I'm here for the tech rewilders
Happy Pride season folks! I'm writing to you from Coast Salish land and it's almost the solstice, which is on this coming Friday. I can't believe we are at the longest day of the year already, or the shortest if you're in the Southern hemisphere.
A while back I shared on this newsletter that I was taking a step back from my focus on tech, in my coaching offerings.
Things in my creative business practice are a continuous evolution always, and yet I was surprised that my detour away from tech was in-fact more, a spiral. Leadership and coaching that supported people folks in tech is the ground from which my business was launched and coming back after some distance, it no longer feels like tech is my one public home. It feels a lot more expansive now that I am reaching out to my audience in tech from feeling at home in myself and my interdisciplinary practice. At the same time I have the experience and insights from over a decade in the tech industry that is exceeded by my own love of computers and internet since I was 10 years old.
I realized that burnout was a contributing factor to needing to step away, which was to a large extent not from technology itself, as in my interaction with computers that enable my existence in so many ways, or the people in and around the tech industry. I see my burnout as an inevitable outcome of trying to fit myself into the shape of tech industry as it is now and has evolved to – a way of thinking and being and doing things that are focused on extracting as much data and resources and labour as possible from the lands, waters, and the people at large, with outsized impacts on Black, Brown and Indigenous communities and ecosystems.
In the past few months, I've been creating my signature Self*-leadership coaching framework and my upcoming coaching offer for people seeking to be tech rewilders**, with incredible support from Ayana Zaire Cotton in their Powerhouse Portal container at Seeda School. Through our conversations I realized I was not done working with tech, and that I had gone on my own journey outside of tech so I could show up grounded in my own Self* now. And that my path looks like crosspollinating between the worlds I play in, being of both, neither and something else entirely at the same time.
I believe that there is a pool of creative adventurers in the world of tech right now who are desiring to build tech ecosystems that are in a reciprocal relationship to earth, to the people who it seves, and with the people that are building it. And may be you are asking yourself, "Can I do it? Can I make the thing I want to make or do the thing I want to do that will breathe life back into the relationship between technology, people and the land?". In this threshold, I hope we meet.
"Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species makes in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying. Yet intelligence is demanding. If it is misdirected by accident or by intent, it can foster its own orgies of breeding and dying."
— Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, Graphic Novel Adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings.
Octavia Butler's prophecy, as with this whole book, rings strikingly true when I connect this idea of "intelligence" with A.I. and the impact of the misdirected use and proliferation of artificial intelligence today, "fostering it's own orgies of breeding and dying" — I do not believe this kind of unsustainable growth can stand the test of time.
However, "intelligence" in the lead character Lauren Olamina's synthesis here is referring to living Intelligence, and I'll speak to us humans – we have the capacity to look at the patterns of the past and the imaginations of the future to shape our reality in the present moment. In this way, us becoming rooted in our own inner "intelligence", the kind that comes from listening to the whole of us and our deepest truths – in our messy corporeal bodies, brains, emotions, desires and intuition — is becoming essential to our adaptation, that is, the ongoing continuity and thriving of all of our collective species and lands and waters.
This process of becoming rooted in our own Intelligence, is what I'm calling Self*-leadership.
I believe that the problems out of the world at large ... the climbing temperatures in summers in places that are systematically impacted by tech fueled capitalist resource extraction, aren't separate from the climbing temperatures inside us — burnout, inflammation, loss of belonging, fear of scarcity. When we connect with with our deepest desires for the worlds we dream of, we can begin the process of grieving the ways we have been hurt in systems of domination, and chart our way forward through the process of learning from and with those spaces of hurt. When we do this, we are able to step into our own agency, power and sovereignty in a way that then proliferates liberatory change back out into the larger world. This is the alchemical way in which I continue to show up and grow and evolve in my own leadership and creative practice, and what I support you on when we work together.
If you are interested in my upcoming Self-leadership coaching offering for tech rewilders, or my co-creative Tarot reading for clarity during changing times that is launching next week, I invite you to sign up for my first invitations mailing list.
Notes and citations:
* Self with the capitalized S, is a concept in Jungian psychology, and in the Love Letter to the Movement — Using a Coach Approach for Healing, Justice and Liberation by Sarah Jawaid and Damon Azali-Rojas. When I say Self in Self-leadership I'm drawing from Love Letter for the Movement — and referring to our most loving self/deepest self/soul led leadership.
** Tech rewilders is a phrase I'm using to connect with people who are seeking to 'rewild' tech — nurture tech ecosystems that support and are in partnership with the diverse ecologies of our lands, waters, plant and animal kin, and people.
I want to cite and give thanks to my prolific peer from Seeda School, TQ, who is a Land-Body-Ancestral Connection Coach™, they have a beautiful somatic coaching and education practice I highly recommend – called The Rewilding. Although I didn't collaborate with them directly on this, their work is part of the lineage of my relationship to the language of Rewilding. I am excited to share that we recorded an episode together for their new podcast, Rooted Leadership, that's coming soon!
* The Self*-leadership coaching framework I'm developing and my approach to coaching and this work of rewilding as empires crumble around us is shaped and inspired by:
- adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, AK Press, 2017,
- Bayo Akomolafe's writings and We will Dance the Mountains slow study course that explores "A Pedagogy of the Cracks",
- Love Letter to the Movement — Using a Coach Approach for Healing, Justice and Liberation by Sarah Jawaid and Damon Azali-Rojas, the book, and their Introduction to Liberatory coaching weekend intensive,
and the land, oceans, trees, pollinators and cats around me.
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