3.1 Imagining the Stories We Tell in the Kindness Economy

Welcome to season three of Something Different This Way - imagining the Kindness Economy, Rooted and set in Thunder Bay, within the global economy. Today I imagine the impact of kinder storytelling industries teaching, selling, entertaining and connecting us.

Something Different This Way Comes

I’ve written you a song, and will sing another by Joni Mitchell for you. But first here is a story to consider, about who we are and how we fit within our home This small, blue planet.

This planet was once a hot rock mostly covered in lifeless water. Then plants evolved in that water and started burping out the beginnings of a breathable atmosphere. The first living things to colonize the exposed surface rock in that thin air were lichen, that miraculous marriage of fungus and algae in the molecules directly next to their surface Lichen create their own atmosphere and climate and slowly, an atom at a time, started to build both soil and air The algae parts capturing the energy of sunlight the fungus elements breaking down the minerals within the solid rock. It makes the miracle of the loaves and fishes look almost paltry in comparison. Lichen turned light into life, and rock into living, giving soil. Until larger plants follow to root in the earth they built, and add to the air they exhale, then animals who flourish among those plants, eating them and building a deeper richer soil, a deeper more nourishing air, a greater wealth and diversity of life.

When we die and as we live and digest, the circle of life doesn’t just trade but actually deepens life With ups and downs, extinctions and eras, the thin skin of life on this planet deepened over time And this continued through this latest second in earth’s evolution, with us By and large people’s lives also added to the deepening and enriching of life on this planet With the grace of consciousness we helped mindfully Harvesting and choosing how to do the things we do so that more of what we grew, grew. The great plains, for example, were home to more ruminant grazing animals than all the cows now raised to feed us beef and milk The great buffalo herds They were more plentious not despite but because of their  relationship with people Who did not fence them in, but valued them and paid attention to them, harvested without waste and with care not to deplete the herds As humans flourished on this planet we moved a lot, we built relationships with plants and animals, places and seasons, and we deepened the diversity, health and depth of the life in our homes Most of the time. The times we fell out of balance were devastating though Those cultures begat invasion, colonialism, a distance between the decision makers and the land keepers that led to a loss of life. Land depleted, diversity lost, cultures cut away from their roots Half of the excess carbon emitted into our atmosphere, from fossil fuels being burned, from forest loss and soil erosion, has happened during our watch,  in these last thirty years The invaders have no rich lands left to colonize and exhaust, to strangle with their efforts to control and their addiction to fear.

But the time of colonization and fossil fuel combustion is coming quickly to its end. In the kindness economy our grace and generosity rises up to rebuild and restore, Renew this skin of life in all its overwhelming diversity and uncontrolled proliferation. Rebuild our relationship with the living things seen and unseen that nourish us. Apply our capacity to notice, adapt, help and support to restore the carbon-capturing super-power That is life on earth. The miraculous, marvelous thin skin of life on our planet comes from consumption.

I have seen it outside my front door. Our house is surrounded by pastures that had not been grazed except by the odd deer for decades and had become spotty and sparse, tufted hillocks of strangled grasses  marooned between barren spots of earth, the bush creeping in one seedling at a time, growing towers of ant hills. But four years ago our neighbour started bringing his beef cattle to graze these pastures Waiting until the grass was tall enough, then moving them before they over graze. And the cows stomp, eat, poop, pee, knock down the anthills to roll on them They definitely make an impression, But the poop and pee spread seeds and nutrients. The stomping and rolling breaks up the earth, letting water soak deeper. The grass when grazed leaves more carbon in the earth and grows richer and wider. The bare spots are filling in. The plants are more diverse and healthier every year. Pastures need grazing, and grazing ruminants benefit from human care and support.

I was listening to the CBC’s What on Earth recently. About when the National Grasslands Park was created in Southern Saskatchewan. The bought land from the ranchers who had used it to graze their cattle. Then they set up studies to see how the land would rebound Compared to their still grazed neighbouring farms And instead found species disappearing, the land losing diversity and resilience Where it was no longer grazed. Those that could migrated out of the park back to the neighbouring farms. Until the park figured out the grassland needed grazing. They reintroduced bison where they could, and where they did not yet have buffalo they asked the ranchers to once again graze their cattle And not only graze them but share how they knew when a pasture was ready to be grazed And when it was time to move the herd To share their knowledge as keepers of not just livestock, but of the land.

