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June Observations by
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David Whyte ❡
L. Frank Baum ❡
Christian Busch ❡
Quan Barry ❡
Oliver Burkeman ❡
Sarah Perry ❡
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❡ Krista Tippett, Kate DiCamillo
❡ Jaime Gil de Biedma
❡ Robert Swan
❡ Richard Dawkins
❡ James S.A. Corey
❡ John O'Donohue
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Last month's inwords was themed, "on Discipline" and co-starred a goldfish by Greek portrait painter, Gerasimos Pitsamanos, who could easily have been Prince's great-great-grandfather.
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👆 for everyone who didn't get it.
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inwords 10: The Ecesis Edition
[less than a 5 minute read]
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Merhaba Anıl, Emilia and Sudha!
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Tuesday, June 21, 2022, Casa McLeod, Wallace, Nova Scotia
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One fish, Two fish, goldfish, pupfish: This edition of inwords co-stars pupfish and was supposed to be in your inbox on the 12th. I got stuck and, even with howtobrandyou.com's super-getting-unstuck archetypal powers, there was a moat between me and the "missive" button.
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I stopped crying myself to sleep when I realized that there's probably some mirror galaxy where the 12th is the 21st , so, on reflection, "Yay!" — yet another deadline unmissed.
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"I like the cover," he [Arthur Dent] said [to Ford Prefect]. "'Don't Panic.' It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day."
— from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
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Don't panic!
You don't have to remember the word ecesis but here's a tip if you feel like using it in brand or product name discovery, as a section of your About page, or the theme for an upcoming edition of some half-baked email newsletter: it sounds like big brother [me] mansplaining something to Sarah [my sister], "Ye see sis..."
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Ecesis has been in use by ecologists since 1904 to describe "the process of successful establishment of a plant or animal species in a habitat that was previously barren or was left barren due to some catastrophe."
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Ecesis may someday be used in a good news story headline about what comes after this planet's current human catastrophe — provided there's anyone writing stories.
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That's as ominous as I'm going to get this month.
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Descended from the Ancient Greek oikēsis, meaning inhabitation or colonization, ecesis could just as easily mean something as simple as the occupation of new space, and that's what archetypewriting is all about: filling the authenticity vacuum in stories with legendary goodness.
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And it's also what Prince did for music.
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Ecesis in Story: The Owens pupfish
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"Another desert pupfish, the Owens pupfish, was thought to be extinct, only to be rediscovered in 1964. By 1969, it was just barely hanging on, in a pond the size of a rec room, when, for reasons no one could quite explain, the pond shrank to a puddle. Someone alerted Phil Pister, a biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, who rushed to the site—a spot known as Fish Slough. Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets.
'I distinctly remember being scared to death,' he would later write. 'I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.'
Pister spent the next several decades working to save the Owens pupfish and also the Devils Hole pupfish. People would often ask him why he spent so much time on such insignificant animals.
'What good are pupfish?' they’d demand.
'What good are you?' Pister would respond.”
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Your Intermission Mission
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(where you go down to the lobby and strike up a conversation with someone about ecesis)
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The UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals are predominantly — and rightly so — about righting imbalances from Poverty [1] to Gender [5] to Peace and Justice [16].
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More on the Global Goals that best align with your archetype below.👇
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- Painter Pitsamanos via Wikipedia | Prince photo courtesy eonline from its 2011 MusiCares Person Of The Year Tribute To Barbra Streisand story
- Towel Day, May 25, 2006, "Don't Panic" banner, Innsbruck, Austria
- Ecesis at Merriam-Webster
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Afterword
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Next month (July 2022): Once upon a time...
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The Innocent Archetype is proactively honest, transparent and wonder-ful.
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— on what it is
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"Innocence is, in a way, the ability to be found by the world. It’s not a state of naïveté. It’s the ability to be found by the world you’re now inhabiting. And part of what we find is we’re just supposed to give ourselves away, actually."
— David Whyte, from the On Being Podcast
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Innocent SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
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SDG 3's aim is to "ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages" and its 13 targets range from Reducing Maternal Mortality to Fighting Communicable Diseases and Achieving Universal Healthcare.
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The Everyperson Archetype is inclusive, individual and the salt of the earth.
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They can often be spotted wearing their striped socks inside out.
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— on brains
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"Do you think,” he asked, “if I go to the Emerald City with you, that Oz would give me some brains?” “I cannot tell,” she returned, “but you may come with me, if you like. If Oz will not give you any brains you will be no worse off than you are now."
— The Scarecrow, from Frank L. Baum's The Wizard of Oz
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Everyperson SDG 2: Zero Hunger
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This Global Goal aims at eight targets to end world hunger; from ending malnutrition to maintaining the genetic diversity in foods.
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The Hero Archetype is as humble and vulnerable as it is valiant.
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— on connecting dots
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"Cultivating serendipity is first and foremost about looking at the world with open eyes and connecting the dots. It is not just about being in the right place at the right time and having something happen to us—but rather a quality or process in which we can be actively involved."
— Christian Busch, The Serendipity Mindset)
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SDG 1: No Poverty
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I matched SDG 1, No Poverty, with The Hero archetype because heroic is the level of effort it's going to take to achieve its seven targets.
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As gutsy as The Hero Archetype, The Caregiver Archetype embraces compassion and empathy.
