Owning Our Future

NINELIVING PURPOSECreating the Conditions for Life

One of the most extraordinarily alive companies I know is a tiny children’s bookstore in Minneapolis called Wild Rumpus, where I love to take friends and family in the same spirit with which I might take them to visit a museum or a treasured church or a sacred grove of trees. To visit this store is an event. We often make a morning of it, and inevitably we linger. I show my niece the mice under glass in the floor, a hidden warren of life literally beneath the floorboards. I tell her, watch for the chickens—they’re funny chickens without tails, and with heads that are barely visible, so they look like bits of white fluff walking about. And then there are the cats, the Manx cats, the world’s friendliest ...