Intentional Society: The seasons change
Want to catch the Season 8 Intentional Society kickoff? There'll be two orientations on Saturday, September 24th and Saturday, October 1st for new folks. Existing members will receive a renewal-ritual form tomorrow.
Our area's summer streak of warm weather (which means 70°F/21°C here) is now over. My kids are back in school as of yesterday, leaving the house quiet and still. That sudden void marks a pronounced transition in my daily routines, as coincidentally this is also the final week of Intentional Society's season.
We note nature's seasons for the change that they mark, of life and death and renewal and energy. Yet the underlying rhythm is one of constancy and yearly repetition — the embodiment of that well-known expression, "Change is the only constant in life." Zoom out far enough on the seasons, and we can see that they are the breath of the earth, inhaling and exhaling through the millennia of the planetary lifecycle.
Why does Intentional Society operate with a seasonal framing? In conversation yesterday I said, "so we never stop reinventing ourselves" and that intention is, to me, something worth grooving deeply into our rituals and rhythms. This borrows from the accumulated wisdom of agile software development, and even further back to and beyond Deming's iterative cycles. The "step to the outer frame" move, modern or not, differs from just marking time and reflecting like e.g. the fixed traditional liturgical calendar. Bring awareness to the awareness process itself!
But let me stop myself before I fall into pontificating about double-loop learning again. The point I want to make is: Intentional Society is not the same today as it was a year ago. IS will not be the same next season as it was this season. It is a thing, a construct, with a particular set of attributes and characteristics at any point in time — and yet at the outermost frame it is a process, characterized by change, evolution, life.
This week we'll tend collectively to some of the recent and upcoming shifts in the design of our shared construct. Then, our rest week finishes the out-breath before we inhale and spring forth into our next cycle of being and doing. Season 8 will begin on October 2nd and, while I don't have a rule-of-thumb like e.g. "every 3-4 seasons should be a complete metamorphosis," I do hope that there's an aspect of "surprising ourselves" that can be sensed at accumulated time scales. You'll probably hear more next week about what's currently taking shape.
Cheers,
James