#DecolonizationIn28Steps

How to Design and Elevate a Business Dedicated to Decolonization, Financial Reparations, and Rematriation in 28 Steps.

We exist in relation to a global ecosystem and beloved community, a term Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used to describe a community organized around racial justice, peace, and shared wealth. We also live at a time of proud fascism and climate chaos. If we are to survive these times, it will be through system change, the radical recreation of ourselves and every existing institution under the sun, including business and religion. In a word, decolonization.

Rematriation is a return to living in loving relationship with Mother Nature and Earth, this lovely planet under the sun.

Reparations are heartfelt financial apologies to survivors of violence that don't always feel good to investors, colonizers and the company they keep such as cops and lawyers but also the living descendants of predators of the first order, namely investors and colonizers.

The first seven symbols of this method represent where you stand in the world and how to aim your radical business for the stars. You are the other me, and we are the pueblo who rise as one to amplify love as the world's most natural currency.

Seven Steps Towards Business Perfection and the Sacred Commons

1. Heart — Radical self-love is the heart of decolonization. This symbol represents your heart's values. Your heart's values are the center of your universe. They direct your actions and dreams. They are the core of your radical business. Your heart's values serve to replace notions such as debt, profit, policing, extraction, competition, and incarceration, which define the capitalist marketplace. Hand over your heart, breathe into your dreams. What do you most want for yourself? What do you most want for the world we share?

Concepts: #Decolonization #SystemChange #RadicalSelfLove #PrisonIndustrialComplex

2. Roots — These five tree roots represent your ancestors, teachers, friends, sacred places, and most significant personal experiences. Your roots provide ancestral, ecological, cultural nourishment. Some roots carry poison and need to be cut for you to grow. Still, they can still provide valuable instruction and put you on your path for radical business creation. Who shaped your earth walk? What are your roots — the ancestors, teachers, friends, places, and personal experiences that most shaped you?

Concepts: #Ancestors #SacredSites

3. Diamond #1 — This diamond showcases your gifts and talents. Gifts are natural. Talents have a bit of formal training. When you tap into your gifts and talents, you radiate pure beauty and authentic leadership, resonating with cosmic and earthly energies of love. Your gifts and talents are naturally regenerative. They replenish. What are some of your gifts? What are some of your talents?

Concepts: #Gifts #Talents #Leadership #Regeneration

4. Power Fist — This symbol celebrates protection that is fierce like a lion, gentle like a lamb. A leader loves and protects beloved community in all times, especially those of crisis and change. Whose voices and visions do you wish to amplify? What are you here to love, honor, and protect? Raise your power fist in the name of the ones you love.

Concepts: #Resistance #DefendTheSacred #BelovedCommunity

5. Diamond #2 — Leaders scale rocks called mountains, sometimes on our knees, sometimes using our teeth and nails to hang on. This diamond embodies your skills and personal struggles. Your skills have been forged in the school of hard knocks and, perhaps, the colonial classroom. Your personal struggles are just that: the rough edges and sore spots you want to smooth. Diamonds are forged under immense pressure. Blue diamonds are among the most rare, costly, and cherished. As a leader, you don't want to be crushed by the weight of the world, but help create a new one. Balancing your diamonds — your gifts and talents, your skills and struggles — can help guard against depletion. What are some of your skills? What are some of your personal struggles? How can you better balance your blue diamonds of leadership?

Concepts: #Skills #Balance #Struggle #Leadership

6. Soil of natural abundance — This green patch of earth represents wealth in all its forms, from those you have to those you seek to cultivate. Wealth is ancestral, cultural, spiritual, material, futuristic. It stems from the languages we speak and those we are reclaiming. Wealth emerges from the earth as clean water, plant medicine, and regenerative agriculture. It is birdsong and a child's laughter on the wind. Wealth is educational and experiential. It is financial, technological, monetary. What forms of wealth do you have, and which do you want to grow?

Concepts: #MniWiconi #Abundance #NaturalWealth #Reclamation #PlantMedicine

7. Clear blue sky — The clear blue sky is Mother Nature in her sacred, sovereign domain. How do you feel Mother Nature’s needs at this time? What is Mother Nature asking of you? How can you meet her needs from the standpoint of your heart's values and your own gifts, skills, and talents?

