per week…noted.  However, I learned something in my Arabic class from my brilliant teacher Nooshi Saberi.

Going into the class she told me that the most important thing in learning Arabic was consistency…it didn’t matter how much you studied every day, just that it needed to be consistent.  I was telling her that when I traveled I was totally failing to keep up with my studies and then felt terrible when we’d video-conference for my weekly lesson because I hadn’t actually learned anything even though I’d done a remarkable job at forgetting just about everything I had learned the previous week.

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So over the course of the last two years or so I’ve been working with a remarkable team of individuals, both formally as well as informally, on attempting to revisit the basic assumptions of the role of business and commerce in society.

Watching everything go down with the financial industry has had me very agitated at times. It seems we often end up trying to blame a bad CEO or a few greedy people at the top or even an entire industry while we completely ignore the fact that the entire cultural context within which ALL corporate decisions are made is rooted firmly in a pervasive materialist ideology that explicitly states that human prosperity will follow material prosperity as a matter of course. (Though I wonder if the series of failed social experiments that we refer to as the 20th century might provide a bit of evidence to the contrary)

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‘Tis late this night you visit me
I lay upon my bed
Perplexed as how you know the time
I sink as molten lead

My mountain turns to rubble
‘neath the overcasting sky
The weight doth clinch my beating heart
my lash embrace mine eye

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Oh angel ye of fire
Oh ye angel of the snow
Though you burn in brilliant passion
Yet the gap you see you know

Do you see the crystal vision
of that you wish to be
Whilst you drown in tears of sorrow
‘thin the shackles of reality

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