Mendo Briarpatch
From CFI
The Briarpatch is a local, small business community of self-reliance and mutual aid.
You are a Briar when:
• You have an insatiable curiosity about how the world works.
• You believe in finding and creating meaningful work.
• You seek to do the work you love and to make a living at it.
• You understand that small-scale local farming is the basis for the survival of community.
• It is more important to you to provide the highest quality product or service than to go fast and get rich, but you recognize the need to produce a surplus to maintain a healthy, sustainable business.
• You prefer cooperation to isolation.
• You prefer honesty and openness to deceit and secretiveness.
• You believe in independence and personal responsibility.
• You believe in simple living and environmental preservation.
• You believe in social responsibility and democratic management.
• It is important to you to have fun in everything you do, learning to live with joy in the cracks.
History of the Briarpatch
Dick Raymond is the father of the Briarpatch concept which emerged in early 1973. Dick’s idea grew out of his image of a dinosaur-like demise of existing large businesses. In his first visions of the Briarpatch he saw the giant corporate dinosaurs unable to find food for their enormous profit appetites. He visualized a business apocalypse, using such terms as “living with joy in the cracks” to describe the new subsociety in which “the cracks” referred to his apocalyptic earthquake image. The Briarpatch was to be the social system for survival, with Briars using the tools of living on less, sharing with each other, and learning through new small businesses. To this, Dick added the positive value of doing it all with joy. In his vision, Briars were to be doing what they loved most, secure from the ravages of the crumbling culture around them. Their lack of material possessions and small-scale living would appear to others like real briarpatches—thorny places so unappealing to the greedy people around them that, like rabbits, Briars would be safe.
The apocalypse was postponed temporarily as the corporate dinosaurs found fuel for their profit appetites by building an empire to cover the whole of the earth. But now we know that the fuel for their operations and transportation is indeed running out, and Dick was just ahead of his time.
Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit
"Drown me! Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please," said Brer Rabbit. "Only please, Brer Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch."
"The briar patch, eh?" said Brer Fox. "What a wonderful idea! You'll be torn into little pieces!"
Grabbing up the tar-covered rabbit, Brer Fox swung him around and around and then flung him head over heels into the briar patch. Brer Rabbit let out such a scream as he fell that all of Brer Fox's fur stood straight up. Brer Rabbit fell into the briar bushes with a crash and a mighty thump. Then there was silence.
Brer Fox cocked one ear toward the briar patch, listening for whimpers of pain. But he heard nothing. Brer Fox cocked the other ear toward the briar patch, listening for Brer Rabbit's death rattle. He heard nothing.
Then Brer Fox heard someone calling his name. He turned around and looked up the hill. Brer Rabbit was sitting on a log combing the tar out of his fur with a wood chip and looking smug.
"The briar patch is my home, Brer Fox," he called. "The briar patch is my home."
The Mendocino Briarpatch Network will begin meeting soon at the Brewpub. It is about giving, sharing, and exchange of skills and services in business. Humanistic management methods, unusual organization solutions, and better practices and traditions for those who have tools and work to do are learned and encouraged. The main criteria is helpfulness and fun.
We are affiliated with the Briarpatch Network in San Francisco that was founded in 1974 and currently has 150 members. Our affiliation will include internetwork referrals, resource sharing, learning opportunity exchanges (such as workshops, etc.), mutual website links, and parties.
We will also be working with like-minded community groups in our watershed that are springing up to create a new way of restorative living and working such as the Greater Ukiah Localization Project, Mendocino Organic Network, and the Solar Living Center.
I co-founded both the Briarpatch Co-op and a branch of the Briarpatch Network in Menlo Park in the 70’s.
Let me know if you’re interested.
The community always knows more than the individual.
Dave Smith tobeofuse.com 707.272.7256
