Letter from Benevolent Trickster and Agent of Epiphany – Winter 23′

We walked through a forest, watching the light weave through branches without their leaves. And we asked ourselves, “Why do any of us do this work, friends? Why are we doing this work?”

There seems to be a symphony of catastrophes. They sing to us of the climate crisis and economic disasters, supply chain breakdowns, and an onslaught of battles against personal and social well being that have become the hallmark of this age. Should we be sending a different type of hallmark card to each other, “sorry for the bout of chaos, hope you feel better soon!”

These are mad libs. We cannot plan for all scenarios, stellar events, and cosmic collisions. Well, a little word play tells us that we’d like to host stellar events, but when it comes to asteroids, we expect the dinosaurs also did their best. Nuclear War? It’s been a threat all our lives. Sure, there are some unpredictable and annihilating events that we seem to have mostly escaped/survived for the last few million years.

What can we even be strategic about? Where can we apply our grassroots foresight and  futurist skills that create a more thrivable world? And could we create that thrivable world in a cool fun way that might help us vault over the overwhelm and cast away the catastrophe fatigue, please? “Sign me up,” you say? You are heretofore invited to participate with us at Thrivable Society, a playful space for serious, and sometimes not so serious questions.

We believe that life gives rise to more life and that the universe has a serious can-do attitude that we’d do well to adopt. If there is any way to “thread the needle” of the remotely implausible and dare we say audacious path by which a more thrivable world is possible, then we should choose that path over giving up.

Why choose to sip metaphorical martinis on a sinking ship or flagellate ourselves and others for a past we can’t change? We need to lean into the universal wow and create our own stellar event: How about we co-create the world we want to save, then save it? Let’s find the bold and adventurous path that will push a more thrivable world through the eye of the catastrophic needles.

What is this thread and where is the needle? Let’s imagine the thread as our intertwining strings of life, weaving into a tapestry of social fabric. And the needle is the minuscule possibility space we pass through into another glorious day of aliveness on this spinning blue marble. In the ginormous space of the universe, we are but a tiny blip, lucky to be here, even if briefly. Let us revel in our near impossibility. Grieve, laugh, scream. We exist, stardust made conscious.

If there is a way through, how do we find it and live into that? Let us begin with this premise: there might be a way through, perhaps implausible or unforeseeable, but possible.

Given that premise, how might that way be decorated with signposts? We have experienced too much democracy, shoddy as it is in practice, to give it up. That would look like Austerity Fascism. Market solutions? Hahahahhhaaaaaaa. That looks like Disaster exploitation! No, the first signpost we notice points to a massively distributed cooperative effort of conscious beings tilting like maniacs at all the windmills we can find.

So how do we collectively build the stellar event of our own thrivable world and push it through the eye of a needle? Look to the edges where experiments might already be working. Celebrate these attempts of a grassroots thrivable future, and add to them. Assume mass customization rather than upscaling and universalizing. Harmonize this tension: the gloriously specific and local with what can be borrowed, shared, or hacked to fit elsewhere. No one knows it all. And No one has nothing to contribute.

We offer this Journal to you, our thrivable family, to highlight your work to foster aliveness in the world.