Concepts: #MotherMary #PachaMama #MotherEarth #MotherNature #SacredFeminine #SixthExtinction #ExtinctionRebellion #DefendMaunaKea

Mother Nature's winds of change are strong. We need trees to weather them. We also need radical businesses, yours and mine too. #MeToo. #BlackGirlMagic. #DecolonizeYourBusiness. Your Tree of Life/Ceiba Sagrada provides shelter and sacred knowledge to help your business grow in the wilds and winds of global structural transformation.

These steps and questions serve to ground you in your heart, even if it is broken, just like the global economic system.

They speak to the #SacredCommons, a world being born again. The Sacred Commons is Earth as seen from the standpoint of her actively decolonizing children who embrace principles of radical self-love, beloved community, and regenerative agriculture.

Radical self-love is you being happy at heart and in your skin.

Beloved community, as defined by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a world organized around racial justice, peace, and shared wealth. Peace is genuine, daily security that requires neither prisons nor guns to ensure.

Regenerative agriculture feeds the soil, just as it feeds people and other animals, from bees to bats and all manner of squishy such as worms, snails, and fungus. It promotes life-based systems versus dead ones, like fossil energy that serves as the foundation for commercial pesticides.

Honoring the truth of these times can ease our transition into the new sun. The Four Directions of Decolonial Business Planning, steps eight through eleven, help you to stay aligned with your heart’s values of radical self-love and system change as you attune to cosmic and earthly energies of change and crisis.

The Four Directions of Decolonial Business Planning

8. Scales of Justice — The scales of justice are located in the west, the direction for introspection in the traditional medicine wheel of the Indigenous Caribbean. This symbol derives from Ma'at, the personification of truth and order in Kemet, what is now known as Egypt, and is also associated with Archangel Michael, who, on Judgment Day, weighs souls to determine their destination. Here, the symbol represents balance in legal and economic relationships. How can you balance your expenses and revenues while keeping your heart as light as a feather? Really, what do you need to expend as monetary and financial currency to manage your life's daily needs? What must you gain to realize your soul's calling and elevate your social enterprise? Balance isn't always a simple one-to-one ratio. At this time, cultural, spiritual, and ecological balance is largely replenishment, so don't be a thief in the dark night of the soul. What do you need? What can you give?

Concepts: #ScalesOfJustice #MedicineWheel #IndigenousCaribbean #Maat #Kemet #ArchangelMichael #Expenses #Revenues

9. Flying Saucer — Your flying saucer, your social enterprise, ascends from the south, the direction for innocence, open eyes, and innovation in the traditional medicine wheel of the Indigenous Caribbean. Your radical business elevates on three pillars of light. First, your exit strategy from violence and delusion like white supremacy, the global oil and gas regime, and toxic masculinity. How can you create a working culture in direct defiance of the world system? Second, your sacred responsibility to practice of self-love, beloved community, and true love for Mother Nature. How can you and your business be true love in direct action? Third, your actual business structure such as a grassroots formation, a BCorp, a 501c3, a Worker Cooperative, or a Solidarity Cooperative. What is the business structure that is most appropriate to your life at this time? The options for business incorporation are vast, and not all people need business licenses or a formal structure to pursue their work. When your business rests on their three pillars, its elevation is smoother and its flight more direct. To fully elevate you will need to tend to each light individually and collectively and also learn radical transparency. A radical decolonial business keeps no secrets, knows no borders, and takes no prisoners. It is pure, simple, collective liberation.

Concepts: #SocialEnterprise #Innovation #EndWhiteSupremacy #EndToxicMasculinity #BusinessStructure #SolidarityCooperative #WorkerCooperative #BenefitCorporation #NonProfitIndustralComplex

