The stupid economy (part 2)...

FOR centuries, poverty has clearly been visible as a costly and ugly social sore: shortening lives, impairing health, engendering crime, incubating violence and nurturing “black economies”.

Evolutionary biologists who have studied survival strategies in harsh, unpredictable, unhealthy and marginal environments that are likely to shorten your life — the sort of conditions engendered by poverty and oppression — tell us that they predictably include reproducing as soon as possible (teen pregnancies) and engaging in high-risk activities that can bring quick returns (like crime, gambling and dominance-related violence).

The “scientific” way to address the problems linked to poverty is not to foist education programmes on the poor but to reduce inequality: to narrow the gap between rich and poor. That gap is the cause; the other disparities are symptoms and consequences.

But “The Economy” has been resistant to conclusions like these, preferring to see poverty as an inescapable warning of how bad things get if you don’t play the game the way you should: in more ways than one, your credit gets cut off.

A billion children live in poverty. That’s half the children in the world. According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.” That is about 210,000 children each week, or just under 11 million children under the age of five, each year. They should get off their lazy butts? It's their parents' fault?

One popular myth is, of course, that poor people impoverish themselves by having too many children: the crux of their problem is “overpopulation”. This is a naïve notion that assumes a Congolese child will gobble up as much of the world’s resources as a child born in Manhattan. The fact, of course, is that it takes scores of children in the “developing world” to rival the consumption of just one only-child born to a middle class couple in the wealthy West. It is that one child whose impact is problematic… on scales of both consumption and pollution. No one woman in the “developing world” could possibly bear enough children to rival its impact. In any case, families in the “developing” world are, at this, point smaller than anyone remembers. The “population problem” is topping out.

You have to think in terms like “middle class” and “wealthy elites” in contexts like these because poverty is not confined to poor countries. Canada’ poorest citizens — predominantly aboriginal peoples — are also the most frequently imprisoned, the shortest-lived, the least healthy and the most deprived of opportunity. Most tellingly, they have been and continue to the most ruthlessly denied the dignity of their cultural and personal identity. Their history is invisible, their languages and community life have been suppressed and marginalised, their wisdom denied… their resources have been appropriated or wantonly destroyed… and they are then blamed and insulted for the position into which they have too often been cast.

And blaming the poor for their condition is not unlike blaming holocaust victims for their fate. That one or two manage to escape from time to time changes nothing when it comes to the morality of it all.

Poverty is oppression.

A study of poverty and income disparity by the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD) published in October 2008 found that the gap between rich and poor had widened since the mid-1980s in more than three-quarters of the world’s “rich countries”. The previous five years had seen growing poverty and inequality in two-thirds of the OECD countries. Canada, Germany, Norway and the United States led the spread. The latest “recession” saw the position of black Americans worsen both in absolute terms and relative to white Americans: by 2010, their median household income had fallen to 61.6 per cent of the white median household income from the high in 2000 when it had reached 65 per cent. In Canada in 2006, the median income of aboriginal people trailed that of non-aboriginals by about 30 per cent ($18,962 compared with $27,097). Even educational parity didn’t close the gap.

Globally, the social devastation wrought in the name of economic “freedom” is horrendous. When we take a look at the numbers, we get a picture that’s the antithesis of what “economic development” is purported to mean, with environmental degradation adding weight to the chains of poverty and demoralisation that “development” has inflicted.

In its ‘Least Developed Countries Report’ of 2008, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development found that poverty was deepening in the world’s 50 least developed countries despite their economies having grown by a record average of seven per cent in 2005-2006: 277 million people in these countries were still living on less than a dollar a day, up from 265 million in 2000 and 245 million in 1995.

Since 2006, the situation of the poorest of the poor had been worsening thanks to climate change and a new biofuels industry. Together, they pushed food prices up. Some countries saw basic staples like maize, wheat and rice double in cost in 18 months.

“Biofuels demand is soaking up grain production, as is rising consumption in emerging countries for animal feed,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme. “We face the tightest agriculture markets in decades and, in same cases, on record. Global wheat stocks have fallen to the lowest level in 25 years. We are no longer in a surplus world.”

This is a statement that’s at serious odds with a premise that most academic economists have long subscribed to: that supplies are inexhaustible. As part of the basis for their modelling studies, economists also have subscribed to the curious belief that everyone acts rationally and single-mindedly to pile up as many possessions as possible, and that growth is essential. It is as though life itself has no value, and “quality of life” is a by-product of having lots and lots of money.

