So naïvely, I left my professional domain (references are here) and invested almost a decade building a “Plan B” in the event the government either cannot (or will not) help.

I…

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There was a time, long before the satyr leapt into the arms of agency and descended into mortality, when The Mother would stand at the edge of the void and contemplate what lay within, although within was perhaps an unfortunate word for a place that possessed neither boundaries nor any particular obligation to observe the customary arrangements of what we call “space” and “time.”

Caption: wabi-sabi 侘わび 寂さび - all things have impermanence (mujō 無常むじょう), suffering (ku 苦く), and emptiness, or absence of self (kū 空くう). Wisdom comes from making peace with these qualities, as they are intrinsic to our natures

The younger gods, who had inherited an extraordinary universe and consequently assumed they understood a great deal more about it than they did, sometimes described the void as empty, an assessment Demeter found amusing, since emptiness was itself a rather ambitious conclusion to draw about something one had scarcely begun to understand.

The satyr, for his part, seldom troubled himself with the matter, being occupied with frequently randy and vain pursuits that he considered more immediately rewarding, while Atropos regarded the darkness with an apprehension she rarely acknowledged, even to herself, not suspecting at that time that what she feared might reveal considerably more about the observer than the observed.

The Mother knew better, although she did not feel it necessary to explain herself, especially to am irreverent half-goat inclined to regard every unanswered question as an invitation to become insufferable and annoying.

For within the void dwelt qualities of the Divine that were neither creatures nor objects, and which could not properly be said to have begun or ended, although the gods had given some of them names in the hope that doing so might make them easier to contemplate.

Among these was kavod (כָּבוֹד), the immeasurable weight of the Divine (derived from kaved (כָּבֵד), which means “heavy” or “weighty”).

The kavod possessed no need to accumulate because it had never been diminished; and Pistis (πίστις), which the gods understood as faith, although Demeter suspected that the word was inadequate unless accompanied by a verb, for faith that remained forever unexpressed was rather like a song that nobody had troubled to sing.

There were other qualities as well, some familiar and others whose names had not yet occurred to anyone, and Demeter understood that their apparent separation owed more to the limitations of those who contemplated them than to any actual division within the Divine.

But it was not these qualities alone that occupied her attention.

Somewhere among them was Ananke

In those days, Ananke was known as Necessity, and the younger gods spoke of her with a solemnity ordinarily reserved for things they believed themselves powerless to change. They imagined her as an ancient and implacable presence, the embodiment of all that must come to pass, and seldom considered whether the character they attributed to her might have been shaped by events they did not remember, or whether Necessity herself might once have understood her nature rather differently.

Demeter, who had known Ananke long enough to recognize the difference between a quality and the manner in which it was expressed, was not so certain.

She had observed how the severing of the samsara had wounded Atropos, whose grief had become so great that she sought to relieve it by interrupting the very passage through which grief might eventually find its way home.

Yet the Mother had also observed something that the other gods, preoccupied with the suffering of the daughter, had scarcely thought to consider:

Atropos’ mother Ananke had suffered, too.

Ananke had witnessed the despair of her child and the terrible consequence of an act undertaken in the hope of making that despair bearable, and something within her had changed. She had not ceased to be Necessity, nor had she relinquished any of the powers by which the younger gods recognized her; rather, she had begun to regard the future as something that must be constrained, lest it once again produce a sorrow that no amount of divine authority could prevent.

And in this fashion, without quite understanding what she had surrendered, Ananke had lost her faith.

Demeter did not suppose that she could restore it by argument, for she had lived long enough to recognize that those who have suffered a profound injury seldom recover merely because someone has explained why they ought to feel differently. Nor did she imagine that Ananke would welcome being informed that she had become a stranger to herself, particularly by another mother whose own daughter had not suffered the same fate.

There was dignity to consider, and Demeter considered dignity no small thing.

So she remained at the threshold, contemplating the darkness and the extraordinary company it contained, while the satyr went about his mischief and Atropos attended to the wound that had become her dwelling place. She could not know what would become of them, nor whether the arrangements of the Divine would ever again resemble those they had once known, but she was not especially troubled by the absence of such assurances.

She had faith (pistis), which was not the same thing as certainty, and she understood that sooner or later her faith would require something of her.

For the moment, however, she watched Ananke, and wondered whether there might come a day when Necessity would recognize herself in something she had not foreseen.

The Mother did not yet know where such a thing might be found, or what form it might take, and she was content to leave the question unanswered.

After all: there was no reason to presume that the Divine had decided it had finished becoming.

An Unfinished Love Letter; an unsettling dream

To understand what followed, it is necessary to revisit a rather unfortunate episode in the history of the Greek pantheon, involving a satyr, a goddess, and a betrayal whose consequences were considerably greater than either of its principal participants had imagined.

For those who still value a story told properly, the betrayal was more thoroughly explained in this story - How does a wound travel through time?

The satyr and Atropos had once been companions in the cultivation of dreams, which they dispatched into the mortal world with the expectation that humanity might make something worthwhile of them. Their work was not intended to determine the course of human affairs, for a dream, however lovingly conceived, was merely an invitation, and its worth depended in no small measure upon the freedom of those who received it to decide what ought to become of it. A dream might inspire a poem, a garden, a reconciliation, or a civilization, although the gods were occasionally dismayed to discover that mortals possessed an equally remarkable talent for making dreadful things out of otherwise promising material.

The satyr, who loved humanity but had never been especially patient with its shortcomings, eventually became convinced that he could improve upon this arrangement by altering the dreams before they reached their intended recipients. He imagined that a sufficiently clever manipulation of human aspirations might hasten the arrival of a more peaceful world, and in pursuing this ambition he committed the very offense that the dreams had originally been intended to discourage: he deprived others of the opportunity to determine their own futures. What followed was a catastrophe, and Atropos, wounded by the betrayal of someone she had loved and trusted, severed the samsara in a desperate effort to relieve a grief that had become unbearable.

The severing accomplished nothing of the sort.

The passage through which souls had once returned was interrupted, and the grief that might otherwise have found its way home accumulated instead, until the wound itself came to occupy a place within the void.

The satyr, having exhausted his considerable talent for making matters worse through well-intentioned intervention, eventually arrived at the uncomfortable realization that he did not understand the injury he had inflicted, and that no further exercise of his ingenuity was likely to repair it. He therefore undertook something that would have struck his former self as preposterous: he surrendered the privileges of immortality and entered the uncertain passage of mortal existence, hoping that through the experience of loving, suffering, losing, and dying he might begin to comprehend what Atropos had endured.

The Mother followed him, although she did so without announcing herself, and in time Atropos also entered the passage, so that the three moved through one lifetime after another, sometimes meeting and sometimes passing within a hair’s breadth of one another without the slightest recollection of their ancient acquaintance. They became parents and children, lovers and strangers, neighbors and adversaries, and through these ordinary relationships discovered aspects of the mortal condition that no amount of divine observation had prepared them to understand. They did not always behave admirably, nor did they invariably recognize the significance of what they were learning, but something of each life accompanied them into the next, as though the passage itself had acquired a memory that its travelers could not consciously possess.

In one such lifetime, the satyr was born John Keats, whose brief existence as a poet furnished him with an insight that would prove useful long after the circumstances of his life had passed from memory. Keats came to appreciate that uncertainty was not necessarily a defect in human understanding, nor was the inability to resolve a mystery sufficient reason to abandon it. There were experiences whose worth depended upon the willingness of those who encountered them to remain among competing possibilities without insisting upon an immediate conclusion, and poetry, he discovered, could provide a peculiar sort of shelter for such encounters.

The satyr did not remember having been Keats, any more than Keats had remembered being a satyr, but the lesson endured, and in subsequent lifetimes he began to reconsider the nature of the love letter he had been composing for Atropos. He had once supposed that the purpose of his undertaking was to demonstrate the depth of his remorse, or perhaps to persuade her that he had finally become worthy of forgiveness, but these ambitions had gradually come to seem rather selfish. He could neither determine the manner of her healing nor require that she recognize his efforts, and if he truly wished to honor the freedom he had once stolen from others, he would have to relinquish even the expectation that his love might eventually be returned.

And so the letter changed.

Instead of attempting to persuade Atropos through declarations of devotion, the satyr began to cultivate opportunities through which ordinary people might discover their own capacities for love, faith, and stewardship. A garden might become a letter, as might a meal shared among strangers, a promise honored when nobody was watching, or the patient work of establishing a community whose members would eventually have no particular reason to remember the person who had helped bring them together. These were small things, and the satyr had once dismissed small things as inadequate to the scale of the world’s suffering, but mortality had taught him that the smallest things were often those upon which everything else depended.

In time he began to imagine a labyrinth, although it bore little resemblance to the structure in which Theseus had once encountered the Minotaur.

The satyr had no intention of supplying its visitors with monsters, for he had learned that people were generally quite capable of bringing their own, nor did he wish to prescribe the means by which those monsters ought to be confronted. He envisioned instead a place of encounters, passages, and thresholds, in which those who entered might discover that the guardian they had feared was not altogether separate from themselves, and that the creature they had intended to destroy might possess qualities they had never troubled to understand.

Somewhere within this labyrinth there would be a mirror, although its purpose was not to reveal a hidden truth selected in advance by its architect. Those who stood before it might recognize their grief, their vanity, their tenderness, or the injuries through which they had come to mistake one quality for another, and a few might glimpse something more ancient: the weight of the Divine that had accompanied them all along, or the faith that had remained possible even when they had ceased to believe in it. The labyrinth would confer none of these things, since they were not the satyr’s possessions to bestow, but perhaps it could provide a place in which their visitors might become reacquainted with what they already carried.

He understood that some would leave disappointed, others would misunderstand the undertaking entirely, and a few would undoubtedly accuse its architect of constructing something unnecessarily complicated when a perfectly serviceable straight road might have sufficed. He was prepared to accept these objections, having finally recognized that an invitation ceased to be an invitation the moment its recipient was required to accept it.

What he did not understand was that the love letter he continued to write for Atropos might be reaching someone else.

For Atropos had not been the only one wounded by the severing of the passage, nor was she the only one who had forgotten something essential about the nature of homecoming. Her mother, Ananke, had witnessed the suffering of her daughter and had come to regard the uncertainty of the future as something to be feared, rather than as the very condition through which life might continue to become.

The satyr knew little of this, and Demeter had no intention of telling him. She had watched his undertaking develop with considerable interest, particularly as he began to abandon his old habit of determining what others ought to make of the opportunities he placed before them, and she wondered whether the same invitations that might eventually reach Atropos could also find their way to Ananke.

She did not know, and the uncertainty did not trouble her.

For somewhere, in a place far removed from Olympus and the concerns of its inhabitants, an old woman had spent much of her life wrestling with questions of love, necessity, and stewardship, although she would have been thoroughly unimpressed to discover that the gods considered her struggles worthy of their attention.

She had more immediate concerns.

Among them were the deer.

The Old Woman and the Deer

There is a place in Central Texas where the hills begin to surrender their dominion over the landscape, and the ancient limestone formations that rise and fold across the country to the west gradually yield to the flatter terrain that stretches eastward toward the Gulf. The change is unmistakable to those who have learned to recognize it, although it occurs without any particular regard for the boundaries that men have drawn upon their maps, and a traveler might cross from one country into the other without appreciating that he had passed through a threshold at all.

To the west, the land rises and falls among rocky hills and narrow valleys, where the roots of live oaks and junipers contend with limestone for whatever soil and moisture can be found between them, and the creeks have spent ages discovering passages through stone that no engineer would have thought economical to construct. To the east, the country gradually opens, the hills diminish, and the horizon begins to assume a different character, although the transition is neither sudden nor altogether consistent, and there are places where both landscapes appear to have laid claim to the same patch of earth.

The woods possess a character quite unlike the temperate rainforests of more northerly latitudes, where enormous trees stand among ferns and mosses beneath a canopy that seems determined to conceal the sky.

Here the trees are shorter and more stubborn, their branches frequently contorted by drought, wind, and the necessity of growing wherever the rock has permitted them to take hold. Sunlight passes through openings in the canopy and falls upon pale stone, dry leaves, and the occasional patch of grass, while deer move along familiar passages beneath the oaks and birds of prey circle above the clearing, attending to affairs whose significance is seldom appreciated by the creatures below.

The air changes with the seasons, although the seasons themselves are not especially obliging about announcing their arrival. A person who walks these woods regularly may detect the approach of autumn while the summer heat remains entirely capable of making a fool of anyone who dresses for cooler weather, and the first intimations of spring may be carried upon the wind long before winter has surrendered its hold upon the calendar. Sometimes the difference is scarcely perceptible, no more than a change in the direction of the breeze or the scent of vegetation carried from one side of the hills rather than the other, but those who have learned to attend to such things recognize that a transition may already be underway even when the world appears unchanged.

There are older passages through this country as well. Along the bed of a nearby creek, the stone bears grooves that recall the passage of wagons, whose drivers had to negotiate the same stubborn geography that continues to determine where roads, houses, and communities may reasonably be established. Beneath the soil, worked stones occasionally emerge, including arrowheads and the head of an axe, left by people whose names and intentions have disappeared from memory, although the objects they fashioned remain as evidence that this country has been inhabited, traversed, and altered by many generations of people who imagined, as people generally do, that the circumstances of their own lives were of considerable importance.

And perhaps they were.

For the land has a queer habit of preserving the consequences of things long after it has ceased to remember their authors, and the woods, which appear so indifferent to human ambition, are nevertheless full of its remains.

It was here, near the place where one country gradually became another, that an old woman had spent many years attending to a population of deer whose expectations about the proper administration of their affairs had become rather more elaborate than nature had originally intended.

The Old Woman had been feeding the deer for so many years that she had come to regard their daily visits as an established feature of the household, rather than as an arrangement that might someday require reconsideration. She knew which animals had recently appeared, which had been absent longer than usual, which mothers had brought their young into the clearing, and which bucks had begun conducting themselves with the exaggerated self-importance that ordinarily accompanied the discovery of antlers. There were rivalries, injuries, reconciliations, and occasional scandals, and the Old Woman followed these developments with an attentiveness that might have been considered excessive had the subjects of her concern been human beings.

Marina listened to these reports with interest, although she had begun to suspect that the Old Woman’s account of her daily activities omitted a rather important detail.

“When was the last time you fed the deer?” she asked.

“This morning,” replied the Old Woman, who had no reason to suppose that the question required a more elaborate answer.

“No,” said Marina. “When was the last time you fed them?”

The Old Woman regarded her for a moment, considering whether the child was being deliberately troublesome or merely exercising that form of honesty which adults generally endeavor to discourage before it becomes inconvenient.

“I make certain they’re fed.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know perfectly well what you asked.”

“Then when?”

The Old Woman looked toward the clearing, where several of her charges were waiting beneath the trees, evidently unconcerned with the distinction that had become so important to Marina. She had not carried the food down to the clearing herself for some time, although she could not immediately remember when she had last done so, and she disliked the implication that the arrangement had changed more substantially than she had intended.

“Someone helps me,” she said at last.

“I know.”

“And I know what’s happening down there.”

“I know that, too.”

The Old Woman frowned, for she was beginning to suspect that Marina understood the situation perfectly well and had nevertheless decided to make a nuisance of herself.

“Then what is your point?”

Marina considered the question, which was considerably more difficult than the one she had asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, and then more quietly: “I was just wondering.”

The Old Woman might have found this answer unsatisfactory had it come from an adult, but she had learned that children occasionally asked questions without possessing an argument to accompany them, and that their questions were not necessarily less important for the omission.

For a while they watched the clearing together, where the deer continued their ordinary affairs without the slightest appreciation of the arrangements upon which their meals depended.

The Old Woman knew that she could no longer manage the journey to the clearing as she once had, much less a more lengthy climb to the creek, although knowing a thing and accommodating oneself to its implications were not always the same undertaking. Her body had grown less willing to cooperate with her intentions, and the assistance she now relied upon had become so familiar that she seldom considered it separately from the care she continued to provide.

Yet the deer were fed, their comings and goings remained the subject of her daily attention, and the relationship she had cultivated over so many years had somehow continued, even as the means by which it was sustained had quietly changed.

Marina, meanwhile, was thinking about something else.

“Do they know it’s still you?” she asked.

The Old Woman turned toward her.

“What?”

“The deer. Do they know you’re the one taking care of them?”

It was a question for which the Old Woman had no immediate answer, and one she was not entirely certain she wished to pursue.

What happens when the person who has always been necessary can no longer do what everyone expects of her?

The Forest Breathes

The labyrinth, the Minotaur, and the Divine weight of those who know how to welcome a stranger.

There is a particular kind of darkness in the forests surrounding Astoria, Oregon, which is difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it, and perhaps even more difficult to explain to someone who believes that darkness is merely the absence of light.

Astoria sits at the mouth of the Columbia River, where an enormous volume of freshwater encounters the Pacific Ocean, and neither is particularly inclined to yield to the other. The river is several miles wide, the ocean occupies an altogether unreasonable portion of the planet, and behind the town stand forests that continue for hundreds of miles, interrupted here and there by logging roads, small settlements, and the occasional reminder that human beings have been attempting to impose order upon this landscape for a very long time.

It rains; good God, does it rain. Not like it rains here in Central Texas, which gets about the same amount of rain as Portland, Oregon each year - here in Texas we get it all at once. But in Oregon that same amount of rainfall drizzles month after month beneath dark and heavy clouds which shielded us from the sun, and when the rain comes, the forest drinks, the rivers swell, the earth becomes heavy, and the entire landscape seems to draw a long, patient breath.

My grandfather taught me that the forest breathes, and he wasn’t speaking figuratively.

He had spent much of his youth among those trees, having left home as a teenager to find work and help provide for his siblings. He rode the rails, endured the occasional beating, worked in the forests, and eventually found himself employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. By the time I knew him, he possessed a familiarity with the natural world that could not have been acquired by reading books about it.

He understood that a forest is not a collection of objects; it is a community.

The trees, the ferns, the deer, the raccoons, the fungi, the rivers, and the creatures living beneath the soil are engaged in an enormous and ongoing conversation, one that began long before we arrived and will continue long after we have departed.

I believe this literally.

I am an animist, and I do not regard the living world as an elaborate collection of resources awaiting human exploitation, nor do I believe that the capacity to experience existence belongs exclusively to creatures fortunate enough to have developed a human nervous system.

There is something akin to sonder in my relationship with the natural world: the recognition that every living thing possesses an existence of its own, with concerns, relationships, and purposes that do not depend upon my awareness of them.

To that end: a deer is not a decorative element in my landscape. I am a passing figure in hers.

And by my reckoning the crows are not the messengers to us, for we are relatively recent additions to this landscape, all things considered. Why wouldn’t the crows be messengers for the others who live in the forest?

Why wouldn’t the crows be messengers to the forest itself?

My grandfather understood this, although I don’t recall him ever using the word animism; he simply told me to listen, and because he loved me, he taught me how to survive.

Our house was in Alderbrook, on the eastern side of Astoria, where the houses stood between the Columbia River and the forests rising behind Highway 30.

According to local tradition the neighborhood had been built over a brook, an arrangement that occasionally reminded its occupants of the considerable difference between constructing a house upon the earth and persuading the earth to accept it. Our basement required a sump pump, and when the pump failed, the water returned to the space we had attempted to occupy, sometimes with spectacular consequences. On one occasion, a Mazda RX-7 found itself beneath approximately six feet of water.

The brook, evidently, had not been consulted about the building plans.

My grandparents lived across town, a couple of blocks uphill from the house that would eventually become famous in The Goonies, although at the time it was simply another house in a town where people had considerably more immediate concerns than the future geography of Hollywood nostalgia.

I could reach them by following the highway, along Highway 30, but I preferred the woods. The woods were more interesting, for one thing, and they offered a measure of concealment that the highway did not.

This was important because there were people in Astoria whom I had good reason to fear.

I was a small boy, frequently hungry, poorly-dressed, and living in circumstances that invited the casual cruelty of other children. My mother was struggling, our household was unstable, and we lost nearly everything in two house fires. I was learning, at an age when other children were principally concerned with television and baseball, that the people who professed affection for you were not necessarily the people who would protect you.

And then there were the Langdons.

I won’t pretend that the Langdons were mythological creatures - they were boys, and whatever circumstances produced their cruelty belonged to a human story I did not understand.

But they were dangerous.

They chased us, hurt us, and made the ordinary business of getting to school or moving through the neighborhood considerably more frightening than it ought to have been. One of them once held me upside down by my ankles over a stairwell two stories above the floor. They killed our cat, and gloated about it.

I knew enough to be afraid of them, and I had learned that being afraid was not the same thing as being helpless.

The blackberry brambles offered refuge

If you’ve never encountered the wild blackberry thickets of the Pacific Northwest, you might imagine a collection of pleasant shrubs bearing delicious fruit.

This is an understandable mistake.

In the Pacific Northwest, the blackberry is a formidable organism, inclined to occupy whatever territory it can reach, armed with thorns that seem to have been designed by someone with a personal grievance against mammals.

Yet within these enormous tangles exist passages made by deer, raccoons, and other animals going about their business, and a boy small enough to follow those passages can disappear into a place that a larger pursuer would be reluctant to enter.

The thorns do not distinguish between the innocent and the wicked, but they do make certain kinds of pursuit considerably more difficult, and so I learned to enter the brambles and hide within the darkness until danger passed.

My grandparents also taught me not to carry a flashlight through the forest at night.

This advice might sound counterintuitive to someone accustomed to regarding illumination as an unqualified good. A flashlight allows you to see what is immediately in front of you, but it also allows everyone else to see where you are.

