Entropy is the scientific concept of chaos, randomness, and uncertainty. It’s also a pretty appropriate word choice to describe a lot of what we’re seeing on a global scale. Israel/Palestine, Ukraine/Russia, Sudan, Myanmar, Iran, Haiti.

We have to know what we have to recognize when it’s gone. Inventory comes in all shapes and sizes - from the simple on the shelf version to the complex comprehension of feelings of love and satisfaction. The reality is, we’re always taking inventory if we are aware and conscious.

FEMA has $20B in disaster recovery funding. Extreme weather means that’s not nearly enough. Bottom line, we’re spending way more than we realize on natural disasters. Perhaps if we knew the real cost, we might think hard about making communities more resilient.

It’s hard to believe but not entirely incomprehensible I would be writing this while Hurricane Milton barrels down on Florida as a Category 5 storm. The numbers from Hurricane Helene haven’t even been tallied. My friend Preston at Rich Hill Farms hasn’t even grasped the damage, let alone accounted for it. How do you value 50 years of gravel on a road that’s no longer there? How do you value 1000 fence posts that have vanished? Does it account for the posts, or the layout, design, and installation? It took 3 generations of people to get all those posts in the ground - let alone to do it the way the land (and livestock) intended.

I’m not a physicist. I’m not a meteorologist. I’m not a data scientist. But a superpower of mine is seeing the common thread - and pulling on it. It has served my entrepreneurial mind well for the past 24 years. This storm lit my 🔥. While she is gone, Hurricane #Helene continues to pack a powerful force inside of me. Not the common forces of wind or rain, this force is fusion and energy. I’m talking about the power of networks. I’m talking about the power of change.

It hit me this morning. Go here to watch this video. You’ll see the destruction, confusion, and grief in Marshall, NC. I paid particular attention to what she was expressing starting at 19:35. Keep in mind she is on day 6 and still trying to make sense of what has happened to her community.

There might only be two other times in my life when I felt this way. The day after my dad died unexpectedly, and the day I witnessed (along with my whole family) a fatal farm incident involving our family dog, Willie.

48 hours of Hell. September 25th through September 27th of 2024. At the time of this writing, 600 people are still unaccounted for in the mountains of North Carolina - that’s on top of the 133 confirmed deaths. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s Hell.

Along my journey into circular systems and regenerative processes, I have encountered two words in different spheres; consciousness and awareness. They feel interchangeable until I apply the context or the nuance of the situation they present themselves in. As part of my quest towards literacy and taxonomy around this circular world of better thinking, I might share my nuanced understanding of the relationship between these two words.