Upcoming events:

• Friday Jan 23: IS Connection Call
• Sunday Jan 25: Community Hub call 22.43
• Tuesday Jan 20: The Oasis

Last week's newsletter was Worlding, and the Community Hub call was titled "Listening into Us".

At some point it might no longer be appropriate for me to sit down and simply spill words onto this page in so direct a fashion, dear reader. Purposes and audiences may fork, but it's been a ritual of awareness and intention for me, once a week for the last five years, to follow the aliveness of my day in communicating to you.

You might simply scan the events list and ignore whatever I say below it, or skim lightly — if so, good on you for regulating your attention. But we don't have all that many special + public events, and I have a story that the hundreds of you consistently opening this email every week (I hope you don't mind the tracking pixel) do so in part because this newsletter isn't modern marketing but something deeper, real-er, weirder.

I like to imagine that you can resonate with something real coming through these little slices of word pie. At least, often enough to make a habit of opening this and checking. I try to attune to whatever notes the universe is playing for me to hear, and every now and then (maybe once a month, average?) I manage to vibrate my tuning fork well enough that I get a few spontaneous replies back from readers expressing resonance.

That's not why I write, though — to optimize for responses. The causation goes the other way. I can tell, before I even hit 'send', when I've managed to tune into something bigger than me. Bigger than my usual 'me', at least — my biggest me may include you and everyone and all the love in the universe. All constructs dissolve at some zoom level.

The word 'faith' is buzzing at me right now, a messenger from just over the horizon of my edge. This faith is not found in the conventional layer of belief and ideology, but something deeper in orientation. It comes from a turning-towards, towards not just all that we usually avoid, the sad and bad and grievous... but turning towards the immense and intense goodness of existence at its roots. The beauty of the,,, holiness, the divinity (damn these religious words for being the best available), the realness of the fullness of the world that we can barely even touch like ghosts on heavenly grass. It is faith to move into and be pierced by that blade of grass which contains more realness than our shallow awareness can contain... and yet, when we attune with fellow human minds in expanded multi-headed consciousness — – -

From that state of awareness, we touch the indescribable. I've done it with small groups, soft thunder rippling at the spark of harmonious difference finally aligning into crystalline clarity of contact with the true thing beyond and underneath everything. Now and then, sitting here as part in connection with the whole, I can do it with you, dear reader, even through these clumsy words. What we see together, it calls us to open, to turn toward, to have the faith to dare to open up to the intense eradicating sunlight that blasts away all the protective blinders that make the walls that we call self.

The words start to bumble and interfere, the resonance slips away, the afterimage lingers, and just a little bit more smallness is burned away on our journey to all-ness. Life is calling we who can hear to sing the song of faith in flow and growth and love, to choose the searing expanse of awful awesome transformation and respond with intention to keep moving toward, to embrace even our recoil, to be and become and be with the is-ness of available scalable infinities embedded into each moment.

May you be be well. Thank you for reading. Dance as the spirit moves you.
James