Miloli'i

I remember waiting for my father's fishing boat to come back in at the beach at Miloli'i (in South Kona). My younger brother and I would play by the boat ramp in the lava rock tide pools. Pahoehoe lava that was once flowing liquid stone, hardened into voluptuous folds at the water's edge, forming shallow basins lined with seaweed and coral, populated by tiny fish, crabs, sea cucumbers. The water, absolutely clear, washed in and out, carrying tiny flecks of seaweed, evanescent bubbles and swirls like fairy-tale hair. The ledge of tide pools dropped off into a small bay where a few boats were anchored on the pale sapphire.
In Miloli'i one felt yet the rhythm of an earlier world, that world that existed before, when we did not know there was anything else to do but simply live in it. Edge of land, edge of water. Sunlight and coconut trees. Mid-day silence.
Another way of saying it, Miloli'i has not lost its Being. It resists being real estate. It is a Being in which the lives of humans have been held for a thousand years, in the pulse of the sea on the shore, the ebb and flow of time and lives. Bones among the coral. Coral in the bones. Lava worn by sea and feet. Children laughing in the small waves on the other side of the bay.

Growth towards Equilibrium

I've been reading "Holistic Management" which is basically about sustainable ranching and holistic decision-making. I came across a sentence in a section about ecological succession that began "Complexity, productivity, and stability..." And I've been chewing on those three words for the past couple of weeks. They seem to sum up, in my mind, the direction that we need to take as a society. The frustrating thing is that there is so much work to be done and yet no "jobs." I am thinking that the idea of a "job" has become obsolete, a relic concept of the old economy. Now there is work that may or may not provide a margin at any given moment. Everyone is going to have to accept that risk and the responsibility of their own means of existence to a far greater degree than just a few years ago. There is still huge potential for us to grow but it will not be in the exponential upward curve of the old economy. Now we have to grow towards equilibrium. There is room for growth in building a stable, complex, and productive economy - but to do that we are all going to have to take on the responsibility as co-entepreneurs and not just employees. And we'll need to support each other to make it possible, and yet we cannot take away the elements of risk and freedom that keeps us honest. There is and needs to be a process of succession going on - where we move away from a simplified global economy towards complex re-localized and scalable economies.

Mind-bending

look into our possible futures...
























biology is technology: the promise, peril, and new business of engineering life
Robert H. Carlson