Anger Dragons

As a human, you experience emotions like feathers—they touch your face, frame the corners of your experience, invade your body.

Anger generates in us for what isn't true but ought to be. For what is deserved and denied. For ego and power winning over dignity, over common good. For a system that lets people with money hurt others indiscriminately. For the foolish shows we make trying to display power, to prove we will win. For what's denied the essential work of ending suffering—work that seems only to increase it. Anger for the feeling that each action generates more uncertainty than the last.

Despair and anger must be felt to find their place. Where do they go?

I believe they need somewhere to be reckoned with—where we hold bad actors accountable, say no to what hurts us even when it offers someone else luxury. Anger for people dying stupid deaths. For what they're trying to do with our data, our private information. For tactics that prey on human loneliness to steal what's ours.

Your anger needs a place to go. If it sits there without company, without home, without tether, it unleashes dragons we don't want or need. Dragons that don't serve us.

Instead, we can give our despair and anger somewhere to go.

A place with us where it is seen and listened to.

What is it trying to say?

Listening

"Sit at your desk and listen." Franz Kafka

Listen to the chorus of people hollering outside your window, and to that intermittent motor as it starts and stops repeatedly.

Listen to the kids at the nearby elementary school as they negotiate and compromise during recess.

Listen to how your eyes close in the warm sunlight as you start your day on the roof.

Listen to the wind whisper near concrete.

Listen to your own unresolved stomach and the roughness of your feet.

Listen to your calf muscles, which carry you around.

Listen to the nesting pigeons that never seem to stop moving.

Listen to the truck backing up.

Listen to the shifting shadows dancing on the wall.

Listen to your own not-so-silent beating heart.

Plant Marketing

“There's a party

…and you're not invited.”

That's the feeling I get from most traditional marketing I come into contact with. It has a desperate feeling of exclusion mixed with feigned urgency.

But what about the way plants do marketing? Through fruit. Through pollination. By quietly turning sunlight into food and trusting that what's good will be found. Then sustaining life through deliciousness.

A peach tree doesn't send you urgent emails about limited-time sweetness. It just makes peaches. When they're ready, the right creatures come for them.

Plants spread their seeds by creating something worth spreading. The fruit is the message and the medium. The value is built in.

What if we create actual abundance because we care more?

What if the marketing was a better quality thing itself?

There's something about patience, too. Plants grow slowly and they take their time to root well. Quality finds its way to the right people.

Let the fiber, nutrients, and deliciousness do the talking for you.