10. Full Moon of Economic Stability — Located in the east, this triple moon symbol invokes illumination in the traditional medicine wheel of the Indigenous Caribbean. For many modern pagans and witches, the triple moon symbol represents natural abundance that exist at all stages of a woman's human life cycle. The moon is always full; she just looks like a sliver at certain times of the month from where you stand. The same is true for women at all ages, from girlhood until our elder years. We are always full, complete unto ourselves. This is also true for economic and natural abundance. If we widen our scope of vision and shift earthly perspectives, we can see through the lie of colonialism and capitalism — exploitation, scarcity, competition, etc — to the natural abundance that exists on this planet. Your full moon of economic stability represents all the material, social, and financial currencies you use and bank to ensure economic abundance. These currencies can include seedbanking, foodbanking, and timebanking. They can include seasonal foraging and urban scavenging in the dumpster. They can include digital currencies like Akoin or Circles, which is based on a global basic income built on blockchain. They can include income-sharing, tithing, even wealth redistribution. And, to whatever degree is needed, debt and cash. What forms of economic currency are you able to accept at this time? What kinds do you wish to share and spend in your town and beloved community? What is your vision over the next months, year, decade?

Concepts: #TripleMoon #TimeBank #SeedBank #FoodBank #DumpsterDiving #Foraging #Akoin #BlockChain #GlobalBasicIncome #UniversalBasicIncome #CommunityCurrency

11. North Star — North is the direction of wisdom in the traditional medicine wheel of the Indigenous Caribbean. The symbol of the North Star represents your guide though dark times. Revolutionary, survivor, and spy, Harriet Tubman stole herself from slavery and dedicated herself to liberation of her people. On her very first trip, she used the North Star to navigate her movement across rivers, mountains, and valleys she'd never seen. Tubman made at least a dozen trips, freeing hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. All through her travels, she sold pies to fund her work. Tubman refused payment for her efforts in the US Civil War, as she didn't want anyone to question her alliances. Harriet Tubman's guide? God. Many Christians say that Christ is their true north, or Mother Mary. Taíne / Taína / Taíno people often name Atabey, Yaya, or Yocahu. Muslims often say that of Mohammed. Buddhists say that of Buddha, Quan Yin, or the Dalai Lama. Radical activists often invoke Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, Angela Y. Davis, Sylvia Rivera, or their abuelita as their guide. Who's your North Star? Perhaps your star is a constellation such as the Pleiades that awakens your dreaming and guides your actions.

Concepts: #Guidance #Mentorship #HarrietTubman #MarcusGarvey #SylviaRivera #AngelaYDavis #DalaiLama #Mohammed #JesusChrist #QuanYin #Atabey #Yocahu #Buddha #BlackStarLine

Basic Business Logic in times of Revelation and Reckoning

From the Four Directions of Decolonial Business Planning, we shift to learn and practice Basic Business Logic in times of Revelation and Reckoning.

What's basic about business creation? All businesses seek to fill a need, grow over time, and measure their success. Sometimes, success is an end to daily operations, the start of a new phase, or the rise of new visions, methods, and leaders. In short, business is resource management. A decolonial business, in contrast to colonizing enterprises, aims for resource replenishment and local living economies that cultivate leadership and natural abundance for all.

A decolonial business identifies need in relation to your personal calling to defend the sacred against the sixth extinction, white supremacy, and toxic masculinity. A decolonial visionary is attuned to life under threat yet sees over the rainbow to other realms.

These times are here — our waters may bleed red, our allies may serve enemies. Your heart is your best guide and only true home. Reckoning is practicing this revelation and your sacred responsibility on a daily basis.

12. Conch shell — A sacred symbol to Native People all around the world, the conch shell calls in the gods and ancestors for spiritual guidance. In the occupied Caribbean, the conch helped people to organize rebellions and safeguard maroon communities, people who had stolen themselves from slavery and created beloved community in the mountains or marshlands. This symbol, the conch, invites you to hear the sacred as it speaks to and through you. What do you hear when you listen, truly listen, to your heart, your ancestors, all future children? How can you amplify love as the world's most natural currency? What does this mean in terms of using upon your gifts, skills, talents, and struggles to create a business that regenerates natural abundance for all?

Concepts: #SacredCalling #IndigenousLeadership #MaroonCommunities

13. Spiral — The spiral represents ecological regeneration. It is scroll and serpent. It is logical and linear, sudden and striking. Looking forward and backward in time, drawing on the scroll and serpent of sacred emergence, how can you work for earth healing? Sustainability isn't enough to survive climate disasters and proud fascism. Really, what do you want sustain from the present world system? What do you want to resurrect? And what do you want to create, innovate, and elevate as we move into the new sun? And who can be your guide as you unfurl as a leader, a sacred creator in your own rite?

