A Delicious New Future

I hesitated to post a picture of fresh garden lettuce to get your attention, but here it is: Taken today, Nov 2 2018, this is the Pirat variety from the Ann Arbor Seed Company.

And why does it get your attention? Is it because of the color? The visceral response to an image of something so green and healthy looking?

If so, all the better, because that visceral sense of aliveness and connection is fundamental to the Green Hands Reskilling Initiative as I experience it. The idea is very simple: Build community resilience through skill sharing. That’s it. If you do this, you’re a participant. 

But the enjoyment matters! On offer is the opportunity to feel the fresh aliveness of spontaneously generating our own abundance through sharing. Together we can make life delicious!

So take a minute and ask: Is that a vision of a world I want to see? How can I live into this idea? Where in my life have I shared my knowledge and skills lately? What would I like to do next?

Part of the reason I hesitated to post the picture, though, is because Green Hand Reskilling isn’t about gardening – it’s about cultivating relationships through the sharing of skills. Because of this, the Green Hand concept is exponentially greater in its potential than a mere green thumb. This isn’t a gardening blog or project. It’s about hands, not thumbs, hands that reach out to help one another.

I’ve recently been reviewing my blog posts and yes, there’s plenty more to say. However, each of these pieces is worthy of a second and even a third reading. Dr. Thomas Gwaltney, one of my professors at Eastern Michigan University, once defined educated people as those who read and who are changed by what they read.

I’ve done everything I can to fill each of my blog posts with content that, when taken to heart, can change us. Packed with ideas, like seeds, they contain hidden surprises. They’ve certainly blown my mind many a time while writing and even re-reading them. So please take a look.

But I also realize I have to do more to promote the basic idea of the Green Hand(s) Reskilling Initiative. The high-water mark I created with the published blog pieces, many of which were subsequently republished by Post Carbon Institute’s Resilience.org website, became hard to reach time and again on a regular basis. Just writing them required enormous growth on my part. However, I now see that the depth I’ve brought to my more formal writings needs to be balanced with more frequent and ongoing opportunities for community building and dialog. 

This is what I plan to do, because eight years after beginning the Green Hand Reskilling Initiative, I see no evidence that this idea has become outmoded. On the contrary, if anything, it’s ahead of its time: revolutionary in its simplicity and profound in its potential impact.

We need community more than ever, and the very things that are getting in the way of that —fear of our neighbors, distrust of strangers, binary thinking, disregard of anything that isn’t monetized and marketed, and a hesitancy to share that is rooted in a scarcity-based mindset — all of these need to be confronted now more than ever.

So, basically… I’m back, and on behalf of the Green Hand Reskilling Initiative I invite you to like, share, live, love, and join me and others on this journey. It may seem like a strange time of year to begin planting seeds (here in the northern hemisphere, at least), but you can expect many more ideas and images sown here and on the Green Hand Reskilling Facebook page in the weeks to come. 

The Green Hands Reskilling Initiative is an idea whose time is just arriving.

Hello!