Realigning with the Land of Here Vision

Empowerment through purpose by aligning to the greater vision

Hi, my name is Barry Low and I have a dream that is called the Land of Here. It is a dream of creating an organization/company/business that believes cultivating communities by nurturing people and planet can be a sustainable, healthy and profitable endeavor.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve been working to make this dream tangile by building this new business from the ground up. Developing brand and philosophy, administrative and financial frameworks, web and mobile applications, etc., etc., etc.

But recently I ran into a wall. A sudden realization, that despite all this work, I still don’t quite have anything ready to put out in the big wide world. That I’ve been so mired in the details, that I’ve lost my way and fallen into traversing a failing path.

And I realized that if I just keep going, if I force myself through that wall without looking where I’m going, my next barrier is falling off a cliff.

I don’t know what brought me to this moment of honesty but a better part of me, buried deep within, has been subconsciously yelling that something just isn’t right. I’ve been reading articles like how Jason Fried of Basecamp is transparently taking personal accountability for his companies shortcomings or the discipline of John Saddington to just do or Poornima Vijayashanker discussing our comfort zones — and then, something clicked. I’m not being who I want to be. I’m not cultivating the things in myself that I admire in others.

That, I’m not being true to my dream.

And there is sudden clarity on why I’ve been in a rut. The realization that my behavior and therefore, my sense of purpose, has become misaligned from my dream.

Land of Here is more cleary expressed through the vision statement: Nurturing together, here

There are two key values that building a company upon this vision requires: transparency and authenticity. I attempted to try building the story of Land of Here through these values in my Learning to Speak series, but I quickly dwindled in my efforts as I allowed my fears to restrict me from “saying too much” or that what I had to say wasn’t quite ready.

And so I reconsider and realign purpose with vision:

• Nurturing — is about growth. While there is an ideal for the destination of what we might grow into, the focus is on the moment to moment care of the journey, especially the pain that is inherent in the growth process. By not sharing the journey of Land of Here, I was throwing the greatest assets of transparency and authenticity— the ability to show the world that I am truly building what I’m saying I’m building — and therefore, a huge portion of integrity required to make this dream possible, out the window.
• Together — is about collaboration. Not sharing what I am working on is, by itself, grounds for dismissing my intent. But to exacerbate the situation, I am actually stunting the growth of Land of Here by not taking advantage of the exponential potential and energy availed when combining forces with another individual, let alone a whole community. The ability to nurture ourselves and our community requires togetherness, especially for interfacing with the great pain I see out there.
• here — is a point of grounding. It can be a complex spectrum of location, time, state and being, but the fact was that I was focused on the destination of what Land of Here could be and simply was not here cultivating and nurturing what Land of Here is now.

To be honest, this kind of self-examination is painful especially with so much time and energy invested. But it is certain that if I didn’t face this current reality, I would eventually find myself in deeper pain. On the flip side, being re-aligned with a sense of purpose empowers me to redirect that pain down a path of growth.

To exacerbate the pain felt, I’m quite familiar with well-constructed resources like the Lean Startup framework that is wholly about averting this kind of pain. I can blame the plethora of learning I’ve had to do, but in the end, it all comes down to my ego.

What’s next?

While I’m still numb from pain, I might as well up the ante and maximize my growth potential.

1. My relationship to social media is much more fear and loathing than any thing else, but being a rural freelancer, my options for creating connections and therefore, collaborations, is small. So I’ll force myself to push this out on my social networks and …
2. to keep engaged with these new sources of connection and ultimately, accountability, I will be committing to writing and sharing EVERYDAY about what Land of Here is and how it’s being cultivated. I have no problems with what to write about, it’s really a matter of instilling personal discipline.

I recognize the sum total of this article and pointing towards my future actions could be viewed as merely a crass business pitch. So I have on my list of things to write about — the hypothesis that a business of trade or commerce is currently the most-ideal vehicle for cultivating a better world. Whether the necessary values and responsibilities to make such an endeavor realizable are sustainable in this current age is what the Land of Here experiment is all about.

To join the journey, please click on the Follow button below for me or the In The Land of Here publication. Collaborating with your thoughts is most welcome.

Hi, my name is Barry Low and this blog is about making tangible a dream called Land of Here — a business that nurtures communities by connecting local people with local resources — currently focused on our food system.