Intentional Society: Landing the plane
Last orientation before the holidays: Click here to register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, December 10th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 9pm UTC).
With two weeks remaining in IS Season 8, we've game-planned the remaining sessions to wrap up 2022. This will be a shallow concrete update, leaving the next few newsletters to wax philosophical looking backwards and forwards at the overall journey of Intentional Society.
Exploring choices together in last week's Community Practice Session felt useful to me on a personal level. Sometimes I wish it was easier to come away with a clean and tidy "here's what we learned" but that's just not how it works: when a group of people come into contact with some questions, each one of them is encountering them from a different context — and coming into contact with each other's contexts and perspectives is a major source of how we evolve our own relationship to the topic. People learn different things, move towards each other's perspectives to varying degrees, and generate new questions for their own personal explorations.
We'll do a bit of a similar thing with "stories" this week. At the object level is a question like, "What's your story of how your year was/went?" The meta layer would then be "How and why do we tell stories about ourselves?" and how we relate to those stories. Most of us might open up a bit of a new way to be aware of the stories that we're telling ourselves constantly and unconsciously, by bringing awareness to our own story-telling processes. We'll look at "the story of Season 8" a bit as well, and that will serve as the traditional seasonal retrospective.
Last week also saw the 7th meeting of our internally-open Circling crew, which Jochen has been hosting and which I (James) have not been attending. Instead I've just gotten to hear the stream of reports flowing from participants, gratifying in both their contents and in the sense of community-generated momentum in the loop of those folks and their experiences together.
The "holiday season" has begun around these parts — a time of yearly festivity and commemoration across company/organization/school/family gatherings. In the busyness or stillness, in the social or solitude, I wish the best of you to yourself as these last weeks of the year slip down the hourglass of time.
Cheers,
James