IT PAINS ME TO REPEAT the same dull moments all day, every day. Working is currently defined as producing far more than we need so someone else can get rich. It traps my body in an insulating rut and empties my mind and soul. Inevitably, my imagination takes me to faraway places—to the factory chicken farm outside of town or the mono-cropped bean fields sprayed with carcinogens.

In order for the challenge to the World Trade Organization to have any real impact, we must aim at a level below the most extreme, single-issue problems. If we only criticize the “excesses” of this unhealthy society, then its roots and everyday brutalities will continue to grow and will soon destroy us. We must use this opportunity to strike a blow against the absurd fact that people other than ourselves control our lives through structures they’ve built that are inherently in conflict with what’s left of our health.

TWO GOOD WAYS to learn more about healthy living are by watching trees grow and animals play. What those have in common is a sweet, vibrant chaos: apparently unpredictable, but almost always following one turn with another that feels just right. Nobody knows exactly whether, when, or how a tree will twist this way or that, nobody knows whether a dog is going to lunge to the left, then go for the throat, or just take a bite out of someone’s leg. Dogs and trees create themselves as they adapt to their situations, adapting while unfolding. This is the subtle, flowing music of real life. Unplanned by anyone, it exists for itself and for its parts to create themselves within it.

We find this music deep inside ourselves, beneath the ideologies, the socially constructed prejudices, beneath the neuroses that molest our moods and perceptions (“I need to be controlled by ‘experts’; it’s OK that some people live in opulence while others starve; I don’t care about animals!”). When we allow our actions to synchronize with that music, then we are able to play with animals and make beautiful love. We can learn from its rhythms as they express the true ways of the world. We can find deep inspiration to battle the forces that are replacing that good music with social- and self-control.

“Working” today is not a healthy rhythm that freely creates itself for itself and for all its players to create themselves within. Its planners consider only profit or power as they uncaringly grind away anyone and anything that can be used to sustain “the way things ARE.” Our time has been so devalued and our consumption so pumped up that we find ourselves doing jobs that shouldn’t exist for far more time than would be necessary if we didn’t have to produce for someone else’s profit. Many historians have found that all of this has been intentional, that the spirit of nature, ours and the earth’s, has been consciously domesticated so that it can be exploited.

The WTO takes this conquest of power, by people increasingly disconnected from reality, to another level. It makes me more resolved to fight the same battle I’ve always fought: to kick over the tower that was built to control me; to live my life based on what is inside me!