Are modern organizations competing or collaborating?

Have you watched the documentary “Kiss the Ground”? It shares the truth about how the soil is the skin of our planet. It shows the truth of soil’s function when we design our food production systems to take care of it.

Soil, when covered in plants as nature designs it, sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, helping mitigate our climate imbalances. The root zones of those plants house microbes that then transfer micronutrients to the plants’ above-soil bodies and make them stronger, healthier, more nutritious and more robust. So taking care of the soil means collaborating with nature’s design and allowing plants to cover the soil. This allows life to flourish, which in turn provides more resources and life to all. Collaboration all around.

I’d like to share how this serves as a metaphor that transfers to our human system. Because of consciousness and free will, it becomes a bit more complex. And this is why, as life has led me to understand, we must rely on the compass in our hearts, keeping them open.

I had a recent bump up against policy, shall we say. The system that created the policy had good intention when it was created, surely. To protect a body of learners. But ironically, the protection was needed from the capitalist system that this learning system is created within. And the real issue shows itself as the lack of discernment of what goods and services offered from that capitalist design would truly benefit those within the learning system. 

The biological organisms in this learning system also have spiritual, emotional and mental needs.  These are like our unseen bodies within our physical, seen body. Like the roots of a plant. That also need nourishment. Like the unseen microbes required for the plant to be healthy, so too do we need to innoculate these other three unseen bodies for our own optimal health. 

So let’s pause there for a moment. The learning system, based off the capitalist system that houses it, needs a policy to protect itself from the house it lives in. This outer capitalist/machine system dictates that the learning system should stop even that which can bring life to these 3 other human systems of the learners: spirit, emotion, and mind bodies. 

Connect soil metaphor. We need the soil to uphold the system of industrial agriculture. The crop must be protected from the system that upholds it because that is how we designed it. It must be protected from the natural system so it can serve the capitalist system and make profit gains. Hence call in the pesticides and kill the life-giving organisms that would “compete” with those gains. Which slowly kills the natural system the crop needs to grow and be nutritious. Losing topsoil to desertification. Releasing carbon and water to the atmosphere. Creating dead zones where the microbes and soil organisms can no longer grow. And ultimately stripping the foundation of our food and its future of its integrity.

Now there’s grace for the fact that we got here. It all makes sense for choices we made when we had different, lesser understanding and had to feed booming populations. Same goes for institutions. But now is a new time. The age of information. The age of the evolution of human consciousness. The age where we get to draw down deep and make new decisions. Design new, life-giving models.

The coaching container I get to carry is like microbes for the spirit, the mind and the emotional bodies. It brings health to these bodies which can then support the physical body through conversation, reframed ways of thinking and belief reimprinting which shifts both habits and identity. And ultimately does the work our souls came here to Earth to do. All of our bodies are positively impacted by this work. And all of them are needed to be in good shape in order to get the most out of an Earthly education. 

To really spell out what happened above, I was utilizing a campus space. It’s a beautiful facility in a community that houses international students and the most concentrated diversity in the county. I spent time there studying from quiet corners and communing with the student body. I eventually was called to make a small and affordable, donation-based group offering as a beta test for these young and creative leaders on campus that I was connecting with. A bit of a Gamme Talks 2.0 (see my “About” tab ;) )

I hung up some fliers and pretty soon started getting some emails from a certain campus director telling me how there will be “no solicitation of goods or services permitted on campus”. She had her staff take my fliers down. She tracked the room a student from this first group had booked for us to meet and emailed me again saying I must have misunderstood her in her previous email and that there will be “no solicitation of goods or services permitted on campus”, my name not even being trace-able to this room but she had the times and dates from my fliers. She then had the head of campus security kick me out of campus, saying that students had complained about my presence. When I returned 4 months later, I was issued a 5-year no trespassing order. All of this in the setting of a private Christian college. 

What is it that Christ teaches us again?

I imagine, as the Son of Man and the Son of God, that he would remind us that we are in COLLABORATION, in addition to each other, not competition. And that this model of competition-based capitalism viewed as a hierarchical machine where some humans have more power than others is long outdated. But what an adventure we’ve had to get here!

So where do we go from here?

I say we bend down low, study this Mother Earth. Look to see, to ask, what is truly healthy. Have grace for our road to this exact state of this world we’re in now, for this is what we came to learn. Have patience with ourselves and love for others. This is the system we’ve grown in, that’s been modeled for us. Yes, you could say plants compete in nature for the niches that allow them to thrive best. We can also see that same unfolding as collaboration between them, helping each sprout where they are going to live best, communicating with one another, supporting each other to offer their gifts and medicines to the world. Might we do the same? What does it take for that to happen?