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Stories for life was written in 2020, exploring the question – “What are the new stories?”
We found insight in a blend of ancient and modern understanding.
This website is offered as a gift, a tool, to help us all connect to this understanding as we seek to navigate our troubled times.
The site’s chapters, listed below, tell the story of this understanding, ending with some practical recommendations on beginning.
You will also find an ‘inspiration section’ linked at the bottom of the site, which gathers some of the work from which we have drawn, and downloadable assets that are free to use.
Over to you.
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This moment
“The pandemic is very quickly teaching us what’s important: health, love, food, a safe and comfortable home, creativity and learning, connectedness and being able to get out into nature. Shouldn’t those things be the pillars around which our societies are organised?”
Laura Basu
“We have been so drunk on the pleasures of the material world, so sold on an amoral view of economics and social policy, and so worshipful of the false god of short-term profit. Our entire economic system has been based not on loving one another but on exploiting one another, and not on stewarding the Earth but on raping it, all for the most rapacious goal of extracting whatever money we could. And there, in our collective iniquity, lies the root of our problems, as well as the beginning of their solution, should we have the courage to face it.”
Marianne Williamson
Our crises are symptoms, caused by our economy. An economy designed with a way of understanding the world that we now know to be hugely destructive to life.
An economy which exploits the natural world and the most marginalised to the point of collapse, and wrecks all our hopes of leading meaningful, fulfilling lives.
It’s time for a new design.
“This between two worlds period of history contains myriad details of an emerging economy in which the word ‘development’ takes on a profoundly different meaning. Its core value is stewardship rather than extraction.
It is motivated by concerns for future generations, not by what the economy needs today. It cherishes qualities found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution. It also respects social practices – some of them very old ones – learned by other societies and in other times.
This new kind of development is not backwards looking, it embraces technological innovations too, but with a different mental model for what they should be used for. With every action we take, however small – each one a new way to feed, shelter and heal ourselves in partnership with living systems – the easier it becomes.”
