Gardeners and Builders

The Spell of Technology

• – The California metaphor:  early Europeans experienced California as Eden — 400 miles of wildflowers, ungulate densities rivaling the Serengeti. They called it wilderness. What they couldn't see: it was a ten-thousand-year-old garden, hand-tended almost every square mile by Indigenous peoples. Evan sees the same blindness in what technology has done to human consciousness — destroying structures grown over millennia, largely through ignorance.
• "We're a consciousness-ignorant culture. We've been raising and destroying the structures within human consciousness that were grown over millennia — just like the Europeans did to California." — Evan Sharp
• – The scale of it:  in the US and UK, one in every two and a half waking minutes is now spent on a screen. And that number is growing.
• – The user tours:  around 2015, Evan started traveling to places like Iowa — deliberately unglamorous, far from Silicon Valley — to sit with Pinterest users one-on-one. What he kept hearing: people who couldn't find words for what was happening to them. "I love it but I really hate it. I feel ashamed that I use it in front of my kids." The vocabulary for inner experience didn't exist in the culture. That gap became a calling.
• – The ergonomics of the mind:  Biz points to his chair. These are designed for lumbar support. They are ergonomic. No one asked whether the infinite scroll, the tap, the feed is ergonomic for the mind. It wasn't wrong, exactly — it just wasn't thought all the way through.
• – The TV parable:  Evan's father grew up in 1950s Philadelphia — families on the front stoop every summer evening. Then one summer, TV arrived. The next year, people weren't outside. Then air conditioning came and people stopped leaving their houses entirely. "That cycle has been repeating for centuries. We get new superpowers, and the price is a little more spiritual subjugation."

The Gardener and the Builder

• – The poem:  Evan wrote The Gardener and the Builder for his daughter — shared at a retreat, unfinished until the night before. One line: the builder locks the doors, the gardener lives with bugs. Eventually they sit for tea. [Read the poem]
• – What the gardener sees that the builder misses:  Biz pointed out that the builder looks for order — things plumb and square, outcomes predictable. The gardener embraces the tangle. You don't kill all the bugs with toxic spray; you introduce a different element. A good building tries to resist an earthquake and breaks. A blade of grass doesn't care if it's windy.
• – The gardener in practice:  Evan describes his leadership style as finding the right people, giving them what they need, tending to them — stepping in only when things go sideways. Biz adds: Evan is one of the great conveners — he introduces two people and somehow the introduction becomes an organization.
• – Gardening a company:  WEST's planning cycle is shifted eleven days to align with the seasons — instead of Q1, you plan winter. There is an ancestor table: a monitor where each person places a photo of someone from their lineage or a personal hero. First person in lights a candle. Last person out extinguishes it. The leadership team reads their written covenant aloud every two weeks, holding space for what someone was waiting until now to say. "So much of the rituals of business are about de-synchronizing us from life so we can focus on productivity. It's like an industrial revolution hangover."
• – Ancient + future:  their team includes a reverend with 30 years of pastoral experience doing "prompt engineering," and Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner joining weekly. Ancient wisdom technologies sitting alongside the code.

What Is This Fire For?

• – Wildfire is not natural:  before European colonization, wildfire didn't exist in California. Indigenous peoples set intentional fires every few years — fire was relational, in service of renewal. It became catastrophic only once that relationship was severed. The same split runs through civilization: the dangerous, alive, uncontrollable forces — wilderness outside, and grief, desire, the irrational inside — walled off in exchange for safety. Technology extends that wall further inward.
• – We've forgotten what fire is for:  the Prometheus myth — the founding myth of technology — is a human stealing fire from the gods and being punished eternally. We've always related to transformative power as something to seize, not something to be in relationship with. What got lost: fire's actual purpose is transfiguration — burning away what is finished to reveal what is eternal. Even in Christianity, all the weight falls on the crucifixion. The real destination was the transfiguration.
• "Fire burns to transfigure — to burn away what's no longer necessary and reveal the divine nature of all reality. Our culture has completely forgotten that's what fire is for." — Evan Sharp
• – Coming back into right relationship:  AI is the latest and fastest fire. It could be wildfire, or sacred fire. Evan doesn't reach for a strategy. He reaches for faith — that this civilizational moment will force a confrontation with what it means to be alive, and that the way through is a series of unfolding revelations, not a plan. "My hopes lie in God. Just faith, listening, and cleaning the instrument of yourself — and allowing whatever is coming to unfold."

Forgetting and Remembering

• – Evan's plea:  he's been writing a longer piece called Please Help Us Remember — not nostalgia, but a species-level retrieval. A call to wisdom holders, to anyone who knows something the culture has mislaid. "I go through days of intense remembering — it's all divine, there's a larger plan. Then the next day: what the hell am I talking about? So I go through these cycles. I'm adrift in eternity, trying to do the best we can."
• – Biz's version:  quieter, more immediate. He's remembering himself — literally. Started working out. Learning to let his wife finish her stories without jumping ahead. Reframed the twenty-minute drive to school with his teenage son from chore to gift. "I'm just going to listen and let him have the space to tell me things. You could do that with any moment in time."
• – The 78:  People remember Gandhi's Salt March as a pivotal moment. What they don't: fifteen years of 78 people building a relational field together — personal practices, inner covenants, daily rituals of care. Those were the people who stepped off into uncertainty with no idea what would follow. The ground had been prepared. Evan's response: "Let's just do the seventy-eight people thing. That's what I'm here for now."

"Not more time in your life. More life in your time."