Wetico, Syntropic Enterprise and the Season for Change
There is a Cree Indian word ‘Wetico’ which means cannibal in its purest translation. But rather than simply eat the other, it means to eat life itself.
The story goes that the Cree believed the white people suffered a disease called Wetico. Rather than simply take from the land what they needed to survive that day, they took everything in sight.
Like the greedy caterpillar that eats all the leaves, eventually, we discover that the price of greed becomes our own suffering, our own starvation, our own spiritual and emotional bankruptcy.
We have created many constructs that have enabled great progress in so many domains of existence. Our financial, economic and capitalist systems.
The question is, are they the ones to take us into the future?
So many people are brought into a frenzy of fear around words such as socialism, fascism, communism, capitalism, left, right…
I would propose that all the ‘isms….and the way we think about care of the home…the economy…are built on world views that need to be deconstructed.
Perhaps we might consider that we do suffer an illness called Wetico. Our illness has us consider that the only way is to consume life itself, take rapaciously from Earth, cut down the forests, dam the rivers, pollute the waters, raise mono-crops, kill all the animals….and keep humans as separate from Nature, from cycles, seasons, soil…to use humans for wage labour, cogs in the machine of progress.
The cure for Wetico is to consider how we create all human thriving that doesn’t cost the Earth or our future well-being.
This is where real innovation lies. Not in the creation of another thing that we do not need. Rather, in the larger consideration of how we can all thrive on our precious home planet, as central to everything we do.
This is the principle of Syntropic Enterprise. An advance on anything we have done before.
The time is now. The season is upon us.
March 31st 2020
Photo taken March 31st, 2020
