Intentional Society: Landscape of care
New here? You can register for our next orientation video call on Saturday, October 29th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Daylight Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).
What we do inside Intentional Society practice sessions very often feels meaningful and personally transformative. And in doing those practices and explorations, we often leave behind tons of context from the situated nature of our full lives, in order to meet other human beings in "pure" (ish) connection. It's like, you can go to a retreat with other people, feel like you've touched each others' souls, and still feel like you don't know those people outside of that one dimension, don't know the rest of the picture.
Sometimes we look at social connection as a spectrum between "chit chat" and "going deep", and a typical trust dance might progress from the former to the latter. Within Intentional Society, it often ends up going in reverse! But I think it's not a matter of "filling in the chit chat" or leaving the zone of deep care. I think the way of that dance is more a progression from "finding things in common" so as to establish a base of trust, towards then "exploring our interesting differences" which enriches and expands us.
That's what leads me to ask, this week: "What does our whole landscape of care look like?" The people we love are a part of that picture. Our needs and how we'll meet them. Our goals and hopes for our future. The places and communities we're a part of. These things may be unique to us, and illustrate our differences... and yet our existing resonance and common humanity may infuse all these things with relation-ality too?
Thanks for being with me today, yes you, helping me toward our next step of practice on the inside. What this ends up looking like on Sunday will, I think, in one sense be a very "normal" kind of thing — but with some intentionality behind it, and our cultural foundation supporting us, to do what we shy away from in other contexts, in order to bring that mode of being out into those other contexts we care about so much.
Cheers,
James