When I began this project, which will finally catalyze a loving movement so life affirming and life enhancing that everyone is drawn to it as a dream coming true*, I wrote "interdependence design consists of the visioning, pathfinding and arranging that facilitate, in each case, processes of both key-principles-adoption and restorative balancing and integration."  More recently, I recalled that my journey to that articulation included separate readings about working relationship.  Discovery of discrete manifestations of positivity sharing precisely that label was noteworthy and inspiring.  It was a moment of dream-coming-true.  Such moments are this producer's soils, streams and sunlight.

It seems everyone is familiar with the term dysfunctional.  Far too many have bought and daily invest in the belief that human nature makes dysfunction inevitable, makes every relationship a mine field and justifies controlling people.  Their chosen ism makes it so, at least operationally (and then historically), and makes them, collectively, Pandora:  I messed up, the good time's over forever.

What's right about the story of Pandora is that, despite restriction and repression, humans imagine, wonder and choose.  Without choice there would be no designs, humans would make no arrangements.  Pandora's guilt-driven-and-saturated mistake was to confuse her fond, but static memory of the irretrievable past with the dynamic reality it was, which is ongoing.  The memory eclipsed the anticipation necessary for vision, making her effectively dead in life.  "There is always the movement.  What was the movement is the establishment," explained Ralph Waldo Emerson, having contemplated soils, trees and surely more.

Working relationship was the focus of Roger Fisher and Scott Brown in their 1988 book Getting Together:  Building a Relationship That Gets to Yes.  Fisher and Brown defined good, working relationships as ones "able to deal well with differences," and showed how they can be achieved and maintained.  David Holmgren, who with Bill Mollison developed the permaculture concept, in his Foreword to The Basics of Permaculture Design by Ross Mars (1996), opened by stating "The permaculture concept is the conscious design of our working relationship with nature," and went on to include re-establishng our working relationship with nature in his designation of effective action now.  These affirmations of relationships that deal well with differences (even among species), that are functional, are guiding lights by which we can navigate to where we've always wanted to be.


* NOT because everyone will have read my writing, but because of what many do in view, where they are.