IS: An unremarkable newsletter where nothing happens
Open events this week:
- none
Calls start at 1pm Pacific Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC). Season 15 Core Community calls run Sundays through Sept 22.
I feel quite pleased that we have a collectively-designed season plan of community calls, after our first week, that is markedly more interesting and innovative than I would have come up with myself. We took a chunk of large-group time for a "build-a-season" exercise, and a small group of 6 the next day did the synthesis to converge things. It will be a summer season of scale-and-ownership play, in small groups (four weeks of Pods doing a more divergent set of self-selected mini-series) and in large group exploration of "the imaginal".
Next up to figure out is Practice Dojo details — the focus is heading towards simplicity and "making contact" between humans, and maybe I'll have dates for you next week.
Okay, now that the expected informational stuff is out of the way, and some folks have stopped reading already (ah, no I'm not really kidding anyone)... I'll try to bring my current personal development edge out, because this (ironically, as you'll see) is a space where that works. Edge as in, edge of the map, "there be dragons" beyond. Even after typing that intention, I can still feel the impulse to divert my attention from the spiciness of diving into not-knowing what I'll uncover.
Something's been working me today, and the prior few days, and a few days before that. The IS PNW picnic meetup, brainstorming with R. on Second Renaissance, talking VillageCo with J., and inquiry with my VNP crew all feel somewhat connected, loosely, to this sense dancing just at the edge of my awareness. The bigness of potential arising, is one strand of this unsettling energy. There are so many pieces of this everything-project... what if we really can create the world I want to live in, the world I want to pass on to my kids?
But the bigness isn't the scary part. I've worked through (some, not all!) shadows of hubris and ambition and humility and post-tragic post-ironic desire. The scary part comes when this wispy sense at my edge points inside of me, and asks what in me is blocking me from living fully in this world already?
I have some fragmentation, un-integration, in my life, across the parts of my life. My online virtual life with bright passionate cultural pioneers amazes me, and is where I've done so much of my work and my development over the last four years. My offline physical life of house and home, marriage, family, daily life... I'll say it has changed less. I have some sense of lateral-tension, shear-stress, and being with it, friends I think it's coming from me. This isn't, I think, some story of external constraints hemming in my "authentic expression" and I have to choose conformity or else face rejection. The call is coming from inside the house, y'all. I am seeing, looking at this right now, that I do have some amount of story about the complex challenge of navigating development within long-term relationships and the inertia of decades of accumulated norms across many facets of my life and the life-structures intertwined with habits etc etc...
And the "oh crap" part of seeing that story-ness there is seeing the construct-ness of the story, so... what if that story been in secret service as an unconscious excuse? As in:
"A lot of visible problems that you can't seem to solve are secretly solutions you don't want to admit to adopting to problems you don't want to admit to having." David R. MacIver
Humbling, humbling, but potentially freeing? On the visible surface: "Feeling tension/fragmentation of not bringing my biggest self, from the most intentionally developmental and expansive spaces in my life, to the other parts and people in my life". Secret solution: "I believe I can/should hold back from changing/disrupting my 'real' life until this new world has been fully realized, then I can safely bring along those I love." Problem I don't want to admit: ... ... ... "I can't not change, and I can't control the impact of that on others or in my relationships." Oh damn. That's pretty close - the tears are there affirming the accuracy of what this part has been trying to protect.
Transformation is a struggle, loss, surrender, like molting a whole self to make room for a new one. What's that saying, "Better not to start. Once started, better to finish." It's a rough ride! But there's an involuntary nature to starting - my experiences with "awakening" are that it happens to us, or that we choose to start when we have no other option. What's seen can't be unseen.
But no man is an island. My family especially doesn't get to opt in or opt out of changes in the living pattern that is me, me in connection with them. And maybe I'm admitting that maybe I've been trying to protect them, to shield them, to guard their current lives and normalness from my weirdness while I keep trying to "finish" (hah!) the transformation process. Noble intent, freedom and choice - but the one choice I can't offer them is the old me. And that connects to everything.
So then what? I sense, from pattern recognition, that unraveling a twisty story leads to really good places. But I also feel the cliff's edge under my toes, that feeling of is-it-really-time-to-jump because those rocks are far away down there and is growing wings mid-air really a reliable strategy?
But I trust. Faith in surrender. More life is waiting on the other side.
Cheers,
James