Intentional Society: Structureless Sensing
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Help me out today — let's set the stage, you and I, for this Sunday's Community Session (illustrating and continuing our sensing in Monday's Meta Meeting). We'll be 5 weeks into our season, coming off a couple of "doing-flavored" calls. A pull to balance is calling to us — to be together, to slow down, to do less, to attune more to ourselves and each other.
Can we tap into what's important? What's important in our lives, what we do, how we spend our time, what we value and prioritize? How would we guide ourselves to tap into that, are there structures that would serve? (Bentoism? Eisenhower Matrix?) No... what's calling to us isn't structured exercise. What is the structureless structure?
What's important touches our identity — or rather our multiplicity of identities. Surfacing what's important might call for a shift in identity; am I ready for that? What identities are coming into view and which am I letting go of? Let's honor our past identities that have served us in earlier times. They've done their part, and we carry them with us into our self-transforming space of identity-having (vs is-a- identities). Wearing identities, like hats, helps us stay loose and fluid relative to any situation.
People in a room together, long form breakouts — the minimal online structure for us to be with each other. Nothing to get right, nothing wrong, just space to inhabit and co-presence a weaving of individual and collective sensing and sense-making. No framework, no script, no guide — these ideas of importance and identity can be held like seeds... seeds or starters in a garden center. Maybe we pick some and not others, take them to our community garden patch, and plant them in some relation to the other plants there. How will they grow? We don't know, nor what the emergent garden will look like as gardeners work in the space. We make choices, yet are not fully in control of what comes out of the soil.
Importance and identity may be seeds, and also the earth itself is significant. Imagine stepping out of your house on the edge of the forest: out the back door, past the patio, through the cultivated back yard, out into the edge of the wild where human influence and nature's complexity together create a chaordic liminal zone. What is important here? What can we learn from plunking ourselves down, feeling the dirt, the leaves, the trees... what life forms thrive most outside of the rigid structures we construct for orderly living?
"What's important?" is an awareness-inducing frame. Remember, right now, that there is space above and behind your head. Bring your attention to that space. Did your body just shift a little bit? So it is with what we see of ourselves, and in the landscape of meaning. This week we shall inhabit that space, collective awareness arising and supporting, our be-ing with our beings, relating to our relations. Thanks for being a part of the cultivation.
Cheers,
James