And, perhaps more importantly, the flashlight persuades your eyes to rely upon a narrow circle of artificial light rather than learning to perceive the forest on its own terms, so I developed a ritual.

After crossing Highway 30, and scaling the hill into the forest, I would make my way toward the natural gas pipeline that cut through the woods (locally known as “the pipeline”), find a large tree, and lower my face beneath the ferns growing at its base.

Then I would open my eyes into the deepest darkness I could find.

And wait.

Fifteen minutes, sometimes longer. Gradually, the blackness would begin to distinguish itself. Not into daylight, of course, but into shades of gray, subtle boundaries, interruptions, and movements. When I emerged from beneath the fern, the forest that had appeared impenetrable began to reveal its contours.

I could move through it. I could listen, and, importantly, I could recognize that I was not alone, which was the lesson my grandparents wanted me to remember. There were animals moving through the undergrowth, branches responding to the wind, water making its way downhill, and innumerable living things conducting their affairs without the slightest interest in my presence.

I wasn’t becoming invisible; I was learning not to announce myself. There is a difference, and there is another difference, one that took me considerably longer to understand: learning to see in the dark is not the same thing as learning what deserves your trust. The forest contained both refuge and danger. So did the town. So did the institutions that claimed responsibility for my welfare, and so did the people who loved me.

My grandmother possessed a different sort of knowledge.

She had been born in West Texas during the Great Depression, lost her father while still an infant, and received much of her early education from the extended family who gathered to help preserve the family farm.

She could recite Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Imagine that: a woman raised amid the privations of rural Texas, carrying within her the stories of ancient Greece, and offering them to a little boy growing up between the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean.

And I loved listening to her, and what I particularly appreciated was that she did not insist that the gods were admirable merely because they were gods. Zeus could be powerful and foolish, Hera could be majestic and cruel, Athena could be wise and calculating. The gods possessed extraordinary capacities, but they also exhibited the familiar frailties of human beings. Their divinity did not excuse their conduct.

And so, without delivering a sermon about the matter, my grandmother introduced me to a question that would follow me throughout my life:

What makes authority worthy of respect?

The Hebrew word kavod, associated with honor and glory, comes from a root carrying the sense of heaviness or weight, expressed in kaved.

I’ve come to think of this as moral gravity, not the kind of weight imposed upon someone by standing on his neck, but the weight possessed by someone whose character makes his presence consequential.

I knew people who had it; my grandfather had it, my grandmother had it.

A retired New York policeman had that same moral gravity.

Ron Cotter had come to Astoria for reasons of his own, and he possessed an accent that made him pronounce the town’s name incorrectly, an offense I was willing to forgive because he was otherwise a decent fellow.

He knew that I was avoiding school, and he also knew where to find me.

Sometimes he would arrive in his rather unimpressive police car with a collection of magazines: Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, and other publications that were extraordinarily valuable to a boy growing up in a culturally-isolated town.

He would find me near the woods, sit on the curb, and invite me into a conversation. He asked questions, he listened to my answers, and he did something that distinguished him from many other adults who claimed authority over me.

He allowed me to leave.

Ron possessed the legal power to detain me and return me to school. He understood that exercising it would likely destroy the relationship he had cultivated.

So he chose not to.

There was also a teacher named Mr. Fay, whose instruction in economics, political science, and history was sufficiently compelling that I would voluntarily return to a school I had otherwise abandoned. Later, after moving to Portland, another teacher named Mr. McDermott would find me smoking weed between parked cars and politely remind me that he expected to see me in mathematics.

He could have made an example of me. Instead, he helped me become someone capable of mastering calculus. Years later, when we encountered one another again, he wept because he had feared I would not survive adolescence.

These men were not indifferent to my behavior; they had the wisdom to understand that my future mattered more than their immediate satisfaction in compelling obedience.

These men possessed kaved, and I respected them.

I’ve spent much of my adult life contemplating the relationship between authority, competence, and stewardship. In 2003, while camping among the trees, ravens, and trout in the hills above the Klamath Valley, I wrote an article about the design of technological systems and the cultivation of human capability.

It was, ostensibly: about printers, and this is unfortunate, because printers are among the least romantic objects ever devised by civilization. Nevertheless, the problem interested me.

We had built extraordinarily sophisticated machines that required occasional maintenance, and the people who used them were understandably reluctant to become their caretakers.

Rather than demanding compliance, I wanted to know whether we could design environments in which people acquired competence through the ordinary pursuit of their own objectives. I drew upon my experience designing skateparks.

A good skatepark presents challenges that invite the participant to develop new abilities. Its curves, transitions, and obstacles form what skateboarders call lines, pathways that reveal themselves progressively as the skater acquires proficiency.

The designer doesn’t need to stand beside every participant issuing instructions; the concrete teaches, and, if the design is sufficiently engaging, the participant eventually discovers possibilities that the architect never anticipated.

I described flowing concrete as a curriculum.

But I hadn’t invented the underlying principle; I had learned it in the forests of Astoria. The difference was that the forest had no obligation to teach me anything, much less to ensure that I survived the lesson, and the people who helped me learn to navigate it understood something that I would spend decades attempting to articulate.

Stewardship does not necessarily mean protecting someone from every difficulty. Indeed I learned that by protecting people from negative consequences you might be robbing them an opportunity to grow up.

So sometimes stewardship means helping them acquire the discernment to recognize which difficulties are worth confronting, which are worth avoiding, and which people might be trusted to accompany them.

The labyrinth

In Greek mythology, the labyrinth is associated with the Minotaur, a creature possessing the body of a man and the head of a bull, and the usual telling emphasizes the monster and the hero who eventually defeats him, but I’ve always been interested in the labyrinth itself.

What makes a labyrinth dangerous?

Is it its walls? Its complexity?

Is the danger that the creature waiting somewhere within?

Or is it the possibility that a person entering it may lose the ability to distinguish the way forward from the way back?

I have known Minotaurs. They did not have horns. Some were children, and some were adults.

Some Minotaurs possessed credentials, titles, and considerable institutional authority.

But I have also known people who could enter the same labyrinth and make it less frightening simply by being present, and this is where I think our understanding of the labyrinth becomes incomplete if we imagine it merely as a place of danger.

A natural ecosystem contains predators, certainly, but it also contains shelter, cooperation, nourishment, and relationships of mutual dependence.

The blackberry bramble that tears your skin may also protect you from someone pursuing you. The forest that can swallow a child may also contain the paths that lead him home, and the stranger you encounter within it may turn out to be someone who understands the obligations of hospitality better than the people who claim to govern the world outside.

The ancient Greeks called that hospitality xenia, but it was not simply generosity.

It was a relationship between host and guest, each possessing obligations toward the other, each acknowledging the dignity and agency of the person before him, and I had learned something about this from my grandmother’s Homer.

But I would encounter its most remarkable expression many years later, in circumstances I could scarcely have imagined as a boy.

In 2017, at fifty years old, I found myself briefly homeless.

I had enjoyed a successful professional career. I had earned good money, raised children, lived in a comfortable house, and possessed most of the ordinary furnishings of a respectable middle-class existence.

Then a succession of family crises, health difficulties, adverse experiences with prescribed medication, and the deterioration of my marriage brought that chapter of my life to an abrupt conclusion.

I found myself with a bicycle, a backpack, and the clothes I was wearing.

It was a peculiar experience.

At an age when I had expected to be contemplating the transition of my oldest son into adulthood, I was instead contemplating where I might sleep, and then I encountered an old van.

There were three people inside: a man named Scott, his wife Barbie, and another man named Bryant King, and I didn’t know them.

I didn’t know whether they were friendly, dangerous, indifferent, or simply exhausted by the experience of living in circumstances that most people would prefer not to imagine, but I knew something about the etiquette of approaching another person’s home, and that van was their home.

I understood that the fact that it stood upon a public street did not entitle me to intrude upon the lives of its occupants, so I sat on the curb, some distance away, and I waited.

Eventually Bryant came over, and he introduced himself. We shook hands, and I asked him to tell me about himself. It turned out that Bryant had been contemplating the creation of a homeless ecovillage, a place where people living outside conventional housing might establish something more durable than a temporary refuge.

He had ideas, informed by lengthy and bitter experience, and he had written them down, and as we talked, he became sufficiently enthusiastic that he returned to the van, retrieved his notebook, and brought it over for me to read.

I read it carefully, we talked some more, and I asked questions. He answered them, and somewhere in that exchange, two strangers began to recognize something in one another.

It was not wealth, and certainly not status. Definitely not professional standing, but something considerably more interesting. Eventually Bryant said he wanted to introduce me to his friends, so I stood, collected my bicycle, and accompanied him to the van.

I met Scott and Barbie, and we got along splendidly.

They called themselves members of a Leper Army.

I have always loved that name.

There is something magnificent about a group of homeless (some of whom are veterans) choosing a name that evokes those whom respectable society has historically relegated to its margins.

And there is something particularly delicious about the name when considered against the Christian tradition, in which the treatment of the outcast repeatedly becomes a measure of the moral condition of those who consider themselves righteous.

The Leper Army lived among the brambles, and after we had come to know one another, they invited me to join them.

Beneath the enormous arms of a hemlock, surrounded by blackberry thickets, they had established a place where they could sleep, eat, and avoid the police sweeps that periodically displaced people living outdoors.

They offered me shelter, they made sure I had food, and they treated me with dignity, and I found myself, at fifty years old, entering another blackberry labyrinth, only this time, the people within it were not pursuing me.

They were welcoming me as family rejected and ignored my calls for help.

I had spent much of my childhood disappearing into the brambles to escape people who wished me harm, now I was entering them at the invitation of people who wished me well.

The thorns hadn’t changed, and the forest hadn’t suddenly become benevolent. The circumstances of my life were certainly not enviable, indeed I was losing support in each passing day as people recoiled in a spirit of self-preservation, afraid they might catch what they perceived I was carrying.

But something extraordinary had happened; I had encountered xenia.

And it had begun not with a demand for charity, but with two men sitting on a curb, discovering that they had something worth sharing, and eventually, a former colleague named Mike learned of my circumstances and offered me his basement apartment while I worked to regain my footing.

It was another act of hospitality, arising from a different relationship and expressed through different resources. The Leper Army had offered what they possessed. Mike offered what he possessed, and neither required me to establish my worthiness by producing a ledger of my former accomplishments.

And neither needed to become the author of my future, they just made it possible for me to continue writing it. I’ve spent years contemplating the economic implications of experiences like these, because they expose a rather serious deficiency in the way we commonly account for wealth.

We know how to price a hotel room.

We know how to calculate the market value of a rental apartment, and we can even estimate the cost of services provided to people experiencing homelessness, but how do we account for the value of a stranger who recognizes our dignity?

How do we measure the worth of a teacher who refuses to abandon a difficult student?

What is the monetary equivalent of a grandmother teaching a child to read the forest, or a policeman deciding that his authority is best exercised through restraint?

These are not sentimental questions. They concern real resources, real capabilities, and real consequences. Borrowing from the teachings of Ruth Glendinning, I call my inheritance a legacy of opportunity.

This legacy of opportunity was bestowed upon me by people who possessed something worth giving, often without having much money themselves, and the most valuable part of that inheritance was not that they made my life easier.

It was that they helped me recognize the wealth and goodness that might otherwise have remained invisible.

There is a temptation, when telling stories like this, to make the forest stand for something else.

The darkness becomes ignorance. The brambles become adversity. The Minotaur becomes cruelty. The labyrinth becomes life, and the whole thing concludes with a tidy lesson about perseverance, preferably accompanied by a photograph of a sunrise.

I have no particular interest in doing that. The forest is not merely a metaphor; the forest is alive.

The blackberry possesses its own ambitions, the Douglas fir, the cedar, and the hemlock participates in relationships that neither begin nor end with the human beings sheltering beneath its branches. The deer follow passages through the undergrowth for reasons that belong to deer, and the ravens conduct their affairs without requiring my approval.

The forest breathes.

It was breathing when I entered it as a hungry child, and it was breathing when I returned to the brambles as a homeless man of fifty. I was not the same person, and neither was the forest, and perhaps that is why I remain interested in the labyrinth.

Not because I believe it contains a predetermined lesson, or because every Minotaur can be defeated, or because those who enter it are guaranteed to emerge wiser. But because the labyrinth is a place where discernment matters.

The labyrinth is where appearances can deceive.

It’s where authority may be exercised without honor, and honor may be found in people who possess no recognized authority at all. Where hospitality cannot be demanded, but may nevertheless be offered.

Where a person who has learned to perceive the darkness may discover that the most important thing within it is not the danger he has learned to avoid, but the life he has not yet learned to recognize.

I think about the boy who lowered his face beneath a fern and waited for his eyes to adjust.

I think about the man who sat on a curb, careful not to intrude upon the home of strangers, and I think about Bryant walking over to introduce himself.

The boy had learned to enter the darkness without announcing his presence, and the man had learned to approach another person’s world without presuming an invitation.

I think about my five children.

And somewhere between all of these encounters, I had begun to understand that discernment is not simply the capacity to recognize a Minotaur. It is also the capacity to recognize kaved when it stands before you, and xenia when it is offered.

The Leper Army did not rescue me from the labyrinth; they literally invited me into theirs, and beneath the branches of an enormous hemlock, among the blackberries and the living things that had made their homes there long before us, I found something I had spent much of my life learning to recognize.

It was not an escape from the world, and it was not a promise that everything would be all right.

Theirs was a place where I was welcome.

The Old Woman and the Acorns

The deer had not come that morning.

Nor had they appeared the evening before, which the Old Woman found peculiar, since they had become such regular visitors that their absence seemed almost a discourtesy, although she knew perfectly well that the deer had made no promises concerning their attendance.

Marina sat beside her on the porch, examining an acorn she had discovered among the limestone gravel. The little cap had come loose, and she was attempting to persuade it to remain attached by pressing it firmly against the nut.

It refused.

“Perhaps they’re angry with you,” Marina suggested.

“I can’t imagine why.”

“You haven’t been feeding them.”

“I have been feeding them.”

“Someone else has.”

The Old Woman considered this distinction, which she did not particularly appreciate.

“Someone has been helping me.”

Marina looked up.

“Do you suppose they know it’s still you?”

The Old Woman regarded the clearing beyond the porch. The grasses had begun to surrender their summer colors, and the live oaks were casting their small, hard fruits across the ground. A squirrel moved along a low branch, stopped to inspect the two humans, and continued upon discovering nothing particularly interesting about them.

“I should like to think so,” she answered.

“Then where are they?”

The Old Woman was quiet.

Then she said, “Let’s ask them.”

She turned toward the forest and Marina followed her gaze.

For several moments neither spoke. Somewhere beyond the clearing, something disturbed the leaves. A breeze passed through the live oaks, moving the branches differently according to their age, their position, and the burdens they carried.

The Old Woman listened.

“I think,” she said at last, “they’re feasting upon acorns. There are so many this year.”

Marina looked down at the one in her hand.

“Did they tell you that?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I don’t. But I know something about deer, and I know something about oak trees.”

Marina considered this.

“So the trees are feeding them?”

“It would seem so.”

“Do the trees know?”

The Old Woman smiled.

“You’d have to ask them.”

Marina turned the acorn over in her fingers.

“Do you think they’d answer?”

“I think they already have.”

The child looked toward the oaks, which continued their ancient business without acknowledging either of them.

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“Most answers aren’t, until you’ve learned how to listen.”

Marina regarded the Old Woman suspiciously.

“Grandma says that when she doesn’t want to explain something.”

“Your grandmother is a very wise woman.”

“She also says that when she doesn’t know.”

The Old Woman laughed.

“Then she is wiser than most.”

For a while they watched the clearing.

An acorn fell from a branch and struck the limestone with a small, satisfying click.

Marina looked at it.

“Who feeds the trees?”

The Old Woman considered the question.

“The rain, I suppose. And the soil. And the sunlight.”

“And who feeds those?”

“Well, that’s a considerably larger question.”

Marina nodded, pleased to have discovered one, then she looked toward the empty clearing.

“Maybe the deer don’t need us today.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Does that make you sad?”

The Old Woman was quiet for rather longer than Marina expected.

“A little,” she admitted.

“Why?”

“Because I like knowing they’re all right.”

“But they are all right.”

“We don’t know that.”

“No,” Marina agreed. “But they might be.”

The Old Woman looked at her.

The child had returned to examining her acorn, which had apparently become more interesting than the conversation. After a while, Marina stood and walked toward the nearest oak.

“What are you doing?” the Old Woman asked.

“Putting it back.”

“Why?”

“Because it belongs here.”

She placed the acorn among the fallen leaves, where it disappeared almost immediately into the mottled earth.

The Old Woman watched her return.

“Do you suppose it will grow?” she asked.

Marina shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

And because she was eight years old, and had not yet acquired the adult conviction that uncertainty was a condition requiring immediate correction, she seemed entirely satisfied with this answer.

Beyond the clearing, the forest continued to breathe.

What Necessity Had Not Foreseen

For a considerable while, Ananke said nothing.

The Mother, who had accompanied her through the innumerable ages of the Divine, recognized this silence as something unusual. Necessity had never been troubled by unanswered questions, largely because she had long since persuaded herself that every question possessed an answer, whether its author had the good sense to recognize it or not.

But the Old Woman troubled her, this episode that the two had just witnessed from within their adjacent realm.

There was something familiar about the creature - the Old Woman - although Ananke could not immediately account for it. She had witnessed countless mortals extend themselves toward others, often with considerable tenderness, and had seen just as many become embittered when their generosity failed to produce the outcomes they desired.

This woman was different.

She had never borne a child, yet there was something unmistakably maternal about her affection for the deer, the child beside her, and even the forest whose creatures she could neither command nor protect from every misfortune.

Ananke recognized the quality, and she was surprised to realize that she had possessed it once, but the recognition was incomplete, and that troubled her more than she cared to admit.

The Old Woman possessed something that Ananke remembered, but which had acquired a depth and substance she could not recall having encountered before.

“Where did she learn that?” Ananke asked The Mother, her arms folded, indicating the mortal human with a single guarded finger.

Demeter casually regarded the clearing.

“Learn what?”

“To love something without knowing what will become of it.”

The Mother considered the question.

“I shouldn’t presume to know all the people who taught her.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I know.”

Ananke turned toward her.

“She reminds me of someone.”

“Yes,” said Demeter.

“Me.”

The Mother smiled.

“Yes. I’ve missed you.”

Ananke looked again toward the Old Woman.

“But I was never like that.”

“No,” Demeter agreed. “Not quite. It’s nice to get to know the new you.”

There was no cruelty in the answer, although Ananke felt its weight.

For an age she had regarded herself as diminished by grief, as though some essential portion of her being had been lost when her daughter suffered and the world became a place whose uncertainties she could no longer bear.

Yet here was something recognizably hers, living in a mortal woman who had never known her name, and somehow richer for having passed through lives and experiences that Ananke herself had never inhabited.

“Did you give her this?” she asked.

“I gave her something,” said Demeter. “But I was hardly alone.”

Ananke considered the innumerable presences within the void: sorrow and longing, tenderness and memory, the restless dreams of mortals, and all the things that had been carried there without anyone quite understanding what would become of them.

She had believed those qualities merely endured, but it had not occurred to her that they might be changing one another, nor had she considered that she herself might have contributed to their transformation.

For a moment she thought of the acorn Marina had returned to the earth. The child had neither planted it nor eaten it, and could not say what would become of it. Yet something had passed between the child, the tree, and the forest that no single participant could claim as an accomplishment.

And Ananke, who had spent so long regarding the future as a succession of calamities to be prevented, discovered that she wanted to know what would happen to the acorn.

It was a small desire, and she found it almost embarrassing.

Then she thought of Atropos.

Her daughter had once presided over homecoming, before suffering persuaded her that some journeys must never be permitted to begin again. Ananke had watched her withdraw into the certainty of severance, and had mistaken her own helplessness for an obligation to make the world less dangerous.

She had wanted to protect her daughter, and in time, she had become so occupied with preventing another wound that she had ceased to consider what her daughter might yet become.

“Mother,” Ananke said quietly.

Demeter turned toward her.

“I think I should like to see my daughter.”

The Mother regarded her for a moment.

“Then go to her.”

Ananke hesitated.

“What shall I say?”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

Necessity stared at her.

Demeter smiled.

“Perhaps you might begin by asking how she is.”

“And if she does not wish to see me?”

“Then you will have learned something.”

Ananke looked again toward the clearing, where the Old Woman and Marina had resumed their conversation, apparently unconcerned that their small affairs had attracted the attention of beings older than memory.

For the first time in an age, Necessity contemplated an action whose outcome she could neither foresee nor compel.

She was afraid.

And she went anyway.

Ten years ago, the people around me said:

“A flood’s coming. Donald Trump. Big flood. It’s going to destroy our institutions. Our vulnerable, Kent! They’re in trouble! We need to come up with a plan.”

And I said:

“Well, it’s not a perfect plan, but I come from a place that doesn’t have a lot of institutional support. I grew up in a place like that. We had two house fires. We lost everything twice. So I kind of know how to build an ugly ark, so to speak.”

I’m going to use the ark-and-flood metaphor because some people get it.

It’s not going to be a pretty ark, but it’s an ark, and it reflects the blueprints of something humans have been doing for 200,000 years.

It’s not very mysterious. It’s working with others without assuming institutional support.

If the institution does support us, that’s great. But we have to begin with the assumption that the institution might not be there, particularly if your primary supposition is that a huge flood is coming and it’s going to destroy the institution.

It’s a logic thing.

What surprised me, and still surprises me, is that people said

“No, no, no! Your job is to vote for the political party that has written a sternly worded letter to the clouds!”

Also:

“Who do you think you are, building an ark without an advanced degree in ark construction? You have to go to the institution. You have to get the degree.”

