BLOG
15 July, 2024
What can it mean to perform a feminist, Earth mind and heartful company?
Fragrant as well as prickly in places.
Flower crown to mark the beginning of Mathilda Tham feminist, Earth mind and heartful learning and wisdom company to people and organisations in existential crisis and metamorphosis. (Sage, mint, bay leaf, rosemary, bramble, fern, musk mallow, sea holly, green alkanet, corn marigold.)
Photo Mathilda Tham, 2024.
That’s what I would like to find out on this (exciting as well as nail-biting-inducing) adventure of imagining a new kind of company. The purpose of this blog is to share this adventure with you - the happy moments as well as the mistakes I will make and the friction I no doubt will encounter.
Of course I have ideas of what performing a feminist, Earth mind and heartful company can mean, but I don’t ’know’. And my first promise to myself, and to you, is to try to abstain from knowing for sure and conclusively, and from pretending to know. As so often when trying to define something, it feels easier to start from the negatives – in this case what a feminist, Earth mind and heartful company is not. The top line of ‘nots’ is simultaneously radical, complex and simple: A feminist company is not sexist – it is actively anti-sexist. An Earth mind and heartful company is not motivated by profit and economic growth – it is motivated by the health of Earth and all species (including humans) (after Fletcher and Tham, 2019). This is already challenging and a pursuit of a lifetime or more.
The addition of the word ‘company’ signals a form for how this endeavour can be organised. Putting ’company’ in relation to ‘feminist’ and ‘Earth mindful and heartful’ introduces further complexity and is helpful in making explicit an important tension, I think. ‘Company’ is where the friction between a dominant culture and mindset of economic growth and alternative, feminist and Earth mind and heartful ways of being in the world becomes tangible, and it is this between-paradigmatic dialogue that I want to work with. I’m imagining a company to put myself directly in this space of friction, without (as they would say in the food programmes on telly) any place to hide, such as a university or other organisation. I hope that by putting myself in this space, I can learn, rehearse and share some nuances to the between-paradigmatic tensions and, most importantly, some tactics for negotiating friction in caring, compassionate, peaceful and generative ways. I want to be in this space with full responsibility and full ability to respond (see response-ability, for example Donna Haraway, 2008), filterlessly as myself – although I hope to be accompanied by many old and new friends.
I chose the word ‘company’ after much deliberation and because of its double meaning of business entity and friendly ‘someone’ to spend time with. As soon as I taste the word ‘company’ in the business sense, I taste friction: deeply entrenched legacies of the economic growth logic, as well as colonialism, slavery and human exceptionalism that economic growth is dependent on. But in addition to these overtly objectional flavours, there are many ‘company’ and ‘economic growth’ legacies that taste virtuously in our time: productivity, progress, individualism, master plans, universality, as well as categorisations – like the separation of lives into work and play, or work and unpaid care work. Some of these legacies appear desirable, maybe harmless or ambiguous, and at the same time play a part in killing vital earth systems and deeply undermining social justice as well as mental health. I want to be in dialogue with all these legacies as I explore performing a feminist, earth logic company.
Talking across paradigms and challenging a dominant culture is a long preoccupation of mine as you can see from my projects. And, I am of course not starting from scratch when I try to perform a different kind of company. There are a wealth of clever people and communities to be in dialogue with, doing business differently – like the social entrepreneurs and bcorps, and rethinking householding – such as the field of community economies. And, I also want to stay freshly, amateurishly curious and engage my whole being in this learning journey.
In many of my roles, such as working as a trend-forecaster, professor, research leader, I have felt a need to project and perform certainty, especially when navigating tricky gender dynamics and knowledge traditions that have predisposed me to lesser legitimacy (than for example coming from a more conventional knowledge background). One thing I know is that a feminist, Earth mind and heartful company cannot be a know-it-all. On this journey, I have to be open and therefore more vulnerable.
What gave me the final push to get over my insecurities, imagine the company, publish this blog post and deem it good enough to share with you was a few sentences by the Buddhist monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh:
“Even if we are a minority, if we believe we have an insight that can lead us out of our difficult situation, we should have the courage to speak out. There are many ways in which we can succeed in speaking out – and not just as an individual, because there may be a number of us who think clearly but haven’t had the opportunity to show our light. Therefore it is very important to say “I am here!” to those that share the same kind of insight. Please raise your voice so that you can come together with others.” (Thích Nhất Hạnh 2021,161)
So today I mark this new endeavour with a flower crown and say ‘I am here, and I hereby offer myself as your company’. I hope so much to hear from you and to learn with you.
Love
Mathilda
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. The University of Minnesota Press.
Nhất Hạnh, Thích. 2021. Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. Rider.