-
·
Someone here is crazy
Hint: It’s not me. Oct 31, 2018 The thing that makes me the angriest about our most recent slide towards fascism is that even when I know what’s happening, I still question my sanity from time to time. I suspect I’m not the only one. Most of us are unprepared for this. We have been…
-
·
Blessing or curse?
Oct 13, 2018 There is a classic Buddhist story about a farmer and a horse. The moral of the story: you never know whether something is a blessing or a curse. With time and perspective, curses look like blessings and blessings look like curses. Most people, myself included, have direct personal experience with the concept. We’ve…
-
·
The Dusty Dimmer Switch
A Soft Apocalypse Survival Tool Nov 19, 2025 Some conversations start as small talk and end up accidentally telling the truth. This one began with me teasing Aiden about his strange workplace. We were just hanging out after we’d worked on a few “business items” together. When I looked around, I could see he lived…
-
·
Learning to unlearn
Business as Usual and the Antidote Jul 14, 2025 I’m often surprised at how hard people make things for themselves. For example, we treat sociocracy as some complicated, arcane rule-based system when it’s actually amazingly simple. Sociocracy basically says “do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.” Simple. To do that, we lean…
-
·
Homeless in the Agora
The Wisdom of Agoraphobia Nov 25, 2024 A few years back, as we were “coming out” of Covid and everyone was rushing to get things “back to normal” I started to develop an odd form of agoraphobia. There were some events or meetings that I just couldn’t bring myself to attend, even though I’d been…
-
·
The Wetiko Habitus
Are you willing to give up privilege for connection? Sep 17, 2024 No one wants what I’m selling, which I completely understand. What people want is a delicious tasting candy that is guaranteed to help you lose 35 pounds in three weeks without diet or exercise or your money back — get your free bottle…
-
·
Bullies, Stooges, Lackeys and the Rest of Us
Everything you need to know about global politics you learned in elementary school Nov 12, 2024 A lot of people are scratching their heads about what the hell just happened. Talking heads are acting like the descent into authoritarianism is mysterious and unfathomable. “How could it happen here?!?” It’s actually not that hard to understand…
-
·
The Canary and the Ledger
Reciprocity has become one of the most fraught words at the Farmastery. Everyone nods along, but underneath the agreement is a collective flinch — because most of us still reach for a ledger when someone hands us a shovel. But what if the forest’s accounting is older and wiser than ours?
-
·
The Lifeboat Project
This is a call to action. We live in turbulent times and they are likely to get even bumpier. The combined pressures of climate chaos, social breakdown, and a post-peak-energy future mean there will be no “going back.” Science is telling us that we need to mobilize like we’ve never mobilized before and yet our…
-
·
The Happiness Project
It’s not accidental that our mid-winter celebrations are marked by three related holidays — Solstice, Christmas, and New Years. They symbolically represent the arc of a near-death experience. Imagine our ancestors migrating north from our native African home where mid-winter and mid-summer have little impact on the cycles of life. Suddenly those first explorers to…
Category: Concept Pieces
Essays that build out an idea or framework — economics, governance, land, the thinking behind how Lifeboat works.