“We’re not getting into an ugly ark. We’re going to get into an ark that allows us to continue our climb without taking any lateral steps downward, and definitely not backward. It has to be a forward ark!”

And that’s the part I find most interesting.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why people entertain such a strange spell of learned helplessness.

I think part of the answer is that people have been consumers for two or three generations. They’ve been able to buy their way out of problems for as long as they’ve had money, and somewhere along the way they’ve lost the muscle memory of doing things themselves.

That loss of muscle memory informs the learned helplessness.

But this isn’t irreparable.

The good news: we have elders

There are boomers who still resemble my grandparents’ generation. People who actually did things, and not just for themselves.

I’m not talking about people who built an ark for themselves and said, “Fuck you, kids! Fuck you, grandkids! We got ours, and we’re taking this money to heaven with us!”

That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the kind of people I grew up around.

My family had strays. People who were aligned with our values but weren’t technically related by blood. And I was one of them, for what it’s worth. I didn’t realize that until two years ago.

I wasn’t even related to a lot of my family, but they took me in as if I were one of their own.

And that’s the thing.

We still have elders who know how to build things.

They have that muscle memory. It might be a little sore because they haven’t had to exercise it in a while, but at least they remember. They have some recollection of how to do things without outsourcing everything to an institution.

It’s a weird irony.

But there you go.

Build the ark, y’all.

There’s a difference between an elder who remembers how to build an ark and an elder who built one for themselves, pulled up the gangplank, and told the grandchildren to learn how to swim.

Find the former. Learn what they know. Work alongside them, and eventually become the kind of elder who makes room for somebody else.

That’s the art of stewardship. We don’t preserve what matters by waiting for institutions to rescue us, nor by accumulating enough for ourselves that we can afford to stop caring about everyone else. We preserve it by passing along the knowledge, relationships, skills, and responsibilities that allow the next generation to build something better than we did.

An ark isn’t much of an inheritance if you never teach the children how to build another one.

Here’s the story of one such elder (Douglas), invested to ensure that he leaves this world better than how he received it:

It’s my favorite way of knowing you’re not REALLY from the private sector.

Allow me to explain. Imagine ordering fast food, but:

• Your burger comes from Burger King

• fries from McDonald’s

• and drink from Dairy Queen

They’re miles apart. You take the bus. Bring your own cup. Nobody takes three bus rides to eat one lunch (article).

That’s how “the homeless industrial complex” often delivers services

Housing, health, trans, employment, childcare, and other services come from separate orgs, budgets, eligibility rules, and administrative processes

The person needing help is the “systems integrator.”

Every organization might be doing a perfectly-respectable job managing its own budget, AND the overall system can STILL be spectacularly inefficient.

That’s what happens when we optimize individual components without adequately considering the performance of the whole.

I’m a private sector guy (you can read my professional endorsements here)

I’ve spent 35+ years working on tech that sustains enormous throughput at global scale, and one lesson has remained remarkably consistent:

You don’t solve every scaling problem by building a bigger palace.

You build capacity at the last mile.

Good architecture doesn’t require everyone to understand the whole system.

It enables capable components to do their jobs, coordinate through shared infrastructure, and produce outcomes none could deliver alone

The same principle applies to governance and service delivery

This is also why I challenge cost-centers.

Reducing one department’s budget isn’t necessarily reducing enterprise costs.

Sometimes you’ve simply moved the expense somewhere else.

Fiscal stewardship requires understanding how decisions affect the performance of the whole.

Well-designed wraparound services address fragmentation.

Not every integration saves money; coordination has costs

But dismissing integration without examining costs, duplication, incentives, and outcomes isn’t fiscal analysis - it’s a preference masquerading as one, making the problem worse in each cycle.

Let’s talk solutions

I’ve spent decades developing products in the private sector and helping communities build concrete skateparks.

Different domains, same principle: identify what’s missing, organize capable people, and build infrastructure that enables them to succeed

I’m not proposing THE solution; we’re showing you that viable alternatives exist.

We built one, documented the architecture, and published the recipe

You can use it, improve it, or vibe-code something entirely different

The point: stop treating the status quo as inevitable.

To that end: I published a white paper on the 214 Alpha coordination architecture, grounded in established work on organizational design, economics, and governance.

It proposes infrastructure enabling people and institutions to coordinate from the bottom up.

For almost ten years 214 Alpha built Commonweave as a working reference architecture, demonstrating how people can organize, trade, govern, and coordinate from the bottom up.

Not merely a theory. An operational model that communities can use and adapt.

Bene Esse extends this approach to affordable housing and community dev.

Housing is inseparable from livelihoods, services, relationships, and the local economy.

The social and economic infrastructure matters as much as the physical.

That work brought Terra Global Developments into the picture through HALO Communities.

HALO applies these principles to community dev, connecting housing with services, enterprise, and recurring local revenue.

The objective: build sustainable communities.

Progress rather than perfection (because perfection does not exist)

I’m not claiming this architecture is perfect or superior to the existing system, nor am I trying to replace it.

I’m addressing a career-long challenge: helping systems achieve sustainable throughput at scale by building capacity at the last mile.

You can read more about the plan in this article:

Incumbents don’t need lectures.

People at the last mile need capacity to manage their affairs and coordinate.

Have a better method? Bring it.

But don’t confuse spending less with solving problems at lower cost. You may be making things worse AND more expensive.

Returning to the opening illustration:

Don’t become so preoccupied with cutting branches that you forget you can grow the tree...

...or just plant more of them.

I could tell the government was going to stop paying the bills for programs frequently described as “squishy” and “nonvital,” and I knew we needed a Plan B to keep the lights on so we can continue taking care of the vulnerable.

At the time I was still married and my brother in law is developmentally disabled. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t just shuffled off to some home.

Our friends included a couple whose only child had Downs syndrome, and I wanted to make sure that he didn’t slip through the cracks in the event he outlived his parents in a world where the government either cannot or will not continue paying for unpopular “entitlements.”

I raised this concern with my wife and my people and was universally dismissed as a MAGA, so I departed my professional endeavors (catching those engaged in fraud), and focused on using my skills to improve tools for refugee populations in conflict zones, reasoning that experiences in a war zone might inform designs that will work here in the US.

And almost ten years ago my team received the same UNESCO recognition that put Twitter and Spotify on the map - international recognition for a solution that was subsequently ignored inside the United States as “unnecessary.”

I lost a lot of people along the way.

People who wrongly accused me of being a MAGA, and my “loved ones“ accused me of being mentally ill, etc.

⁨But.

It’s not mentally ill to suggest that those responsible for nonprofits should entertain contingency planning enabling them to continue paying their employees a living wage in the event their plan A is no longer viable.

Indeed, this is their explicit corporate directive.

In any case: it’s bittersweet to receive validation that I projected outcomes correctly, based upon obvious signals that this was to be so, which were stated in plain English by a guy who has always done the exact thing he’s currently doing.

Q: y’all had a million mile head start. How in the world is any of this a surprise?

And it’s bittersweet because people are weirdly protective of institutional narratives, and it doesn’t matter if those narratives are no longer true.

In fact: they get extremely angry when you correctly point out that they are no longer true and stopped being viable years ago.

This has led me to ask hard questions, mostly to myself, because I’ve wondered why people are so loyal to dogma.

I have lost so many people along the way, and it makes me curious why people lash so viscously at a messenger delivering a message they don’t want to hear.

I’ve come to understand the problem in the following, layered way:

(1) “Common sense” is predicated upon an assumption of common experience, and fortunately: experience is not common.

One reason people cannot see it is because the system is still working for them.

The experiences which informed my convictions are not the same as those who have experienced an institution that has always been there for them.

These people will say “Kent, things have always been that way,” which is so logically and historically untrue that one wonders why a thinking adult would ever say such a thing aloud.

Humans are about 200,000 years old, America is 250 years old, and “the way things are“ has only been true for a couple of generations (at most).

And define “always.“

Humans are pattern-based creatures, and because people seek predictability, they seek (and yearn) for routine.

Patterns become routine, routine becomes orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes ossified canon.

Once people are locked into that mindset, they have a difficult time acknowledging something they know is true: things have NOT always worked this way. So why are they acting like it?

By happenstance I encountered a short essay on Twitter during my trip back to Central Texas.

The essay featured the following lucid observations about what the author described as “the boomer consensus bubble.”

Selected passages that delivered some oomph:

“One of the most revealing features of the boomer worldview is the tendency to treat the economic conditions of their formative years as though they were permanent features of civilization.

And this is where arguing with a boomer can become so surreal.

You’re asking whether the rules make sense, but they’re insisting that accepting the rules is what it means to make sense.

You think you’re debating an economic arrangement, but they’re defending an autobiography.”

This gets us closer to understanding why people have invested in remaining willfully blind to evolving reality.

They might be committed to taking their consensus bubble to their grave, and nothing you say will change their minds.

(2) For as long as the system is working for them, people are going to remain willfully blind to how it’s not working reliably for others.

I was rejected by “good liberals” who told me that Trump was literal Hitler that was going to burn the United States to the ground.

I said “ok, assuming you’re right, what’s our plan B?”

I proposed a model that rewards people for collaboration, with the explicit assumption that the government cannot or will not lend a hand.

They became extremely angry for my decision to pursue this line of contingency planning, as if I’m suddenly one of the bad guys.

So what’s with the self-imposed blind spot?

Part of it is because the system is actually working pretty well for the people who complain loudest about the system’s unfairness, and those who considered themselves “good liberals” who accused me of being MAGA probably didn’t want to hear that they might experience a future where their compensation and benefits packages might not always be available and/or subsidized by government resources.

And it’s sane to ask these questions because the actual data paints a different portrait than the one people consider to be real.

I’m not saying “Trump is literal Hitler,” I’m saying: the data sort of supports your claim that the government might lose interest in helping sustain your current standard of living.

I’ve learned that people will internalize a dual narrative whereas an exaggerated and extreme claim is delivered by a person who concurrently doesn’t want to consider a future without, for example: Social Security benefits.

Which, I should mention, very few of my fellow Gen X cohort have ever considered something we’ll see in our lifetime.

I’ll ask a question: what happens to one such boomer if (and when) something goes wrong and their plan A stops working?

The answer is obvious (at least to me) - a 59 year old white male who has never experienced a reliable institution in my short life.

I’m a veteran! That’s great!

Except when I returned from a deployment in South America with a fungal infection, and I learned the VA refused to see me, causing me to become extremely sick, and was forced to navigate the illness alone because the VA also refused to authorize assistance from a non-VA doctor.

The experience was so traumatic that I refuse to seek help from the VA to this day.

I have the GI Bill! That helps me with my education!

Except when I learned how the VA is so habitually late in delivering their payments that their tardiness results in veterans being unable to secure placement within classes as the schools await payment.

In the end I just paid for most of the classes out of pocket because the GI Bill was such a headache.

I’m a high tech guy with 80+ high-profile recommendations from CEOs, public leaders, and government officials! (see them here)

I’ve worked for some of the most respected firms in the world! That’s great!

Except that my career trajectory came to a premature end as soon as it became less expensive and more convenient to just hire someone younger.

And so on.

The system that’s working for you isn’t always working for everyone

And criticism of an unreliable system is not an indictment against you.

Stop defending a system in need of repair as if each observation is a personal attack.

Stop being so thin-skinned.

This over-sensitivity is why people bury their heads in the sand and pretend that all is well, except for those who say mean things about a system that’s not working for everyone.

Avoiding the message by attacking the messenger

People are generally terrified of uncertainty, and will embrace any irrational theory to avoid admitting they don’t know what to do.

That’s one level, but the self-imposed blindness gets worse than that.

Not everyone knows how to separate the message from the messenger, especially if the message makes them feel uncomfortable.

You know what they say:

people don’t remember what you do or say, they remember how you made them feel.

It doesn’t matter if you are correct, and it doesn’t matter if you were being polite.

If you make a person feel like they are within uncertainty, (and if that knowledge makes them feel uncomfortable), they’re going to lash out at the messenger to silence the messenger.

I kind of talk about the same dynamic in this article, where Christians refuse to receive messages from those who make them feel uncomfortable.

Candidly: I don’t give a shit about that. I’m not running for office and am disinterested in your vote. I’m a private sector guy and intend to stay that way.

What I do care about is effectiveness, because the vulnerable people depending upon these institutions cannot afford the luxury of protecting your allergy to discomfort.

And when people inhibit that effectiveness because they’re afraid of feeling uncomfortable, it’s my inclination to get them out of the way.

But then again: why bother?

Why bother doing that, when their entrenched ineptitude, risk-aversion and fear is already doing the heavy lifting?

If failure is your thing, then bang on.

It would be my preference that people invest in a viable plan B, and it doesn’t even have to be ours. At least do something but continue fretting as you wait for “everything to go back to normal” while claiming that “Trump is literal Hitler who plans to destroy this world and everything in it.”

Grow up.

All of that silly nonsense is escapist thinking, but I’m not going to change anyone’s mind on that topic. All I have to do is continue on my current trajectory.

I just need to continue preparing a solution, as we’ve done these past almost ten years.

What began as an effort to help vulnerable populations organize and sustain themselves without reliable government support has evolved into three complementary initiatives, each building upon the last.

(1) Commonweave - The Economic Engine

(2) Bene Esse - The Community Model

(3) HALO Communities - The Scalable Implementation

These are three expressions of one shared conviction, articulated thus:

The best way to prepare for institutional failure is to build something that doesn’t require institutions to fail before it becomes useful

You might want to re-read the above statement a couple more times.

I have frequently observed the following:

Discomfort is often what motivates people to change their patterns, because comfort reassures them that whatever they’re doing must still be working.

And because stubbornness is frequently rewarded with temporary stability, people will double, even triple, down on preserving routines that have long since ceased to serve them.

Sometimes a stick is the only way a person learns, it’s just too bad that people find it necessary to deliver self-inflicted wounds that a carrot would have prevented if people had the wisdom to receive knowledge which runs counter to their ossified canon.

They do not. Not often.

The tragedy is that discomfort might have otherwise inspired healthy adaptation before circumstances made emergency adaptation unavoidable.

In any case, it’s bittersweet to receive validation that I was able to read the tea leaves, so to speak.

But it WASN’T hidden in the tea leaves. the truth was published in plain black and white text, with some messages emphasized in red, and it was broadcast from the highest rooftops.

Ten years ago.

Which begs the question:

Why were people so stubbornly unable to acknowledge an emerging threat that is obviously real?

The answer is right in front of their faces: for those who have ears, let them hear.

And for those who prefer the empty catharsis of routine: you keep doing that thing.

As Tom Bodett says: “we’ll keep the light on for you.⁩”

And by “silence” I am explicitly referring to the cacophony of Central Texas hill country when the animals, the insects, the trees, and the wind realize they can let down their hair because the human occupants are deemed safe - a message nature likely receives from either the crows, the ravens, or both, as this sliver of woods represents the only place in Texas where the domain of the two corvids overlap.

And so instead of continuing to speak, both listened to the creek and watched nature doing what nature does best - using their combined music to fill blanks in conversation as silence does its work.

Dragonflies stitched impossible blue lines through the warm afternoon air while hummingbirds appeared and disappeared among the flowers as though the garden had learned to breathe. Both were aware a herd of deer were nestled down within the brush to wait out the afternoon’s heat, and they watched an older fawn and its mother make their way across the creek to join the others.

Marina had been rolling a piece of vine between her fingers, which were now green, and she was looking down at her knees as children often do when they’re about to say something they don’t fully understand. Marina sighed, pulled her legs close to her, cradled her chin between her knees, and said:

“My mom says you’re mean.”

It wasn’t an accusation, and it wasn’t even a question; the statement was just a thread carried from one loom to another, offered without malice by someone too young to know she had become a courier between two adults whose stories had already begun weaving themselves together long before she arrived.

The old woman felt herself reach instinctively for the same tools adults always reach for:

• explanation

• defense

• context

She wanted to know which mother, which afternoon, which misunderstanding had found its way into Marina’s small hands. She wanted chronology because chronology is where adults hide within their stories.

These questions raced through the Old Woman’s mind before she realized the absurdity of her fourth question:

“Which mother?”

The Old Woman looked hard at Marina, as if for the first time, and suddenly realized she had no idea which adult or adults the eight year old girl belonged to.

And Marina wasn’t asking for an affidavit; indeed she wasn’t even looking at old woman at all.

The eight year old girl was trying to discover whether the Old Woman beside her belonged safely inside her world, and as the young girl suddenly looked back at the Old Woman, having detected a weight to the sudden silence which hung between them like violence, the elder watched Marina’s shoulders begin to fold inward, watched hospitality draining from the little girl’s face, and in that instant recognized something more important than whether the accusation was fair.

Whatever had happened before that afternoon belonged to adults; whatever happened next belonged to Marina, but in any case: the energy had shifted and now things felt uncomfortable.

Just like that: Marina wanted to go home.

Marina didn’t know what happened, and had looked at the old woman trying to determine what had changed.

She saw a look on the old woman’s face that she had never seen before, and it did not make her feel welcome or wanted, and she began to shift her body towards a more defensive posture.

The old woman could see what was happening in each passing moment - she could see her reflection in the young girl’s face, and the reflection scared her.

So with great effort she softened her face, and she looked away so as to minimize the damage she was doing to the young girl.

In a soft voice the Old Woman said “I’m sorry” and Marina studied the Old Woman’s face as she thought about that for a minute, and finally she said “really?”

The old woman said “yes, I really am” and looked away. She was afraid that the girl would leave and she wanted to take the pressure off of the young girl.

Marina relaxed and said “okay” and went back to looking at the butterflies and the dragonflies as they danced above the Texas creek.

The Old Woman is real

The old woman is real by the way; I’ve shared this in previous articles, listed in sequence:

• We call them children because we have forgotten how to call them heirs (link)

• “Slow Down, Child” (link)

• The Year I Chose to Live (link)

This story is the fourth in a series of evolving discussions between eight year old Marina and “the Old Woman.”

Having first encountered Marina during a conversation with my eldest son Ezra in 2016, in a conversation about literary tropes, the eight year old girl plays a role in my evolving autobiographical fiction, with downloads and dispatches that land with some frequency as I walk the Old Woman’s estate each morning.

Time is not always linear, especially if you’re a child

We imagine that if only people would understand us properly if they knew their sequence of events, yet children don’t experience life chronologically; they experience it relationally, more closely aligned to the Greek concept of kairos, and on some level we do as well, although we forget that part as we learn how to become adults.

Adults frequently indulge their discomfort, which informs a justification to treat others as they themselves would not like to be treated, and often they vent their anger and frustration towards those they consider safe from retaliation, which is to say: children and the elderly.

And I’ve been thinking about the evolving exchange between Marina and the Old Woman because a couple months ago another of the Old Woman’s helpers, (speaking with the confidence of someone who had earned the right to her opinion), offered me a piece of practical advice. She said:

“If you’re nice to the old woman, she’ll be mean to you.”

I understood exactly what she meant.

The implication was that I should hold myself cold and aloof so as to preserve the old woman’s respect for me, otherwise she’ll mistake my kindness as a weakness - a common enough thing I’ve come to realize.

For the same reason people tend to misunderstand the nuance of being “of service” and “being a servant” to someone who is deserving and is appreciative of love and attention.

The trouble, as noted a moment ago, is that some people indulge their discomfort, which affords them the excuse of treating other people poorly, (particularly children and the elderly) without remembering that people don’t remember what you say and do as much as how you made them feel.

And this shared experience is part of why Marina and the Old Woman became friends in the first place.

And in recent months I’ve realized that my children would “respect” me more if I held myself aloof and unavailable to them, but what kind of respect is that? That’s definitely not kavod, as I discuss in this foundational article that invites us to consider how a wound travels through time.

No, I’d rather be available to them, ironically despite the fact that my own parents weren’t reliably available to myself and my brothers when we were children, and this policy of benign neglect has continued into adulthood.

You know what they say: sometimes a parent seeks to give their children what they did not receive for themselves, rendering their children strangers who do not understand the reason for their parents’ generous investment in time and attention.

Whereas other parents are inclined to replicate the conditions of their own childhood so their kids understand their defects just a little better, eg: “misery loves company.”

I can’t speak for other people’s families, but within mine this indulgence in repeating avoidable themes has resulted in an echo of that same aloof, selfish, and rude mistreatment of those considered “safe” that has self-erased grandparents from my children’s lives as my kids decided to be treated as they would like to treat others.

As my almost 17 year old daughter recently said in therapy:

Why am I expected to chase an adult who doesn’t know how to admit they were wrong? Am I expected to think it’s ok that we’ve been subjected to emotional withholding by a person who demands that you deny your own abuse so they don’t have to feel bad?

A decent set of questions, and I applaud her for honoring her worth, as the young people say.

FACT: the Old Woman is objectively mean-spirited to many people

But the observation regarding the Old Woman was probably earned honestly, perhaps over years, but I’ve begun to wonder whether what we call discernment is often just the habit of mistaking one visible thread for the whole tapestry.

Which is to say: it’s not always discernment as much as judgement.

People who know the Old Woman will openly say that she’s mean, unpleasant, and frequently manipulative, and these statements are true.

The Old Woman has invested decades creating that legacy through an accumulation of experiences which have come to reveal her character, which is informed by her habitual mistreatment of others, rooted in justifications regarding her declining health and general state of unhappiness.

And that’s how the Old Woman will likely be remembered, but these statements do not describe who the Old Woman actually is, and as a reminder to the reader:

this series of short stories began because eight year old Marina recognized something about the Old Woman that others did not:

The Old Woman prioritizes an investment in caring for the little things, which she describes as “the least of these my children,” paraphrasing Jesus, whom she loves

The old woman intends to leave this world better than how she received it, and most importantly: she is no longer invested in being remembered in the first place.