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— on keeping secrets
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"Details of the One for Whom the Sky Never Darkens must be kept secret lest some well-meaning grandmother inadvertently feed[s] the signs to her grandson, telling the child of his life in Lhasa—the interminable hours spent at court, the sand mandalas constructed in the Potala’s Great West Hall wide as the city’s avenues, the sound of the beautiful sand being swept up and poured from a ceremonial urn into Lake Manasarovar."
— Quan Barry, When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East
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Caregiver Goal 5: Gender Equality
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Thankfully the authors of SDG 5, Gender Equality, went beyond the token = symbol in its icon and tasked this goal with empowering all women and girls.
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Explorer Archetype thinking is synonymous with bucking mainstream mores and myopic thinking — like an albatross and not all that unlike the Outlaw Archetype.
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— on winging it
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Explorer Goal 15: Life on Land
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The targets for SDG 15 aren't specifically about people, which I think is a nice change because, as a species we have been such selfish, destructive asses. Here are SDG 15's targets and the UN's suggestions for supporting it.
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Although The Outlaw Archetype is challenging, confronting and sometimes disruptive, it's inherently honourable.
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— on change
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"I don’t know what I can do. But something’s going to change. Can’t you feel it?’ He was not certain he could, but then she kissed him on the cheek, and shook his hand, as if she could not decide which greeting suited them best."
— Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent
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Outlaw Goal 13: Climate Action
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The map element in the icon for SDG 13, Climate Action, actually looks like another planet, which would be great because that would mean we could just carry on buying shit and throwing it away. Unfortunately, if you look at it in motion on its official SDG page, you'll see it's just a view of earth taken by a drone from above Santa's workshop.
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The Lover Archetype seeks union, is comfortable in surrender, is dedicated and powered by passion and tenderness.
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— on capaciousness
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"So you said, in that roomful of librarians and, I’m sure, writers, readers, for sure: “We have been given the sacred task of making hearts large through story. We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries … of ourselves and of each other."
— Krista Tippett quoting Kate DiCamillo in the On Being podcast, "For the Eight-Year-Old in You"
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Lover Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities
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The principle of SDG 10 is that "when every individual is self sufficient, the entire world prospers." This Global Goal has 10 targets that are "big picture" macro-level benchmarks. Even the action items take effort and guts and humility and passion: like the Lover Archetype.
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The Creator Archetype is imaginative, artistic and visionary.
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It loathes inactivity, occasionally to the point of workaholism.
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— on being a poem
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"I believed I wanted to be a poet, but deep down, I just wanted to be a poem."
— Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma
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Creator Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy
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Of all the SDGs, this one struck me as being uber-technical but when I listened to Greenlight Planet's Radhika Thakkar speak to James from the SDG Talks Podcast on October 8, 2021 about off-grid communities, individuals walking miles to charge their mobile phones, kids not having lights to study by — I got it.
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The Ruler Archetype is challenged to temper ego with understanding, and to distinguish majesty from bravado.
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— on the present perfect
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Ruler Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
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Whenever I read about SDG 16's mission to, "Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels," I get a little overwhelmed.
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We have been asleep at this planet's wheel for a long while.
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A Magician brand must strive to weave delight between the lines of its visionary and intuitive story. Its tendency toward arrogance — expectations of colleagues and customers to read its mind — risks distancing its worth from its audience.
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— on distinguishing magic
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"Arthur C. Clarke, a more consistent writer of good science fiction than Hoyle, although he only equalled Hoyle at his best, stated as his ‘Third Law’ that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
— Richard Dawkins, in his afterword to The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle
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Magician Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
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If SDG 11 was simply Sustainable Communities, the cities that are the confluences of those communities would magically look after themselves. We have to think small, local, community to achieve the larger, global goals. Read the targets for SDG 11
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The Sage is forever seeking balance; it struggles with idealism and its inability to compromise. "Listen more attentively" is sage advice for this archetype.
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— on complex problems
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"The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too."
— James S.A. Corey Tiamat's Wrath: Book 8 of the Expanse
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Sage Goal 12: Responsible Consumption & Production
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I aligned SDG 12, Responsible Consumption and Production, with The Sage archetype because responsible production requires tough choices and forward-thinking; two qualities that our dumb-assed decisions have been lacking. Here is SDG 12 in detail.
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The Jester Archetype lives for the experience; it is naturally compelling, entertaining and delightful, and is challenged by the tripartite trap of self-importance, disingenuity and indifference.
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— on being music
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"Music is what language would love to be if it could."
— John O'Donohue
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Jester Goal 6: Clean Water & Sanitation
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SDG 6, Clean Water and Sanitation is a tough Global Goal to write about but I refuse to give in to the thinking that my generation and the last few before it have screwed this completely. Here's the juice on SDG 6 from the Global Goals website.
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Like more than 37,400 40,000 other species, Konos, our Pelican-in-Chief (a Dalmatian Pelican from Lake Prespa in Greece), and Jerry, our Chief Algorithm Officer (a Jerdon's Courser from Andhra Pradesh, India) are threatened with extinction and therefore difficult or impossible to find.
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That's not the case with our 🍊 unsubscribe button, because unlike Konos and Jerry it's not the end of the world.
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Read more about beautiful creatures like Konos and Jerry on the IUCN's Red List.
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