I listened this week to an episode of Ideas about transhumance. About all of the places in the world were people moved with their animals Seasonally, to manage the grazing, the birthing and the seasons. And what we lost and lose when we discourage that kind of organic, moving relationship

With our broader home. I think about borders and citizenship, really very recent notions That have proven to provide more costs and risks than benefits. 

In the kindness economy, our stories build on our shared values, goals and humanity And work to lessen the divisions that might arise between us. Out stories would aim to pull us together in this existential effort to save ourselves and our home. Breaking our habits born of invasion, accumulation and extraction and pour love into our whole planet.

Something Different This Way Comes

That story is rooted in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer And Humankind by Rutger Bregman Also inspired by the episode called Made of Honour featuring psychologist Ryan Brown I heard recently on the podcast Hidden Brain As well as all the things I already referenced in that telling. I will put links to them all on the homepage for this episode. You can find more from my Library of Hope at www.SomethingDifferentThisWayComes.ca You can also sign up for my newsletter, for the stories behind the recording I send out weekly during each season. You can listen to past episodes, like the launch of season two called Ground Level Lessons which has more of my thoughts on sustainable and unsustainable land management cultures in Canada’s prairies. If you haven’t heard that one yet, you can find it there.

And you can donate to me, through the GoFundMe link you’ll find on the home page. If you enjoy this podcast, if you find it entertaining or good company, and you can afford to pay for the pleasure, I welcome your donation. I ask only for the equivalent of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer, that small sum every month, would be such a boon. Something Different This Way Comes is an independent podcast, no sponsors, no funding per se, just what you give, when that is not enough I pay the bills myself. I detail the programs I pay for monthly in order to record and edit, broadcast and produce it, as well as any contributions I receive. I was named Artist in Residence this year by the Lakehead Arts Integrated Research Galleries which came with $3,000 that I put towards these expenses. That was a lovely boon. What an honour. Every dollar donated is a boon and an honour. I say I do this alone but I rely on the generosity and insight of my family, who give me time and space and ideas. Leea McKay does great work as a graphic artist, web designer and social media promoter for this podcast. And everyone who emails me with their thoughts and suggestions, you’re helping make this show happen too.

Stories are important.

They are how we wrap our head around things, picking a storyline out of the mind-boggling diversity of the whole of things, choosing a frame. Storytelling is at the heart of politics, marketing, journalism and science. I think of Bob McDonald on CBC’s Quirks & Quarks - he is such a genius at translating the language and perspective of a specialist deep in their particular corner of science, into a simile, and suddenly it all makes sense. The tell is how the scientist is delighted to be so clearly understood, and to be gifted this way of translating their insight so that we can get it. We are a storytelling species. We need stories to translate information into knowledge.

In the Kindness Economy the power and the impact of storytelling would be wielded with skill and accountability. Because it has tripping hazards. Fear catches our attention and makes us vulnerable to manipulation as we freeze, flee or fight in its face. Fear is an over-used additive and hook skewing our information economies right now. Thinking about that, this song by Joni Mitchell kept coming to mind:

Every picture has its shadows
And it has some source of light
Blindness, blindness and sight

The perils of benefactors
The blessings of parasites
Blindness, blindness and sight

Threatened by all things
Devil of cruelty
Drawn to all things
Devil of delight

Mythical devil of the ever-present laws
Governing blindness, blindness and sight

Critics of all expression
Judges in black and white
Saying it's wrong, saying it's right

Suntans in reservation dining rooms
Pale miners in their lantern rays
Night, night and day

Hostage smiles on presidents
Freedom scribbled in the subway
It's like night, night and day

Threatened by all things
God of cruelty
Drawn to all things
God of delight

Mythical god of the everlasting laws
Governing day, day and night

Compelled by prescribed standards
Or some ideals we fight
For wrong, wrong and right

Threatened by all things
Man of cruelty-mark of Cain
Drawn to all things
Man of delight-born again, born again

Man of the laws, the ever-broken laws
Governing wrong, wrong and right
Governing wrong, wrong and right
Wrong and right

That is Joni Mitchell’s Shadows and Light from her album The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It is all about what we have. Governing wrong and right - so binary! I have a whole episode about the benefits of non-binary thinking - in season two. I’m going to recommend you give it a listen, rather than taking you down that rabbit role just now. But the perils of benefactors makes me think about social divisions, so does the blessings of parasites. First I think about the parasitic communities in our guts: The fungus and bacteria and viruses that digest what we eat, so we can draw nourishment from our food. Without those parasites, we could eat all we want and yet we’d starve. But we could think of Children, people unable to work for whatever reason, those that earn less in a household, we could think of them all as parasites.

