Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
This week we celebrated the Winter Solstice, and tomorrow we celebrate Christmas. Our house is filling with family and friends, the first such gathering since the winter of 2019, and maybe the last for a while again.
Wishing you happy and healthy holidays.
How We Live
Love as the practice of freedom
Image via Critical Theory
As you know, bell hooks died last week. In their obituary, the New York Times referred to her as a "pioneering feminist scholar", who, "wrote about women, race, love, healing, pop culture and much more, always keeping Black women at the center." But as she succinctly said: "I will not have my life narrowed down." Where I find inspiration in her teachings is in something that transcends these categorizations: love.
The lede grafs from the chapter titled, Love As the Practice of Freedom from her book Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations articulate her pov so powerfully:
"In this society, there is no powerful discourse on love emerging either from politically progressive radicals or from the Left. The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns. Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.
"Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination - imperialism, sexism, racism, classism. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I have been puzzled by powerful visionary black male leaders who can speak and act passionately in resistance to racial domination and accept and embrace sexist domination of women, by feminist white women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white supremacist domination of the planet.
"Critically examining these blind spots, I conclude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination. Until we are able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle." - bell hooks, emphasis mine
Book Excerpt: Outlaw Culture. Resisting Representations
Futures Thinking
Artist Katie Paterson has created a one hundred year artwork for the city of Oslo in Norway.
"I imagine the tree rings as chapters in a book." - Katie Paterson
"One thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, a forest just outside Oslo, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years' time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114. Tending the forest and ensuring its preservation for the one hundred year duration of the artwork finds a conceptual counterpoint in the invitation extended to each writer: to conceive and produce a work in the hope of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future."
Website: Future Library
How We Learn
Age-based classes are not the only way to learn—and may not be the most effective.
"Each year across the world, kids of roughly the same age are packed into classrooms and confined to desks with the intent of learning from an adult teacher.
"But is this how children were adapted to learn?
"In today’s technologically dependent, economically complex world in which a particular subset of skills is critical, fact-based knowledge is no doubt best imparted from those with experience—which is usually adults.
"But what about social learning? Humans as a species are set apart by their incredible dependence on one another; cooperation is at the heart of both an individual’s survival and a functioning society. So, how do children typically learn to cooperate?
"Anthropological research in small-scale societies—including my work among with the Pumé of Venezuela and the Maya living in the Yucatan Peninsula—resoundingly suggests that they learn from one another.
"Schooling and growing up in small nuclear families have been the norm for only the past century or so in industrialized societies—just a brief flash in evolutionary time. Childhood in these societies is commonly thought of as a period requiring intense adult investment dedicated to learning and instruction. But research in nonindustrial, small-scale societies—the kinds of communities that all our ancestors lived in both deep in the past and until fairly recently—gives a different picture." - Karen L. Kramer
Article: What Industrial Societies Get Wrong About Childhood
Regenerative Leadership
What might a regenerative approach to leadership look like?
"There are five principles that characterize a just and regenerative approach:
"Principle 1: Focus on the how, not just the what.
Principle 2: Start with potential, not the problem.
Principle 3: Care for the operating context.
Principle 4. Value history and lived experience.
Principle 5. Radically embrace a participatory approach...." - Samantha Veide
Article: 'A Compass for Just and Regenerative Business': 5 Principles of the Leadership We Need
How we work
For more effective systems change focus less on outcomes and more on principles and practice.
"In The Systems Work of Social Change: How to Harness Connection, Context, and Power to Cultivate Deep and Enduring Change, Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici argue that there is no easy way to generate systems change. They delve into the deeper work of social change through a series of eight case studies of civil society organizations worldwide to propose a pragmatic pathway for systems change. These organizations share a commitment to centering people in their work—and reject the traditional, top-down approaches to social change that often overlook the communities they serve. 'The day-to-day work in the long arc of social change is messy and nonlinear,” the authors write. “Effects can rarely be traced to single root causes, and outputs are rarely proportional to inputs.'