So, where is the money going? In 2006, military spending was $1,158 billion worldwide: an average of $173 per person (or 2.41 per cent of global GDP). That same year, by way of comparison, the United Nations World Food Programme distributed about $2.9 billion in food aid. It’s a whole lot more cost effective, one might idly imagine, to feed people than it is to kill them.

Throughout human history, the interdependent benefits of group bonding and personal satisfaction have been more or less recognised.  Value has been accorded skills that enhance the experience of living in community, and the customs and the easy interactions that help a community to maintain a balance. It’s not just about pouring in entertainment from a globally centralised source like Hollywood; it is about town planning and the integration of families, about tranquillity as well as excitement, about local economic bases and celebration, it’s about sharing food and fun and relaxation. It is about flows of ideas. And it involves an aesthetic of life in which everyone has a value.

And, where there’s a healthy aesthetic of life, poverty presents an aesthetic as well as a moral and social affront. The existence of poverty is a sign that the community isn’t working… something is broken, with consequences for everyone. For the wealthiest to simply move out to suburbs or enclosed “communities” with razor wire and security guards is not a solution. It turns a community problem into a societal one.

IN a recent speech, Gerard Mitchell, former chief justice of the Prince Edward Island Supreme Court, identified poverty as ” the most important and pressing human rights issue in Canada.” And he isn’t alone in identifying poverty as a moral issue: as a condition that’s imposed on those who experience it. Poverty is not simply about want of income; it is about the social deprivations that are imposed on people who lack financial power; it is a pernicious, institutionally inflicted form of bullying that becomes exploitation when low paid, tedious, dangerous and dirty work is dangled in front of the poor as a false promise of hope.

One of the truisms I was brought up with was that hard work always brings its rewards. So, believing that and keen to make our fortunes, you and I might set out together in search of some seriously tough jobs in a nice climate as a sure-fire way to get rich… mining gold in Africa, perhaps, or offering ourselves as farm labourers in Central America or, if we prefer to indoor work, as line workers in an American chicken processing plant or a South Asian sweatshop making plastic trinkets for something rich white people call “Christmas trees”.

But we’re not that silly… we know that the big money really piles up in a kind of vast, international casino where the work lies in rigging the odds, loading the dice and stacking the decks.

The casino’s name is “The Global Economy” and it is manoeuvred by collectives of the wealthiest and most powerful of the world’s elites in ways that are calculated to over-accumulate their surpluses.

And, despite the considerable intellect of Milton Freidman and anything that economists might tell us, money is nothing more than a faith-based means of communication. It isn’t “stuff”; its existence is notional. It’s our source of sacrificial tokens for the modern Caesar. And, should some sufficient mass of people suddenly stop believing in it, whole societies would collapse.

More and more of the world has been enveloped within this fantastical, viral way of thinking and, although it has become extremely powerful, it has not been for the best.

There was a time when to gain control of someone else’s resource, you had to fight them for it, face to face; now you just buy it. Oddly, it has not made the world a markedly more peaceable place. But it has made appropriation very much easier. And that has often been damaging. When trees become “money”, deforestation does not only denude landscapes of their forests. Human cultures may be annihilated or rendered unsustainable; plant and animal habitats are wiped out; erosion can make soil fertility irrecoverable and rivers carry toxins, silt and shock-levels of nutrients into the sea.

When fish are turned into money, overcapitalized fisheries stretch themselves to breaking point and marine food chains come apart. When initial gluts turn to inevitable shortages, fishermen take loans to buy bigger, better boats and install new, more costly fish-chasing technologies and it all becomes a client sector of the banking industry. When over-fishing can no longer service the interest payments, fishing communities collapse and the banks repossess the boats and gear, presumably to sell as scrap to the steel industry.

When it’s minerals, everything that’s not the target ore is turned into over-burden, a nuisance to be removed, even if it happens to include ecosystems that have been millennia in the making, or human cultural values that have sustained communities for centuries, or watercourses that affect lives many hundreds of miles away.

Exploitation is usually hailed for the jobs it “creates” but financial and competitive forces make it best to extract the target mineral as quickly as possible, so the jobs are usually short-lived. And the collateral damage to the “overburden” is likely to take centuries to repair, or prove altogether irreparable.

We’ve seen airwaves, water and the right to exploit various resources turned into money, even genetic material, which turns it all over to exclusive ownership and rights of access. In the case of patented crops, corporate development efforts went into hybridised maize rather than wheat because the characteristics of maize make it the easier crop to exert patent controls over. Community resources — too often thought of in cash terms as “free” — get less respect than they should and can come to be viewed as useless and, therefore, a good place to dump garbage.

