06-02-2026
Memorable and history-changing Creative Sync!
This morning, the agenda was simple: Choose between a story circle or a review of budget and such? We chose the Story Circle unanimously. There had been an attempt last week which ended up being a debriefing for the Avery residency. This time, Victoria had consulted our ROOTS source: John O’Neal. Personal stories around a subject she proposed: What is WELLBEING for you?
“The rules of the Story Circle are the rules of civil participation in society.
You agree to listen. You agree to respect.”
John O’Neal, Founder of Junebug Productions
We had two rounds of stories, all very personal indeed and heartwarming. Exactly what Americans are not very good at, usually so superficial in their smalltalk! The importance of the experience is that, ever since Gwylène and I have started gathering people at the house around art, justice, culture or socio-political topics … thirty years ago? … whether to organize coming actions or not, NEVER have we been able to get a Story Circle going! Hard to believe but true … We have not yet started speculating about such a failure! Same with TINYisPOWERFUL!
Yesterday was a first!
It was at the Dart Library, in a refrigerated quiet room! I get it! A need to warm up, body – and soul!
At the end of the second round, we looked at each other with what I would call an air of total surprise, relief and satisfaction … That is the moment Victoria chose to enter into a long and clumsy monologue where I got completely lost until I understood she was expressing skepticism about the whole future of TINYisPOWEFUL! What? Why? She could not go on like this, she was burning out, in front of us, in this freezing library room! Self-declared unfit for the job – too full of doubt to continue! All that after Avery, the Story Circle, the recent granting of a large sum of money awarded to the collective for what? For its wellbeing of course! And, above all, after her own proposal, at the very beginning of the meeting, that we indulge in a weekend at Edisto Beach together, with the wellbeing money no one knew about then!
What was going on? What is going on? How can we gather around our fragile leader and prop her up? Or is it just a post-story circle syndrome of affects unbound, liberated, in search of vindication? We may never know but we heard Victoria yearn for time to return to her own art practice. Therefore, it was almost decided that some of the new wellbeing fund may also be used to find her an assistant. I insisted that we should see this new person as a shadow, an active apprentice who would be trained to take on some tasks and free up Victoria’s time. This person would preferably be a practicing artist as well. I see this as a call and an opportunity for more artist collaboration within the collective itself.
Here we were: during the Circle, each of us had told personal stories mostly about our art practices … and here she was, Victoria: a spectator to our passions, facing the task of facilitating them, but not participating in them. Enough! We were witnessing a catharsis, induced, I am pretty sure, by a successful story circle session!
06-05-2026
My turn for a round of doubt!
I am really at a standstill. The studio is too cluttered with parts and pieces from the Tale, still needing to be packed up, wrapped and put away. As soon as this is done, I will test the ability for my hands to move and show some nimbleness! They are presently almost paralyzed, frozen, unable to grab and carry anything!
All this started, I feel, when I lost control of my blood pressure, was put on pills that had extremely destructive secondary effects that started to weakening my whole body. Not a pretty development. So much so that to install and take apart the Tale at Avery, Gwylène had to organize a team of helpers. Every time, someone was working with me to put the pieces together, my hands being unable to screw, unscrew, bolt, unbolt, carry, attach parts together one way or another. To mount the show, Marion was my support team. [Marion is a friend of Gwylène in Paris, who also was a student of ours in Nancy!] To take it apart, I asked Rayn. Both were so patient and worked so well I could not believe how easy it was to feel no guilt having someone do the work for me!
I have seeking treatment for my hands. Physical therapy and a possibility of surgery.
Now, I have started accepting jobs again. One for Harriet who wants a printer box! An other one is more consequential: a new piece of functional furniture for the café. Speaking of the café, yesterday we had lunch there with Greg, former worker in Charleston and then manager of the Cary venture! He also stays upstairs for the week, doing his yearly Spoleto with a couple from Wilmington, where he lives. Every time we go to the café is like a vindication for our approach to (TINY) Business. Indeed, commerce remains a positive engine of socialization as long as its scale is humane, its spirit collaborative. A SERVICE that is. At the café, someone approached Gwylène and insisted on giving her a big public hug! She did not remember who it was! I did: a County employee who was coming for lunch every single weekday and would bring friends on weekends. At the café again, a few minutes after the hug, an old-old man approached us and asked if there was a French bookstore in town. My answer was negative but my mind stayed with it for a while, until, that is, I had found a more acceptable answer for him … It was too late though. The guy was gone but my sense of service was still with me! That is what it takes to enjoy being tiny in business! Otherwise, one should not choose TINY BUSINESS as a profession. Working for a boss, after all, only means to enjoy (or accept) heteronomy. To be dependent.
