Hi Britta, I've been circling these kinds of questions for a while now using ChatGPT to help connect multiple perspectives along with my own. I'm reluctant to share much of it as if feels like the AI is doing the heavy lifting, but I'll let you decide for yourself. I'm struggling with taking a concept into something tangible... https://chatgpt.com/share/697e4a3c-9654-8009-8da3-dc9d6a64ce32
Hi Paul! Thank you for your honesty about the hesitation. I think the question of where our thinking ends and AI assistance begins is an interesting one. What I notice in your comment is the circling, the connecting of perspectives, the struggle to make something tangible, and that is very much yours. The AI is a thinking partner, not the thinker.
I really enjoyed this, Britta. The Gaia archetype felt very familiar to me. I spent more than 15 years in retail category management, putting all my energy into growing other businesses, improving their categories, and making the customer experience better. I was good at it. Still, at some point, I realized I was always building things for others and never focusing on myself. It took me a while to shift from asking, "What am I doing for them?" to "What is this doing to me?" Do you often see people who are so focused on helping others grow that they forget about their own growth?
Yes, and what you describe is one of the clearest expressions of the pattern I see. Fifteen years of growing others, being effective, being good at it. “What am I doing for them?” as the only question available. The shift to “what is this doing to me?” is not selfish – it is the beginning of sustainable stewardship.
And to answer your question: yes, I see it constantly. Often in the most gifted, most committed people in any field. The very qualities that make someone excellent at serving others can become the thing that keeps them from tending their own growth.
What I have come to believe is that Life itself is asking something of us here. Not to stop serving – but to remember that we too are participants in Life, nourished by it, part of it. The tree does not only give oxygen. It also drinks light. It is rooted in soil it did not create. And in drinking and rooting and growing, it makes the forest more alive for everything around it. That is stewardship in service of Life – not despite being a participant, but because of it.
I am glad Gaia felt familiar. She is in good company.
Thank you for sharing Britta. Reading each section of this evoked a different energy in me relating to what i've explored around ownership, flows, relations, and how to activate an energy field of stewarding the web of life in place.
Gaia and Felix reminded me of the story of twins in Kenya - born to a drunk, wife beating father, one grew to be like his father, while the other saw the effects of his father's situation and chose a totally different future. Same source, different energies.
Your Participant ∞ Steward framing is rooted in the word Obuntu - which has two words Obu + Ntu;
Obu – centering nested interdependence and multidimensional richness of all life in a bioregion/place,
ntu – while recognising the unique contribution of each individual (human & nonhuman) being as a stakeholder in the ecological, social and economic health of a bioregion.
Mapping this onto the Will-Being-Function framework gives;
Will: the nested interdependence of life
Being: I'm because everyone participates in right relation. It's the spiritual twin between I and We, self and whole.
Function: Stewardship:The work of caring for life in our bioregions: The more we live as one, the better we can care for our place. And the more we care for our place together, the more we feel like one.
I'm working on inviting money / wealth into kinship with life in place, essentially seeing wealth as a relation - where funders shift from chasing problems to co-stewards of life - integrating inner-consciousness flows with funding flows towards healing and enriching the web of life relations in a place.
Am curious to learn how your participatory stewardship initiative creates value-adding roles where participants receive more than they give, while expanding the energy field of stewardship toward the relational intelligence in a place?
This is a genuinely enriching response – thank you, Abdul.
First of all, I love that you name the energetic impact the different parts of the article had on you, and that you are also consciously cultivating the energies to support the field of your work!
The Obuntu framing is beautiful and maps onto Participatory Stewardship in ways I want to sit with. I had encountered Ubuntu as “I am because we are” – but Obu and ntu as distinct dimensions, nested interdependence and unique individual contribution held together, gives it a precision and depth I hadn’t found before. Gratitude for that.
The twins story lands deeply. And it is an important corrective – it is not automatically true that hurt people hurt people. The same source can generate entirely different relationships to what that source means and demands. That choice, made again and again, is at the heart of what I am exploring.
Now to your question... My provisional answer is that it begins with exploring what receiving means and normalizing that we are constantly giving ans receiving here on Earth, in so many ways. When that is restored, something could shift in the quality of their stewardship: it could become less driven, more responsive, more able to sense what a place or system actually needs rather than what they have decided it needs.
And from what I have witnessed, everyone on this path receives far more back than they could have imagined – embeddedness in a purpose-aligned community, meaningful direction of their life energy, personal growth and discoveries that open up possibilities beyond their wildest dreams. The receiving is not a concession to self-care. It is what makes the stewardship sustainable and alive.
What are you observing in your work? Might this be especially true when a steward is part of a bioregion or the like, so their giving and receiving loops are more closely linked?
These are rich ‘receivings’ thank you for sharing your experience with capital stewards.
- embeddedness in a purpose-aligned community,
- meaningful direction of their life energy,
- personal growth and discoveries that open up possibilities beyond their wildest dreams.
I feel a pattern of an enriching exchange between self and whole. And this is the response to your question. This is the way indigenous cultures self-organised, self-managed and self-regenerated, until modern ways dropped that nourishing exchange — extracting the whole into the self.
My observation is that this nourishment between self and whole requires re-membering, and cultivating. Just like you are doing, we’re creating spaces for self-discovery, land-sourced belonging and responding to a higher orders calling at the place level.
But my curiosity in the word ‘Energy’ as you used it above has been increasing recently. And this also relates to restoring the human capacity of listening to the web of life that you frame as "more able to sense what a place or system actually needs rather than what they have decided it needs."
If capital stewards saw capital as energy flowing through (to and from) bioregions and portfolios, the same way energy flows to/from the body, organ or cell, how would that evolve their theory of how it should flow and where? How does that enrich and direct their life energy? What is required for that shift?
