musings of an itinerant lover

I have recently had the opportunity to participate in a forum wherein the participants have been exploring the foundation of the current global economic system and challenging some of the basic assumptions that may not represent our current understanding of reality.  Though I think virtually everybody on that forum is far more qualified and capable of providing meaningful input to the discussion, I wanted to share some thoughts that I posted on my blog.

My own formal training in economics was only at the undergraduate level, most of the time of which I was fairly intellectually comatose. My interface with our economic system has instead been mainly as an entrepreneur. In doing so I feel and daily taste the fruit of our system but I find that I rarely take the time or energy to think deeply and penetrate the assumptions underlying such a system. As such I feel it is helpful for me to start from the most fundamental assumptions that I believe to be true, state those assumptions explicitly, and work my way from there. I unfortunately don’t have much of a toolkit for this type of thinking, so unless I start from the absolute basic underlying assumptions of what we know to be true I find time and again my thinking gets hijacked by largely unexamined patterns of thinking that, because I have been thinking this way for so long, become my go-to default modus operandi. I hope that the following provides some useful and relevant content for the ongoing discussion surrounding the current global economic situation and that it is not too basic or elementary. If so I hope you bear with my attempt and I very much welcome any assistance in ways that I can improve my approach or thinking on these topics.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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)

Read the rest of this entry »

‘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

Read the rest of this entry »