Bryan Welch of Mother Earth News, and Donkeys

The Business of Optimism

Full house for Bryan Welch!

Yesterday at the Fayetteville Public Library, Bryan Welch, publisher of Mother Earth News and author of Beautiful and Abundant shared his steps to positive visualization of what we want to see in the world. According to Bryan, Mother Earth News is one of the fastest growing magazines on American news stands, even surpassing Playboy in sales 2 years ago.

It was an inspirational moment for me, since as you know, Ripples is in the business of dreaming: the blog header above illustrates (literally) our dream in animated form as we try to add more & more photographs as the months pass to turn the vision into reality.  Often  my fears of realizing the dream and living off-grid prevent me from seeing the idealistic picture.  But like my friend says, I should put that fear back up on the shelf like a jar of mayonaise, which is good advice for someone like me who can’t digest mayonaise anyway.

It’s also great advice to employ positive visualization to achieve one’s dreams.  Environmentalists are not much fun to talk to when the conversation is mostly doom and gloom without many positive, exciting solutions to our common problems. At Tuesday’s event, Bryan Welch suggested these steps to a successful vision:

Steps to Visualization

You can tell what I was most excited about here 🙂

1. Idealize the Vision. Don’t be too realistic.
2. Acknowledge the challenges and accept change.
3. Define criteria for success:
1. Is it beautiful?
2. Does it create abundance?
3. Is it fair?
4. Make it contagious and engage all kinds of people.

Homework: 

Interesting fact of the day from Bryan: “Treehugger in Dutch is translated as “goat-hair-sock-wearing-people”