It's here, it's happening! Join us on Sunday!
🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈

There's always a silly side to congratulating someone on a birthday, right? Good job getting older! Whatever you do or don't do, the time will pass anyway. Anniversaries, though... that's the sustaining of an intention, lived out over time. We're impressed by perseverance, like golden wedding anniversaries. Wait, what traditionally goes with 5 years... oh, wood. 🪵🪵🪵🪵🪵 Oh yeah like growing a tree, seedling into sapling... sure, that fits!

This celebration also will fit a lot of other things into the same action-packed call: New network scope, new logo, new software, million dollar funding... I'm tellin' 'ya, new era: nothing will ever be the same again! (Disclaimer: that's always true, but it's a liiiiitle more true this time.)

Alright, joking aside now. It is worth celebrating — that we've found each other, that we can reduce our suffering, that we can become more who we want to be, that we can do things together to enrich our lives and our world. We can celebrate the creation of meaning through our relating, which is a profound mystery and also the most natural human thing in the world.

The word "Promise" is in the title... am I promising something to you, as the founder and outer sourcekeeper of IS? No! I can't promise you what my future self will do, or that I won't disappoint you, or that I can be big enough to do all the right things. I can't promise that I'll distribute the right amount of governance power at the right time to the right people, and I can't promise that all the safeguards and best practices in the world will prevent eventual corruption at the layer of the shadow that lays outside what we can see.

Instead, I see promise... not pretending that we can control the future, but that the future holds promise that we have good grounds for expecting to experience. Promise laying in potential for us to step into together — in creating joy in our lives, in perspective-taking and emotional support, in increasing our capacities individually and collectively, in creating livelihoods, in weaving economic interdependence, in coordinating together to do good and beautiful things.

Will this "new era" see us maintain coherence at a larger scale, or will it all fall apart? Probably both. Let us turn toward it all. My vow, my unshakeable intention that the universe puts in my soul (shall I call that a promise? hmm), is to move in that direction (of capacious love) day after day, year after year, for as long as I am me. Perhaps your vow is similar, and we can dance together.

(Meta: What a strange newsletter, huh? Proof of humanity in the age of AI. Become un-slop-pable.)

Following the celebration this week: Saturday March 21 (@IS-2hrs): IS Connection Call