Or we could tell that stories differently, and celebrate our people, whatever their cost and capacity at the moment, count all of us as blessings.

In the kindness economy we frame our stories to celebrate the light, and give the shadows less of our attention. We worry less about wrong and value more getting things right. We are born again to delight, to freedom and to sight. That is not today, but it could be tomorrow, with bright stories lighting the way towards that kind economy. Man Joni Mitchell - Wow. I recorded that song with the women’s choir Cheur Maha in Montreal. I had to pull it off the shelf and look up the year it was released: 1996. Arranged and conducted by Kathy Kennedy. Powerful stuff

Now let’s get into the nitty gritty of the story-telling industries of the Kindness Economy I am imagining here.

Obviously the wild wild west of manipulation and deception currently sickening on our online spaces would be solved. It might still be rotting in spaces few would then visit, but most of us will spend our online spaces 100% sure we know who we are dealing with, and that the information we find is true. Anyone who tries to convince you that an industry based on data mining and identity profiling can’t manage that is blowing smoke up your ass.

I think of Estonia where the government is tasked with protecting and coordinating your personal information. You have an indentifying number and you use it for everything, from paying for your bus ticket to filing you taxes to pulling up your medical file. Not only is identity theft pretty much impossible, so many things are so much easier. Google it - or tap the link I put in the landing page. Estonia has this one figured out. 

The kindness economy is all about knowing and being known.

And so is the truth. We flip those algorythms that currently manipulate our online experience to influence and market to us, into fact-checking and information-sharing excellence. With those basic principals entrenched, I imagine us using our online spaces more actively. I think of how Ben & Sam differ from Arno and I in our online time. Arno & I tend to be passive, scrolling, reading, maybe commenting or emailing. Of course I spend my work days using analytical tools online, the computer as computing tool more than a communications tool.

But Ben & Sam communicate and collaborate online. Their games and chosen activities are all about conversation, learning and gaining skills or accomplishments. My kids play at work all the time. When they do play a game with winners and losers, it often leads to offers to teach one another skills, or share insights. But most games look a lot like work. They figure things out, they build and solve and are never really done. But their progress is celebrated, their skills are immediately useful, and there is no real insecurity, every effort is welcome, everyone is needed.

That is the aspect of storytelling in the kindness economy I love to imagine. Imagine tracking our progress and weighing our accomplishments, imagine gifting our attention on how well we are doing as a whole, every single one of us. If our story was that no one should be without a home, a meal, and a welcome place in our community unless we are all homeless, hungry and exiled.

In the Kindness Economy I imagine the dish with one spoon treaty between the Anishnabe, Mississauga and Haudenosaunee. Or the Nis’Gaa principal of Our Common Bowl. Imagine if our expectation was that all that we gather, we share? That how much each contributes is not what is measured or valued, but rather how well all are fed from the total gathered by us all as a single community?

I think there are a lot of rules and procedures that exclude and impede because they are blind to too much of the wholeness of things. People & potential fall out of their tight frames, trip over their well-intended walls, fail waiting through perfection-seeking delays.

I compare that to this farm we live on. The house, sauna, big stone foundation cattle barn and smaller squared timber barn as well as the hand-dug well and the miles of fencing all around the quarter section - all built in the 1930s. By refugees with pretty much no money, probably didn’t speak much English or French.

Here we are making good money, secure in the middle class and dominant culture, with so many more things than they had. Not just more clothes in our closet and tools in our toolshed but learning and access to information, programs and funding opportunities, life expectancy. But those barns and fences, we can’t keep them up. We have so much, but we are only two adults and two kids, with lots that takes us off the farm and keeps us in the house.

They had so much less stuff, but they had people. For a roof, a meal, a welcome conversation in your own language, lots of people lived here in the 1930s. Everyone slept and cooked and ate in the sauna until the other buildings were built. People slept in the barn loft, there were cots along the wall in the dining room. Strangers set adrift in the terrible losses of the depression came up the lane and offered to work for a food and a bed, and they were welcomed. They worked hard, all day, to build this infrastructure we have inherited. They might not have been terribly literate, but they were smart, problem-solving, they could trade their work for expertise to bring in the water witch so they knew where to dig that well, or the master craftsman to make those cedar shingles and teach them how to roof the barn with them.