The life-sustaining atmosphere and the ocean depths are two towering examples, and these fundamental sustainers of life have both been compromised by carelessness, over-exploitation and unchecked pollution. Biodiversity? Who owns it? Who needs it? Actually, we all do.

Yet we have insisted on finding ways to make consumption endless, and not just through online shopping and 24/7 malls. On one hand, money lets us postpone consumption but to continue hoarding the potential to consume; on the other, debt enables us to have now what we can’t pay for until later. And economists keep telling us that a lack of growth — stability — is unsustainable failure. The treadmill has to keep accelerating.

BUT “The Economy” offers few assurances or certainties, it’s a gamble… and, if you stand back and look at it with a clear and open mind, you are very likely to start wondering whether it’s not hopelessly unsustainable anyway.

I don’t want to scare you, but poisons are accumulating in food chains; clean water’s getting scarcer; rare metals needed for hi-tech applications face potentially extreme shortages; no-one’s yet found a safe, long-term way to get rid of nuclear waste; biodiversity is being lost at a calamitous rate and cultural diversity has already crashed; social and economic gaps are widening; war deaths, global temperatures, sea levels and species extinctions are all rising; diminishing resources are likely to ignite wars; international debt levels will become unsupportable… and, on its way down, “The Global Economy” as we know it is going to spit out a lot of its loyal devotees and, given its interest in weaponry and indifference to justice, things could turn seriously nasty.

Most of us have far more than we know in common with the world’s poorest of the poor... much more than we do with the profit-takers and the “wealth creators”: wealth is not “created”… it is taken. And we are duped if we think it is taken to provide for our general benefit. It is, in fact, to our grandchildren’s imperilment.

The moray eel can be dangerous to divers because it strikes blindly. It knots its body into a crevice in a reef; its backwards-curved teeth make it almost impossible for the eel to let go of anything it sinks them into. Clenched too tightly into their crevice and with their teeth locked into something too big to swallow, they can die. The lesson here is about the dire alternatives to letting go, and swimming free… things we modern humans are not at all good at. We adhere to “stuff” as if were grafted to it.

It’s time to loosen the grip.

Shaping your own heart-full of hope and sharing it with friends… valuing small things and taking pleasure in beauty… learning to enjoy growing, preparing, sharing and eating food… loving-kindness and curiosity… these are the sorts of life skills that will surpass an MBA for satisfaction any day.

It’s still a wonderful world. You just have to make a point of experiencing it.

-  See also: Breaking Free: The stupid Economy  -

Freedom's banner...

THE granting of social and political “freedom” to the majority of a nation’s population — once so natural to most aboriginal North Americans and Australians — is a relatively new idea in European contexts.

Slavery gave way slowly to serfdom, and serfdom to indenture and oppressive employment practices… but, even today in the most libertarian countries, the ideas of a minimum wage, unemployment benefits and universal housing, health and old age care, suffrage and access to education — basic prerequisites of freedom for society’s poorest people — are widely seen as impositions on the freedom to amass wealth, and often begrudged among those keenest wavers of freedom’s flag, the proprietors of the Western economy. It becomes a contest between two desirable but definition-defying principles: “progress” and “justice”.

It surprised me to see, in Ontario, signs saying something like, “This land is our land, government keep out”: if you deny the very authority that ensures your possession, what are you saying? Don’t protect me? Don’t educate my children? Cut off the hydro? Deny my vehicles access to “your” roads? Deny me health care? Don’t count my vote? Revoke my citizenship? Erase me and my family from government records?

Despite the absurdity of this, it is with rhetoric about the “darkness of injustice” and “shadows of oppression” that The Ontario Landowners’ Association presents its claims that “the urban environmentalist, politicians, bureaucrats and academics covet and thirst over our priceless property”… which is not the tone these same people welcome when, say, aboriginal Canadians point out that their lands were appropriated without payment to provide land “owners” with the ”brightness and freedom” they say has now been reduced to “ but a dim reminder of a bountiful past.”*

The problem is that, as long as we remain social creatures, public freedoms are always negotiated, always antagonistic, always a compromise. Its brokers, as in ancient Rome, have usually been the land-owning wealthiest of the free. Those to whom it’s least extended have always been the poor, the undereducated, the dispossessed and the weak… people like the disemployed petty debtors whose homes are forfeit when banks over-reach their capacities to aggregate interest. Historically, it has too often ended badly, in wholesale bloodshed.

