Natalie Audelo

In the early 20th century, Rilke wrote a wonderful series of letters to a young poet in which he counseled, "Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart." He said, "Try to love the questions themselves as though they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language." He said, "Don't try to reach for the answers which could not... See more

Visa’s founding CEO Dee Hock had a realization. He saw clearly that it was “beyond the power of reason to design an organization” capable of coordinating a global network of financial transactions of the sort that had started to develop.7 Yet, he also knew that nature regularly achieves just that. Why, he wondered, couldn’t “a human organization wo

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Schopenhauer loved metaphor, and his counsel starts with the example of a mason: The man is “employed on the building of a house” but “may be quite ignorant of its general design.” Because of this arrangement, Schopenhauer suggested, the mason was stuck in the daily details of his work instead of seeing it as part of a grand design. And so it is wi... See more

I feel my life has unfolded in a way that prepared me to do this work and along the way, especially so in the last decade, so many doors have opened that shouldn’t have and I feel the weight of the hands of all of my ancestors on my back urging me through them. So the essential part of this work is to show up. Show up when asked to represent my peo... See more

I want to do x, so why can’t I?

For many months now (as you could tell by my silence) I have had the hardest time prioritizing the thing that’s important to me. Writing. Not just here publicly but also my own personal writing that happens in the early morning when my brain’s rested but fuzzy and supple and things spill out with ease, or late at nig... See more