{"id":1246,"date":"2021-03-27T13:04:03","date_gmt":"2021-03-27T20:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/?p=1246"},"modified":"2021-03-28T17:59:00","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T00:59:00","slug":"musings-on-the-ever-given","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/?p=1246","title":{"rendered":"Musings on the Ever Given"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
 The Ever Given has run aground in the Suez Canal
 One of the world\u2019s largest container ships
 En route from China to the Netherlands
 Wedged diagonally in the sand
 Two hundred thousand tons
 Bearing on saturated earth
 Refusing to budge against the tugs and winches
 \u00a0
 A box full of boxes of boxes is boxed in
 The global economy has an arterial blockage
 And health points are ticking away
 Measured in GDP growth
 Or billions of dollars
 \u00a0
 We read about the dollars
 About the hundreds of ships waiting
 But we seldom hear about what is in <\/em>those ships
 What is in those ten thousand boxes of boxes?
 How many lifetimes of human labor does that represent?
 Shoes?\u00a0 Clothes?\u00a0 Tires?\u00a0 Computers?\u00a0 
 Toilet paper?\u00a0 Canning jars?\u00a0 Spices?\u00a0 
 Hopes?\u00a0 Dreams?\u00a0 Proud creations?
 Or just products, commodities, dollars?
 \u00a0
 The web of global commerce is beautiful
 Trucks rolling over mountain passes
 Trains snaking through wooded valleys
 Barges plying the waters of deep canyons
 Giant ships gliding through canals and rocking on high seas
 Electricity crossing mountains and plains
 Changing voltage, becoming smaller, spreading out
 From the great steel-pyloned arteries
 To the little capillary wires that power our homes
 Keep us warm, our batteries charged, our screens lit
 \u00a0
 I am different perhaps
 In that I notice this always
 Watch the trains
 Observe the patterns
 Follow the web of wires and pipes
 See the steady flow of wood chips and recycled boxes
 Carried to the maw of the great mill to the west
 Returning as giant rolls of kraft paper
 In boxcars and box trucks
 Day in and day out
 To become boxes again, in places around the world
 Boxes of boxes-to-be
 \u00a0
 For most of the rest of humanity this web is invisible
 Until it breaks
 And then we realize that there is a canal in Egypt
 And a hundred ships
 Carrying thousands of entire lifetimes of human labor
 Of blood, sweat, and tears
 Pass through it every day
 With no fanfare and hardly any notice
 \u00a0
 It is an immense sadness to me
 That the outcome of this great global dance
 This flow of lifeblood involving billions of humans
 Is a mundane, meaningless sameness
 The same products for sale in the same stores
 The same Amazon and Walmart warehouses
 In every corner of every country
 Marketed with empty slogans
 And handed over for dollars
 Purely transactional
 And devoid of humanity
 Devoid of story
 Devoid of recognition, appreciation, thanks
 \u00a0
 Have you ever given this much thought?
 Have we ever given our consent to this way of being?
 Could it, please, be otherwise?
 \u00a0
 A commodity is an abstraction
 Function abstracted from creation
 Product abstracted from process
 Wheat from the South Dakota plains
 Wheat from Ukraine
 Farmers cutting swaths of rolling hills
 Praying to different gods for rain
 All just wheat
 All just dollars
 \u00a0
 Oil from Venezuela
 Oil from Saudi Arabia
 Oil from deep below the Gulf of Mexico
 Raised from the Earth by proud and gritty crews
 Carried around the world by skilled sailors
 Under resplendent sunsets and circling albatrosses
 All just oil
 All just gasoline
 All just dollars
 \u00a0
 Shirts sewn by Marisol in Mexico
 Shirts sewn by Nguyen in Viet Nam
 Shirts sewn by Ikenna in Nigeria
 Shaped proudly by skilled hands
 Of people who have children and stories
 Hopes and dreams
 Packed into boxes in boxes
 To be sold in big boxes
 All just shirts
 All just dollars
 \u00a0
 Our global society has built a beautiful web
 Of interconnectedness
 But has abstracted it
 From reality, from humanity
 And so this web is invisible
 Trillions of hours of human labor unnoticed, unappreciated
 Commerce divorced from culture
 Story and meaning scrubbed from the business of making and being
 So that we seek instead in fiction and fantasy
 In a cult of celebrity
 In escapism rather than presence
 \u00a0
 A great rift is opening
 Between those who buy boxes from big boxes
 And those who fill the boxes
 Those who move the boxes 
 Those who work with their hands and bodies
 A great rift that threatens to swallow the world
 Into violence and chaos perhaps
 A great clash of politics and ideologies
 And the basis of that rift
 Is the fundamental absence of reciprocity
 \u201cYou produce, I pay, I consume
 I have no idea who you are
 And I don\u2019t care\u201d
 \u00a0
 I wish to declare \u201ccommodity\u201d a curse word
 I wish to de-commodify the world
 So that the global web of commerce
 Becomes a global web of story
 I wish to know the stories
 Of Marisol, of Nguyen, of Ikenna
 Not merely some fake advertising copy
 I wish to feel connection with those who grow my food
 Those who make my clothes
 Those who bring the electricity to my house
 The gas to my car
 Those who captain the ships, the barges, the trains, the trucks
 And I wish to thank them
 Not merely with dollars
 But with my heart
 A deep feeling of gratitude
 For their labor which nourishes me
 And I wish also that my labor can
 In some small way
 Nourish them as well.
 \u00a0
 I do not wish to produce and consume
 I wish to co-create
 And in so doing
 I wish that all who create
 Are both compensated fairly 
 And appreciated
 \u00a0
 When I build my Winnow Wizards
 The sale price pays the bills
 But it is the stories that feed my soul
 A window into the world of small farms
 Interesting and unique human lives
 Who appreciate my creation
 And I appreciate them in turn
 \u00a0
 When I organize the Soil Amendment Sale
 It is the human connection that pays dividends
 Bina\u2019s lemon cake for trucker Dale
 Volunteers working together
 Conversations with hundreds of farmers and gardeners
 Getting what they need to grow
 \u00a0
 I wonder what it might take to re-humanize the economy 
 On a larger scale?
 Perhaps it could be done
 Without the permission of corporations
 What if instead of the royal drama of Meghan and Harry
 We were to read the stories of Amazon workers
 Of oilworkers, of farmworkers, of garment workers?
 What if we could begin to know these people as people
 Rather than invisible cogs in a giant machine?
 Could we begin to de-commodify the great web
 To give thanks where thanks are due
 To ensure that all are paid enough to survive and thrive
 To heal the rift of inequality, of disrespect
 That divides us
 To imbue the great web with story and meaning
 To celebrate presence
 And all who are present?
 \u00a0
 That may be a tall order
 But I wish to work toward such a world
 In my own small ways
 And I wish that I may live
 To see it happen <\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Ever Given has run aground in the Suez Canal One of the world\u2019s largest container ships En route from China to the Netherlands Wedged diagonally in the sand Two hundred thousand tons Bearing on saturated earth Refusing to budge … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1246"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1251,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions\/1251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}