Permaculture & the Subversive Promise of Passions Lived Generously

The St. Francis House student org leaders gathered for the first meeting of the new year year yesterday. Our first-ever program intern made the us dinner and shared a new way to connect over food. It was really beautiful.

At the outset, we connected over my new favorite thing: the 10 questions from Inside the Actors' Studio, shamelessly stolen from one of my go-to podcasts, who stole it first from IAS.

One of the 10 questions is "What turns you on, creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?" My answer is "When people open their lives and share their unique passions in ways the rest of us can engage and touch." I love being invited into the beauty another person sees in something that I wouldn't have seen that way by myself. And it's amazing, I think, how contagious vulnerable beauty-sharing can be, even when that passion is very different from my own. 

Enter Mark Shepard, whose video I'm watching today. He calls his work "easy," and I'm glad it is for him. And I'm so glad he is sharing his passion. And while the prospect of his work catching on in a global way feels like climbing 10 Everests put together, he makes the impossible feel possible and accessible before adding this tantalizing and subversive promise to his project at the end: "The whole doom and gloom fear industry might go broke."