And Marina’s convictions about acknowledging the Old Woman’s gift to her community was informed by an intuitive recognition that Marina’s mother was bullying and conditioning her to become successful within the same vitality-consuming machine that stripped the Old Woman of her name as soon as she made the mistake of becoming old.

So began their friendship, with one girl entering a machine that the Old Woman has just departed, within the hallway and upon the threshold of what Keats referred to as “a mansion of many apartments” in a letter written in May of 1818, just under three years from his untimely death.

The Old Woman’s third apology

After a few minutes of silence it was the old woman’s turn to sigh, and she said “Marina, I don’t know who your mom is.”

Marina didn’t look up. She said: “my mom told me you’d say that.”

The old woman’s face was suddenly hot with embarrassment. She wanted to understand the context which led the girl’s mother to conclude that she’s not nice, but she didn’t know how to find out, and didn’t feel like quizzing the girl.

Marina continued:

“mom said that I should be careful because you’ll start asking me to do things and the more things I do, the more you’ll treat me bad, but I told her that’s not what you do. I told her we just sit and talk. I told her that you made your yard pretty for other people. She told me to be careful because you say mean things.”

The old woman thought about that and it made her ears pop as her face grew red from shame and embarrassment.

She thought about young Marina bravely and defiantly defending her honor in rooms she wasn’t in, defending the old woman to a person who didn’t think it was a good idea that the girl continued coming to her house.

She wanted to explain herself, but she didn’t know what to say. So she apologized a third time - twice to Marina and once to one of her helpers a few days prior, over a disagreement and misunderstanding about toilet paper, of all insignificant things:

“I’m sorry.”

Marina continued resting her chin on her knees as she watched ants crawling through the grass, and finally said:

“I like you. I like coming here. I think you’re nice.”

My moment later, she added:

“And I told my mom that, cause I think she’s wrong. She doesn’t know you like I do.“

And the old woman thought a long time about that as the sounds of the forest returned.

Not because the forest had grown silent, but because the Old Woman was unable to hear anything beyond the roar of guilty conviction that appears when someone holds a mirror you’re not accustomed to seeing.

She considered that maybe compassion begins the moment we suspect there are more threads than we can see, and the Old Woman was astounded that the eight year old girl could see in her what she could not see in herself.

Our shared tapestry

We encounter another person’s sharpness, their generosity, their pettiness, their patience, and with astonishing confidence decide we’ve met the person themselves, when in truth we’ve only brushed against the place where the weave crosses the surface.

And I use the word weave on purpose because it “fits” within my evolving mythology, which is not canon, nor is it ideology.

It’s just a story I tell about how things are, and it doesn’t extend very far beyond that.

25 years ago I was working on a technology still used today by broadcast media (such as network news companies), and at the heart of the solution was something I called a self-healing thesaurus which aspired to perform what is currently described as semantic drift, eg: a self-healing mechanism with detected and bridged rents which occur when the language used to negotiate a shared perceived consensus begins to tear apart.

In that era (early 2000’s) I became fascinated by the metaphor of the tapestry, which is a weave where the weft is visible, and the warp is hidden.

This is a late Gothic tapestry, almost certainly South Netherlandish (Flanders — Tournai, Brussels, or Bruges), woven around 1480–1520.

And in the era prior to mass-produced books, a tapestry was custom-made for a family and/or a community, delivering a narrative which could be told without a requirement that it’s aligned to linear progression.

And within the English language, the collective noun for a group of grandmothers is also called a tapestry, and my grandmothers were my sanctuary, so the entire metaphor works for me as well as it helps me understand the inadequacy of traditional narratives, which are commonly rife with archetypes.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve slowly fallen out of love with archetypes, not so much because they’re false, but because they’re unfinished.

“The wounded healer,” “the crone,” “the black sheep” - they’re all Polaroids, and human beings aren’t Polaroids: they’re movies.

We’re movies, not snapshots that captured a glimpse of us 30 or 50 years ago.

But more than that: we’re movies witnessed from an infinite number of seats in the theater. Every observer leaves carrying a different film.

The betrayed husband watches one story, the daughter another, the neighbor another, and the child still another.

Which story is correct? The answer: not any one of them, but ALL of them. History usually keeps only one reel, then mistakes the surviving edit for the whole person.

That’s how Atropos becomes remembered as the woman who cuts the thread while the man who betrayed her disappears from the story altogether. That’s how Chiron becomes the wounded healer instead of the one who, day after day, kept turning toward wounded people until history forgot he had ever possessed another option.

In the short story How Does a Wound Travel Through Time?, Atropos is not abandoned after the betrayal; the man who wounded her disappears beneath the loom. Unable to heal what he has broken with his own hands, he spends the next thousand lifetimes weaving conditions under which others may carry comfort to her without ever realizing they are participating in a story older than themselves.

Every grandmother who offers tea, every stranger who chooses mercy over vengeance, and every child who softens an old woman’s heart with an innocent question becomes another crossing in a love letter whose author has long since surrendered the desire to be remembered.

The Satyr no longer wishes to receive forgiveness; he wishes only for Atropos to become whole.

Before books became commonplace, people stood before tapestries in cathedrals and great halls, not so much because they admired weaving but because tapestries allowed stories to be entered rather than merely read. Your eye wandered where it wished: a shepherd gave way to a river, which led to a king, which somehow revealed a grandmother carrying bread across a bridge.

Meaning emerged through attention rather than sequence, and the visible threads (the weft) told the story. The hidden threads (the warp) carried the weight.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become so attached to the image; we spend almost our entire lives evaluating one another by the weft, rarely suspecting that the strength of the whole cloth depends upon threads we’ll never actually see.

Perhaps the opposite of crying isn’t strength - it’s the safety of isolation

Lately I’ve been saying something to myself that has surprised me by how true it feels: before I can properly love, I need to learn how to properly cry, but when I was little, crying invited belts and wooden spoons. Boys need to learn how to be strong!

Children learn those lessons with frightening efficiency, and although the danger disappears, the strategy remains.

Forty-five years later my body still behaves as though tenderness and vulnerability needs to be hidden underground before it becomes visible to anyone else, but perhaps love and grief were never meant to be stored separately.

Perhaps tears are simply what happens when the hidden warp finally finds a way to become visible through the weft, and over the past three years my girlfriend’s sons have been guiding me to rediscover the experience of crying, which they consider to be a gift.

And not weakness, but revelation.

Maybe that’s the satyr’s work: not so much convincing people to become part of the weave (because they already are, although many would benefit from periodic reminders) but reminding them of something civilization encourages them to forget.

We imagine ourselves as isolated individuals because isolation is easier to market than belonging. As I say at the end of this article:

Redemption is not necessarily arrival in another apartment; sometimes it begins with the discovery that the door was never locked in the first place.

Yet every kindness, every cruelty, every apology, every forgiveness sends tension through threads we cannot see.

We keep pretending we’re separate while living as though our lives are stitched into everyone else’s. The satyr doesn’t offer a new philosophy. He just points toward the loom and smiles, as though to say, “You’ve been woven into this from the beginning” and then vanishes back into the forest with the other beasts.

That’s kavod.

The Hebrew notion of kavod is almost impossible to separate from this evolving story. It isn’t really just honor, and it’s not merely glory. It carries the sense of weight, substance, gravitas. Something with kavod resists being blown away by the next passing wind.

In this story: the wound that travels through time finds itself floating in a Divine substance so dense that even grief can float within it, much as a person might find themselves floating in the Dead Sea.

And that Divine substance is called Kavod, and “the Mother” within the story can perceive this outcome from the very beginning, informing her decision to take a leap of faith to help the Satyr and the Crone reconcile their shared wound.

Stories are used to bring us more closely together, but not all stories are of the same quality. In other words: memes can only go so far. The rest requires action.

A viral post is often a leaf; a grandmother’s story is an oak. Neither occupies much physical space on the page, but only one continues casting shade decades later.

This also changes the purpose of metaphor; modern prose often uses metaphor as decoration.

Whereas what you’re reading (which some refer to as Dahlgrenesque prose) uses metaphor as load-bearing structure. The tapestry isn’t an illustration; it becomes the architecture within which Marina, Atropos, Chiron, Juliet, the old woman, HALO, and kavod suddenly recognize one another.

The metaphor isn’t explaining the story; the story is discovering the metaphor

A butterfly garden stops being a butterfly garden, and a quilt stops being a quilt. Tea stops being tea. A kitchen table stops being furniture. An old woman stops being a character.

Everything thickens, as Hebe’s mythical nectar - a drink that preserves the youth of the Greek gods and goddesses, but nothing remains merely itself. That’s not symbolism in the usual literary sense; it’s density. The ordinary acquires enough accumulated meaning that it begins bending nearby ideas into its orbit.

The reader begins to realize that they are not floating; they are being held.

Sidebar: on the Naming of Ancient Things

One of our customers - a woman named Kai - sent me a photograph of a forest in Japan just as I was returning from a recent trip to DC.

She is an American who grew up in Japan, and we’ve been working together on her aspiration to establish a peace sanctuary, a place where people might discover something about themselves and one another that the ordinary arrangements of modern life seldom encourage them to notice.

She told me that when trees reach a thousand years of age, they receive names, and that there are ceremonies associated with their recognition. I have since learned that on the island of Yakushima, ancient cedars are distinguished from their younger relatives by a name of their own: yakusugi. Elsewhere in Japan, certain ancient trees are regarded as sacred, not necessarily because they have become something different, but because generations of human beings have learned to recognize something extraordinary in their continued presence.

Having spent a great deal of my youth walking temperate rainforests (in Oregon) that resemble the landscape featured in Kai’s photograph, I found myself looking at her photo for a long time.

The trees have twisted around one another, their trunks bent into improbable shapes, their roots occupying the spaces between stones and fallen timber. Moss has made little distinction between what is living and what has died, and a narrow wooden walkway passes through the middle of it all, inviting the visitor to continue toward a destination concealed by the forest itself.

I wondered how many storms those trees had endured, how many branches they had lost, how many other trees had fallen across their roots, and how many generations of people had passed beneath them without troubling to learn their names.

My grandparents told me that the forest breathes and speaks, and advised me to sit and listen at the base of ancient stumps beneath the arms of sword ferns.

And it was in that light - having just returned from a recent trip to Washington DC - I wondered whether we have misunderstood something about the dignity of old things.

A tree does not become worthy of reverence on its thousandth birthday. Its worth was not conferred by the people who eventually learned to recognize it, any more than the old woman’s dignity was conferred upon her by Marina, or the dignity of a wounded stranger by someone who happened to notice the butterflies blooming along her wrist.

Perhaps the ceremony, where one exists, is not the moment in which dignity is created. Perhaps it is the moment in which the living finally acknowledge what has been standing among them all along.

And perhaps the same is true of redemption.

We are inclined to imagine redemption as a verdict, something granted by an injured party, a family, a village, or a god. But I have begun to suspect that redemption may also be an exercise of agency, the decision to become something other than the person our circumstances, our injuries, or our neighbors have persuaded us we must remain.

The old woman need not become a saint. The ancient tree need not grow straight. Neither must apologize for the shape it has acquired while surviving the weather.

But the old woman remains responsible for the shade she casts upon those who come to sit beneath her.

And she may yet choose to make room for a child.

The Ravens’ Living Room

My grandparents used to tell me that the forests are the ravens’ living rooms, and that their smaller cousins, the crows, had been carrying messages for so long that the Indigenous peoples of North America had incorporated them into their own stories about the world.

I have always loved that notion, although I’ve come to wonder whether we’ve misunderstood something about the arrangement.

We imagine the ravens and crows as messengers to humanity, perhaps because we are accustomed to imagining ourselves as the intended recipients of everything meaningful that happens around us. But these birds have inhabited forests, communicated with one another, raised their young, quarreled with their neighbors, and negotiated the hazards of existence for vastly longer than human beings have been telling stories about them.

Why should we assume their messages are always addressed to us?

Perhaps the ravens are carrying news to the trees, or warning the deer, or discussing matters of consequence to other ravens. Perhaps we are merely overhearing conversations in a living room that was never ours to begin with.

I don’t mean to suggest that the birds are literally delivering correspondence to the oaks. I mean that the world is full of relationships that exist independently of our awareness, and that our failure to perceive them does not diminish their significance.

But who knows what conversations are occurring between the crows, the ravens, and the trees of Central Texas as Marina and the Old Woman navigate the latest knot in their shared tapestry?

We have become extraordinarily proficient at constructing institutions that can see across continents while remaining remarkably ignorant of what is happening beneath their own feet.

Our corporations, governments, and charitable institutions resemble enormous trees whose crowns rise so high above the forest that they have begun to mistake visibility for vitality. They command resources, occupy vast territories, and cast impressive shadows, yet some have become so poorly connected to the communities beneath them that they no longer possess the roots required to withstand the next storm.

I do not propose cutting down the forest, nor do I imagine we can return to some earlier arrangement by reversing centuries of human history. I propose that we learn how to belong to the places we already inhabit.

Not by abandoning modernity, but by helping its institutions become more deeply rooted in the living relationships upon which their continued existence depends.

And sometimes, I suspect, the beginning of that work is considerably less complicated than the institutional architecture we imagine necessary to accomplish it.

Sometimes it begins by sitting down with an old woman over coffee, listening to the crows outside, and discovering that the person beside you has been waiting a very long time for someone to ask what she intends to do with the rest of her life.

Which brings me to a McDonald’s in West Baltimore.

The Crows of Baltimore

I was in Baltimore this past week, staying with an old friend and his family after several days of meetings in Washington, D.C., where I’d been talking with people about the peculiar business of helping communities become more capable of caring for themselves.

On my last morning there, I found myself in the company of an older woman named Deborah, the stepmother of my friend’s wife. Deborah had offered to make breakfast, but her stepdaughter doesn’t particularly enjoy the smell of coffee, so I suggested we go somewhere else.

We went to McDonald’s.

I realize that McDonald’s is not ordinarily where one expects to encounter the mysteries of human existence, but I’ve long suspected that the universe has a rather mischievous sense of humor, and that some of its more consequential conversations take place in establishments whose principal contribution to civilization is the Big Mac.

Deborah is an extraordinary woman. She has an advanced education in language acquisition, a particular interest in Hebrew and Farsi, and a lifetime of experiences that have carried her into other countries and cultures. She’s also reached an age at which people have begun treating her as though the most interesting things she might accomplish are already behind her.

I didn’t know all of that when we sat down. I was about to learn.

A young woman brought our breakfast to the table and I noticed that her left forearm bore a collection of scars that are characteristic of someone who has indulged what’s commonly referred to as “cutting,” and that near her wrist she’d made a butterfly tattoo, a small and rather beautiful declaration amid marks that appeared to have a considerably less cheerful history.

I didn’t mention the scars. Instead, I complimented the butterfly.

I’ve come to think of the left arm as the shield arm, particularly when speaking about the body as a canvas upon which people record their private mythology. On the inside of my right arm, in my case, is the sword arm, and I have a tattoo there of the Good Shepherd. Tattoos interest me because they often reveal something about the stories people have chosen to tell about themselves, rather than the stories others have assigned to them.

The young woman began telling us about her butterfly, and then, without my asking, she began telling us about her scars.

She had been sexually assaulted by a classmate. The experience had contributed to a period of profound depression and self-injury, and the butterflies had become part of her effort to move beyond the limits of what had happened to her. She wanted to become a tattoo artist herself, and we talked a little about how she might practice her craft, including the possibility of working on pigskin before attempting anything more ambitious.

I told her I understood something about carrying injuries that other people cannot see.

When I was young, I was held down and tortured with cigarettes. I still carry the burns on a part of my body that would be neither polite nor particularly appropriate to display over breakfast in a McDonald’s.

The intention had been to humiliate me, to make shame a permanent feature of my relationship with my own body, but I had made another decision.

I told her that I had chosen to turn that shame into an expression of pride, not because the injuries were good, nor because I was grateful for what had been done to me, but because I refused to allow the people who inflicted them to retain authority over their meaning.

And in that manner, I explained, the grief of my experience had become something I could sometimes offer to others, a gift that allowed me to cross the distance between strangers a little more quickly.

I told her that I admired the warrior standing before me, with a bloom of butterflies at the apex of her shield arm, because she was telling me that the person she intended to become was larger than the box someone else had tried to put her in.

I meant it.

There was no need to pretend that either of us had escaped the past. We were carrying it with us, after all. But carrying something is not the same as remaining imprisoned by it. I told her of my partner - a woman with broad shoulders and long arms who fights with a garland of flowers upon her crown - fighting with a short blade named Choices that invites people to demonstrate their quality and their righteousness.

I told the young woman it had been the best conversation of my day, and after she left, Deborah looked at me and said something that caught me by surprise.

“I see you.”

I asked her what she meant, and then, rather slowly, Deborah began telling me about herself, but before she could do that, she needed to reorient herself 50 or 60 years, and that required her to physically back herself up for a silent space of several minutes.

She needed to begin her tapestry at the beginning, which required her to reconcile what it means for a story to finally start, suggesting an ending that may or may not actually exist beyond human imagination.

And not merely where she’d lived or what she’d studied, although those things were fascinating, but about the circumstances of her present life. She was living in a house that had belonged to a life that no longer exists, surrounded by the accumulated artifacts of another era’s existence, and she had begun to feel as though she were expected to spend her remaining years tending a museum.

A museum in which she was not the principal exhibit, which reminded me of conversations I had with my maternal grandfather after the death of his wife - my grandma Ruth.

She had been describing this predicament for years, she told me, as being placed in a box.

I thought about the young woman who had just left our table.

And I thought about my grandfather.

When my grandmother Ruth died, people seemed to expect my grandfather to spend the remainder of his life preserving the domestic arrangements that had existed while she was alive. There were possessions to maintain, memories to honor, and a certain expectation that fidelity to the dead required the living to remain where they’d been left.

I thought that was a terrible idea.

And despite a family bias against profanity, I told him to sell the stuff and get the fuck out of there. And to his credit, he did.

He bought a boat.

He named it the Hanky-Panky.

Then he acquired a girlfriend in her forties, which was a development my mother found considerably less charming than I did.

Personally, I thought it was the best part of the story.

But the detail that still makes me laugh is that the Hanky-Panky had a little tender, and my grandfather named it the Ringing Dinghy.

Jesus Christ.

I told Deborah this, and she burst into laughter, because laughter helps us salve a shared wound as we tend to our shared tapestry, and then I started laughing - because it’s almost impossible to say Ringing Dinghy with a straight face, especially when you’re describing an old man who had apparently decided that widowhood was not a sufficient reason to stop enjoying himself.

We were sitting in a McDonald’s in West Baltimore, two people from different generations laughing like fools over the nautical adventures of a man who had been dead for years.

And something happened - our laughter attracted attention.

The restaurant was occupied by a number of Black men, and one of them, an elderly gentleman who appeared to be in his eighties, approached our table.

He was well groomed and carried books, and we began talking.

He told us that he had once belonged to a family of considerable means and standing, but that his circumstances had changed as he grew older and lost the earning power that had apparently contributed to his place within it. He was now without a permanent home, moving among shelters, choosing where to stay according to conditions that allowed him some measure of dignity and cleanliness.

But he was not merely a homeless man.

He was a reader, and where I come from literary considerations were once considered valuable and important. This consideration was once considered beyond the normal calculus of “earning a living.”

The man loves fiction, carried books with him, and possessed a knowledge of literature that suggested a life of considerable intellectual curiosity. I found myself wondering how many people had passed him on the street and believed they understood his story because they could see the circumstances in which he was living.

How many had noticed the books?

How many had asked what he was reading?

I don’t know whether everything he told us about his earlier life was accurate, and I didn’t feel particularly compelled to adjudicate it. He was standing before us, capable of telling his own story, and there was no reason to assume that the circumstances of his present life were an adequate summary of the man himself.

There was something almost comically appropriate about the whole arrangement.

• A young woman whose body carried the evidence of violence, yet whose wrist carried butterflies.

• An older woman whose family had begun to imagine her future in terms of where she might comfortably settle, while she herself was struggling to imagine what she might still become.

• An elderly man without a permanent home, carrying entire fictional worlds beneath his arm.

• And me, a fellow whose own injuries had become part of the peculiar equipment with which I navigate the world, telling stories about the Hanky-Panky and its Ringing Dinghy.

Nobody had arranged this gathering.

There was no facilitator, no agenda, no registration form, and no institutional framework for measuring the social capital being created at our table.

We were simply there.

And outside, the crows were talking. More like: the crows were shouting by the dozens.

My grandparents used to tell me that the forests were the ravens’ living rooms, and that their cousins, the crows, had served as messengers for so long that human beings had woven them into stories about the unseen world.

But I’ve never been entirely convinced that the messages are always intended for us.

Why should they be?

The crows were conducting their affairs long before Baltimore was Baltimore, before Maryland was Maryland, before anyone decided that the land beneath their feet required a name on a map. Their ancestors had been calling to one another across landscapes for millions of years before a human being thought to write a poem about them.

Perhaps the crows outside McDonald’s were carrying messages to one another, or perhaps they were discussing breakfast.

Perhaps they were announcing our presence to other occupants of the neighborhood, none of whom had the slightest interest in the metaphysical significance of our conversation.

Or perhaps, if you’ll forgive a little poetic indulgence, they were carrying messages between the living and the dead.

I had arrived in Baltimore during the anniversary week of Edgar Allan Poe’s death, October 7, 1849. Poe died in that city, and his association with Baltimore has become so thoroughly woven into its identity that even people who have never read his work are likely to recognize the raven.