That said, it’s interesting that 4,600 years ago there was a wise king of Sumerian Lagash who, among other reforms, outlawed forced sales and seizures, put other constraints on exploitative enterprise and granted tax relief to widows, orphans and debtors; that, historically, Judaism and Christianity have both found the charging of interest theologically odious; that in a number of early medieval European states charging interest on loans was outlawed; and that Islamic financiers have developed a different form of banking, based on partnership formation, that obviates it.

For the people at the base of the modern Western financial food chain, the social and political freedom that’s granted comes at the cost of insecurity: spurts of consumption and indebtedness in times of surplus; layoffs and foreclosures in times of shortage. And, if there’s a choice, the curtailment of freedom has long been preferred to starvation.

“Freedom”, although it’s long proved an effective battle cry, becomes a mercurial concept when it gets to the detail, and to workable political accommodations. There are “freedoms to…” and “freedoms from…”. There is political freedom, intellectual freedom, academic freedom, economic freedom, religious freedom, press freedom, freedom of travel, freedom of speech and expression, and freedom of association. There is the freedom of the wild, the freedom of consumer choice and the freedom of ownership. It’s nice to be free from violence, bigotry, coercion and fear, “cruel and unusual” punishments, crime, invasion, enslavement, exploitation and unnecessary pain or hardship. And — in even the most ideal of states — the varieties of freedom we want to enjoy tend to impinge on and limit each other. It doesn’t help that individuals and different cultures value some social freedoms more highly than others. It becomes an endless, essential but never entirely satisfactory negotiation, ideally striving for the greatest possible good for the state as a whole and, within the state, for the greatest number of people… with some safety nets added for those least well served.

And, ironically, there is probably no more contentious issue in a healthy, freedom-loving, pluralistic democracy than the extents and boundaries of personal “freedom”.

But, in all of the clangour and turmoil over abutting rights and interests, values and egos, the greatest compromiser of freedom is oneself.


It is some nagging, unworthy thing inside me that resents humility, that gets afraid, that wants what it does not need, that frets about tomorrow and stirs envy towards the strengths or successes of others. It is prickly voices within me that ask “but what if?” when I feel drawn to something unfamiliar. It is the same voices that threaten to throw tantrums when I start tossing out old ideas, old perceptions and old attitudes. They are responsible for my fears and failures, for my possessiveness and insensitivities.

It is the voices within me that urge me to lock doors, and hang back when someone else is hurt, insulted, confused or attacked. They make excuses for me to keep a distance from strangers and encourage me to surround myself with cocoons of entertainment and consumption.

Claiming freedom from this source, from myself, is the most headily exciting form of liberation I know. For one thing, it brings revelation after revelation of ways in which I am not alone and that there is far more beauty in the world than I could previously have imagined. It floods my experience with more vivid colours, more exciting flavours, more alluring forms… it feeds a growing desire to counter in whatever ways I can the ugliness I meet with: the ugliness of cruelty and damaging ways of fear, anger, neglect and ruthless acquisition; the ugliness of power and suspicion and violence against people but also against other creatures and landscapes. “Bad” acts and impulses are always ugly when you see them with any clarity and, too often, they arise from those false voices within.

Breaking free of them is to step into a different, wonderful universe of experience. It frees us from failure because it very quickly becomes clear that each of us is part of a flow of forces that ebb and flow in ways and directions that are not responsive in precise or specific ways to an individual’s best intentions. Individuals are essential, but the actions of one are always affected by, and diminished or magnified by the actions of others. What one person seems to achieve always hinges on the actions and inactions of thousands; what one person seems to inflict out of personal vindictiveness has happened in the same way: released from a flow of malice that is rushed on its way by the actions and inactions of thousands. You and I can join these flows deliberately, or obliviously unaware… but we cannot step aside, and we all share responsibility for the outcomes. Each of us is implicated in whatever comes to pass on the planet: in the causes and the consequences.

Fortunately, it’s extremely rare for a truly free person to choose a life of destruction, ugliness and wanton brutality; these forces are seeded in fears and doubts, anxieties and anger… in failures to forgive and compulsions to judge… and they generate experiences and emotions that are, in absolute terms, as unnecessary as they are damaging.

The truly dangerous way to live is as a prisoner to all those inner voices of fear, anger, envy, self-righteousness, false need and unnecessary doubt, listening to all of those ego-manipulating murmurs of “what if?”… .

