Upcoming events across the web:

• Friday, Oct 16: Open IS Connection Call
• Sunday, Oct 18: IS Community Call
• Saturday, Oct 24: Being With It All at Relational Dojo

The previous newsletter was "Personal field tour" and last Sunday's Community Call was titled "What calls us?".

what happens when collaboration fails?

what happens when we fall apart?

what is worth living and dying for?

what is worthy of my devotion?

who is my neighbor?

No, I'm not vague-posting about something in my own life breaking recently. These questions have been asked near me and to me, though, and it seems appropriately confronting to set them next to each other and interrogate myself with the set.

I'm feeling a common shape underneath all these questions. A question of orientation. The question could be about unconditional love. Or it could be about surrender. Subsumption into the whole.

There's a desire to commit. To join together, to become one. To bind ourselves, and gain the benefits of trusting, relying on, counting on, the commitment.

What binds us? Something like "identity" comes up, even more than "integrity". We are bound by our sense of self, our is-ness, our I-am-what-I-am. The quality of our clarity. The clarity of our connection. Our connection to... it loops back around to love as the animating life-force of life.

I've heard it posited that reason God created the universe as somehow separate from himself was so that he could love — that love requires relationship and relationship requires separateness. Light requires dark. Completeness requires incompleteness. Maybe that is the game: Pain and gain, risk and reward, rupture and repair.

Raw life-force feels united, though, and unitive? As in, one piece, no smaller lego bricks underneath. That's what my feelers tell me. I don't know how to explain it any better right now, that connection between the oneness and twoness.

To the extent that we become a vessel of love, that is the degree to which we can give and receive love.

Cheers,
James