Nevermore.

It’s a terrible word, when you think about it.

An answer that forecloses every possibility of another answer.

Poe’s raven is not especially interested in consolation. It offers the same response to questions that grow progressively more desperate, until the repetition becomes a mechanism through which grief consumes the questioner.

I have always been interested in Poe’s relationship to the Romantic imagination, particularly the influence of John Keats and the way the two writers approached the uncertainties of human experience.

Poe, for all his gothic extravagance, often approached literary construction with something closer to the temperament of a mathematician. He was fascinated by the deliberate arrangement of effects, by the machinery through which a poem or story might produce a particular experience in its reader.

I find myself somewhere between them.

I appreciate the architecture of a well-constructed story, but I distrust the impulse to resolve every mystery merely because the author has reached the final page.

And perhaps that’s why the crows interested me.

They were not required to say nevermore, indeed they were not required to say anything at all.

They could just continue their conversations while the people beneath them struggled to understand what it meant to remain alive after something terrible had happened.

I thought about a story I’d written earlier, How Does a Wound Travel Through Time?, in which Atropos, (one of the Three Fates), suffers a betrayal that cannot be undone, and the man who wounded her disappears beneath the loom, spending a thousand lifetimes weaving circumstances through which other people might carry comfort to her.

The Satyr cannot reverse what he has done, and he cannot demand the Crone’s forgiveness.

He cannot even determine what wholeness must mean to her, but he can choose what to do next, demonstrating the miracle of agency - which I consider to be the highest of Divine gifts, hand-delivered from within the depths of kavod.

And the threads travel outward, crossing lives whose occupants have no idea that they are participating in a story older than themselves.

• A grandmother offers tea.

• A stranger chooses mercy.

• A child sits beside an old woman and tells her that her mother thinks she’s mean.

• A young woman places butterflies upon a wounded arm.

• Two older people laugh about a boat.

• A man carrying books approaches a table because he hears something that sounds like companionship.

• And somewhere outside, the crows continue talking.

When Deborah and I returned to the house, her stepdaughter remarked that she could imagine her stepmother living in one of the communities I’d been describing during my trip.

I objected.

“Fuck that,” I said.

“Deborah and I are going to travel all over the place helping other people set up those communities.”

I told her we’d be like dandelion seeds, carried from one place to another, eating baked potatoes and talking to strangers.

Deborah laughed again.

And I meant it.

I’m not particularly interested in finding my forever home. I’m interested in helping other people find theirs.

But I think the same might be true of redemption, returning us to the Old Woman’s third apology.

We often imagine that someone must arrive at a particular destination before we can acknowledge that their journey has mattered. They must become respectable, or agreeable, or forgiven, or productive, or otherwise conform to the expectations of people who believe themselves qualified to determine when another human being has finally become worthy.

I don’t think it works that way.

The young woman didn’t need me to tell her she was a warrior, and Deborah didn’t need me to tell her that her life wasn’t finished.

The gentleman with the books didn’t need me to recognize his intellect before he could possess it, but sometimes being seen helps us recognize something in ourselves that has become difficult to perceive.

And sometimes the person who sees us is also waiting to be seen, which brings me back to Marina and the old woman beneath the live oaks.

The Neighborhood Before the Dream

When I first arrived at Jim’s house in West Baltimore, I stepped outside into the evening and discovered that the air was cold enough to make my skin sting.

It was only in the sixties, which would ordinarily be considered rather pleasant weather, but I’d just endured five or six months of a Texas summer in which the temperatures had hovered around a hundred degrees, and the nights had offered little relief. I hadn’t even thought to pack a proper jacket.

I grew up in Oregon, where such weather would scarcely have warranted comment, yet after several years in Central Texas I had apparently forgotten that autumn could announce itself without first obtaining permission from the sun.

The first thing I noticed was a tree whose leaves had begun turning red.

I stopped to photograph it.

There was something almost embarrassingly familiar about the colors, the cool air, and the quality of the evening light. For a moment, I felt as though I’d returned to the country of my childhood, where the changing seasons were not merely dates on a calendar but events that could be felt upon the skin.

Then I noticed the clover growing in the grass. And the dandelions.

I cannot remember the last time I’d seen dandelions growing so casually in a neighborhood lawn. They seemed perfectly at home, occupying the little spaces available to them without requiring anybody’s permission.

I walked briskly through the neighborhood, studying the houses, the vehicles, the trees, the yards, and the ordinary evidence of people going about their lives. It was an overwhelmingly Black neighborhood, and I could see signs of an established community, although I had not yet learned much about the relationships that sustained it.

There were cars passing with hip-hop playing through their windows, people moving about their evening affairs, and houses whose accumulated years suggested generations of lives unfolding within them.

I had the impression of a place that was very much alive.

Later, Jim would tell me more about the neighborhood, including the families and musicians whose relationships gave it much of its character.

But that evening I knew only what I could see, hear, and feel.

The air was getting colder.

I was beginning to wonder whether my suit jacket would be sufficient if the temperature fell into the forties overnight.

And somewhere beneath my feet, the clover and dandelions were preparing for whatever weather came next.

That night, I dreamed of a family reunion.

The Mansion Has Many Apartments

That night, I slept uncommonly well.

Jim had put me up in his office, where a comfortable bed and the peculiar acoustics of an old Baltimore house afforded me both a view of the neighborhood and some acquaintance with its evening activities. I was tired from traveling, and the cool weather was a welcome reprieve from the Texas summer.

I dreamed of a family reunion.

Not an ordinary reunion, mind you, but a spectacular gathering in which the distinction between family and community had become almost meaningless. The streets were closed to traffic, enormous tents occupied the neighborhood, and people moved freely among them, greeting one another with the familiarity of those whose lives had been intertwined for generations.

There were children everywhere.

Music filled the air, particularly the exuberant brass and rhythms I associate with New Orleans jazz, and each tent appeared to have its own character, its own contribution to the larger celebration.

At the center of this extraordinary gathering was a cohort of perhaps eight or ten older women, the sort of women whose authority requires neither introduction nor enforcement because everyone already knows what they have contributed.

They had organized the celebration, as they apparently did with some regularity, and were enjoying the fruits of their labor. Everywhere they went, people approached them with affection and gratitude.

I had been invited to help, an honor I took seriously.

Unfortunately, I had also managed to create a problem.

One of the women had entrusted me with her old Honda, which I had subsequently allowed my daughter to drive. She’d had a minor accident, and although the damage was hardly catastrophic, I understood immediately that I had exceeded the authority granted to me.

It wasn’t my car to lend.

I needed to find its owner, tell her what had happened, accept responsibility, and arrange to repair the damage.

I suspected she wouldn’t be particularly concerned about the automobile. But that was beside the point. She had extended her trust to me, and I wanted to honor it.

I wanted to restore the ledger to its proper balance, although the debt that concerned me most wasn’t financial.

I wanted to belong to this community, not merely as a beneficiary of its hospitality, but as someone capable of reciprocating it.

And so I spent much of the dream trying to catch up with the women, who were constantly being greeted by neighbors, embraced by children, and drawn into conversations with people who clearly loved them.

It was wonderfully frustrating.

I had encountered a community whose social wealth was so abundant that its principal stewards were almost impossible to find.

I recognized something about the gathering.

As a child, the highlight of my year had been the extended-family reunions organized by my grandparents’ generation. We children ran with cousins who were not necessarily cousins in any biological sense, while the elders exchanged stories about people who had lived before us, people who were still living, and people whose lives had become inseparable from our own.

Those gatherings were not monuments to the people who organized them. They were occasions for renewing the relationships that made us a family.

When that generation died, the character of the reunions changed. Hospitality gradually gave way to ceremony, and ceremony increasingly became an occasion for recognizing the status of those who presided over it.

The ancient Greeks called the obligations of hospitality xenia, but hospitality loses something essential when its custodians begin to mistake themselves for its purpose.

The women in my dream had made no such mistake.

They were important because the gathering was important, and the gathering was important because it belonged to everyone.

When I woke, I remembered the celebration vividly enough that I later described it to Jim.

He listened, and then told me something I hadn’t known.

The neighborhood, he explained, was home to a remarkable concentration of accomplished musicians, and every year its residents organized a block party. Streets were closed, large tents were erected, and music filled the neighborhood, including trumpets, trombones, and the sort of exuberant brass performances that had accompanied my dream.

I hadn’t told him about the music.

I hadn’t heard anything like it during my walk the previous evening, either. There had been hip-hop coming from passing automobiles, but no brass bands, no street festival, and no indication that the neighborhood had a tradition so closely resembling the gathering I’d just described.

I was astonished.

I still am, although I don’t propose to resolve the mystery by declaring the dream prophetic, or by insisting that it was merely coincidence. Perhaps I’d noticed something without consciously recognizing it. Perhaps my childhood memories had supplied the architecture, and the neighborhood had supplied the atmosphere. Perhaps the resemblance was more remarkable in retrospect than it would appear to someone who hadn’t experienced it.

I don’t know.

And I find that I am increasingly comfortable saying so.

John Keats once described a quality he called negative capability, the capacity to remain among uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without the impatient pursuit of certainty. In another letter, he imagined human understanding as a Mansion of Many Apartments, whose chambers open into one another as our experience of the world becomes increasingly complicated.

I’ve come to think that negative capability is especially valuable in the margins between those apartments, when we have begun to recognize the inadequacy of the room we’ve occupied but cannot yet discern what awaits us beyond the next door.

The dream and Jim’s account placed me in just such a threshold.

I could not explain the correspondence, but neither did I need to explain it before recognizing something meaningful in the experience.

The more interesting question concerned the community itself.

In my dream, I’d been welcomed into a gathering whose abundance was measured less by money than by the relationships among its participants. The women who sustained it possessed a kind of wealth that could not be adequately described by their bank balances, and the children inherited something far more consequential than the temporary occupation of a neighborhood street.

They inherited the experience of belonging, and I had been entrusted with a small part of it.

I’d made a mistake. I had damaged something belonging to another person, and I wanted to make restitution. But nobody had expelled me, condemned me, or declared that my failure had permanently disqualified me from participating.

Indeed, the celebration was continuing quite happily while I searched for the woman whose car I’d borrowed.

The community had room for my error, just as it had room for my accountability.

Perhaps that is something we’ve misunderstood about redemption.

We often imagine it as a destination, a better apartment somewhere deeper within Keats’s mansion, accessible only after we have satisfied the requirements of those who believe themselves qualified to judge whether we deserve admission.

We imagine that someone must open the door, pronounce us forgiven, and invite us to cross the threshold.

But perhaps redemption is not always waiting in another apartment.

As I said earlier in this dispatch: sometimes redemption begins when we discover that the door was never locked in the first place.

We remain responsible for the damage we’ve done, of course. The Honda still needs repairing. The woman who entrusted it to me deserves an explanation, and the fact that I love her community does not absolve me of my obligations to it.

But accountability need not require exile, and dignity need not be suspended while we await someone else’s verdict.

The door may already be open.

The difficult part is deciding what sort of person we intend to be when we walk through it.

And when I emerged from the dream into the waking world, I found myself beneath the considerable weight of two small children, one a baby and the other a toddler, who had apparently decided that I was an entirely suitable place to gather.

There was no ceremony of admission, no inquiry into my credentials, and no particular concern for the philosophical questions that had occupied my sleeping mind.

One of them was busy investigating my beard.

I held them both.

And for a little while, that was enough.

I’ve begun to suspect that there is more than one old woman in this story, and considerably more than just one Marina.

Perhaps we take turns occupying those roles, depending upon whose wounds have become visible, whose dignity has been overlooked, and whose turn it is to make room for someone else.

Marina did not know the old woman’s history.

She knew only that she liked sitting beside her, that the garden was beautiful, and that the woman had frightened her for a moment before recognizing what she had done and apologizing.

The old woman did not know who Marina belonged to.

Perhaps she was beginning to understand that it was not the most important thing she could have asked.

And perhaps the crows, wherever they happened to be that afternoon, were carrying on their conversations without the slightest concern for whether either of them had been redeemed.

The creek continued running.

The butterflies continued dancing.

And the old woman, who had been certain that the child was about to leave, discovered that Marina was still sitting beside her.

Not nevermore.

Not yet.

The word agent matters.

It appears in computer science, but it also appears in law. Agency is connected to responsibility: who acted, on whose behalf, under whose authority, and ultimately who is accountable for what happened?

That overlap has interested me for more than a decade because I came from information security, where one of the disciplines we practice is threat modeling.

Instead of asking how a system is supposed to work, you ask what happens when an intelligent, motivated person starts pushing against its assumptions.

That’s an important distinction. Anybody who has called tech support has heard some version of: “That’s not supposed to happen.”

Yes. We know.

That’s why we’re calling tech support.

Security people have to learn to think differently.

A creative adversary isn’t especially interested in how the system is supposed to work. They push against its boundaries to discover how it actually works.

So apply that mindset to artificial intelligence.

If I were an enterprising bad actor, I would be extremely interested in creating ambiguity around the word agency. I would encourage people to imagine an intelligent and mostly autonomous software system as something independent enough that, when something eventually went badly wrong, everybody involved could point toward the machine.

It wasn’t us.

The AI did it.

Our golem escaped its chain.

That’s the part that bothers me - the perceived ambiguity.

A machine can possess various degrees of operational autonomy, but we should be deeply suspicious whenever the language surrounding that autonomy begins obscuring human responsibility. The more consequential these systems become, the more important it becomes to ask the oldest question in the room:

Who is responsible for what happens next?

And perhaps that question matters because we’ve been surrendering our own sense of agency in places having nothing whatsoever to do with artificial intelligence.

We wait for governments, institutions, corporations, algorithms, experts and leaders to make things right. We imagine consequential agency as something possessed by enormous systems somewhere beyond our reach.

But some of the most consequential agents in human civilization have never commanded armies, run governments, founded technology companies or possessed particularly impressive résumés.

They were mothers.

They were grandmothers.

A mother standing behind her children, or a grandmother standing behind her grandchildren, may possess only a small radius of direct influence. But within that radius she can be one of the most stabilizing forces in the universe. She remembers. She feeds. She teaches. She corrects. She protects. She tells the stories. She holds the family together when larger institutions fail to do anything of the sort.

That’s her halo.

And you have one too.

The question isn’t whether you possess agency.

The question is what you’re going to do with it.

For historical context: almost 36 years ago myself and a few friends built (without permission) a large concrete skateboard park beneath the east end of Portland’s Burnside Bridge, in what at the time was one of the worst and most dangerous places in town.

The popularity of the Burnside Skatepark successfully repelled those engaged in deviant behavior to the extent that crime rates diminished and property values increased, thus allowing us to successfully negotiate the establishment of a community policing agreement shoulder to shoulder with law enforcement, the neighborhood association, the business community, and other community stakeholders.

This story is told in greater detail in the following article:

Returning to Austin’s House Park, 30+ years later

It was 100+ degrees, and the girls were riding the deck up by the bowl, safely in the building’s shadow because the sun was blazing and the heat was characteristically ghastly. Most of the afternoon crew were seated on the park’s south side, also in the shadows, but closer to the flat street / small transition side.

Two men walked up and seated themselves, both had “skateboards” but if you skate you can see the difference between people who skate as an athletic endeavor and those who use skateboards as a mode of transportation.

These guys are somewhere between - they had skill but you could see that their athleticism was hindered by their lifestyle to the extent that they were less interested in progression and more interested in getting high.

Pretty interesting to sit and listen to them talk as they seated themselves and prepared to share their respective foil-based drug as they sipped on large cans of malt liquor.

And it was real interesting to realize that their talk is indistinguishable from the people who talk about love and light. Their language was identical, eg: bad energies, light energies, transformation, etc. One of the guys called himself a light worker - he was the one with open scabs and wounds on his skin. That part fascinated me because I’m about fed up with the love and light crowd, separate aside.

In any case: they settled in and appeared to be completely comfortable doing whatever foil-based drugs they’d couriered up to the park’s most secluded corner, at least until I decided it was time for me to join them.

I stood up, walked over, shook their hands, and sat down next to them, and talked about skateboarding in the way that I do.

I interview people

I asked who they are and expressed an authentic and genuine interest in their unique and distinctive contribution to the skateboarding world, and at first they were pretty cagey but opened up when one of them revealed that his older brother sometimes works with the Grindline crew.

I said “small world! I know some of those guys!” and talked about how Mark Hubbard used to rent a large closet in our apartment in Portland back in the 1980’s (in an apartment shared with my brothers Kevin and Jason Dahlgren, also Burnside OGs), allowing he and Q to store some of their stuff as they traveled north and south from Seattle to Portland and beyond.

Along the way they realized that I had some association with Burnside, and it was as I was asking them about how they might be involved in DIY in the Austin area. Both had indeed earned their callouses in years past helping move concrete.

Also on deck were a pair of BMXers, and I hold BMXers in high esteem because quite unlike most skateboarders: BMXers are unafraid of hard physical labor, indeed: several of them reliably helped us excavate Burnside in the early years, when many skaters complained about being cold as they waited for us to finish construction of the park’s latest addition.

I’d already chatted up the BMX guys so they rolled in to create a circle and excitedly talked about the renewed plan to add more parks and skateable terrain to the Austin area.

Burnside Babies - the offspring of the Burnside effort

And it was in that context that I directed their attention to the three girls who were rolling around on the deck of that portion of the park, indicating that they were “Burnside babies” like their brothers Ezra and Isaac.

And we talked about a multi-generational legacy that keeps the flame burning.

Not sure how to explain it the shift in “energy,” other than this: these guys had slowly and carefully hid their foil-based drugs from what appeared to be a growing sense of shame.

And as a parent (and as a manager), I’m not a fan of using shame to inform a change in behavior, but if shame is what you feel when you’re invited to look into the mirror, then maybe shame is what gets the job done.

Reward good behavior; discourage negative behaviors

For what it’s worth, I dislike the use of “negative energies” to inform a change in behavior, and my parental style is to emphasize positive reinforcement, so I focused on reminding the two men that I could see from their shoulders that they are not afraid of hard work, and might be interested in helping us get this going so we can restore Austin to its proper place in the pantheon of skate and BMX scenes.

In other words, I invited them to think about their legacy, and dang it: this kind of talk drove those two guys away from the skatepark and into the trees.

Which is fine by me, as long as they take their foil-based hobby away from my three girls, and away from Austin’s House Skatepark.

Generative Stewardship

In related news: skate (and music) legend Cary Jackson showed up for Austin this past week, and earned us an agenda item in a coming parks board meeting.

I met Cary a generation ago when he was regional director for a 501(c )(3) I founded called Skaters for Public Skateparks - an endeavor so successful that it was absorbed into the Tony Hawk Foundation when I was invited to sit on their board, in 2009.

Today, Cary is a charter member of SCAMP Austin. Skate, community, arts, music, and parks.

By our reckoning: skateboarding and BMX are keystone species in the ecosystem of creativity, athleticism, music, and art.

And I’m fond of the campfire metaphor because it’s apt: the community brings the firewood, the city is seated next to the fire.

This is where a lot of people get it wrong: they expect the city to build the fire pit, bring the wood, start the fire, and tend to its flames.

That’s the wrong approach, as we’ve articulated in our stewardship philosophy, which we describe as “built to last“

Call to action

If you care about music, art, and athleticism, let us know if you would like to contribute. If you are passionate about generative stewardship, we definitely want to speak with you.

I’m not exactly talking about $100,000 paintings hanging in a gallery, although that expression of creativity plays a part. I’m talking about a post-session vibe that resembles improvisational jazz after the audience has already gone home.

It’s three to five BMXers exploring their latest creative reach beneath an Austin streetlight as the city’s heat abates.

It’s artists bumping elbows with musicians in some niche invite-only pop up venue with a low-dollar cover; invisible they float like fingerprints upon glass.

These transcendent expressions of creativity always manifest within the margins, not under the hot glare of a spotlight, and this is why skateboarding and BMX are “keystone species,” working in concert with other community partners.

Everybody evaluates the world through the lens of their own experience, and for my part: I’ve made a lot of mistakes by entertaining false assumptions.

I assumed that other people assessed their current trajectory by comparing themselves to the values, morals, and ethos of their ancestors.

But I’ve heard it said that tradition is just peer pressure from dead people, so maybe family values are less important to others than they are to me.

Within my family, we retold “the family stories“ at reunions, although in recent years I realized that these “stories” weren’t always true, and it was a real wake-up call when I realized (two years ago) that I’m not actually related to my dad.

There are stories, and there are narratives; these are not always the same thing.

Government protects narratives, stories are something different.

A story is an account of what happened; a narrative is an account of the story’s meaning, and it’s in that light that I’m thinking about guidance I received this morning from one of my mentors.

I asked:

“Why am I not more successful at inspiring people to take action?”

He said:

“Sometimes your stories are distracting.”

I said:

“My stories are an invitation for the other people to weave themselves into our shared endeavors.”

He said: not everybody thinks that way, and he’s right.

Not everybody describes their endeavors as “a weave.“

In fact, I would say many people pursue endeavors in exchange for monetary compensation, and I am probably the outlier.

He said:

“When you tell a story of how you worked with others to achieve an outcome, people tend to remember you as a hard worker.”

He said:

“They file you away as “the doer” and this gives them permission to relax and pursue other endeavors, waiting for you to get the job done.”

And you know what? That’s been an issue within our circles.

We have sustained the assumption that I am the doer, but it took a 26-year-old to break that spell by correctly observing that I am a maker, I am a creative person.

In fact, as I share in this recent story, it was Sophie’s observation that earned her a unanimous vote to replace me as executive director of Bene Esse.

The reason I am good at “doing“ is because I’m trying to bring my vision to life, I’m trying to demonstrate that it’s real because I want you to participate.

