Natalie Audelo

My narrative as I age is about using my skills, abilities, and know-how to make things better for other people. Helping to facilitate the circumstances under which others can flourish gives me joy. And it's not a sense of stepping in to save people, or whatever mucked up, ego-driven thing that might be. It's knowing where I have connections, privil... See more

What you want is never a thing.

The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call for the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear. Money may not disappear anytime soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as ... See more

I don’t have any answers because I don’t think there are any. But I’m fond of Margaret Wheatley’s framing of creating “islands of sanity,” which a kind reader reminded me of in the lovely comments of my last post. These islands are crucially not places of retreat, but rather of contribution — hyperlocal, small in scale, yet deeply meaningful. To re... See more

There’s also something to be said about collating and curating in the slow writing process—facts, knowledge, smells, descriptions, stories, passport stamps, headlines—until the collection becomes part of the transformation process. Through acute and critical attention, away from the drive of production, toward the singularity of studying a branch, ... See more

Telling stories is a process of mattering. Who matters? When we tell stories, we make ethical choices about who to bring in and who to leave out. We cannot bring in all of the voices. The voices themselves only come to exist once we recognize them. The in-between power increases the probability that we notice the voices, listen to the voices and in... See more

Only that nothing works out the way you plan, which is a blessing every hour. Life always takes a different form, if only because life will always be more imaginative — deeper, wiser, more surprising — than you are.