​Upcoming Events:

​Building Belonging Community Conversation July 6 at 10am PT | 1pm ET | 5pm UTC

​CMX Summit September 13-15

​Community is a big deal - but NBD

​(note: I will be offline for the next week at Radical Dharma Camp - see you on the other side!)

​The Inner

​On Sundays I go to the No Big Deal Sit, a practice of meditation in a Zoom with the framework of Point Practice developed by Rev. angel Kyodo williams. The idea of Point is that you are either in Point (attending to your belly outbreath) or out-of-Point (anything else).

​After a few sessions I discovered that trying to focus was the quickest path for me to feel tension, to find my eyes trying to focus on something (Point is practiced with eyes open in a gentle gaze), to start "seeking" something. Whereas being in Point is being. (I know, I know, you've already seen The Empire Strikes Back).

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​There are many 'realizations' that happen for me intellectually a thousand times before I get them in my body. Another thing I noticed - and even struggled with - is that I’m judge-y. Out-of-Point seems "worse" than being in Point. Each time my mind wandered off, I might say, "why can't you just relax" or lots of other things that are, obviously, out-of-Point. The goal is to be in Point, right? When I started seeing that I could put that story down, that maybe the 'goal' is to notice Point and notice out-of-Point, I began having a much more loving time out-of-Point. It turns out it's OK, even great, to be out-of-Point, and then return to Point.

​I write this feeling like maybe you won't believe me, maybe you'll say, "what's the point of a goal if the goal isn't accomplishment?" or maybe "something has to be good, or better than other things, or else every terrible thing is OK." I don't think I can argue these points, and still, what I crave is practice, because when I am figuring out what to do, I am stuck, and when I am doing something badly, I am learning.

​One of the loudest voices for me is the one that says, "If you do something and look stupid it will ruin you." My past is littered with environments that involved tests of knowing to gain entry.

​If I could just show you I am not stupid, you'd accept me. I'd accept me.

​What's crazy is how knowledge (in the intellectual sense) rarely ever leads me take action or feel like I matter.

​Practice and learning are deeper, more embodied, and have no value as 'things to seem good at.'' What I mean is that the little insights I pick up in practice are possibly interesting and I will share them with you and we may laugh when we see our common manoeuvres of avoidance. It's weird that feeling, being, is nothing to understand. It is not something I can tell you about or we can share, even though being with you helps to feel and be in myself.

​The Inter

​At the beginning of each Sit, the co-keepers of the space say that this is not a community, it is a collective. We are responsible to each other, but not for one another.

​In these spaces I do feel caring, more than simply allowing. Sometimes it is an appreciation of the intellect or the ideas. Sometimes I feel beauty, heartbreaking, fiery, sweet. I can be a witness, alive to the other humans who are gathered.

​These spaces have rules, norms, a bias to respect and openness. They are more porous than community. You are there if you choose and you are not needed. There's a kind of belonging and without interchange, a lack of action.

​Community is something else. In Teaching Community, A Pedagogy of Hope, bell hooks quotes M. Scott Peck’s idea that community is the “coming together of ‘a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to… make the condition of other’s our own.’”

​Friendship also requires commitment, conversation, exploration, and uncovering. It comes from reciprocity, from time, from intention. It's making a new thing which is us together. Friends are not "better" but require different rules. Action is the same.

​Great communities often have an open space of non-dialogue, and conduct practices of action outside that space. How can the technology we build serve that kind of community, one that allows people to be themselves together and also supports people to share a common purpose, to talk, to inter-relate in service of something that matters?