My stories are an invitation for you to step in and help me bring the story to life.

But because I get categorized as “the doer,“ the story changes, and people forget that I’m actually a maker, I’m a person who is good at creating a vision.

This sustains a team’s imbalance, inhibiting execution.

Because the team assumed that I was the doer, the team relaxed into their more creative endeavors, and it slowed our execution down as other endeavors became a higher priority.

When you choose to do one thing, you are explicitly choosing not to do other things, and this morning: my mentor reminded me that each time a person chooses to do something else, it’s a vote of no confidence in your endeavor.

They might say they are “on board,” but if they have pursued 16 alternative endeavors, those are 16 votes of no confidence in your endeavor.

Ultimately: people make a way or they make excuses.

And if I haven’t told a story that inspires you into making a way, I have not done my job, or: it’s not a story you’re interested in, and in our endeavors I think that’s closer to the point.

Naïvely, I believe believed that people would be inspired to realize that they don’t have to stay unhappy.

Instead of waiting to be rescued, they can escape the confines of their home, walk across the street, and work with their neighbor to bring about a shared outcome of mutual benefit.

This is logical, but it’s not what many people want.

Naïvely, I believed that people don’t like to be unhappy.

In fact, people issue votes of no confidence in themselves each time they sustain their contribution to social media, defending a narrative that says they are without agency, they are miserable, and things are hopeless.

I had failed to adequately reconcile that many people are fundamentally loyal to stories that tell them they lack agency.

This reminds me of something I posted about a few weeks ago:

Why do we teach our children to have integrity?

It’s not logical to do so, indeed the world rewards the wicked and lionizes the cruel and the dishonest, so why do we teach our children to be suckers?

The answer is: because it’s the right thing to do.

In my life, I have learned that people assess kindness as a weakness, and they curate distain for those who authentically want to help them succeed.

I don’t tell my children to only look out for themselves. I share my story, which is an account of what happened, and I invite them to choose their own narrative.

I cannot impose my narrative upon them. They are entitled to develop their own as they form an opinion of the world that they are inheriting.

On the wall in front of me are many photos of children, most of them mine, but others are strays that I hope to weave within my family

Every day, I renew my commitment to leave a story that inspires them when it’s their time to make hard choices

I hold myself accountable to them because I cannot presume to be correct. I cannot impose a narrative upon them that they believe is false.

As I’ve shared elsewhere, I invite them to become my parental mentors when they turn 12, and this is a clever, social contract that holds them to a higher standard, because my success as a parent is predicated upon their participation in our mutual agreement.

I talk a bit about the dynamic in this article:

This is worked remarkably well. I don’t have disputes with my children, we have conversations, and our spirit of mutual respect seems to grow through each shared challenge and opportunity.

In the 16 years I’ve been the parent of my eldest daughter we’ve never had an issue of discipline until she chose to challenge my parental dominion (described in this article).

This came to a peaceable conclusion and has resulted in no flare-ups since.

The policy of mutual respect works well within my family, but it doesn’t necessarily extrapolate into a world where the wicked are lionized and the kind are vilified.

I’ve lived long enough to witness the spectacle of the youthful generation dismissing Christianity as evil because they can place a finger upon examples of “believers“ who have abandoned their faith so they can defend villainy in pursuit of power.

It’s difficult. It’s hard work.

I talked to them about Jesus and only my oldest two sons are willing to entertain a conversation.

I say:

“Don’t assess the teachings of Jesus through the lens of experiences you have had with people who claim to be his followers.“

The younger three say:

“What does it matter, Dad? They are terrible people.“

I remind them “not all,“ and they laugh and roll their eyes.

My 16-year-old said “give me an example of just one Christian that isn’t a terrible person,” and I said:

“I’m not gonna say me because I don’t believe that people are entitled to label themselves Christians.”

I said:

“There wasn’t much of a formal Christian church and there wasn’t a Christian Bible in the first couple of hundred years after Jesus was killed.

There was a following, and some of them called themselves The Way, and the name “Christian” was given to them by people who were not believers, and they were acknowledging that there were a people who lived like Christ, ergo: Christians.

They sold their excess belongings to attend to the poor.”

The 16-year-old said: “where did the Christians go? What happened to them?”

I said:

“I’m trying to be one of them, and it’s hard. It’s the hardest path because the wicked are rewarded, and the kind are punished for their kindness.”

16-year-old says “dad, that’s dumb. Why bother?”

I said:

“Because it’s the right thing to do.“

It’s hard. It’s work.

But it’s righteous work that I reconcile as an intentional expression of worship.

Fun fact: the Hebrew word for work is similar to the word they used to describe worship, and I like work.

Lately I’ve been working with Douglas, and he embraces his laborious endeavors as an expression of praise, worship, and service on two other others.

I’m quite certain he would never describe himself as a Christian, but I have told him I often think that he might be an angel.

I talk about Douglas here:

And I don’t mean he’s an angel in the literal sense, I mean that I’ve seen Douglas transform into something else when a person needs to hear a few words of assurance when they are at their lowest point, and then he vanishes.

And by “vanish” I mean: Douglas goes back to being a humble tile worker.

He works, and when I use the word work, I’m thinking about the Greek word ἔργα used in the scripture James 2:14.

The word ἔργα was intended to convey something of intentionality, versus something that people do on a performative and superficial basis.

So when I hold myself to high account before my children and my community, I’m aligning these activities to both the Greek and the Hebrew meanings.

Work is worship, it’s praise, it’s intentionality, and it’s not always fun.

But it’s worth it. It’s the right thing to do.

I was thinking in particular about the people in leadership positions having a hard time paying their employees and their bills, and as always: I was trying to be some kind of hero by helping them save the day.

But look:

I’m the first to admit that I’m not really from the nonprofit world

But I did start and run a fairly successful nonprofit that earned me a seat on the board of the Tony Hawk Foundation.

It was working with Tony’s org that I gained insights into best practices that I want to share with other orgs.

And this is because the nonprofit industry has been struggling to remain viable as funding becomes more scarce year after year.

As my brother Kevin reports: as funding dries up, the beneficial halo within their respective dominion continues to diminish to the detriment of society.

I spent much of my career in the private sector (you can read ~80 of my professional endorsements here), so I have insights on the calculus that informs a corporation’s decision to fund an org.

At 51 years old, I launched myself wholeheartedly into trying to help orgs “do well by doing good,” and encountered a number of interesting objections.

Here are seven of my favorite reasons why nonprofit leaders don’t want to try something new:

(1) “We don’t want help from some tech company”

So says the nonprofit in bed with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.

If they’re a modern nonprofit, they’re using technology.

They’re using technology from a big company; they just don’t want to be affiliated with “some tech bro,“ which has been how they dismiss a technology vendor that’s not Google, Microsoft, or Oracle.

Which brings us to excuse number two:

(2) “I don’t want to work with some tech bro”

That’s fair.

I’ve been in the tech world for over 30 years (including 10 years in manufacturing) and I empathize with people’s frustration with “get rich quick” tech culture.

Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I got burnt on the tech corporate world in the first place, and it’s why I departed to apply lessons and insights gained in my advocacy and my career to help refugees in places like Gaza, Syria, and Myanmar.

It was in that same year (2017) my team received UNESCO recognition for our work helping refugee populations.

Which brings us to the third reason why nonprofit leaders don’t want to use our software:

(3) “Do you have any examples of it working?”

Yep.

If our software works in a war zone and a refugee camp, I’m pretty sure it’s gonna work in your nonprofit here in the United States.

Reason four:

(4) “We have concerns about algorithms.“

Same. We don’t have them.

I won’t allow an advertising algorithm to be built on our platform, and it’s because I’ve never taken any large infusion of capital, indeed my largest investor is a guy I met in Boy Scouts in the 1970’s.

Our customers keep their data, because I don’t have any use for it.

Then they say (reason 5):

(5) “I suppose your software costs money.”

Yes.

In the spirit of reciprocity: the same is true of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and all of the other big technology companies you’re currently working with.

We enjoy paying our employees a living wage, and appreciate customers who pay us for services rendered, and here’s the difference between us and the big companies you’re currently working with:

With our solution, you keep fees that are currently going to those big companies, and those fees help fund your endeavor, which helps you pay your employees a living wage.

Which brings us to reason number six:

(6) “That sounds like a Ponzi scheme“

Reason seven:

(7) “We don’t want to be corporate“

So says a person responsible for a literal nonprofit corporation.

They say that because they are trying to be “anti-capitalist” while running a corporation within a variety of business relationships with some of the largest corporations in human history.

It might be one of those reasons sound familiar to you

That’s OK by me. Some of these are actually reasonable, and I’d rather work with people who are willing to ask a difficult question than someone who doesn’t ask any and just walks away.

But things change. Organizations continue to evolve, and sometimes an answer that was “right“ a few years ago is no longer the right answer.

You’re invited to take another look, and bring the objection that stopped you last time. Bring a board member, your concerns, your budget, bring the questions you think I won’t be able to answer.

If we’re still not a fit, at least we’ll know more than we did before

If something changed, then nobody has to lose face for noticing.

And if you’re struggling to make ends meet, take a look at what we’ve build, and see if these best practices align with your aspiration to do well by doing good.

If it were possible to stand on the room’s ceiling, the same would occur up there, and this is likewise true on every wall in probably every room on earth.

“Measure seven times, cut once,“ says Douglas, a master stone mason and tile worker who has chosen to mentor me in his craeft these past few years.

As a guy who enjoys meat sweats as much as I enjoy working in the Texas heat: it’s a decent, equitable arrangement.

He pays me for our time together, he buys lunch, he tells stories, often of his only son, whom succumbed to suicide a few years ago, and he patiently teaches the art of making tile and stone flow like water.

Years ago, Douglas built an enormous artificial waterfall in Florida, and not knowing for sure how the water would flow: he followed his intuition and assembled over the course of months boulders that weighed tons.

And when the switch was flipped, the immaculate flow earned his art a mention on the cover of architectural digest.

The new homeowner immediately bulldozed it and replaced it with an asphalt parking lot where they could park a few of their extra cars.

So it is.

As I observe it: every room is “roughed in,” and tile is a finish that transforms hard and physical in precision into the illusion of perfection.

But there are nuances, for instance: when tiling a bathroom, you don’t really want the floor to be perfectly level, because there’s water in there. You know?

Water, like the metaphoric marble, does its thing: it patiently and insidiously seeks the room‘s lowest point

On our first job together, I watched him meticulously assemble a mosaic counterclockwise upon the floor of an enormous shower, and the entire time he described how a person will sit in that shower and watch the water flow into the drain.

At the time, the person who brought us together was slowly dying, so we likewise discussed the phenomena of watching someone so youthful slowly succumb to a failing heart.

Pretty rough experience, because he just couldn’t accept that it was happening.

“Water’s going to do its thing. You don’t want it to pool anywhere, and there’s just no way of knowing for sure if we are doing this right until we’ve collected our tools and have already departed the job site.“

Which is true. You don’t know for sure until you’ve already departed, which is to say:

You never really know for sure until after you’re gone

In terms of sequencing: the plumbers have “roughed in“ the piping, but the finishes are not yet applied, and sometimes the water isn’t even turned on in the house.

And in my limited experience you don’t really know what the shower is gonna do until weeks or months after “the tile guys” have left.

Well, I came back to that job, immediately went into the master shower where we’d spent six full weeks, I turned on the showerhead and watched the water gently flow across the floor of that shower and enter the drain without a single pool.

Incredible.

The current project is in a mid-century home built east of the Balcones fault, which is to say: build upon a foundation of sand

Not literal sand, but if you own a home east of 35 in Central Texas, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

This region gets 1/2 inch less rain per year than Portland, Oregon, but we get it all at once, and it saturates the soil, which is not dirt as you might know it.

That’s why there’s no basements here, as an aside.

The houses are posted on block that shifts over the course of decades, and like a slowly sinking sailing vessel from the 19th century: the walls crack, and the rooms shift to accommodate the home’s gradual absorption.

The home is being remodeled, the walls stripped, new plumbing installed, the room is now “roughed in.”

It’s our job to render hard and physical imprecision into visual and perceptual perfection, installed in such a way that stone flows like water, within the parameters of 1/32 of an imperial inch.

For the first couple of days, Douglas walked me through various and inconsistent “site lines,” inviting me to consider how a person who doesn’t look into their cell phone will sit and evaluate how the tile was installed.

And you know what? That’s what happens when you start doing tile.

Instead of looking into your phone, you look at the tile and you realize that most people don’t think very much about how to do it right. I imagine the same is true for those who study literature and film.

You start recognizing avoidable patterns, and if you think about it: you realize that the people who did the job didn’t bother shuffling or evaluating the tile before its installation.

Patterns (like tropes) tend to repeat, thus revealing themselves; signal from noise

Douglas has learned that you can’t trust a brand’s integrity simply by looking at its name; most big name companies have cut corners and skimped to the extent that their steadily diminishing quality has become their only reliable feature.

So we pulled all of the tile out of their respective boxes, we assembled them, we evaluated each piece, we reshuffled them, and we re-examined them, considering how they look in the morning, the afternoon, the evening, and at night, when the room’s only lighting is coming from inside.

From lights that are not yet installed, to be clear.

For this evaluation, Douglas brings a flashlight

We evaluated the quality and integrity of the mortar, assessing the benefits and deficiencies of the lighter versus the gray “mud,” observing that they came from different lots and had been manufactured in different locations, obviously by different teams of individuals.

And we stood in the roughed-in shower discussing alternative strategies, we stood in the doorway, we stood at the window, and we did the math, using the old imperial vs metric.

Confined to the hard constraints of 1/32 of an inch, we discussed how to reconcile imperfections to the tune of one and a half to three-quarter inch, from lowest to highest, and from narrowest to widest, in all six directions, calibrated to a balanced center-point.

The walls are measured at the floorboards and at the ceiling, the tiles are dry staged on the floor, and we measure seven times so we only have to cut once.

Using a plum, a bob, a level, and eventually a laser: we meticulously established the floor’s lowest point, and with that lowest point as our true north, we reassembled the room from first principles, 1/32 inch at a time.

On Friday, we applied a skim coat of white mortar and we lay the first tile, and then we stopped.

We went to lunch and we talked about engines for 90 minutes

And then we returned and invested the next couple of hours reevaluating the room from different perspectives, reevaluating the sightlines now that the first tile has been laid.

And then we cleaned up and we left for the weekend, because Douglas says:

“Sometimes you need a couple of days not thinking about a thing to figure out whether or not you’ve done the thing right.”

And in that light:

I spent the weekend giving the trees in our yard a deep drink as I reviewed and studied teammate’s Patrick’s recent development plans.

I think they might be the best work I’ve ever seen.

Patrick has been doing this work for decades, and as he and I learned how to incorporate our respective experiences - he from a development standpoint and me through the lens of operations - and he’s done his version of “removing the tile from the boxes, evaluating how they look in the morning, the afternoon, the evening, and under the harsh scrutiny of light that comes only from within the rooms.”

He’s assessed and reassessed the quality and integrity of various brands, hoping for the best while preparing for the worst; trusting but verifying.

And I appreciate that because I’ve burned through three marriages trying to fix avoidable problems because my employers trusted the integrity of another company’s immaculate marketing instead of simply verifying whether or not their claims are true.

Ageism: the snake eats its tail

There’s this phenomena in the tech industry (and many other industries) called “ageism,” where people at the top of their game are gently pushed out of their career field in favor of youthful and malleable “talent.”

I’ve got nothing against talent for what it’s worth, and one of the benefits of age is perspective - the perspective of recognizing talent in all ages, shapes, colors, sizes, and forms.

I’m a big fan of rewarding talent, and to that end: I like being among professionals at the top of their game, doing some of their finest work.

My nearly lifelong friend Sage is the executive director of the Burnside Skatepark nonprofit, and he meticulously curates a stewardship philosophy he refers to as “the template.“

He and I, along with a small number of our friends, successfully launched a renegade DIY project in the heart of Portland, Oregon, almost 36 years ago.

I write of it in this article - one of nine love letters to the people of America:

Rendered from concrete, tile, and stone, the Burnside skatepark reclaimed a portion of real estate that the institution had allowed to fall into the arms of criminality and dysfunction.

And over the past almost 36 years the stewardship community (inclusive to the neighborhood association, the business community, and others) has increasingly become adults who were technically born after we broke ground, in the fall of 1990.

Many of the youth (many of whom are in their 30’s) don’t know who we are, and our “elder generation” is increasingly subject to the spectacular experience of having someone tell us our story with no knowledge of our actual identity.

As they say: here lies a man whose name is writ in water

Sage isn’t an office guy, he’s been making concrete, tile, and stone flow like water for decades, and his use of the word “template“ is intentional because it’s informed by experience gained from first principles.

“The thing about a template, Kent, is that we can use it over and over again.”

And that’s what he’s done. He and his cohort have built these facilities all over the planet - each one a concrete curriculum that flows like water, from the Levant to the Pacific Northwest, and into Central Texas.

Last week, the board of our small Bene Esse nonprofit unanimously voted for 26 year old Sophie Beilinson to replace (and transcend) me as its executive director, and she and I invested many hours the past several days establishing the foundation of our collaboration.

I wrote of Sophie’s recent and hard-earned promotion in this short article:

Brings to mind the work of Douglas - measuring seven times so he only has to cut once as he aspires to make stone flow like water.

Reminds me of Patrick’s meticulous weaving of new information and hard-earned experience to create a wholly new thing that feels like it was birthed within the cradle of a culture so ancient that it was admired by the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians.

Brings to mind the work I’ve been doing with fellow skateboard and creative activists, leveraging our experiences to create a plan for renewing creativity and athleticism in Central Texas, and yesterday we released our first version of our plan at this SCAMP Austin website.

I genuinely hope I’m doing my best work as Sophie prepares to transcend my legacy within this small and old “house” (Bene Esse) which has settled its roots deep within the soil of Central Texas, just east of the Balcones fault, and I genuinely hope I’m doing my best work as this community of athletic and creative activists prepare to transcend our legacy in this region and beyond.⁩

I started meeting new people, some of them pretty exceptional, and I thought wow:

this is the immediate benefit that comes from leaving a relatively midsize city and jumping into the deep end of a huge metropolis.

And that’s what the Austin area is.

It’s not Austin itself as much as how the city is positioned vis a vis the Texas triangle, which is home to 23 million people and growing every minute.

To put this in context: if the Texas Triangle were an independent country, its economy would rank roughly 12th globally.

About 150 people move to Austin each day, and those who are priced out of the city can’t really move north, they can’t move south, and they sure as heck can’t move west (that’s where the billionaires are), so they stream eastward towards Houston in an economic diaspora that’s populating Manor, Elgin, Giddings, and other small towns.

I don’t come from an established family with “a good name” and I don’t come from money

Indeed: other than a modest bump of prosperity experienced in the post-war era, my family has historically come from the generational poverty of folks who have chased the ragged edge of American frontier since the early to mid 1600’s.

For my part, I’ve done pretty well with the opportunities that have presented themselves, and I attribute many of these successes to the lessons I learned from my grandparents and their kin - people who cut their teeth during the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and World War II.

My kin didn’t settle into a comfy administrative seat within an established eastern city

They chased opportunities west until they ran face-first into the Pacific Ocean, and then they buried themselves deep within the forests of that region, not unlike their ancestors did across the hills of Tennessee.

As the story goes: my mother and her siblings lived for a time in a log cabin in the southern Oregon forests at the far end of a rope bridge as my grandpa Henry pursued logging opportunities after the second world war.

I didn’t attend a prestigious college, nor did I enlist in any Greek-themed fraternities. I was not an officer in the military; I was a staff sergeant (E-5) I was little more than an enlisted bullet-catcher, although I did learn “the Internet” in the 1980’s, which puts me considerably ahead of the technology and innovation adoption curve.

Other than that, I don’t have any of the normal shortcuts that help a person gain a toehold within our society, besides the fact that my skin is (relatively) white and I am conversant in the language of institution.

I don’t have the normal shortcuts that help a person succeed, so it’s a delight plunging into deep, deep waters

All I have is my reputation and my network, and with opportunities drying up in the Oregon area, an investment in expanding my professional and personal network was a logical and life-saving measure.

Although I don’t know for sure, this is probably similar to the experience of moving to New York City from some small Midwestern town. Immediately you are among a spectacular variety of connections, contacts, and people.

It’s electrifying

Some of these people are truly exceptional, as has been my abundant experience in the building of the Bene Esse cohort.

And not long after you get to know some of these exceptional people, THEIR PEOPLE slip in to cut them back down to size.

They approach as friends, so what happens next is confusing

They volunteer to “set the record straight,” so you are not led to believe that the person you just met is exceptional.

Fearing that the narrative was slipping out of their control, they insert themselves to restore their version of order that keeps other people safely within their marginal little boxes.

There’s a fancy new therapy language for this; people call it “narcissistic triangulation”

Too many syllables!

My grandma Ruth was extremely eloquent, especially when she deployed the single syllable word, for example:

Small. Ugly. Common.

That’s how she described gossip.

My grandma used single-syllable words to describe the common, small, and ugly practice of lifting oneself up by punching down

My grandma Ruth said it’s like crabs in a bucket, and my grandpa Henry, (her husband), said a measure of a person’s success in this world is how far you have traveled from where you were born, and how you have helped other people shine.

Not sure if I like the label “narcissistic.”

The label stinks of pathology, suggesting that a person who has indulged narcissistic behavior is beyond redemption.

It’s entirely possible that a person might become clinically narcissistic, but are they born that way? Or is their embrace of behavioral narcissism a trauma response?