Concepts: #SacredSpiral #ClimateCapitalism #AncestralKnowledge

Here, as we continue in our sacred spiral of business development, we pass the Scales of Justice. Are there new expenses and revenues that have come into focus as you reflect on your sacred calling to amplify love as the world's most natural currency and promote ecological regeneration in the face of chaos, violence, and grief? This regenerative medicine wheel is always in motion, so too sacred radicals who aim to elevate a decolonial business. So pause here to consider if there are new costs or possible revenues to consider.

14. Location pin — This symbol represents your objective social location, your digital identity, and your bioregion. Who are you in terms of your education, ancestral experiences, your disposition? What skin, gender, and sexuality do you wear in this earth walk? What are your embodied privileges and struggles? The division between the real world and the digital is small and large. Where do you exist online, and what is your life like on those platforms? A decolonial business is grounded in local realities, even as it aims for the stars. Where do you live and roam on Earth? You, as its visionary, want to elevate a business on pillars of light. Your goal is to enrich, not deplete, your beloved community. So, where are you in your life? Where do you exist online? Where are your everyday stomping grounds?

Concepts: #Intersectionality #DigitalIdentity #Bioregionalism #Embodiment

15. Prayer hands — Every breath a prayer, every moment a lesson. This symbol represents your daily practice of living in this world: sleeping, waking, cooking, bathing, eating, cleaning, meditating, and providing for other people such as elders or young children. And actual prayer too. These prayer hands represent all the stuff you do to survive and sustain. What do you do each day? How are you being nourished, depleted, renewed? Radical self-love is an aspect of decolonization; it is also one of the hardest lessons to live. For your business to elevate, you need to be honest to material reality and dream bigger than empire. What can you cut from your day, and what must you add to thrive and elevate?

Concepts: #RadicalSelfLove #EmotionalLabor #ElderCare #Feminism

We are now sweeping past your social enterprise. This is your business. It is the structure through which you create freedom, a business grounded in radical self-love, beloved, community, and true nature and showcasing transparent divestment from the global oil and gas regime, toxic masculinity, and white supremacy. As you pause here, ask yourself if your location and your daily practice conjures a new insight, revenue stream, or expense for your business.

16. Protest sign — The protest sign, ah, the beloved protest sign. This symbol speaks to your direct actions. What are you creating, doing, offering in your business? Look at each element of your regenerative medicine wheel starting at he heart. See all the people and places that have loved you, guided you, nourished you. Look at that glorious tree of life, that la ceiba sagrada that reaches towards the heavens and deep into soil, the Earth's flesh. See your gifts and talents, your skills and struggles are being sheltered under the tree yet also radiant, sparkling, and uniquely positioned to move. Move forward, to the frontlines. Frontline activists are the people who step into the line of fire to protect themselves and the ones they love who, perhaps to due to age or mobility or other responsibilities, can't protect themselves in the same way. Given your personal experiences and the radical, diverse riches that define your life, what can you do to promote love, healing, and resilience? And what else do you need to do to ensure it happens successfully?

Concepts: #DirectAction #Resistance #TreeOfLife #CeibaSagrada #Resilience #IntersectionalFeminism #HealingAncestralTrauma

17. Tic Tac Toe — Life is a game that we play no matter the odds against us. This symbol represents social media and digital technology at this exact moment. If you look closely at this symbol, you can see that a tic tac toe contains both a jail cell and a hashtag. Policing, detention, and incarceration are part of digital infrastructure of the internet. The hashtag as jail cell represent the theft, doxxing, and hacks at the heart of today's technocapitalism, while the game board represents an invitation to play, to skip, to jump ship. The game is rigged, but that doesn't mean don't play. It means play if and when needed. Given the digital realities of the tech world and the particulars of your work, how do you want to engage with digital culture, platforms, and technology? How can you better protect yourself? How can you better protect your business and beloved community?

Concepts: #Policing #PrisonAbolition #SurveillanceCapitalism #Doxxing #Malware #Ransomware #ContentMigration

Here we pass the full moon of economic stability, where we mix and match currencies to meet our needs and goals. Based on the direct actions you plan to take and the reality that digital technology is under constant surveillance and subject to hacking and malware, are there certain currencies that you now seek to add to the mix or avoid altogether? Can you diversify your currencies, meaning use a greater variety of them, to stabilize? How about packing a seed stash and water purifier under your pillow? Grave times, grave times.