Hi Britta, I've been circling these kinds of questions for a while now using ChatGPT to help connect multiple perspectives along with my own. I'm reluctant to share much of it as if feels like the AI is doing the heavy lifting, but I'll let you decide for yourself. I'm struggling with taking a concept into something tangible... https://chatgpt.com/share/697e4a3c-9654-8009-8da3-dc9d6a64ce32
Hi Paul! Thank you for your honesty about the hesitation. I think the question of where our thinking ends and AI assistance begins is an interesting one. What I notice in your comment is the circling, the connecting of perspectives, the struggle to make something tangible, and that is very much yours. The AI is a thinking partner, not the thinker.
I really enjoyed this, Britta. The Gaia archetype felt very familiar to me. I spent more than 15 years in retail category management, putting all my energy into growing other businesses, improving their categories, and making the customer experience better. I was good at it. Still, at some point, I realized I was always building things for others and never focusing on myself. It took me a while to shift from asking, "What am I doing for them?" to "What is this doing to me?" Do you often see people who are so focused on helping others grow that they forget about their own growth?
Yes, and what you describe is one of the clearest expressions of the pattern I see. Fifteen years of growing others, being effective, being good at it. “What am I doing for them?” as the only question available. The shift to “what is this doing to me?” is not selfish – it is the beginning of sustainable stewardship.
And to answer your question: yes, I see it constantly. Often in the most gifted, most committed people in any field. The very qualities that make someone excellent at serving others can become the thing that keeps them from tending their own growth.
What I have come to believe is that Life itself is asking something of us here. Not to stop serving – but to remember that we too are participants in Life, nourished by it, part of it. The tree does not only give oxygen. It also drinks light. It is rooted in soil it did not create. And in drinking and rooting and growing, it makes the forest more alive for everything around it. That is stewardship in service of Life – not despite being a participant, but because of it.
I am glad Gaia felt familiar. She is in good company.
Thank you for sharing Britta. Reading each section of this evoked a different energy in me relating to what i've explored around ownership, flows, relations, and how to activate an energy field of stewarding the web of life in place.
Gaia and Felix reminded me of the story of twins in Kenya - born to a drunk, wife beating father, one grew to be like his father, while the other saw the effects of his father's situation and chose a totally different future. Same source, different energies.
Your Participant ∞ Steward framing is rooted in the word Obuntu - which has two words Obu + Ntu;
Obu – centering nested interdependence and multidimensional richness of all life in a bioregion/place,
ntu – while recognising the unique contribution of each individual (human & nonhuman) being as a stakeholder in the ecological, social and economic health of a bioregion.
Mapping this onto the Will-Being-Function framework gives;
Will: the nested interdependence of life
Being: I'm because everyone participates in right relation. It's the spiritual twin between I and We, self and whole.
Function: Stewardship:The work of caring for life in our bioregions: The more we live as one, the better we can care for our place. And the more we care for our place together, the more we feel like one.
I'm working on inviting money / wealth into kinship with life in place, essentially seeing wealth as a relation - where funders shift from chasing problems to co-stewards of life - integrating inner-consciousness flows with funding flows towards healing and enriching the web of life relations in a place.
Am curious to learn how your participatory stewardship initiative creates value-adding roles where participants receive more than they give, while expanding the energy field of stewardship toward the relational intelligence in a place?
This is a genuinely enriching response – thank you, Abdul.
First of all, I love that you name the energetic impact the different parts of the article had on you, and that you are also consciously cultivating the energies to support the field of your work!
The Obuntu framing is beautiful and maps onto Participatory Stewardship in ways I want to sit with. I had encountered Ubuntu as “I am because we are” – but Obu and ntu as distinct dimensions, nested interdependence and unique individual contribution held together, gives it a precision and depth I hadn’t found before. Gratitude for that.
The twins story lands deeply. And it is an important corrective – it is not automatically true that hurt people hurt people. The same source can generate entirely different relationships to what that source means and demands. That choice, made again and again, is at the heart of what I am exploring.
Now to your question... My provisional answer is that it begins with exploring what receiving means and normalizing that we are constantly giving ans receiving here on Earth, in so many ways. When that is restored, something could shift in the quality of their stewardship: it could become less driven, more responsive, more able to sense what a place or system actually needs rather than what they have decided it needs.
And from what I have witnessed, everyone on this path receives far more back than they could have imagined – embeddedness in a purpose-aligned community, meaningful direction of their life energy, personal growth and discoveries that open up possibilities beyond their wildest dreams. The receiving is not a concession to self-care. It is what makes the stewardship sustainable and alive.
What are you observing in your work? Might this be especially true when a steward is part of a bioregion or the like, so their giving and receiving loops are more closely linked?
These are rich ‘receivings’ thank you for sharing your experience with capital stewards.
- embeddedness in a purpose-aligned community,
- meaningful direction of their life energy,
- personal growth and discoveries that open up possibilities beyond their wildest dreams.
I feel a pattern of an enriching exchange between self and whole. And this is the response to your question. This is the way indigenous cultures self-organised, self-managed and self-regenerated, until modern ways dropped that nourishing exchange — extracting the whole into the self.
My observation is that this nourishment between self and whole requires re-membering, and cultivating. Just like you are doing, we’re creating spaces for self-discovery, land-sourced belonging and responding to a higher orders calling at the place level.
But my curiosity in the word ‘Energy’ as you used it above has been increasing recently. And this also relates to restoring the human capacity of listening to the web of life that you frame as "more able to sense what a place or system actually needs rather than what they have decided it needs."
If capital stewards saw capital as energy flowing through (to and from) bioregions and portfolios, the same way energy flows to/from the body, organ or cell, how would that evolve their theory of how it should flow and where? How does that enrich and direct their life energy? What is required for that shift?