Intentional Society: Three interesting things
I'm limiting myself today in sticking to three things, and will claim them as interesting to anyone who reads further without a specific hook. 😉
One: The spiral. Many people have special books or texts to which they repeatedly return, time after time, and find new things with each reading. The words don't change, but the meaning does because we change: We re-interpret anew in the context of who and how we are now.
Intentional Society has fundamental practices, and there's something really similar to the "books re-reading you" phenomenon — similar, but not as automatic. The culture, the group's edge, the live current, needs to be fed into the forms of the practices in order to continue the journey without a feeling of resetting/retreading. The form, the structure, isn't the whole thing: It's us who change and grow, and which dances with the form to make the interplay of structure and emergence.
I've been re-re-reminded of this spiral, and am re-excited that we can just keep pursuing those amazing edges of our collective explorations. The depths of our shared context can coexist with the shallows of varying experience, and that's what can keep the shared journey alive and lively.
Two: Once a year, I tell y'all about y'all. There are 266 of you receiving this message, and my newsletter software says that about 150 of you will likely open it. That's known to be an undercount, as some mail clients don't leak any mail-opening data. Still, an open rate of over 50% blows any commercial/marketing norms out of the water. I think that means we have a pretty decent relationship here, as far as impersonal emails go. It's been slow and steady growth: We've never had a big surge or viral bump, though I suppose it's bound to happen eventually.
About 50 people have ever unsubscribed, which seems healthy to me — not too low, not too high. Another 50 people have initiated a subscription but never clicked on the "confirm your email" step to finish subscribing. I wish I knew more about these, and what fraction ended up in junk boxes or were never seen. Totally fine to decide "nah, nevermind" but that seems artificially high for people changing their minds.
Three: A special guest next (not this) week! I've hidden it down here at the bottom of an email out of an aversion to name-dropping, but anyone who knows Authentic Relating knows of Sara Ness, the founder of Authentic Revolution, author-curator of the epic AR Games Manual, and a huge part of the reason why most people know of AR at all.
We're thrilled to become early testers of The Relating Languages model/material/training that Sara has been incubating for the last two years, and are looking forward to experiencing it and seeing what it might mean to us in the context of IS.
This is a members-only event with some pre-reading required. Former members are always welcome back (ping me! you can reply to this email), and if you're still on the outside of IS but want to catch this, there's one orientation call on the 21st you could use to onboard.
Cheers,
James