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Greg left this morning, but not without a long, broken conversation that ended up on the subject of business schools NOT teaching SERVICE, only the making and managing of money. Once again, Gwylène and I could observe how difficult it is for most of us to know where to situate money in commerce. This, again, ignites in me the urge to go back to David Graeber and two books of his on the anthropology of money: “the Debt” and “the Dawn of everything”. It also brings me back to Emilie Hache “Generation”, which coordinates well with Graeber’s in that it digs deep into the causes and consequences of (re)Generation and how cultural, intellectual and material capital is passed on or not, from generation to generation. I love all this. It reinforces my foundational values … I could also quote André Gorz or even Simone Weil … as if it were as urgent to either banish capitalism or to upend it! We have to choose the least violent of these two options but, for sure, not to scorch the Earth with the delight of our masochistic, masculinist, cowardly usurpers!
06-07-2026
This morning I woke up early to enjoy listening to ‘Living On Earth’! Too rare a pleasure when I am reminded how dedicated the LOE team is to advocate for the future of our planet. Could it be too late to save enough of it for its youth to have a bearable life. From this morning’s particularly rich issue, I have noted three passages from the LOE website:
I Know Where the Wild Crane Goes
Sandhill cranes are now nesting up on the tundra, northwest of upper Hudson Bay. Explorer in Residence Mark Seth Lender has followed them there from their wintering grounds in Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico.
My interest here is in the way Mark Seth Lender is regularly asked by LOE to write a poem about a phenomenon covered in the program. This time, the poem was : I know where the wild crane goes. And it is short, very accessible, read by the author himself. This sequence used to be done by an Atlanta Earth scientist who would report, in very poetic terms, on ecology-related topics. He died and was replaced by Mark Seth Lender.
Yesterday, Victoria sent us a report on last Tuesday’s Creative Sync. It was in the form of a poem! To this new show of creativity, I say: Victoria, keep it up. That’s what we need more of. I also hope you will convince Rayn to inject some poetry in her accounting as well. Then, maybe, Morenga will have a revelation!
Ancient Greek Sites Rich in Biodiversity
Today, the Agora and Acropolis of Athens, Delphi on Mount Parnassus, and other Greek archaeological sites preserve not only cultural heritage, but also animal and plant species, including some that were around in ancient times and are described in historical accounts and Greek mythology.
Pretty fascinating to realize that preservation of historic sites also means preservation of species, animal and vegetal! This shows a high respect for humanity’s common(s).
Seeking Environmental Justice in Papua New Guinea
The indigenous residents of Bougainville island in Papua New Guinea say their home used to provide them with everything they needed—shelter, fertile land, and clean water. That is until a copper and gold mine run by British-Australian company Rio Tinto set up shop and operated in the 1970s and 80s. Today, heavy metals like copper sulfate and cadmium still pollute waterways, and Theonila Roka Matbob, the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize Winner for Islands and Island Nations, has been fighting for years to pressure Rio Tinto into taking full responsibility for remediating this damage.
In this case, I heard Theonila Roka Matbob say that she was humbled by her Goldman Prize.
HUMBLED? If to be humbled means to be conscious of one’s own equal status with all other people and not feeling superior for having acquired a level of celebrity, then I understand how lethal any sense of exceptionalism and how brutal and unjust meritocracy are! As for the star system, it can only lead to envy and violence.
06-09-2026.
Ninety years ago, on June 4th, 1936, Leon Blum became prime minister of France, at the head of a Popular Front government. The Education Minister, Jean Zay, from a Pétain-regime jail cell some years later, (Zay was not a collaborator), articulated his criticism of “Science Po”, the school where most of France’s political elite was educated then and still is today. This criticism resembles so much that which Gwylène keeps bringing up about our present Business Schools, in the US as well as everywhere else, that I am translating it below:
Jean Zay:
“The lack of character so many top officials of the republic have shown since June 1940, [date of the defeat of France and its occupation by German forces – my note], the ease with which they submitted to the new masters, accomplished all the tasks assigned to them without any revolt of conscience, have sadly reflected on their lack of civic and professional education. The price the Republic has payed for one of its saddest failures is their reneging. It has neglected to supervise their recruitment, to personally guarantee their education: they have not defended it.”
How right Gwylène is to insist on the un-civic/immoral/unethical education of so many of its future economists, bankers, political leaders, influencers! Their irresponsibility/un-accountability, reaches all the way to top statesmen, themselves often products of elite ‘institutions of higher learning’. Then, where can the State – and voters – turn to and find those who should precisely guarantee the future of the nation?