And if so: why do we embrace the temptation to dehumanize those who are wounded?

I dislike the black and white nature of therapy language dispatched as a dehumanizing weapon

And I dislike binary extremes, because I know they are abstractions often used to describe a temporary state.

I studied computer science, I spent a lot of of my career in the technology world, and so I know there are no ones and zeros traveling around inside your computer and on the Internet.

Everything is analog; binary is an abstraction.

What if the cause of “ugly gossip” is something simpler?

What if it’s just fear? What if it indicative of a wound?

My grandma‘s metaphor about crabs makes sense, at least to me, because I grew up near the ocean, and I know what crabs do when they are piled on top of one another within the confines of a small bucket.

Those crabs closest to the top can see outside, and they try to pull themselves out.

But those beneath them cannot, so they hold on tight to keep the others from escaping.

Whether they are doing this to protect themselves or to protect the other crabs, we will probably never know

Crabs in a bucket” is a decent metaphor, like the one regarding vampires who show no reflection in the mirror.

For the longest time I thought of the vampire metaphor literally, (and literarily).

But recently it’s occurred to me that the vampire / mirror trope speaks to the monstrously vampiric behavior of those so fearful of death that they cannot see a true reflection of themselves in the mirror.

Fortunately for humanity, sooner or later, one or two metaphoric “crabs” manage to escape the marginal niches and containers others have contrived for their protection.

The use of the word “their“ is ambiguous on purpose.

Who are they really trying to protect?

And more to the point: what happens to them when they realize that they were single-handedly diminishing the shine of others just to protect themselves from feeling fearful?

How do they redeem themselves when they are revealed? Returning, of course, to the vampire / mirror trope.

What happens when enough crabs escape the confines of the imaginary bucket that those who pulled others down begin to see a reflection of themselves and their ugly behavior in the metaphoric mirror?

How do we help them save face?

Although I am American, I grew up at the furthest most ragged edge of Western civilization as it overlaps with Eastern influences, flowing Westward from across the Pacific.

I believe in the wisdom of helping other people save face.

So how do we do it?

How do people redeem themselves? How do we help them save face?

I’ve written of these and related topics in an ongoing series of short stories, of which the following dispatch forms the most recent foundation, asking how a wound travels through time?

I’ll leave you with a surprise: kavod is a Divine quality of such density that even grief can float within it, as a child might as it lay within the arms of the Dead Sea.

Since COVID we’ve pursued a living laboratory that we affectionally call “the nexties” to demonstrate the value of people collaborating within what we call a “virtual pod,” located here in Central Texas.

The baseline assumption has been that we can launch a successful community without the benefit of lots of money.

We believe we can do so by activating forms of nonmonetary capital that are worth more than money (such as relationships, trust, and wisdom), allowing us to preserve our values, many of which are intentionally resurrected from our elders.

You can read more about our history here.

Last night we convened an emergency board meeting and unanimously elected 26-year-old Sophie Beilinson to step in my successor

Further: the board unanimously committed the next 18 months to make Sophie successful so she can transcend my legacy and contributions, as things should be.

Sophie has been in the thick of our “nexties” collaboration,” for the past few years, working within our core administrative team, turning wrenches to keep our automobiles running, using our chain saw to clear fallen trees and branches, and providing care and comfort to the kids, the elders, and the community’s pets.

Sophie is more than a member of the Bene Esse team. She’s become family.

Sophie is in the middle of our community, and yet none of us anticipated the belated realization that she deserved to sit in my chair - not until we invested using a tool we built called the “Bene Esse Dream Builder.”

You can think of the Dream Builder as a mirror

And as we supplied observations about the team, the Dream Builder organized those observations into a model.

The team looked at that model and realized that one of the assumptions embedded in the Bene Esse organization itself was wrong.

We realized:

Sophie should be our executive director, or at least be given an opportunity to step into the role I am currently occupying, and gifted with our full support.

We looked at the Dream Builder and realized that one of the assumptions embedded in the organization itself was wrong:

Kent = initiative taker

Which is not a false assessment, it’s just incomplete.

I DO initiate, but the Dream Builder helped me realize something more specific than that as my highest-value function:

I make a future imaginable; I can see a vision of the future

I see a configuration that doesn’t exist yet, give it language, turn it into a story other people can inhabit, and then perform enough of that story myself that it becomes credible.

That’s why I lead with action (aligned to the ethos of James 2:14, eg: “faith without works is dead”), but ceteris paribus:

Sophie is actually the better and more capable initiative-taker, and she’s better at breaking larger tasks into smaller breadcrumb steps so others can follow her lead.

This led me to ask myself a hard question:

Sophie might be better at this job than I am

My immediate thought was a scripture I believe perfectly encapsulates my philosophy regarding parenting: John 3:30.

“He must become greater; I must become less”

As the parent of two boys and three girls, (and aligned to my understanding of the spiritual nature of kavod), I extend this scripture to include “he” and “she” as I endeavor to leave this world better than how I received it.

And in order to do that, I must find and empower the youth to transcend the legacy of my contributions.

Fun fact: Sophie is a fellow car nerd

Until recently Sophie had an old Toyota Avalon, and she and I concluded that it might be the best car ever made.

Consistent with the shitbox paradox, (which posits that we gain an ironic sense of confidence the more we reuse, repair, and recycle something that others dismiss as old), Sophie has helped me keep my 21 year old minivan running.

Likewise, she and I made a hobby of keeping her old Avalon running, even after a serious collision that devastated her radiator and air conditioner’s condenser.

The wreck made an absolute mockery of her beautiful old Avalon

But we had a lot of fun with trying to get the car running, and we laughed ourselves silly as we used a tow rope to pull the car’s front end back into place.

With a sledgehammer Sophie made room for a replacement radiator and condenser, allowing her to squeeze a few more thousand miles out of that bad boy before it was finally traded in.

Sophie is consistent with the ethos of “renew, reuse, recycle” that my grandparents relied upon to thrive during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, as I talk about in this short article, where I describe what it was like to grow up at the feet of giants in my grandparents kitchen.

The entire Bene Esse team speaks about how to restore, recover, and resurrect the old ways so we might curate a more healthy way to example the world as it’s becoming.

And to that end, I think sometimes we get so caught up looking into our own mirror we overlook that there are other reflections within the team that might broaden our awareness of a higher potential.

The Dream Builder is intended to address this blind spot, and we were surprised to realize it revealed a weakness at the heart of our own core team

I’m sitting in a chair that might be best suited for someone like Sophie.

We’re interested to hear your feedback on the Dream Builder, but you are not obligated to share the information; it’s free for you to use, and one of the tool’s most exciting features is this:

Helping you realize that you might have forms of wealth that are worth more than money, which becomes critically important as you seek partners in your endeavors.

You can learn more about these forms of wealth on the Bene Esse web site.

Part of the problem is that Commonweave is software, and software invites you to explain what the software does.

So I can tell you that Commonweave is a white-label coordination platform for existing communities. I can tell you it includes a marketplace, Help Wanted, identity verification, earned reputation, communication, financial coordination, adjudication and governance.

And I can tell you that the original framework was born in a refugee camp, indeed in 2017 our team received the same UNESCO recognition that put Twitter on the map.

All of that is true, and none of it tells you why you should care, because most people are inspired by why a project or a goal matters to them, rather than how they intend to get it done.

The better question turns out to be much simpler:

What are you trying to do that you currently can’t afford to do?

Because we can show you how, but first let’s focus on your goals.

Maybe you run a small nonprofit. Your mission is sound, your community needs you, and your staff is exhausted, but every useful thing you want to do seems to require another grant or another donor.

Maybe your town needs a skatepark. Everybody agrees: the kids want it, parents want it, and the city even wants it. Then somebody says it will cost $750,000, and suddenly a community problem has become a fundraising problem.

Maybe you run a church with a commercial kitchen that sits empty most of the week, while families around you are trying to make ends meet, start little businesses, find work, find customers and find one another.

Those look like three completely different problems, so we built three little thought experiments to explore the possibility that they aren’t.

Today we launched a new website for Commonweave.

But rather than build another software website full of feature matrices and photographs of impossibly attractive people pointing at dashboards, we built a substantial part of it around a question:

What if?

Suppose 700 households redirect just $100 a month of spending they were already doing through their own local network.

• Move the slider.

• Change the transaction fee.

• Reduce the households.

• Increase the transaction volume.

Don’t take our assumptions on faith: play with them.

The calculator isn’t a forecast; it’s a sandbox, allowing you to assess “what if” scenarios of how people are known to spend money within their community.

Imagine 01 — The Struggling Nonprofit

A nonprofit needs money.

The normal response is to look outward: donors, grants, foundations, sponsors.

Imagine 01 (“your nonprofit”) asks what happens if it looks inward; not to extract more money from the people it serves, but to identify economic capacity already present among them.

Someone needs their yard cleaned up. Somebody else needs work. Someone needs bookkeeping. Somebody knows bookkeeping. Somebody fixes cars. Somebody needs brakes.

Commonweave helps those people find one another.

Most of the economic value remains with the people doing the work. But if the organization chooses to retain a small transaction fee for operating the network, useful economic activity can also produce recurring unrestricted revenue.

The useful thing being built is not the fee. It is the trusted coordination network that makes more local activity possible.

Imagine 02 — The Town That Needs a Skatepark

The second “what if” page walks you through the steps necessary to fund a public skatepark and it’s informed by the 40+ years of experience I’ve earned getting countless skateparks funded and built.

Why I know this process - this one comes from experience.

I was one of the original builders of Portland’s Burnside Skatepark. What started beneath a bridge around 1990 as a small, unauthorized DIY project eventually became one of the world’s best-known skateparks, and sent my life in a direction I never anticipated, as I share in this story.

Burnside led to decades of work advocating for public skateparks and helping communities understand how to get them built. I eventually served as Executive Director of Skaters for Public Skateparks and worked with communities far beyond Portland.

But the important lesson wasn’t about skateparks.

It was about what ordinary people can build when they learn how to coordinate what they already have.

More than 40 years of working on problems like these eventually helped inform the architecture behind Commonweave. So the town in this Imagine story is fictional.

The process isn’t.

Imagine 03 — The Church That Became Useful on Monday

This one comes from experience, too.

The church in this story is hypothetical; the economic mechanism behind it is not.

My business partner, Ruth Glendinning, created the Community Renaissance Market in Austin after a 60,000-square-foot Albertsons closed in her neighborhood. She took over the abandoned store and turned it into an experiment in what could happen when community, culture and commerce were deliberately brought together.

The result became an incubator for dozens of microbusinesses and many more household-scale enterprises. People who possessed recipes, skills, knowledge and the ability to make something useful suddenly had infrastructure through which those capabilities could become businesses.

CRM also taught Ruth something important: the building was useful, but the building wasn’t the magic.

The real asset was the network of people, relationships, skills, customers and opportunities that formed around it. The enormous physical marketplace made that network visible; but it also brought enormous physical overhead with it.

Years later, Ruth recognized in the technology that became Commonweave an opportunity to preserve the useful part of that model without requiring every community to begin by acquiring a 60,000-square-foot grocery store.

That experience informs this Imagine story. A church doesn’t need to recreate Community Renaissance Market. It may already possess one piece of the infrastructure - a kitchen, meeting rooms, a parking lot, trusted relationships, or simply a place in the life of its neighborhood. Families around it possess the rest: recipes, skills, labor, businesses, needs and purchasing power.

Commonweave helps those things find one another.

The church described here is fictional. Ruth’s experience is not. Her work showed us what can happen when underused physical space meets underused human capability—and that lesson is part of the ancestry of Commonweave.

We called these stories Imagine for a reason

They aren’t forecasts, and they aren’t promises.

They aren’t case studies pretending that somebody else’s circumstances will reproduce themselves perfectly in yours; they’re invitations to look around differently.

• What do your people already know how to do?

• What are they already buying?

• What are they already selling?

• What buildings sit mostly empty?

• What equipment already exists?

• What relationships already carry trust?

• What useful work needs doing?

• What project does everybody want but nobody knows how to pay for?

What wealth is already present but presently invisible because nobody has built the connective tissue between it?

We built Commonweave because, after enough years doing this work, we began to suspect that communities are considerably wealthier than their bank accounts suggest.

Sometimes the first step isn’t acquiring more; sometimes it’s finally being able to see what you already have.

Imagine what you could do with it as you discover your halo, which I talk about in the following brief article, illustrating that even those without money are surrounded by forms of wealth that are worth more than money.

Which made me think about something.

I had this fantastic experience early in my adulthood, and it was building this skatepark, and I felt like we moved mountains; it really did.

We felt like we moved mountains one bag at a time, because that’s kind of how it was.

We didn’t have a lot of alternatives. There were not places for us to ride a skateboard.

And the police; I think the thing that really radicalized us is recognizing that the police would be brutal, actually absolutely brutal, to protect business interests, and we thought that was unfair because none of us were bad kids, per se.

We just chose to participate in a sport that wasn’t yet fully endorsed, and there was really no reason to beat us and steal from us. This small injustice really radicalized us against law enforcement, not yet fully understanding that we were experiencing a niche example of the institution at its worst.

So rolling out of childhood into early adulthood, we decided we were going to do our own thing, and we failed for about five years, and then we succeeded, and then we did the thing.

So I fairly naively believed that people were going to do the thing, and I realized that they don’t, actually.

They’re just really good at complaining about it

So I’ve been at this thing I’ve been doing for about 10 years, and I have this really interesting insight, which is that people (for the most part, the people who complain the most) are the ones who are least inclined to do anything about it.

It could be that complaining is something of an energetic release valve that keeps people from getting pent up enough to actually turn that frustration into action.

But this idea of, “You’re not a victim of late-stage capitalism, Eric. You work at Deloitte,” is kind of spot-on.

People who complain about capitalism, they’re still buying $11 smoothies. They’re still buying $17 bars of soap at Whole Foods. They still go to the mountain and go snowboarding.

They might feel some material discomfort, but they’ve already imagined a savior. They know what it’s going to look like, and they don’t want to adopt something that’s outside that.

And that is actually what we saw with the whole skatepark thing, is that when we built our imagined Zion, if you will, a lot of the guys were like, “Well, I don’t really want to go down there.” They said:

What we had in mind was something that’s more inside a warehouse, and it’s clean, it’s dry.

And the city actually did subsidize the creation of one such place. It failed because fiscally it didn’t make any sense, but the complaining people got what they wanted. It just didn’t last.

And the thing that’s remembered, and the thing that’s most influential, is the one that a lot of people, I would say, just weren’t really into. I talk about its long-term impact in this article - one of nine love letters to America, which begin here:

They’d say, “It’s not always dry down there. It’s a little bit shady. Kind of smells down there. It’s kind of rough. It’s not really what we want.” But they complain.

I’ve been at my current endeavors for a decade

And the people who are embracing what we’ve built and putting it into action are those who don’t really have an option. They’re already working with one another; they’re already doing the thing.

They’ve already recognized what humans have recognized for 200,000 years, which is that when you work with others, you get some economies of scale that elevates your well-being.

Well, if you’re still able to afford $17 bars of soap, trips to the mountain for snowboarding, and $11 cups of smoothies, you probably don’t need to work with others.

You just want an improvement in your material living condition without having to actually do something with other people, and this is what creates, I think, probably one of the largest ironies of the modern era.

Many people who call themselves leftists avoid behaviors that have been historically associated with leftism

And it creates ironies where I genuinely thought I was going to get a lot of pushback from people who are conservatives. It turns out conservative people are already doing that thing.

They already get up early on a Saturday and they pack sandwiches and they feed their neighbors, and because there’s a spirit of reciprocity, city people don’t really have to do that.

City people don’t really want to have to do that.

I’m not saying all city people, but for the most part, man: if you have the option to not do the thing, you’re probably not going to do the thing.

And what makes it confusing for me is that those people are the ones who are most conversant in the language of their misery vis-à-vis late-stage capitalism.

It’s pretty annoying, actually, but what are you going to do about it? Probably nothing for as long as complaining makes you feel better.

If you want to improve your life, it helps to realize you already have a halo

In the following article I reveal how you are probably already within the beneficial halo of a community-oriented effort that can immediately improve your well-being, even if you don’t have money.

Although he claims otherwise, he doesn’t take jobs for the money. He lives on a large piece of property out there in Texas Hill Country. He’s got cattle, and he’s got a real nice slice of heaven. He spends a lot of his time fishing off the coast of Florida. He’s not working because he needs to.

I talk about Douglas in one of nine love letters I’ve recently published - love letters to the people of this country.

Douglas has a good life, but he’s frugal, and he’s always looking for work. Well, I’ve seen the quality of his work, so I put the word out, and I’ve seen him walk away from a fair number of jobs that weren’t the right fit.

Most jobs, actually. Douglas turns down most jobs because they weren’t the right fit, and what’s the right fit?

Doing the job right. Not just “doing the job.”

He doesn’t hire laborers; I learned that during lunch yesterday.

He said:

“some guys are just here for the money, and I don’t invite them back. A few guys, not always guys, they learn as much as they can, so I keep inviting them back. Most of them have their own practice”

And then he named them. I managed to remember a few, and they have established themselves as highly-reputable; Douglas is masonry’s version of a kingmaker.

Douglas is in his 70s, he’s been doing tile for over 50 years, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a person so skilled at making stone flow like water.

Every job comes with a mind-boggling variety of lessons that I’m not sure I will ever retain, nonetheless: he keeps delivering them with a quiet and unhurried patience of a person who is focused upon helping another person realize their fullest potential.

Douglas doesn’t blame anyone, and I’ve never seen him angry

When there’s a mistake - and this happens less and less frequently - he ruminates on where he failed to adequately counsel me on the right course of action.

He apologizes, rewinds, and he does it again, right there with me, which gives me every incentive to tell on myself when I realize I’ve strayed from the ideal, bringing to mind the origin of the word “sin.”

In modern terms, the word is used to label a person as bad, but in the New Testament, the Greek term (hamartia) originally referred to archery, and literally meant missing the target or the mark, and in the Hebrew Bible, the word Ḥāṭā’ meant the same idea: failing to reach a goal, going astray, and/or missing the path.

There’s very little incentive for a person to tell on themselves if they are punished every single time they stray from the aspired path; Douglas makes it easy to learn for as long as I curate the practice of telling on myself.

Which is a good thing because when working with the precision demanded by masonry and tile, you learn something important:

There ain’t no such thing as a room that’s perfectly level, square, or plumb

What the eye cannot see when the room is unfinished becomes impossible to ignore once the tile has been laid, and anyone who has been to a gas station bathroom knows how tile can look real wonky.

So how do you do it?

How do you make stone and tile transform a wonky room into something that looks perfect?

Couple of years ago, Douglas said:

“the thing about stone is that it’s not really a solid, not all the way down at the atomic level, and it helps to think of it a fluid, it just moves really really slow.”

And I said how does that help me, Douglas? From our perspective, the flow is so slow and its state is so fixed that it’s effectively a solid.

He smiled real big and said:

“and what makes you think your perspective is THE perspective, mister tile man? I’ll show you.”

And then he did, demonstrating how he comprehends sonder without ever using the word.

There are countless perspectives that we cannot always anticipate, and there are certain tricks of the trade that can render a room’s imperfections invisible unless one knows how to search for them.

Most do not, and so: most cannot, and it reminds me of something I read about cinema:

If you like movies, don’t befriend someone who knows about them, because they will ruin the experience of watching a film. They will tell you about how the film featured a repetition of themes and tropes which paid homage to prior films and stories, and so it is with masonry and tile.

Likewise, I can no longer enter a room with stonework without reading their work as a filmmaker reads film. You quickly learn that there are those who did it for the money, and far fewer who did it because they love the work.

Work as praise

Related aside, although you’d never hear Douglas explain it this way: the Hebrew word for work (avodah - עֲבוֹדָה), is the same word used to describe praise, and this is of interest to me because of James 2:14 (“Faith without works is dead”), which was written in Greek.

The Greek word used to express “works” erga (ἔργα), and these two words are not linguistic equivalent - I’m not claiming they are - but when you are in the company of craftsperson’s, people who embrace opportunities for work as expressions and praise, they meet somewhere on the job site.

For some people, there’s work performed because someone is paying you, but for others there’s work performed with such care and attentiveness that the doing itself becomes an offering.

Douglas has invested 50 years teaching stone to flow like water, and watching his work and receiving his instruction feels like being in church, which is a significant statement coming from me because I can’t stand church, but I’m talking about something else - I’m talking about a true sanctuary, where truth is embraced rather than avoided, as I touch upon in this article:

That’s what Douglas does as he teaches stone and tile to flow like water, reconciling truth so it aligns with every room’s wonky nature to deliver something that’s perceived to be nearly perfect.

And I’m honored to be his student at this point of my life, because it’s not really about the job, nor is it really about the stone. As far as I can tell, he’s teaching me his craeft, which is not the same word as “craft” as it’s currently used.

Craeft as a form of worship

Craeft (or cræft) is an Old English word that originally meant strength, power, skill, and deep practical wisdom, rather than just a simple handmade hobby; the word’s meaning changed as the industrial revolution changed how we view work.

Caption: credit to Ivey Masonry

In early Anglo-Saxon times, the Old English dictionary definition of cræft carried a heavy sense of character and capability: it meant mental sharpness, wisdom, and moral goodness, and it showed a person’s ability to survive, adapt, and shape their environment using traditional skills.

Modern society reduced craft to mean glue-and-glitter hobbies or simple decorative items, losing the connection to deep survival skills and ecological knowledge, but true craeft connects humans to their environment, through activities like thatching roofs, tending sheep, and understanding materials (such as mortar and stone) over generations.

