IS: getting on a new plane
Upcoming events:
(Seasonal IS Community rest day Sunday Sept 28)
Tuesday Sept 30: The Oasis - special edition Open Space
Sunday October 5: Season 20 Community kickoff
Last week's newsletter was "Shooting the messenger" and the Community Hub session was titled "Political Activism".
I am writing this on a plane - an airplane. But my other title idea was “getting serious” and it strikes me that that, too, is getting on a “new plane” of the more abstract sort.
The airplane is taking me to Toronto, to explore “Villaging” with many folks I've known more online than offline. An in-person gathering had a focus and intensity and realness which I'm very much looking forward to.
Realness. That's a nice weird for this quality which is serious not in the sense of “no play, no smiles” but rather in the sense of this matters that is the opposite of “playing pretend”. It's not larping a village for four days at a summer camp that is the meaningful thing to me - it's the deepening of relationships and the downstream impacts (of what we do subsequently) that are what matters.
I'm bringing my kids with me on this airplane - a first for them, and a first for me to bring them into a space that's on the other side of “dad's remote work in the basement”. Can my family life connect more with this plane of my life? It's quite a tender experiment for me this week.
Intentional Society is also growing up. What will its wholeness/fullness look like as it approaches it's fifth birthday? One new and interesting answer that has revealed itself recently is that that the time for a fourth quadrant, one rooted in collective exterior.
This direction (of work, of team, of org) has been rising in me for a time, and it was a confirmation to put an integral quadrant lens on it and see it as the missing fourth quadrant. Other parts of this ecosystem map across to this centers-of-gravity:
Practice Dojo = individual interior
Community = collective interior
Ventures = individual exterior
(If interior/exterior feels abstract, substitute being/doing in their place.)
Intentional Society is a big name, for a big thing blooming toward holistic all-of-life relevance. The serious realness of acting in the world, wisely wielding power, cannot be ignored or neglected from a complete stance.
I've begun groundwork for this new quadrant under the codename “the IS org” and begun talking with members, collaborators, and allies. Much still to be defined, largely through iterative evolution as usual…
…but I wonder what a few days of villaging will advance on that front.
Until next week (and the start of ”Season 20” in the life of IS),
James