FAYE COX | founder of Hourbooks
Listen to Faye’s latest podcast interview
“Faye is a founder, yes. She is a thought leader, a curator of artists and ideas. Certainly a visionary. But perhaps more important than all of these, she is a chalice bearer of wisdom.”
- Hourbook Reader
It is time for a Cliff’s Notes of Consciousness.
In a time of dumbing down, we not only need to do things differently, we need an entirely new mindset. A different worldview, one based in frontier science (the best of our current understanding) and ancient wisdom. Put those together and smart, practical, beautiful, and transforming solutions to our very huge global challenges emerge. But with the noise of so much information flying at us from every direction and never enough time, the time is ripe for a compendium of a well-rounded 21st century curriculum.
“My work is to find thought leaders & authors with the transforming knowledge that we need now and build a team that can make that knowledge attractive & accessible around the world.”
I was born to this work.
I have always had a strong sense of a larger reality that encompasses everything we experience. Growing up, I remember listening with great concern to my beloved older brothers argue fiercely. I didn’t understand Republican or Democrat back then, but somehow I knew they were both right and both wrong. What I sensed but could not yet voice was that each was incomplete and that a bigger field carries both sides in a life-giving way.
I have always been an active a leader when it comes to my beliefs. When my neighborhood needed a parade, I gathered the kids and led one. When my Junior High needed a new student manual, I wrote one. When my college sorority wouldn’t pledge a black woman in 1968, I walked out. When my country waged war in Vietnam, I emigrated to Canada and went back to the land. For ten years my family lived without electricity or phones.
I have been educated by experience.
I earned my master’s degree in literature at Oxford University after which I needed to recover, so I became certified in Art Therapy and started a women’s counseling center. The center still exists some 30 years later.
Upon returning to Canada, I created The Green House retreat center and began a non-profit called SEED to support sustainable development (though we didn’t even have that language back then).
Soon after, I founded a charitable organization called Green Seed to spread the gospel of the link between local economy and social & environmental benefits. For twelve years, from 1992-2004, I poured all my energy and love (and yes, money) into my vision of a green village as a model for living more lovingly on the earth. Ultimately, the project folded. I learned more from the failure of that vision than from any master’s degree. It is why I’ve approached my subsequent endeavors with such an unwavering eye towards solid financial planning and seeking collaborators who can share equal footing.
Working alongside a world recognized expert in currency creation, I planned events and conferences and wrote articles promoting alternatives to fiat currency which helped launch a local currency based in time and food. The project was short-lived, but it did make waves large enough that it was featured in Forbes that year.
I immersed myself in natural systems design in my next undertaking, building a proposal for the Sustainable Living Research Initiative as a way of allowing affordable eco-housing to be built without adding to existing parking and climate problems. The proposal was on the verge of being adopted by the City of Santa Barbara in California, but in the end, it was just too ahead of its time to be recognized.
I’ve been honored to study at the feet of masters.
It was 1981 when I read Fritz Capra’s The Turning Point and first encountered an interconnecting science that resonated with the ancient wisdom of our spiritual traditions.
While creating the Green House, SEED, and Green Seed, all of which I now understand were really education centers, I encountered thought-leaders from all areas of expertise. City designers who planned with people’s health and natural systems in acting as lynchpins, agriculturalists dedicated to soil health; economists stripping down outdated theories based on false assumptions to build models that took into consideration the realities of human beings and our environment; financiers who revealed that the very structure of money as a placeholder for debt is at the root of nearly every global challenge and envisioned monetary generation systems that held more shared benefit for all; and teachers who nimbly navigated the interstitial space in which science and spirituality dance in their eternal embrace. Through all of these apprenticeships, I came to understand that decision-making could include all voices while at the same time honoring efficiency and transparency.
In each subsequent phase of my life I’ve continued to be drawn to study with the best in their field. I learned from a Master Coach the art of discovering a future that draws you forward, that a positive vision of what we really want and believe in illumines the path of how to get there. I learned from an Episcopalian priest and teacher of Wisdom Christianity about embodied faith and practice and how current science only confirms the Christ teaching. I learned from a world renowned expert on the creation of money how a currency can be created based in something other than debt.
Everything I’ve learned, and, in fact, the very value of learning, directs the essence and intention of Hourbooks.
My vision spans from ecosystems to economics.
I want to spark a global awakening to who we are as a human family as part of a living earth, blown away by the beauty and intricate wisdom of the cosmos, and dedicated to implementing holistic systems that:
restore the abundance and generosity of the earth
regenerate the economy as a boon for all (it's so possible!)
renew politics as an exercise in serving the common good.
recover the freedom of children to play safely everywhere