18. Sacred fire — The flaming lotus flower represents disaster awareness and response. It honors indigenous Buddhist resistance to colonialism. During the U.S. war on Vietnam, a number of spiritual teachers such as B? Tát Thích Qu?ng ??c chose to set themselves on fire to call attention to genocide. Like our spiritual and historical ancestors, we have little choice but to reckon with sacred fire in the forms of systemic violence and climate change. What forms of disaster are possible given your location and identity? Proud fascism isn't a joke. Guns were made to be used. Climate catastrophe is accelerating. How can your business be resilient in the face of political and natural disasters such a category five hurricane, a full data hack, or a major earthquake? What are you prepared to do in response to the gravest of horrors such as a bombing campaign? This symbol represents your ethical, formal plan for disaster.

Concepts: #DisasterCapitalism #DisasterManagement #WannaCry #EternalBlue #NotPetya

19. The Good Books — This symbol represents spiritual and seasonal accounting as well as authentic assessment. If you look closely at this symbol, you'll see a book shelf and a graph chart. The idea here is to evaluate your business in terms of actions, numbers, and next steps. Some forms of assessment aren't numerical and financial but spiritual and emotional and require words or other forms of communication. Have you met your spiritual responsibility to radiate self-love, honor beloved community, and practice true love for Mother Nature? That's the good book at the base of the graph chart. What are the metrics that matter for Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer? What do you need to track in terms of metrics and for whom? How you set next steps for the coming season and year? These questions and your responses line the book shelf. They are the good books of seasonal, spiritual accounting.

Concepts: #CommunityAccountability #CorporateAccountability #Accountability #Assessment #Accounting #Metrics

Six Sacred Partners

Arms are for hugging. Hands are holding our hearts and protest signs as needed. Are fists for punching nazis?

Kali, the mother goddess of birth, destruction, death, and awakening in Hinduism, has six to eight to ten arms. In each, she holds a tool, a weapon, a gift to ensure protection of her realms and people. Kali is a force of fierce nature and sweetest motherly affection. She is always in motion, and she sees all.

This method of radical business creation has six arms to represent the formal relationships you need to elevate your social enterprise. The hands extend in both directions to show that power is a circle, a curiosity, and a juggling circus act.

20. Mentors — This hand represents inspirations for you to emulate, even unseat, as you elevate. These are people, companies, and organizations. One mentor is always Mother Nature. Learn from her and natural processes, including #biomimicry.

Concepts: #Mentorship #Biomimicry

21. The Next Gen — This hand invokes the young people who teach you daily and who you guide and train. Children aren’t simple the future. They are leaders and teachers and visionaries. How can you learn from their ways, be it dreams or play or direct questioning? Imagine a world where they exceed us, their elders!

Concepts: #PedagogyOfTheOppressed #ProjectBasedLearning #EducationalScaffolding #YouthVoice #Praxis

22. Partners — This hand represents contractual relationships with other people, companies, or organizations. Here, think goals, outcomes, deadlines, and even boring legalese! Partners are those entities whose work is essential to your own, be it as a means of delivery or education or zero waste support.

Concepts: #B2B #BusinessToBusiness #ProjectManagement #OrganizationalManagement #PerformanceManagement

23. Suppliers — Everything material that you can’t personally give or receive from formal partners comes from external suppliers. Mother Nature is always a supplier. See her! Name her! Honor her! Who and what else serves as a supplier to your social enterprise?

Concepts: #SupplyChains #SupplyChainTransparency #SupplyChainManagement

24. Customers — People who provide economic and financial payment for your work are, under capitalism, customers. Capitalist economic exchange is one custom, one practice, we're working to dismantle, yet for the time being, we're engaging in sales to pay for necessities that can't be paid in time, seeds, food, or other forms of loving, natural exchange.

Concepts: #CustomerEngagement #CustomerExperience #CustomerRelations

25. Peers and the Pueblo — This hand celebrates the good, noble people of the world. It represents the everyday connections and people around the way, barrio, and rez that don’t result in a sale or formal relationship but inspire you and keep you on the path.