And this means the professional storytellers, the journalists and politicians, the leaders and translators that help us pool our savvy and our skills to collaborate, delegate and coordinate. These storytellers manage fear like an addictive substance we are all recovering from. The fear that triggers our attention, and makes us vulnerable to manipulation, is managed like a toast at an alcoholics anonymous celebration. We might raise glasses, but they won’t contain wine.

In the kindness economy we celebrate our capacities to welcome, include, contribute and learn. Everyone is okay. No one is left without the basic securities. There are neither benefactors nor parasites among us.

And this means the professional storytellers, the journalists and politicians, the leaders and translators that help us pool our savvy and our skills to collaborate, delegate and coordinate. These storytellers manage fear like an addictive substance we are all recovering from. The fear that triggers our attention, and makes us vulnerable to manipulation, is managed like a toast at an alcoholics anonymous celebration. We might raise glasses, but they won’t contain wine.

Instead we build our brains to better manage the wholeness of things, to grow more comfortable within a hive of activity, deepening our awareness so we walk through the busy diversity of our days like Arno walks through this property. I have lived here for fifteen years now and I know it better than I did. But Arno roamed this land from toddlerhood, he has worked it and explored it thoroughly - what grows and has grown, what lives and has lived, what happened and might happen there again.

In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about untangling a forest floor to harvest some Spruce Roots. It is mind boggling how much life there is beneath our feet. There are more living organisms in a chunk of living soil than all the billions of people on the planet, a whole interconnected, diverse community. There is little soil in the forest floor, it is so dense with rooted life and its biodiversity of visible and invisible life.

In the kindness economy I imagine us deepening and broadening our storytelling to better embrace this busy diversity of everything. To get us more comfortable and less overwhelmed. Our storytelling minds can get addicted to the bare bones at the heart of familiar patterns. Picking out our main and supporting characters, our primary and secondary climaxes, our plots and conclusions, our story line through the overwhelming width and depth of wildest of all that is actually going on.

In the Kindness Economy of my imagination, that habit of pattern perpetuation and over simplification is managed by our storytellers to help us build a broader context. Casts are as diverse as the audiences watching. Conversations and consequences are clearly picked out rather than inevitable. You will more often see what also happened but turned out not to be key. You will be more often surprised by who turned out to save the day, and how it all worked out.

And it is aspirational. It teaches by demonstrating kindness, collaboration, problem-solving and inclusion that we may not as yet have managed in the real world. Fear is avoided like an overworn dramatic tool,  in the kindness economy artists broaden their pallets to educate, inspire and imagine solutions. Facts feed fiction and fiction feeds innovation.

And in this entertainment industry of the Kindness Economy, there are no villains, Only villainous acts. There are no heroes only, though there is heroism. And it is often collective, collaborative, and fun. Because we love to solve problems. We love to make a difference, be included and valued and part of a team. We flourish and do more when we feel safe and secure. And when we can focus on right now, what we can do in this moment that will be welcome and good, confident that we might get to do something completely different later on, that change is a given and something we can not only manage but enjoy. A change is as good as a rest. Imagine that being the story we wake up to everyday. Imagine that economy.

Time for your song. Written for you today 

(A)

The stories we tell
Can feed (G) heaven or hell
They can (F) teach, they can sell
(Cmaj) Connect or (E) divide
On (A)  Stories we ride

(E) This is my prayer
Let our (A) stories be true
Let them (E) help me and you
(D) Let (E) them be (A) true

Let them inspire
Let them (E) stoke the good fires
(D) Let (E) them in- (A)spire

The stories we tell
Can feed (G) heaven or hell
They can (F) teach, they can sell
(Cmaj) Connect or (E) divide
On (A)  Stories we ride

This is my prayer
Let our (E) stories engage
Feed the (A) peace, not the rage
(D) Let (E) them en- (A)gage

Let them expand
Stretch our (E) hearts and our hands
(D) Let (E) them ex- (A)pand

The stories we tell
Can feed (G) heaven or hell
They can (F) teach, they can sell
(Cmaj) Connect or (E) divide
On (A)  Stories we ride
(E) on Stories we ride
On (A) Stories we ride

In the Kindness Economy I imagine stories feeding, connecting and directing us. An industry that is accountable and reliably true and helpful whether educating, translating for or entertaining us. Helping people collaborate and coordinate as we all pitch in to rebuild and renew the places we live.

I'll be back again next week.

Our neighbourhoods and our planet

Inspiring one another, tracking our sum progress towards our goal of regaining climate balance

And supporting our successes by our own hands where we live