Original Living Goals (OLGs)
Ancestral Instructions for Earth-Aligned Living
Why We’re Calling These the Original Living Goals
We are choosing to move beyond the language of “development,” a term rooted in colonial logics of extraction, expansion, and improvement. In many Indigenous traditions, there is no word for development—because the Earth is not something to be advanced, but listened to. Life unfolds through reciprocity and rhythm, not through benchmarks of growth. Original Living Goals are not about doing more, but about remembering how to be in right relationship—with land, time, ancestors, and the living world.
What We Mean by Original
Original does not mean primitive—it means primordial. It speaks to the instructions that came before human plans and interventions. The Original Living Goals are grounded in the coding of life itself—the wisdom held in rivers, roots, fungal networks, and star patterns. These are not human inventions but inherited understandings that biocultures have lived into for millennia. We are not here to innovate them—we are here to remember them.
Why We’re Reframing the Concept of a Goal
The word “goal” suggests a future target, something to strive toward—as if wholeness is always somewhere else. But in many ancestral and biocultural traditions, what we seek is not beyond us. It is encoded in the patterns of nature, in the dreams of seeds, in the instructions gifted by creation. What’s needed is not attainment, but attunement. These aren’t goals to achieve—they are truths to live into.
Why now?
In a world obsessed with solving problems, fixing discomfort and confused by duplication of dominant paradigms, we’ve forgotten how to simply listen — to Mother Earth, to the winds, to the fungi and rivers. The Original Living Goals (OLGs) are not another framework for self-optimization or inner development disassociated from kinship worldview; they are a remembering. Rooted in ancestral wisdom, biocultural heritage and ecological intellligence the OLGs invite us to shift from striving to attuning, from dominating to dancing with life. Joy, presence, and connection are not rewards for productivity; they arise when we re-enter the web of life with humility and reciprocity. This is not about becoming more—it’s about becoming kin. In a time of unraveling, the OLGs are not instructions to achieve, but invitations to belong.