The classical Greek stereotype of slaves was negative: slaves were widely held to be fearful, acquisitive, not interested in ideas or beauty, unprincipled, dishonest, ungenerous and self-centred. The “free” person, on the other hand, was recognised as self-sacrificing, generous, learned, principled and acting with integrity and justice for the benefit of all.

Freedom that is simply self-interested offers no freedom as all. And, where one person is denied justice, there can be no assurance of justice for anyone.

The price of freedom is the sacrifice of self-interest.


If we think like slaves to our inner anxieties, we enslave ourselves. It’s only when we risk freeing ourselves from ourselves that all of those widely debated public, social and political freedoms begin to matter or have merit.

*see: the Ontario Landowners Association website: www.ontariolandowners.ca

Stories upon stories...

 

ON the local beaches of northwest Prince Edward Island, I’ve been fascinated by the variety of small stones and pebbles: their colours and textures and shapes. And, magpie-like, I often pick them up.

Each has a story that’s tantalisingly just out of reach. The pointed stone at the top right of the picture above is chert, and it has been flaked: someone once held that in skilled hands, worked it for a bit, then discarded it. It’s an unfinished hunter’s tool. Or perhaps it was an apprentice piece… a practice exercise, or an experiment, using an inferior piece of stone? I found it on a beach within a sheltered bay, among a scattering of flaked and un-flaked stone of the same sort — none of it native to Prince Edward Island. The pebble to the left of it is the same, semi-translucent material.

Was this once a Mi’Kmaq workshop?  A place where, perhaps, a young hunter learned a necessary skill from an older expert? Why was so much un-worked stone lying around? If it had been imported, probably from deposits in New Brunswick, surely it had some value to whoever worked it? What happened that it was left there?

Most of the pebbles on these beaches are fallout from the glacial morraines that overlaid the area at the mouth of the St Lawrence River during the last glacial… more than 12,000 years ago. They’re now eroding out of the soft sandstone and you realise that they were smoothed, not on the beach here, but on long-vanished shores and in rivers many thousands of years ago. Others arrive in the spring with ice that formed on, then was washed from beaches further north, probably the Labrador coast. When the chunks of ice ground on our shores and melt, they leave little mounds of the pebbles, shells and the other beach wrack they’ve brought with them.

IN most cases, the mother rock from which they came is likely to have been formed billions of years ago in the vast volcanic plateaux of “Arctica”: the highly mineralised sheet of rock that, as well as laying down the Canadian Shield, contributed to the landforms of present day Scotland, Greenland, Siberia and eastern Antarctica.

Many experts think it could well have been there that life as we know it began (see Creation Story: http://nosretap-ekim.blogspot.com/2010/10/creation-story.html).


The biggest stone pictured is decorated with patterns I imagine to be the result of some sort of fossilisation: I’d love to hear from anyone who can tell me more. And that finely-grained, shiny black pebble (on the right in the top picture), naturally buffed to a tantalising sheen, fascinates me: there are so very few black pebbles on these beaches, one like this stood out. Much more common are quartzes and calcites like the snowy-white smoothed pebble at the bottom left corner of my picture. The little deep-red one? Iron? Volcano? Earth’s core? Maybe.

 

I have no geological training and little knowledge — this’d be more interesting if I did —but I do realise that each small pebble I pick up is its own, remarkable story: story on a timescale so far beyond first-hand human experience that it’s humbling, and even a geological explanation would not dispel the feelings of encounter-with-enormity I get from holding one of these pebbles in the palm of my hominid hand.

In fact, we all occupy our own measures of time, even though there are all sorts of unresolved questions about what, exactly, “time” is. In many ways, WE are time; in many ways, we generate time. And, when we see ourselves this way, we realise that each of us is an unfolding story: a story we graft on to all the other stories around us in ways that we, individually, can shape.

We respond to story in a deep, primal way. Stories connect directly with our emotions as well as our intelligence and reason. As every charity fundraiser knows, we “feel” stories, and fall for them, while any amount of raw data can leave us utterly unmoved.

This sense of story, this need for narrative, is deeply implanted in our human way of understanding things. We’re adept at finding patterns, order and uniqueness, and excerpting from patterns of experience “our” stories and “my” story.

We’re born with the magical power of finding meaning in particular interactions with all that’s flying by, sweeping past and around us, and carrying us along. Once we have found that meaning, we’re enabled to create places to live and ways of living in company with others, even though we can never come to know them fully. But, thanks to the new stories that begin to include them, we generate resonances between “me” and “you, “us” and “them”… and the stories bring us feelings of companionship, predictability and control: we are NOT alone. We are a “community” that, as time goes by, continues to grow its own repertoires of reassuring narratives.