Concepts: #Allies

Birds sing and soar. They gaze from the heavens. They nest on land. They circle and swoop when the time is wise. Birds are the dinosaurs that survived. The last three steps of this method of radical business creation focus on bringing your business into material existence and ensuring it elevates in style and grace.

26. Lovebird of Distribution — This symbol visualizes how you get the good stuff to your people, remembering you're working for regeneration in times of chaos, reckoning, and catastrophe. Cars run on death called fossil energy and require insurance and routine maintenance. Same for planes, trains, and cargo ships. Our digital platforms are powered by minerals and a vulnerable, commercial energy grid. Your bike also has gears and tires that require maintenance. Your feet are made of flesh, bone, and blood that can only move so fast, including those of us who need canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. The lovebirds of marketing and distribution are creatures of emergent creation, moving between the world system in place and the one we are building together. How can you better ensure distribution under these conditions?

Concepts: #DirectSelling #DigitalDistribution #RegionalDistribution #WholesaleDistribution

27. Full red lips — Your solution statements. You kiss a bruise to make it better, and so does your radical business. You want to sing solutions into the wind. Your full red lips spit truth in the face of delusion and violence. Here, you are moving from "spin" as marketing to describing community solutions that amplify love as the world's most natural currency and end the reign of death that masquerades as today's business leadership. What are your business solutions to the crises we are facing?

Concepts: #BeautifulSolutions #ProblemStatements #CommunitySolutions

28. Lovebird of Marketing — This symbol showcases advertising of all kinds, plus responsive communication to all your people. Community accountability isn't spin but your spiritual directive and business objective. Be direct. Be honest. Be daring. And be really, really strategic. Gossip is marketing. Fake news is king. The internet is the naked emperor — and the angry princess who saves herself and her pueblo. Many Indigenous folk and our allies invoke the prophecy of the eagle and condor to better understand this moment in spacetime. The prophecy states that the eagle is the path of the mind, the condor the path of the heart. When the two meet, there is a choice to transform together or to die in brutal battle. How do you plan to market your vision to your people? What are your methods of advertisement and customer engagement? Part of what you are advertising is decolonization, a world without prisons and borders, where all people and beings live well and free. Yet how?

Concepts: #GuerrillaMarketing #NativeAdvertising #DigitalMarketing #PersonalBranding #ReputationManagement #MarketingCampaign

Tricksters, Shadows, and Twins

Look closely at this regenerative medicine wheel. Your ship is elevating on three pillars of light that rise through your roots, your heart's values, your raised power fist, and your north star of wisdom. These five symbols are the blood lines of radical business creation. These lines might run long and deep into the earth. Your pillars are light, for example, might illuminate a cross on which you, like Jesus, hang your head in pain, sensing the truth of Jesus's promise betrayed by colonizers and global capitalism.

As your business rises towards the stars, it will meet turbulence and catastrophe. You, as a business visionary, will meet tricksters: entities that play games, defy norms, and seem to subvert your every move. Part of your work is becoming as balanced as possible in the winds of change, reckoning, even crisis.

Each symbol to the left of your Tree of Life / Ceiba Sagrada has its shadow, twin, and mirror on the right. Your daily practice, for example, is what allows direct action. Your location includes existence under technological terms and services of exploitation and surveillance. Your spiral of regeneration happens in the context of sacred fire, which can flare at a moment's notice or none at all. Your sacred calling is evaluated via holistic assessment that might fall short of your dream or exceed it wildly.

The Four Directions of Decolonial Business Planning are not fixed but flowing, spiraling, blossoming, much like your business. They are in cosmic movement and social movement. They exist in the space of radical creation.

Work with natural laws of the sun, moon, and stars. Work with digital technology while understanding it was designed to entrap and police, steal and shame. That's a system design bound for system failure, but not yet. Work with love as your muse, your guide. Work with soil. Work with people who love, honor, and cherish your business as they do your being. Work with reality and the natural law of energy. Energy wants to flow: if held up, it will flood.

If you have to push away a partner because they are dealing in delusion or their vision no longer resonates, do it. You don't want to drag the dead but elevate your ancestors and all future children. You want to live well and free, and you were made to rise to this global challenge.