Coming Courageously Home

I'm returning home from a bag it yourself grocery, and listening to an African-American novelist respond to questions, actual open-ended real NPR questions, like old school inquisitive journalists once asked before the polarizing days and nights of fake right/wrong answer questions and their concomitant fake avoid entrapment non-responses. Anyway, I don't hear his name, or the title of his latest published work, although it may be The Water Dancer but then again, maybe not. You would think I would be too embarrassed to courageously publish this piece so carelessly unsystematically researched. But, he says, "We do not do well to expect courageous behavior from systems" or something to that political and economic effect. Thinking with him about the slavery/property-ownership system, about capitalization and colonization and commodification systems, my first response is to celebrate this profound and wise soundbite, both quotable and true to my own experience of disempowering monoculturing systems. But, then I think of several exceptions to the cowardice incentivizing rule of authoritarian systems, Like wildly robust cooperative ecosystems and even vulnerable volunteer ego-systems, biosystems zealously loyal to win/win compassionate outcomes without which we would have no language systems or experience of courage or cowardice, integrity or fragmenting mendacity. Yet, why does he so boldly say, and why do I so instinctively and enthusiastically agree, that systems produce win/lose compromising servile bureaucratic timid behavior? Too often hidden shadows lurking behind deliberate non-communication. This free and brave individual competing against an unhealthy craven society is a plot line that seems to go back to Adam and Eve playing blame and shame with their Great Systemic Gardener. Then I realize it's not that organic systems are unsupportive of co-invested courage, it is corporate systems, monetized systems, colonizing systems extractive technocratic systems producing commodification of secularized values, reduced from sacred courage and integrity and health Rather than inviting wealthy health values into our responsive compassionate selves working and playing in cooperatively owned and managed, responsible and authoritative, nutritious and nurturing, courageous and curious flow systems of commonly-held ergodic energy good healthy humor vocations positive, Invocations wealthy and robust with co-inspiring witness courage listening and speaking unflinching compassion, candor for self and other mutual health care embodying interdependent Golden Rules and zero ego/eco-ratio zones of co-acclimation. Destroying bipolar stressed systems demands bad humored win/lose bullies detached careless mindless broken. Creating resilient robust systems invites good humored win/win courage commitment constantly changing curiosity.