As our dread of the chaos falls from us, we claim for ourselves the power to act, to analyse and to shape destinies we’re able to believe are of our own making.

Intuitively, we compose and tell stories all the time. We see events and experiences as stories. Story is THE art that seeds all of our other arts, all the way back to their origins. Stories shape our political and moral evaluations. Stories are also the stuff of daily conversation, whether it’s the quick sharing bit of gossip about some acquaintance we saw at the mall the other day, or the thoughtful telling of our hopes, or a description of some activity we’re engaged in; they regularise “our” worlds.

Shared stories establish and maintain relationships, build communities and define cultures. When we hear a story, it enters the world of our experience and changes, perhaps in just the smallest of ways, the way we appreciate and think about the world — and this, in turn, changes us. It’s all cumulative: we are shaped by the stories we hear, just as we are shapers of our own stories.

THE “magic” elixir is meaning.

Information gets useful and available to us when it can be related to what things mean, when it can be seen in the context of a story or theory (and a ‘theory’ is just a good story in an academic gown). Information that stands on its own, alone, is hard to see as anything but intellectual litter. If we can’t find any place for it, we’ll disregard it altogether. At the same time, entire, coherent narratives can form around hardly any facts at all, if there’s a mite of meaning to be had there: phrenology became “science”, Loch Ness hides a monster in its depths and failing to win a lottery improves your chances the next time… for example.

The power of a narrative to manipulate information into meaning — and thereby to make it considerably more persuasive and memorable — applies to everything. An e-mail or letter that’s sensitive to the principles of narrative (by clearly linking new information into an existing story), will be better understood and remembered than any unorganised downloading of data. Computers need software to systematise the data that’s put into them; we need a story.

It’s revealing to deliberately start looking at all the “things” around you as moments in a continuing story. Nothing around you has always been the way it is now. Everything was once something else and, right now, is gradually or rapidly becoming something else again.

Think about your clothes: those synthetic fabrics were made from hydrocarbons that came out of an oil well. Chemically, they originated in some vast, dripping, decomposing prehistoric swamp. Once they were plants, waving in the sun and wind, beaten by rains of long, long ago …or creatures ploughing around in the primeval muck.

The wool you’re wearing was once on the back of a sheep. Where? Some sprawling Australian sheep station? A moist, misty Scottish hillside? Some coyote-threatened threatened flock in North America? Can you imagine the particular sheep? What hands sheared the sheep and graded the wool and baled it? It was dyed and milled and woven. People did that and many of them are probably doing the same work today.

Your genuine cotton grew on a plant … where? The Nile Delta perhaps, where Mark Antony once made his fated way? Or was it Uzbekistan, the world’s second-largest exporter of cotton where children as young as seven are conscripted to help bring in the annual harvest. Where was it processed? In Turkey or the Phillippines, both notorious for sweatshop labour practices? Your leather? That was once the hide of a cow or bull, or some other animal that grazing pastures you may never see.

Everything you touch, smell or see is like that, a moment is a story that has yet to be concluded.

And, once upon a time, every atom heavier than hydrogen was formed in the cataclysmic collapse of a dying star, then flung out into space to coalesce into the shape of the world we inhabit. Everything — a person, a place, an object — nudges everything else and is poised, ready to catapult us into experiences we don’t have time to consider … unless we choose to enter into them.

Categories — the way we’re inclined to name experience with the most obvious, habit-formed label — can trip us up because they can hide our own experience from us, they can hide, even to us, the true, personal measure of an event or ongoing experience. Few categories are as clear, as consistent or as closed as we routinely assume. We get a most of our categories from our culture and, when we stop to think about it, it’s all pretty obvious, but our culture — by way of our routines — ensnares us in habit-formed ways of thinking so snugly that it seldom occurs to us to re-examine them. Who has the time?

We all, and each of us, are surrounded by constant opportunities to rediscover, reshape and refresh our world. Taking charge of “my” story frees me to lead “my” life without loads of wanton baggage. Taking charge of “our” story helps us to shape the community that gives us our courage.

We don’t need a press campaign or massive social networking effort to do that: we simply need to express and present our essential values, insights and discovered meanings by telling the stories that are “true” to us.

The narratives we make, shared in our regular contacts with friends and the people who matter most to us, have the power to transform our lives, and our communities. It’s something we can do as we go about doing whatever it is that we do… just by sharing OUR stories.

As a way of living, it stands to extend our freedom, gain us respect… and inflame our hopefulness.