By my reckoning the lesson of craeft that Douglas is delivering pertains to masonry as much as it pertains to fatherhood, and on that note: on our first day at this job - indeed the first time he and I have worked together since Thanksgiving last year:

Douglas told me about his stepson

I listened to him describe a devolving state of dysfunctionality, and finally I said has he ever expressed interest in learning tile? and Douglas said “fuck no” and talked about how the man has turned his grandmother’s former home into squalor.

Douglas said:

“what would you do?“

I said throw him out. Put him on the streets.

Douglas said

“he said that it would kill him, he said that he would kill himself.”

I said he’s killing himself now, and y’all are helping.

I shrugged. It’s easier to say when it’s not your child, and technically the man isn’t Douglas’ boy, but it doesn’t matter to him because he loves him as his own.

Having lost his only son, he’s less inclined to discard others who cross his path, but in his current state the man is indulging a popular line of thinking that’s dragging himself and everyone else down. What’s merited is a wake-up call, ergo my recommendation to put him out.

I said I’ll throw him out for $5,000 if y’all don’t want to do it. Then I’ll go home and sleep like a baby all night after telling him the things he needs to do to earn his way back into y’all’s good graces.

That last part is about the kind of truth-telling that people avoid trying to protect themselves from discomfort, and then I told him about my baby brother - a story he’s heard before.

Most of y’all know his story. Maybe you don’t; I don’t care, but you can gain the story’s measure by allowing him to tell it himself:

Sometimes loving a thing too much can ruin it

People get spoiled, they get entitled, and they get mean, and I ain’t putting this on Douglas because it isn’t his fault that his only son killed himself. It’s just a thing that happens.

Douglas loves masonry so much that he gives it away to those who are willing to earn an appreciation for its artistry, and Douglas isn’t alone. Indeed, last November Douglas and I worked a job in Bastrop with a master in cabinetry named Jimmy, who had likewise lost his only son to suicide.

Central Texas was sliding into winter and I was laying glass tile alongside Jimmy’s hardwood cabinets. Douglas and Jimmy told me about how you need to let the house breathe, because if you don’t that glass tile will shatter.

“The house breathes in during the summer and it breathes out during the winter.”

They weren’t really talking about glass tile butted up against hand-built cabinets. Not really.

We were at that job for a few weeks and over a number of lunches I realized they were talking about their boys, and they were talking about themselves as they continue to learn how to make the hard things flow like water, which reminds me of something I read a couple weeks ago.

A mountain’s steam would not sound so pretty if not for the stones which blocked the water’s flow; it’s the stones that teach the water how to sing.

On the east side of Mount Hood there are two waterways about a quarter mile from each other, in two entirely different ecosystems.

Closer to the summit: Barlow Creek meanders through the stone, the rock, and the forest, the crystal clear waters loudly singing their journey to the ocean.

But a quarter mile east, the white river sounds completely different because it’s filled with the glacier’s silt.

The White River doesn’t sound like Barlow Creek because the water is continuously pushing the silt downstream; the sound of the river changes constantly.

But Barlow Creek? For as long as those rocks remain in the same place, the song sounds more or less the same, changing just a little bit at a time each season as water does its job.

Between them runs a narrow band of hardwoods which thrive between the Douglas fir and the hemlock to the west, and the piney forest to the east as the landscape flows into Oregon’s high desert.

Beneath them at night runs a thread of bioluminescent fungi that glows from beneath the surface, allowing you to look deep into the labyrinths far below your feet.

And above them in the daytime, there are ribbons of butterflies flying downstream, and when I told Douglas about this he smiled for a long time and he told me what it’s like to fish far out in the Florida keys. He told me about how he can tell a storm is coming by the sound of ocean and by the feel of the air in his ears, and he said:

“mister tile man, THAT’S how you make stone flow like water. You take what you learned in church and you repeat it down here at the jobsite.”

He wasn’t talking about church, not likely as you think of it.

Eg: most people prefer to scapegoat "socialism" or "dem-run cities" or "capitalism," etc.

And I love Alan’s framing because it validates what 2/3 of we experienced within our family (where 2/3 of us ended up on the streets because we were abandoned by family).

But let's put family aside for a second and consider this:

We keep trying to explain socially what we as a culture have ceased doing relationally

Alan Graham's observation is powerful because he isn't just describing housing economics; he's describing the disappearance of the last person who would have caught you before you hit the pavement.

That doesn't mean housing costs, addiction, mental illness, wages, domestic violence, incarceration, disability, zoning, or public policy don't matter. Obviously they do.

Graham's formulation is too categorical if treated as an empirical claim about the single greatest cause of homelessness nationally, but that’s not what he’s saying.

His is an observation that reflects years intimately involved with people experiencing homelessness, and by that I mean he’s not a street journalist, although that perspective is also valuable.

Alan offers homes to the homeless, and accompanies them as they transition into a post-homeless life, and he's pointing at something upstream that our political vocabulary has trouble seeing:

Most people can survive a catastrophe if somebody catches them

• Lose your job, but your sister has a spare room

• Get divorced, but Dad says come home for six months

• Your car dies, but Uncle Mike has an old Corolla

• Can't make rent, but Grandma covered $600

• Have a babies too young, but your mother and your sister watches the kids while you work

• Get sick, but somebody brings food and makes sure the electric bill gets paid.

None of those things appear in GDP as a social program, and they don't appear on anybody's balance sheet. Much of the time nobody even called it mutual aid.

For most of human history it was just what family did

For most of human history, family was capital, and not metaphorically; family provided housing, childcare, transportation, food, credit, labor, knowledge, connections, emergency liquidity and insurance.

We just didn't put dollar signs on it, and here's where it gets dangerous:

The fake and dishonest bootstrap story retroactively erases family capital

Someone remembers:

I was broke when I was 24 and I made it.

They forget:

I lived with Mom for eight months, Dad cosigned the truck, Grandma watched the kids, my brother got me the job and Aunt Susan loaned us the deposit.

Thirty years later, when the next generation needs the equivalent assistance:

Nobody helped me; I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.

Well, EVERYBODY in the family helped you, they just didn't invoice you.

Within my family, the old traditions collapsed around the time when the boomers embraced the "me first" ethos of the 1980's went mainstream

And I’ll state up front that this is not the boomers’ fault.

People who had relied heavily upon family support as young adults immediately rejected an opportunity to reciprocate when it became their turn because they didn't want to get dragged down.

Of course, when they were young parents it didn't occur to them that their frequent requests for assistance within the family was "dragging other people down" because it was just part of the social order.

This is not a generational thing; our society changed as we collectively embraced new values which negated the old values which got us here

My dad’s folks took him in after his first divorce and my grandpa and grandma helped my dad purchase his existing home. My dad’s has never held a job that his father didn’t get for him, and my grandpa helped him with his small business - these are facts.

But my dad’s version of events is substantially different: he claims that he did it without anyone’s help, and that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps.

And my mother received substantial assistance from her family until the elders began to realize they were enabling her childish and irresponsible behavior, resulting in her losing custody of all three as soon as consequences caught up to her.

Today her story reflects significant narrative editing intended to protect her from accountability, even if it means editing her sons and her grandchildren out of her own life to protect “her truth” as the young people say.

But in the old days, mutual support was just something that grandparents and aunts and uncles did, and that was true until my folks became aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

This isn't "the boomers fault," although they are the convenient scapegoat. In truth, the issue cuts across generations.

This is a cultural transition, not a generational defect

Boomers participated in it, gen X participated in it, millennials participate in it. It has been taught as "the proper and responsible way to manage your money" in messages delivered by the wealthy about how to manage our estates.

So now: wealthy people do it, poor people do it, conservatives do it, liberals do it, and then our politics provides beautifully convenient explanations that allow us to preserve the underlying behavior.

• “The left” can explain homelessness intellectually, assigning blame to faceless institutions they perceive to be enemies of their “side”

• “The right” can explain homelessness behaviorally, assigning fault to individuals to protect their “side”

Both perspectives can contain important truths, but neither explanation necessarily requires me to let my fucked-up nephew sleep in my spare bedroom.

Because that’s what it comes down to:

Rubber hits the road: who is willing and able to take in someone in the midst of an emergency?

Despite pretty (but empty) statements of compassion in theory that are assigned to people without faces, many people believe that it's every man or woman for themselves.”

They don't have the time, money, or interest to help those who fall outside of their dominion, and I get it: with rising costs and an average pay that has barely budged for 50 years, people are barely keeping their noses above water.

Those who "got out while the getting was good" have every good and logical reason to privately say "screw those kids" while publicly claiming they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and did it all by themselves.

That the story itself is false doesn't matter.

People prefer stories that tell them what their itching ears want to hear, and are less interested in hearing truth that makes them feel uncomfortable.

For a long time: family helped family, but those values have washed away in favor of false stories of how they "pulled myself up by my bootstraps" that conveniently erase stories of mutual aid and assistance that got them up there in the first place.

In effect: the legacy of the older generations are erased as the younger generations claim victories they did not earn on their own.

In truth: the victories were collective wins, but this model isn’t replicable when false narratives are proposed to support the ethos of “every man and woman for themselves.”

There's a way to fix this, and it's not even that dramatic or difficult:

Do onto others as you would have then do unto you

Consider what you might want if you found yourself homeless. Who would you want to help you protect your dignity as you faced your lowest moment?

Because if it can happen to me, it can absolutely happen to you, as I illustrate in the following article that talks about how my brother and I ended up on the streets:

It’s odd that the solution is “the golden rule.”

And it's odd that so many of these solutions return to little things I learned in church when I was a child.

And it’s odder-still that so many of these churches have adopted congregational policies that negate the old ways in favor of the new, placing a particular emphasis upon those who can afford to be there vs who might need it the most.

But not all churches, and not all boomers. Reality does not resolve into hard all-or-nothing positions, although it's convenient to believe otherwise.

The following is far more effective and grounding. Ask yourself:

Q: Who would catch you?

And then ask:

Whom would you catch?

Those are uncomfortable questions because you can't outsource the entire problem to capitalism, socialism, Democrats, Republicans, landlords, drug addicts, zoning boards or San Francisco.

Imagine yourself homeless

Not "the homeless," not "an electorate." not "a demographic," not "victims of capitalism," and not "a policy problem."

You.

You have nowhere to sleep tonight; who do you hope answers the phone?

I was locked from my home and my finances when I was 50. I called and was turned away.

I was turned away in the midst of a near-fatal medical emergency falsely reframed as mental illness and drug abuse by a woman planning her divorce, and by a family intent to bury an old story regarding child torture and abuse.

It worked: I ended up on the streets, although fortunately it only lasted a few weeks.

If it can happen to me, it can absolutely happen to you.

Now turn it around:

Look at your phone; whose call would you answer?

That's the Golden Rule stripped of abstraction, and fortunately for my children, my friend Mike answered the call and allowed me to sleep in his basement apartment.

It was in that same basement apartment that I outlined the 214 Alpha business model on a whiteboard in that same basement - the same business model we are using today, as I talk about in the following article":

In that same basement apartment I outlined the same business model I imagined might save my family, and as far as that goes: I failed. I failed to save my family.

But because I'm holding true to my family's old values and to my children, I succeeded in finding others who share my same "old time" values, enabling us to create a scaffolding that sustains and expands the halo of mutual benefit where it's needed.

And the best part of this story is that you don’t need a single dollar to unlock the halo of benefit that can immediately make your life better, as I outline in the following article:

I miss getting a salary, but you know what I don’t miss?

I don’t miss 95% of my day consumed with meetings that could’ve been an email that I didn’t have to read

It was nice getting a magic paycheck every two weeks, but what I prefer about this life is having greater agency over how I spend time away from my children, because that’s exactly what it is:

We are exchanging money for time that cannot be recovered, and until my final breath I will resent the time I will never get back because I was sitting in an avoidable meeting discussing a topic of no lasting consequence.

My life is different now.

My kids can tell that I have been enjoying myself, which means that I am enjoying the people I am working with and the projects that we are working on, and my little “home office“ is a common area where my children chill just out of view of the camera, and they curl up and eavesdrop.

This weekend, my 16 year-old said “this is an important project, isn’t it?“

I said yeah, how can you tell?

She said “you are really enjoying yourself, it’s how you get when you’re writing a good story.“

And she’s right. I love writing short story fiction, and when I get into a creative mode I am floating.

Not knowing what to say, I said: “it’s my intention to leave this world better than how I received it,“ and she said “I know, you’re weird like that.“

I lost everything when I chose this life; I don’t regret it

The people who said they loved me pursued a scorched earth campaign because they were so angry with my decision to reclaim my life.

Working for yourself is described as “feast or famine,” but the periods without compensation are still feasts if you are spending it in the company of others who share your values.

By comparison, what’s a famine?

A famine is living in a 2,600 sq/foot home in NE Portland with a person who increased my life insurance when doctors told me that I was at risk of early death, and with the full support of both her mother and my own, drove me into the streets as an expression of “tough love” in the middle of a medical emergency.

I was locked out of my home and my finances, and took to sleeping in my old SUV as I tried to stay in my children’s’ lives, as I shared in the following article:

A feast is being taken in by a cohort of homeless fellow veterans who call themselves the Leper Army, and witnessing them observing the ancient traditions of xenia as one of them gave up their bed to ensure I had a safe place to lay my head.

And on the topic of values, you might have to reclaim your life if you realize you’re among those who are operating out an incompatible world view; a lot of people speak the language of values while demonstrating behaviors which betray their loyalty to money.

If getting rich is your passion, we’re probably not gonna get along, because there are things in this world that are worth a lot more than just money

Coming from generational poverty, I used to think money was a vehicle for achieving liberation, but frequently it becomes the basis of slavery, and I’m not into it.

Not anymore.

I’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, and it’s liberating to currently be among people of such high substance and quality.

This weekend my youngest 13-year-old twin asked if we could go to the store, and for hours we walked the aisles as she told me funny and insignificant stories about what’s going on in middle school.

It’s not about the stories, it’s about the investment of her father‘s time that left her feeling important and substantial.

She perceives that her dad is working on something important - I am - and it feels good for her to see me drop what I’m doing so I can walk the aisles of the local grocery store, bumping into each other and laughing as she talks about what’s going on in her life.

She said “aren’t you busy?” and I said “I’m busy pushing you down and running away because your farts smell so bad” and she burst into laughter.

As a child I gasped for the smallest bit of attention from two parents who were more focused on their exciting social and dating lives than the lives of their children, but fortunately: I received high-fidelity attention from my grandparents and their siblings, and it showed me that there’s another way to do this thing.

We don’t have to wait around for a person holding us in an icy grip no closer than arm’s length; we can find others who share our values and we can life this life to its fullest.

There’s no such quantity of money that can purchase this thing, and yet, once we recognize this kind of wealth, we can begin deliberately creating more of it.

That’s the why of my current endeavors - to build a scaffolding upon which y’all can create a life that matters to you, provided you feel an affinity to the old ways

This is a halo, as I describe in the following article, which reveals that many of y’all are already doing the thing. That’s the good news.

And with a little more focus y’all can extend the reach and the warmth of y’all’s respective halo.

It’s my thank you for making this lifetime my favorite one to date. It’s about the people who leave the world warmer than they found it, in a series of stories delivered through nine brief narratives of things I’ve witnessed and experienced in my short life.

And I mean warmer in the sense that there are still millions of people, objects, skills, relationships, and opportunities radiating usable heat if you know how to recognize, activate, and connect them, provided one can relearn how to behold the world from a fresh perspective: what my grandparents and their siblings called the old ways.

Sometimes I wonder if civilization is just the heat of stored generosity that learned how to outlast its authors.

This short article serves as an index, weaving eight related articles into a single theme: what kind of people create a place where ordinary life feels warm?

Observations:

• Industrial heat: 17 million Dodge Caravans

  • Q: How much civilization can you buy for $1,500?

• Cultural warmth: the one-of-a-kind heirloom

  • Q: How do another family’s memories become part of your story?

• Relational fire: the elders are still among us

  • Q: Who taught the person who taught you?

• Communal hearth: how Isaac earned the name “Eisenhower”

  • Q: What happens when a village helps raise your child?

• Civic glow: ordinary people authoring their future

  • Q: Who gave citizens permission to build extraordinary things?

• A passionate spirit of practicality

  • Q: When did knowing how to help become a form of wealth?

Reflections:

• Kindling

  • Leave one place warmer than you found it

• A glimmer

  • And once you see it you’ll never stop seeing it

• The afterglow

  • the future feels different when you know where warmth comes from

I don’t care what the radicals say, but revolution isn’t the future, at least not as they imagine it. The future doesn’t begin by inventing a wholly-new culture - that’s ridiculous:

Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?

But rapid evolution? Now, that has a better ring to it.

The future begins by remembering the warmth that has been here all along, and deciding to tend the fire together.

This series serves as my love letter to the ordinary Americans whose accumulated competence, generosity, initiative-taking, and care make America feel warm, but without ever asking for recognition, repayment, or reciprocity.

This series talks about invisible heroes like:

• the engineers who designed the transmission

• the family that preserved the heirloom

• the tile guy who taught me the art of masonry

• the businessmen and women who mentored a teenager

• the kids reclaiming their city by mixing concrete under the Burnside Bridge

• the parking lot mechanics who stop what they’re doing to help a stranger

None of them are famous, yet all of them become protagonists in the same story, which begins with an anecdote about what I like to call industrial heat as I ask “how much civilization can you buy for $1,500?”

One of my favorite things about Texas is how fast things move. Not just traffic, but life in general, and if you like life on fast forward, 85 MPH is badass.

But, again: this is Texas, and that means you better be doing 95 MPH or you’re going to be run over by semi trucks or guys doing twice that on speed bikes wearing flip-flops.

And it’s ghastly hot, with the heat index pushing 107F, yet my daughters and I are floating in a cozy air-conditioned living room at 95 MPH, with a 21 year old engine that redlines at 6,000 RPM.

Most of you aren’t car nerds, but I just described an impressive accomplishment

The engine is barely touching 2,600 RPM - it’s able to hold that speed without even trying very hard; I’m impressed. I love engineering, and I’m just completely impressed.

I know that most people get off on elite supercars, and sure: niche and bleeding-edge engineering is cool, but I am far more impressed by the fact that Chrysler/Dodge sold 17 million of these things, and you can pick them up for about $1,000-$2,000 if you’re in the mood to overspend.

In fact, I looked at one today that’s $500 that I might help get for a friend who is down on his luck.

The parts are plentiful, (and therefore they are cheap), and if you don’t want to buy parts, you can just get them out of the wrecking yard because so many were built.

On an Internet forum today, I saw a man from Ghana trying to negotiate a trade of a wiring harness in exchange for a pulley that’s located in Mexico.

This is the part of engineering I don’t think people understand, and so they don’t appreciate it:

Anyone can make one remarkable thing, but can you make seventeen million of them?

As I said before: I’m impressed when a bunch of engineers create a single innovative thing.

There’s a YouTube channel called Engineering Explained, and it’s definitely my favorite “TV show,” acknowledging that television shows no longer exist in the historical sense.

The host frequently provides tours of mind-blowing innovations from a variety of automotive engineering companies, and it’s really wild. Some of these engines represent a humbling collection of incredible technologies.

Like I said: that stuff is cool, but it’s a completely different thing when engineers work with manufacturers to create a platform that is used worldwide, and it’s literally a generation later and you can pick one up for a couple of thousand dollars if you’re in the mood to spend twice as necessary for a floating air-conditioned living room that’s able to sustain 95 MPH without breaking a sweat.

I’m afraid I’m not making my point. I’m going to repeat myself:

• Bleeding edge engineering is cool! You can buy one for $75k!

• This article is about the heat of industrial scale engineering delivered globally for the past 40 years…enabling a common person to buy one for $1,500.

And for $1,500 you can roll down the same freeway at 95 MPH with the AC blowing - the freeway that passes in front of the same Tesla factory that is delivering industrial-scale engineering that reflects the current state of the art.

To be fully transparent: I got this van for free

It wasn’t in great shape when I received it, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, so to speak, I’m able to recognize that there are some things that are worth more than money.

It began its life in Alaska, then sat in western Washington for several more years after its first owner died, and there it sat, infrequently used. When it was offered to me, my son drove it to Texas, via Mexico, and I’ve been driving it ever since.

I feel lucky, to be honest, although I’ve been forced to work on it constantly as the van has settled into a new life in Texas, inspiring an article called the Shitbox Paradox, where I explain why a person becomes more confident the more they work on an old vehicle.

Why throw it away and get something new when instead you can work on it to create something a little better?

You know what’s worth more than money? Fidelity and trust, of course, and I’m talking about the confidence that comes from knowing how to repair a vehicle no matter what, using a small number of tools sitting in a child’s sandbox bucket stored in the van’s back luggage compartment.

Most people would prefer something newer, but I didn’t have the option; I was blindsided by a divorce which landed weeks before covid, and because I was facing homelessness, I was forced to sell my only vehicle, and I walked so frequently that my feet earned burns and blisters from the holes in my shoes.

Seeing the dire state of my situation, a family member offered me the van, and I gratefully accepted. I’d call this “wealth,” but that depends upon perspective.

If a person has acquainted themselves with the old ways, they see opportunities where others see setbacks and scarcity, and that’s the point of this article - the special lenses that a person wears when they acquaint themselves with how their grandparents and great-grandparents lived in their day.

And in their day, many didn’t have the luxury to be picky. They were happy to reuse, repair, and recycle the things around them to create opportunities from what others think of as trash.

I love machines, but it turns out machines aren’t the only things capable of carrying warmth across generations.

Steel preserves the work of engineers for 20, 40, 60 years, but wood can preserve the love of a family for three generations, and I didn’t understand that until the grieving man handed me a bookshelf custom made for his parents.