Who are you or how would you describe your life’s work/play?

I am a five-fingered Earthling currently residing in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where I co-mingle with the wild turkey, the black bear, and the winds that sometimes howl. To be honest, the older I get the more fluid and permeable my sense of self becomes. My identity is increasingly more kaleidoscopic, in participatory relationship with the ever-changing world around me and less pinned to titles, credentials, and cultural identifiers.

At the heart of my life’s work/play as a filmmaker, coach, and wilderness rites of passage guide is recognizing the epochal time we are living through and thus it’s about liberation from the malware of separation so Life can re-wild itself and unfold its complex potentials. It all centers around being a threshold guide between the OS of late stage (parasitic) capitalism to the emerging world-space of regenerative thrivability, from globalization to planetization.

Thrivability. How are you relating to the world through a thrivable society lens? What story do you have about thrivability and why are you being named a thrivable society fellow?

First off, thank you for the invitation to join the thrivable society fellowship. I’m honored.

About 15 years ago my late friend and teacher Larry Emerson, a Diné scholar and medicine man, told me “don’t start anything if you can’t finish it in Beauty.” I took this on as something of a koan to guide how I relate to the world. Is this act or how I am being in accord with Beauty? In the midst of inevitable mis-steps, how do I complete this in a good way? Now looking back I see that it has served as a thrivability heuristic for me all these years.

Thrivability is equal parts paradigm and virtue for me and has everything to do with Beauty (capital B) and aiming to live, walk and play in Beauty – “blood, snot and tears” as Larry would say. Thrivability is centering the health and wellbeing of life, meeting the needs of all beings within planetary boundaries, such that all of life can flourish – grow, blossom and fall away according to natural law.

Aliveness. What is fostering aliveness in you?

Paying attention to and playing in the edge spaces of what is coming alive in this time between worlds. It’s not all coherent and visible, more like mycellium growing beneath the mainstream radar, but it’s crackling with potential and an invitation to harness our collective intelligence and deploy daring creativity.

What question could I ask that would be the most interesting to answer right now?

What is possible when we reboot our imagination through the perspective of thrivability?

Imagine we are living in an incredibly fecund world, what would you be/do/have?

We already do live in an incredibly fecund world. It’s a perceptual detour that tells us otherwise, and that I certainly fall victim to. But in this possible future you allude to, we would be ecological selves living reciprocally with the non-human world in a land-based economy that tracks flows of exchange and governance by metrics of thrivability, which is a reflection of the health of our relations. The value is and will be in the relationships between things, not in the acquisition of things. We will live by relational currency which will set the conditions for new structures to emerge.