Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

This past weekend I was reminded of the importance of community. I think the competitive nature of our Western society has a tendency to create a sense of isolation from each other. We find ourselves stretched too thin, having to take care of everything alone, needing to be perpetually hyper-vigilant, invulnerable and strong - especially in the world of business.

Eventually this becomes exhausting and results in burn-out.

I’ve been feeling rather burned out lately from the tech scene, and took a trip with my friends to a gathering at a community called Kayumari.

The Kayumari community is responsible for the creation of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, an alliance of 13 medicine women who are catalyzing international recognition of indigenous traditions through prayer, peacemaking, healing and global activism.

It’s been many months since I’ve had a chance to visit Kayumari - it’s located at the foothills of Yosemite, which make its rather challenging for me to get to. The land there is beautiful, wild, and untamed. The community is, sadly, leaving this location.

Here I was reminded that the support of one’s friends and family is indeed beautiful and necessary for personal well-being, and that one should never feel weak for having to seek it.

I am grateful to have a connection with this incredible community of people who are committed to honoring and preserving indigenous wisdom traditions.

Thus, the quote of the day from Paulo Coehlo’s Manual of the Warrior of Light is:

When a warrior is a victim of some injustice, he usually tries to be alone, in order not to show his pain to others.

This is both good and bad.

It is one thing to allow one’s heart to heal its wounds slowly, but it is quite another to sit all day in deep contemplation for fear of seeming weak.

Inside each of us there lives an angel and a devil, and their voices are very alike. Confronted by a problem, the devil encourages that solitary conversation, trying to show us how vulnerable we are. The angel makes us reflect upon our attitudes and occasionally needs someone else’s mouth to reveal itself.

A warrior balances solitude and dependence.

Shelly and Bob Boyle, one of the wisest and kindest souls alive.

Marlo, soaking in the cool river - where you can still pan for gold.

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Last night I was over at a friend’s house and we got into a discussion on one of my favorite topics, “What is reality?”

I encounter a lot of people in the West who have an adamantly, unquestioned belief in certain theories of existence, be it scientific or economic that have really only emerged in Western civilizations within the last 2-300 years. Rationalism, however, is mere blip in in the timeline of human existence on this planet.

Having travelled extensively around the world, I have found that the definition of reality and an individual’s relationship to it varies quite drastically from culture to culture. In Brazil, and many other countries, people wholeheartedly accept and believe in the existence of non-embodied deities, spirits and entities. I know an elderly Ecuadorian shaman, who routinely transforms himself into an 10 foot long anaconda - according to numerous members of his extensive household. Though I have not witnessed this phenomenon with my own eyes, it is a little more my style accept that it is out of my experience that than vehemently insist that physical transformation into another organism is impossible.

The Assumptions of Capitalist Economics

One of the most commonly unquestioned assumptions that I encountered in university and again in graduate school is that of the “truth” or “reality” if you will of capitalist economics, as defined by Adam Smith in the “Wealth of Nations“. The existence of an “invisible hand” that will perpetually adjust prices to a point of equilibrium between supply and demand. The supremacy of free trade economics and the inherent goodness of consumption-fueled, growth-oriented economies.

Bollocks.

While a lot of this rhetoric seems to pervade the political arena, and our educational (more…)