I don't need to tell you it's been an exhausting week.

Despite the welcome relief of my nourishing art project, the anxiety of watching and waiting while the most cruel US president in modern history faces his trial by the people is just scary. I know you know. Here's me in front of the TV (shout out to my Star Trek nerds):

But today I'm just feeling inspired.

After a few days of watching mostly the big media outlets which are focusing mostly on numbers, I'm going deeper into the behind-the-scenes stories about the specific people who have pulled off extraordinary leadership feats and the movement work that has happened on the ground over the last several months.

I'm reading the outpourings of brilliance from a whole world of analysts and commentators and artists and activists on Twitter about the small places and races that have made such a difference.

I'm putting my attention on the fact that our government is getting browner, queerer, more indigenous - person by brilliant committed person.

I'm marveling at the culturemaking that's been happening. During this week of high anxiety and the agony of the wait - we have taken care of each other with hilarious memes and GIF convos and comedy routines. The artists, comedians, bloggers, meme makers, Tiktok-ers, writers, painters, photographers, sigers, dancers, DJs and all the other artists responding to each moment spontaneously, and with such joy and ridiculousness, inspires me, soothes me, gives me space to feel and remember what I love about human beings.

All around us, and inside us - we are listening to the future. We are doing the movement work and the activist work and the creative work to make a gorgeous, just, dazzling, caring garden grow up through the collapsing structures of a society built on the backs of Black and brown people, poor and working class people, women, and indigenous people and their land.

I didn't come to business because I loved business. I did it to build an economic life for myself as an artist that didn't rely on the totally unreliable and oppressive financial systems of the art world.

I never thought my relationship to social movements would be, in part, talking about branding and marketing, two things that I have always considered the art forms of capitalism. I thought of the art I was making as the opposite of that. A whole different operating system.

I've changed. I've changed because the people I found in the small business space are some of the most creative, imaginative, powerfully world-changing people I know. They are here for similar reasons as I am me: they want their gifts to shine, they need it to be reciprocated financially, they want to make a positive change in the world while they do it, and they want to do it with others. They want to serve, they want to do it as whole humans, they want it to be meaningful.

Whatever your business - whatever the field or topic is that you focus on or skill you bring - it is inherently a creative political and cultural being. Whether you are a bookkeeper or coach, artist or virtual assistant or nanny or salon owner or therapist or sculptor or filmmaker or consultant -

Your work and the way you do it becomes a template of the world we want. It's a chance to embed what matters most to you into the details of life. It's a place where your love and vision becomes real, tangible. That's a political, cultural, social project as well as a business project.

So branding gets to be a place to tell the inspired truth. To create culture - art and words - that tell the story of the world we are creating, to speak from the garden growing up through the crumbling towers of an empire than can only fail its people, and then itself. To speak it so clearly that others will see it and hear it and join forces with you.

If you have been struggling to pay attention to your business this week, then first: welcome to the club - me too.

I recommend writing a love letter to your people (as I am doing now), to remind yourself (as I am reminding myself) that its not one or another: It's not "pay attention to the world or pay attention to your business."

You don't have to put any part of you away to show up in your work and get it done.

The voice of political, and spiritual, and emotional you does not have to be different than the voice of business you.

You get to be strategic about what you say with your voice and where, but you don't have to hide. After all, we are building an inclusive world and economy. And that means loving all the people we are, and making a world where everyone is equally valued in the work of living in the world. Even the different people that live inside YOU, today.

So write to us from where you really are today. Carve out more space for all of us to be whole humans who do good work.

This was originally published (November 6, 2020) for the Bureau of Tactical Imagination's email subscribers. To receive our weekly free education and inspiration for your business and brand building efforts, sign up here.

How to integrate the world and our work?