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PATRONS!
I need a vacation. I was supposed to be having one these last two weeks of May. I was going to be completely offline either on top of or underwater from May 15 to June 1.
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Instead, you know. This week felt like a high degree of struggle. Worry, anxiety. I need to relax. I want to go diving. In an effort to get my brain to see the way it sees when I'm underwater, I've been spending time looking very closely at things in my garden. Nature helps. I can recommend it for whatever you might be feeling.
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Maybe I'm scattered
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A desired path that isn't a cow path in DD. cc-by Laura Hilliger
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The blue is a trick, of course. Dust and droplets of water in the atmosphere scatter light as it passes through them, blue light the most because its wavelength is shortest. As Solnit writes, the fantasy of a blue world you could walk into, moving beyond the familiar greens and browns to a country where “you too would be blue as the Hindu god Krishna,” is seductive. And yet, no matter how far we travel, the blue always recedes: “the far becomes the near, and they are not the same place.
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I'm finding it hard to get lost lately. I'm not walking enough, not wandering enough. The lock down and my particular skillset has caused an increase in me being tethered to my desk, and I was always tethered.
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Instead of writing, I am contemplating if I should keep the MacBook Pro I recently sent for repairs as my "writing" computer. You know, a whole separate device devoid of work stuff. I hate selling things on eBay because I don't want to deal with people haggling. I have that common fear of negotiating, and this week we had a lot of money business talky talk to do at We Are Open, so I'm even less inclined to sell my old machine.
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Anyway, I'm finding that it's getting easier to let myself off the hook for not being busy. Being busy isn't going to help me find meaning because we don't "find" meaning, we build it.
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Maybe I'm uncomfortable
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Perhaps they had seen their fathers live lives of quiet desperation in top-down bureaucracies, and they wanted something different for themselves. You can’t blame them — but it would have been admirable if they had given credit to the many grassroots movements (like Riot Grrrl) and organisations who had already been working like this all along.
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Except that men don't see what they haven't been taught to see. As I try in my own life to overcome the inequity of the patriarchal society, I find that even the best and most well-intentioned of men don't know the struggle of women in particular issues. Women get to do the labour of explaining and then usually having to adapt because it's less exhausting then trying to justify complicated patterns of emotions. It's hard work to be self reflective, damnit.
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Many men, bless them, bristle up at issues of gender. It would be better to feel curiosity. This gender inequality thing is such a complex topic. It's deeply uncomfortable for me, which is probably another reason I'm so interested in it. Also FWIW nearly every time I write about it here, in my own newsletter, a guy unsubscribes. A couple have yelled at me that they didn't sign up for this "feminist crap". It's both hilarious and unsettling because I reply and say "well what did you sign up for?" and then they don't answer me.
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I use these examples to serve the idea that what we now call Lean-Agile principles are principles that are already taken for granted within progressive social movements, and which are deeply necessary to succeed.
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I serve as a bridge between activist, cooperative and open source communities because there's such a similarity in the principles that these communities are driven by. Does it matter which movement first adopted humanistic principles? Probably not and it's impossible to contact trace anyway. I appreciated this article though for pointing out the long and storied connections around "tech created" methodologies.
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As Austin Kleon would say, steal like an artist.
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Maybe I need help?
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It'd would be GREAT if you hit reply and share your thoughts. I've been thinking about changing this newsletter from "Laura brain dumps stuff" to "Laura stops brain dumping stuff". What do you think? Why did you sign up? What topics are you most interested in? What am I doing here? Why are you here!?
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I've added the Offset Earth logo below. Click if you want to help plant trees and offset carbon emissions.
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