The OATHmeal: “Are you even part of a Thriving Meadow bro?”
“Buenos dias and welcome to the OATHmeal! What is the OATHmeal you ask? Well, it’s a quick, delicious, and nutritious start to your day as you go out as your WHOLElistic self aligned to systemic change.
But this is no simple instant OATHmeal. This has been intentionally stewed with care so that it powers your knowing and doing. It can be informative and interesting, but more importantly, it offers an invitation to action. Here is what we’re serving up for today:”
Ingredients:
“Mechanistic Reductionist” logic vs “Life Honoring” logic
This recipe is best paired with:
An open mind
A readiness for reflection
Instructions:
“Mechanistic Reductionist” vs “Life Honoring” logic
In recent years I have thought about how the language of ecology pushes me to both think differently from mechanistic reductionist frames of thinking and to see how models from nature can orient me in recommendation to the land and each other. First, let’s unpack those terms.
You might not be aware of “mechanistic reductionist” logic until you see how often it might show up and frame our relationships with each other and the land. Writer Michelle Holiday points to this as a driving factor for colonization, as show in this visual that incorporates Dr. Rupa Marya’s work:
Take for example if you have heard the expression “your team is running like a well-oiled machine.”
However, how does your mental picture change if we said “your team is running like a well-nurtured meadow” or “your team is functioning like a thriving meadow”?
If that sounds silly, why does a machine sound better? And how many of us would go out to a thriving meadow and say “meadow, you’re not meadowing enough, I need you to meadow better.”
Yet that meadow is being quite effective. So this can push us to think about how we’re valuing relationships, outputs, efficiency, leadership, etc. To think about what it could mean if you ask your team “how about we meadow on this for a bit?”
This is mindship that moves from a that “mechanistic reductionist” logic to a “life honoring” logic as shown here:
And this invitation can not only open new opportunities of relating to each other in nurturing ways but you can also see how much of this connects to language that is both familiar and ancestral, a language we often refer to in the “conservation world” though too often we only use it on an ecological landscape and not our social ones. To me this is where the language of ecology and the language of social justice connect to heal severed connections amongst ourselves and with the land. So onward, to being our meadow selves.
