Alpha is a relative term.

I’m sitting in an airport terminal in Phoenix as I type this, having missed my connecting flight because of our “security” practices. It actually took me nearly an hour and a half to get through the checkpoint, there are so many signs and screens it’s a wonder anyone knows what’s going on at all and so as fate would have it I missed my flight. My head is pounding, sleep seems like an old friend I haven’t talked to in a long while and life couldn’t be better. The environment is collapsing under the weight of the self inducing feedback we have forced upon it, the economic crisis in Europe and America grows more morose and asinine every day, and our proof to fix it in case you’ve forgotten goes something like this: time as money + growth = progress = prosperity. To be justified in living you must simultaneously be expanding so if you’re not working towards a “better” life than you deserve to be left behind. Meanwhile life moves towards perpetually more specialized mediums, it can feel like to do anything you need to learn a whole new language and even then you never know if you’re doing it “correctly”. It’s funny I find in dialog people are either over generalizing or over specifying and the medium in which true exchange can happen is often never reached. In short the world is a batshit crazy place to be, and you should be getting ready to “go London” on those helping to make it that way, right? Well in a way, but honestly not so much. We’ll play a game it’s like the ones in those scholastic magazine you had as a kid where you have to look at the picture or read the paragraph and find the thing that doesn’t fit. Well it’s the fact that amidst all that negative I said “life couldn’t be better” but chances are you didn’t pick up on it imbedded in all that bad news.

It is with this that I gladly welcome you to the launch of our site and our work in general. The purpose of Motuv is to imbue individually and communally a sense of respite, clarity and then positive right action not only to fight for ground against the negative but to keep that ground within and to truly foster the creation of healthy, joy filled work that roots itself comprehensively in an organismic ethos. Whether by building neighborhood gardens, or having community dinners, or taking time to focus on things that need to be dealt with inside oneself, or just taking the time to slow down and appreciate the life one has and all that underlies the conveniences it is so easy to take for granted. The point is that life IS truly wonderful, that even with all the chaos rocking the world we must bear in mind that all things have been chaotic in all times and that chaos is relative. It goes hand in hand with our American notion of life as superpower, that all those cultures and peoples we don’t see and will maybe never know directly or indirectly must sacrifice in order for us to enjoy many of those very comforts. Alpha just like Omega is a relative term, it describes through contextual means that which gives one dominance or authority but not all cultures or peoples hold the same things sacred. How do we define affluence? We do so through time and as referenced earlier we equate that time with money and thus power. But when you get right down to it, our whole “pursuit” has been one of happiness and when money is no longer based on honorable and equivalent exchange but hoarding privilege and using denial as a justifier can one really even call that happiness?  In many indigenous cultures around the world time isn’t even that relevant, for it moves in circles instead of lines. Time is simply what passes while one is lucky enough to enjoy the company of loved ones and pursue one’s work as not only what one can learn, but more importantly what one can give back. This site’s main focus is hopefully on how each of us can remind ourselves and our communities that this life is a reciprocitous one, between people, animals, plants, AND places. Take some time to browse our projects, and help us create systems that render old ones obsolete instead of rebellions that repeat our past mistakes.

And most of all remember, life is a gift, and it is good.