"Rayner and Bonnici’s definition of 'systems change' emphasizes the gradual, often under-recognized, work by nonprofits. 'Rather than just promote successful outcomes, these organizations are focusing on the process of change, creating new systems that are more responsive to a rapidly changing world, and more representative of a diverse and growing global populace,' they explain. 'The values and approaches with which these organizations are operating are not new, but have generally been happening beneath the surface. … We have come to call these principles and practices systems work.' Their definition differs from an understanding of systems change that reduces societal problems to discrete technical issues that are then analyzed in isolation and solved through 'scaling what works' while diligently measuring performance indicators until the job is done." - Alex Counts
Book Review: The Systems Work of Social Change: How to Harness Connection, Context, and Power to Cultivate Deep and Enduring Change
Design
What happens when you put some of the best mid-century design minds to making a holiday card.
Herb Lubalin New Years card from 1972. Courtesy of the Herb Lubalin Center.
"If these cards seem more clever than most, consider that before the internet the office holiday card was a excellent annual excuse to show off your work, and experiment with designs without the constraints of a client. Here’s what you get when some of the best minds in the history of graphic design put their talent toward the humble holiday missive." - Meg Miller
Article: Season’s Greetings from Paul Rand, Milton Glaser, Elaine Lustig Cohen + the Eames’
Packaging
An environmentally friendly coffee lid
"The latest design to replace the plastic coffee lid is Liplid and comes from the Swedish firm UniCup. Founders Lars Bendix and Håkan Löfholm have 20 years of experience developing carry-out and beverages products. The duo identified several problems with the current design, besides the contribution to plastic pollution plastic lids made. Existing tops fail too often and spill, and beverages are impossible to cool and sip simultaneously. Over a cup of coffee one day, Lars and Håkan sketched out the initial design of the Lidlip.
"The Lidlip hangs on two sides of the cup’s lid, bowing down slightly inside. On either side are sipping holes. One hole can vent and cool the beverage; the other can be used to drink. The Liplid gets made out of 100% recyclable material made of Swedish pine and spruce using a unique dry molded fiber process."
Article: Swedish Firm UniCup Aims To Replace Plastic Coffee Cup Lids
Oneliners
Article: To Connect Consumers’ Searches to Brands, Focus on Delivering Answers, Not Keywords
Article: Sustainability Is the Supply Chain Issue Nobody’s Talking About
Article: World’s Vast Networks of Underground Fungi to be Mapped for First Time
Article: Joan Didion’s Greatest Two-Word Sentence
Playlist
I've mentioned before how Reina del Cid and the musicians who circulate around her sun are a model of how to collaborate. Sometimes she's the leader, with an artist like Joshua Lee Turner serving as a band member, and sometimes he'll take the lead and she'll sing backup. He plays solo a lot, and he's in a group with Carson McKee called, The Other Favorites. Both he and Carson have been more than occasional members of Reina del Cid, and everybody has played with a whole lot of other people. As it is the day before Christmas, it seems right to let some of my favorite collaborative artists, in their various configurations, play some great Christmas songs.
First up is a sweet, sweet reading of the Raveonettes', The Christmas Song, by Reina del Cid. Backing her on vocals and guitar is her very regular accompanist Toni Lindgren. I just love Toni's quiet competence. She is such a smooth and cool player and she knows all the chords. If she's sweating it, she sure doesn't show it. This time they've got Andrew Foreman on bass and Nate Babbs on percussion. I agree with Reina when she says that this is "one of my favorite lesser known holiday songs." (Here's the 2004 original by the Danish duo: The Christmas Song.)
Video: The Christmas Song - Raveonettes (Reina del Cid cover)
Next up is Joshua Lee Turner singing all eight parts of “Bogoróditse Djévo” by Arvo Pärt, a song written as a commission for the famous Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King's College on Christmas Eve in 1990. He totally nails it. And btw, he shot and edited it himself, too. His is a new standard.
Video: Bogoróditse Djévo - Arvo Pärt (Josh Turner Cover)
Finally, put your hands together for The Other Favorites performing "I'll Be Home for Christmas". Josh is such an elegant guitarist and Carson's voice is sublime. I want to second a comment made on this YouTube post: "I'd love to hear Carson and a nice female counterpart sing Baby It's Cold Outside to Josh's guitar". (While we wait, we could do worse than Zooey Deschanel's and Leon Redbone's rendering: Baby it's Cold Outside.)
Video: I'll Be Home for Christmas - The Other Favorites
Image of the Week
The Image of the Week is a "Warning sign for magical reindeers in Belgium". It was posted this week on Street Art Utopia's Twitter page.
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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