That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

I’ve long believed that the ones who have more joy win.

The ones who come next are different, growing more slowly in a resource-limited world. Stressful conditions incentivize nurturing relations of cooperation alongside competition.

But those colonizing plants find they cannot continue this rate of growth and resource extraction. They start to run out of resources, disease may attack the overdense populations, and competition begins to limit their growth. In fact, their behavior facilitates their own replacement. Their rampant growth captures nutrients and builds the more stab

I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else.

What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from a better way of life?

This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote.

Oftentimes this avoidance is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting “If there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.”

But since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition.